House of Prayer No. 2 (20 page)

Suddenly there's nobody there. The footsteps stop, the singing ends, right at the top of the stairs. It seems to be just as spooky for the three guys who are about to rob you as it is for you.

Just then the No. 7 train roars into the station and people get out, including two transit cops, and you get on the train and go home.

The next day you get a call from your mother and she wants
to know how you're doing in New York City. She was against you moving to New York. She says the night before she had woken up wide awake because she had a feeling that you were in danger. She says she got down on her knees beside the bed and she prayed that you would be surrounded by legions of angels.

You write up what happened to you and take it to
Guideposts
magazine, a magazine that publishes stories of faith, the only place you think might be interested. You hand-deliver it, and you notice in the elevator directory that
Playboy
is in the same building, and you remember the bad erotic story you once wrote about a naked woman up a tree at whom enraged townspeople were throwing their shoes.

The editor of
Guideposts
telephones and says to come to the office, where he tells you he's going to run your piece in a section called His Mysterious Ways. He's a pleasant man, and on your way out he says he wants to give you something; he gives you a parallel Bible that has the King James, New International, Living Bible, and Revised Standard versions laid out side by side. Thank you, you tell him, and he smiles and says,
You don't deserve it
.

YOU GET FIRED FROM THE BARTENDING JOB
for stealing a hundred dollars out of the register, even though you didn't do it. It was the slightly autistic bartender you worked with. For three months you and he had been using an old-fashioned cash register, and one night in a crush of people he came up to you and asked you where the Eleven key was on the register, and you tell him it's the Ten and the One keys pushed together, and you realize the
source of all the overages and shortages on your shift; you had thought it was just the manager skimming.

FROM THE CLASSIFIEDS IN
the
New York Times
, you find a job at a private investigation agency on Wall Street. It's mostly verifying résumés and doing background checks on people handling large sums of money. You're working with a bunch of real New Yorkers. When you all go to lunch and you stand looking up from the base of a World Trade Center tower, they say,
Pretty tall, huh, Gomer?

Some of the guys working are off-duty cops and detectives, and they teach you how to work the slush pile of cases nobody wants for extra cash, like that of the Korean girl who disappeared in Chinatown, all you have is her last known address. An old cop says to call her landlord and tell her you're the missing girl's boyfriend and you want to come pick up her stuff. The cop gets on an extension and coaches you through it; when you ask the Chinese lady about the girl's stuff, she says, you think, that until somebody pays the back rent, nobody gets the girl's things. The cop puts his hand over the receiver and says you're worried about the stuff, and the Chinese lady says it's all safe in bags in the basement, just bring the back rent, and she hangs up. Good, says the cop, let's go, and he hands you a ConEd hard hat.

You find the address, and when the Chinese lady answers the door, the cop says you're there from the power company. He's got a clipboard, he's told you beforehand that the Chinese are very respectful to people with clipboards and badges. He tells the lady
that he's got a few questions for her, while you go in the basement and check the lines. You're nervous, and you go down in a stinking basement and see some black trash bags and go through them, looking for address books, personal items, anything. You find some bank statements, a personal phone book, and a crack pipe, and you stuff them all in your pockets.

Back at the office you spread the items out on the detective's desk, someone else was using the lunchroom table to sift through a bag of somebody else's trash, and by the end of the afternoon you've pieced together that the young girl probably developed a crack habit, went into debt to at least one dealer, maybe two, and they probably did away with her. The cop says there's a catacomb of streets under Chinatown and lots of bodies buried there all the time. Unfortunately for you, you have to call the girl's parents and tell them what you think happened. And since you didn't find the girl, no body fee for you.

Another case is easier. An investment banker was having an affair with his best friend's young daughter out at a country house in Connecticut. When the best friend came home unexpectedly, the banker went out on a second-story ledge that was covered in old snow and ice to hide, naked. While the friend was confronting his daughter about whom she was sleeping with, the guy on the ledge apparently lost his footing and fell to his death on the garden path behind the house, where he lay for a few days until someone found him. The police found footsteps in the snow on either side of the body; someone had come and gone a couple of times, stepping over the body in the snow. You're trying to determine the girl's shoe size because you have a copy of the police report. It was the girl all right, and when she's asked later why she
just stepped over the body at least twice coming and going, she said it was because she was
busy, okay?

You lose your job at the investigation agency because you seem to be unable to master the style of the Account Summation Document. Your reports are too narrative-driven and too objective. In your reports, it's hard to tell if anyone is guilty of anything. One of your buddies tells you the bosses also know that you are writing short stories on company time and they are unhappy that you continue to wear boat shoes to work.

YOU ARE LIVING OUT OF A SUITCASE
, carrying a cardboard box of papers and a small electric typewriter from the end of one person's sublet or lease to another. You live up in East Harlem, the only white person in the whole building. There's a jazz bar where you go, and if it's too late to go home, you stay in the bar after the bar is locked up. This is what the owner does for people, lets them stay in the dark at the bar and drink and try to keep track of what they owe. It's in this bar that you meet your cousin. You're holding some Jewish kid by the throat who claims to be a real American because his ancestors came over to Ellis Island in steerage, and you keep saying you had two ancestors who died at the Alamo, goddamn it, and a bouncer is about to throw you out, when the piano player who is on break hears what you're saying about the Alamo and tells you his ancestors' names and you don't believe him, because they're the same as yours. He takes out his wallet and shows you his driver's license; he's named for one of the Alamo heroes.

When a cop gets shot in the face on your block, your cousin
offers to let you stay at his place on the Upper West Side. He cooks gumbo on Thelonious Monk's birthday every year, and one night you remember the girl who had just come from her Broadway musical where she stars, and your cousin accompanies her on his white baby grand, and then an opera singer comes in from finishing her performance at the Met and sings, and some jazz players come later, and at some point there are some guys from a circus, and they are juggling items from your cousin's refrigerator in a complete circle through the house and over the heads of people, and you have a profoundly erotic experience with a Columbia coed simply by helping her squeeze the heads off several pounds of shrimp for the gumbo onto a soggy newspaper in the kitchen. At daylight savings time every fall, you and your cousin turn your watches back an hour for every bar you hit until you're drinking in the distant past.

YOU GET BY PROOFREADING LEGAL DOCUMENTS
at night down on Wall Street and writing articles for the city's weekly papers, little impressionistic pieces, like being backstage when Ringling Brothers Circus comes to Madison Square Garden. When an editor from the
New York Times
calls, no one is more surprised than you.

The
New York Times
asks you to go down to Atlanta to profile Jimmy Carter. One thing they don't tell you that you probably should have known is Jimmy Carter has a contentious relationship with the
New York Times;
and that's probably one reason you were offered the job.

Mr. Carter is cool to you at first, then loosens up as you meet his wife, and you spend a couple of weeks with them coming and going to the Democratic National Convention, which is in Atlanta that year. At the end of the two weeks, you have an idea of how to put the story together, and Mr. Carter invites you to go to Africa with him, where he's leading a campaign to eradicate river blindness. You call the editor at the
New York Times
and tell her you're going to Africa, and after she hears your pitch that maybe Mr. Carter needed to be president to become the statesman that he is evolving into, she tells you to come back to New York, you're not going to Africa, you're too sympathetic to Mr. Carter. The paper pays you a kill fee, and you're back on the streets again.

It's the first year of the time when the doctors said you would be in a wheelchair, and maybe because you're aware of this, the pain in your hips is getting to you, maybe it's just walking the hard concrete of New York looking for work, often not having subway fare, maybe it's the bitter cold.

You help a guy who has fallen out of his wheelchair on East Seventy-ninth where people keep walking past, and the guy is angry with you for helping as he accepts your help, and all you can say is
I know, I know
.