Swell too is the little girl screeching with delight on the carousel at Bryant Park, while the cars go by, bits of garbage flick through the air, the wind irritates the trees, chairs are scraped again and again over gravel, the ground rumbles distantly as the trains plow the dark tunnels, grackles fight, small, unseen electric explosions, wrecking balls, gobs of spittle smacking the pavement, someone claps, someone taps the Gertrude Stein statue on the shoulder, someone stumbles on an abandoned bright pink beauty-company supply case. Astoria and Fort Greene and Hell’s Kitchen and Spanish Harlem and Washington Heights and Cobble Hill are swell. Swell, as we have already seen, are the museums, movies, bathhouses, and restaurants frequented by petty hoods. A woman says, where are they all going? Another slaps her Bible shut. A man groans a little as he stoops to pick up a weather-stained pamphlet from the Church of Scientology. Two boys dressed in identical oversized Knicks jerseys take turns kicking a plastic Yoo-hoo bottle and doing beautiful 360-degree jumps over every crack. New York is unbelievably swell with its loud surfaces and sharp, sweeping contours, even more so with its endless peripheral zones. There people are told to hush or leave, to stand with their faces pressed against wet brick, to back away slowly, to curl up in a ball, to pay for that hot dog, to hand over a few bucks for a little New York City porn. You get, say, five minutes, and you open the magazine you’ve chosen and you’ve got this guy and another guy and three gals and some objects or you’ve got this gal and this gal and maybe a table and some green underwear or maybe a couch and a guy and a magazine or a guy with big hair and bad features wearing bell-bottoms, holding a book, listening to a “hi-fi,” and a young gal wearing a cream-colored fur-lined negligee enters stage left looking surprised and even more surprised, in the next panel, when the guy is standing and opening his pants.
New York is swell, you think, as you leave the brightly lit shop, warmed in the body though not in the heart, and get back onto the glittering, grimy street. As you walk toward the neon billboards and giant television screens of Times Square you think about New York’s swellness in almost cosmic terms, wondering where it begins and where it stops, and what is all that why in the middle, and then you leave off thinking and are just walking, past face after face backed by stone, steel, and dark brick, down into the subway and then out again at Fourteenth and First, where your mind flicks back on and you realize you just spent five bucks in a porn shop looking at what now seem like grotesqueries, pure and simple, and that you’re broke and hungry and that, even though things have been much better lately, even though New York is so swell in so many ways, things are still far from perfect, far from soothing, far from, moment to moment, ideal. So you head over to see Mr. Kindt, your dear friend, who often feeds you, who often talks to you at great length about not uninteresting things, who frequently eases the pain of parting, now that you have exhausted your own supply of funds, at the end of the evening. Mr. Kindt, who greets you at the door on this particular night, this night that is now in question, before you’ve even rung the bell and who says to you, come in, come in, Henry, I’m so glad you decided to drop by. It feels like it has been ages. What on earth have you been up to? Was it just the day before yesterday that you accompanied me to Russ and Daughters? There is a little of the pickled whitefish left and some dried pears. You can take it with you later. Where have you been? Never mind. I’m so happy to see you. Your timing couldn’t be more perfect. Mr. Kindt, who says, you see, I would like, this evening, to introduce you to a murderer.
A murderer? you say.
He has ushered you into the front room. There is some unfamiliar outerwear hanging
New York is swell, you think, as you leave the brightly lit shop, warmed in the body though not in the heart, and get back onto the glittering, grimy street. As you walk toward the neon billboards and giant television screens of Times Square you think about New York’s swellness in almost cosmic terms, wondering where it begins and where it stops, and what is all that why in the middle, and then you leave off thinking and are just walking, past face after face backed by stone, steel, and dark brick, down into the subway and then out again at Fourteenth and First, where your mind flicks back on and you realize you just spent five bucks in a porn shop looking at what now seem like grotesqueries, pure and simple, and that you’re broke and hungry and that, even though things have been much better lately, even though New York is so swell in so many ways, things are still far from perfect, far from soothing, far from, moment to moment, ideal. So you head over to see Mr. Kindt, your dear friend, who often feeds you, who often talks to you at great length about not uninteresting things, who frequently eases the pain of parting, now that you have exhausted your own supply of funds, at the end of the evening. Mr. Kindt, who greets you at the door on this particular night, this night that is now in question, before you’ve even rung the bell and who says to you, come in, come in, Henry, I’m so glad you decided to drop by. It feels like it has been ages. What on earth have you been up to? Was it just the day before yesterday that you accompanied me to Russ and Daughters? There is a little of the pickled whitefish left and some dried pears. You can take it with you later. Where have you been? Never mind. I’m so happy to see you. Your timing couldn’t be more perfect. Mr. Kindt, who says, you see, I would like, this evening, to introduce you to a murderer.
A murderer? you say.
He has ushered you into the front room. There is some unfamiliar outerwear hanging
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