Chapter 7 ~ The Thrill is Gone
March 15, 2010
I lay on a bench in Washington Square one night, wrapped in desolation.
A wino was crashed out two or three benches along. There had been a minor scuffle earlier, when another guy tried to take his pitch. Little more than hair pulling, slapping and drunken, missed punches, but more than enough to bring my situation home to me.
I was tired, hadn’t eaten for a couple of days and didn’t know what I was going to do about the mess I was in.
I was scared.
It had been two weeks since I’d walked out of my parents’ apartment.
Two weeks. A pitifully short time to grow so despondent. I felt like I’d been alone for a lifetime.
Which, given my parents, was closer to the truth than I cared to admit.
Across the square, a drug deal was going down and I was sure it must have been a set-up, it was so blatant. But there were no flashing lights, no blaring sirens, no S.W.A.T. team dashing from shadows to take them out.
They faded away into the night, rejoining the gloom.
My misery deepened as I lay on the bench.
It was Spring, warm enough to stay out most nights; not like Winter, when my breath felt like it might freeze in my throat. Despite the evening’s warmth, though, it might as well have been ice, desperation and hypothermia, I felt so wretched.
Lying in the darkness, the wino snoring, dealers coasting, awaiting their next buyer, I was so close to tears it made me shudder.
Then it came from a stereo in an upstairs apartment, a minor chord drifting across the square like a whisper.
A guitar, electric.
B. B. King.
Unmistakable.
Soft horns in the background; Lucille lifting the darkness for a moment.
‘The Thrill is Gone’ filled Washington Square.
Everyone was still.
Shadows within shadows grew apparent, people I hadn’t even known were there, some of them sniffing back tears, some just humming along.
The guy three benches along woke up and railed at the apartment window: “Shut the fuck up, we’re trying to sleep down here!”
A rock came out of the darkness and hit his shoulder.
B. B. played on regardless.
By the end of the first chorus, some of the shadows were singing.
Me, I turned over and let the music soothe me to sleep.
B.B. King’s guitar melted the night into ice cream and shadows.
I dreamt of twirling carousels and red fairy lights, screaming wheels and ozone bitterness, of the yelps and screams of teenage girls; rough answers from over-protective boyfriends, all bravado and testosterone. My dreams left me spinning, dizzy with vertigo and confusion.
When I woke, in the early hours of dawn, the guy two or three benches along had been knifed and I was the only person within twenty yards of him.
* * *
I couldn’t move.
I stared at him.
Blood pooled under the bench hadn’t had chance to dry as yet; glistening as it congealed in the early daylight.
I looked about myself quickly but there was no-one near me, no-one to offer a hand or respond to a call for help. I could have been the only man in New York City.
I felt like crying, like shouting, like screaming at the top of my lungs.
I DO NOT WANT TO SEE THIS!
I craved silence. Cars revving, buses roaring down Sixth, the bitching of some woman shrieking razor blades through my ear drums, all of it battered me senseless. I couldn’t help but stare at this guy, his tongue poking out of a distorted grin, slaver down his chin. Tinged red.
There was no sign of a knife.
Like most winos in the city, he’d been wearing layers, even during this warm period. The bench was surrounded by his plastic bags, shopping cart a few feet away, turned over on one side. All manner of junk had scattered across the pavement.
His collected crap, his life’s work, his life’s worth spilled on the concrete.
Like his blood.
I coughed a little, tasting bile in my throat.
What did I do now?
I looked about myself again, hoping a cop would be walking by, that I could get rid of this responsibility, this duty, this…
I only woke up next to the guy!
Panic made my breath short and I caught the smell of him over the undercurrent stench of the city. How I wished that backdrop were now like it was in July or August, almost solid in the back of my throat. If it had been, I would have been less able to smell the old wine, sweat, fumes and gasoline trapped in his unwashed hair; grime embedded in his face, his dirty hands, grit under his fingernails. I sniffed hard, testing whether it was my imagination or whether I could actually smell his congealing blood.
It wasn’t make-believe.
I was not imagining it.
I could smell his blood.
Because it was on me. Somehow it was on me.
I looked down and my jeans were covered. It had splashed up from where my shoes had stepped in it. Spattered all down the front of my shirt in spots and streaks, some tiny, little more than pin-pricks, some larger; dimes, nickels and quarters in polka-dots across my waist and thighs.
For a moment, I wondered whether I had done this to him.
I couldn’t have.
I was sober. I was clean. I would have remembered. Wouldn’t I?
I’d have remembered.
Surely?
On the pavement, footsteps from his bench to mine.
They stopped at the point where I’d put my feet up on the bench.
My hands were sticky. I looked at them.
Looked long and hard.
My eyes swam. Bile surged. I doubled over and what little food was left in my stomach came burning up my throat. I retched and retched until I was heaving dryness; catching a quick glimpse of him, his staring, dry eyes, the flies lighting on his neck where… I puked again, even though there was nothing left to come up.
His throat had been cut.
I couldn’t have. I couldn’t.
I would have remembered. Surely, I’d have remembered.
I looked around myself, now desperate that no-one was there to see this, that the nearest human being be anywhere but in the city, anywhere but running towards Washington Square right that minute.
And that was when I saw it.
It took me a couple of seconds to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. Could have been the morning light. Could have been that my eyes were still hazy from sleep. Could have been the tears that had sprung unexpected at the sight of his gaping throat; bloody red smile and staring eyes. It could have been all of these things. Or it could have been what it was, an inverted shadow on my bench, the shape of me asleep on the wood, outlined by blood spatters.
My dream came crashing back to me. The carousel, draped in red light, illuminations flickering. His body reeling while they pushed him between themselves. Of girls screaming and twirling as metal ground against metal; his shrieking fear at the sight of the knife. The rough shouts of the boyfriends, his attackers. The panic; manic chaos, spattering the night with red light and insult.
And all the time, I’d been laying there like the world’s biggest piece of toothbrush art, like some toddler was having the greatest laugh of its life, spattering me with red paint, outlining me against the green and grey wood of the bench.
Now I was able to breathe, I could see that the footprints leading to my bench had been left by boots. I was wearing sneakers.
One of them had walked over to check I was crashed out.
I was suddenly flooded with relief. I had not killed the guy.
I hadn’t killed him.
I had just watched while they did; possibly a greater evil.
Before I knew it, I was running.
I almost tore my shirt off as I went. But then I remembered what forensics could do. I turned it inside out, resolving to burn it later.
That done, I ran. And ran.
And ran.
* * *
Blissful ignorance, regular Joes and Josephines, heading out for their first coffee of the morning; voluntary blindness for just another wino, running down the road and cursing under his breath.
I ran.
Until I was in the middle of nowhere. Or what passed for it in New York: Central Park. Over the bridge that spanned the boating lake, into the wilderness of the rambles. Under some trees, I grabbed a bag of clothes from another rough-sleeper, crashed out on a bench.
A few minutes further away, I took stock of the clothes. There was a jacket in the bag that didn’t look too bad. Some trousers too but I stopped short of putting them on. The jacket would be enough.
I headed north, more than aware that that the park wasn’t safe but keen to avoid the streets. Police preferred asphalt to undergrowth at that time of morning.
I needed to burn my clothes but had no idea where I could do that. Unless…
A million clichéd movie scenes flooded my mind.
I knew where to go.
* * *
I stood at the east river, longing for stereotypical movie sets, for a winter’s night and a trashcan filled with glowing coals and flame; in the middle of May, I had as much chance of that happening as my mother caring enough to kiss things better. With no hope of burning my clothes, I decided to put time between myself and the murder. I sat in an alleyway, disguised by trash, and waited for dark.
Despite it all, my vigil was tinged with a growing sense of excitement.
His body would have been discovered early that morning. There was no way it would have gone unnoticed. A dead body was a dead body, bad for business no matter what the business may have been. Whether it was police or junkie who found him, it would have been called in almost immediately. Which means they’d have completely searched the area. Which means they’d have worked out that there was someone sleeping on the third bench along who must have been covered in blood and probably knew a good deal about what had happened, who might even have had a hand in it.
I had hours to run the scenes and script through my imagination.
With each hour that passed, I grew more and more convinced that I was in the clear.
Sure, in my panic I had walked much of Manhattan that morning, variously visible in blood stained trousers and shirt, or liberated jacket. Were they to have put out a dragnet, released photo-montage images of my possible face, or gone door-to-door across the whole island, they might just have been able to trace my journey.
But they wouldn’t have. Because he was only another bum, crashed out in the village. The city tolerated its victims provided they remained below radar, offering unseen hand-outs and soup kitchens; acts of denial for the collective guilty conscience. Just another bum.
The screenplay started over again; the movie gaining depth with each virtual performance.
I continued to grow excited as I huddled amongst newspaper sheets soaked in pig-blood; meat district packing.
If they were looking for me, they hadn’t found me yet and wouldn’t if I stayed right there. The more time passed, the better the chance I had.
They would be looking for me in the village.
I was nowhere near.
By evening, I was locked in the rapture of an escaped convict. Since waking to find a dead body not fifteen feet from where I’d slept, I had suspected myself of murder, stolen from people who had nothing and sequestered myself beneath obnoxious garbage. I felt good. Excited. Elated.
Like shouting: Nyah-nyah, you can’t catch me!
I couldn’t contain my energy – it was time to move.
I ripped my blood-stained shirt into strips and distributed them across alleyways before scattering the remainder into the East River. After that, wearing my lice-ridden, knock-off finery, I walked back towards the Square.
I wanted to see what had happened.
And the thought of being back there gave me a pure adrenalin rush; my own return to the lion’s den.
* * *
For the first time in a long time, I felt a high without having to inject or ingest a single chemical. And, though I didn’t know it at the time, it was the birth of a new addiction for me.
Flirting with the law, playing cat and mouse with the NYPD.
I walked into Washington Square feeling the rush of a very new thrill.
My new fix.
