Tours of the Black Clock

33

MY FIRST NIGHT IN New York I spend on the streets huddled with a whole colony of men like me around a garbage can that burns in the middle of a block of West 34th over around Eighth Avenue. It isn’t until daylight that I see the city’s edifices black and wet like the watermark of a tide that rolled through in our sleep. At dawn the colony scatters a bit. I hunt down a roll of bread or a cup of soup off a line. Most of the day I’m hungry because I’m still learning everything, how you scout the lines early and maybe wait the whole night so you’ll be far enough up front to get something the next morning. Then you wait the whole day for a bed in a flophouse. I hear about a pretty good one down around the Village, where the floors are clean and there’s heat most of the night. It takes me a while to figure out where the Village is, though.

Then you learn where the trucks roll in at six in the morning and nab guys for work, guys who look like they’re just desperate enough to work for almost nothing but not so broken they don’t have the spirit for working at all. The pickup points change from week to week or maybe even day to day depending how fast the word gets out and how big the crowds become. A crowd of men angry to work, that’s just plain unruly. But the whole city’s unruly as far as I can tell, forty-eight hours of it tell me that. You keep looking around for who’s in fucking charge, and there’s just nobody like that at all. The cops just ride their horses back and forth through the park, up and down Fifth Avenue. Who the hell’s angry on Fifth Avenue, that’s what I want to know. Guys in black cars with machine guns roar by, laughing. All night is the sharp splash of guns, you can stand in the middle of Broadway and see their fire blossom like wild sunflowers in the dark. Roosevelt and LaGuardia are heroes but only in the way God’s a hero: you know they’re up there somewhere but you never figure they’re ever actually going to do anything that has anything to do with a life as little as yours. Instead every street roils and churns with union men shouting at you from corners and telegram boys pouring out of Grand Central, running up and down 42nd calling out the names of people you’ll never see, bringing wires with no words dated in years you can’t remember, never delivering them to anyone until by the end of the day the gutters are filled with them, blank Western Union messages discarded by wandering lost telegram boys who wind up drinking beer in Coney Island. Those of us who don’t get picked out for work in the mornings just hang around the streets watching the telegram boys or listening to the union guys or telling a joke to someone who just told it to us five minutes before, or sometimes someone will pull a radio out of the scrapheap somewhere and jimmy it so we can listen to the Yankees. When the weather gets warmer it isn’t as bad. But you’re tired of the street and the snarl of your stomach, and every day you have a choice between waiting all night for the soup or a job in the morning or all day for a bed that night in a flophouse, in which case if you’re sleeping in the flophouse you’re obviously not in line for the job or the soup. You make these choices all the time between what you feel the worst, hunger or fatigue or enough desperation to gamble on tomorrow holding some future.