Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

have, and where I got it.
    »Bordo, get over here,« she shouted across the room. Our mutual pal was already winging his way in our direction, tippytoeing over like he was sneaking up to the cookie jar. »What’s shaking?«
    »Overseas assignment,« he said, »Feeling 1A?«
    »I’ll enlist,« she said, hooking my arm and hauling. »You too, Walt. This’ll be just the ticket to bring you out of this.«
    »Maybe better call it a day tonight.«
    »You’ll be sorry if you don’t stop making with the sourpuss,« she said. I’ll admit it, my brothers; I’m not much of one for physical threat. »Join the glee club and let’s go. You can’t wait forever for Rapunzel to let down that hair.«
    Knowing it was useless to fight I cried uncle, and fell in with the parade. We took the air and started off down the street. It figured the one time I’d finally meet somebody of interest she’d be harder to catch than I was. No matter how often I tried prying Eulie out of my head she was a hard tenant to evict.
    »Walter,« Trish said, shaking my arm as we crossed Seventeenth, heading down Park. »What’s got you hypnotized?«
    »Just distracted,« I said, watching steam rise out of the street over by Union Square. The usual gaggles of junkies and hooligans were scuttling through the underbrush, waiting to snare stray passersby. Far too many lackies on white crosses and mean reds for me to deal with; I hadn’t been in that park for maybe eight years. Rather deal with a D train full of Fordham Baldies. Steam oozed upward from the Belgian block, circled slowly and curled around, tried to gel and blew apart. For a second I’d thought my ghosts were on the prowl. »Nothing more.«
    »So where’s the circus?« Trish asked Borden.
    »Go east, young girl.«
    »Not without a chauffeur,« Trish said, lifting her hand and giving the high sign. A yellow Checker shot across three lanes of honkers and screeched up to the curb. We hopped in, Trish and I taking the chaise lounge and Borden commandeering one of the jump seats, shouting directions at the hack all the while.
    »Wake up, Snoozy,« Trish said, poking my side as we hit Fourteenth and cruised past Luchow’s as we sped under the el. »What kind of trip are you on tonight?«
    »Nothing natural,« I said. »Out of body experience, I guess. Don’t clip the cord.«
    Turned out the bash was down in the East Village on 12 th between B and C. The sensible man steered clear of the neighbourhood even at high noon these days, but when in the company of the adventurous one tends to stop fighting the current and swim faster towards the waterfall. Two blocks from where we were heading was New York HQ for Hell’s Angels; uptown Tong wars broke out weekly on 10 th and 11 th ; the Third Balkan War was in its fifty-second year at the corner of A and 13 th . Nothing that untoward, considering, but then the hippies showed up. Starting the summer before all the nitwits who couldn’t figure out that San Francisco was at the far end of the country started pouring into town, flower girls and gurus and Sergeant Peppers, every one a fat little pigeon waiting to be plucked. Now ten months later the wreckage was all over town, plucking lutes in Herald Square, wandering back and forth in front of Saks hustling spare change, drawing the cops no matter how low they tried to lie. Bad scenes all the way around; last October, in the block we were shooting towards a Greenwich deb who’d dropped out of NYU got her 36-24-36 run through a meat grinder and fed to her boyfriend’s Alsatian after she complained he spent more time over the meth boiler than with her. He called himself Otter; she called herself Trout’s Dream. Let me tell you, my brothers, the world of altered consciousness used to attract a much more sophisticated element than had lately been moving in on the territory.
    The party that night was in what New Yorkers call a back house. For you non-Gothamites let me elaborate. Back in Dead Rabbit days, long before the tenement laws, a landlord could build his sheds any way he wanted – walls a brick thick, two room apartments with no windows and one door, no plumbing or wiring or roof. But sometimes unexpected pangs of guilt caused them to provide light and air; when that happened they’d throw up the usual seven-storey walk-up at the front of the lot, but one shorter than usual; leaving a small paved courtyard and a small wooden two or three-storey house, behind. That was the back house. Even in