It's A Long Story

Night vision

After dark I lit the fat candle that I sometimes burned on my windowsill, tonight a light to meet the light uptown, and invoked the lines from Mame:

Because we need a little Christmas, right this very minute,

Candles in the window, carols at the spinet....

I sat at my desk and stared out my window and watched the skyscrapers of the city light up with the pictures and things I had stuck on the walls of my apartment all blown up, hanging hundreds of feet high over midtown Manhattan, mirabile visu, all across the night. All the breath in me came out in one "Wowwww!" Omigod. Lookit!

My Margaret Keane litho, three lady harlequins, done as three stick figures strung down one building. Profile of a boy, the Paul Davis-illustrated United Farm Workers’ Viva La Huelga poster chico on a building alongside them. Hexagon framing a stick figure: poster of the Resurrection, POV inside the tomb looking out. East, the necklace lights of the 59^th Street Bridge forming a cup, right where I kept mine. A $ sign — framed first dollar I ever earned — ten stories high on another building. West, a Gronk, all square teeth and bugeyes and monster flattop, grinning down from a wall of windows. Further up, my profile, art-pad-size caricature by Old Mark, hung with pushpins in my bathroom and now displayed down here, on a scale of twenty stories or more — weak chin, receding hairline, squint and all, and — and exhaling smoke from the mouth and nostrils!

Wotta surprise! Wotta show! Thank you. To see and think better, I turned out all my office lights, with only the candle burning.

After some time Old Mark and Tiernan McBride, bearish Irish TV producer given to wearing love beads, came in behind me and asked if I was all right.

<<So they sent the Catholics to lead me along.>>

"I’m just watching this cartoon show. Look out there!"

"James, those are just people turning lights on and off," Tiernan said.

"Well of course they are."

"James, we just want to see if you’re OK."

"Never better. I feel fine."

"I mean how are you mentally, James? Like how’s your head? Really? You’re not going to walk under a train or something tonight?"

"Of course not. Hey — what’s going on here?"

"Did you know that some people are saying that the thing you did for Doc was an inside job? That your office belongs in a place that can be hosed down?"

"Wha?"

"That you do your best work in the bathroom?"

"Fuck that shit. What’s going on here?"

"James, think you might want to wash your hands?"

Whatever. Snide was out of character for Tiernan, but everything had become utterly uncharacteristic now. I went down the hall to the bathroom, but there was a rubbish cart and a mop in front of the door. Back in, Tiernan was on a phone with no buttons lit, playing back "10^th floor? Weithas’s office?"

"Anything interesting in the bathroom, James?"

"I saw a trap and a block. Also notice that you were on a dead line."

"I think you may be needed downstairs."

So I went into the stairwell to go down. The door closed and locked behind me.

For each of five flights down, the doors were locked. Another prank. Shoulda expected it. Hosed down indeed: on the landing was a bracket with a length of 1½" line and brass nozzle tip.

At least they knew where to find me. I hollered some, banged on the doors and pipes, sat down by an ashtray under a placard reading "PLEASE," and having been up all the night before, then run all around town, fell fast asleep.

"What are you doin’ in here?" I awoke to look up at a couple of building security guards and a squad of cops.