The Colt 45 Chronicle #49

When I lived in Manhattan I always lived on the West Side and never more than a couple blocks from the tracks of the 'A' train. When I first arrived in New York City, my wife and I lived in married student housing on the campus of Columbia Presbyterian. After an aborted initial foray at a career-track position with the Foundation Center I made do with a series of temporary assignments secured by an employment agency. The agency's office was on 42nd Street and Madison Avenue. I would take the 'A' train from 168th Street, the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital stop, down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal stop at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. Then I would head east by foot on 42nd Street through Times Square until I got to Madison Avenue.

At that time, the late 1980s, 42nd Street, from the bus terminal until you got to the theater ticket kiosk near the corner of  6th Avenue, was filled with street hustlers, peep show pornography shops, junkies and old steak houses. The strip of 42nd Street on either side of Times Square was the quintessence of urban blight. Like the last post of The Colt 45 Chronicle, this epistle narrates an episode having to do with criminal violence that I witnessed on 42nd Street.

Summer 1989

New York -- she is a big woman made out of subway track. She has a lot of pop, a lot of voltage, but it's only now and then. Most of the time she's just grating -- breaking you down, busting you up -- like Cracker Jacks spilled on concrete steps. She is especially mean in the morning; she makes you wear a noose around your neck. She makes you shave and paste and brush your teeth and comb and shower and ingest coffee. Oh, She is nasty alright. I was walking down 42nd Street the other day. I had got off the subway and was heading east to drop off a time slip at my employment agency on Madison Avenue when I sensed some of her electricity bristling the air.

I looked over to the other side of the street, and I saw a skinny black guy run up behind a fat black guy in an Adidas sweat suit. The skinny guy had a Coke can in his hand, and he poured it on top of the fat guy's head; except Coca-Cola didn't come out, fire did. -- The skinny guy had gasoline in the Coke can, gasoline he lit with a lighter, and he was pouring it down on top of the fat guy. The fat guy was all fire head to tail; he looked like a lion in the desert. He took off running -- sprinting -- due east. He shook off his sweat top. Lucky for him, that polyester really burns; it sat there like a cow pie on the sidewalk and burned and burned, and he just kept on running. He made a quick right into a 25-cent peep show house. He disappeared and everything became quiet.

After not too long a bunch of guys came jumping and elbowing out of the doorway. They stopped and looked back inside when they were out on the street. A black guy came up to me and asked, "Did you see that?" He had seen it too; he was just looking for someone to exchange comments with. I told him, "Yeah. That was cold."

Later, continuing my walk, I thought to myself, "Bad choice of terms. That was actually very hot." Everybody on the street was a-tingle. A real feeling of upness and openness and aliveness shot through everything. I felt it, but I could tell that the junkies and homeless and loveless and depraved on that block felt it much more because that stretch on 42nd Street between 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue is their living room; it was a feeling that what happened to the fat guy in the Adidas sweat suit could have happened to anybody on the block at anytime.

I waited and looked around, and sure enough out of the 25-cent peep house walked the fat guy. The fire was out and he looked okay. People gathered around, running from all directions. The Coke can was still burning, but you couldn't tell it was a Coke can any more; it might as well have been a generic beer can: it was all black and gray and white, burned to the color of a cinder (but it was still a cylinder). A junkie walked up and tapped it with his foot. That made him feel good. I started walking east again.

I'm shifting away from the Coors and moving to the Colt 45. I buy quart bottles here in New York (that's the best value). Colt 45 is brewed in Wisconsin. So I don't feel so bad about refusing Golden, CO. Sunday and Monday nights are my sobriety nights, and from there on out I try to keep it going. It's tough. When I get home from work I say to yourself, "There's no way I'm drinking tonight." But then I watch the last half of the 6 o'clock news and give myself a little time to think, dinner resting under belt, and I manage somehow. By the time 9 o'clock has rolled around I've already been down to the deli and three or four quarts are cooling in the fridge. I tell you, it's the only thing good and interesting in my life. Ashley doesn't think so. As for work, that's a big joke. You can proofread better hungover than well slept. 

Greg, needless to say, I miss you. You know now, if you're ever out on the East Coast here you really got to pay us a visit. We'd put you up majestically. You'd get your own futon, and for as long as you wanted. All the above goes for Tresca too. Ashley and I are carrying on very nicely these days, and I know the city satisfactorily.