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went by and to take our money and stick us with knives they had made in the prison work-
shop, but they never bothered us, they just stared.
New York still frightened me. I felt the same sense of menace now as I walked down to
Times Square. New York scared me. I had read so much for so long about murders and
street crime that I felt a personal gratitude to everyone who left me alone. I wanted to hand
out cards that said, “Thank you for not killing me.” But the only people who assaulted
me were panhandlers. There are 36,000 vagrants in New York and in two days of walking
around every one of them asked me for money. Some of them asked twice. People in New
York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging. I began to regret that I didn't live in
an age when a gentleman could hit such people with his stick. One guy, my favorite, came
up and asked if he could borrow a dollar. That knocked me out. I wanted to say, “Borrow a
dollar? Certainly. Shall we say interest at 1 percent above prime and we'll meet back here
on Thursday to settle?” I wouldn't give him a dollar, of course-I wouldn't give my closest
friend a dollar-but I pressed a dime into his grubby mitt and gave him a wink for his guile.
Times Square is incredible. You've never seen such lights, such hustle. Whole sides of
buildings are given over to advertisements that blink and ripple and wave. It's like a
storm on an electronic sea. There are perhaps forty of these massive inducements to spend
and consume, and all but two of them are for Japanese companies: Mita Copiers, Canon,
Panasonic,Sony.MymightyhomelandwasrepresentedbyjustKodakandPepsi-Cola.The
war is over, Yankee dog, I thought bleakly.
The most riveting thing about New York is that anything can happen there. Only the week
before a woman had been eaten by an escalator. Can you beat that? She had been on her
waytowork,mindingherownbusiness,whensuddenlythestairbeneathhergavewayand
she plummeted into the interior mechanisms, into all the whirring cogs and gears, with the
sort of consequences you can well imagine. How would you like to be the cleaner in that
building? (“Bernie, can you come in early tonight? And listen, you'd better bring along
a wire brush and a lot of Ajax.”) New York is always full of amazing and unpredictable
things. A front-page story in the New York Post was about a pervert with AIDS who had
been jailed that day for raping little boys. Can you believe that? “What a city!” I thought.
“Suchamadhouse!”FortwodaysIwalkedandstaredandmumbledinamazement.Alarge
black man on Eighth Avenue reeled out of a doorway, looking seriously insane, and said to
me, “I been smoking ice! Big bowls of ice!” I gave him a quarter real fast, even though he
hadn't asked for anything, and moved off quickly. On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump
Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over
New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and
had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen-all brass and
