One very cold night in New York, in January, in Manhattan, in the East Village, a young man was murdered. There were many murders that night, as on every night back in 1979 so his would likely have gone unremarked, not newsworthy, not even worthy of a paragraph in theNew York Post.
I can’t recall his name although I knew him. He was a neighbor living like me in one of the few recently rehabilitated small apartments of a still half burnt out tenement at 608 East 9th Street. Rents were so low that lower rung trade magazine staff member like me, or a would-be dancer passing time as a waiter like him, could burrow there to live on furniture much of which was poached in from where it had been dumped on a nearby sidewalk.
Before getting the landlord, a youngish Serb named Frank, to let me take his most recently fixed up apartment on the top floor, the sixth, I had lived for a year on the 3rddirectly above the murdered young man, younger than I was. Rare do people simply meet in New York, people can live a lifetime in an apartment there without knowing the neighbors.
We met because my bathtub leaked. I was soaking when someone, him, came banging on my door, rattling its chain and two locks, the police bar too that was always in place.
I peered at him through peep hole of the reinforced metal door. He looked mousy enough to make me indignant. To stress the point that he has bothering me I opened the door naked to the bone. He gaped. Stare hard. I’d lived just long enough in the East Village to know he was gay. I then took refuge in my towel.
We actually had a pleasant exchange. He readily understood it wasn’t me flooding the bathroom, and him, but rather Frank’s plumbing DIY plumbing work. From then on we’d gesture hello, or even say so when crossing on the stairs.
Later I learned he was from somewhere in New Jersey. Frank told me he was a Russian Jew, and from the way Frank said ‘Jew’ I guessed Serbs weren’t to keen on them.
I knew exactly where he lived because when I moved up to the sixth floor he in turn took my apartment on the third.
By the time he was killed I was living with a young woman. We had a queen sized mattress I had bought from an airline hostess, flat on the floor. It basically filled the larger of the two rooms, the other being a very small kitchenette.
Our so called bedroom had two narrow windows looking out onto 9thStreet, one with a locked gate of bars that opened onto the tiny landing of the fire escape. It being the top floor the fire escape ended just outside this window.
It was three weeks after Christmas. I was sick. Very much so. As sick as I’ve ever been. It was a bad case of adult mono. My girlfriend went to work during the days, so I just slept and slept too ill to even read. I spent nights sweating. Even though the apartment was lukewarm. I sweated so much that my girl friend had to get up a couple of times to change the sopping sheets. She took good care of me, which is probably why I later thought to marry her.
We slept naked. The apartment was dark while we slept except for a weak piss yellow halo from the night lite in the bathroom, door left a bit ajar just for that.
Apartment was so small it took only three steps to to get from the bed across the kitchen area to the police lock on the door to the hallway. Hallway was always lighted. Kept at night bright as a hospital corridor. The tenement had been built like most with two dinky apartments up front over the street, then the stairwell and banister separating ours from two more identical apartments at the rear. Those were still fire gutted along with the rest of the neighborhood, torched by owners desperate for the insurance payout.
No one yet lived next to me either. We two were the only occupants of the 6thfloor. The roof was directly above with an access. Frank had it kept locked.
The rest of the tenement, below us, the floors were mainly occupied as Frank labored to bring each derelict apartment one by one back to life.
My girl friend woke me about two. I was half delirious but immediately heard it too. Somewhere a woman was screaming. To avoid whatever I told her it was the neighbors in the next tenement over, across the ventilation shaft. That building was filled with dopers, who often fought, loud and long with a few screams as well. I told her to let it be I’d heard them often enough.
“No, listen, it’s more than that.” I listened and knew she was right. We didn’t have a phone, I couldn’t afford one.
I cursed, pulled on pants and went out on the landing, blinking in the sudden glare, shaking with fever, dripping sweat. I grabbed the bannister, which was perhaps a century old, my bare feet freezing on the floor tiles.
Bending to look the stairwell spiraled down to street level, the gray slate steps looked frozen in time like an archeology dig, frozen in place from the 1970s down to early Sumerian. The scene looked brittle in its eternal emptiness. On acid I’d have called it surreal.
“Who in hell’s screaming! Someone hurt down there?” I wasn’t convinced how effective I could yell with 103 F. Silence of the tomb except for my own voice echoing back.
Something like a weakening yelp rose up from the pit. Rising and then waning into nothing.
“I’m calling the cops, you hear me! Better tell me what’s going on.”
Counting down three flights I saw movement. A hand sliding slowly along the bannister.
“I see that. Who is it?”
The hand, a black hand, progressed slowly on to where the stairs began descending down, turning out of sight.
No more screaming, no hand. All quiet and still. I waited long enough to hear far below the heavy front down make its tomb-like slam.
Back in the apartment I slid shivering into the damp sheets. I told my girlfriend what I’d seen. She just slid closer. “Go to sleep. Maybe you were seeing things.” I knew she didn’t believe it so. I was too exhausted to figure anything.
We were awakened shortly after dawn by a boulder fist on the metal of the door. So commanding it rattled the police lock.
We had visitors. NYPD Homicide Detectives, two of them, in rumpled suits, either groggy or very tired, both men nine months pregnant. They flashed badges, red Irish jowls and insipient alcoholic noses at us like genitalia.
My girlfriend made a whole pot of coffee which didn’t last long. They guzzled it. I drank my usual breakfast beverage, Dr. Pepper on ice. They left her half a cup of coffee to get to the office on.
With them inside, the place was obscenely crowded. And ominous.
After the usual explanation, which made my girlfriend cry, they began their inquisition, questions to ascertain our income and pedigree. Then they started on the murder. Three or four questions repeated again and again in different guises.
What woke us? What time? Why did we think it was a woman screaming? Why did I go out on the landing—no one else in the building even cracked a door on its chain? Why hadn’t I called 911 (a simple answer which really seemed to make them suspicious).
What was I wearing? Where were those clothes now. When I went out why didn’t I go down the stairs? Was it really a hand I saw sliding along the bannister? Not a foot? Why do I say it was black?
Couldn’t it have been a glove?
Of the questions this one along brought me up. Of course it could have been a glove. I had just made the assumption all whites in America would make. Of that I felt shame and quilt, our national frames of mind that show us so naturally racist we fool ourselved time and again into solemnly protesting that we aren’t at all.
One cop left then. The one that stayed relaxed. He asked for more coffee. Told me in a nice way that he knew right away I was from somewhere “out there. ” Because I’d gone to look.
“What’s a nice young fellow like you doing living down in this crap. Listen to me and move out. Go to Queens.”
He also revealed that the perp had somehow been wounded while he was killing the vic. “Guy fought hard, got to say that.”
Whoever the murderer they’d left a trail of red spots down the stairs. Trail showed whoever then went next door, got in to that tenement, climbed to the top, got out on that roof and then came over to ours. They’d made two attempts to break into this tenement, detective said it looked like they’d worked hard at it too.
“Probably wanted to get back to you. Maybe he thought you saw what he, whoever, looked like. I’d call that a close call. Thinking this was one of several murders we been having down here. Young gay guys picking up the wrong guy at the bars. Call me if you think of anything else.Take my advice, Mr. Bell, move to Queens. ”
To give company and comfort I walked my girlfriend down beyond the third floor, weak as I was. The body was still there. We had to step over him. Blood had virtually covered the landing.
The young dancer I had known was covered in a sheet. Sheet clung to him. It was slightly disarrayed. At the very top of the body a few fine black curls were visible.
Months later we were married and living in Queens.
This remains one of my strongest experiences from my early times in New York. It prompted me quite soon to begin writing my second novel, L. O. V. E.
Wow, I can understand that this left a thorough impression!