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Show •183 taller than it was wide, with a bathroom no bigger than the one in a Greyhound bus, a kitchen in a closet and one window opening on the fire-escape. The place was too small for a normal bed but I took a hint from the previous tenant and slung a double hammock from hooks he'd left sealed in the wall. By Eastern city standards it was a good neighborhood, two blocks from Central Park, full of delicatessens slowly going broke but from whose open doors curious enormously good smells poured into the street. In antique-store windows were old toys, farm-tools, wooden furniture put together with pegs and wedges, crude and reassuring. Through the iron grilles of the pawnshops I saw more valuable things: buttery-yellow trombones, cameras with purple iridescent eyes, electric razors, tape-recorders, old-fashioned pocket watches big as goose-eggs. Sometimes late at night I walked along Central Park West, glad to be a wall-width away from the crazy ones but safe among the Yellow Cabs, under the pale city lights. I was fresh out of an actively bad marriage, I prized lonesomeness and wanted to develop regular habits. I went to work at Weinstein's factory every day. From one of the pawnshops I bought a little black and white television to watch at night; in used bookstores I found cheap copies of Connecticut Yankee, Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass; from the |