I know who I am, he thought.
“I’m Edward Voegler,” he said aloud, and nodded.
Bellevue Hospital was on 26th Street and First Avenue.
They would put him in a padded cell and he would forget the whole damn world.
Quickly, he began walking out of the park. He had almost reached the sidewalk when the policeman stopped him.
The silence, which had surely been there all along, suddenly registered on his ears as a total absence of sound. The cop materialized soundlessly, stepping into his path with a nightstick stretched between two hands, held horizontally somewhere between his waist and his knees, as if he were ready to use it momentarily. The chess players were silent, the folk singer was silent, the chattering students were mute; he knew now they all must have looked up in surprise at his first outburst and then grown ominously still when he announced to the world at large that he was Edward Voegler. Again, a crosscurrent of thought entered his mind; he was Edward Voegler and this kind policeman would only help him to get to Bellevue immediately; but he was not Edward Voegler and this goddamn Keystone caricature was only going to complicate things.
“What seems to be the trouble, mister?” the cop asked, his hands still at the ready on the nightstick.
“No trouble at all,” Buddwing answered curtly, and moved to walk around the cop, but the cop took a quick sideward gliding step into his path again, and the nightstick moved up just a trifle higher toward his waist. The cop was redheaded and freckled, with a sour expression on his face. Buddwing hated him instantly, partially as a conditioned response of all New Yorkers to cops, and partially as recognition of a very personal obstacle in his path. The cop knew he was hated as a symbol and suspected he was hated as a person because he happened to have halitosis, but he stood before Buddwing in placid immovability with an expression on his face that silently imparted menace to the nightstick. Behind him, the chess players had turned from their game and were giving the encounter their undivided attention. The folk singer, surrounded by a group of teen-age boys in dungarees and a scattering of girls with smoky Cleopatra eyes, had shoved his guitar onto his hip and was staring at the cop.
“Well, it looks to me like you’re yelling all over the place,” the cop said.
Buddwing backed down with a pacifying, cop-fearing grin on his face. He was carrying no identification, and whereas he would not have minded being taken to Bellevue, he did not particularly want to be taken to jail first. As a matter of fact, the more he thought about it, the more he began to realize he did not want to be taken to Bellevue either. So he grinned mealymouthed and said apologetically, “I’m sorry if I was noisy, officer. I guess I didn’t realize I was being loud.”
“Yeah, well, there’s such a thing as disturbing the peace, you know,” the cop said, unmoved, and all at once Buddwing knew this was going to be bad.
“I’m sorry, officer,” he said.
“I could pull you in for disorderly conduct, you know that, don’t you?” the cop asked.
“I didn’t realize I was creating a disturbance,” Buddwing said.
“Mmm,” the cop said, studying him. The Negro folk singer had moved closer with his assorted collection of beatniks and music lovers, and the chess players had managed to gather around themselves a group of Saturday students who were asking what all the fuss was about. The cop, aware of the audience behind him, and seeming to feel his authority was being openly challenged if not severely threatened, stepped a little closer to Buddwing and said, “What are you doing here outside the school in the first place?”
“I was just sitting on a bench taking the sun,” Buddwing said.
“Yeah, well, why’d you pick here to do it?”
“Isn’t this a public park?” Buddwing asked.
“Never mind what it is, just answer what I told you.”
“It seemed quiet and peaceful and sunny, so I decided to sit here, that’s all,” Buddwing said. “I didn’t realize there was a law against that.”
“There ain’t,” the cop said in a placid, line-of-duty, not-about-to-take-any-crap voice, and then added imperturbably, “How about showing me some identification, mister?”
There followed an ominous silence during which the cop surmised he had accidentally struck pay dirt and Buddwing instantly knew he was trapped. The crowd, which had moved in from the benches and the walks to form a loose curious circle around Buddwing and the cop, was part of the silence in a patient, tentative way, as though undecided which of the pair to choose as its champion. The cop was staring at Buddwing calmly and impersonally, and Buddwing stared back at him in fear and anger, and weighed the silence and the temper of the crowd, and knew that lynch parties sometimes started with just such a silence.
“I’m not a vagrant,” he said.
“Who said you were?”
“I was simply sitting here in the sun.”
“Doing what? Watching the college girls?”
“No, but...”
“Watching the young college girls?” the cop said, certain he had hooked onto something big now, maybe the Boston strangler in town for the weekend. His nostrils dilated with the smell of blood; his hands tightened on the nightstick. The absurdity of the situation almost caused Buddwing to smile, but he recognized that even a trace of humor now would be his undoing. Mention of college girls and all the sneakered tweedy virginal images they conjured had caused a noticeable stir in the crowd surrounding Buddwing and the cop. He heard the buzz that swept through the onlookers and he was tempted to tell them he had been to bed with a college girl only this morning, how about that, huh? Where was our fat minion of the law and protector of the people then, huh?
In his most dignified voice, he said, “I wasn’t watching the college girls, officer, although I don’t believe there’s any law against that, either, is there?”
“No, none at all,” the cop said calmly. “Let me see your identification.”
“I told you I am not a vagrant.”
“You seem to know all about vagrancy, don’t you?”
Buddwing smiled at the policeman while inside his head the thought of flight took visual shape in the form of a blinking Broadway sign: RUN, run, RUN, run, RUN! He heard himself telling the officer they were making a mountain out of a molehill, weren’t they, or some such stalling nonsense, while the sign kept blinking on and off in his head. Smiling, talking, stalling, he laid his careful heroic plan: he would kick the cop in the groin, grab the guitar from the Negro folk singer, and bat the cop over the head with it. He would then leap over the bench and run into the Village where he would lose himself. “After all, officer, there’s really nothing so unusual about a respectable citizen sitting on a park bench taking a little sunshine, now, is there?”
“That’s right, so let me see your identification,” the cop said.
He was ready to lift his knee in a sharp crotch-splitting piston kick when one of the chess players, an old man with white hair and thin-fingered hands, said, “He was only sitting in the sun, officer.”
“Nobody asked you,” the cop said.
“I’m simply offering my observation.”
“Nobody asked you for your observation,” the cop said.
“I can back up his testimony,” the other chess player said, a short bald man wearing a large, faded blue cardigan.
“This ain’t a trial,” the cop said, “and mind your own business.”
“I thought this was a free country,” one of the smoky-eyed girls said.
“Who asked you?” the cop asked.
“What are you going to do next?” the Negro folk singer said. “Stop us from singing here in this park?” thereby opening a few old wounds and causing the cop to turn to him with a sour, pained expression.