I know where you can buy two huge fresh fish for a dollar, and where you can buy the same fish at three for a dollar. I know where there's cheap paper, and where, in the tangle of streets, there's a store with cheap five-cent pens. Oh, what I know! It would suffice for ten normal New Yorkers.
The best display window in New York, without question, is at Henri Bendel on Fifty-seventh Street. The most exquisite, the most sophisticated. Its gaggle of lesbians, girls grouped in weird poses, excites me to sexual arousal, the basest lust. I want to climb in there, into the window, and fuck them. Sometimes I go and watch three strange men change the clothes on them. This happens at night. Bendel's changes and rearranges its lesbians very frequently; one day it has them trampling dollars underfoot like fallen leaves, the next day whispering together, clustered in threes and fours.
I have secret relations with the mannequins. When I see them at night, slender, mystically naked or half undressed, flooded with the incredibly ghastly light of the display window, I am much more attracted to them than to live women, who have been no riddle to me for a long time now and who have but one solution. I spy on the undressed mannequins with voluptuous curiosity, much as when we placed a mirror under the school desk, as children, and tried to see the cunt of our teacher, our young little French instructor. I remember how frightened and shaken I was when I crawled under the desk in my turn and saw the dark folds and hairs (she went without underpants in summer). Now, when I feel like fucking all the time but don't arrange it for myself, the mannequins also frighten me. With pleasure and fright I think how I could tear aside their skirts, scarves, and other frippery to get at that place, and suddenly it would turn out they had a real live peepka. But forgive me these mystical sexual daydreams. It's because I'm not fucking much.
The most exquisite clothes in New York can be seen on Madison Avenue between Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, at Julie, which is also called the Artisans Gallery. There is something weird and fantastical about the clothes in this shop, a fairytale quality and at the same time depravity. They drive me wild with delight. Nearly all the suits, dresses, and masks in this gallery are constructed, not sewn, constructed the way a building is constructed; or carved, like sculptures. I love a holiday mood, effect, surprise. This is the only shop that surprises me, these are clothes for rare, strange natures, but unfortunately you have to be rich to buy them.
I dream of someday, somehow, getting some money and buying something from this shop for Elena, my former spouse, now my merry widow. She too is mad about clothes like these. A present from this shop would make her happy, I think. Such clothes would be becoming to no one else, only to Elena. Who else could wear a feather camisole, or the weird dresses, the wild play of fantasy.
I once got into the Diplomat Cabaret Theatre for a performance of Le Bellybutton and saw the sex star Marilyn Chambers. In one of her numbers Marilyn Chambers wore a feather bra from this shop. I recognized both the style and the execution at once. I don't suppose even Marilyn Chambers can afford to dress entirely in things from here. Too expensive.
I could live in this shop and never leave it. I often come and look at its small display windows, peer in, sometimes even go inside. I'm bashful about being here too much, I don't have any money, all I have is a taste for the unusual and strange, that's all. At times I feel like beginning to make, to construct, something similar; I did do tailoring in Russia, and I have to my credit several crazy self-made objects, among them the 114-patch "Blazer of the National Hero," and a jacket sewn of white filter cloth six millimeters thick. Perhaps I'll do it someday…
Another reason for my sorties around New York, apart from my abnormal desire to encounter someone or something, is the desire to distract myself from my eternally half-erect, nagging cock and from learning English. The two together cause me to fall into a terrible half sleep, a doze with nightmarish apparitions.
So I roll my trousers up to the knee, my white trousers with patches on the seat, which I'm forever washing in Tide in my hotel room; I put on my unvarying buskin sandals, which have already survived a summer and have lost half their straps; they are wooden and look like some Oriental structure, a bullock cart or well sweep, wood and leather; I take off my one and only summer shirt, white with blue checks, and I trudge downtown along Second Avenue in August. I walk on the sunny side of the street, of course, only the sunny side, never otherwise, the sunny side in any kind of heat, that's why I'm always so tanned. As I pass Fifty-third Street, I glance to my left. There's a very good wine shop down there, very pleasant and nice. It has bottles standing and lying in barrels, on shelves, in carts, in the middle, on the walls, wherever you look. You can buy any wine in this store, any beverage, it has a pleasant smell, and a huge bottle of French champagne, which very likely stands as high as my waist, costs between $162 and $175. That bottle is another thing I want to buy, if I ever come into any money, and intend to present to Elena. She is capable of appreciating it – she loves champagne, and a bottle this big will delight her. She'll be glad, and I will too. Elena is an uncommon woman, our tastes coincide, that's why I feel so bad about her. She's very beautiful herself and used to love the beautiful, and though she is no longer what she was, though life has broken her, in my heart she is always the same.
I trudge on, thinking pleasant thoughts about this shop. It would be nice to go there, browse awhile, and finally buy a bottle of Jamaican rum and drink it from a small wineglass – which I don't have, but will – in the heat of the day. I know where I'll buy the glass: at the comer of Perry Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the Village. They always have a variety of good crystal for sale, and if I spend a little time, look around, I'll find a wineglass that satisfies me.
So I march on downtown, and some people smile at me because when I'm walking I try to look as though I'm reciting a prayer that I recently composed for myself, thought up in a difficult moment when I noticed that I was excessively angry at people. Here is the prayer:
No anger has my soul
No anger has my soul
Though dead my hopes and cold
No anger has my soul
Do you suppose the people around you don't know whether you have anger in your soul or not? They know perfectly well. That's why, on seeing that I have no anger in me, many people smile at me and many ask me the way. First a cheerful Latin-American behind the wheel of an old jalopy asks how to get to Avenue C. "Turn left, my friend, turn left," I tell him. "You'll come to First Avenue, then Avenue A, then B, and the next is C." "Thanks! Have a nice day!" he calls to me, and smiles. Then a gray grandpa with a mustache, sitting in the open door of a truck, stares in fascination at the blue-enameled Orthodox cross that sticks to my chest. Grandpa may be a Ukrainian, this is their neighborhood. I stop at the fire hydrants, which are open, the water is flowing from them; I wash to the waist and walk on, without drying myself. This is natural, I get hot and I perform my ablutions.
Sometimes when I'm walking along Broadway, usually late at night – I used to walk this way from Roseanne's – someone will approach me, beg for money. I don't give it, I really can't. The man who is begging can certainly obtain money in New York more easily than I can. I am always willing to stop and explain that I don't have money, I'm on welfare, which means I'm on the same level as those who beg, if not lower. By this assertion I'm declaring that I'm a scorned individual. Everyone is satisfied. The only people I do not stop for are the ones who are very drunk or dulled out on drugs. Stopping for them is futile, it's hard to understand what they're mumbling. They're not actually seeing the world around them at that moment; to them, I, Eddie-baby, am a blob in the shape of a man. They are offended, but what can you do… I do give money to people who in my view are really unfortunate.