The Christmas Kid

And he knew then that people from cities and people from the West had grown up in different corners of the universe. On that Sunday morning, Ira from the West Bronx was washed by a sense of peace; the trembling weekday urgency was mercifully gone, the streets as bare of tumult as paintings by Hopper. Subways were almost quiet. And yet Nydia, of the San Antonio suburbs, heard sounds that his New York childhood had edited away forever. That day, he doubted for the first time his vision of the rest of their lives.

Now thinner and tauter than when they moved to the Factory, her body poised like an exclamation point, she was hearing strangers on the roof. Ridiculous. He sighed and sat at his desk to begin the melancholy task of correcting essays.

Then he heard the footsteps.

Right above him. Someone walking slowly and deliberately. He sat very still, holding his breath. The footsteps described a small circle. And then stopped. Directly over his desk…His skin pebbled with fear.

He picked up the telephone and dialed 911, and waited, and then tried to explain to a female voice that someone was walking on the roof of his building, and the woman said, “Yes?” As if saying, this is not news. And then Ira felt foolish, and hung up the phone.

The footsteps moved again. Another small circle.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered, and got up, and went to the door, taking a ski jacket off a peg, thinking: It’s probably some dumb kids, fooling around on the roof, smoking dope or something. But it can’t go on. I’ve got to tell them. He went into the hall. A flight of stairs led to a door that opened out onto the roof. As he hurried up the stairs, adrenaline rushed through him, fueled by anger. Kids. It must be kids. But whoever the hell it is, they shouldn’t be prowling around the roof of the Factory at night. He turned the lock and pushed open the heavy metal door.

The roof was a black tar-paper field, from which jutted strange figures: chimneys, and cowled metal objects, and deep shadows cast by the smothered lights of the street. There was no moon. The wind made a whining sound. He stood for a moment, forcing his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but the far shadows were deep, blank, impenetrable.

“Hey,” he said loudly. “Who’s out there?”

The wind lifted his words and tossed them into the night. He tried to locate himself on the roof in relation to the apartment, to locate the spot on the roof that was above his desk. That was the street. That was the avenue. It should be…He walked out, and circled and knew where he was. Then the wind moaned, and he wanted to run. It was as if some gigantic figure loomed behind him, and he felt his scalp riffle, as if something were scurrying between skin and skull. But he couldn’t turn to look. He waited, glanced at the light from the street, warm and inviting. Suddenly there was a loud slam, metallic and final. The door.

He grabbed for the handle, twisted it, yanked at it, then pounded against its painted metal skin. But the door was firmly, solidly locked. For the moment, at least, he was trapped in the black terrain of the roof. He cursed now, blunt obscenities retrieved from his youth, the words like impotent weapons hurled at the wind and the darkness and his own dread. And then, far across the rooftop, he saw something move.

A man. In a T-shirt on this cold night. There were tattoos on his arms, and a bandanna around his brow, his skin a sickly white. “Who are you?” Ira asked hoarsely, across the distance. But there was no answer. Then he saw another figure, smaller, with Hispanic features, and then another, a heavy-bellied white man, and then a muscular black man, all of them emerging from the darkness.

He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come, and he backed away, backed away, seeking light and escape, and still they came, more of them now, possessors of the roof and the Factory. He thought he heard the word “strike” once, then again, whispering at him in the darkness, “strike,” and then, at the lip of the roof, one final time, “strike,” before he plunged into the light.

A Poet Long Ago

THERE WAS A DOUBLE-PARKED panel truck on 52nd Street near Ninth Avenue, and a sanitation truck trying to squeeze by, and a line of backed-up cars from Jersey, their drivers leaning on the horns in the cold, anxious morning. Then one of the sanitation men came around from the front to see whether the squeeze was possible. He was very calm. He gave soothing signals to the people in the cars and then estimated the room the truck needed to pass through. I knew him. Sonny Rosselli.

“Hey, Sonny!”

He turned and I waved and he came to my car and peered at my face, as if trying to remember. I told him who I was and got out of the car. He embraced me and then the Jersey drivers were crazed again, and I told Sonny I’d pull around the corner after he got the truck through the morning slalom.

Sonny Rosselli. Thirty years ago, he’d been Sonny Rosselli the poet.