Cops and Robbers

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I left the car on Amsterdam Avenue and walked around the corner onto West 72nd Street. With the heat the way it was, I was glad the Police Department let its people wear a shortsleeved shirt in the summer, open at the neck, but I could have done without all that weight around my middle. Pistol, holster, gunbelt, flashlight, one thing after another, all dragging down on my pants and giving me an uncomfortable bunched-up feeling around the waist. What I would have liked most of all right then would have been to take all my clothes off and just stand there in the street and scratch. But in a way that would have been more against the rules than what I had in mind.

At the corner of Amsterdam and 72nd is the Lucerne Hotel, one of the spots where the bar-flies live who hang out along Broadway. Broadway between 72nd and 79th streets is lined with those narrow little bars, and every one of them is the same; the same loud jukebox, the same formica-and-plastic fixtures, the same fake Spanish decorations, the same big-breasted Puerto Rican girl behind the bar. All the losers from the single-occupancy hotels in the neighborhood spend their nights with their elbows on those bars, mooning at the barmaids, and then at closing time going back alone to their rooms to dream great seduction scenes before going to sleep. Or, if they have the money, which they usually don’t, they take home with them one of the fourth-rate hookers who walk up and down Broadway waiting to substitute for the barmaids, who have lives of their own.

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