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He ran up West 114th Street, stumbling over a gentleman of the evening who was lying half
in, half out of the doorway of an apartment building. Roger excused himself and would have waited
for a response to make sure he had not damaged the fellow, but the man had somehow gotten his
tongue stuck deep inside the neck of an empty Boone’s Farm Apple Wine bottle, and speech was
beyond him.
Roger grabbed an IRT express downtown, and sitting in the clattering hell of the subway car
he tried to ignore the overhead fluorescents that babbled I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOUR SOUL,
YOU CLOWN. I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU. ARE YOU BEING ASSAULTED BY LOVE EVERY
DA Y SO MUCH YOU CAN TURN DOWN A TERRIFIC OFFER LIKE THIS?
Roger closed his eyes. It didn’t help. His chest coil was obviously activated and it was
pulsing in time with the overheads. He opened his eyes and with a sudden weariness that had swept
over him like a sea of sand he opened his mouth and gave a primal scream. No one in the subway
car noticed.
He got out on Times Square and, of course, she was everywhere. In the signs of the sea food
restaurant on the other side of 42nd Street, in the marquees of the skin flick theaters, in the neon of
the pornobook shops, in every flashing, bubbling, flickering, hallucinating light that made up the
visual pollution by which Times Square proclaimed its wares and snagged its victims.
“Okay!” he howled, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as the mobs split around him.
“Okay! I quit! I’ve had enough! I give up! Name it, just name it, I’ll do it! I’ve had the course! I’m
only human and I’ve had it!”
TERRIFIC! AT LONG LAST! said the neon come-ons. THERE’S A LADDER OVER
THERE BY THAT MOVIE, SEE IT?
Roger looked and, yes, there was a twenty-foot ladder up under the marquee of a movie
house playing a double bill comprising Leather Lovers and Rebecca of Sinnybrook Farm. “Now
what?” Roger said, softly.
I CAN’T HEAR YOU, the neon replied.
“I said: What the hell now, you goddam pain in the ass!” he screamed, at the highest decibel
count he had ever achieved, his throat going raw. People shied away.
CLIMB UP THE LADDER, YOU SWEET THING.
“Oh, God,” Roger mumbled, “this is just terrible; just terrible. I hate this a lot. “
But he climbed the ladder, just as the assistant manager of the theater--a zit-laden young man
in a soiled tuxedo and argyle socks--emerged from the lobby carrying the heavy boxes of marquee
letters to change the bill. “Hey! Hey, you! Weirdo, what the gahdam flop hell you think you’re
doin’? Get offa there you freako-pervo-devo!”
Roger went up and up, and when he was standing at the top he was on a level with the neon
theater name. It said, very suddenly, TAKE ME! TAKE ME NOW!
And for no particular reason Roger could name, he reached out with both hands, swung
himself onto the marquee, and--ripping open his shirt so his coil was exposed--he slammed himself
against the love-message.
There was a blinding flash of light that pulsed and continued flashing like endless novae,
over and over and over resembling--said a narcotics squad cop who had worked on the ski patrol at
Stowe, Vermont--who happened to be emerging from the theater handcuffed to two Queens junkies
he’d caught scoring in the highest row of the balcony--resembling nothing so much as the sunlight
glass flashing off the thin crust of ice-over-powder at the summit of a snow-covered mountain.
Someone else said it was the exact color of tuna fish salad.
But when the light faded, Roger Chama was gone, all save the little finger of his left hand,
lying on the sidewalk humming a medley of tunes from The Student Prince, Blossom Time and The
Desert Song, a very peculiar eyeball that seemed to have developed a terrible case of glaucoma, and
a dollar and thirty-five cents in change.
