Glory Goes and Gets Some
Excerpt

East on Houston

There was this one summer that began in June and ended quite some time later, when I could hear the voices of men in traffic, while I was walking east on Houston. They honked and squealed, barked, drawled, groaned, purred, hissed, whispered, and raggedly begged at me as I twitched down the street in a borrowed dress that was as red as the stoplights, the stoplights gleaming in the black air like costume jewelry from a sunken Spanish galleon, gleaming from the bottom of the sea: the night on Houston like a black tropical shipwreck ocean, fathoms deep and full of trinkets for a young girl like yours-ever-true.

Their voices glittered like tossed beer cans on traffic islands and said, Excuse me Miss, excuse me, can I walk you? Excuse me, excuse me Miss, those are some fine young thighs you’re sliding along on there, with that creamy swish-swish, sweet, like my wife’s when she was still walking. If I call her collect this one last—I’m going to tell her this time that I really mean it, this time, she’ll forget about all the hours that piled up like stale blankets until she couldn’t get out of bed, and we’ll go to that place in Sheepshead, we’ll go to that place that serves that crab with the butter sauce you could just about make love to, and you’ve got those exact same thighs, Miss, just slow them down a little because I’ll tell you what, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Their voices reflected me in pieces of what they saw, like shattered Christmas ornaments on the sand in July: Excuse me Miss. You can stop can’t you, you can spare one second, can’t you? Can’t you, you little cunt? You little stuck-up cunt? Think it’s made of gold or what? All you cunts—don’t even care what it was a man used to do for you, it’s all what can you do for me right now. From watching too much television, that right-now thing—you’ve even got it in your walk, you walk like "right-now, right-now" . . . you don’t care, do you, what I used . . . I used to . . . I used to know the first four hundred pages of the "Iliad" by heart, memorized, I could quote it from memory, fine, fine, keep walkin’, you ugly at any rate.

Do I remember what it was exactly I was walking into when I was walking east on that particular street? Nothing good, but listen, the voices of men lifted me like a murmuring tide and floated me down toward the river, me with my eyeliner making my eyes black and green, smeared, shaped like tears, like black and green chalk-drawing eyes running in the rain.

I was moist, like the sky before a shower, and the voices of men clamored to me like a summer thunderstorm—Excuse me Miss, they cracked, they lit up the sky, Excuse me Miss, but I’m a jazz musician. They blew around me like a light breeze. Excuse me Miss, but do you know how to get to that little place on the end of First and A? What I mean is, I feel a little awkward in this neighborhood, and I’d like to bring something back to show my friends, something I could give a bath and brush its hair, something to lick like a sweet poison plum, something that would climb out my fire escape in the morning and never ask to see my bank statement—I heard them say things like that. Excuse me Miss, but I’m a jazz musician. I heard them clacking their knees together, heard them say, Excuse me Miss, I’m tired and I’m no longer a young stud by any means, but if I could touch the hollow of your ankle, if I could just once see it filled with rainwater, I’d smile like a wolf and bring you something wrestled from the concrete with my bare hands, my hands stained yellow with cigarettes and strength—hell, I’d wrestle the lights off the Chrysler building if you’d just let me look at it, even though I have no teeth.

And that guy, who was always there, with his broken instrument: Excuse me Miss, but I’m a jazz, excuse me, excuse me Miss, but I used to play with Parker, Miss, excuse me, but I’m a jazz musician, and I’m talking to you . . . I heard them say it, their voices twining around, through the pointed scrawny leaves of the plane trees, around the twigs and paper cups at my feet: Excuse me Miss, but my mother was a knife-sharp, slender blue dragon, she spat white hot fire from her eyes, like lasers, and her teeth were shaped like needles, twelve feet long, her scales like sapphires; when she flew overhead she cast a shadow across the face of the sun, her talons were made of black steel, and she would have called you a bitch because you won’t talk to me, Miss.

It seems to me now like I had been on roller skates, young enough to slide in and out of traffic, in between taxis and trucks. But I knew what I was walking into, and what I was listening for all along, and how after I heard it I couldn’t hear much of anything else for a long time. I don’t want to go back there. I only ever think about it when I hear the sound of screeching brakes.