It was two-thirty A.M. I'd bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in a Korean deli, where the food lay gleaming in metal trays beneath glowing heat lamps in the back of the joint: drumsticks dripping fat, noodles, mashed potatoes, soy-soaked spring rolls, over-boiled broccoli, spareribs, fettuccine carbonara, sausages with their meat turned out through cracked skin, lasagna, won-tons, burnt rice with tired vegetables, fried eggs looking suspiciously like painted plastic... Without really being hungry, I fell into a reverie for just long enough over the buffet to make my mouth water, before noticing the young Korean behind the counter, eyeing me suspiciously through thick-rimmed glasses - with one hand alertly beneath the cash register, maybe even fingering the trigger of a pump-gun? The deli-food was clinging to my nostrils, eventually combining itself with other pungent odors from the alleys I passed - rotting garbage, fermented piss, the smoke from my own cigarette coming back up from the lungs and merging into one with the universe again. Up in the hotel room it was so cold and clean that it didn't smell of anything else than the two of us when we were close to one another in the darkness. Like a sleepwalker slowly waking up and, with consternation, finding himself out there on the street in bare feet and pajamas in the middle of the night, the senses returned, jump-started by beer and nicotine.
Suddenly, I discovered faces and bodies outlined in the shadows, heard echoes of hip-hop tracks booming from cars gliding by ("FIGHT THE POWER!"), and felt the adrenaline rushing through the limbs. Marilyn was still looking up towards our room, where Louise was probably asleep again, as if she were wondering where the guy standing in the window had gone off to. I didn't have any eye contact with Marilyn anymore from this worm's eye view, which on the other hand could certainly not be said about the girls on 8th Avenue, more and more of them, in fact, the closer I got to the Port Authority bus terminal and 42nd Street, for the first time all by myself down here, without any guidebook or girlfriend, after the first week in New York. Black they were, most of them, black like the asphalt. Long-legged, wide-hipped and stacked Pam Grier clones with Afros, leopard-bras, hot pants, with fake gold around their necks and go-go boots hugging their thighs. During the day, they didn't restrain themselves either, not even when I came along as any other innocent tourist with a camera and Louise by my side, with their "Do you wanna blow-job, sweetie?!" or whatever proposition they could come up with. But now their marketing resembled the growling of hungry predators just before attack. "Come back here, white boy, I got some chocolate pussy for you - let momma fuck you hard, little baby!" they hissed with hoarse voices, melting together with the blackness of night except for the white of their eyes and their ivory teeth, and otherwise only occasionally illuminated by the lights of passing cars or the red-fluorescent tubes over porn shops when they stepped off their own slab of the pavement, looking for a potential customer. Off the slab from where they leaned up against the wall during breaks, waiting with flesh strapped up and loins protruding, lips puckered around cigarettes and gazes scanning from right to left for anybody remotely resembling a john. Waiting with shiny handbags dangling like amulets from loose wrists and unmentionable bodily openings oozing under the makeup, the leather, the panties, where a man - as if on account of a stumble made when crossing through life against a red light - could whirl himself straight down into a heavenly Hell. My throat felt harsh and dry. Emptied the beer with the neck tilted back as I stood at yet another crosswalk. What would it be like to screw a black girl? In other words, how would it be different? Tried to remember a certain skin-mag from the teen years, "Black Bunnies", I believe it was called. But it was hard to focus; it was the same feeling I had musing over the food in the deli; impossible to choose between all those courses even though you had a craving for something tasty. OK, you might have chosen the first, the best. You could have let yourself be taken down a side street, up a staircase and into a sleazy room. You could have pulled out a wad of bills, counted a few and paid her whatever she wanted. You might have laid down on a bed underneath a rotating fan and watched her twist her arms around her back to unsnap the bra. But I just kept on down towards 42nd Street, in a trance, even though I felt like saying 'yes' to all of them. And in some irrational way, I was actually sorry to disappoint them, giving them the impression that I didn't find them attractive enough to shell out the "only forty bucks". A little like when I was scared of losing Louise, worrying about not being kind enough or attentive enough, and rambled on, telling her how sweet and beautiful she was, and how much I loved her, until she - tiring of the compliments - coolly cut through them: "You don't have to say that all the time, do you?" When I averted my eyes in polite rejection, balancing myself on the curb to get away without any confrontation, they only sneaked up on me from behind. Breathing down my neck or stroking my skin with long nails through the sticky wet T-shirt until a trembling palpitated from my synapses, along the spine and down into the groin. In free fall from the Empire State, in slow motion into the abyss. It was only me and the black girls. Everyone else on the street - taxi drivers, cops, panhandlers, winos, night creatures, sailors, hot-dog vendors, dealers, psychos, junkies, doomsday preachers with their Bibles raised above their heads - invisible in the heat mist. Turned around the corner on to 42nd, into the conflagration of neon and wailing sirens, without even noticing the threatening looks, wounds on outstretched hands, voices shrill with hysteria, pills or powder displayed for my assessment, screeching tires, crutches quivering under weakened bodies, guns in the oiled holsters of policemen, slamming doors, blood-filled hypodermic needles strewn on to the ground around garbage cans. With a sensation that now, now it should happen, entirely clear and serene and all in place in my own choreography, while the pulse hammered its beat through the flesh. Through my flesh, through the flesh of the girls, through the sweet-scented flesh of a thousand black girls.
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