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Jerry McFall. The girl was with him now. “Another thousand if I do. I might as well try.”
    Jim nodded. “Where are you gonna start?”
    I told him what I had done so far, which was waste my time up at Barnard.
    â€œYou know who you ought to talk to,” Jim said after a minute. “Old Paul. The guy who lives on the Bowery. If the girl’s been using dope for a while, she’d be likely to meet him at some point, right?”
    I nodded. It wasn’t a bad idea.
    â€œOh, hey,” Jim said. “Before I forget. There was a nice picture of Shelley in the Daily News today. An ad for a jewelry store on Fifth Avenue.”
    â€œThanks,” I said. “Was the ad for a bracelet, by the way?”
    Jim nodded. “Yeah, you saw it?”
    The waiter brought over plates of linguine with calamari and hard rolls.
    â€œHey, that reminds me,” I said, changing the topic. “You seen Mick lately? Mick from the Bronx? I heard he got outta Rikers.”
    â€œOh, yeah,” Jim said. “He’s been out for months now.” He smiled. “In fact, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I bought a dress for you off him just yesterday. Straight from Bergdorf’s. It’s a real knockout. You’re gonna love it.”
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    We talked some more and finished dinner and then had glasses of sweet wine before we left. After dinner I usually went back to Jim’s place with him, but I was tired that evening and wanted to go home. We said goodnight outside the restaurant and I walked through Little Italy for a while before I got a taxi. There were a few tourists walking around, leaving restaurants or looking for one. Groups of teenagers went from block to block, seeing what the news was on the various street corners. Kids were playing stickball in the street. A woman yelled from a tenement window: “Ant’ny! Ant’ny, you come home RIGHT NOW!”
    At Houston Street I stopped at a newsstand and bought the Daily News. Then I got a taxi to take me the rest of the way home. I lived in the Sweedmore, a hotel for women on Twenty-second and Second. My room was around the size of a shoebox, but it was safe and clean. Lavinia, the old lady who ran the place, spent most of her life at the front desk scowling at the girls who lived there and finding reasons to throw us out. She was okay. That was her job. She scowled at me when I came in. I scowled back and went up to my room and took off the god-awful suit I had put on for the dean of students and put on a pair of men’s pajamas.
    I sat down in an old armchair, one of two I had got secondhand to furnish the place. The bed and the dresser had come with the room. I had bought the armchairs and a little table in the corner for a hot plate and a percolator, and there was a coffee table that a girl down the hall gave me when she moved out. On the floor was an old phonograph and some 78 records. The bathroom was down the hall, shared with three other girls.
    When I got my room at the Sweedmore I’d just stopped using dope and just got out of jail, and I didn’t have a penny. Early in the evening, after the banks closed, I gave Lavinia a check to hold the place. The check came from a checkbook that I’d lifted from a lady’s handbag on the subway, and I knew she’d cancel it as soon as she noticed it was gone. So I spent the rest of the night back on the subway, relieving the riders of their wallets, until I had enough for the rent and some extra to eat and buy clothes besides. It got easier as the night went on and people started to come home from clubs drunk and come home from working the night shift exhausted. I worked until eight the next morning and then I met Lavinia in the lobby before she went to the bank. She didn’t mind ripping up the check and taking cash instead.
    I sat in the armchair and thought about pouring myself a bourbon, but I didn’t. A lot of people got off dope