Tiffany Street Read Online Free PDF

traffic whoosing by on both sides of us, and he was throwing another punch at my head. It never landed. This black boy, clearly to his amazement as well as mine, had competition.
    Behind him another black boy—no, a man: he could have been in his forties or his nineties but he was not in his teens—had taken an interest in me. He was taller and heavier than the boy, and he was carrying what looked like a stunted baseball bat. I learned later it was a long flashlight, but at the moment my capacity to learn was limited to my popped eyes. They showed me the long, sweeping motion of one arm, with which the black man shoved the black boy out of his path, and the way both his hands came together at the bottom of the weapon, swung it up over his head and, like a headsman’s ax, brought it down in the direction of my totally unprotected scalp.
    I screamed. I crouched. And something came up out of the past to help me. The memory of that commando course I had been forced to take at a British staging area in Kent shortly before D-day in 1944.
    “Kick,” Corporal Isherwood had snapped at us over and over again. “Kick,” he had barked. “As hard and as straight out at the bahstids as you can. The foot reaches further than the hand, and to do it you don’t have to lean forward and expose the body’s voytal parts. Kick, gentlemen, always kick.”
    A quarter of a century later, on a sunny afternoon in front of Penn Station, I did Corporal Isherwood’s bidding. I kicked. And I added a touch of my own: I closed my eyes. The toe of my shoe caught the wielder of the headsman’s ax right smack in the middle of the target that the Marquis of Queensbury spent his life telling Western Man no civilized pugilist must even approach.
    I did better than approach it; I practically demolished it. Closing my eyes had obviously done the trick. The man screamed. He tumbled backward, clutching his voytal parts, and he flopped onto the black boy who had damaged my head. They went down together, amid a wild rasping of brakes and an insane honking of horns.
    I heard a click behind me. The taxi driver had leaned over and snapped back the catch on the lock of his rear door. I twisted the handle and jumped in. Pulling the door shut with a bang, I fell back on the seat.
    “Where to?” the driver said.
    I looked at the card next to his meter. Ramon Fuentes. I looked at his Puerto Rican face. Twenty-five? Perhaps thirty. Certainly no more. He had not yet been born when Benny Kramer was being taught in Kent to “kick, always kick.”
    “Madison and Forty-ninth,” I said. “Drive slow.”
    “They hurt you bad?” Ramon Fuentes said.
    Not physically. Only in the place where I lived.
    “I’ll be all right in a few minutes,” I said.
    But I knew in my belly I would never be all right. Never again. A couple of hours ago, in Philadelphia, my life had turned a corner. A few minutes ago, in front of Penn Station, a road block had been dumped behind me. There was no way to go back.
    The streets I had roamed at night, as a boy at N.Y.U. Law School, dreaming of Toby Wing and Judge Brandeis, those streets were no longer safe in the brilliant afternoon sunlight.
    “Listen,” I said to the taxi driver. “When you stopped the cab for me in the middle of the traffic back there, why didn’t you open the door?”
    “No taxi driver in this town goes to Penn Station to look for a fare,” the driver said. “It’s too tough. Even the cops are scared. It’s all gangs. They tell a man or a woman, We’ll get you a cab, mister. Then, when they get it, they surround him and his family and they say, That’ll cost you ten bucks, mister. Or twenty. The poor guy, he’s there with his wife, he’s stuck. He doesn’t pay? They get rough. Sometimes with the bags. Sometimes with the man. His wife and kids, too. He usually pays. Like those two guys who jumped you. They were probably promoting a cab for some poor sucker who just got off the train from some hick town out