A recap thus far: Daniel, an obviously well-educated young man, works at a gas station in the Bowery at a time (1969) when that area of Manhattan (NYC) was considered the deadliest part of town. One rainy evening, he steps into the phone booth to make a call. He hears a rapping on the glass doors and assumes that some poor soul is looking for shelter from the rain. But …
It was a girl. A girl with a Botticelli face dressed in bell-bottoms and a pea jacket standing in the steam rising from the sewers. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
“What are you doing here?” Daniel demanded as he stepped out of the phone booth and into the drizzle.
“We really need gas. We got lost driving around the city and then we saw your station.”
“We?”
“My friends and I.”
“There are more of you?” One was bad enough.
“Yes, they’re in the car.”
Runaways, oh lord, runaways, he thought. The city was swamped with runaways, all trying to find Greenwich Village and Bob Dylan. Instead, if they were lucky, they ended up at Father Frank’s calling their parents for money for a return trip home. If they weren’t lucky, they were used and spit out by the godless ones, left to sit on the doorsteps of brownstones, selling oranges or themselves.
“You girls shouldn’t even be in this part of town.” He followed her to their car, a hump-back Volvo with Nevada plates. “You need to get back in your car and leave. This is the Bowery.”
“But, you don’t understand. We’re really out of gas. We’ve been driving on empty for at least an hour!”
Empty, out of gas, out of luck, lost. Probably hungry, dirty and on each other’s nerves. But he couldn’t help. His hands were tied. “Look,” he explained, “I can’t sell you gas even if I wanted to. The owner has locked up the pumps and gone home and I don’t have the keys.”
“Oh. Is there another gas station around here?”
“Not in this part of town!”
Couldn’t they see where they were? The dilapidated brick buildings, storefronts boarded up, trash and broken glass filling the gutters. Were they blind to all of that? “They all close at sunset anyway. No one stays open after dark down here.”
By now the other two had fallen from the car and stood over him. They were so like the girls who arrived every spring after the rye grass had exploded and formed a chartreuse chastity belt around the seminary. Arriving with their families to see the Passion Play. Girls who came bearing homemade brownies and yeast rolls in their Easter dresses, their long hair flowering, their voices echoing against the tile walls. Such a flutter of activity that made buckling down for year-end exams ever more difficult.
But they were far from the seminary. Venus of the Sewers spoke first: “Is there a cheap hotel nearby where we can spend the night?”
“You girls don’t want to stay in any of the hotels around here.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not prostitutes, are you?”
“What?”
“You’re not prostitutes are you?”
”No!”
“Then you don’t want to stay in the hotels around here.”
Damn. He had to do something. He couldn’t just leave them at the station. They’d never survive the night, hunkered down in that small car with winos banging on the steamed windows, begging to be let in for a warm place to sleep. Maybe he should march them down to Father Frank’s. They could sleep on the hard wooden benches beneath paintings of saints, and early in the morning have breakfast with the Father: hard boiled eggs and slices of white bread, strong Lipton tea and, a stern lecture. In the name of all that is holy, go home to your parents.
But St. Marks was on the other side of the Village. By the time they got there —if they got there — they would be soaked to the bone, chilled and susceptible to all kinds of city rot. Still, what choice did he have? And then he remembered Marcia’s place.
Next time: The Behemoth.
Saying nothing in particular 