January 24

I was about to be mugged by a man with a chain so angry he growled at the Lincoln Center subway station when out of nowhere appeared a tall chubby-faced Hasidic Jew with peyot and a black hat a black coat white shirt with prayer-shawl fringes showing we walked together out of the station and when we got outside and shook hands I noticed he was blind. Goodbye, I said, as giddy as a man waking from an anesthetic in the recovery room, happy, with a hard-on. The cabs were on strike on Broadway so beautiful a necklace of yellow beads I breathed in the fumes impossibly happy