SHIVA NAIPAUL PRIZE

MANHATTAN MEN

VANESSA LETTS

THE first man I spoke to in Manhattan took me for a beggar. He was elderly but spruce, and wore a fur-collared greatcoat that dusted the sidewalk. When I asked him the way to Lexington Avenue, the tic in his cheek jiggered and jerked, and he gave me a quarter.

I walked in the wrong direction, up 45th Street, past the Chase Manhattan Bank, where they always have a pianist serenad- ing you with Chopin, and stumbled into Grand Central. The enormous under- ground vault, teeming with commuters, filled me with childish awe. I thought everyone would notice me, so I bought a packet of cigarettes, even though I don't smoke. Then I sat at the bar and the fellow sitting next to me bought me a gin. I felt extremely jolly. 'My life is falling apart,' the man said, 'I can't go home today. I got shot down: I hate to say this about any woman, but it's physical abuse.' I stared at him in astonishment. This was the first incomprehensible man I met in New York.

At last I realised he was getting a divorce: 'I fell in love,' he went on shaking his head like Stan Laurel, 'ain't I a crid- der.' There was a great thud as a water bomb fell plumb in the middle of the bar and splashed on the barman's bald pate. The barman got in a fury and stamped his feet; the mysterious water-bomber went thundering along the glass catwalks with five policemen at his heels. Undaunted, my THIS is the winner of the fourth Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. It is awarded to the entrant 'best able to describe a visit to a foreign place or people. It is not for travel writing in the conventional sense, but for the most acute and profound observation of cultures and scenes evidently alien to the writer'. The prize is worth f1,000. This year's judges were Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, Shiva Naipaul's pub- lisher, Gillon Aitken, his agent, Vikram Seth, the writer, Charles Moore, former editor of The Spectator and Mark Amory, its literary editor.

There were almost 100 entries from 16 countries, almost half from outside Britain. The short list included the work of Xochi Davan, Sebastian Hope, Alice Keen, John Porter and R. Scott and the final tussle was with Charles Gilbert but Vanessa Letts emerged the winner by a clear margin.

friend went on baring his soul, the way strangers do when they meet in bars. I knew I would be terribly embarrassed if I met him again, at a cocktail party or something. The trouble with American girls, he went on tipsily, was they didn't know how to kiss: 'They practically punch you in the smush, and then they make a sound like horses munching hay.'

Only a week later I was walking along 31st Street and I noticed white paint on my shoe. I looked around and there was white paint on the shoetrician's glass window. There. was white paint on the sign saying, If you don't come in, at least smile as you walk by.' There was white on the street, there was white everywhere: in front of me was an unconscious white man and a white briefcase flat out next to a crumpled gallon of white paint. A man wearing an NYC Parks Ranger hat, who may have been mad, was doubled up in laughter. A large crowd gathered round and it started to snow. We were told to get lost, but everyone stayed. I got talking to a man called Joey Lapallo who was walking his pekinese, Joey II: the paint, we decided, must have fallen from quite some height. 'Boy, you got a crispy accent,' Joey said, as the body and briefcase were carted away in a white ambulance.

After that I contracted a phobia about meteors and other unidentified falling ob- jects. I found an apartment in the Village Voice the day I arrived, but my room-mate went on holiday the same night. Her last words were, 'Don't walk past the burnt-out building on the corner because the kids like to set fire to the NYNEX Yellow Pages and hurl them on to the heads of passers- by, along with tin cans and broken bottles.' I looked out of the window and saw sheets of paper and a pair of knickers falling down the airshaft like confetti. All night long I heard sirens and gun shots, but I told myself they were only firecrackers. By the summer I was completely used to noise. The heat made the airshaft smell like a hen-coop, but still, we opened all the windows and put in mesh frames to keep out the bugs. It was only then that I discovered the source of the gun-shots: two fat Puerto Ricans in their underpants, who spent the whole day shooting rats out of the windows and burping louder than I thought humanly possible. In the end they got bored with the gun and used a cross- bow instead.

My neighbour, Dibbs Locksmith, told me to stay away from the fat twins: they were dealers who had apartments on top of each other so they could pass drugs through the ceiling. One of them was addicted to Cockroach Killer Spray, which makes you randy and desperate to pee at the same time; worse still, when you try to pee, you can't.

Styling himself 'The People's Lock- smith', Dibbs claimed he knew everything about everyone in the neighbourhood, because he had done the locks in all their apartments. On the other hand, he had a lively imagination. His hobbies, as he put it with infinite delicacy, were bird-watching and astronomy. Less delicately, he would exclaim, 'New York is for voyeurs', and whisk me up to the roof to peer into the next-door apartments with a pair of power- ful binoculars and a telescope. The rat- shooters got Dibbs's `Puerto-Rican Spe- cial' front-door locks for $40, even though they were bad boys and Dibbs called them `The Arch Fiends'. They owned a pantech- nicon, he said, for robbing whole depart- ment stores.

Nevertheless, Dibbs was the only New York man I met who was not obsessed with crime. He liked saying 'pantechnicon' just for the sound of the word. Dibbs was affected, and adopted un-American words, like 'dreadful' and 'ghastly'. Whenever he saw a newspaper, he would get in a fury, and denounce it as 'poppycock and hog- wash'. I looked over the papers, and Dibbs was right. Crime stories have taken over the Daily News and the New York Post. There is no international news; as Dibbs put it, the papers are all about New York's `knaves, rapscallions and cads'. At a dinner party a publisher told me he liked to go to court cases in his lunch hour. The last one he saw was about an ingenious Iranian terrorist, arrested in possession of a gar- rotte and a sawn-off shotgun, who escaped from the fourth floor of a prison hospital on a rope made of dental floss.

I THOUGHT I would take a look at the courts myself. As I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, the road under the foot- way darkened with a cortege of police cars, motorbikes, prison vans and demonstra- tors. I chatted to two workers repairing the bridge, Charlie and Louie, who said the strange procession was for Al Sharpton, the black civil rights leader, who had just been released from jail. Opposite City Hall demonstrators were chanting 'White Law, No Law' and 'No Law, No Just Ice, No Peace: Slam the Po Lice'. Then the whole scene turned into a farce: a gang of bogus police stormed down the street pursued by a film crew. 'You can tell that's the director,' someone said, 'he's looking down the wrong end of the camera.' In fact he was hectoring the real demonstrators who were spoiling his location.

There was so much confusion I left and found myself in Police Plaza and the Police Academy Museum. The first case was a harmless display of 19th-century badges and uniforms. Further on, however, a group of schoolchildren stood riveted by a case of 'recently acquired contraband weapons' which included an umbrella- dagger and a 'homemade slashing instru- ment' made out of a pen. The 'Youth Gang Weapons' were even more exotic: a silk stocking blackjack, a sharpened letter- opener, an ice-scraper, a meat-cleaver, and a trencher with two horseshoes tied to it which someone had used to try and con- vince everyone that his victim had been trampled to death by a horse. 'Graphically these weapons illustrate the criminal potential of the misguided youth,' said an edifying hand-written label beneath. I glanced at Son of Sam's fingerprints and decided the place was too gruesome for me.

I walked back to the Brooklyn Bridge and talked to my frends Charlie and Louie again. I persuaded them to take me up the great cable to the top of the tower. We walked across the roadway to a wooden scaffold and began climbing. The cable is cylindrical, so you cling on to two wire- rope balustrades on either side which coat your hands in rust. As we climbed it got colder and windier; there was a tiny ladder tied to the tower by a piece of rope. At the very top of the tower was a little hut, and an octopus of rusty suspension cables. Louie pointed out one which had snapped and killed a tourist taking a photograph. `It's like being on top of the world,' Charlie said, so I didn't dare tell him I felt sick.

A few weeks later I went back to the courts. By then, I had discovered the arraignment courts in the 'Tombs', the city's criminal courts and prisons where Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener finally died. Now so many people are arrested in New York, the Tombs have special night courts. Outside the dismal building two policemen leant over a drunk who had capsized in practically the worst place he could have chosen in the city. 'When did you last have a drink?', they said. 'Yester- day', came a whimper. 'Yesterday', the cop said, hauling him inside, 'was one hour ago.'

`It'll be a good night tonight, for sure,' the porter said as I went through the metal-detector. I gave him a quizzical look, and the man had me pinned, Ancient Mariner fashion. 'It depends on the weath- er, see; tonight's hot.' I asked how many people just came to look, like me. 'You're all the same,' he said in a sudden passion, `you come here looking for entertainment. People like you, you don't know how to enjoy yourselves any more. I'm a jack of all trades: I like sport, I'm a first-rate connoisseur, see: I know good bread, same as I know good caviar.' I felt abashed. 'I know what it is to enjoy life,' he went on relentlessly. 'What was it Shakespeare said? The play's the thing.'

Inside I joined an audience of four huge women and a man drinking a can of soda sitting on benches. The accused, all pitiful- ly young, waited in line. First they were interviewed in a sound-proof confessional box, and then they were up before a judge. There was such a back-log, I found out later, that sometimes they have to wait for three days. A narcotics dealer was up in front of the judge, but everything stopped when three of the women started snigger- ing and were sent out of court. The man started eating a bagel, so he was sent out too, and I followed. Outside the building, he threw away his bagel and held a razor in my face. A weird blue light crackled in the darkness. 'That's a cattle-stunner, babe; so you betta watch out,' he said and walked off.

AFTER that, I gave up being interested in crime and took up genetics instead. I had been living in the city for several weeks before I nerved myself to ring my only contact, Ross Bradley, a scientist from Connecticut I had once met at a party in England.

On the way to visit him at Rockefeller University, I passed a little shrine on the stoop of a smart brownstone. There were several bunches of white lilies, a sad little pile of chocolate-coated, bone-shaped Doggo Bix, a photograph of a black labrador next to a sign saying 'THURS- DAY: SUNNY IS NOW WITH THE ANGELS'.

Before supper, Ross said he would show me round the lab. Rockefeller's laborator- ies are all housed in an inscrutable black glass tower. Grey ribbons of smoke twist out of the top. 'It looks a bit like a bunker, I'm afraid,' said Ross, 'Ha, ha, ha.' We went straight up to the roof, which had a tremendous view of the East River and the Pepsi-Cola neon sign in Queens. It qui- , vered and melted in the smoke like a mirage. 'It's carcinogens; we produce as much pollution as a factory; it goes straight up the flow hoods and out the top,' Ross said, smiling his wholesome smile. 'Fifteen minutes up here is the same as inhaling a whole packet of cigarettes.' Next to us was a tiny greenhouse full of wilting tobacco plants. 'They're our transgenics,' Ross explained cheerily. 'We infect them with a gene and alter their internal clock so they open at night and close in the daytime.' We went downstairs to the lab where Ross was working on genetic sequencing. `There are certain ethical problems,' Ross conceded, taking me into the cold room which is — 40°. It is like getting inside a freezer, and no one spends more than 15 minutes in there at a time. Ross opened a fridge: DNA is kept at — 20° and is made from salmon sperm. 'Once you've made it', Ross said, 'it lasts for years. Although, of course, you can't see it with the naked eye.'

`You can help me feed the cells,' Ross said, taking me into the room which was kept at + 37° and resembled a laundry, with five giant-sized washing machines which were actually centrifuges. Over in a corner, jogging away in a stirrer, were the cells; the seething orange soup made such a racket, Ross had to shout. 'These cells aren't normal,' he bellowed. 'Because they're cancerous they keep growing.' I asked how long. 'Since 1957,' Ross said. `Apparently they belonged to a lady called Henrietta. Only', he laughed, 'the cells have grown a little strange over time.' We fed them with bovine calf serum and Ross took a sample to count under the microscope. Ross was worried. 'They're not doing so well,' he said, 'the mem- brane's all rough. They look sad.' He counted 41 on a grid, which was 30 below usual. 'There's one dividing; Jesus, it's huge. Have a look,' he said. 'It's sick'.

Ross seemed to spend all his time unloading centrifuges and mixing and stir- ring. 'It's just like working in the kitchen,' he said. 'You mix your solutions like a vinaigrette, and you don't like to use other people's. Some of us have good hands; some don't.'

I WHIZZED off to Chelsea in a taxi. The driver was so worried about me going in, he said he would wait 15 minutes to see if I was all right. I walked into a pitch-black corridor which re-echoed with the peculiar seaside sound of skin slapping skin, although it wasn't until I got to the bar that I realised that this was no ordinary club. A man wearing a bowler hat and a G-string was rotating a nude boy on a wooden turntable attached to the wall. At the bar people were wearing tutus or leopard-skin satin pants. In the lavatories I was accosted by a gang of transvestites fixing their make-up. 'You're English,' Lady Mont- gomery shrieked in ecstasy. She had a basketball net between her cleavage and iridescent eyelashes. 'Darling!' she said. `Come and meet Jane.' Jane was gluing on a beauty spot. She looked like a jaundiced Marilyn Monroe; 'Jane does phone sex,' said Lady Montgomery, who was a lawyer. `I think it's a service, don't you?' Jane said, and I nodded. 'After all,' she said, 'what's the odd jerk-off in the roulette-wheel of life?'

I went off to telephone my friend, who hadn't turned up. Loud sobs were coming from the telephone booth, but all I could see was a pair of fish-net gloves. 'Are you all right?' I asked the creature who came out. `No,' he said. 'My fiancee's run off with someone else, my father died, and the Queen of the Drags won't speak to me.' He was dressed in a black body suit with a saddle on his back, elasticated stirrups bobbing up and down on his chest, and a flashing green neon bit. 'My name's Danny the Wonder Pony,' he said, pulling himself together, and handing me his calling card. `How-dee.'

Danny sipped on a Strawberry Screw and confided, 'I never thought I'd make a career out of my vocation. Now I've been on the road for six years; I've done eighteen TV and five radio shows, and I can get $200 an hour for Sweet Sixteen parties. Really, those teenagers,' he said, shaking his head. 'They start dating when they're 11, and by the time they're 16, they're all sexual pre-verts. I'm glad you're not narrow-minded,' he added. 'In fact I'll give you a ride, just because I like you.'

Downstairs the Queen of the Drags was in a tussle with the Bird Man and a flat-chested nurse, who had hair growing out of her ears, bushy eyebrows and stiletto heels. The Bird Man was trying to rip off the nurse's bonnet, but he was so fat he kept tripping on his feathers and tumb- ling over in a ball. 'You'll like riding Danny,' the Queen of the Drags said to me. `Just you wait till you feel the sweat running down your thighs.' Overcome with embarrassment, I got on the saddle any- way, and Danny crawled to the middle of the disco floor and began his gyrations. After 20 minutes he crawled back to the telephone booth. 'Always take a lady back to where you found her,' he said, and gamely offered to ride me out of the club and drive me home. I said no thanks. 'AU want is somebody to share my life with,' he said in misery.

I BEGAN to assume, in my arrogant English way, that I would never meet a New York man with a sophisticated sense of irony. Inevitably, they fell into one of two categories. Either they told you they liked Benny Hill and made a pass at you, or else they sobbed their hearts out and told you the secrets of their lives, and you never saw them again. It was only in my last week in the city that I met an exception to my snobbish rule. One day the tele- phone rang at eight in the morning. A voice said, 'This is Mr Morse. We got your letter. You can come to Water Tunnel 3 tomorrow at 11.'

Next day, I got on the No. 1 train, which hurtles through the half of the city stran- gers don't refer to when they talk about New York, to Van Courtlandt Park in the Bronx. I got off at the end of the line, 242nd Street, and waited for Mr Morse. The park is famous for its cricketers, West Indians who live locally. But instead of cricket there was a sinister man with a portable wishing well and a sandwich board saying, 'Dr Albatross says this: Make a wish: put 25c in the dish: your wish come true: God is Love.' Look at your bittiful blue eyeff and your dimpulff,' Dr Albatroff lisped. `Thiff iff Miff Maria Gontharleff,' he said, pointing to a preg- nant monkey on top of the battered tin well, although two signs below said she was called either Jacko or Gabriello. I gave him a quarter, and he proffered a plastic seahorse in return, and then suddenly changed his mind.

'Let me giff you a kiff infted,' he said. `Oh pleaff, pleaff, pleaff.' But the water tunnel man, wearing a yellow plastic hel- met, arrived in the nick of time. `Mr Morse?' I asked, but the man shook his head, and said he was Mr Morse's 'part- ner'. We drove off in a Land-Rover to a kind of prehistoric burial mound on the edge of the park and Yonkers. I asked the water tunnel man why there were two white crosses stuck in the middle of one side of the barrow, but he looked vague and mumbled an answer I couldn't hear.

He took me into a Nissen but and started unravelling two enormous maps of the Catskill Water System, a network of reser- voirs 150 miles upstate which rather cheekily syphons off water from Delaware, and supplies New York with 1.5 billion gallons a day. 'Water,' said the water tunnel man, disappearing through a door to get another map, 'is the sign of a sophisticated society.' He spat the words out contemptuously. Although New York is infested with cockroaches and rats and a day outside leaves your hair lank and your face as grimy as if you had spent it up a chimney, New Yorkers are fastidious ab- out cleanliness. They buy white eggs rather than brown, they keep fruit and cereal in the fridge, and they shower at least twice a day. On the table I noticed Webster's Dictionary. It had fallen open at the flyleaf where someone had jotted an unpunctu- ated poem that began 'Abscond from the shades . • •'• The water tunnel man returned with blueprints of shaft 2B. Even before the second world war, he explained, New York consumed four times as much water per capita compared to London. 'Now every- one depends on washing machines, dish- washers, humidifiers, and air conditioners. Suburbia is growing. And the figures don't account for the alien immigrants.' I asked him how many, and he looked at me with scorn. 'There's no accounting. The aliens sneak in every which way. Could be three million, could be ten. It would be nice to know how many people we're dealing with. All we know is that Water Tunnel 1 and Water Tunnel 2 are falling apart and if something isn't done soon we'll be back to treadmills.' He shrugged his shoulders.

We left the Nissen but and walked over to the mound, the only patch of green in a scrubby wasteland of mud, rock and muck. On the way the water tunnel man ex- plained that work began on the tunnel in 1954, but it had been interrupted by the political fudging and the city's 1975 bank- ruptcy. The entrance to the mound was modest, like doors to a pyramid, except that immediately inside was an enormous elevator. 'I hate to disappoint you', the water tunnel man muttered as he pressed a button and nothing happened, 'but this isn't the least bit exciting.'

He bashed the door with his foot and eventually, subjected to more booting and beating, the elevator opened its doors onto a valve chamber the size of two football pitches. We were 800 feet below the ground, more than half the height of the Empire State Building. Clouds of steam fizzed out of 16 pipes laid across the length of the chamber and the place had the sawdust smell of the circus. There was a narrow-gauge railway spanning the vault for transporting concrete and allowing the valves to be opened and closed manually in case of an electricity breakdown. When the nuclear war came, the water man said, New York's water tunnel system would be a prime target. So the whole place had been made 'atomically safe'.

We walked along a clanking metal cat- walk that ran the whole length of the chamber. The walls were exposed Ford- ham gneiss, although apparently this part of the Bronx had deposits of fool's gold and industrial-quality garnets. 'Not that we ever find anything interesting here,' he added.

Finally we got to the third shaft. 'We certainly got some weird growths here,' the man said, pointing to a ceiling that was oozing water and dripping great gelatinous globules. 'Weird green growths'. The en- trance to the tunnel was fringed about with cement stalactites.

Inside, the tunnel stank of damp and illness; it was more than four times my height, and lurched steeply downhill into blackness. 'When's it going to be finished?' I asked innocently, and the water tunnel man burst into peals of laughter. He flashed his torch and gave me a knowing wink. 'The further down you get,' he said, `the closer you get to God.'