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| Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
I walked hand in hand with Merle through an endless maze
of dark rooms – West End Avenue had all the light of a sepulchre. And finally
we came to her room, which was almost as large as our apartment in the Bronx. It
had two beds, a sofa, and a desk near the window. Merle didn’t believe in
preludes or preambles. She undid her robe and let me glimpse at her partial
nakedness in pajamas that almost served as a second skin.
She meant to play Manhattan’s own alley cat and seduce a
cockroach [if curious look up Archy and Mehitabel], but I was as much of a
trickster as Merle. I moonlighted after class. I was a male model for a Seventh
Avenue clothing cataloguer, Rosenzweig & Co. Girls were always running
around in the showroom in their panties and peekaboo bras. Romances would flare
up behind a photographer’s curtain. The whole place was a tinderbox.
Archy and Mehitabel from Jerome Charyn’s Bitter Bronx- Thirteen Stories