BY THE TIME Jerry Pankow was ready for breakfast, he'd already been to three bars and a whorehouse.

It was, he'd discovered, a great opening line. "By the time I had my eggs and hash browns this morning..." Wherever he delivered it, in backroom bars or church basements, it got attention. Made him sound interesting, and wasn't that one of the reasons he'd come to New York? To lead an interesting life, certainly, and to make himself interesting to others.

And, one had to admit, to plumb the depths of depravity, which resonated well enough with the notion of three bars and a whorehouse before breakfast.

Today he was having his breakfast in Joe Jr.'s, a Greek coffee shop at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Twelfth Street. He wasn't exactly a regular here. The whorehouse was on Twenty-eighth, two doors east of Lexington, right around the corner from the Indian delis and restaurants that had people calling the area Curry Hill. Samosa and aloo gobi wasn't his idea of breakfast, and anyway those places wouldn't open until lunchtime, but he liked the Sunflower coffee shop on Third Avenue, and stopped there more often than not after he finished up at the whorehouse.

This morning, though, he was several degrees short of ravenous, and his next scheduled stop was in the Village, at Charles and Waverly. So he'd walked across Twenty-third and down Sixth. That stretch of Sixth Avenue had once afforded a good view of the twin towers, and now it showed you where they'd been, showed you the gap in the downtown skyline. A view of omission, he'd thought more than once.

And now here he was in a booth at Joe's with orange juice and a western omelet and a cup of coffee, light, no sugar, and how depraved was that? It was ten o'clock, and he'd get to Marilyn's by eleven and be out of there by one, with the rest of the day free and clear. Maybe he'd catch the two-thirty meeting at Perry Street. He could stop by after he left Marilyn's and put his keys on a chair so he'd have a seat when he came back at meeting time. You had to do that there, it was always standing-room-only by the time the meeting started.

Recovery, he thought. The hottest ticket in town.

He let the waiter refill his coffee cup, smiled his thanks, then automatically checked the fellow out as he walked away, only to roll his eyes at his own behavior. Cute butt, he thought, but so what?

If he were to show up at a meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous, he thought, nobody would tell him to get the hell out. But did it make his life unmanageable? Not really. And, more to the point, could he handle another program? He was in AA, sober a little over three years, and, because drugs played a part in his story, he managed to fit a couple of NA meetings into his weekly schedule. And, because his parents were both drunks -- his father died of it, his mother lived with it -- he was an Adult Child of Alcoholics, and went to their meetings now and then. (But not too often, because all the whining and bitching and getting-in-touch-with-my-completely-appropriate-anger made his teeth ache.)

And, because John-Michael was an alcoholic (and also sober, and anyway they weren't lovers anymore), he went to Al-Anon a couple of times a month. He hated the meetings, and he wanted to slap most of the people he saw there -- the Al-Anon-Entities, his sponsor called them. But that just showed how much he needed the program, didn't it? Or maybe it didn't. It was hard to tell.

Three years sober, and he started each day by visiting three bars and a whorehouse, inhaling the reek of stale beer and rancid semen. The bars were in Chelsea, all within a few blocks of his top-floor walkup on Seventeenth west of Ninth, and of course they were closed when he arrived for the morning cleanup. He had keys, and he would let himself in, trying not to dwell on the way the place stank, the odor of booze and bodies and various kinds of smoke, the dirty-socks smell of amyl nitrite, and something else, some indefinable morning-after stench that was somehow more than the sum of its parts. He'd note that and dismiss it, and he'd sweep and mop the floor and clean the lavatories -- God, human beings were disgusting -- and finally he'd take down the chairs from the tables and the stools from the bar top and set them up where they belonged. Then he'd lock up, and off to the next.

He hit the bars in what he thought of as working his way up from the depths, starting with Death Row, a leather bar west of Tenth Avenue with a back room where safe sex required not just condoms but full body armor. Then one called Cheek, on Eighth and Twentieth, with a neighborhood crowd that ran to preppy types and the aging queens who loved them. And, finally, a straight bar on Twenty-third Street -- well, a mixed crowd, really, typical for the neighborhood, straight and gay, male and female, young and old, the common denominator being an abiding thirst. The place was called Harrigan's -- Harridan's, some called it -- and it didn't reek of pot and poppers and nocturnal emissions, but that didn't mean a blind man might mistake it for the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

In his drinking days, Jerry might have started the evening at Harrigan's. He could tell himself he was just stopping for a quick social drink before he settled in for the night. He wasn't cruising, certainly, because nobody went to a place like that trolling for a sexual partner. He supposed people who got drunk there sometimes went home with each other, but that was essentially beside the point.

But after a few drinks there, and maybe a line or two in the men's room, a gay bar would seem like a good idea, and he'd be on his way to a place like Cheek. And there he might meet someone he'd take home or go home with, but he might not, and before the night was over he could well wind up at Death Row or some equivalent thereof, barely knowing what he was doing or with whom he was doing it, and, when he woke up hours later, sickened by what he remembered or terrified of what he didn't remember, depending on just when the blackout curtain had dropped.

Now he frequented the bars only in the morning, to sweep and mop and straighten up, and on his way out he'd pick up the twenty dollars left for him. The management of Death Row, perhaps overcompensating for the relentless squalor of the premises, tucked his payment into an envelope with his name on it; at Harrigan's and Cheek, they just left a $20 bill on the back bar, next to the register.

Then the whorehouse, which took longer, but he was still in and out of the place in not much more than an hour, and his envelope, with Jerry in purple Pentel in a precise feminine hand, held a hundred dollars. Always a single bill, and always a crisp new one, and, when you thought about it, an outrageous payment for the time it took.

Then again, he sometimes thought, look what they got for a simple blow job.

MARILYN FAIRCHILD'S APARTMENT WAS on the third floor of a four-story brownstone on Charles Street off Waverly Place, not a five-minute walk from Joe Jr.'s. The sky, overcast at daybreak, was clear now. It was the second week in June, and the weather had been glorious for the past several days, and on the way to Marilyn's he realized he'd had a melody running through his head, just at the outer edge of consciousness, and sometimes that was how he sent himself a message, found out what he was really feeling. Now he registered the song, and it was the one about loving potato chips and motor trips, and especially New York in June.

Well, he thought, who wouldn't? He'd lived briefly in San Francisco, where every day was spring, and in L.A., where every day was summer, and had decided the trouble with Paradise was you got tired of it. If the weather wasn't lousy a fair proportion of the time, how much of a charge could you get from a beautiful day? Here the weather could be genuinely shitty in a rich variety of ways -- rainy, drizzly, bleak, freezing, raw, windy, hot, muggy, stifling. Every season had its own characteristic unpleasantness, and every season sported the occasional perfect days, and how you treasured each when it came along! How your heart sang!

I love New York More than ever...

The new slogan, the post-9/11 slogan, with the Milton Glaser logo adapted to show the heart scarred, like a human heart after a heart attack. First time he saw the new version, on a T-shirt in a shop window, the damn thing moved him to tears. But then for a while there almost everything did. The capsule biographies of the dead that ran every day in the Times, for instance. He couldn't read them, and he couldn't keep from reading them.

It wore off, though. You were scarred, like the heart, you took a licking and kept on ticking, and you healed.

More or less.

The entrance to Marilyn's brownstone was a half flight up from the street. He mounted the steps and rang her bell, gave her plenty of time to respond, then used his key. He took the steps two at a time -- three years ago, bottoming out on drugs and alcohol, it was all he could do to drag himself up a flight of stairs, and baby, look at me now -- and poked the buzzer alongside her door. He got the key ready -- he carried more keys than a super these days, and rather liked the butch effect of it all -- and when there was no response to his buzz he let himself in.

Place was a pigsty.

Well, that was an exaggeration. It wasn't filthy. He cleaned for her once a week, and the apartment was never seriously dirty, but sometimes it was a mess, and it was certainly a godawful disaster area this morning.

Ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, some of them lipsticked, some of them not. A pair of rocks glasses, one holding a half inch of pale amber liquid, the other dry. The dry one showed lipstick, the other didn't.

Yesterday's Times, in all its many sections, was scattered all over the living room. An oblong pocket mirror, and he'd bet anything there was cocaine residue on it, lay on the mahogany coffee table, next to an uncapped bottle half full of Wild Turkey and a plastic ice bucket half full of water. A bra was on the other side of the ice bucket, half on and half off the coffee table, and yes, there was her blouse, lime green raw silk, he'd seen her wearing it once, and now it was tossed on the Queen Anne wing chair. Could her skirt be far off? No skirt, he determined, but there was a pair of black slacks on the floor next to the club chair, and were those black panties wedged into the corner of the club chair?

Egad, Holmes, I do believe they are.

One of the cushions from the sofa was halfway across the room, and he wondered how that had happened. A pair of mahogany tables flanked the couch -- like the coffee table, they were from The Bombay Company, cheaply made but attractively styled. One held three hardcover novels between a pair of bronze bookends -- Susan Isaacs, Nelson DeMille, and Judith Rossner's Looking for Mister Goodbar, which he'd always assumed had some sort of totemic value for Marilyn. The other table, to the right of the sofa, held three little figurines of animals, Zuni fetishes from the Southwest. There was a bison carved from Picasso marble, a rose quartz bear with a bundle of arrows on his back, and a turquoise rabbit, all of them grouped around the white saucer from a child's tea set. The saucer held cornmeal -- except it didn't, its contents had been spilled onto the table and floor, and the bison and bear were lying on their sides, and where was the little rabbit?

With the cornmeal spilled, he thought, maybe the bear had gotten hungry enough to eat the rabbit. Failing that, he supposed he'd find it somewhere in the chaos of the apartment.

Not for the first time, he contrasted Marilyn's place with the last premises he'd tidied, the whorehouse on East Twenty-eighth Street. In all the months he'd been cleaning for them, they'd never once left a real mess. As a matter of fact, the parlor and the individual bedrooms were always surprisingly tidy. There might be some dirty dishes and glassware on the kitchen counter, waiting for him to load them into the dishwasher, and there were wastebaskets that had to be emptied of their unmentionable contents, trash to be bagged and taken downstairs. But the place was always sanitary and usually neat.

Well, wasn't that the difference between your professionals and your amateurs?

He rolled his eyes, ashamed of himself. Marilyn was a sweetie, and where did he get off calling her a whore? Still, he could imagine her coming up with some version of the line on her own, a half-smile on her full mouth and an ironic edge to the bourbon-and-cigarette voice. Her self-deprecating sense of humor was one of the things he liked most about her, and --

Jesus, was she home?

Because her bedroom door was shut, and that was unusual. That might explain the extent of the mess, too. Her apartment was usually messy, she wasn't the sort to preclean out of concern for the good opinion of her cleaning person, but he'd never before found undergarments in the living room, and she'd have at least capped the bourbon bottle and put away the little mirror.

Sleeping late, wasn't she? Well, she'd very likely been up late. He'd let her sleep, hold off running the vacuum until he was done with everything else. If that woke her he could do the bedroom after she emerged from it; otherwise he'd skip it this week.

She didn't have company, did she?

He decided that wasn't too likely. The clothes in the living room were all hers, and the guy, whoever he might be, wouldn't have kept all his clothes on while she took everything off. Somewhere along the way he'd returned from the bedroom, thoughtfully closing the door, and dressed and left the apartment, pulling the door shut. It hadn't been double-locked when he arrived, he recalled, but that didn't mean anything; Marilyn forgot to double-lock the door as often as not, whether she was at home or gone for the day.

He started to whistle -- the same song, New York in June, he couldn't get it out of his head -- and went into the kitchen to get started.

HE'D MET HER AT an ACOA meeting, had heard her sharing wryly about her parents, and had assumed she was in show business. An actress, a nightclub chanteuse, at the very least a waitress who went to all the cattle calls, got roles in off-off-Broadway showcases, and had a card in the Screen Extras Guild. And maybe did voice-overs, because God knows she had the voice for it, pitched low, seasoned with booze and tobacco, coming across like honey-dipped sandpaper.

She looked the part. It wasn't that she was beautiful. Her features were a little too strong for beauty, her facial planes too angular. It was more that she was totally Out There, her energy expanding to fill whatever room she was in. You noticed her, you paid attention to her. You couldn't buy that, or learn it at Actors Studio. You had it or you didn't, and she did.

"It's all my Leo stuff," she explained. "I got my sun and three or four planets in Leo, and maybe I should have been an actress, as much as I like being the center of attention, but I always had zero desire in that direction, and thank God, because what kind of a life is that?"

She'd been born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island, went to college in Pennsylvania, married young and divorced young, and had been living in the Village for a dozen years, first in a small studio in an ugly postwar white brick building on Greenwich Avenue, and, for the past seven years, in this brownstone floor-through on Charles Street.

"I had the usual array of jobs, and the only one I might have kept was assisting this photographer, a really sweet boy, but he got too sick to work. And then I took a class at the Learning Annex, if you can believe it, and it was like I found my purpose in life. No time at all I had my Realtor's license and a job to go with it, and this place was maybe the fourth rental I ever showed. I showed no end of co-ops, and I handled subletting some of them, but as far as straight rentals, this was the fourth, and I took one look at it and saw it was rent-stabilized and what the price was, and no way was I gonna let it go to some fucking client. So of course my first job was convincing this darling young couple that it was all wrong for them, and once I got rid of them I put in an application and rented it myself. I got fired for that, it's a major no-no, but who gave a shit? I had my dream apartment, and how long was it going to take me to get another job? Five minutes?"

They'd stopped at a Starbucks after the meeting, and otherwise he might never have gotten to know her, because she never went back to ACOA. It was too humorless for her, she told him, and he could understand that, but suspected she also wanted to keep her distance from any program that might make her face up to her own relationship with alcohol, which he had to figure was at least somewhat problematical. She reined it in when she was with him -- people often did in the presence of sober alcoholics -- but one time she'd been a toke over the line, as it were, and he got to see the change in her eyes and in the cast of her features.

Well, it was his job to clean her apartment, not to take her inventory. Someday he might see her at an AA meeting, and maybe she'd get sober and maybe she wouldn't, but for now her life seemed to work okay, or at least she thought it did.

Though you wouldn't have guessed it from the state of her living room. Not this morning, anyway.

And that was where he came in, wasn't it? He cleaned and straightened, washed glasses, emptied ashtrays, stuffed her dirty clothes in the bathroom hamper, put things where they belonged. He couldn't seem to find the turquoise rabbit -- maybe she'd taken it to bed with her, though animals carved from stone weren't really ideal for cuddling -- but he put fresh cornmeal in the little saucer and positioned the bear and the bison on either side of it. He bagged the garbage, carried it downstairs and stowed it in one of the trash cans in the rear courtyard. He cleaned the bathroom, scouring the sink and toilet and clawfooted old tub, getting the curious satisfaction this chore always brought him. The first time he cleaned someone's toilet he wanted to retch, but you got over that, and nowadays he felt this great sense of accomplishment. Odd how it worked. Was it that way for everybody, or was it a gay thing?

When he'd finished in the living room and kitchen and bathroom, and the small second bedroom she used for an office, he got out the vacuum cleaner and hesitated. He went to the bedroom door, put an ear to it, then turned the knob and eased it open.

It was dark within, but enough light came through around the blackout shades for him to make out her form in the bed at the far end of the room. He said her name -- "Marilyn?" -- to get her attention if she was just lying there half-awake, but not loud enough to rouse her from a sound sleep. And she was evidently sleeping soundly, because she didn't stir.

Should he vacuum? It was that or quit for the day, leaving her bedroom untouched and the whole apartment unvacuumed. The noise might wake her, but she'd probably want to be up by now anyway, might even have appointments scheduled. If she could leave her underwear in the living room and her Wild Turkey uncapped, wasting its fragrance on the desert air, she might well have neglected to set her clock. Even now some Wall Street hotshot could be cooling his heels in a lobby somewhere, waiting for Marilyn to show him the condo of his dreams.

He plugged in the old Hoover and had at it. If she slept through it, fine, it proved she really needed the sleep. If she woke up, even better.

Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Block