MANHATTAN LOVERS is like Romeo and Juliet —With Fentanyl instead of Nightshade.

KENNY is an Upper East Side brat, based on one particular lowlife who drank in my local, on East 84th Street. After a series of drug arrests, he decides to get clean, “not because I want to, but because I can’t afford to stay dirty.”

While trying to worm his way back into his rich aunt’s affections, he enlists his old girlfriend, Karla, to help him create an impression of normalcy. But Karla has her own plans, and they don’t include a lifelong partnership with Kenny. This chapter finds Kenny, who is now living in a crappy building in Spanish Harlem, travelling out to Astoria to cash a check in an Irish bar. He is accompanied by the young, irascible hooker, QT-Pie.

ASTORIA

"There is no air conditioning in this building because poor people were meant to sweat. The pounding in my head is actually coming from a boombox downstairs. I get up off the mattress and stamp on the floor, trying to kill the musical cockroach, but it just gets louder, and crawls deeper inside my head to lay its eggs on a bed of Salsa.

It’s time to make coffee, except I don’t have any. In fact, there is almost nothing in the pantry. I’m still living like a prisoner, waiting for the food to arrive on a stainless tray slid beneath the door.

My dear old mother always kept a full refrigerator, even when she couldn't afford to pay the electricity. “I’d sooner die cold rather than hungry,” she used to say, as if it was a choice in life that everybody would have to make. There was never a time when we stopped being broke. There was never a time of plenty. We always lived like mice in a storm drain, picking through the refuse and waiting for the deluge.

My first credit card, needless to say, belonged to somebody else. I used it in a restaurant one night, and the waitress held it up beside my face and read off the details like a kid learning to spell.

“This don’t look right,” she said.

“My face or the expiration date?”

“The name. You don’t look like a Harry Chang.”

The way she pronounced Chang, it was like a dropped pot on a concrete floor.

“You don’t look Chinese,” she said, and then she fetched the manager, a skinny kid with a long nose and an overbite that gave him the appearance of a human stapler.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I may need to see some ID.”

I handed him Harry Chang’s New Jersey licence, with my picture on it. “Did you people never hear of adoption?” I said in the most outraged, tearful tone of voice. “Any idea how often I have to deal with this bullshit.”

Apologies came at me, left, right and centre and the meal, of course, was on the house. I can’t tell you how often I ate out on the strength of some fervent indignation.

“Hey!! Open up,” says a voice from outside.

It’s QT-Pie pounding on the door in time to the music.

“I’m not here,” I shout.

“Should I tell FunDaddy to come looking for you? You forget about cashing his checks? You got a new job and it’s starting today.”

I open the door, expecting a spandex catsuit stuffed to the brim with heaving sex, but QT-Pie is wearing denim jeans and a yellow shirt, open-toed sandals, and her hair, which is usually piled up in a messy heap, is combed out and neat. I may have stared for a little too long.

“What?”

“You don’t look like a whore,” I say.

“Is that what's considered a compliment wherever the fuck you come from? Here’s your breakfast.”

She tosses a paper wrapper on the table and it skids greasily towards the edge. Inside, I find a ball of bread with an egg oozing out through a hole that was probably made by a thumb. She watches me eat.

“That first day you arrived, I said to FunDaddy, ‘we got a white-boy-junkie moving in — the neighbourhood is on the way up.’”

"I think this day might go a lot easier,” I say, “if we cut down on the conversation.”

“Fundaddy showed me a picture of your girlfriend.”

I swallow a mouthful of grease. “So?”

“She's pretty. You got any naked pictures?”

She dips her finger into the sandwich and sucks some orange sauce from a pink fingernail.

“Mmm. White girls don’t look so good when they’re naked. But you see this?"

She pats her breasts, belly and hips.

"God knew what he was doing when he put the brown woman together. I might set up one of them websites where you sell pictures of yourself. Would you buy them pictures?”

“Not while I’m eating my breakfast.”

Outside, on Third Avenue, QT-Pie waves her arms like a swimmer in distress until a rat-shit gypsy cab pulls up to the curb.

“We’re taking the subway,” I say.

She looks at me with a slow moving confusion, as if I just suggested a donkey ride over the Triborough bridge. The driver presses a button and a window creaks downwards, revealing a face covered in vitiligo blotches.

“Where you going?” He asks.

“Astoria,” says QT-Pie.

“Thirty bucks.”

“Forget about it,” I say, and I keep walking.

“I’m not taking the train,” she calls after me.

“Suit yourself.”

She dodges around me and plants a finger on my chest.

“Hey, don’t act like I’m not here, asshole, like I don’t count. I’m what you call an independent woman.”

“I don’t think you can use that term when you have a pimp.”

A bolt of lightning shoots through her eyes.

“He’s not my pimp. He’s my fucking cousin.”

I have found something that upsets her, which is good to know. You need to build up a compendium of this stuff. Keep a map of every human pressure point.

As we approach the subway station, she rattles away. Down the stairs and onto the platform, she’s pumping out a barrage of half-Spanish, half-English, all fire and fumes. A man in a brown suit with a bunch of Watchtower magazines under his arm smiles at me and says, “you got yourself one hot firecracker there. One hot little firecracker.”

“Fuck you, and fuck Jehovah too,” says QT-Pie.

The man in the brown suit gives me a look that begs for support, like I should defend him and his God? Why would I care about any religion that didn’t exist before indoor plumbing?

“If I put the word on you," she says, "put the word on you to FunDaddy, you know what he’ll do?”

That’s enough. I lay my hands on her lapels and pull her behind a steel column, whispering into her mouth, the way people do when they’re on the edge of a kiss.

“Baby, do not underestimate me. I’m like the crab spider. You know what the crab spider does? He comes at you sideways, when you least expect it. You do not want me coming at you sideways.”

I let her go as the train pulls in.

“Fuck you,” she says.

People constantly underestimate the junkie. Upstanding citizens always assume that junkies are driven by their needs, but for some of us, the driving force is desire which, unlike need, is ever expanding. Another misconception is that we are perpetually sick or dying, but I was always robust. The secret to my longevity? Clean needles and basic hygiene. What made the Roman legions so successful? Was it the spear, the sword, or the shield? No, it was the fucking sponge.

On the train, we are surrounded by workaday dim bulbs with barely a flicker between them. QT-Pie stands facing me, alternating between a pout and a lopsided sulk. We are done with talking, which is a relief. A seat becomes vacant, and I sit down. She stands there, hanging from the strap, twisting herself around like an angry pretzel, and I know it’s time to soften things up.

I let my eyes drift on a long, slow journey down her body, sliding into the folds of the open yellow shirt, down along the line of buttons to the big belt buckle that says “Juicy” in pink and purple diamantés, down the long pale blue denim legs to the feet in the open-toed sandals.

When I glance back up to meet her eyes, she says, “What?”

She knows I have taken it all in, everything she has, and I can see the labor that went into her choices. She studied the picture of my girl, Karla, wondering how she matched up. This look I give her is a reward for all that effort.

The Glen Bar off Steinway Street is like something out of a scary movie, with a long line of undead Irishman hunched over a dimly lit counter. It couldn’t look much creepier if they were hanging by their ankles from the ceiling. Glorious sunshine outside, but in this piss-soaked cavern, vitamin-D is the enemy.

On the blackened walls, pictures of cottages and castles, wooden reliefs of harps, fiddles and handguns carved by some 1980’s political prisoners. It isn’t really a bar, more a research centre for diabetes and glaucoma.

I ask QT-Pie to wait outside.

“Like a dog? Maybe you want to tie me to a parking meter.”

“Now there’s an idea.”

“My job is to watch you.”

She comes in behind me and draws exactly the reaction I expected. Every big dumb head in the place turns and gawks. Of course, she isn’t the only woman on the premises. Every Irish bar has a couple of hard old crones who spit tobacco, drink E&J brandy and allow themselves to be felt up under the counter by awkward men with dirty hands—not so much groupies, more gropies. Two of them watch QT-Pie with that special spite women reserve for women.

“Are you sure you’re in the right place, sweetie?” One of them says.

QT-Pie does not answer. The other woman snickers up her sleeve like a human cartoon.

“Where did you get the Mexican?” An enormous bearded lug asks. I ignore him.

“I’m not Mexican,” QT-Pie snap back.

“You look like a Mexican.”

It seems that QT-Pie is just about to respond, so I put my arm around her shoulders and give a little squeeze. “Piensa antes de hablar,” I say—think before you talk.

She looks at me strangely.

“You a Mexican too?” Says the bearded lug.

For the flash of a moment, I consider grabbing his Miller bottle and stuffing it all the way down to his tonsils, but I smile instead.

“Si, Senor,” I say, and all the dumb Micks laugh, their faces glowing in the artificial twilight like piglets caught in a slaughterhouse fire.

“Where’s Liam?” I ask.

The men look at one another as if they never heard of Liam, like this is a Liam-free zone. Nobody answers, and while I’m considering how to make the question simpler, a voice from behind me speaks up.

“Liam has gone back to Monaghan. There was a woman here looking for him to pay for her baby.”

I turn to see Frankie the bartender, mid-twenties, a mop of curls and a lazy eye.

“Last time I seen you,” he says, “you were on your way to the ATM.”

Back in February, I played a game of pool with Frankie, and I lost. There was a question of the twenty dollars I was supposed to fetch from the machine in the bodega. But once you leave a bar, who remembers anything? “Probably an oversight on my behalf,” I say, “but I’m here to make it up to you. I have a check.”

“Yeah? Me cashing a check is doing you a favour, not the other way ‘round”

QT-Pie sighs loudly. Clearly, she isn’t used to the Irish way of business and diplomacy, which involves sarcasm and insults against five generations of your family.

“The Mexican your girlfriend?” Says Frankie.

With my arm still around her shoulders, I can feel every muscle in QT-Pie’s body tighten.

“She’s just here to keep an eye on me. Keep me honest.”

“She’ll need more than one pair of eyes if that’s the case.” The men at the counter guffaw.

“Gimme a look at the check,” says Frankie.

I hand him the check, which is for thirteen hundred bucks. Frankie snaps it like a hand towel.

“The way you disappeared after that last game…”

He shakes his head and laughs, as if that twenty dollar pool game was the funniest thing that ever happened to him. The piglets at the counter laugh too, and so do I. The only person in the bar who isn’t laughing is QT-Pie, and she probably thinks we are all insane, an impression that might be compounded by the way the laughter stops on a dime.

Frankie nods at a guy in a Mets jacket who stands close to the exit. The bolt on the door snaps shut. I reach for the check and say, “if it’s a problem I can come back some other time.”

Frankie covers the check with his hand and says, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do this time, we’ll have another game of pool and if I win, I’ll keep this check and if you win, you won’t need a stretcher to take you out of here.”

“Maybe I’ll come back when Liam is on duty.”

“Liam is gone, and you’ve got no friends here.”

The bearded lug lights up a cigarette, blows a line of smoke towards QT-Pie and says, “that’s a fact.”

Behind me, the sound of balls tumbling down a chute inside the pool table.

“That’s not my check, Frankie.”

“You’re dead right, buddy. Ten minutes from now, it’s going to be mine. Now go ahead, I’ll let you break.”

There is no point arguing. I turn to the rack of cues, and pick out the least offensive piece of shit. Nevertheless, the tip still wobbles in the hollowed-out chalk, and the butt-end looks like it was chewed by one of the regulars. Meanwhile, Frankie screws together a fancy piece of equipment, part cue, part sniping rifle.

“Any chance of a drink?” I ask.

“What do you want?”

“Sambuca, a large one.”

The laughter rolls down the bar. These hard drinking Irishmen only indulge in pissbeer and bottom shelf whiskey, the sort of stuff that congeals in the corners of the human brain, and turns filthy yearnings into remembered moments.

I break with a long hard stroke. The three ball goes down; the nine and the fifteen sit close to the pockets.

“Stripes,” I call, as Frankie slaps a Sambuca on the table’s edge.

I sink the nine and the fifteen; there’s a chance with the eleven, but the tip of the cue almost pops off, and the ball skitters harmlessly along the cushion. The Micks cheer when I step back and make and space for Frankie, the hometown hero. He’s one of those players who splay his fingers and stick out his ass as if awaiting anal penetration. I note that his cue has the word ‘Predator’ stamped on it in yellow lettering, and it slides effortlessly along the bridge of his hand, slamming the five ball into a middle pocket. It is followed by the one and the seven.

Fuck!

More cheers from the crowd. Outside, the ’N’ train screeches on its tracks like a woman in the middle of difficult childbirth. Frankie wiggles his ass and repositions his fingers. The two ball heads for the corner pocket, as if it’s going home.

“Amazing what you can do with a good stick,” he says. The four follows the two. Now the six. The men at the counter rise to their feet as Frankie takes aim at the black. So, here is the plan, as much as you can call it a plan. There is no way I can let this fucking asshole keep FunDaddy’s check. Simply put, I don’t want to end up nailed to a door, floating down the Harlem River. The moment the black goes down, I intend to smash Frankie in the face with the cueball, grab the check, pick up the Sambuca, toss it in the lug’s beard, and hopefully the cigarette will set it ablaze. The other mugs are hopeless drunks and the moment I break a bottle on the counter’s edge, they’ll dance in a puddle of their own pee. As I said, not a great plan, but possibly the only option left open.

However, I might just have telegraphed this idea to QT-Pie, because she gives me a barely perceptible shake of the head, and when I follow her line of vision, I can see the glint of a badge on the bearded lug’s belt. He is a cop. This big, heaving, sack of hairy human excrement has been put on this earth to protect, serve and get drunk before lunch. Double-fuck!!

QT-Pie yawns, and does a slow parade around the table. Frankie pulls back the cue, and it isn’t a difficult shot to the middle pocket, providing there are no distractions. QT-Pie yawns again, interlocking her fingers, and raising them above her head. The yellow shirt, so short it’s barely tucked in, slips out of her jeans, exposing a bellybutton with a little gold barbell piercing. This is the brown skin, made by a God who knew what he was doing.

Frankie blinks, just as he makes the shot. The cue ball brushes the black and pushes it gently into the hole. The men at the counter, still half-distracted by QT-Pies performance, start cheering their homecoming king, and hardly even notice the white ball, out for a lonely stroll, heading straight for a corner pocket.

Thunk!

And now we have absolute fucking silence. It isn’t easy to lose a game on a foul shot, especially when your opponent still has five balls on the table. Frankie smacks the table with his stick.

“You fucking lucky cocksucker,” he says as the air in the bar turns red with unexploded danger. One wrong word could ignite this place and bring the timbers down around us.

And what does QT-Pie do? She picks up two quarters from the table, sticks them in the Wurlitzer and stabs three buttons without looking. And we all wait, like kids on Christmas Eve. I’m fully expecting something born in a Connemara mud hut with chants and screams and rowdy accordions, but no. It’s not that song. What we get instead is a thumping bass drum followed by biblical chaos, screeching guitar, fractured hi-hat, and that guy howling out of breath, like he’s running up a hill with a crazy mob behind him.

And the Micks love it. They fucking do. The go absolutely nuts, drumming their heavy knuckles on the counter, smacking their bottles with battered wedding rings, and giving it their all when the chorus arrives.

“Bullet the blue sky.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Bullet the blue sky.”

And what makes it even better for this bunch of MacRetards and O’Morons? QT-Pie is swaying, her body strapped to a metronome, shoulders sloping and hips churning, as if she’s trying to wriggle out of a sack. You can practically hear the sound of blood pumping and chin muscles relaxing as she weaves them into her web. With the music rising and falling and the men nodding like bobbleheads on a bumpy ride, there is one thing I know for certain. This show is not for them. This four and a half minutes of sexual hypnosis is focused on one man only, but when she catches my eye, I give her a look that only says, ‘try harder.’

“I’ll cash your check,” says Frankie as the music grinds to a halt, “but I’m keeping three points, plus the twenty you owe me. Let’s round it up to an even seventy, and don’t ever fucking come back here again.” He points the cue at QT-Pie and says, “You, on the other hand, can come back any time you want.”

The guy in the Mets jacket slides back the bolt on the door. The bearded lug growls and the other men at the counter fall back into the stupor our arrival interrupted.

Outside, on 31st Street, QT-Pie tucks in her shirt and says, “What now?”

“Now we go to Woodside.”

“Another fucking train?”

“Nah,” I say, feeling the lump of cash in my pocket, “this time we’ll take a cab.”