She's on 11 the doorman tells me shunting me back down the sidewalk to the service entrance. I feel slighted, muttering about it walking down the long ramp back to all the garbage and the basement to do my business with my comrades in the lower castes. These guys in the basement wear worky uniforms decorated with various appropriate embroidered patches. They indicate their superiority to me by directing minimum notice and no words. I decidedly reconsider myself as their better, but since it's their turf what I think doesn't much matter. Sit in this damp little cell all day, haul out the rich folks' shit. I lean against a wall and wait, my posture nonchalance. The service elevator man takes me up without my mentioning the floor, he only corrects my pronunciation of her name and starts us rising. One floor into our ascent, the alarm bell buzzer in the elevator, futilely wrapped in foam padding, begins clanging loud enough to wake the deadest operator, a flashed on B at the bottom of a column of numbers, five or six times till we slip past 11 to PH. He has a package to deliver, the someone in the basement continues their impatience, then another for back down on eleven, same as mine. Mine takes forever while he waits for me. "Rug sample," I say same as is written on my ticket pad. The ethnic domestic, in solid white contrasting against darkish skin, darker hair and darkest black soft leather, pads off to some lady's voice, leaving me to hold the door halfway open with my foot. The alarm keeps sounding while the service guy cusses the sonofabitch. I stand there gawking into the kitchen, composed entirely of spotlessly pure white glossy surfaces. It looks never used, a model show piece, but I suppose that's what the girl's for and quietly at that and finally back. The swatch I'm expecting is a huge rolled up showroom sample, some blueprints and assorted paper shit scrolled loosely inside a cardboard tube at the core. Back to the basement, where the guy says to his partner, "Who the fuck was ringing that buzzer?" "Delivery man, just left." Out in front of the building a UPS truck is double-parked with no driver in sight as I start walking east trying to decide the most comfortable, least uncomfortable way to carry the roll without all the layouts sliding out into the slush. No position is satisfactory enough to sustain for more than half a block.

As Stephen Dixon I turn up Madison, on my tickets MAD as LEX and the great B'WAY and Sixth is 6TH never even spoken of by its big business tag, continuing straight until traffic turns me right along 72ND, all this because I have Columbia Libraries' copy of Too Late in my messenger sack, No Relief finished last night; book snug against a notebook occasionally scribble in during work--sitting on subway cars or next to receptionists' desks, jostling down the sidewalk or leaning against a building leg propped up on a standpipe, curbs and benches in any excuse for a park.

Midway down the block towards Park is a large residential building meaningless to me as I glance over in passing its twenty yard stretch of garbage lining the curb, a levee of black plastic bags bulging shored up with odd sized cardboard boxes. A clutter of rectangles of wood strips poking up, inviting bullshit, shaped like all the canvas stretchers I haven't been able to afford in five months, and damned the glance back, turn around, they are canvas stretchers. A whole shitload of them, a store assortment of lengths. Yes. At least, how can't I, two or maybe three of the larger sets, I stand in the gutter bending over the pile and am seizing with greed, I gather them all, even the one too small for anything except someone's head, a bowl of fruit. I heft them over to the sidewalk and lay them out flat, bubbly to think I don't give a shit about everyone looking. Providence is my benefactress, and these are my next seven paintings. Wanting to get away anyway and think of a permanent arrangement I hang them all looped in a clacking confusion over around a shoulder, pick up the carpet roll and carry it with both arms curled under like a baby or a log, straps crossing under and over the other shoulder my sack. I am quite fit to the quick approaching Park Avenue, up for one block then right to 125 East for the delivery. Stepping back from the payphone after calling in done and getting three new pick-ups I absolutely have to do something about my neck ornamentation. Stack them against a wall and proceed, methodically breaking them down to loose slats, undamaged, piling into a bundle I grasp with both arms, cradling my new baby though by now I feel more like a forklift at the end of a long day. I guess it only ten-thirty, no later, fucking heavy and sliding and cumbersome two or so blocks north until orange catching my eye stuffed in a garbage can a long breeze-fluttering tail of plastic ribbon used by utility repair crews for block-offs, like the telephone truck bound in by the same in the middle of the cross street butting a bit into the intersection on the other side of Lexington. Wrap I tie the bundle tighter together, not pulling the knots so taut the ribbon stretches and breaks with a snap as I more than likely expect, no I accomplish rightly pick up and stick under the flap top and secure it if awkwardly with the flap straps. Fucking heavy. Seven times four makes twenty-eight of the damn things. Mind over matter, I say, about all I can say to last through this day. My shoulder is already knotting away.

Compared to simply carrying them, the stretchers were a breeze to break down: those worthless wooden pegs that jar loose at any shock, breeze, sour look, a couple stapled at the corners overlapping into several more also gripped around the edges by bands of canvas, but that's it. Just stand one up vertical and put a foot on to hold the bottom slat and grab hold the top one and start pushing sliding it left to right until the pegs pop staples spring out and the canvas rotted rips nearly at each corner. The one with the woodstrip framing job worked the same with a quick heft more effort. Whatever the motivation I readily agree, it was rather kind of my patron to have sliced out the actual paintings.

When if I had to tear out the canvases myself, and I at the first try to carry them off ungainly unsuccessful until I use my keys to rip a hole through each one to stick my fist through, avante armbands. Walking on down towards Park feeling mostly ridiculous, consciously embarrassed of any mistaken associations with the artwork clattering at my elbows.

Unless I walk a block and decide to just ditch the whole thing, and forget about, won't work, I reach the same payphone and repeat of everything I have arrived at the spot and time to break down them canvases. I stack them against the same wall, keeping one, inventing a procedure, grabbing a chunk at the fist hole I tear out the paintings in bands rip and long strips, fluttering and rustling like huge late dropped leaves skittering over the curbside to drown in the gutterslush. To not my eye I am not breaking down discarded stretchers, slats of knocked up wood, this shit holding the whole thing together. Instead I am some guy on the corner destroying stolen works of art. Art. Ahrt. Aht.

"But no," I say to the officer taking charge, beefcake muscular and mustachioed and not really my type, "this is just some shit I found in some garbage." The partner officer smaller but equally cold and steady and really rather stunning, and it is interesting to suddenly be staring deeply as possible in a sly glance into the limpid blues of a cop, my lady in blue, and best of all none of it matters a wink, "Oh come on, you mean this shit? Why the hell would anyone steal this crap, you couldn't even give it away to a friend, all you can do is throw it away, and I picked them up, not that I wanted them, I only want these wooden stretchers they're stapled on. Then I'm going to walk to the nearest garbage can and put this here art back where it belongs." Of course he doesn't blink, his lips spread and set in a small snarl, nor do I amuse her, wait, she looks at me, then sideways at his impassive profile, back to me, her lips parting, melting, ready to croon to me, she rumbles, "Looks to me like this guy, maybe he's crazy, but you've gone in some gallery in the neighborhood and ripped them off and now you're maliciously destroying them valuable works of art, real crazy." Her right hand alternates caressing the shaft and massaging the butt of her club.

"Oh come on now, really," happenings very fast as they start to size me up. He tugs at his gunboat, "So you maybe want to tell us where you really got these from?" He doesn't care, he asks and stands swaggering waiting for an answer even though what he wishes he was really doing is driving down the road in the squad car with his partner driving down the road too, but a separate car, just a regular old car maybe a red Camaro, and in her own car she wears only a slinky clinging half-thigh dress slit up past net garter clips and slit down wide into her breast valley, speeding slightly he thinks to tell to her after he pulls her over and the road is dark and deserted and he collects his fantasy fine, I see this in his eyes, how he shifts and rearranges his crotch. "I mean I am, I think I mean I think, I mean I will, that is I'm telling you the absolute truth when I say I picked these out of the trash, mid-block on Seventy-second between Park and Madison, south side mid-block a big apartment whatever sort of residential building. Huge, Fifties-ish though maybe I'm wrong about that, the dating, circa whatever. But here, I'll even get in, with the junk, and we can go there and I'll prove it to you. I'll describe it right now in detail, the row of garbage, your usual industrial size black garbage bags, some domestic brands, mostly black, with a scattering of green brown and silver, maybe a yellow or two, three and four deep from the curb, huge place, twenty to thirty yards long this line at this garbage bus stop, can't miss it, I'll show you exactly where these were lying, sticking up, pardon the pun, and there's a doorman there who was probably watching me, remembers by face or clothes or posture or shape and me taking these paintings the lady in 13-C or whichever had thrown out with the coffee grinds and orange rinds."

When we get there the entire stretch of sidewalk lining the building looks to be recently vacuumed, "I swear to god and anything and everything that five ten minutes ago, when I walked past, it's where I got them." The doorman has changed and never seen me before in his life long days, nope, trash gets picked up about 3:45 a.m., he doesn't know nothing about no paintings, first time he ever seen what's left of them, though he wouldn't really know much anyway because he never personally gave much a hoot about no art pictures.

It'll seem we don't have the same language in common when I tell them, "You can't arrest me, I have a sick wife at home, and then I'll probably still be fired from my job even after I've proven that I am innocent."

Instead, later, back crippling hours later, lunchtime, in the area lunch was definitely going to be at the New Lex restaurant at 28th; I jostle on in and get the last available booth, in the back past the counter, a man quickly clearing away the dead meal and tip with a greasy wiping. The bag sticks nestled down on the other bench, my jacket vest on the coat hook, the hooded sweatshirt dropped draping over the bag. She comes down out from behind the counter, we both lean forward over opposite sides of the water dispensing station, she points says about menu and I reply I'd like a grilled swiss&bacon on rye and a coke. She brings the coke, napkin knife and fork, perfectly soon after my cigarette's going, thirsty. I think about calling home collect to talk to my wife at home sick on the couch, an intermission between the morning reruns and the afternoon soaps and game shows, have a few minutes to say hello, my find, a big chat to cheer her, and then be able to say, "Well, a grilled swiss&bacon on rye has just come up with my toothprints on it." With my cigarette in hand, a last sip of coke, I stand up to call, walk two steps and look back seeing her coming, too soon it's mine, I stand there stupidly as she sets down the plate, leaves, I sit back down to eat. Eating while thinking I still want to tell somebody about my martyring trove, but what, I am silent and that weight just lies there heavy on the bench across the table saying I'll break you yet!