Safe & Lock

         If it hadn't been the odd feel of the key in the lock or the ten-inch, Sabatier carver out of place on a kitchen stool in my periphery, the sight of the florid and engorged, hot pink double dildo standing proudly out amidst the chaotic jumble of the ransacked living room would finally penetrate the veil of denial that had befallen me as soon as I'd turned the knob of the front door. I'd only been gone a few minutes; down the six flights, to the corner and back for a pack of smokes, and up again the endless stairs. Had I heard a scuff or shuffle from above as I passed the third or fourth landing?  Something was strange about the door – not quite closed, the lock cylinder rough to the key, a new divot or two in the battered metal sheathing. Had I left that knife there? Disoriented, I picked the blade up and moved slowly through the kitchen towards the studio, all the little hairs on my neck and scalp now atingle as I struggled to process the scurry I might have heard at the back of the loft, the sensation that everything was just a little off, a bit askew. The slam and bang of the back door, the feet pounding down the stairs broke the spell. Dropping the knife I stumbled for the gloomy bank of windows overlooking the canyon of 21^st Street, tripped on an overturned credenza and landed in a tangle of Sapphic sex-toys the color and consistency of a heap of massive gummy-worms.

    This spectacular Chelsea beauty-loft, the latest in a string of short-term sublets, belonged to a pair of performance artists notable for daubing their otherwise naked bodies with mud and twigs and posing mutely for hours on the corner of Prince and West Broadway while the passing hordes affected jaded, downtown attitudes and steadfastly ignored them. I don't think we'd been there for two of our six weeks when the robbery occurred and had no way of knowing what the thieves may have made off with in that crazy, ten minute whirlwind of destruction and defilement other than the few items of our own that turned up missing: a tenor sax, a camera, a set of expensive studio lights. Book cases had been pulled down, closets tossed, cushions slashed; the very personal adornments of these two lives strewn about the place like so much flotsam at the wrack-line of a beach. And there in the middle of the mess, shining through the gloom like a beacon bearing witness to this creepy violation, a pile of perky, high-gloss erotica illuminating an intimacy we'd just as soon not have been forced to imagine.

    Two patrolmen arrived to survey the scene and fill out a report. We'd left the place ahoo for their appraisal and they were naturally drawn immediately to the turgid paraphernalia, indulging in a feast of ribald innuendo, hoisting some of the more complex examples aloft and asking for a demonstration. “Which of you guys is the pussy?” the fat one might have asked. Righting a few chairs and ottomans, we all sat at the coffee table to fill out the report as, still snorting and chortling at their own wit, the skinny cop distractedly swept away the pot seeds littering the table top which were popping chads in his paperwork. We took pictures of the scene and sent them off to our landladies together with the police report and a note begging their forgiveness should they return to find their stuff somewhat rearranged. The saxophone turned up at the pawnshop down on Seventh Avenue where the cops had said we'd likely find it, brought in that very day by the three kids the cops said had likely stolen it, according to the Shylock behind the bulletproof glass. Three kids who'd been hanging out on the street and watching my every move for the last two weeks.

    Years before, when I'd lived in Providence above the locksmith on North Main, I'd awoken one early winter morning to a trail of bootprints in the snow across the rooftop to the window by my pillow. Someone had been standing there, close as a lover - nothing more between us but a pane of glass - peering in at me for minutes, maybe hours in the night. Some days later I was at a pawnshop downtown with my friend John who was looking for an amplifier. The minute we walked in, John pointed to a shelf and said, “Hey, that's my clarinet!”

    “Can't be,” I said. “ You lent me your clarinet; it's back at the house....” The pawnbroker sidled over, “Nice horn, couple of kids brought it in this morning.” Confused, unable to imagine how John's clarinet had found its way downtown, I raced back to North Main and up the tiny alleyway beside the locksmith to find the door ajar, the rambling old house tossed from stem to stern. And the unsettling feeling of knowing someone had been watching my every move.