in.

The time passed, thank God. The television was going but I didn’t look at it, and there were a few brawls but I didn’t watch or participate. I just wanted to get loaded and watch the hours go by until it was three in the morning and my father was dead.

I didn’t get drunk. I drank slowly, for one thing. More important, I had too much of a fire going inside of me to get tight. I burned the alcohol up before it could get to me, I guess.

By midnight I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wanted to be with someone, and being alone was impossible. I couldn’t go home, for I knew how important it was to Mom that she be by herself. She had a lot of crying and drinking to do, and I didn’t want to get in her way.

There was no one I wanted to see. No one but Betty.

It would have been so good to be with her then, to have her in my arms, holding me close and telling me that everything was going to be all right. What the hell, I thought. I walked over to the phone booth and gave her a ring.

The phone rang ten times without an answer. If I’d had anything better to do, I’d have given up. But I didn’t so I stayed in the booth listening to the phone ring. And after ten rings, she answered it.

She couldn’t have been sleeping, for there was a tension in her voice that showed she’d been busy. Her voice was tight and husky.

“Betty,” I said “Betty, I want to come over.”

There was a pause. “You can’t.”

“Look, I won’t bother you. It’s…it’s a bad night, Betty. I need someone, you know? Let me come over.”

Again a pause, and a boy’s voice in the background. Bookspan’s. I gritted my teeth and banged the phone down on the hook. I needed another drink, and I had one. And then I had another, and another.

I left the joint at one, and I walked home. I felt fine, in spite of the liquor I’d had. I walked a straight line and my head was clear as crystal. I tiptoed up the stairs, past the living room where Mom was drinking and crying.

I found what I was looking for in Dad’s bureau drawer. He’d tried to kill Bookspan before, you see. Once he bought a gun at a Third Avenue hockshop, but he never used it, never even pulled its trigger. When he finally shot the bastard, he was in California and the gun was still in the bureau drawer. It was almost as though he had left it there for me.

I left the house as silently as I had entered it, the gun snug and comfortable in my jacket pocket. At one-thirty, I climbed the stairs to the apartment house on Saint Mark’s Place.

She didn’t let me in, because she didn’t have to. They’d left the door open, and I walked in without knocking. I walked through the familiar kitchen to the equally familiar bedroom. I knew that I’d find them there.

I flung open the bedroom door and I saw them lying there, in each other’s arms. My girl. My girl, with the guy I hated most in the world. I’d expected it, but it was a hard thing to watch.

Her lips parted for a scream, but she stopped instantly when she saw the gun in my hand. Her face froze in terror, and she looked like a very little girl just then, a little girl trying to pretend she was a woman.

Bookspan just looked scared. I enjoyed the fear in his eyes, as much as I could have enjoyed anything at the time. I let them look at the gun for several minutes, without saying a word.

Then I told them to close their eyes, and then I walked to the side of the bed and struck each of them on the head with the barrel of the gun. I just used enough force to knock them unconscious. I didn’t want to kill them; I couldn’t do that.

I tore a bedsheet into strips of cloth and tied them up. I put their arms tight around each other, tying his hands around her back and her hands around his. Then I gagged them, and I waited.

When they came to, they struggled helplessly while their bodies pressed together. It could have been funny, if the circumstances had been different.

But I didn’t laugh. I just watched them