There was hardly anyone on the street, just a few people sitting on the curb with funny expressions on their faces. But I passed that big garage between my apartment house and the subway station, and there I stopped dead. It’s one of the most expensive car hangars in the Village and it looked like, I don’t know, a junkyard soufflé.

In the dimness, I could see cars mashed against cars, cars mashed against walls. Broken glass mixed in with strips of torn-off chrome. Fenders ripped off, hoods sprung open and all twisty.

Charlie, the attendant, came dragging out of his cubicle and kind of grinned at me. He looked as if he’d tied one on last night.

“Wait’ll your boss sees this,” I told him. “Man, you’ll be dead.”

He pointed at two cars locked together nose to nose near the entrance. “Mr. Carbonaro was here. He kept asking them to go on making love. When they wouldn’t, he said to hell with them, he was going home. He was crying just like a milk bottle.”

It was turning into one weird morning. I was only half surprised when there was no one on duty in the subway change booth. But I had a token on me. I put it in the turnstile and clunked through.

And that’s when I first began to get scared—on the platform of the subway station. Whatever else is going on in the world, to a New Yorker the subway is a kind of man-made natural phenomenon, routine and regular as the sun coming up. And when the routine and regularity stop in the subway, you sure as hell notice it.

Like the guy on his hands and knees at one end of the platform staring up a woman’s dress, she rocking on high heels and singing a song to the ceiling. Or this pretty young Negro girl, sitting on a wooden bench, crying her heart out and wiping her eyes with great big newsprinted sheets of that morning’s Times. Or the doctor-lawyer type miming a slalom in and out of the iron pillars of the platform. He was chanting, “Chug, chug, chug-azoom, chug, chug, chug-azoom.” And nobody in the station being startled, or even looking worried.