THEN THERE WAS THE TIME

Be Cool Tonight / 2014 / Pasted paper collage / Russell C. Smith

Then there was the time I was having drinks in Hell’s Kitchen, at the bar on Eighth Avenue emblazoned with the name Smith’s in bold neon, with two undercover cops, and a fireman who retired at the age of 30 from disability. Too much smoke messed up his lungs, he’d said. The cops loved adding details to the stories they told. More often than not, they said they were on dead body protection detail. They’d learned the hard lessons through trial and error. Like, you one hundred percent don’t want to breathe in the foul fumes coming from a freshly deceased corpse. The body off-gasses all the things leftover in the dead person’s stomach, and other places. Once or twice breathing that into your throat and landing at the bottom of your stomach, you find out how cops who’d been on the force for decades handled it. They got short and not too sweet instructions. Get a medium-size plastic bottle of ammonia, each of you. Wrap a bundled-up T-shirt and press it firmly against your nose and mouth. Walk into the apartment, and keep splashing the ammonia out, from side to side on the floor where you’re about to step next. Then the oldest of the two cops, his face carrying around a hooked nose like that lady who played the witch in the Wizard of Oz, and dark circles under his eyes launched into a story about the time the both of them were called in the middle of the night to secure a body that’d been stuffed into an oil drum. Eddie, the older guy, had asked, “Hey, can’t it wait until dawn? It’s not like the guy’s gonna get up and walk away.” Apparently, this caused much merriment for the nighttime operator, who’d said, “Definitely not in this case.” These two undercover guys had arrived at around 3:30 a.m. In an alley close to the corner of Houston Street and Bowery, where a couple of uniformed cops were holding lukewarm Greek diner takeout coffee and standing guard close, but not too close, to the oil barrel in question. The one in charge handed each of them a paper bag with one bottle of ammonia in it, gave a quick wave, and said, “We’re out of here.” Hook-nosed undercover said, “Wait a minute, you’ve got to tell us something.” “Uniform in charge said, “Mob hit, canary in the guy’s mouth, body broken in half so as to fit inside the barrel. Happy now?” “Ecstatic,” Hook-nosed replied. End of story. I laughed. They laughed. We ordered another round. I paid the bill and left a big tip for our waitress. They never suspected I was the kind of guy who could’ve done what was done to the guy who wound up in the empty oil barrel, in an alley, close to the corner of Houston Street and Bowery.