Christmas In New York

It was in the mid seventies, I had just come back from a year living in Rome, and had not yet recovered a memory of the rhythms of New York City.  I was on East 57th Street, between Fifth and Madison, intent on going to the Midtown Gallery, which was on the second floor, on the north side of the street.  I entered a smallish door with the number I was searching for, walked down a corridor to an elevator at the end.  I could see someone waiting for the elevator, and absentmindedly noted that the elevator was available and the  gentleman waiting in his trench coat did not seem to go aboard.  And then he was in front of me turned in my direction and pointing a gun at my belly.  "Shut up, turn around."  I am not Mr. Brave Heart and nearly fainted, spun around, my heart in my mouth.  He nudged me over to a stair out of a line of vision from the street.  He pressed the gun against my back "Give me your money."  All I could think of was the gun going off shattering my spine.  I reached into my pocket which unfortunately held a lot of cash in a money clip, pulled the dollar bills out of the clip and passed it over my shoulder.  I realized that by mistake I had given him my driver's license, too, and in an automatic reaction asked for it back.  There was silence, and then "Take it."  I turned around to find his face up close to mine and the drivers license in his teeth.  "Take it," he repeated, and I almost put my mouth up to his and took the license in my teeth before I suddenly had the presence of mind to use my fingers.  I had had a moment of erotic confusion and sort of thought maybe we were playing some exotic form of Spin The Bottle.  He was young and black and very good looking, there in his natty trench coat.  But very, very nervous.  He pocketed the money and disappeared down the corridor up which I had come.  I got on the elevator and made it to the gallery, whereupon I almost fainted from the fear of it all.  "Oh, dear," the two ladies in the gallery exclaimed, when I had explained my immediate need to sit down, "and just last week somebody got knifed on that elevator."  They called the detectives, and I spent the next half hour with them from which I learned that passing things with the teeth avoids finger prints (I have yet to have that useful information come in handy), rolling their eyes when I brought up Spin the Bottle.  Mugging at Christmas time was endemic, they said, as young  impoverished parents were desperate for money for toys. Jesus, what those Magi started! The gallery ladies gave me ten dollars so that I could get a cab downtown.  I was in a mental fog but resolutely determined to make my lunch date in Soho.  My lunch partner was one of those extraordinarily rich people who in those days never carried money, and neither did he have credit cards.  So it was that I used my own to pay for the lunch and lurched to an ATM to get money for the rest of my stay in New York City.  Whenever I see televised shots of the fabulous store windows in Midtown decorated for Christmas, I think back to my own moment of Noël in Tinsel Town.