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The thing about that scene, I told them, was the economy of it. A man who stabs another man over a seventy-five-cent ticket isn’t worth even a shudder of compassion, not even a spasm of revulsion. I didn’t feel any pity at all for him. I didn’t even think of him as a man. Of course, those were days when violence was uncommon, when it could still be seen as dramatic or moral. What I had seen was an act of tribal solidarity, and it was satisfying in its way to see how much the Happy Boys cared—how they laughed and kissed Pablito, how impressed he was by their anger and grief—and then their fastidiousness as they wiped off their trousers and shoes. As an expression of passion, the incident impressed me, for I was a stranger, too, like the man they killed.

It was the sort of thing Hemingway would write about, I said, or Mailer—yet I didn’t trust them with such scenes. They’d make it both more and less than it was. Hemingway would harp on the handkerchiefs. Mailer would reach for philosophy.

I told them another story—about the night when the air was filled with flying chairs. A couple of men had gotten into a fight and the whole place divided into two groups. They were all friends and they really didn’t want to fight, so they took up positions at each end of the hall and threw chairs. They were light, cane-bottomed chairs that the audience would drum on, like a chorus, when they got carried away by the music.

The chairs arched through the air like birds flying the length of the hall, birds trapped in a room. There must have been forty or fifty of them, a flight of chairs. Some of them met in midair, as if they were mating on the wing. Then after a while it just stopped. No one seemed to be hurt.

As I told these stories I could see that I was making an impression, that these three literary men saw the Happy Boys as something like the Parisian apache dancers, where men threw women around in a violent acrobatic tango. For all their intellectual sophistication, Village writers were suckers. They were awed by action and passion. They saw Western movies as myths. You’d see them coming out of the Loew’s Sheridan with their eyes shining.

Was that true, Dwight said, that part about the handkerchiefs? They liked the story. I could have published it in Partisan Review. They wanted to see Spanish Harlem. They wanted to visit the primitive, see it in the flesh.

It was a Friday night and I knew that there was a gran baile every Friday, so we jumped into a taxi and went straight up Fifth Avenue, which was a two-way street at the time.

Though my father had played New Orleans jazz on our Stromberg-Carlson phonograph, it was Latin American music that I loved most. I don’t know why, because much of it was terrible. The arrangements were full of churning horn sections and awkward staccatoes and the singers, who were almost always male, sang through their noses in a high, pinched tenor.

Yet I loved it. As far back as I could remember I had listened to Xavier Cugat on the radio. I was so devoted to him that I was allowed to monopolize the radio when his regular weekly program came on. When I think about it now, I suppose it was the rhythm section, the drums, that appealed to me. I had always felt that life was a rhythmical process. When I was happy, my rhythms, my tuning, were good—everything danced—and when I was unhappy, I didn’t have any rhythm at all. It was my secret conviction that Delmore and the other writer-intellectuals had very little sense of rhythm. It wasn’t just that Delmore, for example, was clumsy—it went further than that. As Kenneth Burke said, the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude—and I thought there was something about the way New York intellectuals danced their attitudes. There was not much syncopation in their writing. They stayed too close to the bone and they had turned themselves into wallflowers.

I liked it better when writers danced. Even Hemingway, another clumsy man, knew how to dance, and I can imagine even Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dancing.