“Blues doesn’t fill a club,” Boris kept saying. He’s the Hot Spot’s manager. Okay, so a blues joint doesn’t need the doorman and the velvet ropes. And the night I got turned onto the blues, there were only a couple of people in the place. But that was Atlantic City. Who’d go there for blues?

This is Manhattan. “We’ll fill it. We’ll fill it,” I kept saying, back when I thought that was my only worry.

So tonight’s our first gig at the Hot Spot. No cover but a cut of the bar. And it’s right in the heart of the Village, so a foot in the door would be great for the band.

But half of New Jersey is backed up at the tollbooths, waiting to cross the George Washington Bridge. I’m inching forward, windows open because my car doesn’t have AC, breathing hot air heavy with exhaust fumes, on my way to pick up Jimmy and then head down to Bleecker Street.

I’ve got the classic rock station on, and the Rolling Stones are competing with the hip hop the guy next to me is blasting from his oversized speakers—and I’m glancing into the rearview mirror from time to time to watch my makeup drip away. Usually I try to dress up nice for a gig, but it’s hard when it’s so hot. Tonight after staring in my closet for about twenty minutes, I settled on red leather shorts and a red sequined halter, and I’ve got my red spike-heeled sandals in my bag.

Finally I reach the tollbooth, where I hand six bucks to a lady wearing a rubber glove. Eight lanes merge into three, and in a minute I’m out over the river. At the end of the bridge, I swing around onto the West Side Highway. It’s a straight shot downtown now, with the river on my right and New Jersey beyond in a haze of heat. I take the exit at 95th and head east. Within a few blocks, a neighborhood of grand, stone-faced apartment buildings turns into one where guys stand on the sidewalk in front of bodegas, listening to salsa on boom boxes.

And something is going on. The street that skirts the side of Jimmy’s building is clogged with cop cars, an ambulance, and a crowd: salsa guys, chubby Hispanic grandmas, slender brown kids who’ve found something interesting to look at.

The crowd is jammed up against a chain link fence with razor wire on top, filling the sidewalk and spilling out into the street. The fence protects a concrete-covered yard that separates Jimmy’s building from the building next door. People are jostling and bobbing to get a better view of whatever’s on the other side of the fence.

I try to edge my car past the ambulance, but one of the cops holds up a warning hand. I shift into reverse and creep back toward the corner. I turn the corner and scan the curb past a collection of cars in not much better shape than mine. I slip into the only available spot—available because it’s by a hydrant. I’ll just be a minute, I tell myself. I don’t bother to roll up the windows because the lock on the passenger side doesn’t work.

Making my way through the crowd, I notice that a gate in the chain link fence is open, and a cop is standing at the gate with a stern look on his face. A few more cops and some ambulance people are hovering around something in the middle of the yard.

I can’t resist a look, even though I’m in a hurry. I slow down and stand on tip-toe to peer over the heads of the people between me and the fence. The thing everybody’s interested in seems to be a person lying on the concrete, a very still person. I can’t see much because leafy, tree-like weeds grow along the fence, and beyond the fence two ambulance people are crouching by the person with their backs to me. Another ambulance person is standing off to the side, talking to a cop. A stretcher is lying at the edge of the concrete patch.

“What happened?” I ask a wiry brown kid with a gold chain around his neck.

He checks out my legs then says, “The guy fell… or something.” His accent gives the statement a musical lilt.

“From where?”

“Up there.” He points at the side of the building, craning his neck back to look as far up as he can.

“He was on the roof?”

“No, he came out of a window. Up there. See?”

Lots of people have their windows wide open on this sultry summer evening, and lots of the windows don’t have screens, so it’s hard to tell where the kid’s pointing.

“Did you see it happen?” I say.

“No.” He waves his brown hand in a small circle. “The people here—they were talkin’ about it.”

Now the ambulance people have stood up. One of them heads for the stretcher; the other one heads toward the gate.

I can see the body now, and for a minute I just feel cold. Then the whole scene stretches away from me, like it’s not real. People are talking, but it’s the background noise in a movie. I’m floating a few feet above the sidewalk, watching a story unfold. The breeze is stirring the leaves of the huge tree-like weeds springing up along the fence. The evening sun is glinting off the razor wire.

The body sprawled out on the concrete is Jimmy.