I arrived in New York during the summer of 2000 from somewhere else. It doesn’t matter where because nowhere else is like New York. Like most newcomers I was awed by the spectacle. I stole glances at the sky from the sidewalk while I tried to keep pace with other pedestrians. I walked the streets as a stranger. I thought I knew you aren’t supposed to look at the sky, the skyscrapers, or anything in particular. I practiced staring at an imaginary point in the distance. When passing others I concentrated on creating a vacuous expression. One look at me and people knew I didn’t know they existed.

It was hot that summer, though maybe not hotter than others to New Yorkers. The humidity at night choked the air and caused sheets to cling to my sweat soaked-limbs in bed. I learned to sleep with the window open as traffic’s cacophony played on Lexington Avenue only one story below. The hum from the oscillating fan hardly helped mitigate the heat or the din. But over time I became inured to the noise. Garbage trucks, cabs and cars passed and I slumbered. I merely stirred at the sound of sirens.

The subway was a different matter that summer. I never found comfort. Furnace blasts licked at my face as trains approached, forcing hot air from the tunnels. Hell’s Kitchen is on the West Side. The subway platform at Rockefeller Center that summer felt like Hell’s lower intestine. Most nights I clutched a magazine in my sweaty hand and waited for the F train. The F offered the only direct route to a stop at Lexington and 63rd and I hadn’t figured out the subway system yet. Green, yellow, orange and red lines ran across a map of Manhattan like varicose veins on a bloated calf. Sweat formed and stuck to my face, legs and flanks while I tried to wait casually for the F. E’s, Q’s and another F bound for The Bronx rumbled through the station. My F came less often nights when I worked late.

Mind-numbing boredom while waiting and torrents of sweat pushed me to the revelation that it would be more comfortable to walk the mile-and-a-half home from Midtown. The mood at night made walks worthwhile. It was easier to look inconspicuously at sites like the lights in windows that created a composite against a black background, like the dappled effect of an impressionist painting. On my walks home sometimes I saw hookers talking together in front of a deli on Sixth Avenue between 57th and Central Park South. I once saw a six-foot tall black transvestite on Park Avenue who muttered, “Motherfucker” at a doorman who looked too long. I set out one night in August for the possibility of any of these things.

I walked up Sixth Avenue past the tourist hotels where doormen screamed on their whistles and cabbies stuffed food into their mouths and hopped into their cabs to race for the next fare. No hookers stood in front of the deli that night. I walked onto Central Park South and the clomp-clomp of hansom cabs. Central Park was inky dark as a mystery that night. I walked past Mickey Mantle’s restaurant; another mystery because Mickey was dead. I passed the doorman dressed as a genie with turban and curly toes on his boots. And then I approached the illuminated splendor of the Plaza’s red-carpeted steps. Men dressed in dinner jackets waited with attractive women while doormen found them cabs from those queued in the street. A few paces past the steps, while I admired the hotel’s flower boxes, a woman screamed as if from the script from a thousand detective TV shows of my youth: “Oh my god, he’s got a gun.”

I heard more screams as I twisted to watch a man dressed in a drab suit sprint across the street toward the park. In one hand he carried a hefty brown briefcase. In the other he carried a gun. He suddenly turned and fired toward The Plaza. Well-dressed people crouched and sprawled for cover on the red carpet. More screams. Shots rang out from the steps. Stocky men in suits rushed between frozen cabs into the street, firing their guns. The man with the briefcase fled east through Grand Army Plaza. It was easy to follow his path by the commotion he created.

I looked eagerly at a woman approaching on the sidewalk, wanting to say, “Did you see that?” She walked past stonefaced. I abandoned my usual route and walked slowly up Fifth Avenue. I was drawn by the sound of more gunshots. I approached a small crowd gathered around a cab at 59th and Fifth Avenue. Men in suits wore earpieces with wires running under their collars. A woman in a pantsuit talked on a radio. A cab sat in the middle of the street with its rear driver’s side door ajar. A few feet away on the ground a man groaned while burly men pinned him to the ground with their knees. The man’s white shirt was stained in blood. He cried out in raspy tones that he couldn’t breathe.

I got a good look at him. He was middle aged and his ruddy face poured sweat. He was thin and his thin chest heaved for breath. The burly men in suits told him in gentle but authoritative tones not to struggle. I thought about my discomfort in the heat. It didn’t compare to being shot and bleeding into a suit on a hot street while men squeezed the breath from you.

Soon my sympathy passed and instinct took over. I wondered how much The Post or Daily News would pay for a photograph? Wasn’t it good practice to always carry a camera in my shoulder bag? I cursed myself and looked wistfully down Fifth Avenue. I knew Bulova and Tiffany sat perched in windows only a few blocks away but no disposable cameras would be found nearby.

I was distracted from my disappointment by other witnesses. We compared tales. One said he saw the trouble start in the hotel’s lobby. The cab driver, an East Indian, was disconsolate. He paced nervously, possibly wondering how he managed to get into this predicament. He stopped to pick up a fare dressed in a suit on the Upper East Side and the man had been shot while entering his cab. The police arrived and wouldn’t let him leave. The police moved at a snail’s pace while the man lay on the street, groaning. Cops talked to some witnesses, filled out paperwork on clipboards. Others looked for shells on the street.

Eventually I drifted away home as an ambulance arrived. The Daily News placed the story inside under a sensational but forgettable headline. The story described the suspect as a recent parolee. Security had been beefed up at the Plaza recently due to unrelated thefts. Plain-clothes (suits) security confronted the suspect in the elevator. He pulled a gun and fled when the doors opened in the lobby. There was a black-and-white photograph of the suspect on a gurney at the hospital. You couldn’t even see his face.

I stayed at the hotel one freezing February night while on assignment for a magazine from Buffalo. I wasn’t footing the bill and neither was the fledgling magazine. The room was on NBC’s tab.

As it turned out I didn’t much enjoy the minor luxury. I slept on a pullout sofa bed in the main room of a two-bedroom suite, my bed triangulated between a kangaroo, monkey and two poisonous snakes. The room oscillated between freezing and malodorous. I alternately opened the window to allow in fresh air and closed it to shut out the wintry night and din from traffic below.

Toward the window, in the largest cage, lay Red, a 130-pound adult male kangaroo. He thrashed his bulk against the cage, searching for comfort not to be found. There was an acrid odor from his lying in his filth all. Red would stir the stink and rattle the metal parts of the cage door before sighing for both of us and settling again.

At the sound of Red’s stirrings, Emmett, an excitable tamarind, whimpered from a cage that sat across the room perched on a chair. In my mind’s eye I saw through the darkened room to Emmett’s surprised expression. A slight repetitive sound may have been him sucking his thumb. It was more likely masturbation.

All night Red thrashed and I thrashed and Emmett whimpered while two snakes sat silently in transparent Rubbermaid containers tight-lidded with air holes punched into the tops. The green viper was frightening for its venom but the rattler’s irritation was as unnerving as a frantic tambourine.

The serpents had sat in their Rubbermaid under the passenger’s seat during the eight-hour drive from Buffalo. I sat atop it while Stephanie drove. Stephanie is husky-voiced with a healthy love of booze, cigarettes and punk rock, and a preternatural love for all animals – snakes included. If we crashed, I planned to flee the car before the snakes, once loose, could lunge at my legs. When I told her, Stephanie gave me a look of pity.

Our motel menagerie included more animals than humans. In one of the bedrooms slept a tall, rugged man from the Midwest improbably named Lee Huntsman. Lee’s tall teenaged daughter slept in the other bed. Scattered in cages throughout the room were a lynx, black leopard cub, and a young lion named Chance. Lee said the animal was named Chance because anyone who petted him was taking one. Lee owned all the animals in his room, plus Red and Emmett. He kept them on a small, private zoo, which he personally financed.

Stephanie and Jarod Miller shared the other bedroom. Jarod would handle the animals and a speaking role on Late Night with Conan O’Brien the following day. He is small which makes him seem even younger than he is but he commands a presence with his enthusiasm and seriousness about animals. At the time he was working on a bachelor’s degree in biology at a college upstate and augmenting his connections with zoos across the country by appearing on talk shows with exotic animals. Jarod was the subject of my magazine story.

We rose early the next morning with the sun low in the sun. In the early morning light I could see the snakes still snug in the containers. After breakfast, we walked through Columbus Circle to the Mayflower on Central Park West. Jarod dropped in to say hello and smooth over an incident from his last stay. The Post, Daily News, Times and television news had descended on the hotel after a rare bird escaped into Central Park.

The doormen greeted Jarod by name. The management chafed at the presence of a journalist, even one that wasn’t interested in revisiting the story of the escaped bird.

We returned to Le Parker Meridien where Lee paraded Chance through the lobby. The lion lay on the cool marble floor and yawned at his own reflection in the mirrors. Occasionally he let out a low growl that echoed off the hard surfaces and high ceilings. Passers-by flooded in from the sidewalk and timidly asked to have their photos taken with disposable cameras bought in the lobby gift shop.

Two fat twins took turns videotaping themselves with the docile feline. They worked for Cleveland R & B act “Bone Thugs-N-Harmony”. Members of the band showed briefly in the lobby and disappeared to their rooms upon seeing the crowd, either thinking it was for them or resenting that it wasn’t. The folk singer Sophie B. Hawkins stopped to stroke Chance’s velvety coat while he licked his paws.

Sophie is beautiful in an unembellished healthy way. Her long wavy blond hair hung like a mane at the sides of her angular makeup-free face. Sophie remarked that she wanted to live in a world where a lion in a lobby wasn’t unusual. “I wish our whole world was like this,” Sophie said earnestly. “I would die to live this life to be with animals all the time.”

Her manager crouched at Sophie’s side like a sprinter waiting for the gun to spring her. She wore heavy makeup and carried a date book. She recognized an opportunity and talked about Sophie’s moral imperative to crusade against experimentation on primates at Columbia or St. John’s or both. I tacitly agreed it was horrible although her description’s graveness was only exceeded by its vagueness.

Back in the room, Jarod prepared for his performance on Late Night by handling each animal separately. Lee released Red from his cage. Erect, he stood approximately 6 feet tall and cut an imposing swath through the room with his long, powerful tail giving his frame the appearance of greater grandeur. Red stretched and hopped forward as far as his harness would allow. Lee held the harness fast. Red hunched and moved in a skittish manner as he surveyed the room. Seeing his reflection in the mirror, he reared quickly.

Lee spoke to Red in soothing tones to calm him and explained that fighting was in Red’s nature and that he seemed fond of it. He explained that the best resistance was to offer none because to fight back would only encourage Red to go on a rampage. I had seen black and white footage of a can of tomatoes bobbing around a ring with a kangaroo in boxing gloves. The man offered meager resistance and invariably was pummeled by the marsupial.

With his short arms, Red didn’t appear equipped for boxing. Lee explained that like so much else in the television tradition, kangaroo boxing was an inauthentic representation. As if demonstrating Lee’s narrative, Red, who stood a head taller, grabbed Jarod by the shoulders and grappled with him. Jarod calmly turned 45 degrees and attempted to walk away from Red’s grip. Lee reprimanded Red in a tone usually reserved for retarded adults who must cease doing something that is simply too tempting. By pulling on the harness and pushing down on his back, Lee managed to settle Red on his haunches.

Lee explained between heavy breaths from the exertion of wrestling an animal as large as he that male kangaroos in the wild fight for dominance or mates. In a fight, the idea is to rock on the powerful tails and spring into a kick with their powerful legs. A kangaroos’ feet are equipped with sharp claws, which can tear the flesh from a man. Or worse, they can emasculate.

After some minor grappling, Red returned safely to his cage. Thinking the demonstration was complete I called the hotel manager for an interview. I sat at a desk with a pen in hand and a pad lain out in front of me. The large desk sat pushed against a mirrored wall so that I could watch myself work and survey the room behind me. The manager and I talked about the policy of allowing animals into the hotel. She talked about dogs and cats and “making a house a home”. I saw in the mirror to my right that Jarod and Lee loosed the snakes from the Rubbermaid containers that might otherwise contain Rice Krispies Treats for kindergarteners. Jarod and Lee manipulated the rattlesnake with a hook, which resembled a golfer’s putter. The grip and shaft are the same as a golf club but instead of a putter at the base, there is a thin hook. Unlike a putter, which functions to shorten the distance between the ball and the hole, the hook intends to maintain distance between the handler and the snake. I lapsed into and out of the conversation as the snake sizzled in irritation like a frying egg. A little nervous, my throat parched, I croaked questions to the manager while trying to concentrate on her replies and write them while monitoring the movement in the room through the mirror.

I scribbled and listened and suddenly Jarod was at my elbow whispering for me not to move. I glanced at my sick expression in the mirror. The manager’s voice droned on the other end of the receiver. Lee cracked, “Don’t make any sudden movements.”

Through bits of dialogue I learned that Jarod and Lee planned to distract and capture the snake, which I imagined was poised to strike at the backs of my legs crossed under the chair. The rattle rolled to a crescendo. I recalled that Jarod said a day earlier that the snakes had been devenomized. He later said he thought they had been devenomized. Still later he said that devonomized snakes would eventually produce more venom.

Suddenly the putter was in the air, the angry snake rattling on it like a tambourine. I heard the container’s lid snap shut and the voice on the other end of the telephone became audible again. I stammered before interrupting her. “I wondered, have there ever been any incidents with the animals?”