Coal tar, I thought.
Too late not to light a cigarette.
I stepped down in the gutter--in gum wrappers, glittering bits of
cellophane, the blanched drift of horse manure, a swatch of blue cloth,
a letter that had been rained on, fresh Pekinese sign, and a little
dry mud. All around me midday, midtown Manhattan soaked up August in
its brick pores, its limestone pores--flashed back August from glass,
from polished granite, and from all its million metal fixtures. The sky
was bluely vague. An air-liner shoved up through it from La Guardia--a
grinding abnormality.