I have no idea how long I'd been out when I awoke to a smear of yellow teeth, and snarls. Coyotes! I'd heard the beasts had eaten pets in Scarsdale and now were expanding their habitat south, menacing the rat population of Morrisania. But they weren't coyotes. They were just dogs, mangy and vicious, three of them, yapping and snapping.

"Go home!" I screamed, fake-feral me shouting at real-feral them, as if they weren't home already.

Ever try cramming a mummy bag into a micro-stuff sack while encircled by possibly rabid mongrels? Plus, where was global warming when you really needed it? A front had come in. I had on my Jets stocking hat -- like, Bill Parcells, save me now -- but I was still freezing. And so I ran, numbed and purblind, through low-slung forest branches, hellhounds on my trail. Ahead lay upper Broadway.

It wasn't yet midnight, but luckily, upper Broadway in the mid-200s is rich in establishments where the three-leaf clover offers a pale-green neon beacon to the gentleman traveler. El tracks above my head, I hit them hard, fast. The Terminal at 242nd, Hennessy's Headquarters, Keenan's, the Punch Bowl, Pauline's, Jesse James, the Liffy, the Liffy 2, Irish Eyes, and Rich Willies -- at every port of call, firemen, disgruntled District 37 workers, cops, and who-knew-how-many IRA bombers noted my backpack, assumed I'd been tossed out, and offered manly sympathy. Like a Cheever character swimming across Connecticut, I walked downtown, bar by bar, upon a stream of Budweiser.

Crossing into Inwood, I found myself teetering on the edge of what the Broadway drinkers called "the end of the earth." I was entering Dominican territory, where, according to one barroom patron, "they scream 'Sosa 66!' like 'banzai' -- and slam a machete into the back of your neck." Racist claptrap, I had snorted. But now, standing at the brink of Washington Heights, with Harlem to follow, I blinked.

"You carry your home on your back like the turtle?" the youth asked, referencing my backpack as he emerged from the shadows, head hidden by a sweatshirt hood. I fumbled in my pocket for my sole item of self-protection, a Swiss Army knife. I knew I should have passed on the tweezer and toothpick options in favor of the box cutter and Kalashnikov.

"You lost?" the kid asked solicitously. On second glance, I saw he couldn't have been more than 12.

Lost? Absolutely. I was losing myself in order to be found. Would this youngster care to hear of the vicissitudes of the shamanic path? On the lamppost in front of me was the same flyer I had seen affixed to every lamppost all the way up to 242nd Street. HOSPITALS NOW HIRING, it said. FOR ALL POSITIONS. EXPERIENCE NOT NECESSARY. To the left of the letters was a crude line drawing of a man in a doctor's coat examining a young child. Suddenly, I wasn't feeling so good myself.

"Know of any place to stay around here?" I asked.

The kid shook his head. "No" was all he said. Across the street at the 24-hour car service, the guy behind the desk handed me the Yellow Pages. Under hotels, in a tight little box display, it said, DEEGAN MOTEL -- WHERE THE NEW YORK THRUWAY MEETS THE NEW YORK SUBWAY. LOW DAY RATES! The Deegan was back up near 238th Street, about 45 blocks away, but I'd struck a covenant with myself: feet only, no public transport, no cabs.

The office of the Deegan wasn't an office at all; it was more like the booth of a parking lot, glassed-in and bulletproof with a sign that said ADULT MOVIES -- $3.50 taped to the window. Inside, on the ledge, a roll of Trojans streamed toward the floor like carnival tickets. The bumpy-faced attendant asked, "How many hours?"

"How about until morning?"

The cashier squinted, as if this was some kind of trick. Then, recovering, he blurted, "Fifty." Like a moron, I took out my credit card. "No, man, we got to take cash," the attendant replied. When I asked him if the rooms were clean, he shrugged and said, "You'll see."

Alienation is like cholesterol -- there's good and bad -- and the Deegan is an all-night fish fry. No slo-mo Willy Loman death scene here. At the Deegan, thousands, millions -- billions of millions -- of potential souls go by the boards each prorated hour, smeared into the sheets, dribbled onto the shag rug. Aye, Johnny, ye swiggling little tadpole, we barely knew ye. Clean? The room smelled like it had been smart-bombed with Lysol straight from the Pineywoods; at the Deegan, even Saddam's germs check in but do not check out. Peering through the streaked window to the great highway from which the motel had taken its name, I watched cars and trucks whiz by, the whine of their tires a mantra of separation.