Spanish Harlem is both part of Travis’s nocturnal taxi circuit and the setting of a sudden act of violence that changes how he understands himself and his life. A neighborhood he enters for routine errands becomes the place where his armed fantasies meet an actual emergency.

The Grocery and the Robbery

Around this period, Travis began stopping at an all-night grocery in Spanish Harlem to buy food when the streets were relatively quiet. Its proprietor, Melio, played salsa while he worked and welcomed company during the night, particularly when the visitor was armed. One evening Travis went in for chocolate milk and a Cuban sandwich. While he was in an aisle at the back, he heard a man speaking sharply to Melio and came to the counter, where he saw a young Black man, apparently high, threatening the shopkeeper with a gun and demanding money. The ordinary details of Travis’s errand—the drink and sandwich he had come to buy—remain present as the scene turns into an armed robbery.

The Shooting and Its Aftermath

The robber had not noticed Travis, and Travis called out just before firing his .38 Special. The shot struck the young man in the lower jaw; the recoil knocked Travis backward into a stack of cornmeal. As the packages fell, Melio recovered from his shock, drew his own .38, and fired twice into the robber’s chest, killing him. Still shaken, Melio briefly turned his gun toward Travis before recognizing him and lowering it. Travis left as Melio reached for the telephone to call the police, carrying the chocolate milk and Cuban sandwich he had come to buy. He described the shop as smelling like a butcher’s, and understood the shooting as a dividing line: after tasting blood, life and time no longer felt the same. In the days that followed, he increasingly shut himself away in his room, cleaning the gun, watching television, and eating from jars.

A Place on the Night Route

Spanish Harlem belongs to a broader geography of deliberate nocturnal exposure. Travis drove through Harlem and along Lenox Avenue, avoiding bottles scattered in the roadway and passing crowded blocks, then continued through the Lower East Side toward Tompkins Square and Avenue B. He described these patrols as a way of testing what might happen if he had to use his weapons, hoping to make his violent dream tangible; instead, people were polite, tipped him, and kept to themselves. The all-night grocery in Spanish Harlem marks the sharp reversal within that pattern: a neighborhood he had entered as part of his armed night life becomes the site of an actual confrontation, not the imagined danger he had been seeking.

The Grocery Within a Larger Preparation

The robbery unfolded during the same period that Travis was preparing a separate act of political violence. He had gathered information about Charles Palantine’s route from Kennedy Airport to The Plaza Hotel and around the city, studied reports about the senator’s security detail, and practiced drawing and firing. His equipment included a .44 Magnum, a concealed Colt .25 mechanism fitted along his forearm, and a combat knife strapped to his calf. The grocery encounter was not part of that plan: its importance lies in the contrast between calculated preparations directed at Palantine and the sudden use of his .38 Special inside a neighborhood shop. Spanish Harlem thus enters the narrative at the point where Travis’s deliberate rehearsal of violence and an unplanned confrontation occupy the same stretch of his life.