Home For the Holidays.

Gary had these wide eyes and grin that never left his face when he ran into Mark on Main Street just up from the canal bridge that morning.

It hadn't been that long that he'd been out of town and nothing had really changed.

But,

"It all feels so different," he laughed. "Everything looks the same only - I guess I'm not used to seeing it anymore, y'know?"

And Mark did, kind of.

Gary had been downstate to school and was now home for the holidays and, though the two of them hadn't really known each other that well in school, Gary seemed genuinely thrilled to have run into Mark and they went around for coffee.

Gary had gotten in the evening before. He told about coming up on the Thruway and pulling into the old town, the old neighborhood. He was out, now, he said, just to look around and couldn't get over the feeling of being somehow a stranger to it all. It was great being home but he was a day late getting back because he'd stayed on a day with friends he'd made at school so they could binge together one last time. They'd been out the night before break and decided it just hadn't been enough. They had all stayed on and did it over again.

"That was goddam special, let me tell you!"

Mark had been commuting across town to MCC and thought he would transfer eventually but wasn't sure where he'd go.

They should get together, Gary decided when they were back out on the street. They should go out somewhere, close a bar.

"Man, I just can't come down, y'know? I'm not ready yet. I need to JUICE!" he bellowed suddenly and made people stop and stare.

They planned to get together that night and go down to Monroe Ave in the city. Gary had been a few times before but never when he was on his own. Mark could, maybe, show him around.

"Gona be a blast!" Gary was certain.

They arranged to get together and agree that it would be a good night for going because it would be out ahead of the snow that everyone said was coming. When they met up that evening Craig Martin, who had been in their class as well, was with Gary. Gary was still up as before and Craig switched off to the back seat of Gary's car so Mark could sit up front for when they got off the Expressway downtown.

Craig had run into Christie Steiger earlier in the day much as Gary had run into Mark. Mark recalled her as another of that crowd. When Craig and Gary weren't recalling their old times together, Craig was on his cell in the back seat with Christie. He wanted her and her firends to make it down to the Avenue and meet up with them.

"It's early. Nothing happens before ten."

He was on the phone with her again when they left the car in the lot off Oxford Street.

"We're here...at Oxford's...on Monroe.... Come on down!... Anytime 'fore closing."

When they came out of the alley onto the street they fell in with a crowd crossing from Spike's that had gotten segmented when it tried to ignore the traffic which was heavy both ways. They all went into Oxford's Pub together.

Coming down the sidewalk, Gary had noticed that the Mark's across the way on the corner was no longer a Mark's, had become something called Rookie's Express but was still a pizza parlor.

The summer before Gary had been 'down here,' with a couple of friends, he told them over their first beers. They hadn't been able to get in anywhere then, but it was one of those summer nights and they hung around anyway. They got an old panhandling bum to buy them some beers in the corner store at the other end of the block up from Spike's and drank them in the lot between the bar and Subway. It was the lot where the bums hang out on the steps of an enclosed porch and stairs up the side of the building. Later they went for slices and sodas from Mark's, sat on the curb and watched stretch limos pull up and unload whole dozens of guys and girls in front of Oxford's.

They saw a fight nearly break out that the pub's bouncers broke up. Some faggot in these big strange glasses thought he was part of one of those crowds and kept trying to horn in with them.

"But this other guy?" Gary related, "He wasn't havin' the loser. He was going to throw down, go hands with this guy if his friends hadn't held him back. Then the bouncers shooed the dork off the block."

"Gil Farnum?" he added. "He nearly laughed his ass of the curb. Actually - off the curb. Dweeb came back up our side of the street. And he's shouting all this shit over there to the bar, y'know. Startin' things back up again. Only one of the bouncers, man. He stepped down in the street and jus' looks at the guy - and he runs off again! Jus' looks! And Gil fell over on my lap he was laughing so hard!"

"You knew Gil, right?" Gary asked, his face a mile wide with the memory.

"Freakin' Farnum!" Craig called him and pulled on his long neck.

Mark said, yeah, he remember Gil but he wasn't sure which one of that crowd Farnum had been. Maybe he was the blond wrestler who shaved his head to look more intimidating.

There was a gang from Spencerport next to them in the bar for a time. They were buying rounds for one another and, after Gary shout out how they were all from 'the Port' too - just not saying which port, they were included in on the beers.

"We were 'O5," Gary claimed.

"'04," Craig corrected him, popping peanuts and grinning.

"That's right, '04."

Gary got into a running gag with one of that crowd, the two of them sharing memories that had never happened. Perhaps they were memories of things that had happened - just not all in the same school. Some times Craig and Mark were asked to confirm a memory.

"Oh, yeah! Sure! Sure - freakin' best time I ever had!" Craig would say.

From time to time, Craig would go out on the street for a smoke and to make another of his phone calls to Christie Steiger and her lot. They were always somewhere and might be coming around to the Avenue.

Mark would go out, too. At first he would bum a smoke from who ever else was there on the sidewalk but he had never smoked that much and, after a time, even other peoples' smoke made him nauseous. He would go for a walk up the block, instead. For late in December it was a mild night, but he would shove his hands in his pockets and pull his hoodie up over his head and walk along like that. The other end of the block everything was closed and dark. One time he walked as far as the Expressway and stood out on the overpass in the middle with the lights of the traffic whizzing to him on the left and away from him on the right. There was still such a lot of traffic and the cars and trucks traveled so fast that their head lights seemed to streak toward him before disappearing beneath his left foot only to reemerge red eyed and going away beneath his right.

He was returning from one of these walks at Last Call.

Gary and the Spencerport gang were just then blundering out on to the street. There were, maybe, two dozen people out in front of Oxford's leaving the bar but not going anywhere right away. The front door of the pub was more open than closed then with everyone who was coming out or hurrying inside before it was straight up two a.m. They were doing "Teen Age Waste Land," for last song.

One of the 'Port crowd came out later than the rest. He had a slight build and curly hair and stepped around the clot of people who'd come out of the bar last ahead of him. He didn't hurry to the curb side but he walked straight there as if he needed to get where he was going.

He stood at the edge of the avenue straight up and still for a long moment waiting. At last his head bowed a bit forward and what he did was more like spitting up than the spewing that usually happens outside a bar at two in the morning.

Gary's Spencerport High classmate pointed.

"I went to school with that man!" he boasted in the same big voice he'd been using inside the bar.

With out looking around, the kid on the curb lifted his right arm in a weakened gesture of triumph and acknowledgment. When he did look around, he wore an accomplished grin and was glad to have that out of his system.

Soon different ones were piling together with their arms around one another's shoulders posing for prom night snaps and declaring their Spencerport affiliation. Gary and Craig Martin were among them.

There were cheers of,

"S-port! S-port! S-port!"

And there was laughter.

Gary grabbed both Craig and his new friend and called for the girl taking the pictures to immortalize the -

"Class of 'O4!"

Mark stood up the street and watched.

It occurred to him, and he wanted to tell it to someone, that he'd never had a real friend and didn't believe he ever would. He wanted it out in words spoken, too, that he had never been anywhere and that nothing had ever happened to him.

He wanted only to go home; but he had to wait.

THE END.

Christmas, 2008.

After

"Tell ya, OG," he started and stopped.

Thick fingers bunched about a butt he'd been smoking. Holding it out to contemplate, his rumbling, rumpled voice began again and he figuratively shook his head over it with a doubtful certitude.

"Tell ya, OG," he addressed me, again, intimately, "We godda stop doin'ese smokes, man!"

The Old Guy crack made me a bit defensive.

"I do a Blunt," I wasn't too insistent, but I wanted it understood, "I don't figure it's too much - the one a day!"

Out front of the Goodman Rite Aid with the Beer Rush about to begin, I was standing with my Phillie when he emerged, slow coming on and large shouldered in his OD jacket, out of the shadows at the Edmonds end of the store.

"Naw, OG," he wasn't having any of that, insisting, "we poisoning 'rselves with'ese smokes. 'Stime we stop'em!"

I thought I heard some ponderous resolve, too, in the heavy rolling over of his tone - however much for show it may have been.

I came away thinking the exchange had been indicative of something or that it should be if I only knew what to make of it. Something worth my coming out this night.

It took being reminded that this had been another Tuesday night, this Wednesday morning, this closing hour and that that made it a week from the first Tuesday in November - to start to give it, and so much else, a possible proper significance.

When Oxford's Pub began to let out its Tuesday night pittance of celebrants onto the street there was, at one point, one of those flurries of evening ending bad feelings. An angry young lady was bitterly disappointed in the behavior of a young man of her acquaintance and eager to leave with her girlfriends but not without making a point of telling him how she felt. Not all of, or any of the girlfriends, for that matter, appeared to feel the same or any of the anger though, eventually, they went loyally off with the angry one. None of the Guys in the crowd seemed to have been aware of her feelings. There were stunned grins on shocked faces and, thrown off balance, they could only sputter a defense and laugh amazed.

After, two of the young men remained behind, and one apologized for how the sorry scene had gone down all about me as I stood on my stoop in the doorway at 640 Monroe.

"That was bad. You shouldn't been in the middle of that."

But that was over with, at any rate, and the less said the better, obviously.

"You're out here a lot two in the morning? Y'like that - closing time?" he'd observed and was interested to know.

"I like to be around for the Staggering Out," I admitted.

I take an interest in my street and the Two A.M. is one of the better occasions to catch up on it. I admitted, too, that I write a little, that I write about Monroe - too little, I think, but I write.

Ryan claimed that he had wanted to learn to write in school,

"But the way they show you how, they make it all about form...."

Having a Hemingway moment, I disparaged Creative Writing and, then, thought I needed to put something out there.

"All you need is to find a subject. You need something to write about. I got my subject - here, Monroe!"

I talked a little about what I'm writing and, as an example, I rush through describing how, recently, hearing the strains of a Beatles tune, "Oblah-Dee, Oblah-Dah," from the bar near closing, I'd been sent back to when I first heard the song and all that I associated it with. I told them how I made all that I associated it with into an item I'd posted.

Justin objected,

"Those were interesting times. You lived in interesting times when things were happening that mattered."

That note I've heard before. It is that impression that so many young people seem to have and seem obliged to bring up in the presense of someone of my age suggesting that the great eventful times have all been in the past, an advantage I have supposedly over them. Somehow I seem to have been waiting for some one to say that to me, again, because,...

"Those were interesting times but these are interesting times," I was eager to tell someone.

"I've been watching the news, what has been happening this week since the election."

I'd been listening all week to the cable news commentators, the speculators on the Transition Watch and I was eager to speak with someone about that. On Monroe Avenue after two in the morning I wanted to say that, while those times that I might be expected to brag on because I own them, the times when I was young are worth remembering, they are worth remembering because....

"What I'm hearing now sounds so much like what I remember it was like when John Kennedy came along."

That is something that they can't know positively but should be aware of; and I know that the awareness of something beginning to possibly happen is here on theAvenuebecause I've been hearing it too....

Obama - I've overheard them saying in my room overlooking the rear door of Oxford's Pub where the smokers gather, I've heard the name Obama percolating up out of the usual and largely incoherent boil of laughter and loud bar conversation. Obama - spoken pointedly and with a note of interest that is not the usual matter of conversations there.

And I remember the excitement in the discovery, back then, that a President could be a young man with an attractive young family, the sense that a fresh strength was about to be applied and that a new approach was about to be made.

And, if in my eagerness to make my case, I was excited and livened, it was instantly and avidly apparent that they were, too, a little.

"Yeah, yeah, I've been feeling that, too. For the first time I've been getting that...."

For a good twenty minutes or more on the elderly Avenue of sooty brick and tacky neon, with its panhandlers and crack whores hustling as long and longer than the bar crowds remain, we had a hopeful conversation.

O, Hallowed-E'en!

It is always hard to tell when Halloween begins on the Avenue no matter how apparent in its ghastly glamour it might be once begun.

It could be said that Halloween is everyday Monroe, only more so.

Was that girl on line at Rite Aid, one-thirty yesterday afternoon, the one with the multiple piercings, the black make-up and purple and green hair, the one in the baby doll skirt - was she the first on street for trick or treat or merely expressing her individuality in the accustomed Monrovian manner?

The children's Halloween of costumes and candy corn keeps, largely, to the residential neighborhoods, the friendly back places behind the Big Street. There is a children's hour through the early evening darkness when young gangs and families travel treating about from jack-o'-lantern porch to grave stoned front lawn. Careening, they cross one another's pathes on street corners that are without traffic lights. Intersections with streetlights half lost in maple and oak leaves not neon and flourescent lite by 7/Elevens and bars; where the pavements are strewn with scraps of dead leaf not used condoms and the broken glass of slipped bottles of Steel Reserve.

The Avenue's Adult Only fest doesn't truly begin until ten and the gangs hop bars clad and unclad in not so much costumes and creations.

Between eleven and eleven-thirty the crowd at Oxford's Pub backed up out on to the street. The line formed to the right of the door and extended in disorderly fashion to, at times, Lola's and nearly to the corner. Lobster Girl hung a butter bar purse from a bright red claw and smoked a cigarette; Wonder Woman's shave left a five o'clock shadow along 'her' jaw line. Death came to Oxford's in various guises - black robed as a seven foot montster with glaring skull face and huge hanging gnarly talons; a skeletal Death in jester's cap and bells and black and red motley roared up on the side walk on his hog. Appropriately, therefore, there came, too, the Resurrection and the Life - Sweet Jesus in whitest flowing robes and basketball shoes, arrived a crown of thorns pressed down on his head.

Halloween on Monroe is a live action Simpsons marathon, a review of a century of pop culture references and icons. Flappers with boas and feathered tiaras, hipless and fringe festooned short black dresses and pin-striped and fedora-ed Wise Guys with plastic Tommy guns meet on the street with Robert Redford wanna be Seventies swingers and Haight-Asbury and Woodstock Flower Children. Bernie, the Dead Guy, with cool guy mustache and darkness over his fixed and absent expression, permanently laid back comes down the street propelled ahead with a dandling walk. He (excuse the expression) passes the Labowski, getting out of cab in blond wig, bathrobe and hauling a bowling bag.

Jack Sparrow pirates and Yacht Girls in white caps and blue blazers; Cavemen and half naked Hula Dudes in grass skirts and cocoanut brassieres; a guy in black and brown striped box is a stack of Jenga blocks gets in the back of the line and a girl comes along as a Rubek cube.

When the bars turned everyone out, something like a parade started down toward Mark's Texas Hots. Tommy Lee in top hat led to a banjo, kazoo and washboard march. Up ahead were the flashing lights of cruisers on the scene of one car crumpling accident at Averill while behind the parade the sudden smash of a second collison turned heads to see that some one, pulling out of Exxon, had driven straight into the passenger side of a passing carload of costumed partiers.

Saturday afternoon, a French Maid strolled down Monroe along side her friend who wore a Minnie Mouse polka dot bow in her hair still.

The Avenue has returned to the merely common place strange of Everyday Monroe.

Oblah-Dee Oblahdah

It is chill enough most nights now that the door at Oxford's Pub remains closed when young people aren't ejecting themselves out into the night or lurching to get back inside. Tater, on the door, keeps to his stool just inside and only occasionally brings his grin out to the crowd congregated on the sidewalk.

These are nights of black pavement. Monroe's palette of sooty brick walls is dankness darkened and the sky clouded.

All the Avenue's spatter of colored lights, the cars tht run up and down to the Christmas colored commands of the traffic lights work to liven the scene and the crowds of kids with their laughter and chatter, even their flashes of anger kick in, too.

But it's no longer summer any more. The door is closed more than it is open.

This guy who came along the other night wore a gray sweat shirt and had his hood up and bound tight about his face. It was that chill that it seemed reasonable enough. He came around the corner under the Lola sign and turned as he was passing 640.

"Y' bin here long time," he said.

And I have been. Four summers I've been here on the Avenue.

He said he lives, now, on Wellesley, the street that runs behind our block. But he used to live in the Cornell. That's the building alongside 640, the building on the corner of Wilmer Street that houses Lola's and Oxford's on the Avenue and has apartments above and around behind.

How did I like my building? I like it fine; I like having Monroe on my doorstep. Yeah, that must be great. Yeah, he was living over on Wellesley, now, he told me again. And, he imagined, I must know Gene.

"Everybody knows Gene."

Gene Chandler is everybody's building super here about and, famously, Gene knows everybody on Monroe and all that happens on the Avenue.

"You rent from Tom Adams, too, if you live on Wellesley," was my guess.

"Oh, yeah! Yeah! Tom's the coolest! Tom's a great guy!"

He certainly is, too.

The hand at the end of his gray wool sleeve seemed smudged more than tanned. He asked if I wouldn't happen't...?

I didn't happen to have a cigarette. I was explaining how, unfortunately, if I had anything it might be a cigar but that that would be bad for me - blood pressure, strain on the heart - when this chick popped out of Oxford's door fumbling for a smoke with a cell phone in her hand.

"Hey, hey? Y'wouldn've one t'spare, wouldjah?"

She was dark haired and slender in jeans that were designer stylish or, maybe, just new and stiff. Sure, she told him and took the couple of steps over to my doorway pointing her pack his way. Her smokes were in one of those cases girls carry their packs of cigarettes in and keep in their purses sometimes.

There began a pumping, umphing familiar musical start up back of the bar's black tinted plate glass window while the Wellesley Kid's nubby fingers grubbed out a slender white stick. They curled about her Bic's yellow flame.

The door at Oxford's burst, again, and the music gushed out in full onto the sidewalk followed intantly by the spilling out of a chorus line of girls on the town grinning and singing,

"Oblah-di, Oblah-DAH! Life goes on - BAH!
Lalalala - life goes on!"

And, then, it is 1968.

As yet untracked, a Christmas snow is inches deep and everywhere over the front lawn I'm looking down on from a window on the Second Floor of Kent Hall, one of the freshman dorms at Plattsburg State. Fallen in a storm overnight, the snow is white as a sheet of typewriter paper as yet unrolled under the ribbon. Perhaps to pound out a late paper for a 101 or possibly to compose a letter home to folks that, though nothing you write in it would suggest it, makes you, nonetheless, feel achingly homesick.

Sun and snow make it a brilliant afternoon all silver and blue. One of those days after a winter storm.

None of the kids going out from the dorm lobby are hurried or particularly burdened with books. It is an early Friday afternoon and the last day of class before Christmas break.

There is white snow all over the ground below and the White Album is on the stereo. Oblah-di...Oblah-da....

The stereo is borrowed, a provided stereo that was gone after a half hour into listening to Danny Dunaho's new purchase on his roommate's crappy phonograph, gone after by some of the guys who have come around to listen.

"Whud'e say? 'E say bra? Life goes n BRA?"

The kid, Greg, I think they call him, beams giddy with this discovery.

A good-looking blond kid, he has always looked as though he should be larger than he is - a well put together kid but just undersized. He talks big, too. His friends are always goading him into bragging about this and that just to expose him as immature and not very bright. And he will brag about just abut anything you might suggest. It's a joke that never gets old with them. A Kunt Hall Klassic, you might say.

Greg is from across the hall and, almost any other day, wouldn't be visiting in Downey and Dunaho's room. Few of the kids that wander in and out of the room and back again later this afternoon are regulars in Pat and Danny's room. It's the music that brings them in. It's the Beatles, their latest album, a double album no one else has had the money to buy as yet. 'Sides, Christmas coming?

Danny, who is always hand-to-mouth and doesn't care because he's a folkie, a Dylanesque Hobo any way, took his first paycheck that he wore a food stained dining hall apron for and blew it on guitar picks, strings and the only copy of the White Album any of us have seen.

Now, even Mugs Manka has come as far as the open doorway of Dunaho and Downey's room. He hangs by his thick arms from the transom but he won't come in. Handsome George Halla, his roommate, tearing his pink cheeks away from his mirror, does, though, intrigued enough to want to go through the portfolio of photos that came a bonus with the new album with its white as winter cover and the green apple label on the platters. Mugs hangs and his young Joe Stalin face, a bit resentful, looks on with a seriously puzzled and intent expression. It is like he can't believe an album, any album, even from the Beatles can shift the epicenter of 'cool' more than half way down Second West and away from the room at the crux of the second floor that he made his way to and appropriated from its assignees Day One we moved in.

I double, till now, Mugs has even noticed the limp haired leprehaun folkie Dunaho.

Danny is sitting on the edge of a chair he's turned out from one of the room's desks beneath the twin side by side windows. He's on his toes, his heels are up under the seat. His dumpy body, bent forward, leans over as though hiding behind the big shapelier body of his twelve-string guitar. His one hand rests on its top-most shoulder while the other is draped out its neck. When otherwise unengaged, hearing something he especially likes, Danny's fingers will start to shadow play over the doubled strings of his instrument. His eyeswill absently dart about as though the notes he's hearing must be visible somewhere. He may come, at some point, to be looking right at you and, only after a moment, will he see you looking back at him.

His grin grows and is not at all shy, passing the thing off with a cock-eyed smirk.

Now, Danny is recounting toyet another newcomer how his first Food Service paycheck came to him and he decided to blow the most of it on 'a little Christmas' for himself a week early.

"My money!" he smirks and bobs his head compressing his lips and gnarling his chin and, then, smirks again, and swivels his face from side to side in the affirmative, "I slopped for it....I'm gona spend it...."

And we all who are left about on Second West, all who haven't cut a last day of classes to break for home, get to meet Rocky Raccoon, Lovely Rita, Desmond and Molly Jones....

Some other one is saying,

"They're sayin'..."

Because the World, because Our Generation has been waiting - after Martin, after and after Bobby, after the Hilton - for direction, some hint to how, after the horrors of this year, we should conduct ourselves, get on with our lives....

"They're sayin'...you don't have to get old. Like, life is gona happen and all but you don't have to stop being young 'cuss...."

A dissident voice grumbles,

"Ev'rybuddy gits old!"

"...you can still be a singer with the band, y'know, like....You can get married and have kids and a job but that doesn't have to be all there is. You can...."

"We're all gona grow up and we're all gona get old," the conservative persists.

"All I know is - I'm stayin' pretty!" Mugsy mugs one of his great wide handsome grins from the doorway.

It is a self certain delectable grin so grand that he shows it all around to every corner of the room he won't come in and so typical of him.

Even those who don't particularly like the Mugs have to smile with him.

"Molly stays at home and does her pretty face
And, in the evening, she's still singin' with the band.
Oblah-di, Oblah-da..."

Pat Downey, Danny's roommate, is back still just-out-of-bed gruff. He has had a last minute afternoon lunch for breakfast all alone in a near deserted and chilly dining hall and, coming in, he found a couple of clowns on his cot. After brusquely walking through Manka in the doorway with a grumble, he stopped mid-room. He didn't so much stare as lower his craggy Celtic forehead and seriously wonder in the direction of his cot as though questioning where his familiar sprawl space had gone....

The space that, then, magically reappeared for him.

Patrick tears off his rawhide coat and - with all that sleeve fringe whipping about, turning to sprawl in his space, tosses it on his desk.

The only person in the room too cool to take an interest in what everyone else is so into, Downey makes no complaints, keeps to himself and, staring in a trance of his own grumbles monosyllabicallyback at any effort to engage him. He has the mature good looks that make him seem older, to us, than even Kent's RAs and none of the boyish charm of a Halla or Manka. His beard shaves a dark shadow along his jaw line, his chin is a hard cleft knot and his cheeks flank his face with a wasted look. Only his blue eyes are younger than he otherwise seems. He has the thick and tousled hair and, often, the brooding stare of a dissolute Rock Star; he has, too, the late-rising, drugging and drinking in barrooms to closing life style to match. Girls don't expect to hold on to Pat and can't keep from caring for and about him.

Pat is from small town well off folk who sent their troublesome black sheep to military school where he learned to drink bad liquor and bend rules. Now it is his grandmother, the one with the real money in the family, who is paying his way through State College and sending him a check the first of every month. It funds some of his barroom days and nights and he has learned to sociably take whatever free drinks and drugs come his way in the course of an evening. He should be down now, already, at the long bar in the Union Hotel on Margaret Street...

"We get where we want to be, living how we want - and they send us home to our folks!" I venture and see Pat crack one of his grim smiles and laugh one of his odd tipsy sounding snickers.

I tell him, "I'm gona to miss not being here with you guys!"

It is not how I feel about going home for the holidays - but it is, in a way. It is how I know Downey feels about it - and Danny, too, for that matter, with his martinet Air Force Sar'Major Dad.

"I gotta put an appearance in," Pat admits with his chin in to his chest broodingly and, then, grins another of those laughs of his, insisting, "ButI'm hangin' here till I gotta."

And he is hanging around now because everyone left in school would seem to be in his room - he doesn't know why! And he is enough of a social animal, now, my guess is - guys always buying him drinks and giving him acid to drop and girls always taking him home at the end of the night - that he wants to be where ever there is a crowd. There is something prowling in the way his eyes take in the room.

Soon enough, though, he'll get restless for the Union, for the College Inn, and he'll jerk himself up and grab his jacket tearing out of here.

I'm looking out at the snow.

Out on the low couple of deep front steps up to the dorm lobby door out in the cold, the guy from Two East they call Schmutzy - who looks like a mangy buffalo and behaves like a clown, is leaving with his dad, Stan, and his Uncle Phil, neither of whom look a thing like him. The two of them came up late yesterday from Longuyland to spend an evening with him and his college friends spending their money freely and doing the town right and red. The Schmutz looks harried and is hustling to get his bags out to the car still embarrassed at having his folks. All evening and all morning his pals have been raving what great guys Schmutzy Senior and Uncle Phil with the receding hair lines and big mustaches are - but he won't have any of it.

Two a.m., when Orange Julep delivered my pizza, Uncle Phil and the Schmutz crowd were down in the lobby and Phil was posing for a picture with the GI mannequin from the 'Christmas in Vietnam' display there. Only Schmutz wouldn't laugh when, at the flash, Phil's fingers peace-signed rabbit ears over the poncho clad figure's surplus store helmet.

I'm looking out at the snow and the students and their kin departing for home. I'm in Pat Downey and Danny Dunaho's dorm room with the White Album being played through for the tenth time ever for any of us and the first time for some who have just now heard about it and come around to hear.

And, for some reason, I know I want to save the moment.

Saved along with it are Christmas card-like memories of the drive home late that night in the rear seat of my folks latest Plymouth Fury. After the storm, the mountains by moonlight south of Champlain and before Albany, were a blue and ivory snowscape with dangerous dark clusters of pine forest and sudden rock faced road cuts at the tops of passes.

Long, long after midnight my home coming was that strange sensation of seeing old familiar scenes with new long absent eyes.

I'm truely on Memory Lane, now.

Somehow, too, preserved with the rest is the image of a sun flooded moment over morning coffee with my Grandmother, the two of us sitting alone together at the end of the kitchen table beneath the east facing window. She has just heard that Jim Baxby's dad had had to go and take delivery of his boy's body, shipped home from Vietnam in the middle of the night. So near to Christmas; they should never have done that! Not that way. All her cronies agree. He was a year or two ahead of me in school and one of the good ones - good looking, good at sports and good at being decent to everyone.

A guy with a bright future.

"Hey!"

The Wellesley Kid brought me back to the future, to what was passing for the present.

"I know who you remind me of," he pointed a knuckle up at me. "Y'look like that comic, that George Carlin guy!"

I get that time to time.

"I'm George Carlin."

The Cigarette Girl suspected there was something wrong with that.

"Hey, didn't he just die or something?"

"What's your point?" I tried my best Carlin on her.

It got me a grin - though, from the cross-eyed look she gave me next, it hadn't quite squelched her suspicion that I wasn't that dead comedic legend.

Maybe it was just she was trying to hit a drag on her cig and question my sanity at the same time. Maybe smoke got in her eyes.

"Aw-kay - " she wanted to know - riddle me this, "So, what's that like?"

"Times change - but everything's pretty much the same."

The times change but, if you look around, everything is pretty much always the same. You don't get that until you've been around for a while, Freshman.

"What can I tell y' - I'm still singing with the band."

The Routine.

I worked at my computer till it was ten to two last night, having been out earlier. A letter going over again for another correspondent the scenes and sensations of Park Avenue Fest that began to month of August had to be finished; the beginnings of a piece called "Ten To One," I had long had in mind and had been revived in my imagination while sitting on the terrace at Starbucks on that earlier trip down to the street.

Returning to the street for the Two A.M., seemed almost a drag though you can never expect the usual to happen on Monroe.

All the same it ws the usual gang out of Oxford's Pub Ifound gathered on the street; Sonny's Catering Cart was set up across the way in front of the body piercing salon and the tattoo parlor. The catering crew of two were lounging waiting for the After Two in the Morning crowd to jam about their cart yammering among themselves and crying out dog and patty orders.

I was on or about the stoop at 640 Monroe for most of the hour between two and three. A girl did a saucy little bump and grind close up to the plate glass window beside Oxford's front door. She was putting on a show for friends who had remained inside after last call. Two luscious chocolate girls pulled up and parked to walk to Gitsis' and had to ignore the wordless zombie stare of a tall party who was meandering stupid drunk down the block and thought he might approach them. The crowd that lingered along the street in front of Oxford's until almost a quarter of three was otherwise remarkable only for its good humor and its subdued tone.

Yes, beginning the Labor Day weekend, the traffic into the area was a little heavier earlier than most Friday nights. The jam at Gitsis' door, judged from the block above, seemed to swell out chaotically and a little drive-by socializing down there began to interfere with the orderly passage of traffic on the Avenue.

Still , the cops didn't put in much of any appearance.

No blue-and-white sat down and guard dogged-it at the Exxon and Gitsis gatherers began to park and abondon their cars at the darkened pumps. That which isn't expressly and actively forbidden is assumed to be permitted, to be, at least, something you can get away with.

When the last of the Oxford crowd moved off it was to wander down in the direction of Gitsis'. A gang of six or seven moved off in a lingering playful way all at once. Crossing Wilmer they were holding hands and waltzing around with one another, laughing and carrying on conversations more than they were hurrying on to the next station in Night Town.

I didn't so much follow them as decided that I didn't want to climb the stairs and was tired of standing about in one spot looking at nothing happening.

Crossing to the west side of the avenue seemed preferable to trying to thread my way through the knot of folks gathered at Gitsis'. The crush in the diner's parking lot on Cornell didn't, from across the street, seem so bad as it had been on many other anonymous summer nights. Further down, passed Show World and Enright's Thirst Parlor and Liquor Store, I saw further evidence of the effect of a lack of police presence. Without cruisers parked at Goodman closing lanes of the Avenue to traffic and without flares across its entrance, the Chase Bank's parking lot had gathered something of a crowd as in bad times past. Passing Goodman I checked to see and Mr. V's cart was dark and about to be hauled off.

Below Goodman, however, in front of Advance Auto Parts, a dog cart was doing boomtown business and had hired two bruisers in black tee-shirts as 'SECURITY.' The late night meat and grease eager crowd there numbered over a dozen - perhaps even over two dozen. They were noisily, excitedly, gleefully spilled all over the wide sidewalk just beyond the entrance of the parking lot between Blockbuster and the auto parts store. They sent me back over the Avenue to the east side once more.

Blue-and-White RPD cruisers were pulled up in the parking in front of the 7/11, Meigs and Monroe.

John, behind the counter, sold me a soda while reporting to one of the cops. He told how the young man they had in the rear of one of their cars, had tried to walk out with a burrito he hadn't paid for.

"He t'ro's it the bushes 'n' sez, 'Now, I ain't got nuthin' on me!'"

The officers had John out to id the guy and sign the report and I got to mention to John, during a break, that I'd seen his clerk-partner, Dave, out of uniform early in the day.

"He don' work here no more; they fired him," John offered.

"He was telling me. Seems a shame."

A guy with hair as gray as mine came out of the Convenience with smokes and, passing, smirked back at the prisoner,

"Some kinda big deal!"

He seemed to want to know, after all, and wouldn't ask so I got to be wise.

"Grand theft burrito!" I told him it was. I explained, "That's the Burrito Bandito!"

The news drew a snort of protest at cops wasting big resources on small matters.

"I woke up and - no smokes!" the guy felt the need to explain. "That sucked, so, I come out here!"

It was three a.m., at least.

Some of the same officers who had been in and out of 7/11 had moved up the Avenue and were paying attention to the crowd gathered around the dog car at Advance Auto. It wasn't that there seemed to be anything going on there; it seemed instead that there was just too much crowd and it was too spread over the whole block from O'Cal's up to Goodman and Blockbuster for their liking.

As I was coming up to Bruegger's and the Goodman Street corner, an officer in the Blockbuster lot across the way called over and addressed the young men in front of the bagel shop.

"Are you young men getting food?" he inquired in a big voice. "If not, you need to be movin' along."

It was all of three a.m. and time the cops moved in to shut things down on the Avenue and I felt that, maybe that was what was happening, now. I crossed Goodman to make my way back home. Ahead of me there were people all over the next block. I was thinking I'd cross Monroe, too, to the Show World side and avoid Gitsis' again where the tangle was sure to be thickest. I was thinking, too, that the dark knot of humanity just ahead, below Gitsis' on the sidewalk out in front of Enright's was looking formidable and, suddenly, agitated and angry, too.

There was alarmed shouting. There was running.

The Enright crowd beneath the shamrock tree before the darkened bar roiled. Figures in the crowd turned against the rest, arms, fists were lifted in the air and, beneath them, other figures pushed the flailing ones back, restraining them. Some woman or women were shouting in anger and insult.

"Some one always gotta show a knife!" I heard.

I heard, "What's the madder with everybody?"

I saw three, perhaps, four tall young men run across Monroe toward a car just below the Show World marquee. One ran with his right leg stiff.

I heard,

"Yeah, he clip me!"

That is what I saw up Monroe toward Gitsis'; that is what I heard.

Looking back, crossing toward Show World, I noticed that the gathering of officers below Goodman were there in the entrance to Blockbuster a moment more and, then, they were moving for their cruisers. Other blue-and-whites were already on their way, coming in up the Avenue and going by the cruisers still parked for the moment below the dog cart. They were the first sirens, the first of the flashing lights to come on the scene.

All the cops on Monroe came to Gitsis' then.

The cars streak by between me and the still agitated crowd struggling within itself out in front of the shamrock decorated whitewashed bar and iron-grill guarded liquor store. They sped passed one after another after another after another. The call was to a fight that had broken out at Gitsis' and the cars flashed up in front of the diner pulling in to park with spinning combative lights flashing. They formed in minutes a blue-and-white wall all up and down in front of the lot and diner above Cornell. I heard someone up the street count them, "That's ten of them." I had counted thirteen.

The shadowy crowd of folks surging about within itself on the block the other side of Cornell was still flailing fists and angry charging individuals were being held back and repelled when the police, gathered out of their cars, at last, came down in a blue body and crossed Cornell.

Guns were draw, then, and guns were drawn down as suddenly on the car at the curb on the corner.

The crowd was ordered back. Individuals in the car were ordered out and, one by one, were put up against the white wall of the liquor store to be cuff and set down on the pavement. In the middle of this an individual in the street behind the cops was told, incredulously by an officer with his gun drawn,

"You can't walk through here; go 'round!"

Even before all that was finished, an officer crossed Monroe to shoo those of us who had gathered on the other side of the street.

"No reason to be standing here!"

The car with the three or four men who had fled from the crowd had just pulled away and I mentioned them over my shoulder as I was moving along. I mentioned that one had run favoring his one leg. It seemed irrelevant and was taken by the officer with a light smile suggesting its irrelevance.



THE NEWS is that a fight broke out at a Monroe diner overnight. When 'members of the staff,' at Gitsis' diner moved in to end the fight one of those involved pulled a gun and shot another man in the lower leg. The gun man, described only as a black man dressed in black shirt and ball cab with an unknown logo, was thought to have fled up Cornell Street.

Coming out of the Exxon convenience store some time around eleven-fifteen, I came around the bush at the entrance to the station on Amherst Street and nearly walked into a Channel Ten camera man's set up. He was filming the front of Gitsis' across the street as it looked in the bright light of noonday with a family arriving for lunch bearing a child's car seat. After I had stood around watching him for a minute or two, he packed up his camera and fled the scene in a station decal decorated mini-something-or-other called a Tucson. A white car was just then parking in front of the copy store next to Gitsis' and, seconds after the Tucson stole away, the young man in it got out and took a video camera and tripod from the car trunk. He was Channel Thirteen and he set up for his first shot in front of the hedge and trees near the corner of Amherst and Monroe.

By eleven-thirty, Fox News was setting up directly across from Gitsis'. I walked over and told him he was third on the scene. He didn't seem surprised but said he didn't much care for being third. They were only getting background shots of the diner. They only needed something to run while the anchor read the news about what had gone down the night before.

I asked if the story would get much play on the evening news. He didn't think it would; nobody really cares, he thought.

I had to agree.

After all,

"Nobody got killed. If Mark's taught us nothing it taught us that, even when somebody does get killed, people don't care all that much!"

Last night, with the cop lights spinning into one another, I came inside the blue-and-white wall that had gone up on in front of Gitsis. One of the diner's overnight staff, a narrow dark man with a sharp face and black hair, was smoking a cigarette at the diner door. He looked moody, morose.

A maroon sedan was pulled up to the curb trapped between a police cruiser in front and a parked van behind while anoyher cruiser blocked him in on the street. The car was full, front and back, and several of the men sitting inside had pizza boxes on their laps. Their windows were down.

"You fellas are sort of hung up here."

"Yeah," the passenger in front agreed. "We are hung up!"

The passenger behind him sounded somewhat bitterer and his words suggested social commentary. He said, half spitting it out,

"Yeah, we got no way out!"

Some of Gitsis' departing diners stopped to tell officers what they had seen and heard of the fight and the shooting. Others just came out and went away with their white plastic sacks of food. Stray middle of the night strollers wandered through the scene of flashing lights without seeming to see any of it. A girl in gray sweat pants and a sweater looked to be in a mood; her eyes were searching, looking for something or some one but what was there clearly was of no interest to her. Occasionally some late arrivals would thread their way through the chaos to come up to the diner door and be surprised to find Gitsis' closed.

Then, again, some well known regular would come along and the door would swing open.

As easily as that the routine resumed and I decided to go home to bed.

August 30, 2008.

565

The eye adjusts; the landscape, after all, is only that which is there to be seen.

The day after the whole of 565 Monroe had gone save a hole in the earth and some rubble of brick and stone, I looked up Monroe and saw - only the Avenue, only that morning's Monroe waiting to be walked, talked and lived upon.

The landscape was what it was - and seeing all of Blockbuster and the Rite Aid at the rear of the lot north of Goodman seemed natural enough though it hadn't been possible only days before.

The Past is found in photo files or conjured with an effort in the mind's eye of the imagination but the landscape of today is what the eye really does see.

A building had been there, I had to remind myself. The north end of the block between Amherst and Goodman still occupied at its southern end by the remnant Monroe Theatre had, formerly, been anchored by a three story sprawl of dark brown, fudge brown brick. Its bulk hid all but the front quarter of Blockbuster and, from some angles, all of Rite Aid. 565 Monroe, the south-west corner of the Avenue and Goodman St., a principal Rochester intersection; one of those points like Twelve Corners or Clinton and Goodman around which people can orient themselves.

"Ah, yah! Now I know where yeh talkin' 'bout!"

As its unoccupied space is, today, ignored by the street traffic and joggers that pass it by, 565 standing had ever been a largely unremarked Monroe landmark. Another one-shade-or-other-of-brown brick structure of two or three stories; another of that odd assortment of low, ugly buidlings channeling traffic from the high-rise, skyscraping Magic Mountain of midtown, downtown Rochester out toward green Cobb's Hill, flat, tree obscured Brighton and on to canal town Pittsford.

As 565 was in process of going down, the after-midnight counter clerk at Rite Aid bagged my purchases and expressed her pleasure, grinning near giddiness,

"Now they jus' godda gid'on and do that Show World next, that Theater - that eye sore!"

A Caterpillar shovel had earlier that day begun the demolition, the third floor, southwest corner of 565 stood clawed away. Still discernible 'rooms' were exposed to moonlight, displayed by their missing outer walls and with roof beams shattered and left hanging out in mid-air shoved slightly out of line.

On the street, a slightly swaying and bleary if steady eyed local woman expressed her sour pleasure when she caught me contemplating the ruin.

"Nuthin' but bad drugs," she recalled 565. "Good they're gittin' rid of it!"

At one time, too, I had heard it rumored that the phone bank on the corner in front of 565 was a stand or stroll for young male prostitutes. 565 had long been in bad repute. But, of late and for the most part, tghe repute had been less raffish or evil than simply seedy and, finally, pathetic. It had been a place, at the end, that had gathered the halt and the hazy, injured and directionless folk with few other places to go.

With the wreckers about to move in, a Monroe bum took up residence in the abandoned building's recessed entry sleeping soundly amid the trash that had drifted in there even as the Avenue reveled and rioted through weekend afterhours and cop overheads flashed endlessly over his boot soles.

No one exactly was going to miss 565 Monroe as it waited to be further demolished and it went down attended by few mourners. Some stood along the streets opposite its corner on the Monday morning the Caterpillars crawled about and groped and grappled its walls down to the ground - but even some of those who watched were only waiting for buses, after all.

No one was going to miss 565 and, when it ws gone, the eye adjusted to the its absence.

Nevertheless.

Two blocks further along Goodman, just this side of the Expressway overpass, there is, on the south side of the street, a space along the top of the off ramp up from 490. It is a shady spot that is neither sidewalk, though there is pavement, nor someone's lawn, thought here is grass and embedded flowers. Monroe bums, overcome with a rare case of ambition, will go there to lounge between importuning drivrs caught up on the ramp by the red light for change. The space is unnamed, undedicated and undefinable but in it there is a sign board that does explain some things. On its street side it bares the logo of the Lock 66 neighborhood - a canal barge and Jenny of the Towpath Era for when the 490 expressway was the old Erie Canal and a lock here abouts lifted barges on their way downtown. The logo is surrounded by the names of the streets and places that are the Lock 66. For any one who bothers to stop and walk around to view the other side of the board, the local association has written a legend there defining the neighborhood and giving something of its history and with it something of the history of Monroe Avenue.

"Though still resembling the Monroe Avenue of 50 or 75 years ago, it has passed through several incarnations, from a street of small mom and pop shops - tailors, shoe stores, groceries (including the first Wegmans) - toan eclectic and lively mix of boutiques, bookstores, antique shops, hair salons, craft shops, ethnic restaurants, and bistros."

The heart of that bourgeois, Mom and Pop Monroe may well have been the block between Amherst and Goodman when Show World was the bijou Monroe Threater with its marquee of colored lights glittering beneath of towering leaves of the summer trees down at the end of Cornell Street and inviting people to gather out of their living rooms and off their porches to indulge themselves in Hollywood and air conditioning. 565, then, had been a good address with its high stoop and second and third floor hall ending balcony porches. Urban living had other tempos and tastes then than it has now and has had since.

Today's Monroe may in some way resemble the avenue of five or, perhaps, it was, ten years ago but already it has passed through still mre incarnations than the legend would have it. The book stores are all but gone and our bistros, with exceptions, are more kid bars than they are that. Here and there, more than in the past, too, the 'modern' stamp of chain enfranchisement in a sleekness and neon of familiar corporate logos becomes more and more the character of the neighborhood. Rite Aid, they say, will move to the Avenue in 565's place - one more building of a banal business world modernity purposely bland and preternaturally facelifted and botoxed to be forever ageless before its has begun.

So, perhaps, it is worth noting the passing of 565 - now nothing more than a hole in the ground and some piled up rubble waiting to be removed.

There may, after all, come a tipping point when the eye will no longer adjust so easily and the landscape one sees will no longer be Monroe.

Posted August 13, 2008.

OLD WHITE GUY.

There was this old white guy and he was standing out one night under the marquee of the one-time Monroe Theater - now and for moment still known as Show World, an adult entertainment center.

He had the gray stubble of a beard, the startled staring eyes and expression of a drunk even if he was affecting a casual attitude. His shirt hung open and his pale gut protruded out over his pants. On his head he wore one of those flat caps that old men wear.

"Now...," he was asking repeatedly, "...how do you like that?"

His voice croaked in a beery baritone and he made a short throwing down gesture of presentation with his one hand each time. He was asking it of anyone and no one. Maybe for him there were ghosts gathered for the show.

A lot of people talk to themselves in the city.

As it happens - it is after two in the morning and a weekend and most of the crowd that really is there passing on the street and not paying the old man attention is neither old nor white.

On Monroe, with all that happens and with all the people who crowd on to the street at that hour, the minutes double after Last Call and, though a good many of the young and largely white crowd from the bars linger on, the street's complexion distinctly darkens and the nature of the fun grows bolder and brasher.

With only an hour left in the night, the whole out-all-night city rushes onto Monroe for that final after-hour.

The new people have had to travel across town in cars and vans and limos and there is never, not even at rush hour, more traffic out there than there is as two-ten becomes a quarter after on a Saturday or Sunday morning. It becomes carnival. Parking lots glut and gather gangs of kids standing about while all the streets become banked with parked steel and chrome and late arriving drivers cruise in vain for a space that ain't.

Competing sound systems, in passing and parked, crank dueling screeds and sermons, speeches on subjects from niggers to bitches in a counterpoint of metronomic rhythms and rhymes so loud that, at times, it drown the traffic rumble and roar. At last a chrome-blue SUV with silver spinning hub-caps sits and gleams in the street light and bests all othes with a bass tone output that alters the molecules of the air and approximates an altered conscious state for even those rare few on the block still sober.

Ball cap boys looking all of thirteen do the drive-by real slow in car seats set so far back that they ride in them slung low. Cap bills cut straight across at their brows and their baby faces bobble just above the car windows' lower frames as they give the scene such stone-eyed stares.

What do the young men think?

Traffic jams and sits whether the light at Goodman is green or not. Foot traffic ventures and reels out into the stalled lanes and socializes with vans and sedans of girls they find to talk to there. On Cornell, alongside Gitsis' parking lot, traffic leaving to the Avenue sits and waits at the corner to turn right into avenue traffic that's not moving and avenue traffic arriving waits to turn onto Cornell where traffic is backed up waiting for a turn into Gitsis'.

Above the scene a chorus line of young men, sitting up on a parked car roof, simulates a shuffling dance and laughter screams.

Time lapse - it takes ten minutes or more for a cream brown pick-up to make its way out of Gitsis' lot and down Cornell to the Avenue, driver and passenger ride above the scene sitting outside the cab in the open windows. Something like twenty minutes on and they do it all in reverse returning for another go at Cornell Street.

The line that forms for booths and stools in Gitsis', across from Show World, forms to the right of the diner's door and the bruisers who handle the crowd are the tallest and widest guys on the street. One wedges himself in the narrow door to hold it open and arches a large arm over the crowd that pushes forward to cram inside. in time, too, a straggling line up forms across the front of the building to the left of the door, there and in front of the corner of the lot. They aren't there waiting for admittance. They only want to be on the scene. Sometimes it can be a line waiting, too, to make a scene.

Along side Show World, off Amherst, there is a parking lot, too, one obscured from the Avenue by a six-foot untrimmed hedge. Between hed and sidewalk lays a thin strip of unswept grass littered with trash under a rank of young, leafy trees. The lot gathers a hidden crowd that partys unseen but, at times, not unheard from. Some park there and cross to Gitsis' - girls with spectacular legs wearing slave-girl dresses from Italian films of the fifties, my! Guys decked out in fire engine red outfits and gold, lotsa gold and silver, rings and chains. Some wear shades while the sun don't shine.

Some few just come come out around the hedge and gather to stand along the sidewalk or lean over the parks that park along the curb. They only want to watch what's over there or what's arriving for Gitsis'.

"Oh! Gahdam! I like a big woman!"

When I came along from the corner of Goodman, the old man was tossing down his opinion for the backs of the young men lined there along the cars on the curb in front of the old theater.

"Now..." he was croaking, "how do you like that? How do you like that?"

And, when no one answered, he took it right back up himself.

"I..." he told any and all, magnanimously, "like it jus' fine!"

"Jus' fine," he assured nobody in particular and everyone in general. "I like it jus' fine!"

As I passed him by beneath the pie-wedge shape of the darkened marquee, I sensed his slow arousing interest, his arthritic attention to my passage and kept moving.

"Now..." I hear him saying, "...how do you like that?"

And I keep walking to the dark other side beyond the corner of Show World, beyond the lads gathered about the archway to the party in the parking lot who are happily going off on the girls going over to be dazzling standing on line at Gitsis'. I only stop to look back when I'm half way along the green hedge, beneath the low poplar leaves, half way to the corner of Amherst Street.

The old white guy, my sorry doppelganger, stood staring focusing after me afar with his hand down.

Just fine, I assume his hand and shoulder rising again imply.

I'm not so sure I agree.

Should anyone ever ask me, I might recall approaching Gitsis' on the sidewalk across the way one recent three a.m. with cruisers pulled up in the light where the crowd gathers on the sidewalk at the diner's door. They were doubled parked there with overheads flashing, spinning off red and white and blue light. Some plush and party clad girls were fleeing in a gaggle up the street both distressed and angry. One was saying how there had been a slashing, something with a knife.

"Why do some folks godda ruin it for ever'body?" another complained. "Why do some folks godda ruin ever'thing?"

And, now, out there before me, traffic jams once more on Monroe as a car pulls up to converse with the line up at Gitsis' door. Cars trying to turn out of Amherst back up and one, half out on the Avenue, blocks the lanes traveling south. Horns begin to blare and there are profane shouts.
On the corner across Amherst, the Exxon is dark. The station used to be open all night but clerks can't be found, now, who'll work when the crowds gather after hours and hang out blasting their music and parking at the pumps. Mr. V's hot dog cart that sets up behind the bank at Goodman and Monroe no longer serves the public after two in the morning and hasn't since a gun was fired in the air in front of their location along about three one morning.

"Wha's up, my man?" a young passer-by greets me in the shadows. With a sly and snide grin, his advice to me is, "No more snitchin' - hear!"

As three approaches, the cops who have gathered in their cars at the darkened Exxon, cross the Avenue in a line and purposefully replace the crowd that had gathered at the corner of the diner and its parking lot. They begin to send cars on their way and pay visits to the corner of Cornell to direct traffic and to the back of the lot where the gangs gather.

They turn faces sullen and recentful where ever they go, but the scene begins to quiet and the crowds begin to depart, flee back out into the city.

Eventually an officer strolls over to the corner of Amherst and Monroe. To the slender and suddenly sullen young men there, he suggests, quiet but firm,

"The line for eatin's over there. Y're in it or y're movin' - you decide!"

The young men don't cross to the diner and they don't hurry away but they do turn and go.

In maybe a minute more there is only an old white guy left standing on that corner.

That's What I Heard.

I heard there was trouble overnight on Goodman - trouble near Goodman and Monroe.

It was nothing too bad; nothing that would rate mention on the news or in the paper, though, maybe - it should be mentioned.

After hours on weekends, as everybody knows, the place most of Rochester goes is Monroe. Everyone's out for Gitsis' and for Mark's Texas Hots, for Country Sweet and for Mr. V's catering cart alongside the back of the Chase Bank.

Everyone comes to eat after the bars close but they come, too, and maybe even more, to be part of the crowd, the show that goes on.

Any party night, the Avenue after two a.m. has an audible pulse from the bass reverb. Monroe's thousand faces wear a grin that shouts with laughter and the street sings with the growl of low-ride and high polish street machines. Its riptorn through from time to time by the passage of gangs of motorcycles.

Man, it gets crowded, too! Traffic jams at Goodman sometimes so that the avenue is more a parking lot that people walk around in and visit from car to car. The Exxon at Amherst would be parking, too, if a cop didn't pull up and sit there like a pit bull in the yard.

And, then, the parking lot at the Chase Bank - that becomes a fairground. Picnics on fenders and impromptu dances that break out; people take rides at times on the hoods of cars departing and arriving.

These hot summer nights, there can be light in the sky before all the restless folk go home from the Avenue on a party night.

But...

I heard, last night -someone brought a gun to a good time. Shots were fired into the air in front of Mr. V's - and, then, that was all the good time there was for the night.

That's what I heard.

June 7, 2008.

Drive-In.

It was only one of those brain quirks I'm sure - not really a thought or impression, much less an actual idea.

Some recently sparked memory, perhaps, melded with the idea of "Monroe" - this place, this neighborhood, these few blocks along a busy Rochester avenue that I not only live on but dwell on. Some how or other, I began to conceive of Monroe in an ill-defined way as similar, analogous to or metaphorically - a Drive-In Movie.

And I don't know why in the world I should have.

Perhaps a bit of it is the old Monroe Theater, Show World - soon to be nothing more than a memory and, thereby, weighing on my mind.

It is my earliest association with the street I now live on and somewhat obsess over. First I came to the Monroe on the avenue that happened to bear the same name. I came for the movies and strayed across the street to Gitsis' Hots.

As the thing now stands, the old Theater's bare north wall, I suppose, might even suggest one of those theater screens other-worldly large and incongruously set out-of-doors and nightly prayed to by productions of Ford and GM and Chrysler.

In the night the building fronts of any or all of the old brick buildings that make up so much of these few blocks might do as screens with the light and color, the shadows of the street projected on them, held between them beneath mostly moon and star obscured city skies. Unlike the looming white Drive-In screens of memory that were all silent suburban monstrosities by day, the Boardman across the way with its pale brown brick, the Berkshire further up and the Public Library above all take the morning light bravely and well no matter the weather or season. The Cornell on the corner is a sundowner waiting out the passing of the light to preside nightly over chaos and cheer, over the street scenes at Lola's and Oxford's with a gothic and judgmental grimness on its face. The street's shops, boutiques and eateries and their daily crowds of customers are all a show, full of comedy and action through every hour of the day. It's bars and bar crowds are nightly even more so - taking the production almost to dawn.

Stage sets, then, if not projection-screens.

But that - film projected on a screen - that wasn't even the image that didn't come to my waking mind as this quirk, this notion began to bother me.

It is more that Monroe is - despite the fact of so many of us living along it, on it, within it - Monroe is a place that people come to, drive-in to for their entertainment and amusement.

The Drive-In Theatre of memory was never a space of undistracted film enjoyment. The orderly arrangement of parked cars beneath and before looming living images set against a night sky was never with out late arriving and early departing traffic like that that is a Monroe constant.

There was always, also, a restless foot traffic among the acres of autos.

Bicycle and skate board kids might do for the bore and antsy young who, first, loosed themselves from family sedans and vans and, then, found one another to run riot with. Gawkers only out to take in the Goths and Geeks, the Panhandlers and Creeps for laughs could be the loud crowd draped over one or two second-hand cars an aisle back shouting their own dialogue at the screen and roaring at their wit.

Leaving the bars after midnight, some couples will always find doorways and even less obscure substitutes for the backseats of cars. PDAs, afternoons and evenings, make, at times, Monroe as much a Passion-Pit as any Star-Lite Theatre ever was.

Dog Town is nearly the perfect concession stand reborn.

Add to it a projection booth and stalk its parking lot about with gun-metal gray stanchions bearing cable fed squawk-boxes, have some pimply-faced teen concessionaires in uniform service caps and add to the menu thin crusted pizza pies and pop-corn - and you'd have the Star-Lite food service to the life.

Ultimately, all of this is only an over stretched metaphor. Maybe, after all, I am only anticipating Summer - with memories of one of yesteryear's symbols of the season.

May 28, 2008.

SHOTGUN

Sometimes - ten past two on a Saturday morning, maybe - life is what is happening up the block when you are otherwise distracted.

That Otherwise breezes out of Oxford's door, a palomino pony with a smirk ready to go and an unlit smoke held by her right ear as she comes around.

"Light me!" she insists with the smile and all the confidence in the world that there is a lighter just waiting to come out and flicker for her.

She has high cheekbones, a tan complexion and taut smart features and the smirk on her face is permanent because, as it turns out, she's a Dorothy.

"Kiley," she claims.

"Steve."

"Live around here, Steve?"

"Live here," in fact.

Her eyes narrow as she looks dubious and asks,

"The bar?"

"The building," next door, at 640.

"Cool."

Three pint-size gals are in a cheerful little huddle curbside. They wear baseball pants and sponsored tees the same two shades of blue. From inside Oxford's Pub a keen mammillarian cheer, a yowl spikes out into the night and goes, perhaps, several stories up toward the moon. All three break their confab long enough to answer it in kind.

"Girl midget baseball team," Kiley makes an explanation. And further poses, "Celebrating....First win of the season. With a crawl."

"Down from the Park," presumably.

She enumerates the stations,

"Jeremiah's Tavern; Monty's Krown; Spike's. And, then, here."

"Almost think they'd have gotten further along by this late."

Her look is pointed and admonitory.

"It was an over-time victory, Steve."

"Extra-Inning victory."

"Extra-Inning, over-time - point is they were late starting."

"So, late and - short."

Her eyes narrow, once more.

"Y'er not - " she hesitates to ask, "prejudiced against...midgets, are you, Steve?"

"I've nothing against Little People," he allows, but adds, "Long as I can keep an eye on them."

"Right, cuss y'lose track of a midget y'never know where it'll turn up."

"Or, what it'll be grabbing on to when it does."

"'Xac'ly," her head bobs agreement and her chin makes tight circles at the same time. She tells him, "Nice to know we see eye to eye, Steve."

"Course, either of us was a midget, t'other of us would have to stoop to do that."

"'Xac'ly."

"SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!" a voice up the block booms.

A party of something like a dozen departing Oxonians, graduating out into the night, had been a door or two down Monroe toward Oxford Street for some time a little earlier. Several fancied themselves comedians. When some friends pulled up to the curb in a car retrieved from the parking in back of the block some one or other of the gang on the walk called out that he wanted shotgun.

"SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!" this one hollered down at the car already almost full of girls gone almost wild on their way home.

"Y'can't!" a voice of near reason interjected, "Y'can't call shotgun if somebody's already sittin'!"

"I call shotgun!" yet another outsider bellowed.

"SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!"

It had seemed wildly funny to those who were there on the curb and even to the girls in the car and mock contention had gone on for quite some time. Finally, after much hilarious getting in and getting out and bodies sprawled over the hood of the car, the original girls going home and several very unsteady guys - not nearly the whole or even the half of the crowd on the sidewalk - drove off. Those who remained continued to circle and sway about one another and to move something a little more than glacially on up the Avenue.

Now,

"SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!" the catch-phrase is, apparently, revived - with for a moment a manic gale of male laughter.

And, then, with a dark scuffling that begins and sudden angry and struggling imprecations,

"SHIT!"

"THE FUCK...!"

Followed by a woman's frightful shrilling,

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"

Up the street that the shouts are filling a sudden tangle of shadowy figures toil together and surge as a dusky body away from the parked cars at the curb and lurch toward the nearest shop-front, Poster-Art, to collapse there in a pile and sprawl all over its broad step-up recessed doorway.

"Y'ER KILLING HIM!" she screams after them.

Throwing herself onto the pile, tearing at bodies, the girl succeeds in throwing off to this side at least one slender form, a young man with bowl cut hair.

"GIDDAWF'IM! GIDDAWF'IM!" sh's crying as she throws herself back into the rescue.

There is another girl the other side of the fallen struggling pile, and she turns from standing over them just in time to throw herself with both hands into the chest of some large guy in a leather jacket returning on the run from the corner.

"GIDDOWDA HERE! GIDDOWDA HERE!" she urges him alarm.

Because, now, and suddenly, there are cops - the Blue-and-whites are pulling into the curb their overheads spinning and throwing up red-white-and-blue color on darkened building fronts. They are there before anyone noticed them coming. After 2 A.M. on Monroe it is the easiest magic trick going. You don't have to rub a lamp or stick your hand into a hat to get Blue Genies to appear. They pop up for trouble like icons on a screen.

The stick figure pulled off the pile had fallen back on his ass. With the short announcing skirl of a cop siren and the flashing of overhead light, he is up like a shot and running head long down the alley alongside Poster-Art to the back parking lot. The guy and girl the other side, too, are running, making for Oxford Street. The girl, on heels, goes south looking north over her shoulder and with her purse swinging on its strap in every direction.

The pile sorts itself out a little more slowly. Some trot off but others stay as the officers come on the scene.

Steve admits,

"I gotta go. It's kinda like...business. Have nose will butt in. Professional rubber neck...."

"So," Kiley smirks more than ever, now, "that's how you're bent. I was wondering."

In the time it takes to walk halfway up the block to Poster-Art the situation has been resolved to the extent of one guy confined to the rear of a patrol car. Another in a tank top paces the walk with the preoccupied look of one who has recently been out of it. He's getting his bearings and his anger back with them. The girl who did all the screaming and the work of pulling at the pile of guys to retrieve him, presumably, is still hot and, now, is in it with the officers. She's being waltzed around and away from the scene by them all the time insisting they aren't doing right by her friends, the victims here! Why aren't they doing something!

The cops aren't yet sure what this is all about and the girl is too angry to help them with that.

"Calm down - or you can go! Y'er that close!" she is warned at last, and they force her into the rear of a second patrol car.

They close the door on her so they won't have to listen as she continues to abuse them and make demands on them. At the moment at least one partrol man is almost as hot at her as she is with them now that there is no one else to fight with and claw at. Later in a corner booth at Gitsis' Diner, perhaps, he'll laugh with others on the shift over the memory of that crazy-angry girl they had to deal with up the Avenue. For the moment he glares a warning down at the caged girl and and turns away with thumbs hooked behind the clasp on his gun belt, elbows out.

Accounts and explanations come in snippets from this one and that and all sides.

The story makes a kind of sense, in the end - though knowing what they know and not knowing what they don't, none on the Avenue telling it or hearing it can make true sense of what has happened.

Call it, "SHOTGUN" and have it come out of the mouths of baffled folk at the two a.m. end of a night of drinking and bar plunging.

"I don'know! We were just hangin' out!..."

"Sittin' in our van there!..."

"Guys comin' by'n'Ihear 'SHOTGUN!'"

"Shotgun?"

"Somebody shouts 'SHOTGUN!' - I don't know?"

"And that's when they're pulling him out of the van, draggin him oudda the seat!"

"For nuthin'; for no reason!"

"'nd they're all over...."

"This one gotta sleeper hold on him! He's like passin' out!"

"And you guys weren't into it earlier?"

"NOOOO!"

"OUDDA the Blue!"

Of course - in the final analysis, it is just another story that ends with the moral that comedy is hard, easily misunderstood and more difficult to do - and do properly - than death.

May 13, 2008.

Another Saturday Night Special

At 5:00 when I'm out in front of 640 Monroe looking for and not finding my Sunday Times, further up the Avenue there is a cop car leaving the block opposite Oxford and Rutgers streets. He is driving off down Oxford answering some call.

That only leaves visible a single cruiser parked the wrong way on that block, its reds between the headlights winking and only the blues among its overheads flickering and looking almost violet at a distance. That and lots of yellow crime scene tape billowing into the block from the curb in the light breeze blowing from the south east, seem to be all that remains of last nights drama.

The Avenue is nearly silent at this hour of the morning and being a Sunday morning will, no doubt remain so longer than on any other weekly morning. You can almost hear the fall of the sparse rain coming steadily, mistily down. Some of it is almost sleet though the air doesn't seem cold enough for that. Now and again ghostly streaks of white keep appearing in the near air about you and then they disappear back into darkness before hitting the pavement and puddles as rain after all.

At two a.m., the Avenue's Witching Hour, it was a wholly other scene up there on that block, lemme tell you!

At five to that hour I was all the way down to Meigs Street waiting for decafe to brew on the many pot coffee maker at Seven-Eleven and enjoying the Drunkies hustling in to load up on over night beer before the coolers close at the Two-O'Clock Cut Off. There were sirens in the air - but, then, there are often sirens about. It was the big rigs from the Alexander Street Fire Station hurtling and shouting their way by that first got my attention and made me wonder if something weren't happening after all.

Those Fire trucks brassing off were quickly followed along by a streaking blue-and-white with its thinner and more hysterical sounding siren also racing south on the big street.

Back out on the sidewalk with my hot coffee there were lots of siren lights visible and they all seemed to be gathered on my block. My block!

Wouldn't you know! I'm thinking. Something happens and I'm off my block!

It wasn't 'til almost Goodman I realized the pulsing lights weren't convened between Lola's, Oxford's and Mark's Pizzeria, after all, but further on in the block beyond Oxford and Wilcox.

What a lot of them there were!

The west side of Monroe was blazing with rotating, flashing, strobing red, white and blue lights in the vicinity of the Genesee Center and Elab Smoker's Boutique.

I might have stopped at Oxford's to mingle with those out front and see if anyone had the word but, before I got there, a Rural/Metro ambulance detached itself from the flames of light and hurried my way with lights and sirens.

It was tailed close by two cruisers - and that wasn't good!

It hurried me along. At the end of the long block, coming up on silent Starbucks, the Plum House and the Oxford crossing, I could see the crime scene tape had gone up all across the parking between the Laundry Room Laundramat and Elab's. And there was more of the yellow stuff hanging around the corner of Rutgers Extended across Monroe, at the far end of that block. There were even more cruisers there while the two pieces of Fire Department equipment were just nosing out of the Extension from behind the old brick walls of the Berkshire Apartments building on the corner, departing from where their first aid responders were no longer, apparently, needed.

You have the big block of the Apartments on the corner, a three-story red brick with the first story on the Avenue all high-ceiling shop spaces - SEA Restaurant (South East Asian), Rick's Recycled Books, Shun Fa Inc., the Asian owned up-state bus line and, then, The Laundry Room "voted Rochester's Best Coin operated"laundramat. The crime tape closed off the parking lot beside the laundry and went down to just beyond Elab's small bunker-like front extension on the face of the old avenue house the head shop shares with the Park Avenue Trading Post.

Here and there, some few civilians, too, were around the fringes of whatever it was that was happening, had happened. All were - like me - curious but looking as if they weren't concerned in any way. I walked pass and, then, back toward a group of three young guys on the curb just beyond the deserted bus shelter. The stand out was tall and fair and had something llikea blond buzz cut, a soldier.

"I was going to Blockbuster," Soldier is saying. "I heard the shotgun. I actually heard it. Down to Mark's, what they call Mark's Texas Hots...."

He was talking last summer to one of the other two young guys; he was recalling the Mark Massacre as we all do on the street from time to time.

When a moment present itself, I asked what he knew about what was happening here tonight. But he asked me if I knew what was going on across the street at the same moment and our inquiring minds bumbled comically into one another on the street side.

At Rutgers I could see across, up the Extension and passed the Berkshire building, up toward the Extensions sudden dead-end. There were many more cop cars parked in the Extension. They were thick in front of Ted Cohn's, the office furniture warehouse back of the Hess Station's big corner lot. Up there, away from the Avenue even that little distance, flashing lights were having all the usual weird effects they have in among house fronts and in under trees and lampposts.

Across Rutgers, along the railing of the parking at what used to be Hollywood Video, another couple of young guys were hanging - and equaly uninformed.

I'd noticed a video camera setting up at the corner of the Hess lot, focusing in on the action for one of the TV news shows. These working cameramen, thought not as wary and close with confidences as cops, are not always eager to give away information.

"Two people shot in the back of this house. They think it might be domestic related," this one relates with out any bother.

When I brought this word back across Monroe to the gaggle near the bus shelter, I learned from blonde soldier that he and one of the others were living across the street in the Berkshire. Now, hearing this, he was concerned about getting back there tonight. As I was walking off, this kid was shaking hands with the third guy he'd been standing with, saying that it had been a real pleasure meeting him.

Shootings, stabbing and bad accidents, bad fires - it somehow takes such occasions for city folk to make such social contacts in the open air, away from the charged atmosphere and dimmed lighting of bar rooms.

At Oxford's front door, I, myself, made the acquaintance, five minutes or so later, of Nick, who works security. After I told him the little I knew about what was happening up the street, most of which it turns out was wrong, he introduced himself, saying,

"I"ve seen you around!"

I could have said the same.

We both agreed it is far too early for people to be shooting one another on Monroe.

"You don't expect this sort of thing before July," Nick declared.

He told me how one of the other bouncers at Oxford's had recently been attached by some guys on Wilmer Street, around the corner. OUt of no where - it's getting dangerous on this street.

I went up to catch a least a couple of hours of sleep before starting to wait for my paper to arrive so I could go to breakfast.

At 5:00 in the morning there was no newspaper in my vestibule.

That lone cruiser was winking and flashing. I didn't needed to walk back up that way to see what there was to still see. Ordinarily, I'd go for coffee to the Exxon or to Gitsis' - if I went for coffee at all at that hour of the morning it wouldn't be to the Hess Station all tha way the other side of Rutger's Extension, almost to the 490 overpass, the other end of the world.

But, this Sunday morning, I did.

In the now nearly normal night time dimness of the Extension between the big block of the towering Cohn warehouse and the sleeping houses on the north side of Rutgers Extended, there were still three blue-and-whites pulled up and parked together in a seeming cabalist clutch.

In passing, I jottedthe names of businesses in the Berkshire block on the back of an envelope and went on - my flimsey excuse for coming - to see if I could obtain that good Hess Gas Station coffee. At first, the lady clerk told me I had to "go to the window!" the payment slot on the front of the clerk's cubbyhole. But, sinceit was coffee I wanted to purchase, she relented and, taking cover in her clerk booth and pulling its door safely shut and locked behind her, she buzzed me inside to make my cup.

The street is getting dangerous and such caution, after all, is understandable in the still dark of night.

Recrossing Rutgers again, heaed back north, a woman walking the other way deliberately sidled to cross my path. Since it was there at the phone bank on the corner, I half expected a proposition. But she just wanted to know if I'dheard anything about the shooting.

She was on her way home from work and had heard that there were two people murdered on the street. I told her what I'd heard and how I'd seen the ambulance off with two cruisers in pursuit. I said, with that, I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone had been killed.

"I'll have to see what they're saying on the R-News," she said, of the local cable 24-hour news outlet, as she was walking away, backing up into Rutgers.

My paper was on the floor of 640's vestibule when I arrived home and, a half hour later, at 6 a.m., before leaving for breakfast at Gitsis' I, too, checked in with R-News. Cristina Domingues reported that a 32 year old Rochester man had been shot on Rutgers Street over night. He was in the hospital in guarded condition this morning after having undergone surgery immediately on arrival by ambulance.

April 13, 2008.

Angelus

An autumn evening, an instant before rain and darkness, a No. 7 bus pulled into the shelter mid-block between Oxford and Rutgers streets on the Avenue. The driver, broad bottomed and wearing white ankle socks, had a clever touch on the throttle and brake; he was a bus surfer's delight.

At the wheel of a square-jowled city bus, no one could have ceased all that metal mass to the curb, brought that bulk to any smoother halt than he managed.

The rear door sprung.

Steve, lighting a cigar, swung out and was under the shelter roof all in one, clockwork motion and that, too, just as rain broke storming down, hitting hard over pavements and everything and everyone around.

Everywhere, that is, but in where Steve had come to be.

The atmosphere was dimmed in an instant several shades of gray toward dusk. The remains of the day's brightness had gone above, a glow below the smudged cloud cover lipping in silver the flat brick roofs of the buildings, backlighting the crowning heads of neighorhood trees and - giving that old No. 7 forging off grumbling in pursuit of its schedule something more to chase after up the Avenue.

The shelter was an old familiar place, a neighborhood spot.

Notched into the parking at Corpus Christi Parochial, the shelter was a narrow plate glass house beneath a ridged glass roof. In it one was pretty much out of the elements but still so very much in the open and right on Monroe where everything, everything was happening - even when everyone was only running to get in out of the rain.

With a bus just gone there wouldn't be another to wave along for twenty or thirty minutes, a good time to sit and smoke and take in the Avenue. He had Monroe from the gray-flannel side four lanes wide it takes by the Branch Library up at the 490 Overpass to below Show World and the rain wouldn't be long, a cloud burst. If he sat and smoked, he would soon be out with the long-in-the-tooth girls who haunt the bank of phones up on the corner of Rutgers. The girls who between times and around various corners climb up into the cabs of old-man pick-up trucks to do kind but not charitable duty.

He would be out, too, with those snicker lipped lads from the high schools of Pittsford and Penfield and Webster who unload from cars they park in the parochial lot to run and jump the railing and make eager ways to Elab Smokers Boutique...

Steve was thinking of the rain, heavy but only a cloud burst, fiercely falling but over, likely, in minutes, when a narrow runner splashed through the devils of the downpour and, cutting closely round the corner, came in under the shelter at its other end. Slender with caramel face and bushy head of wet hair he was dressed for a day that wasn't yet autumn and wasn't raining and he carried a plastic grocery sack.

It occurred that these were leftovers and that the latest supper at Blessed Sacrament, Oxford Street's modest baroque cathedral behind the bulk of the school, was letting out.

"Is there a bus?" he hoped, meaning - will there be a bus coming soon?

"There is always a bus," slipped out of Steve and was instantly regretted.

Though daylight was steadily, inexorably diminishing, and the other's face was obscured in the streetlight shadow of the shelter, it was plain this new, stranded sailor, looking more than a little drown, was too dire and disappointed for anything other than commiseration or assurance. Irony, wit would go by him.

"A bus just left." Steve told him. "Won't be another for half an hour...."

...Or, longer this time of the evening.

With, "Oh," only, the guy took a seat midway on the bench to wait however long, it didn't matter.

The rain wouldn't be much longer but he damp and chill it would bring to the dusk would be.

"Mind my smoke?"

The answer, "Nawidohmin'," was small, somewhat distracted and all that needed to be said.

When the rain was no longer falling, ceasing as swiftly as begun, more grubstakers began coming along from the church basement. Some trailed along down Oxford Street in their small gangs of after gathering fours and fives, their partnerships of twos and threes. The trash collectors rode bicycles with wire baskets they could balance bags of bottles and cans for redemption on. Some drew along now empty shopping cards they tow behind their bikes.

Some few others come to the shelter between Rutgers and Oxford to crowd inside and wait, bulky shapeless sacks of clothing in out of the streetlight with the traffic and crowds hurrying by and the neon and traffic lights behind to glow out and speckle and streak the scene with red, green, gold.

"Is there a bus?"

They severally ask, because no one on the avenue ever carries a schedule, or wears a watch to check a schedule against. No one, either, has a lighter for the butts they've picked up, here and there, the smokes they'll bum.

"You wouldn't have a...." they ask.

"Just this cigar," Steve tells them.

Some, too, even lack the buck-twenty-five for the ride they're waiting on.

"Excuse me, please?"

Steve was sure that was what it was about. The voice was polite with just a touch of sing song to it. Steve thought he could hear prayers, a communicant's rote responses to a priest's reading of the mass.

He'd seen the speaker led into the other end of the shelter some moments before, guided along by others arriving, too, from the church basement; the speaker had a moon-face stubbled with beard and wasn't looking quite in Steve's or anyone's direction as he spoke. It was a voice that was or affected a childlike innocence.

"Excuse me, please - but I smell a cigar?"

"If it bothers you - " Steve began to say, certain that that wasn't it.

There is no such thing as a cheap cigar to those who hustle change on the street. All cigars are Havana and smell flavorfully of wealth. Cigars are the choice smoke of celebrants prone, it is believed, to be as generous and open handed with others as fate has been with them of late. Cigars, too, are smoked by men with hair on their chests and jack in their pockets - potential providers out to express in everywhere their masculine identity.

The speaker rushed to sing-song,

"No, no, no, it doesn't bother me!" his big head swayed a little side to side above his shoulders. And, "I don't mean to disturb you at all...."

Steve, himself, was just then, discovering that, in fact, two suburban lads had, after all, been all along across in Elab discussing bongs. They were leaving, now, the cube square shack across the way beneath its awkwardly leaning Cigar Store Indian, sprinting to cross the Avenue, angled off toward Rutgers to cut between the shelter and the beech tree on its island just inside the parking lot. They were fresh-faced kids full of their Avenue adventure and carrying away paraphernalia.

"Would it be alright if I ask you your name - please?" the speaker inquired.

"Steve."

"Stephen..." the speaker held it up and was pleased to find..."That's a saint's name."

He then wondered,

"Steve, would you mind if I told you my name?"

"Not in the least."

Of the two fresh-faced kids one had made it tot he lot's low barrier a few feet beyond the south end of the shelter and was set to climb over it, set to step up on the thick metal tube and hike himself over. The other lad, lagging a little behind, a kid in a beret and dark rimmed glasses very pleased with himself, was, it seemed, noticing the shelter and the collection of types within it and taking and interest.

"Mine is a saint's name, too - Matthew. Everybody calls me Mattie."

In the shadows, among and over the bulky old clothes clad bodies of men, and with the traffic thrum and swoosh going by out across the wide sidewalk pavement -the question was suspended, what could Steve do you for Mattie?

"I hate to ask you this, Steve," Mattie asked, his head davening in its small rhythmic pattern, "but I don't have fare....and I need to get 'cross town....to go home...to my home....It's not something I like to ask, Steve."

"Sure."

"But, if you have some change....in your pocket...."

'Cuse me, 'cuse me, Mister, don't mean to bother you none...twice or three times a day, at least, along the Avenue, Steve would hear one variation or another because Monroe is the Panhandler's drag. They work the bars from late afternoon joining those who come out to smoke to long after midnight. They hit up, too, the folk who come for the New Age and retro shops and boutiques, the college kids and Starbucks loungers. They feel themselves welcome, entitled even on the street where almost anything seems to go and kids with peacock green hair come to get tattoos and hang out.

That kid in the beret and glasses had turned aside and come over tithe shelter with his smart grin and his chin poised forward of his chest avid for any experience that's going.

"You believe me, Steve? You believe I don't like askin'?"

Mattie, your come-on is more elaborate and has more style than almost any. You're a true master or the art - or you're a sincere sonofabitch. It is no longer hard to say no, the occasion being so common.

"I don't happen to have any change at present, Mattie," Steve has to tell him.

There are times, too, when it necessary to give a little.

"But I have a day pass I won't be riding any more now that I'm home. If you can use it, you're welcome to it."

"Anything is welcome, Steve!"

The bus pass had already begun its journey down the bench, smudged hand in frayed cuff to smudged hand.

"I really don't like to panhandle, Steve."

Both Mattie's hands were casually on his slender reed of a cane before him where he was standing near the other entrance to the shelter.

"If you don't mind my asking - do you believe that there are things that are sinful, Steve? Because some people don't believe there are!" Mattie declared with wonder.

"I'm not sure I could say, Mattie."

The last hand reached up and touched Mattie's nearest hand and that hand, unsurprised and deft, took what was offered it and pocketed the pass.

"I know that when a thing is wrong it’s a sin. I believe that and some say that panhandling is wrong. But I asked Father and Father told me, Steve, that I was God's Panhandler!" Mattie exulted. "He says it is alright for me to sometimes ask for hand outs when I really need them."

Both Steve and the Beret, too, had noticed when the strand sailor went into his pocket and slipped a folded bill into the hand of the person seated next to him on the bench with a gesture that it, too, should be passed along to Mattie.

"Do you think that's right, Steve?" Mattie wondered.

"I wouldn't know."

"I put my trust in Father Tony, Steve."

"You could be right."

Sometimes you give a little.

"You could be right."

In a little longer while, a No. 7 ran into the curb and went off, again, with its newest riders seeking seats along its hall-like length suspended up above the Avenue in a bright, detail rich fluorescence.

Beret's pal was seated, still, on the barrier below the shelter concentrating on his nails, impatiently waiting out his partner's whim.

Looking down the length of the shelter where no one was bundled any longer, the young man grinned. He was taking in the trash and cigarette butts, the stains and smudges on the glass walls. An RPD cruiser had come to park conspicuously in the parochial drive behind and to one side of the shelter. Steve could have told the boy that they would be there, one cruiser or another, the rest of the night.

"Where do they all come from - right?" the boy laughed.

"That's an old song," Steve said.

The kid looked around grinning big with that same forward leaning look of his and, then, he, too, was off. He moved so suddenly he was over the traffic barrier before his pal could react and, then, it was Beret laughing, saying,

"Come on, whudayah waitin' 'round for?"

Up the other side of the dark-as-night presence of the giant beech, up on the corner, a prematurely-aged chick with straight long hair and, up close, a few too few teeth , was stalking the phones. Porch lights were on and windows glowed in the houses that come down Rutgers opposite the parking lot bringing the neighborhood almost into the Avenue. Summer sitting porches where they putout flags and suspend platters above collections of odds and ends of furniture.

It all reminded Steve of his favorite shelter moment from his first summer as a resident of Monroe.

A heat wave oven baking his studio room, about midnight he went to sit awhile on the bus bench in the semi-dark with a book on his lap and a cigar for company. It was an early week night with no crowds but plenty of people out and about and even the occasional gang going by. The traffic was unhurried and there were spaces when the street was all but bare and quiet.

The young lady who came along during one of those down times was standing stock still and tall on a skate board. She was an ideal with a slim fair face and long straight blonde hair to below her shoulders and she was balanced so perfectly that she never once had to move or break her glorious pose during her transit. She effortlessly traveled thus clipping along at a steady, slow and smooth roll up from Oxford and by the shelter where he sat. Somehow, someway he couldn't know the manner of she managed, then, a grand looping arc that ran her off into Rutgers and ever on diminishing into the distance one pool of white street light after another after another.

Steve had thought her angelic.

March 25, 2008.