Still, It's Friday Night.

What do you call the night?

It's not what hour it is that matters. The night is what ever you came out on, not what you go home to.

I overheard a 2 a.m. discussion of this and, when asked, that was my opinion. The original two debaters were impaired enough to consider it wisdom, or, at any rate, to consider it - and with more solemnity than it deserved.

Still, it's Friday night to me when it's two on Saturday morning by clock and calendar.

It's still Friday night because you have to watch your self walking by O'Cal's at a quarter or so to Last Call. An unguided and quite blind young lady may lurch forth from the doorway. Her perhaps pretty face may come within an inch or two of yours and, hair obscured, you may never get a good enough look at her to tell for sure.

"Y'godda come right, sweetie! Hang right! Hang to yer right!" her girl friend will tell her, reaching out to turn her round toward Meigs.

They'll go off like that with Girlfriend wrestling to get her arm under her charge's shoulders and Girlfriend's boyfriend, once he has had a drag in the open air, grabbing hold of the Blind Girl's nape with his free hand to help hold her up.

"Walk! Y're gona have to pretend like y're walking!" And she will, too - if flat of foot and puppet fashion.

It may be January with snow on the ground and ice in the air but, still, it's Friday night and the cops pull a cruiser across the two south lanes of the Avenue at Meigs in the fashion of last summer and cruisers park, too, at various favored gathering spots. They aren't as many and they aren't all that pro-active - leaving the cold to limit how long the kids who pull into the Exxon to climb out of their rides and "'Ey, yo!" one another congregate there.

It's January, by the calendar, and you're not long out on the street before your feet ache from contact with the iron pavement and your fingers ache in your best leather gloves. Still, dude, its Friday night and latter day masses are huddled together in line along side the front door down at Gitsis waiting to get inside and GarbagePlate. When the Line Up gets a little boisterous and RPD pull up a blue and white or two to parallel park with their overheads slow flashing, somehow, you still not ready to go in and call it a night.

It's still Friday night.

And twenty-four hours from now, when we do all this again, it'll still be Saturday night - what ever it maybe by clock and calendar.

The Details

As frigid as last night was and as desolate as any Sunday night bar scene can be with only the prospect of Monday work week before it, I was out making my usual 2 a.m. coffee run and taking in the inevitable if sparse details. A city cop felt called upon and his blue and white shot out of the gate at Goodman and sped off up the Avenue. A young man with eye glasses commented in the crossing that, "He seems in a hurry!"

I noticed he wasn't hurried himself, despite the cold, and, some twenty minutes later, I caught him again. He was only a block further on then from where he had been and was standing by his lonesome the other side of the Avenue. He was mid-block in front of the Exxon and considering where there was to go.

On that walk for coffee, I thought the choice moment, though, was meeting with a posse of four or five that had just been let out of O'Cal's. They were all guy and, front and center, was their Alpha. It was like the others faded into the shadows of that nightly stretch of sidewalk and the one guy alone caught every bit of light there was. He had the wide stride and in the icy blue black air he was not only in shirt sleeves but his collar and cuffs were open; he had a cigarette pegged in the corner of a cocksure grin and seemed to be enjoying the afterglow of some smart remark or other.

But, if I was looking for something to write about, for inspiration - I found it later and not in something I saw on the Avenue but in something I heard when I was nearly home to 640. There was just enough and not too much of a breeze rippling the air and no traffic near or I might not have heard it at all. Approaching the corner of Wilmer St. and Lola's Bistro, the sound was like the mewing plaint of an aggrieved alley cat. I'd heard it before and knew there was no cat to look for slinking about or out on a fire escape. Sleepless, I'd been down on the block with a cigar enough times at four in the morning to know that the thick black sign that hangs straight out on an iron rod over Lola's corner doorway repeats and repeats that deceptively feline lament when there is any sort of a breeze.

In that sound it occurred to me that, if I aspire to anything in particular, it is to take in the details that make up these environs. To know this place and convey something of it in words, if anything, is what I have signed on here to do.

It is January 21, 2008.

Something is Always Happening on Monroe

I've just been out - called away by another singing of "Sweet Caroline," down at Oxford's.

Out for a smoke and paying attention to the little comedies and dramas that Last Call always brings with it, I got lured away down the Avenue by the fateful flashing lights of police cruisers.

The Rochester Police Department (RPD) has been closing down Monroe Friday and Saturday nights after two a.m. We had a little episode of gun play down the next block one night and a kid from the suburbs was killed. He came between a gunman angry at having been put out of an establishment called Mark's Texas Hots - an all night diner, one of several along the avenue that caters to an after closing crowd. The bullet was intended for Mark's bouncer (all-night diners here hire bouncers to keep people from crowding in over code) but this suburbanite died in his stead. Since then, and one or two other incidents, the RPD has been turning out in force to keep the Avenue quiet. Partial roadblocks slow traffic and other cruisers and cops are up and down the length of the trouble blocks, Averill to Meigs to Goodman (the next cross-street down from here). The Hip-Hop Kids can come to eat at Gitsi's, Country Sweet, Mark's and Sal's New York Pizza - but they can't gather in the parking lots any longer and play their car stereos and they can't park on the Avenue and just hang out on the sidewalk. There is too much chance fights will break out and drive-bys settle scores that grow out of arguments and punches thrown.

I walked down into the zone of flashing lights as far as Sal' s and watched as the RPD gathered in gangs on the sidewalks at points that have been visited by flashes in the past. Their blue and white cruisers are prominently parked in spaces that formerly would have been occupied by SUV s and tricked out rides with stereos pumped up to frame shaking volume. People were crowding into Mark's and Sal's, as usual, but calm and quiet prevailed out on the street.
I made my way back up to Goodman where a cruiser with overhead's flashing sat across the two north bound lanes. I commented to the two officers standing in front of it, "Keeping things reasonably quiet?"

"We're not waiting for things to get out of hand. We're being pro-active about things these days."
By stepping out into Monroe to ask my question and nod my head, I had missed the crossing signal on Goodman. I might have crossed though - the kid in the only car waiting at the light had closed his eyes for a moment and was late finding that the light was green. I wondered if the two officers had noticed what I had. I'd think one would have to have some level of impairment to pull up to a light with a cop car sitting right there with overhead's going and not keep your eyes open for the light to change.

But, if they did they let it go by.

Maybe their attention was already focused in on what was developing just up the avenue. A car was approaching the opposite comer and a cruiser had lit him up from behind. The car, lime green with black flames, pulled into the curb alongside the Chase bank just as I got light to go ahead and cross to that comer. As I started to walk several cruisers had already emptied out behind the car and officers were approaching it from both sides with an order to,
"Show us your hands! Let's see your hands, gentlemen!"

I noticed I was walking with the officers from the Goodman roadblock.

There was, too, a young guy out walking his dog on a leash. They were coming down the Goodman side of the bank ahead of me. As they near the comer I thought I'd best warn him,
"You might not want to walk up that way," assuming he was going to turn up the Avenue.

He looked over at me with a question on his face but let the dog draw him on past the building and turned to put a letter in the post box out on the comer. Reining in his pet, he turned and asked me with wide eyes,
"Ho! What's goin' on?"
He was about 5'6", same as me, perhaps a little shorter, wore a CBGB gray tee and looked to be about twenty-five.
"Felony stop," I told him.

We stood a moment on the comer by the post box and watched as cops surrounded this car occupied three times by young black males. The driver had his hands on the wheel, having already given his license to the gray haired cop who was out of the first cruiser, the one that had lit him up. His passenger in the front seat had his hands on the dash and the passenger behind was leaning forward with hands out stretched over the arm rest between seats. All three looked scared.

"Do you think they'll let us up that way?" CBGB asked.
The dog was pulling on the leash in that direction. All dogs and gray bearded old guys with cigars have an enthusiasm for flashing police lights.
No guns were drawn. The two officers on the sidewalk were standing back with their flashlights trained on the occupants of the car.
So, I thought,
"We can try. If they want us stopped they'll tell us." We started up the street.
The gray cop was saying,
"That doesn't matter. This," he held up the kid's license, "doesn't match up with the registration," waving it toward the registration stick in the comer of the car's front window.
The two cops standing back by the guard rails along the bank: parking lot didn't even look at us as we passed between them and the car. The older cop was pointing with the license to the rear of the car and saying,
"Your plates don't match with the sticker. Is this your car?" and a moment later, "How do I know that? Your plates don't match this registration."
As I went by, I noticed, too, that some Hip Hop Kids were partying back along the high board fence at the rear of the Bank: parking lot.
The building just the other side of the lot is Enright's Thirst Parlor and some of the late drinkers in that establishment were standing in the front window of the place watching what was happening out on the street. It takes a lot to get the drinkers off their stools at Enright's.
We two stopped just past the bar door and stood and talked as we watch the scene unfold.
The gray haired cop ordered the driver out and told him,
"Put your hands on the top of the car! Put your hands on the top of the car. You take your hands off the top the car again and the cuffs go on."

Eventually, the driver was put in the gray cop's cruiser until his license and registration were checked out and the other two were brought out and patted down, as well.

I learned that my young companion of the dog, Daisy, was from Michigan and had moved to Rochester last year. He was living up on Goodman, someplace closer to Park. I explained to him how the RPD is closing down the Avenue after two, keeping the young people who come here to eat after closing time from allover the city from getting into trouble. He approved.

"You know its getting insane. Some guy got shot here at the Bagel place (comer of Goodman and Monroe across from the bank:) the other night. "
"It's been ever since that kid from the suburbs got killed two months ago.
They've been closing down the street on a regular basis since then. They're not going to allow suburbanites who come down here to drink to get killed."
"Oh, yeah, yeah! Down at Mark's, that was insane!"

I told him the RPD wasn't about to let the Avenue get a bad reputation and pointed out how the side streets back of Monroe, between Park and Monroe were inhabited by the kind of people who want to come to Monroe and not get involved in gun play.
"Oh, yeah, yeah, up where I live, everybody is like going to college or got degrees!"

They let the driver go back to his car and his passengers back in with him. Daisy was getting restless and CBGB walked off as the gray cop, even before the car he'd checked out turned over its engine, was shouting,
"Okay, gentlemen, get a move on!"
I thought he meant the lime green and black flame car but he shouted,
"Okay, there in the lot! Time to move on!" and pulled his cruiser into the bank lot with the over heads still flashing.

Across Monroe, where something like six young officers were standing in a bunch watching the scene, a couple of young black men walked by them going up toward Show World. The one in the long white jersey eating something kept moving right along and, eventually, crossed over to our side toward Gitsi's but the one in the red jersey lagged behind and must have said something. The cops followed after him en masse and one of them wanted to know,
'" Ju say something to us?"

A magic word must have been spoken in response, though not loud enough for me to heard, and Red Jersey's hands were quickly behind his back and he was, as quickly, led away back up the Avenue to the cruisers for the pat down and, probably, a quick ride to the Public Safety Building.
Something is always happening on Monroe. If you don't believe me, take it from CBGB - it's insane!

by - paulfrasca