I got off the phone to family in Florida just as the chorus of an anthem of the eighties was welling up from the alley beneath my window, all the sudden gathered voices of the bar patrons next door chiming in to show fine spirit so early of an evening for even a Saturday night.
I'd been bragging on my Avenue.
I'd been passing on to golden-age seniors long retired to the secure sameness and supposed sanity of the Republican suburban sprawl of central Florida entertaining images of the weird and lively doings of an Upstate New Yawk city street I've come to live on.
The hard rock and babble of laughter that gusted up after it hinted at happenings transpiring below that I might be missing.
That set me down on the Avenue, my bag over my shoulder and with a cigar to light in my face, not a whole minute later nor a second too soon. There was a full moon and I had noticed a limo bus lurking around the Lola's corner in Wilmer Street explaining the early and exuberant anthem singing.
All that was forgotten the next moment as I turned to take in the Avenue the other way and to light that Blunt and came, more or less, face to face with the Mad Man of the Evening.
A round Irish face with stubble and rumpled brown hair approached with both arms dangling sacks of groceries. I was reminded of Mr. O'Hara, Thomas Mitchell, from Gone With The Wind - a short burly body and the beginnings of Andy Rooney eye-brows. He was strolling along with the side to side motion his counterweight sacks gave him and wore a faintly dreamy expression because he was singing, I suppose.
It wasn't a great voice but it was clear and was carrying his tune with even more ease than he was carrying the products of Wilson Farms.
Marie - the dawn is breaking;
Marie - you'll soon be waking
To find our hearts are aching...
You couldn't tell, as he passed, if he was aware I or anyone else might be listening to him. In a world of his own - on a Saturday night on Monroe Avenue, Rah-chester, New Yawk.
I turned to watch him down the Avenue and noticed two young women coming up from Lola's - slightly flared pants, belted jackets. As they met the Musical Mad Man the one with tawny hair gave him a slight smile of passing notice and even danced her wrist a bit and made a finger popping motion. I could tell, even from the rear, that he paid her's no more notice than he had my attention.
As the girls passed Oxford's and 640, I couldn't help myself. I had to amaze -
"Tommy Dorsey!"
The finger popper continued to smile in her patronizing way at yet another Monroe Mad Man - you meet them all the time down there!
"I don't know," she brushed me off with.
"No!" I told her, definitively, "Tommy Dorsey!"
I didn't bother to added the 'Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,' part - she was so clearly, if politely, not interested.
So, I had arrived on the Avenue through the miracle of coincidence just in time to have for my seniors, surviving members of the Swing Generation, a moment from Monroe that they could uniquely appreciate and that I could use to explain my fascination with it. Any given day, any given hour - there is nothing that you might not see or hear somewhere between Canterbury Road and Meigs. A dingy street of crumbling infra-structure peopled with panhandlers and bar tramps but you never know what is going to turn up when almost anything is allowed and little is left untried.
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