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.
