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.
