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.