Last Night On Monroe, Danielle

I was seeing and hearing things.

With some sarcasm an ice-cream blonde, her hair close-cropped and cell phone to her ear, challenged with certainty any one of three dark companions standing slightly off from her and away from the corner of the Sports Page.

"I know what you gotta do!"

There was 'yes, I do, too' in her voice.

In the bar doorway, a young man with the certainty of his not having acted improperly, answered, presumably, another young lady's accusation,

"Did I fuck you that night?"

The 'no, I did not,' that he found unnecessary to add he, apparently, thought conclusive.

I had to dodge wide to the curb to avoid the young man who was walking broadly and blindly toward me from Meigs and Mark's. His bicycle-walking companion beside him was telling him that he had, certainly, to go to,

"Alexander and East; near there..."

I was thinking how, somehow, all these encounters and the young woman eating at a fully occupied booth in Mark's front window were all so Monroe nearing two a.m. But with no idea how I might use any of them and, hurrying to be at the Convenience down at Averill before that two in the morning closing, I could only make note of them as I made the next crossing.

Then, too, in solemn silhouette, there was the memory of three companions I'd seen keeping them selves apart, away from the crowded Avenue. They were a trinity of sorts, variously sitting and standing half-back in the lot toward the old Rite Aid location. What might they be about?

Trinity, I jotted along with the rest.

But it was later, after I was turned around from returning to Oxford's by those two siren-sounding Blue-and-Whites that spun about up Meigs, that I had my most real encounter of the evening.

Crossing Goodman, I was over taken by a trim and hurrying young woman and her hungry male companion.

"I've seen you walking; I've seen you walking everywhere," she said making the corner and turning about to walk along facing her smile back to me, "You write. You carry notebooks in your bags."

Mark's was their destination.

Her companion, perhaps because he was hungrier or less literary, rather grumbled something about 'this guy.' But she sent him ahead to secure a place for them and he went on ahead of us.

We never really stopped walking, either. Because she was so trim and sure of foot, she more than kept up with me, walking along side and, then, at times, turning again to skip backward before me.

What sort of things did Iwrite about; did I write about things I heard and saw when I walked around? Was I writing anything at present? She was interested in writing herself.

I do write short things I encounter on Monroe. But I hadn't done much of that the last month or more. I told her of the novel, short novel, I had just completed. She was writing a piece, too, for an assignment, rather like a bit of memoir.

What was my novel about? How long was it? How many pages? Could I put her up on it? She would like to know what it was about.

My short novel is my memory of a party I was once at, it was a moment when a good many funny things happened all at once. They were things that all seemed in some way to do with the feelings I was then having about losing good friends who were beginning to go away. It was one of those moment that you know, even at the time, if you are interested in writing at all, you will want to write about someday and, now, I had.

Of course, it's my 'sixties' novel, I confessed; though it is only that in the sense of its environment and not at all in its purpose.

She rather challenged me on why I should have had such feelings, naturally. And I tried to explain that that is something that happens when you are nineteen or twenty. You find yourself in a process of transition that is frequently mistaken by those who have not been through any such thing before for something more dire and dreadful, something final and wholly unfortunate.

I should have mentioned to her that the party was a farewell for the first of those departing friends, someone who was a linchpin of the small group of people I was very in with and felt deeply about. It was the last of a week's worth of gatherings, both melancholy and riotous.

Did I have an e-mail address? We should exchange examples of our writing. We could discuss writing, perhaps.

Of course, she told me, she didn't have any paper or pen on her.

Those are things I am never without and I gave her my address and told her of my site http://theoxfordsquare.

"Of course, I can never recall all of that but it's 'theoxfordsquare,'" I told her writing, "and you can get there by googling Monroe, I'm told."

"Oh, sure..."

We were almost to Mark's and she was feeling so hungry, she told me. By the time I was at Mark's I was walking by myself, again, and went on by the officer out of his unit who was parked across the entrance to Woodlawn with his flashers on and a cherry flare burning in the street.

On Meigs, halfway to Park, the cops were leaving and the ambulacne that had come was preparing to leave. A patient, a young man, was on the gurney inside and a young woman was at the window on the side of the bus looking in while up on her toes.

No, it wasn't an accident; it wasn't an accident yet, one of the two young men in front of the Mayflower told me with cynism. It was only some more drama and I was to understand that he didn't approve of drama. More accurately he was bored with such Monroe drama.

"You walk the night?" he asked. "You walk around all night? Don't you ever get bored with all the drama?"

I've been on Monroe for something like five years now. And, no, I'm not bored with the drama yet, though, more accurately, the most of it is comedy and that I never find boring.

Back at Meigs and Monroe, with the cops gone off earlier elsewhere with lights and sirens in several different directions, there was only the one at Woodlawn who was still in sight. Something like the scenes of summer, scenes from a month or so back, seemed to be developing at 7/Eleven. It was still a long way to three a.m.

I decided to stick around on the corner.

September 19, 2009.

Incident Report

LEAVING THE SCENE...

THERE IS something like a

Crump!

Someone, in a voice more amused than surprised, exclaims,

"HO!"

There is some surprised laughter, too, a reactive tittering from as far off as the Gulf Station down and across the Avenue whee the lights are out, the pumps down and cars are jammed in for the after hours scene at Gitsis' Diner.



The car that is traveling south on Monroe, passing the end of Wilmer Street, is black and a sleek new model, perhaps a Chrysler. It is occupied at least four times, front and back seats, by young men who are not the driver and who are not caught in the street light from the near street corner, the streetlight that stands in front of Lola's Bistro nearer to the corner than the bus bench where we are.

The young man framed in the open driver's side window is white and in his early or mid-twenties. He has curly dark hair and has a lean face with deep set surprised eyes. And, for an instant, he stares out not back at the corner and the rear of the car that was turning into Wilmer, but over at us on the bus bench further on. He looks over at us both shocked and helpless even as the car is accelerating, leaving the scene of the accident it has just had.

The look makes him seem almost as though he is and isn't the one doing the driving, making the instant decision to go, go and leave the scene behind.

The car speeds off not that much faster than most traffic that leaves the bars this time of night for the expressway and home to the suburbs, for the further sidestreets and the near neighborhoods off Monroe.

But it leaves deliberately and without the least hesitation.



SOMEONE, near by, perhaps on the far corner of Wilmer or perhpas in the older model black car that was struck, itself, turned half into Wilmer and, now, stopped, exclaims,

"'E 'it you, man!"

The car is one of those older, old enough it has a less stream-lined look than those common today. It is one of those reworked but not meant to be classic looking cars that come into the area after hours. This one doesn't yet have the silver hub caps and dual exhausts and only has the polish.

It, too, is occupied four or five times.

It is a Friday morning, not a Saturday or a Sunday morning, near three a.m., or the Avenue would be more jammed with such traffic than it is now.

Now there is only the newer model black car speeding away for Oxford Street and the less occupied end of the Avenue's zone south toward where Monroe rises to the expressway bridge beyond the Hess Station, past the Y and the Branch Library that loom going up to the overpass.

After a moment of hesitation, the older car that was rear-ended reverses and backs abruptly, dramatically out again onto the avenue to face southward, too, and shifts into gear.

Its engine snarls and the car leaps forward.

And, as it jumps and accelerates, for one instant, too, the occupant of its driver's side window is caught in the light. He is young, black and wears a ball cap and a well-filled out white tee-shirt. Poised forward with his hands on the wheel, he, too, is caught looking over at our bench with an uncertain expression.

It, too, gives him something of the look of detachment from what he is doing, if only for this one split second.



PURSUIT...

The car that caused the accident has already passed Oxford at the other end of the long block before the struck car shifts forward.

The avenue south toward the expressway is almost dark and nearly deserted.

A last party of customers that had emerged and lingered before Oxford's is walking obliviously off between the darkened buildings and the cars still parked beneath them. Over at Rookie's Pizza and further up at the yellow rimmed windows of Subway, a few equally oblivious lingerers are on the sidewalk, too.

The pursuit is in stages, the cars receding away two long blocks south where the Hess is a well-lit and open space on the right of Monroe. The pursuit is sequenced with the shifting of the one car's gears, each increase in speed made emphatic with the renewed tearing snarl of an engine straining.

And each time the two cars are brought closer even as they become more distant and smaller.

"Now where are you going?"

"Up there."

By Rutgers the injured car has closed the gap to half the length of the next and final block and, though the pursued is not running for certain, the gap is still swiftly diminishing.

"Why? They're going to be gone! No way that boy's going to be stopping now if he didn't!"

"Don't come!"

By where Dartmouth and Canterbury come into Monroe on this side, opposite the Hess, the two are one right after the other and traveling like they are one car. The first bears left off into Canterbury at speed and, the purser follows like they are both on one rail.

Both cars are done in an instant.

"There's not going to be anything to see up there!"

"Don't follow!"

By Oxford Street the first Blue-and-White cruiser has come down Rutgers with neither lights nor siren. Only the swiftness of its passage the long way down alongside the empty lot at Blessed Sacrament, against the darkened and residential porches to the corner parking lot on Monroe suggests purpose.

It even stops at the corner before turning up toward the Hess where it pulls in off the street and stops to look around.

A second car comes, this time with lights swirling and traveling south on Monroe. It doesn't slow until it comes to Rutgers and turns right up that street's dead-end extension, along the north end of the Hess corner lot. It disappears around the old bricks of the Berkshire Building.



SHOTS FIRED...

Because of the Hess, all lit up white and flourescent, all white and Kelly green behind its canopied pumps, the Avenue seems to open up opposite the complex corner of Dartmouth, Canterbury and Monroe.

Coming up toward Rutgers more Blue-and-Whites are coming into the area from every direction some even with sirens. They go into the extension and none turns into Canterbury.

Up that way one cruiser hangs back and a knot of them with flashing overheads are gathered near the dead ending.

"Wonder if they know, now, they're in the wrong place?"

"Like it makes much difference now!"

One cruiser that has crept in behind the office furniture store on the south end is returning behind some poor civilian sedan caught back there with a girl doing business.

"Some most unlucky son-of-a-bitch!"

"So, y' got to see something, after all! What do you know!"

The first cruiser creeps, turning away of the Hess, and travels off across and up Canterbury, at last.

"Going to see the same nothing-there-anymore we are!"

Coming up to cross Dartmouth, the cruiser is already returning, slow creeping around the point and spot lighting the hedges. The crew-cut and solemn face in the driver window looks over and asks, stopping,

"You two fellas hear any shots fired?"

"No, but we can tell y' what it was about..."



EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION....

After the police, all the buildings around the Canterbury point, belwo and up the overpass rise, are silent. The streetlights leading away down Dartmouth on the low side go up that street receding beneath the deep darkness of the tree-tops. Only Hess, across the way, bright in tis expanse of blacktop, is open and inviting and the lone clerk is outside the door talking loudly with a customer pulled up to it. Loud as he is, his words are all garbled in a staccato of rap music blasting from the car stereo.

"Guy doesn't pull over and exchange insurance 'cuss y' don't on Monroe at three in the morning and other guy chases after him 'cuss he hasn't. And he, or, one of his friends, gets out a gun which is why the first guy's running..."

"And...?"

"Isn't how it's supposta be."

"Y' gotta wonder! You really are from the country!"

Canterbury, on the high side, is more open and well lighted. Past the two or three stories of the building on the south corner, the parking for the hardware is back around its east corner and trees don't begin until your are past the end of Westminster coming in from the north. That rap that is blasting and the loud conversation, which are all that is left of Monroe noise and carrying on, now, carries even up that way little diminishing.

"Now where are you going?"

"Whatever happened it was along here."

"What do y' expect to see the cops didn't not see?"

"If they got a report of shots fired took them to Rutgers and it ws those two cars turned off up this way, it had to have been right along in here."

"You expect to find that black car plugged and expiring if the cops somehow missed seeing it?"

"Hole in rear trunk, street sign; tree trunk with some bark shattered, somebody's front porch column with the paint disturbed...."

The ejected casing of a bullet it turns out is a thing so small, barely as big as the end of the little finger on a man's hand. Something laying on the black shadow and gray asphalt snake skin of four a.m. still street lit pavement of Canterbury just inches before the end of Westminster. Its brass doesn't even shine in the light. It lies thee and only casts its own little bit more of shadow.

Something so small as to seem insignificant that might have meant so much but, now, can only mean something more to add to another dull report.


September 15, 2009.

Michael Jackson Is Dead.

A storm had threatened in the middle of the afternoon - the atmosphere darkened, wind whipped the tree tops, and, long after, long unfolding black rumbles of distant thunder followed silent flashbulbs of lightning.

The storm never came but passed Monroe Avenue and the city by.

At the height of the storm that wasn't, and through the usual avenue traffic, a ladder truck and hose truck from Alexander Street station raced through the zone with lights and sirens and blaring horns at cross streets and went up and over the Expressway bridge to Upper Monroe. The sirens rivaled the wind, the horns seemed more threatening than the slow peels of thunder and the red flashing lights were more present and constant than the isolated instants of rare lightning.

As the red machines hurtled and bullied through the traffic in desperate rush, it was strange seeing their crews sitting up in them wearing such relaxed and workaday demeanors.

Five minutes or so later a Rural/Metro ambulance returned down the hill and avenue in the opposite direction with its lights and its thinly wailing siren but it wasn't certain whether the run was part of the same job or another emergency altogether.

Except for the inconvenienced drivers made to pull over and allow them to pass and a few pedestrians who waited and used the wake of the trucks' passage to cross a traffic-free avenue, it is unlikely Monroers paid the sirens any especial attention. They minded no more the seeming approach of a storm.

They never do.

Long before evening and the setting of the sun, the sky cleared. Mid-evening was serene on Monroe and foot traffic and cars passing up and down the avenue seemed to assume a leisurely gait in agreement with the long and transfixing sunlight. Anyone who recalled the afternoon would have found the leisure and calm remarkable.

The light even set in amber and isolated in place a near fight that threatened to break out at the corner of Boardman across from Oxford's Pub. It was between a two-by-four wielding angry man on the corner and the passenger of a mini-van pulled up to the avenue. The van's turn signal flashed and flashed as the driver leaned forward over the steering wheel peering for a lapse in the traffic and his passenger leaned out the door exchanging hot threats and excoriations with the Two-By-Four Man.

"Jus' Turn! TURN! Go On!" a woman on the other side of the avenue shouted.

And, soon, the driver did.

After, there was a flurry of comment from concerned parties lingering before the first house on Boardman and among the loungers on and standing about the chairs set out around the corner in front of Rookie's Pizza. Two-By-Four Man marched about and, eventually, tossed his lumber away in the alley behind the pizza place. He returned to the corner and passed through the gang in the chairs to go back inside the Greek restauant, Astoria, which shares an entry with Rookie's.

A big bellied lounger on the bus bench at the opposite corner of Boardman, commented with arms wide over the back of the bench,

"And it isn't even ninety degrees!"

A Rochester Blue-and-White cruised by and didn't stop.

The early evening crowd at Oxford's was largely made up of young people in bold shirts of several colors that had crests over their hearts. Their backs were white with the logos of beer companies and the crests read Summer Ball 2009.

"Kick Ball," one of them explained; with a gesture up and down the avenue, he added, "Bars sponsor us."

"Yeah, I saw a lot of you guys out here Tuesday night."

"Yeah, Tuesday the really competitive teams play, I think."

From a car pulling up to the curb a girl wearing one of the pink shirts got out. She had on especially tight, especially slight shorts and all the street eyes followed her into Oxford's door.

"Aw, that's healthy!" someone commented for all.

"Really!"

Thursday is not one of the major drinking nights on the Avenue but all evening long and into the night, crowds were coming out, walking down the dry pavements with their hands in the pockets of long, plaid patterned shorts and khaki cargoes making the bars their destination.

The people coming out had their reasons and seemed to treat the evening like any Friday or Saturday night.

After hours there was even a small but significant influx of Hip Hop thumping cars to Mark's and Gitsis' from other zones of the city. And, though they had been out in force Wednesday night when the bars offered their specials, the Blue-and-Whites were taken by apparent surprise, put in few appearances and were not needed.

Steve, the Old Guy, came down to the street from his room earlier than his usual and in a mood.

He walked down through the zone and made his late-night purchases early at the No Name Convenience at Averill and across the Avenue at the 7/Eleven.

Leaving the No Name place, he even commented,

"I'm out earlier tonight."

He knew that the owner marked his arrival as time to close for the night.

"Yes," the owner agreed in his accented voice. "You are."

The Comedian, one of the streets more entertaining panhandlers, circled about on the corner of Rowley and up on the sidewalk on his bicycle wanting to get through to the line up out in front of the Angry Duck. He had a joke for them but a stubby bear-like dude with a black beard and a ball cap was blocking his passage.

"DON'TCHA WANNA MAKE TEN CENTS," the dude was laughing combatively. "C'MON! Y'KIN LICK MY ASS FOR TEN CENTS!"

Coming back around and down off the sidewalk out into the avenue on his bike, the Joker almost ran into Steve and excused himself with his usual grin in his voice and on his narrow crumpled dark face.

"S'Okay!"

The line-up sucking on their cigarettes looked between embarrassed and amused behind the angry dude.

He turned to them and in the same loud voice proclaimed,

"Y'OUGHTA PAY ME KEEPIN' THAT BUM FROM HITTIN' Y'UP!" He was certain that, "'AT GUY'S NO CRACK ADDICT HE DON'T WANTA MAKE TEN CENTS!"

Faintly laughing, one of the Ducks sort of agreed, went along,

"It's such a sweet deal, too!"

"DAMN RIGHT! THAT GUY'S NO CRACK HEAD!"

It was still too early to judge the Last Call Crowd at Oxford's and Steve, the Old Guy, went on along to Starbuck's. On the deserted patio in front, he piled his bags on the metal corner table and turned a chair to be in the area light from the corner of the Plum House next door. Across Monroe and half way down to Oxford's at the other end of the block, the newly opened Standard Lounge was doing business inside but there were and had been all evening no crowds in front of its entry way. Perhaps its patrons were taking seriously that whole 'Lounge' thing. With Monroe Mart and everything else closed for the night, the Oxford Street end of the block is relatively quiet after the last bus of the night pulls up or passes by the stop in front of the convenience at ten to one.

Other than late arriving crowds with their hands in their pockets or beery singles, couples and crowds of early home-bound ex-patrons occasionally passing, there were only silently racing late night bicyclists and clattering, leg swinging skate board kids up there.

The Old Guy had brought a book in his back pack.

Eventually, as Steve should have known would happen, a passing beer-phased single came along. He was representatively moon-faced, curly haired and large size and his hands were in his pockets.

His step was slow, wandering away early from the bars, and stopped altogether on the sidewalk just the other side of the railing.

With empty confusion, he inquired,

"Wha'cha doin'?"

"Reading!"

His confusion continuing, Mr. Moon wondered, after a long moment,

"Why?"

"'Cuss there's no news on the cable!" Steve said in his mood.

Without blinking, Mr. Moon thought about that, could make no sense of it and wandered on alone homeward once more.

It was June 25th, 2009 and at Last Call at Oxford's Pub the last departing crowd of five or six young people stood about on the sidewalk until all of twenty after two or two-thirty. It was a mild night and conversation was casual among them. Few opinions of any note were expressed. Only a short round guy with big glasses was conversing, really, and he was grinning over his own brilliance.

"The guy grew up performing. He never did anything else. It has to have screwed him up, y'know? He has to have been screwed up."

He grinned, too, through a tale he'd heard about a concert in Africa.

"He goes over there - in the jungle and all. They don't even have electricity. And, they're setting up all this stuff. He puts on this show. They've never seen anything like him. They think he's a god or something. They probably still think he's a god over there!"

Steve watched them going away. They were going off to Gitsis' for garbage plates the way they always do after hours on Monroe.

More.

Saturday night...

...well, Sunday now that it is coming on four in the morning, cars are still crowding the lot down at 7/Eleven.

Gangs are hanging out on the cars and around them and up on the walk that fronts the building and follows around its south side.

When not clowning with one another, guys are appreciating and shouting out the girls who go by them showing all that leg in tight short Saturday Night dresses that glitter and shine.

Coming back out into the night, the ladies hold their store swag above their breasts with fastidious slender hands. On high heels, they strut and sway as they walk through the lot in that careless slow and arrogant way they have when they know they are Saturday night.

Engines rev and idle and rap radio booms and declares.

Big Deal Pizza, Mark's Hots, North End News are the few other spots still thriving north of Goodman. South of that street, way up the Avenue, there are customers coming and going out of Gitsis' diner, too, a clot of crowd gathered about its door - guys shouting out girls and clowning with one another.

And the Pink Lady is still working there with her hand out.

All the time, perfect and quiet night is in place only a little way up any of the side streets of black tree tops and street lit wood frame houses sleeping off Monroe.

Even broad, cross-town Goodman Street, as soon as it is west of the Avenue, is out of what is still happening north and south on Monroe, now that the traffic to the Expressway bridge and South Wedge has died down.

Pass the end of Blockbuster, the Rite Aid is set back well off the street behind its black expanse of parking lot. The only car there, for the moment, belongs to the store security guard whose shift has something like another two hours to go before he can drive it home after dawn.

Alone, Aaron, the clerk, is out for a smoke. He is not up near the corner of the building where the drug store entrance and most of the light is, but sits on the sidewalk curb toward the west end of the building. There he is nearer the single row of dark trees along the fence line at the back of the lot just beyond the end of the store windows with his shoes on the blacktop and his knees up before him.

"Naw, I'm not hiding," he smiles in his quiet way. "I'm just out for a smoke."

"Not you; me. I'm hiding out."

"Crowds still busy on the Avenue?" he wonders, with maybe an envious, at least a knowing and interested smile.

"That, too; but there is somebody I'm trying to avoid."

"Oh!"

That requires some explanation, even if he seems ready to accept it without.

"I had a Monroe Moment just now. I was down at 7/Eleven...?"

This was when the scene at the convenience store was just getting started. The lot was already jamming up but it was before thee were gangs hanging out and partying. There were only actual customers hurrying in and out again. Maybe some few lingered at cars just parked or sat in them standing out front. But it hadn't gone epic yet.

"Coming out, there is this wad of bills on the ground...."

"Really?"

"No big wad. But more than enough that I feel wealthy at having found it."

His brows lift further, knowing there is more to it than just that.

"So, after, I'm walking around thinking I need to do something with some of this money - so the gods will know I appreciate the favor."

"Seems reasonable," he concedes.

"I was up around Gitsis' watching the crowd there and thinking about what's in my pocket. Do I want to go into Rookie's and buy a pie, offer slices to people on the street? Some such thing as that, y'know?"

"That sounds good."

That was back when the crowd at the diner, at Gitsis', was getting most active. The line-up of people waiting to get in for food stretched south from the door. Customers coming out and folk just hanging out were all over the parking lot the other way and jamming the sidewalk, populating the corners of Wilmer Street. Some wild girl was chasing a guy around through all of it all loud and emotional. It was hard to tell if she was truly angry or only pretending and it was harder to say if his laughter at her chasing him was merely mocking along with here or somehow nervous at each escape he was making and a little uncertain how long his luck would hold out. Everyone else in the crowd was laughing out loud at the spectacle.

"Then I see the Pink Lady - you know that panhandler, that tiny woman who hustles about everywhere with her hand out, wears a pink and white jacket?"

Slender and brittle as a long fallen branch; pointy chin and wide open eyes that are all that there is to a little bony face staring up in sad expectation and supplication while a voice squeaks a mousy plea -

"Excuse me, could you help me, all I need is...."

Appearing suddenly, in the middle of all that is happening, all the partying that is going on, her leaf-like and bone-veined hand outas she stares and asks,

"Excuse me...."

Aaron's brows lift and widen, his slow grin deepening with recollection.

"Oh, yeah! I've seen her," his mellow voice recalls; and, then, darkening a shade on reflection, he says, too, "People can get made at her."

Oh, yeah!

The woman out of the bars, especially, can be cruel, at times, can get hysterical angry even and go off on her. Or, seeing the Lady coming to intrude on their evening, they can beat her to the punch with wildly exaggerated mimicry -

"Ex-Cuse Me! Could you give me a doll-ar! All I need is a Doll-ar!"

They'll go right up in her face and shout. Bewildered, the Lady will stare with a suddenly terrified and amazed, lost look and, then, back off and hurrying away in her snipping, scissor-legged way.

The men are only ever testy and gruff but the women can be aggressive and mean-spirited with her.

"Yeah," Aaron recalls, "she's hit me up before."

"I'm passing through the crowd at the time when I see her there at the corner of the building. For once I see her before she sees me and, I figure, okay, there's a five in that wad I found so...!

"I slip it to her as I'm going by!"

"Well, that was nice."

"I'm feelin' good about it. I'm walkin' off, thinkin' I've taken care, I've done what I needed to do and we're square, y'know?"

"The gods, right?"

"'Xactly. Only, I'm almost through the crowd, just about to cross Wilmer and I knwo she's right behind me!"

Aaron's eyes arch wondering, anticipating.

"She catches me on the next corner, wants to thank me. And - "

Because Aaron seems about to say, again, how nice that must have been -

"She's got her hand out!"

"Oh!" he, now, knows.

The flat wheedling little voice that she has; the wide open sorry expressionless but pleading eyes, were all working.

"'But, cudjahmakit just a little more?' she says to me. 'All I need is a little more ...'"

"O, yeah!" Aaron grin and quiet laugh has got it. "She always does that! All you can do is laugh!"

"Oh, yeah! That's exactly what I did, too."

Head back and laugh out loud; all you can do.

"Waved her away and walked off, told her, 'No! That's it! That's all there is!'"

"She's done that to me, too!" he confesses. "That's way people get so angry with her."

"Persistent!"

"Never stops!"

"Tell me about it!"

At 7/Eleven, just now, cars arriving had to stop to find a way through the crush of traffic to find parking. At Big Deal scraps of crowd lined the walk eating out of pizza boxes and jawing before the light of the long windows with pie bakers and crowd inside behind them like a living picture of Saturday Night. At Mark's the bouncer on his high stool in the entry way was peering inside the diner to see if he could admit any customers and the slender security guard with the gun belt about him and the chrome cuffs hanging in the small of his back worked the hitched theater rope that keeps the crowd outside in line on the sidewalk.

And, up at Gitsis' the crowd might be thinner than it had been out in front but it was still to be seen from the corner of Monroe and Goodman.

"She is still up there, just now when I come back up the street. She was going after folks at their cars parked along the curb at Enright's."

"Y'know, y'd think she'd go home some time."

"I was going to cross and go back up the other side. But, then, I see her come out in the street headed that way, too."

Moving in her tight bee-line manner, she was cutting across the street angling to intercept.

"And I just knew!"

"I don't mind when they ask straight out for change for beer," Aaron allows and, then, thinks, too, of the ones he doesn't like to see coming, "We had this guy come in here one morning, real late. He has a white shirt and a jacket and he's carrying a gas can. Says he has just got a job here and needs gas to get home to Buffalo. But the guy's wearing sneakers. And who's just getting off work and going to drive all that way just to turn around?"

Oh, yeah!

"I got the gas can my first summer here. He was going to Syracuse - to get a job! And looked almost about to cry. Month or so later he came up to me again - still tryingot get to Syracuse and that job!"

Well, if you're on Monroe, you know; if you visit there enough times, you learn.

It is a street of panhandlers and small con artists. There is the comedian who rolls up on a bicycle and asks, 'Hey, hey, goddah joke for yuh!' There is the guy tall as a basketball star carrying around a fistful of plucked flowers for sale. Some day soon the Harmonica Man will return to the crowds out in front of O'Cal's or Oxford's or the Angry Duck, saying, 'Y'like the blue? See, here's the blues!'"

And all the time,

"Say, brother...."

"I don't wanna borther y'none....'"

If you live on Monroe, you know them; ifyou come there long enoug, you learn.

You Know This Guy?

Cass,

I think you might know this guy.

There was, briefly, the appearance of trouble out in front of Oxford's Pub the other night. But the trouble was never some how real.

You know how I am about smiles, how that's always the first thing I notice about someone and all - and, for me, it was the smirk, the sneer this young guy wore the whole time I watched him that made the thing no trouble right from the start.

It was that hour around closing and a weekend night and there was a pretty constant traffic on the street and sidewalk, as there always is. The crowd in front of the pub grew and faded and grew again in the usual way over the better part of an hour. And the particular smaller gang of ex-patrons and casual customers that got my attention, changed in number and faces, too, over that time. Most of the folk smoking their cigarettes and talking their parting conversations barely noticed that anything at all was happening.

A young guy with a lean and close-shaven jaw and a hard grin was the center of that little gang's attention and its attraction for me.

He had been ejected, asked to leave the Pub and he was objecting to that - at least ostensibly. His objection was occasionally persistent and amiably hostile. I'll call him, for the moment, the Ejected. I could call him the Objector but, perhaps, he'd object to that for reasons of political connotation.

Given your background and recently deployed status, my guess is your attention would have been drawn to him, too. He'd be familiar to you, you'd have singled him out, too, while others might only see a good looking young guy if they noticed him at all. Part of it would be his physique. You'd have spotted the over all fitness of him and his attitude, the way he presented himself. We get a lot of young guys coming to Oxford's who work out and, weather permitting, like to show off what they've accomplished in gyms and health clubs. They bare their biceps in tee-shirts ignoring the sharp winds of April. They don't dress sloppy casual like most of the rest of the guys who turn out on the avenue evenings. They wouldn't care for the comparison but they are the male equivalents of the girls who bare their shoulders and show off their thighs in short dresses while there are still traces of snow on the ground.

There are usually one or two or more every night there is a sizeable crowd.

But, out there, you'd have known the Ejected One's form as different and, to you, familiar. There was an overall perfection to the young man's build and set up. His torso and hips and arms weren't honed by a two or three times a week hour or two at World Gym and he wasn't fit just for evening appearances in the bars Friday and Saturday night. Nothing about the guy was just for display. He had been trained more purposefully than that.

I guess you could say this guy was uniform. And I think you'll know what I mean.

In the crowd he was with, none of the others were that or anything like that.

Most were, likely, new friends he'd made while drinking in the bar or guys who had seen him inside and gravitated to him, now that he'd been asked to leave. Some one or two may have been old friends of his one old friend who wasn't out there until later, till after closing, well after closing and with whom he eventually went home.

By that time, he had been deserted by the rest.

At first, the Ejected and those who went out with him were tight on the sidewalk just out in front of the Pub's doorway.

"I said, 'I just want to finish my drink,'" the Ejected One was saying, stating his case. "'N'at fat-fuck wou'dn' let me! What the hell's'at?"

But, like I say, he was grinning when he said it. He said it like it was a good joke, after all.

The others were in a swirl around him. They were grinning, too, enjoying the joke. They were all sympathetic to his cause and someone or two were urging him to go back inside.

"They shouldn'oughta!"

"Yeah, man, should call'em on't!"

I have said it before - one night when the cops swarmed in front of Oxford's and took away a slight young drunk who got into it with another and was put out by the bouncers. And I'll say it again - in all these situations there is always one guy who thinks he's Mike Tyson and at least one or two more who think they are Alan Derschowitz. Nine times out of ten, the fighter is the one the cops have the least trouble from. The fighters lose what ever animus motivated them with the one punch they throw. By the time the cops arrive they are already wondering what all the fuss is about. The cuffs go on and they take a seat in a squad car looking a little lost and puppy dog staring out the rear window wondering who'll take them home. Unusually, no one hears another peep out of them. The lawyers all want to argue with any cop who will listen to them for a time and 'no,' 'get out of here,' 'leave,' mean nothing to them. Even an officer pointing a finger in their faces saying, 'I've told you three times; you're one second from goin'!' won't get them to more than go up the street a ways dragged along by friends and still arguing about rights and their knowing the law over their shoulders. Even at that, they'll be back at least one more time - just wanting to ask, again, about how bail works. They know all there is to know about the law but bail procedures have to be explained to them two or three times more before calmer heads can get them to a car and away home. It would be interesting to know how many of these Legal Samaritans actually show up in the queasy morning after at the lock-up with actual check books in hand.

This occasion, fortunately, there was this young woman who was with these guys for a time but about to leave with another group. She put her arms out and somehow moved the lot of them out away from the door almost to the curb side before going off with her other friends. She was saying things like,

"It'll only get the cops here!"

And,

"The guys, the bouncers are just doing their job!"

She wasn't as high or as wide as any one of the guys in that crowd, and they weren't the equal of the Ejected One whose chest she barely came up to. But she did good work out there and, then, followed her friends to Gitsis' Diner where they were going to get in ahead of the after hours crowd.

On the curb the Ejected stood and smirked with the Avenue and the after hours traffic behind him and his admirers ranged around him. For the longest time, as closing came and went, they were in that one spot and the conversation took a turn that introduced the expression I now know the Ejected One by.

Perhaps the young lady's several times repeated words in favor of bouncers put him off, for a time, talking trash about the fat-fuck who'd put his hands objectionably on him. At least, his objection to the fat-fuck was reduced to one point.

"That guy's no bullet-stopper! 'At fat-fuck'd never make a bullet-stopper! Not ever!"

The expression delighted the rest of them. To a one, they were the familiar Oxford's clientele in their baseball jerseys and caps and Hollister tees. They asked questions of the Bullet-Stopper with admiring smiles and quickly wanted to know if this one or that one among passersby were likely bullet-stoppers or not.

One look and the guy could tell the ones who weren't combatant material and never would be (nearly everyone) from the one or two who might have been at one time or someday might be. It was the game of a few minutes and got the subject off the Bullet-Stopper's having been asked to leave Oxford's before he could finish that final beer. The evaluated ones were guys walking back home with sacks of dinner from Gitsis' or going off to cars parked along the avenue, dashing out into traffic for Rookie's Express pizza parlor over on the corner and there appeared to be no particular reason for any one of them to be singled out.

I was drawn into it.

I'd passed near by the gang of them on my return to my stoop beside Oxford's from a walk down through the zone while they were just out of the bar. Standing in my place in 640 Monroe's doorway, I'd watched them being moved out to the curbside. I'd heard Iraq and two tours mentioned and had admired the young man's self-confidence and had taken in the looks of unadulterated man-love, guy crush on the other pasty faces around him from that perch. I saw this game of evaluation and the kind of impromptu recruitment talk that followed it as all a part of that starry eyed male adulation for the one who has been where the action is.

"'At fat-ass, he'll never stop a bullet," the guy was telling the bright shining eyes after barely glancing around at one of the guys going off with a crowd.

A couple of the others had their heads together, I noticed, just then, and they were whispering and grinning in my direction. To the majority of young guys out of Oxford's I'm marked down as a Monroe panhandler, some gray bearded never was.

"Him?" the Bullet-Stopper considered when one of the two of them pointed in my direction and asked.

"He coulda been in the day!"

I was flattered by the assessment, however inappropriately.

There was talk of combat pay and the probability of his being rotated yet again over there, or somewhere. There was some back and forth between the Bullet-Stopper and a girl and her girlfriend who were leaving with a party. It was a conversation briefly funny and hostile, the sort of thing that is always going on between young guys who have asked and been turned down and the 'Lesbians' they have approached in the crush of Oxford's.

Eventually the changing faces of the small clump of guy-crush friends around him dwindled and the Bullet-Stopper was left making cell calls to someone who wouldn't come down to the Pub this time of night. I got the sense that it was some other young woman, like the young lady who'd moved him away from Oxford's door, and that she was saying some of the same things to him about the bar staff and its treatment of him.

After he put up his cell, at any rate, without his crowd of admirers about him, the Bullet-Stopper took his hands out of his pockets and casually swung up to Oxford's doorway for the first time since I'd been watching him. He reached his arms wide, as though about to embrace the place and, still grinning, leaned in and addressed the occupant of the chair that is always set just to the inside of the door.

There were no hard feelings.

Soon after that he was joined out on the street by his old friend whom he'd told to stay when the bouncers told him he, himself, would have to leave. His old firend was tall and slender and the two of them dodged traffic jogging over to Rookie's. There he remained outside and made a couple of last calls on his cell while his old firend went in and glad handed the counterman. One call repeated the urgings and suffered the rejections of the previous call and ended with the same brief angry spate of words. A little later the Bullet-Stopper was inside Rookie's, in the tight well-lit scene in the pizza parlor, grinning his now familar grin and offering his hand around.

Ordinarily, it being the weekend, I'd have already moved on from Oxford's by that time. I was late, now, for the after hours scenes developing down at Gitsis' and beyond on the corner of Goodman. But I hadn't been lured away by the sight of any cop cars gathering with swirling lights out front of Mark's or the congregating of a jumbled mass of tricked-out cars totally crowding the front of the closed Gulf Station. I hadn't heard any angry words break out over the traffic as young gangs coming in to Gitsis' crossed one another on the street as things turned dramatic.

I was sticking with this guy, I guessed.

Eventually, a taxi van pulled up before Hunan Wok, next door to me at 640, and the Bullet-Stopper and his old friend dodged traffic back to this side of Monroe to get in it. The usual is that cabs arrive and, maybe, there is a discussion between those piling in as to where they are going now that the bars are closed. Or, with a cab secured, there is a late conferral on matters of finance - hands digging into pockets and thin wads of the left over bills of a night out counted and compared. Either the would-be fares get out, again, and start walking home, or, the cabs depart with them.

I was getting ready to pull up roots and walk, myself, at last. But the Bullet-Stopper got into the front seat of the cab and sat with his back to the passenger side-door with the pizza box on his lap and a party ensued. The driver, one of the Nigerians, I suppose, smiled and accepted a slice as did the pal in the back seat driver's side and the conversation was warm and friendly having little to do, immediately, with a destination.

They were parked out there the whole time I was down at Gitsis' and didn't leave until the pie was gone, I imagine.

I liked this guy and I liked him long before he mistook me for a possible former Bullet-Stopper like himself. I liked him the instant I saw him freshly ejected from Oxford's door and grinning over being put out before he could finish his drink. I liked him despite his denigrating the fat-fuck whom I suspected is really a guy I know for a very decent bouncer who is never more agressive than he needs to be and is liked by one and all. I liked the ease with himself he had and the fact that he was laughing at his situation and, maybe, a little, at those around him who were so worshipful and warming themself in the reflection of his glory.

I just liked the guy. He was okay.

I think you'd have like him, too, having, yourself, been where he was.

Perhaps you know him.



May 30, 2009.

"There Are Smiles."

"KIMBA!"

From behind, back at Oxford's door, that annoying Jeremy voice springs after them with a smile in it and Kimberley's slow walk away fades in only two short steps to a stand still.

He's come out of the bar after her and, crap! she's going to turn around and go back up to him. He will be just there in front of or just up from the bar entrance in those stupid suspenders , silly, silly toy goatee stuck under his lower lip like a blond smudge. And, now, crap, crap, there's going to be more to this scene.

Goddamn and it was over with, too!

For the lingering moment, though, Kimberley is only standing looking down a little forward with that same bliss-ed out smiling look on her face that she's had on ever since returned to them from telling Jeremy she'd decided, at last, they should take a break from one another.

But, now, she is going to turn back crap, crap, crap!

"Kim-BER!" she is warned, not that it'll do any good!

And, up ahead of them, where she has trotted off to on the way to the car, tiny Melissa, too, in her knit cap and jacket, looking all candy pink and white like a frosted Christmas cookie, has turned back to them with shoulders hunched in tight against the cold and pleads, too,

"Kim-MY! C'mon?" in her mouse voice.

Kimberley, in the bar, in Oxford's, deciding, once and for all, that Kimberley and Jeremy needed a time out, was all excited happy. Her head tilted forward, then too, in that moment, hands gripping the sides of the little standing table they were sharing. Her face wore a big old grin - a goddam giddy I'm-going-to-do-it-I-can't-believe-I'm-really-really-going-to-do-it grin. It was like she was going to burst out and say just that. Her eyes glittered with the excitement of what she was thinking. And, then, with it done, she came back with this quiet, accomplished smile, bliss-ed out and half daffy, but in a good way.

'Lissa took a picture on her cell to commenorate the occasion.

And, like the flash had fixed it, that look hasn't gone away. It doesn't even yet fade when she does turn around and Jeremy is standing there with out even a jacket on having come out after her with only his own goofy smile.

God, these people!

Again, another useless caution,

"Kim-ber!"

But Kimmy takes in a breath along with her smile. And she's smiling even more, a smile almost like when she decided there before but not that nearly about to burst. It is like the giddiness of having chosen her course, at last, is still with her but the bliss-ed over with having actually done the thing once and for all is there, permanently, too.

And - she goes straight up to him, any way, right up to him standing waiting with his dumb comical grin.

God knows what they can have to say to one another! It isn't good that his happy, oh so smarmy confident face keeps right on looking down over her except when ever he says whatever he says and, then, he keeps looking away to one side every time like he can't look at her and say it. What ever IT is!

God! Does he even know what a clown he is?

Oxford's door stayed open behind him for some reason and ...

Inside they are playing 'More Than a Feeling,' that mom-and-dad oldie with the great riff. It comes blasting over them out the door way so there's no telling what it is they're saying to one another.

But it can't be good.

"Is she coming?" Tiny 'Lissa is returning and is curious and concerned to know.

She's drunk, of course. Her little feet mince and wobble. It's like she's walking a line. Like cops have pulled her over and she's walking a line on the pavement, failing a sobriety test.

"Who knows? Aaaaagh!"

The night is black all the way up to the pinpoint stars.

"Well," she asks, still with that curious questioning whine in her voice that becomes especially concerned just at the end, "What are they s-a-ying?"

And, now, it is plain. Too, too good to be true but - Kimberley is explaining it all to him again, what she said before. His lips are still smiling looking down on her face but he is only listening, now, and no longer talking at all and looking away at the window glass when he does.

"She's telling him it's over!"

Maybe it is over. At last!

Then, Kimberley, having said her piece and left Jeremy with nothing more he has to say, has turned and is starting slowly back to them.

But Jeremy's smile is curled, too, in a new way, now, and he watches her go a moment more looking after her appreciatively before going back into the bar. And, then, too, downward cast and private, Kimmy's blissful smile has a thoughtful sly look about it now.

"'Snot over!" little 'Lissa declares with sad certainty and cynicism.

No, it isn't over.

"Le's go," Kimmy says, walking right by them along with that smile, the small sly part of it a secret thought she thinks she's keeping to herself.

God! Fuck it!

It's Sunday; That Explains It.

Wouldn'tjah know:

It's Sunday night and you can walk by a bar on Monroe without picking your way through a crowd asking for a light, sneaking drinks out on the street, vomiting. You can hear yourself think. You see a panhandler or a crazy person coming you can light right out and cross the avenue without waiting for traffic to clear.

I'm down across Meigs and I walk straight by that bar they've put in down there, the Park Bench, without noticing it has opened, at last, till I come to the corner of the building where they have put out a sandwich sign pointing down it's side to the new front entrance.

I get what I need from the no name convenience store next door and the clerk and I agree there is a new bar in the neighborhood. Thursday night, he thinks it was that they opened.

"They are open now," he informs me in that quiet, careful sounding African accented voice of his.

Concerned only with making a living out of his little store and selling gas, it is apparent he hasn't taken all that much notice of his new business neighbor's presence.

I have no other reason to do so, but I cross to 7/Eleven because I can without interruption and because of something I was told the other night.

I was in Rite Aid Friday or Saturday and the subject was the crowds that were out in the bars and on the street with the fine weather we were having. The subject was mostly all Gitsis' and Mark's and the scene that we expected there would be out in front of those spots after hours. It was largely, too, remembrance of how it had been last summer before the shooting that shut down Gitsis' weekend night after one in the morning.

I recalled how the crowds that come on to Monroe for all-night eats when the bars all close in other parts of town took, after that, to going down to Mark's and raiding 7/Eleven for snacks, instead. Without mentioning it in particular, I remembered how, for a weekend or so, the crowd was baffled by the absence of Gitsis' to go to but, then, began pulling into 7/Eleven's parking lot in their polished street machines till there were traffic jams in there and party scenes started up among the snarls.

"7/Eleven," I only mentioned, "they had to take on that security guard."

"Joe, big guy; he was okay,' the Rite Aid clerk, Aaron, remembered him fondly.

"You know John?" he asked.

John, the clerk, is 7/Eleven after midnight.

"Sure. I started going into 7/Eleven late nights for John - and that guy Dave that worked with him."

Aaron looked baffled.

"I don't know a Dave," he said.

"Tall skinny dude with a beard, always cleaning his nails," I characterized Dave.

The subject stayed John - squat, hair to this shoulders and no neck you can see - since we both know him and how he manages the After Midnight at 7/Eleven. John, we both agreed, hates Panhandlers who hang around his store and sneak thieves who pilfer merchandise.

"The other night," Aaron told me, "somebody busted out the window over at Rent-a-Center and just started walking away with a flat screen. John was out there and followed the guy. The cops busted him."

Now, Sunday night, John, himself, remembers it.

"Oh, yeah, yeah," he says, when I mention it, "Wednesday night, it was!"

He is raking merchandise in under the UPC reader and making change with both hands. The 7/Eleven is busy if nothing else is on a Sunday night.

"Guy," he says, taking it up high, "was walkin' off here like it was nuthin'. I followed him down around there and the cops came and busted his ass!"

We agreed that was a very fine thing, should happen more often.

Back out on the corner of the store, overlooking Meigs and Monroe, the parking lot foreground is all fast arriving cars and vans and trucks that pull in and sit with their engines running, stereo systems rapping and rocking but the streets beyond are that dark and that empty still, that Sunday night. When I'm ready to, I can cross the long way through the intersection to the New York Stylee corner. I can stroll across that long way unchallenged by so much as a bicyclist with a bell. I can take my time doing that and check out the front of Rent-a-Center though there is nothing there now, of course, to see. I can glimpse that doorway down from there and be reminded of that zombie drunk Friday night who was a good ten minutes angling his key at his lock as I came and went from my beyond Meigs stops.

Coming up the dark block toward Woodlawn with its bright corner, Mark's Texas Hots, I'm thinking how it is around Closing Time and there is nearly no one out on the street. There are no gangs of kids pouring out of O'Callaghans to dash through traffic and get in line at Mark's front door. No one is spilling out to hang around in front of Acme Bar and Pizza or the Sports Page, either.

Holding the door open at Mark's, is this runty little guy a half inch higher than a midget. He has a small face that comes to a point at the tip of his nose ferret fashion and he is still dressed for winter yet in heavy jacket and a wool cap.

Coming through, in the light of the entry, there is this slim Pretty Woman with long straight hair and, instantly, I am hoping she isn't attached in some way to this ferret guy.

Then, as she slips out and sidles around the corner to stand and wait, the doorway frames a large tall dude in a bright yellow tee-shirt like two acres of sunflowers seen from a half a mile away. He and the midget are quite the contrast. He is wide as the door, itself, and tall enough to seem to want to stop coming through it. He is hauling a sack of take out that could feed a boat load of Somali Pirates but it is only a snack for this one guy. Slim has her own tiny sack she's holding on to and, I think, she'd better only pick at it when they get where they're going.

"Gonafiniszat, Hon? 'mm'mmm!"

Scripted in red high on the billboard of this tall guy's Carney shoulders as I follow them up the sidewalk is 'Got You Stimulus Package Right Here!'

I'm following the couple of them, but only as far as Acme Bar and Pizza, where they think they see someone they know through the window. Then, it's the reverse and they are coming along just behind me the whole way pass the Sports Page and Country Sweet Chicken and Ribs. I'm hoping that one of these cars parked along the curb is theirs because Hightower doesn't seem to notice there is any one else on the street and I definitely don't want to come between him and his diner.

But no such luck.

So, corner of Edmonds, I veer right and step off the curb without my usual caution. I don't look around dreading to see a bright sunburst of tee-shirt coming up over my shoulder one nano-second ahead of sprawling on the asphalt with a size nine imprinted on my back.

Otherwise I wouldn't be so bold.

Instead, this baby blue jeep jitterbugs around the corner just as I've got a foot down in the street. It comes careening off Monroe as though the parking space on Edmonds along side Sol Burrito were the last spot in walking distance of the avenue on a Saturday night.

I have to step back.

It is a close call - jeep or Sassquatch?

Only, as it happens, the Pretty Woman has veered left and taken her large friend with her out into Monroe to cross.

He is saying,

"What night is this?"

"Sunday, Hon, it's Sunday."

"That explains it."


May 4, 2009.

A Hell of a Thing.

"Guys?"

A Rochester Blue and White is parked in the avenue entrance at the closed and darkened Gulf across from Wilmer Street. The Gulf has only a dim blue-white glow within it and the block next door is dark in the way that brick building are at such five in the morning times.

"It's a helluvah thing to ask you, fellas, but..."

And one really does hate to disturb you...

An even dimmer crimson glow is there low within the cruiser's front seat and the officer passenger is shuffling paper work about in the seat between himself and the driver - printed forms, Incident Reports, Tour logs and such one imagines them to be.

"...I just came down from my room and...there is this homeless guy in the lobby, the atrium of the building."

One really does hate to ask it, to have you disturb him but...

A bundle was seen through the window in the locked and heavy stairway door coming down, a bundle of some sort in the lobby, the atrium down below beyond the door. In a hesitant instant it was recognizable as a person's shoulders and back in baggy brown jacket. Some one sitting or crouching was there across from the residents' post boxes in the four or five foot square tiled space between the stair door and the outer street door of the building.

"It really is a hell of a thing to ask..."

To do.

In a further hesitant instant, the bundle of clothing acquired a leathery-brown face beneath an o.d. wool cap, a suddenly aware face that looked in and up the stairs. And, then, there was no going back, no further second thought of going out the building's back door, instead, into the dark and possibly dangerous parking lot. There had been that incident; someone had been robbed back there a month or so back, the building super had said, had warned.

"...an' I hate like hell to ask it..."

It is such a thing to cross the street and not just look the other way, keep about one's one business, live and let live...

"But I know the Super, Gene, would roust the guy if he were awake, up..."

His back was in the corner where the plate glass and lockless street door hinges while his heavy shoes were wedged where the stair door hinges open. His knees up, he was trying to fashion another cigarette from too much stringy tobacco piled on a rolling paper and making a mess of it. Strands were falling off and about him to the tile floor. There was an odor, too, much of it tobacco that had already emanated in to the bottom of the stair well.

"He says he's just waiting for a bus in an hour...."

Finishing the roll and repositioning his thick soled shoes so that the stair door could swing out enough to emit a person were undertaken all together along with explanations of his presence.

He says, too, he's from around the neighborhood. That he is known and all right.

"But I know Gene...well, I know he'd want the guy rousted. It's just...."

Wouldn't have a quiet word to the wise have been better? Is it better to involve them?

"Which is your building, sir?" is all that the officer driver wants to know.

On the angle across the avenue the only light remaining on at this end of the block is there behind the narrow foot deep door stoop surrounded by its rectangle of rough gray stone. There isn't much that can be seen of the postal lobby through the plate glass of the street door. The man within has positioned himself so there is nothing much of him to be seen at any angle from the street.

"640, the doorway next to Oxford's."

The avenue is so dark and silent and dead at this hour. The officer driver only looks over the street in the right direction and doesn't move to get out or to put the car into gear. The officer rider only continues to shuffle paper.

How is it that this happens now? Will this, after all, happen?

"It's such a hell of a thing...!"

An awkward and awful thing...

"And I really do hate asking it."

Perhaps it is necessary to back away, to leave them to do what they need to do without further involvement, without eyes on them doing it.

The Blue and White sits motionless just behind the sidewalk on the pavement of the station lot the time it takes to walk down almost to the corner and it only moves to pull out into the avenue when the street is almost crossed to the newspaper box waiting beside Gitsis' diner door.

How do such things happen?

The cruiser half fades into the shadows of the block, of 642 and 646. It goes up even beyond the alley way to the parking lot behind the block, before turning and, then, disappearing altogether into a space among the parked cars well above 640.

The wide windowed and brightly lit Gitsis', at this hour of a Thursday morning, pictures a quiet and family friendly diner with greenery potted along the inside of the glass and hanging, too, in decorative pots along the aisles. There are gleaming electric light fixtures that reflect in paneled mirrors on load-bearing square columns and on the walls of the dining room. Of the few customer inside, an old man in beige slacks and a sports shirt, wearing a white canvas hat crumpled on his head is standing paying his check at the register up front.

How does such a thing happen?

One officer and, then, the other are out on the street. They move slowly down toward the unseen door.

Lethargically move...unwillingly...laggardly about an unsavory business? Or just routinely about a job?

The paper from the box has a headline, something about CITY CRIME FIGURES...and the old man's face emerging from the diner door looks surprised anyone might be on the street at this hour of the morning, maybe, even a little concerned. His car is in the side lot and he hurries to it.

The two officers are at the doorway and stopping, not walking on beyond it as seemed at first possible. The driver with the light colored hair, the heavy set unresponsive looking face is first and doesn't seem to look within the lobby, doesn't seem to have seen anything of interest. He stands straight ahead, instead, and looks out across the street, hands on his belt.

Gone? Did he go? Did he take the word to the wise unspoken and leave after being seen, noticed?

And, then, it does happen the way it does happen and the officer driver turns and pulls at the door stepping inside while his younger partner following turns, too, in toward the doorway and holds the door open out on the street with a stiff arm.

Mark's Hots, where the breakfasts are cheaper than at Gitsis', is a long block and a half down Monroe and on the other side of the street. It is a small square yellow sign hanging out over the sidewalk. It is an awful, awkward thing to have to do, to have done. The night is still black all the way down the avenue. There is light only in the Bruegger's Bagel Bakery with the baker inside in his baker's service cap behind the counter in a half lit and empty shop. All the stores and businesses and bars and eateries are darkened windows with some neon left on in them in places down to Mark's. It is a calm night and fair for early April. If it were February and crazy cold outside, or, March with a lake effect storm whipping down the street off Ontario, it would be different. The traffic is all still single cars and vans and not even traffic yet. There might be but isn't a truck or two but there are no buses in an hour. In less than a hour there will be buses but there are no buses yet. The night is that dark that, when the light does comes, the sky won't soften to rose or gold far down the side streets to the east or be that dark blue above the block north and west of the intersection of Meigs and Monroe. It will be only a dull and ordinary Rochester lead.

In Mark's the slinky waitress with the tall face and the blonde and boyish cut hair, the one with rings pierced in her lower lip serves breakfast and the customers are all the usual customers of five-thirty in the morning. At six the sky isn't yet as light as it will be and the African lady is opening the little no name convenience along side Averill for business. Back across from Mark's, Nick's Super Store in the east block is open and lit up and single customers are in and out while, on the corner of Meigs, fares are waiting for a bus downtown.

And a Blue and White is backed into the lot along side the Avenue Pub, hidden from south bound traffic by the brick corner of the building.

If it had been February, March or raining it would have been different.

The guys are overseeing the street in this block, now, though it is hard to tell they are looking at anything at all.

The stair door lurched shut and locked - but the next person out might not have been careful to watch for it, to be sure it did....The lady on three who comes down to wait for the early bus mornings might not have wanted to go out through the lobby; might not have dared go out through the rear door....There were spent paper matches and tobacco shreds and ash on the tiles and, too often, in the morning, there are puddles of urine to be stepped over or around and for Gene to have to clean up.

And, still, it's an awful thing.

At Wilmer it is full day light with the cut off corner of the Cornell building that looks somehow gothic at night stands in front of the dull dawn's early light. The room on the second floor at 640, left without a light on, will be half shadowy while its windows overlooking the inner building court yard with the Cornell next door will be bright with day. The room will have that stillness of a room half dark at dawn in a still sleeping building.

The remembered mess is on the floor of the lobby with out any urine and the remembered tobacco and slightly sour scent is lingering there still and at the foot of the stair well, too.

Still, it is a helluvah thing!



April 29, 2009.

Nichts, Nil, Nada.

Ed,

I don't know why I'm starting this. I don't have a thing.
I'm lettered out. I've done nothing but write folks the last two days. Six pages to Jerry in Penn Yan and another five more to your mom in Virginia. The one, too, that I got off to Linda had to be all fresh material as she is down there in the Finger Lakes and shares her letters with her dad.
I'm writing and editing in marathon sessions all weekend.
I had the last letter to the Lakes almost finished the other night, went out at one in the morning for a walk through the zone and came back with that letter for the Old Dominion formed in my mind.
Eight-thirty in the morning, I had them both complete and collapsed in a heap thinking I'd get up around noon and walk them down to the post office.
Actually, I only slept about two hours - the first time. I caught some news (Go Navy! The only pirates who should live are in Pittsburgh or Disneyland) and, then, slept again. I woke up the second time about quarter after two in the afternoon and had eleven pages to edit and something like two hours and fifteen minutes to do the job, stuff, stamp and address those epistles and leave myself a half hour to walk (run) them down.
You can't count on a six pp letter going through with two stamps on it. Maybe a five pp but even that is iffy.
Two solid hours of backspace, spell check and re-composition in the chair and I was ready to go. I grabbed my gear and made for the door with a few minutes more than that half hour to get to Broad Street Post Office.
Pounding down the stairs, I got a deep diesel growl of possibly a city bus bullying into gear coming up with all the discord of avenue traffic. Damn! Steve, wouldn'tcha just know! It is always happening when I've some place to go late afternoons. The schedule is so crowded with buses there is always one practically waiting for you at the stop or just pulling away as you come out on the street. Luck either way.
And it was sort of that way this time.
There was a bus but it was below at Goodman waiting for the light. Far enough out of reach not to count against me as a near thing.
I was going to have to walk - and move it, with no time to loll along taking in life along the way.
Still, that bus was tantalizingly near, held up at Goodman for some reason long seconds after the light was green. It is a long block passed Gitsis' Diner and running to catch up to get at least the driver's attention so he can pull into the next stop and wait was something I did think about even if it wasn't a real possibility.
As that was happening there was this other matter going on.
Even before I caught sight of that bus, as I was still coming off the stoop, I was aware Darren was sprawling alone on the bus bench out front of Oxford's Pub. And he was talking. He was talking to me.
Darren talks to people. That's his thing. He is around bus stops on the avenue various times of day, a spare runty guy in jeans and denim jacket, ear buds under a ball cap with one of those deep arched bills. He has the kind of crudely chiseled mutt face that always needs a shave and he resents the hell out of anybody hurrying by who can't spare the time to chat. Maybe once you gave him a light or, standing in your doorway, exchanged a few words with the guy. Now, for life, he expects you to take an interest. And his conversations have always long since begun with other passing strangers he thinks should appreciate him or just addressed to the street in general while you're expected to chime right in and agree with him.
"...s'all back'n'forth, back'n'forth..." he was disdaining at me down his should.
Sitting mid-bench, his arms were out on its back and his legs were splayed before him.
"...it's all 'bout business, business, nuthin' but..." he went on saying, shouting, as I hurried by behind him.
"Don't stop, y'...." he complained after me.
I had no time for more than a glance in passing at Enright's to see what kind of late afternoon crowd they had in the Thirst Parlor. Oxford's Pub had had less than a crowd at that hour, but Enright's bar, just behind the plate glass, was crowded around with bodies on stools and even standing between them, here and there. I've seen bodies on those thirsty stools at eight in the morning and small numbers linger in the door after closing at two a.m.
Goodman Street was the first test of how luck would favor my hurrying - if you don't count that bus against me.
I got the light; I got all the lights. That seems to be the way. Even at Meigs, where I didn't exactly get the light, there wasn't any traffic to hold me and I rushed right on by a guy obeying the red Don't Walk.
I wouldn't have minded lingering a little to observe Mr. High Fashion poised on the very southwest corner of Goodman though. He had an especially unusual outfit, today. It was a conservative look for him, that was what was unusual about it. Black slacks tapering to the ankles and a short loose blouse of alternating black and white non-geometric shapes looking like the pelt of some unknown savannah creature - something one might wear to an evening in a tropical bar on a cruise. Mr. High Fashion favors brighter colors and non-tradition combinations of gear - a billowing, almost bulky white suede jacket with sky blue sleeves and tight, tight shiny blue bicycle shorts and leg warmers with matching white head scarf bound by a broad blue band over his coal black complexion and willowy form, the whole completed by red high top sneakers. So, today's look was outstanding not only for April in Rochester, New York. That is if you don't count his black hair highlighted with mustard streaks to match the pattern of his blouse and the whole lacquered to a bicycle helmet sheen.
Usually, too, he does his posing on the bus bench on the Boardman corner of the Avenue, the one cat-a-corner from the bench Darren was on. Yet there he was, removed to the corner at Goodman, standing with arm out to a temporary street sign, his eyes and fine cheek bones set in a steady but unstaring glance far out over the intersection. It might have been a palm he was reaching out to and his gaze might have been fixed far off down a white sand beach. No, he hadn't been driven off his bench by Darren shouting at him; he was only down on the corner for the commuter traffic, the ladies and gentlemen freed from the office buildings and parking garages of midtown and caught in their haltering homeward migration at the light with nothing to do.
I really didn't see anything after that except the usual kids out of Monroe High waiting at the bus stops along the avenue. You don't start to see them until you have crossed Meigs and are in sight of the school, itself, set back behind its athletic field. The bunch of them that gathers near MacDonald's isn't there so much for the bus as just hanging out outside Mickey Dee's. The largest number of kids is always at Monroe and Alexander's stop. From there you can look down the avenue over a long easy grade and see where the expressway loop that circles mid-town has its Monroe access, one of its major intersections, an open plain of exits and on ramps. Every stop down from Alexander has another crowd of kids until late, late afternoon, all the way to the last cross street, Union. At Union the Asian convenience store limits the number of young people allowed inside at any one time. The gang at the stop across from the old Sears building, a deco tower, is usually the thickest and hardest to weave through at that hour. The sidewalk is narrow and the building at the stop is right up square with it. The cool crowd waits up at Alexander; it is the geeks and dweebs and the rest that crowd together opposite the old tower none of them are old enough to know was once a department store.
I walked and dodged through Afternoon Gangland and hit the Inner Loop Canyon at a moment when no one was off or on ramping to interfere with my passage. That was the final possible hold up before the long lazy sweep of the street around the Musuem of Play and its Butterfly Building. Since I've learned to cut through the Museum Drive and around Manhattan Square Park on my way through to Broad there wasn't a crossing light between me and the P.O., only a little more diminishing distance. I hadn't looked at my watch since heading for the door and wasn't about to now. I was sure I was on time and only had to keep pushing it.
Coming down the length of the Museum building, I could have gone by the main entrance and followed the drive around but chose, instead, to cut the corner in the park and go through the children's small play area. A pair of mom's was in the park taking snaps of their kids cavorting on the jungle gym. It was one of those scenes with moms and their kids too young for school in a vacant park all by themselves. Kind of sorry looking with the gray day. But the kids seemed to be having fun.
Hurrying through, I veered right to take the gap between the park terrace and the new pool house, a single story block house faceless in the back but plate glass fronting the end of the reflecting pool it was building along with last summer. The pool is between the length of the high terrace wall and the drive out to Broad Street by way of the front of Manhattan Manor, a high rise downtown housing tower.
Coming through the gap I could hear scraping suggestive of a pair of ice skates. I could only see the near corner of the pool. Its surface looked barely skate able with large patches of white frost and ice that looked watery on top and I could see nothing like a skater. Where there was no frost, the pool was bluer in streaks than the afternoon sky. It was a scene wintrier than Mid-April should be.
Once I was pool side I got the scraping.
Up on the drive a couple of young guys in ball caps were practicing their skate board tricks, making runs and trying to flip them up onto a shin high retaining wall. They were lanky kids. One was in short sleeves while his pal wore a more weather appropriate flannel shirt. Both caps were backwards on their heads. Near the far end of their run, standing up out of the way beside one of the slender trees on the grass berm, a tall blonde girl with long straight hair was watching the boy friends scrape, clatter and clap their boards back and forth in that witless way they have that is only exciting or meaningful to boarders.
We are coming into the season of Rattle and Clatter; it is, now, spring training for the knee scrape and shoulder bruise crowd. They'll be taking over every less than half full parking lot soon to try out their meager few tricks. They succeed so infrequently that the occasional wonder performed the way it is meant to be is raggedly cheered with unexpected amazement. It becomes instant legend for all of the few seconds before the failures begin again. Ordinary success is measured in how minor each failed attempt turns out. Utter failure and its agonies are amiably laughed over.
The girl in the blue wind breaker holding on to the tree watched with staid and stoic concentration alone. I never quite got it before, how she isn't just a spectator at their sport or the the devote fan she is imagined. I saw her waiting for the boys to finish their sport so that time could begin on her own. It probably wouldn't have done to explain that their games always go into overtime.
Well, two stamps were enough postage for either of the big letters I was mailing, after all. I'd hurried for nothing. I could have dropped them in any post box along the way.
I could relax and take my time going home to 640.
Only, once I begin rushing - and I had been rushing since some time the evening before in one sense or another, it is hard to stop.
I heard church chimes and knew it was, at last, five o'clock as I was cutting back through the Museum and almost back to Monroe still hurrying at only a slightly less driven pace.
Everything I saw was the same as it had been - only in reverse.
I rushed all the way back to Gitsis' and, passing there, noticed that I hadn't been gone long enough for Darren to have tired of the bus stop at Lola's. I was in for another encounter.
Fortunately, at the moment of my approach, before I was noticed, someone else whom Darren thought he knew and probably didn't was going by across the street, a woman in a black dress walking past the Lucky Lotus tattoo parlor. He began shouting his conversation for her to hear and, when she walked right on by as if she didn't know him from Adam, he sauntered out into Monroe after her. Talking all the way, he followed her inside the new shop on the corner, Rochester Gold and Silver Buyers, the Neverending Garage Sale.
Just before escaping upstairs, I noticed Darren hadn't attempted going any further into the shop than just inside the door. I imagine the owners, no matter how new to this location on Monroe, already know that he is bad for business.
No, I don't have anything - nichts, nil, nada!
Steve.

Let's Not Get Started.

The patrol cars, twirling red and white and blue, sat aligned perfectly pulled up on the avenue all along side the cars parked at the curb before Gitsis' Diner. Bodies were crowding the diner door in the open air and, with the exception of an occasional one working his or her way inside through the rest, all their suddenly silent attention was down the street on the gathering of young officers on the pavement outside one of the blue and white cars. There were some dozen officers and they were standing and milling a car length and a half south of Gitsis' door.

It was nearing three in the morning and a young black man of a tall and slender build was stretched out full-length on his stomach on the pavement. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was, from time to time, struggling to roll himself over. When his rocking or his trying to twist his legs and shoulders to right himself became too much, some one young man in a blue uniform or other would either kneel between his shoulder blades with cautions or crouch at his feet to hold his angles.

Whether trying to turn or laying as lain, the young man's invective was constant, loud and sputtering.

"BITCH! BITCH! YOU A BITCH! NIGGAHS! YOU'RE NIGGAHS!"

He bitterly protested,

"GODDA SLAVE DOWN ON THE GROUND! THA'S ALL Y'WANT! THA'S WHAT Y'WANT!
GIDDA SLAVE DOWN ON THE GROUND!"

Those lined along the front of the diner, bunched in the diner doorway to see, nearly all of them black, watched in somber silence. The only time any turned away from the scene for a moment was when one or more people came out of the diner and two or more people in the line that was no longer even so much a line for admittance were allowed in the Gitsis' for food.

"NIGGAHS! NIGGAHS! YOU BITCH! I GIDCHEW BITCH!"

The crowd of officers was oddly a seemingly relax gathering standing and talking among themselves apparently of nothing immediate or of importance. For them, it seemed, what ever had happened at Gitsis' was over and they only attended the young man at their feet on his repeated efforts to turn himself to where he could struggle erect which wasn't going to happen. None responded to or, even seemed to be cognizant of his on-going angry and repetitive diatribe. Eventually, a strap retrieved from one of the cars bound his attentuated legs at the ankles. A yellow hood faced about with a fine mesh went over his head when he began to hotly spit his anger out at their feet.

Through the yellow netting of his hood, the young man's violent face could be seen, his sharp chin lifted up off the asphalt from time to time to warn,

"BITCH! I GID YOU BITCH! NIGGAHS!"

The young officers appeared, too, to be unaware of the eyes on them from the diner door.

Leaving their prisoner to yell and trash about on the pavement of Monroe Avenue so long a time seemed cruel and unnecessary, probably even racial to the spectators. Police attentions to the young man on the ground were perfunctory and clinical and their orders unthreatening. Once the mask and strap had been applied, he seemed forgotten entirely. Leaving their prisoner to yell and trash about helplessly on the pavement of Monroe Avenue so long a time seemed cruel and unnecessary and, probably even, racial to the spectators. That it might have been in anticipation that he might exhaust his anger somewhat before transport to the lock-up where more forceful methods would have to be used to restrain him wasn't likely to occur to them.



"'Lo?"

"Did I wake you; you sound as if I woke you?"

"Yeah. Y'did, kinda."

"Sorry."

"S'o.k., I didn't sleep much last night - or, at all!"

"Another late Saturday on Monroe?"

"Yeah, kinda. Had one of those Gitsis' incidents again last night."

"Well...."

"Something of a racial character, or not, y'could say. I didn't see how it began so I can't comment. But I came home and, what I did see, I had to write down. Not enough for a story though."

"Well!...y'know how I feel. I suppose it is fun, exciting living where you do but it's,well, not my thing at all. I wouldn't want it."

"It's not...fun -"

"That was a poor choice."

"...or so much exciting. There is something always to be gleaned, gathered. I just don't know how competent I am to comment on any of that. This matter last night, like Isay, I didn't see how it started so I can't really say anything about that, about the larger issue of it. I'd like to! I wouldn't have written what I did if, what I did see hadn't been so striking and, maybe, complicated enough in its self to do something with. I don't know. I'd like to, but, I don't know...."

"And, then, you were up all night."

"The writing didn't take all that long. It was just that it seemed it might be something I might make something out of. I couldn't stop thinking. Could I do, say more with it. I imagine if I could find a way, I could use it to say some things I've been thinking about. The race card came up and -"

"Imagine!"

"Well, like I say, I can't say for sure if there wasn't something to justify it even a little. I know what I saw -"

"Let's not get started!"

"Yeah, I know. I know how you feel. And, you might be surprised - I mean I know what I saw was, probably, what you'd have seen, too. But there is that other way these things are seen."

"Things are what they are. People get liquored up and -"

"And that's what I saw. Still -"

"...police get called and they have to handle them."

"No question. No question about it. I don't fault those guys for what they did or how they did it! Still...there's that other way of looking at things, that other wayof reacting to them. I saw that out there last night, too. Or, at least, I saw people reacting different from the way I was. That matters, too, and I don't think some things are being said about it, about the situation we're in."

"I think more is said than should be most of the time."

"And I'd agree with that, too - kind of. Some things that do get said that don't help at all. I don't know if it's understood how people like you and I reacted when we hear claims being made we can't see any basis for. And, then, when we're told that even if it doesn't directly apply it should because of second and third hand experiences - that doesn't help any either. That'd be worth writing if I had a way to say it."

"Let's please not get started."

"We just don't all see the same things. And, the people who see things differently, have their reasons and think they're important, too."

"I doesn't do any good to drag race in just because a black person is involved. Crying wolf -"

"I know. Of course, that's what I'm saying....It doesn't do any good. Like I say, it's one of the things I'd like to say...if I had a way to. Everytime that happens it only makes it harder to convince some that race does really matter when and where it does."

"Wolf!"

"Yes. Long as it is understood that there are reasons people make the wrong assumptions, assertions at times and those reason have consequences for us. It matters."

"Well....let's just not get started. I've got to know what we're doing this year about Easter, are you planning...."


There was sullenness and no small resentment in the unvoiced judgmental stare of the crowd outside Gitsis' door. There was evident defiance in the wide-armed gesture of the broad young man in the long white shirt who stopped mid-Monroe well down from the scene and announced to the police that he was only going to his car to leave. Perhaps, too, there was mockery in the walk and carriage of the heavy hipped woman crossing the street with her home-sack of Gitsis' dinner held up above her waist to dangle and sway at her heavy, dainty stepping, something straight out of vaudeville. Maybe nothing was said....

Posted 4/15/09.

OG Says FM!

Ok!

I'm down at 7/Eleven the other day. One of those sweet days we had last week.

It is in the afternoon with all the traffic going by up and down the Avenue and foot traffic, too, is going every which way and doing every other thing.

There are kids out of the school and panhandlers mookin' along the way they do. Some girl is dressed from her white sneakers up to the hood over her head like a fire engine all in red; a barrel with a beard walking along like he's got somewhere to go has the bill of his ball cap turned around behind; a couple of slender gents with pointy faces that are sprouting fine fresh facial hair and wearing plaid shirts and beige caps are out walking their pit bull together like, maybe, they'll chuck it, get their guns and go hunt the hills; a couple with a kid in a car seat that he's luggin' along and a couple that might be them in a matter of months if they keep on the way their going fast -

Like that.

I'm around the corner of the building, around where Yummy Garden and Domino's are there in back. But I'm all the way up at the other corner where there is nothing but brick. You're in the sun and out of any breeze that might be blowing out of the north off Lake Ontario while there.

And I got my soda, Diet Pepsi, on the top of the plastic trash barrel.

The guy that waited on me at the counter inside was the square built dude with the tats on his arms and the handlebar over his upper lip.

"'S that your Falcon parked out front?" I asked.

Forest green and old, old silver chrome it is. I knew the answer but had been meaning to ask for some time.

I explained, or merely made the non-conversation drag out a bit longer, saying,

"Once knew this guy drove one."

They were never that common and Ford didn't make them that many years.

"Now y'known two," was what he said.

A man of few words you might say. Laconic is the word for it.

So, I'm back out around the corner of the building with my soda watching people and things. It is one of those spots, a neighborhood place I'm always visiting. When you are there, the corner of Meigs and Monroe is all laid out below you like it was a stage you were looking down on. There is a slight grade that gives it that affect but, if you go and stand on the northwest corner of the intersection you see just how slight a grade it really is, how short the distance is and how little difference there is in height. It is one of those little lesson in perspective that are there if you look for them.

The building directly across the Avenue and the building across Meigs, diagonal from one another, both have fronts that are recessed straight across, corner to corner. The one across the avenue is a Rent-a-Center and the building is an old three story red brick while the one across Meigs is concrete block and only one lofty story topped off by an enormous bill board set to face the commuter traffic coming up to the light headed south for the Expressway or Brighton. I don't know, but it all, that building across Meigs on the corner, has a fifties feel about it. There is a bus stop there and fares and bums stand in under the recess there when it rains or when the wind blows in January, when the sun's too hot in July. They wait for a bus to pull in and take them away. Cat-a-corner across the intersection from where I'm standing there is an old building of pale brown brick with a rounded and canopied corner. The business in there is called New York Stylee and largely seems to deal in hooker couture. Focus a little further up the street on that side and there is the famous Mark's Hots with its own lopped off corner entrance looking right back at you under that perpetually burning neon promising 'Breakfast All Day.'

So, I'm standing there taking it all in and among the rest there are these kids. There are two clusters of them, maybe, five or six to a bunch on different sides of Monroe, and I know them right away. They are kind of kids out of school, too.

There is a camera class, apparently, that meets in the old Genessee Co-op in the old Fire House across from the parking lot of the old Corpus Christi Parochial School at Oxford Street.

Afternoons, along this time of the year, the classes are sent out on the street with cameras and instructions to take interesting pictures of the urban scene. These two gangs, have come all this way, maybe a quarter mile, and they're still parallel with one another, working their different sides of the street!

Anyhow, over here, this one batch of budding paparazzi, itinerant explorers of the inner city puts their camera bags down just past Meigs. They gaggle together still full of all the eager joy of being loosed from school with a purpose. They're there in front of the embanked bed of corporate evergreen bushes that 7/Eleven has put down to help differentiate their parking lot and its avenue entrance. They are looking around at this and that and plotzing over possibilities, I suppose.

Besides looking somewhat like dead comedian George Carlin, I, apparently, have an interesting face to some. I am, also, it would seem, of a certain derelict and downtown appearance.

At least, experience with student photographers would lead me to suppose that, too.

And wouldn't you know!

Sure enough some trim and fresh faced young one soon comes up the lot, advancing on my building corner with camera held up and out ahead of her. Her darling face is smiling despite her focus on the LCD and her hair is kind of honey blonde and tied in a pony.

She asks, of course,

"Could I take your picture; would you mind?"

And, though her angle seems a bit off, I shoot right back at her a used to it,

"Sure."

And I don't pose. Because I know that's not what any of them want. They always want the unposed shot they thought they saw when they laid eyes on you.

But, then, she says, sweetly and unassumingly,

"Don't smile."

Which is weird as I purposefully wasn't.

And, then, I got it!

She takes the shot and saying as sweetly,

"Thanks!..."

...her and the gang go off down the street in their merry way.

Sure enough, around the corner from me, not more than a foot and half from my stand, sitting on the brick sill of the front window there is this old black dude. With his long legs in front of him and leaning forward on his hands, the guy is perfect. He had, only a minute or three before this, cripped up all slow and painful on a bandaged and slippered foot out of Meigs and passed around the corner just in front of me.

I had assumed that he had gone on into the store. But there he sat a seeming icon of social dejection and damage.

Well!

I don't care.

I am still the very image of Monroe decrepitude!

There are years of student photos on file to prove my point. What does the opinion of one slip of a pony-tailed photo novice prove, any how?

Well, I never...!

4/3/09.