A city is mankind's forever youthful repudiation of the natural world's various impositions.
The other night the Avenue was snow wracked.
Snow fell through the streetlight. On the ground it became a still bound and turbulent lake to look at, alienating and stormy in its distortions of the familiar. Monroe's curbs and corners had become buried, all but indistinguishable in rumpled whiteness from the plowed and tire rutted asphalt; the sidewalks, endlessly stumbled though were too often deep piled and tossed about. Traffic rumpled by with its music oddly muffled, its pace just that much retarded that a resident would notice the difference.
Still it must be said for the young and foolhardly who turn out at night that they will not be denied. They will have their time. Saturday night is Saturday night and must be had for all it is worth. The bars were open. The traffic slowed but never ceased. And, out of the bars, they wandered into the street when and where they wanted in the snow and blared good naturedly back at the horns of impatient motorists. From bar to bar and to Gitsis', Mark's and even Mr. V's cart behind the bank on Goodman, they waded through the static white surf that foamed over the sidewalks and wore grins rather more than grimaces doing it unless and until their faces turned to stone.
They ate hot dogs with snow in their hair and laughed.
The traffic backed up for the light at Goodman and a van's side door opened.
"'Ey, man, you okay tonight?" I heard.
I turned with my cup of 7/Eleven coffee in hand.
"Need any money?"
"No, I'm good."
Only Monroe's ever practical panhandlers had deserted the scene early and what was a night on the Avenue without handing over the broken bills of a bar tab to some colorfully decrepit character?
"I'm good," I told them.
I went home dodging across Cornell between the cars pulling in, one after another, at the parking lot at Gitsis' and walked by the line up waiting patiently behind the barrier at the dinner door for admittance. They were hugging the plate glass, getting in under the overhang.
I crossed Wilmer to the quieter block in front of a now officially closed J. D. Oxford's and noted the same little girl standing on the corner in front of Lola's. It was well after three a.m. and I'd noticed her there more than an hour earlier watching without curiousity the young men who were drifting out of the bar in a crowd.
I stood in the doorway at 640 next to the Pub and kept her distant company. I watched the two or three late customers cramming slices and gabbing with the staff in the lighted window of Rookie's Express across the way. The blue circled sign in the window on the side of the building spelled out in red script Open over and over. And, after a while, the pizza chef with the nearly bald head wearing a logo short sleeved shirt ran a pair of boxed pies over to those drinking late in the Pub.
"That's okay. We're open to three," he said, leaving.
The Rochester Police Department cruised by on the Avenue, went up as far as Oxford Street and turned around to return.
I wondered if he had noticed what I had noticed and looked around to find the little girl gone.
The cruiser turned into Wilmer and disappeared behind Lola's. Walking down I saw him again darkly through the two cornering panes of deserted Lola's plate glass. He was pulled up in the street and, from the corner, I heard him asking the little girl her name through the lowered passenger front window. He asked her to spell that.
It was getting on toward half past. The snow fell more slowly through the streetlight and it was as though the storm had tired of trying to stop the city and its young people.
In another three hours or so my Sunday Times would be arriving.
January 11, 2009.
