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.