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.
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