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.