Last Night on Monroe in the Rain

Last night on Monroe in the rain a surprizing lot was happening.

Most of the time it was only a small rain that was falling and the things that were happening were all small things that mattered little except to the people who were doing them.

Coming out of the Gulf that would be closing in minutes, two young men with fresh faces needing shaves were returning home to Boardman Street under the canopy at the convenience pumps and making for the alley in back of the Wilmer. Perhaps they had been to one of the bars north of Goodman, O'Cal's, The Sports Page, one of those bars. Otherwise why carry home a carton of beer bought along the way and not make their last call at the Gulf nearer home. The carrying the carton before him clutched both hand holes and grinned big like at a joke anticipated or just told.

Last Call, too, was on the minds of the Runners.

These three guys came up from Goodman on a stumbling, flailing, laughing run. They were on the east side of Monroe until just before Enrights. Then they were on the west side and held up a green pick-up truck chasing one another across Amherst.

The one in the middle threw hands up on the front hood and, laughing out loud, apologized,

"Sorry! Godda make Last Call, bro!, while running off.

He stumblingly turned almost around doing it and laughed about that, too.

Crossing the same crosswalk, moments later and in the other direction, I looked around and, now, the Runners were crossing for Oxfords, the east side of Monroe, again, hollering and laughing and running, head-long black figures with arms up and silhouetted against the lights of that block.

I took just that one quick look and, then, only heard them arrive at the bar grinning explanations to the bouncer at the door and gaining thankful entry in time. I didn't much notice either the guy on his cell walking along parallel with me on the outside of the parked cars at Gitsis' across the avenue.

All my attention had turned to the girl down at Rite Aid, almost at the Goodman corner of the store. She had on a dark jacket and ws slim, five-eight, five-eight and a half. At first, and from that distance, just passed Amherst, I thought it some wide-collared or too large sweater she had on, for she seemed to be showing most of a white shoulder and the fabric dipped enough below to expose a shallow arc of back as well. Perhaps wearing a boyfriend's borrowed sweater or sweat shirt, I thought. Altogether, not something you expect to see on a night in November with rain however light, nearly not there at times.

There was something, too, in the way she was standing, tall and slender. When I thought I saw the most of her left shoulder and that arc beneath it, she had turned to look after a number of boys who had passed her and were about to cross at the light. Perhaps they had said something.

But the rest of the time, both at first and after that, she only stood close to and facing the store window nearly to the end, almost at the corner far from the doors where people go in and come out. She wanted to be alone, felt alone and wanted to be by herself.

People were going in and coming out of Rite Aid and I might have been one.

As I was nearing the sliding doors and in-store brightness knowing I wouldn't be going inside yet, there was a clatter.

The clatter got her attention - for a moment she glanced back across Monroe not over or down her shoulder but around it and down.

A young man in a bright, open jacket and white shirt had dropped his cell taking it out of his pocket while pacing in front of the Chase parking, the ATM drive-through. Now, he was reaching for it with head pointed toward the pavement, bent at the waist and a little wasted.

The girl in the jacket - I'd already determined it was a jacket with white lined hood thrown back over one shoulder - had gone back to standing close to the window pane and looking down in her pensive, at least her waiting mood. As I passed her to the corner, she had dark hair that went down straight into her collar and hood and a narrow pretty face. She was looking at the packaged traiin sets in the window. Only something to be looked at while waiting for a boyfriend, I supposed.

Still, she might have waited nearer the doors or looked into one of the windows nearer the doors with dolls and other toys and seasonal things on sale in them. And that continued to be interesting.

I thought in passing of the train sets at - Dan's. Dan's Crafts and Things has sets with perfect in every detail miniatures of the locomotives and cars of trains from the past like the Super Chief and the New York Central's Twentieth-Century limited, sleek long passengers cars they built and repaired int he East Rochester Car Shops.

I might have mentioned them, mentioned Dan's, and had even turned and lifted a small greeting in her direction.

Only a dark young man in a brown open jacket was carrying a carton of beer with him coming down from the entrance of the store. The girl in the jacket shifted her hips and turned to join him walking, hands in her pockets and head still a bit cast down in her same unsmiling mood.

They went on around the corner, west on Goodman, in a resumed, a settled into slight bitterness conversation of short sharp words and grudging silences.

Bright jacket had found and dialed a number and was,

"Where the fuck you at...?"

...and,

"Thought you were comin' right back...."

...and,

"No, I'm not there; I lef' there. I thought you were comin' right back...!"

A wide-guy had come out of Enright's door, a few yards up the block, and ws on his cell, too.

"Guy dohn' mean nothin' by that...!"

...and,

"If y're gonna git pissed ev'r little thing guy says...!"

And a second, narrower guy comes out and paces back and forth, too, out of the doorway with cell,

"...y're on Alexander y' just kee on to Monroe..."

...and,

"Y' got a light on Monroe at Averill, a light at Meigs and just passed Goodman...."

...and,

"Enright's, y' see it on your left just passed the light...."

Short guy with bushy hair traveling fast coming out of Cornell with his head down and his cell to his ear is positive,

"I wanna shop, too!"

It's Closing and every one is on their cells. There is still half a night left to fill, Saturday morning.

At the entrance to Rite Aid's parking lot, a hot blonde with long straight hair driving a white compact has slowed to make the turn into the drive to the lot. The car cuts in across the sidewalk but, then, just sits there. The girl is well made up and wears a gray coat that looks dressy and she is smoking a cigarette that is freshly lit and long. She sat across the sidewalk more to take a logn drag or two than looking to see if the traffic behind her will let her back on the avenue to go south.

And it will and does because her pal, a second hot thin blonde who might be her sister, followed her in another white car, a match for hers and she is sitting in traffic waiting and talking on her cell. The first sister completes her turn, backing out and starting off down the avenue all the while with her cigarette compassing theway between her lips. The second white car takes longer to turn and follow, swinging off to the far curb and three-pointing once two or three darker colored cars ahve cut ahead of her.

It is closing time and she is never off her cell.

The sliding doors at the drug store sprung open and I went inside the brightness.

I figured it would be easier to scribble notes in my pocket pad in the unshadowed white light out of the rain and night. My hands would work better out of the cold.

It was the first of two trips I made into the Rite Aid with my note pad, the second to make notes from a walk north of Goodman.

There was a car lit up that pulled into the Edmonds followed closely by the blue-and-white. The car pulled into the alley behind the burrito shopand the cruiser followed him there, too.

The cruiser's overheads spun flashing a blinking rose light down the back alley that showed itself on the fence back of the Sports Page. Some guy was up close and facing the blank wall of what used to Country Sweet Chicken and Ribs sharing the building with the burrito joint. He kept looking over his shoulder but looked back toward the avenue and people passing there. I doubt he ever noticed the light of authority around in dark back of the building.

There was an altercation that begin in the Page or the Acme that flagged other RPD down. A well dressed girl with dark red hair was angry and was being walked away from the scene toward Goodman by people she was with but wanted all along to go back. It was others who flagged down the passing cruiser and reported what had happened to the officer. A man with a shaved head had begun a fight in the bar and pushed a girl around running off back down toward Meigs.

From the description the kids were giving the officer, I thought it sounded like one of a group of three or four skinheads who have been around the block between Rowley and Meigs since last summer. I have seen several incidents between them and kids on the block. The skinheads in their uniform white tee-shirts get into iwth the neighborhood kids and the altercations all end with the Whtie People's Party of Monroe retreating in a pack to their festung.

"It always seems to be racial with these guys. Whenever they get into it, it always has something to do with race, " I said to the witnesses after the cop was gone to put it out with dispatch.

The one guy, who had doen the most reporting, the guy with the back pack over his shoulder, stared thoughtfully back and nodded a bit.

"Fits," he said, seeing and agreeing to something that hadn't occurred to him before, perhaps.

Later and down at Big Deal Pizza's corner, the girl with the dark red hair was back and on her own, still looking pissed.

It took no more than a few words of recognition to put her back in the middle of the scene from before. She shouted her words out and addressed them angrily to the avenue as though broadcasting them rather than having a conversation.

"Some GUY," she gestured, "thinks he can SIT IN A BAR and ABUSE some poor girl, PUSH her around and....Y' try and tell him Y' CAN'T DO THAT. Y' can't THROW some girl around like that and.... He gets in your face, TELLS you he's going to SHOOT YOU IN YOUR FACE....

"You can't DO that. YOU CAN'T do that in a CIVILIZATION!...."

She said her name was Kelly and shook hands while all around us the RPD were prowling about. Blue-and-whites were pulling out of this side street and that and lighting up to U-turn in the other direction on the avenue; or they were turning off to patrol in to the back parking lots and alley way passages.

Before I went up for the night, I noticed the rain falling in the pools of water along the car-less curb above my building. The lakes were black crone fingers with clawed talons and arthritic joints and knuckles. But they shown just enough in the streetlight for the rain to be rippling them with incessant small rings that appeared and winked out replaced by more and more just their likeness.


Saturday night, 12:48.

HELLO-WEEN JACK

Hello-ween Jack,

Just in time for Halloween.

You wrote in your last letter of going to see a band from your rockin' days. This last Sunday my Times, the Arts and Leisure section, reviewed Keith Richards' autobiography.

The Ghost of Celebrities Nearly Departed is shown in a half-page profile with partially smoked cigarette leaning from his protruding lower lip. The photographer knew what he was about and shot with black and white film. All I can say is - three-day old corpse. Maybe any photograph of Keith would say that no matter the film, but black and white was the perfect choice.

Obviously, too, the gang in the composition department had their little joke. Keith was the half page above the fold while sweet, fresh-as-a-country breeze Taylor Swift was in the lower left corner leaning on pillows and cast in a golden glow.

I don't know but I find reassuring somehow that Keith has been noticeably decaying these past three decades and more yet still he's here smoking another fag despite the times, they be a-changing. And to imagine I'm old enough to remember when a Stones' album cover, controversial for some reason at the time and before most people alive today were born, pictured the gang and Keith as dissipated Regency Rogues sprawled about after a debauch.

I don't know if you'll find them at all artistic or interesting, but it is Halloween and I just thought I'd send you some photographs, I took myself.

I spent a certain number of mid-summer afternoons and evenings in Mount Hope Cemetery and never visited the place without clicking off dozens of these pictures. If you never heard of it when you visited here and about, Mount Hope is quite an usual place. Perhaps you can tell that from the photos alone without my writing it.

About a third to a half of Mount Hope is, in a phrase I've settled on, a cemetery in a forest. Some would say, perhaps more accurately, a cemetery in a park. It's keepers, however, seem to leave it most of the summer largely natural, as natural as such a place can be. The hill I was standing on for the shot of the wedding party being photographed, I couldn't have easily gotten my own picture from for all the underbrush that was there only a short time before that day along with the trees and fallen stones you see.

The building glimpsed through those trees in the lower left corner is the oldest of the cemetery's chapels and the lush foliage in the background of the scene mask a steep hill side known as the Indian Trail. It backs and over tops the chapel and its statuary fountain and comes around on the other, the right side of the shot to another steep sloped plateau parallel with the hill I was on at the time. That flat topped hill is so densely settled with monuments, mausoleums and obelisks that it might be a small Roman or Greek city of classic antiquity.

If I climbed left on the first hill, following a barely visible track up and around it, I'd be opposite the toga clad lady with the anchor in the next photograph taken from above on her hillside. It, too, is quite a steep and a long climb up those wrought iron steps the gate of which you can make out near the foot of her pedestal. You can, perhaps, tell just how steep from the little bit of hand rail visible. Her plot of ground is only the first of three tiers on the hill, each populated by more such large monuments topped with posed, dramatic figures. Seen from below in the vale, they go narrowly up against another green background, the trees, the forest covering the slopes of yet another hill also planted with stones and monuments in scenes hidden from view until you come to them.

There are, of course, angels everywhere and in all manner of poses. My favorite is Serena, the Angel of Peace. I took endless photographs of her and climbed all about to find every angle I could. The one I'm proudest of is this one I got during a summer evening with the sunset lighting bits of her surrounding trees and other and toppling stones beneath her. I had to climb up to Serena's crest for a close up of her, though, as she would never come down for me.

If there is one photograph that says, 'cemetery in a forest,' it is the one that shows only stones and monuments going up among trees and different angled slopes of a hill. I think it must have been taken around the same hour as the first shot of Serena and I know I was near her place. The same light suggests as much. There is a barely visible trail along the base of the slope face there toward the left and further up that trail is an especially affecting group of monuments. The father was a justice of the State Supreme Court. The parents' stones are larger but their son's is the only one with a figure carved in bas-relief. It isn't a cherub or other symbolic being but a school boy about ten. A doggerel verse declares that he isn't dead but only gone off to school, a school whose headmaster is Christ who will know to guide and protect him. The spot is secluded from any of the roadways that circle through Mount Hope. It is closed about by the angles and turns of the hill. Tree tops above shade them. The path that goes by, like all the paths among the graves, seems unmade by any effort other than the footsteps that have worn it through the years.

Some around here refer to Mount Hope as a spooky place and, I believe, there is to be some sort of Halloween affair over there this weekend. But I can't see it. Somewhere in his writings, Bill Faulkner made comment on how the Victorians, the generations that raised him, had a particular fancy for funerals and all the rites and practices that went along with bereavement. It was those same Victorians who chose this odd piece of real estate on hills coming up to the Genesee as their local place to frolic at that favorite pastime of theirs. Nothing that has been done in that line since has been as poised or as sweet and their thought to put it all down in such picturesque surroundings has just made of it something I can't call at all eerie or chilling.

It is worth experiencing and what better season than this.

Of course, Keith Richards will never be seen in such a place.

He's merely going to petrify some day over his Stratocaster, a cigarette half smoked in his lips. And, unlike the supposed Russian saint in Dostoevsky, he will corrupt no further.

How could he?

There Was This One

She went off into the parking at Rite Aid almost the last of her lot to go. Trailing after her there was only the dude she was with and, answering his cell, he walked slower. Danielle's gait was easy and right along, then, and she held her two hands up, out from her sides and moved them left-right rhythmically as though finger popping. Her head, her whole upper body was back leaning, too, nearly in the attitude called trucking though it's unlikely she'd ever have heard of that. It seemed Danielle was quiescent - not done yet but only between outbursts of pure pleasure.

The word must be oout around some campus, or maybe it was just out on Monroe last night that, of all places Enright's Thirst Parlor ws the place to be, I thought.

After Danielle, the last of her lot, departed, I started into Rite Aid myself and met the two up-front clerks stepping outside. As we passed, I asked,

"Since when is Enright's a college bar?"

Both wore smiles nd I didn't have to explain a thing to them.

"We were just figuring the same thing!"

Maybe the word was only that there was getting to be a good crowd, a young and college crowd there at Enrights, I, myself figured, then, and that there was this one chick.... At times it can take just one having a good time to begin to attract and, then, hold such a crowd in some one avenue bar.

When the crowd that was gathered emptied out on to Monroe at Closing in that mass way peculiar to Enright's at 2 a.m. there must have been something like fifty turned out and nearly to a one they had a sophomoric look about them.

That's not an Enright crowd. An evening crowd at the Thirst Parlor is a Harley Davidson, Tattoo Parlor crowd mingled with some long standing drinkers from the neighborhood. The daylight crowd hikes themselves on to their stools and finds their booths early in the morning and they spend the better part of the day in place. Then, too, Enright's being the only Monroe bar that opens early, they are among the few that closes religiously at two a.m. so they can swamp out, sweep up and be ready for the new day. Beer trucks have been parking on Monroe in front of Enright's first thing in the morning as long as I've been coming in to Rochester - a long time.

The crowd that turned out on the sidewalk last night wasn't old enough or local enough to even remember a few years back when the trees in front of Enright's were still festoon with shamrocks made of tiny emerald lights. It was a crowd, too, that hung around and was Fun Times loud a good half hour longer in another fashion uncommon to the place. They revved no bike engines at the curb for show before roaring away. But, instead, there were fake kng fu fighters, bowers with skinnyarms and scattering, laughing sudden pacifists in and out among the mob for a time and the whole lot seemed to "WHOA!" and "LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT!" in unison when such antics broke out.

Maybe the one they called Danielle took her cue from them or, as likely, her own moves got them going.

Undersized for most of those around her and compactly built shewould go in to a crouch-over with her arms up like a defensive back when she found someone to assault, shout out the bigger person's name and take off running at him with all her enthusiasm. Ten feet on the dead run and she would throw a kick at his flank or a shot at his shoulder or for him. She landed on the chest of one friend and half staggered him back till he swung her about with Danielle biting at his neck vampire fashion. Another she hit from behind and attempted to piggy back ride. Grabbing hold around his lower back, she rode his seat as long as she wanted to stay on with him holding her legs awkwardly, legs encased in skintight light blue jeans.

The crowd was laced through with a suspicious number of half-pint, slight and lovely girls all having the time of their lives. They didn't stay all together and they may not have all been of the same party but a number did seem to know of one another. Danielle was only a little taller and a little less slight than those others but shared, too, their shape and appearance - good asses, no tits to speak of and pretty but not spectacular faces. Danielle was all of that and just a little more of everything than those other girls.

Traffic on Monroe got heavy with the after hours crowd arriving in the zone from out and about and Danielle spotted a boyfriend across the Avenue. He was coming up with others from Goodman along the front of Rite Aid.

She hollered out his name in her fashion and nothing would do but she would get to him, get to him latest. Pound on the front of a cab starting up from picking up a fare and she charged by it and into the street. Amid warning shouts and laughter she started and stopped and started again and made it safe to the other side to make her trackling run at her tallest target yet, her Everest. Her leap at his neck was spectacular and, if he was nearly overwhelmed, she landed it ten.

That stunt drew after her her gang of some half dozen, boys and girls together. They came grinning and trotting out daring the traffic with less unconcern but behind her example and, with them, the most of the enthusiasm finally went out of the crowd in front of Enright's.

For a time the lot remained on the sidewalk at the front door of the drug store. There was talk among them of where they would go next and what they would do later. Danielle was little part of any of that. Fun, for her, was now and a single-minded, kinetic moving about, a meeting and greeting strangers and acquaintances on the sidewalk and out in traffic with all the energy and joy in her. Those forays out in to the lanes drew the others' laugher and concern and, eventually, made some go smiling along with her only with more care and less assurance.

At last it was the automatic sliding doors of the store that drew her away from the side of the street. They sprung open together and she charged through them on sudden and unexplained impulse. Once again, to a one, the loyal guard followed in a string with half exhausted and wondering titters of delight.

Among the last to go after, one voice asked,

"What are we going in here for?"

And a second laughed,

"I don't know but we're going!"

When they emptied back out some ten minutes later the dogged talk returned to whose house they would go to and how they would party.

Danielle, now, was more quiescent and, when her friends strung off into the parking lot for their cars, she was among the last of her crowd to leave Monroe. She was listening to music in her head and looking up at the roof tops and into the overhead lights.

She was by no means extinct but only dormant with eruptions yet within her.

After they went, a dude who'd been making a call on his cell at the corner of the store, met up with two friends and they, too, went off into the lot. As he went with them, the cell dude asked in some awe,

"Ju see that girl; the one they called Daniella?"

People In the Street

It was that hour between two and three and it was a Saturday night.

Everyone on the Avenue at that hour seemed young and stupid.

When the light changed at Goodman and he could cross, the young couple waiting on the other side only waited still. They didn't either of them moved to step down off the curb until Steve was almost half way across. Starting up the next block on his way to Meigs, the first party of young people that came at him going in the other direction was led by a young guy with blond hair in a military cut, almost a crew cut. His jacket was open and his leg led to one side, away from the curb, while he stared ahead and down past Steve who was cutting toward the avenue to go by them. The guys and gals behind the blond kid were all smiling over something but theblond kid only looked intent and distant.

The remains of a crowd were smoking cigarettes and talking lined up in front of the Sports Page in winter coats and caps. The most of them were girls who didn't seem to notice the chill on the air and they were lined up facing the avenue taking drags on their cigarettes. But one of the young men was backing up toward the curb and the parked cars. Between times he was stepping forward toward the girls and the door of the bar again. He didn't have a cigarette and he wasn't taking part in the conversation but only listening to what was said and wasn't paying attention whenever he would back up almost to the cars.

Just beyond there and beyond the Acme next door, they were lining up at Mark's Diner behind the shiny rope and the stanchions that it hung off of and that divided the sidewalk in half, into the line of people waiting alongside the front of the diner beneath its windows and the passage out to the curb where people were coming through to get into line or making their way by Mark's to go elsewhere.

Out beyond the cars parked along the curb the cars in traffic were bumper to bumper coming to and from Meigs. In the far lanes they were backing up for the light at the corner while the traffic was nearly as slow coming on in the other direction but still moving. Out in the street, in the traffic, there were kids coming over from O'Cal's across the way and a kid in the middle of the line waiting to get in Mark's was suddenly shouting out to some one in a party going along the sidewalk leaving the bar, going toward Rowley on the other side of Monroe.

"'EY, WHERE WERE YOU?"

And,

"DON'T BE GOIN' OFF LIKE THAT!"

Most of the kids on the line were white and had come over from O'Cal's or from other of the bars up and down the Avenue and most of the kids now coming to get at the back of the line were black and coming around the corner of Woodlawn from cars they had arrived in from other parts of the city and parked in the lots in back of Mark's or in back of Big Deal in the next block.

At the moment, a part of young black girls coming around from the corner to get in line was filling the passage to the curb and smiling.

And, then, some one said,

"Some people in the road!" meaning out in the street.

Some few in the crowd on line stood up to look over the parked cars and one of the black girls looked back over her shoulder, too, for a moment. But most people were too involved in their conversations on going while they were waiting to get inside the diner. And the rest of the part coming around to get in line was too eager to get in palce and too happy that there weren't that many people ahead of them yet and the line didn't go on that far back from the door.

A car, a white car had stopped in the near far lane, in the center of the avenue and a knot of people, young white kids for the most part coming over perhaps from O'Cal's, where standing together out in the street in front of the car. Some were looking about and some where looking down.

They were in the middle of the street, in front of the white car and they were on a line with the corner in front of Marko's door and not quite to Woodlawn Street.

Some in line, who were in a good mood, shouted,

"DON'T PLAY IN TRAFFIC!"

And,

"IF Y' COMIN' OVER, COME OVER!" with the traffic going by southbound.

But there were two legs lying out on the pavement from among the legs of those who were knotted about in front of the white car's bumper and grill. The legs were bent up toward the night sky and the feet were moving about on the pavement but the person was lying flat on his or her back.

The traffic , north and south on Monroe, wa still moving, working its way around the knot of kdis in the center of the avenue. There was only, now, the one furtherst lane to keep moving up onto Meigs and cars trying to leave the curb at O'Cal's were finding it difficult to pull out. The faces of drivers and passengers in cars in the near lane trying to make their way south would look out with concern as they came up to make the passage or to turn off on Woodlawn but it was only to find how they could make their way around.

The security guard from Mark's, carrying a styro-foam cup in his one hand, made his way out into the street to the knot of kids. He had on his blue windbreaker with SECURITY written across the back of his shoulders in white letters and a pair of handcuffs was on his gun belt at the small of his back. He came back to the corner after only a few moments, saying to the kids he was leaving,

"Don't anybody touch her."

Whenever and where ever they could parties were still tripping and walking across through traffic to come over from O'Cal's or crossing Woodlawn hurrying by on the sidewalk north and south.

A party of young guys made it most of the way across Woodlawn on their way to Meigs.

One of them stopped and asked with a smirk,

"What's this going on out there?"

Another asked,

"What happened?"

He looked, too, like he wanted to know the joke.

"Someone has been hit. Some girl was knocked over by a car."

"No," one of the boys grinned. "That's too big; gotta be a guy!"

"Blotto musta fell down!" another one laughed. "Some schmuck fell down crossing the street!"

They all laughed and went on toward Meigs.

The first police cruiser raced up going by thecars that were now stopped coming from Meigs and it pulled up with lights and sirens to face the white car in the other direction. Other cars came with lights and sirens from north and south and a Rural/Metro jeep pulled off Meigs.

When the big red truck from the station at Alexander came with its flashers and siren and blaring its horn for the intersection a white stretch limo was in the way for a moment trying to work its way around the corner to go down Meigs and, then, too, some one of the backed up cars in the near lane was trying to do an U-turn on the block in front of Nick's Super Store.

Young cops were out on the pavement leaving their units parked about the scene and were joining what remained of the knot of kids. The truck from Alexander pulled around int he far lane and parked in the street with its rear flashers about where the white car had been parked. The firemen in their coats and hats, after checking in with the cops on the scene to find out what had happened, began getting a stretcher out. One of the cops was taking a statement from two of the girl's firends with his notebook resting on the truck of one of the cruisers. Red and white lights were batting the air from the overheads and flashers all aruond and the lights were constant, silent and out of sync with one another. They were red shadows on faces and minute white flashes of never-clapped lightning and so numerous and conflicting that the air flickered with them while themen inside it went about their business.

An ambulance crossed Meigs where a cop on traffic detail was putting out road flares in the near lanes at the corner and pulled up. Two of the firemen waited with their stretcher standing on end while the EMTs knelt with the girl who was, now, stretched out full.

Marko went out intot he street to see what he could and had on a grim concern. A guy in shirt sleeves came out of the diner with a party and went down in to the end of Woodlawn to look with wonder out into the street, in to the heart of all the flashing red and white lights.

"What's this all about?" he wanted to know.

But the others in his party were leaving and he left with them after only a little more staring.

He was briefly replaced by an arriving black girl in dark shiny, amply stretched pants carrying a purse. She had made the climb up the sidewalk along the side of Mark's from the parking lot in the rear and came down off the curb into Woodlawn to wonder, too,

"What happened here?" before going along to get into the line with the rest of her friends.

A delivery guy with an empty pouch came along up Woodlawn, too, on the other sidewalk and turned the corner to go into the closed pizzeria where most of the lights were already out. He looked out into the street in passing but didn't stop on his way.

One of the officers was out in the avenue in front of a cruiser parked toward Meigs. He was with several of the late arriving cops and was explaining with hand gestures and twists of his body what had happened.

"The girl, she thought the car had stopped and started to go across and he clipped her and she rolled down the side and fell."

Later, in 7/Eleven a big kid came rushing in for a bag of chips complaining,

"Is it always as crazy as this?"

John, who has grown his dirty blond pony about to the small of his back, turned around behind the counter and told him expansively,

"Aw this? this is Naw-thin'! Gist wait tah Sommer!"

Mike, his fellow clerk on the night shift, smiled with his big, round and tender lipped face.

"That's when it really gets crazy here."

He grinned straight across to the Old Guy, Steve, who would know, too.

"Yer all up and down, you must see a lot more."

Steve told them there had been an accident in the next block.

"Naw!" John made a concerned stare. "Whot hoppend?"

Steve told them how a girl had stepped out and had been knocked over by a car.

The big kid, who had dashed in and on by the counter on his run-in for a snack, returned with his bag of chips, paid for them and went right back out intot he craziness.

An Altogether Fine and Silent Night

It was an altogether fine and silent night we were having on Monroe.

A mist of snow showered down to shush the tires of what little traffic traveled by going nowhere fast. The shower had already renewed and softened the contours of the crude heaps of the last week's snow and had sprayed white the bald spaces of sidewalk where snow had been worn away.

It hadn't yet lightened the brown slush at the curbs and street corners.

Standing underneath the remnant marquee of the onetime Monroe Theater, the lights from all the windows of Rite Aid's new store and the streetlight at the corner of Goodman caught straight falling lines of this precipitation and made evident in the air an otherwise stealthy storm. South, and seemingly further away, the block of Oxford Square buildings were dark above the first floors and more obscuring of what was happening. Only the neon medallions in Oxfords' dark windows fronting the street on the first floor were bold colors shining out in the darkness and through the shower that didn't show itself in that direction. They were red, blue, green and yellow in the Pub's black windows.

Oxfords' close sloping awnings above them had been painted a clinging white.

Across the way the black tree branches of Cornell Street arched together in a not quite gothic manner just before the bend that trends that street northward on an angle down a little more than half its length. House fronts on the south side of the street, those just beyond the bend, where there was a little yellow and indirect street light, filled full the arch like scenery seen through the proscenium of an old-time theater's stage, one deserted after the last act of some vaudeville.

A young couple was coming by Enrights.

He was complaining,

"I don't want to go there. I haven't any money."

"Why can't you just be quiet," she walked ahead saying.

In With the New

Our Karen was all excited.

You should have seen her.

She knew where the whole lot of us were who had come out together and she was around insisting we be together at midnight. As soon as they began with the ball drop on the bar flat screen, the cow was galloping around finding every one of us, the whole lot.

Long as it took for the big moment, nothing would do but that we all gather with her near the corner of the bar and the front door of the Pub.

That was the Big Thing!

The ball hadn't begun to move and you could hardly hear anything being said any longer, the screen being way the hell down at the back of the place, but excitement was mounting and there Krazy Ass Karen was frantically waving those tight little fists of hers and grinning like the gargoyle she is, gathering us even nearer to her.

"C'MON, C'MON, C'MON!" she was urging us.

Leaning down and laughing, she wanted all our heads together with hers.

There was something she just had to tell us and, of course, you could only hear about half of what the ugly elderly elf had to say with all the horns blaring and everybody beginning to shout.

We should all get...

"...CLOS'T...DOOR!"

We had to all...

"RUSH OUT..." on to the street as the..."...BALL DROPS!"

Her fists shaking adamantly, excitedly, she was insisting,

"'AT'SWAY Y' DO IT!"

We all had to go out on the street...

"SHOUT HAPPY NEW YEAR!"...as 2010 was erupting behind us.

The lot of us would lead the orgy of celebration out into the night.

Boss Lady said,

"'AT'S HOW'S DONE!"

Because, being older than sin itself, Mother Monster had seen more decades in than any of us kiddies had fingers and toes, y' know?

"ALL'A US, EVERYBODY, EVERYBODY!"

So, as usual, we all had our work assignments.

Alright, enough, Kathy Griffin, you wanted to say to her fool face.

Some how having the Old Lady out with us, smashed and making an ass of herself, wasn't nearly hoot it was supposed to be even if she was as stupid drunk and uninhibited as we'd hoped she'd be.

She was still givng the orders, wasn't she?

Blah, blah, blah!

The elderly evil bitch was still in charge, wasted or not.

"She's enjoying herself!"

"WHAT?" Melinda took her eyes off the big screen, made annoyed looking brows beneath that cock-eyed silver tiara planted in her hair.

"SHE'S ENJOYING HERSELF!"

That brightened her fat face.

"YEAH, ISNIT A HOOT!"

"Oh, it's a riot, alright!"

"WHAT?"

"IT'S A RIOT!"

"YUH, AHOOT!"

I swear...!

So, then, anyway, the ball was coming down. The menopausal ding-bat, stunted as she is, couldn't possibly see it but some one must have shouted in her ear or, maybe, she just got it from the whole bar's uproar beginning to come together like it did, because she started in screeching,

"GET READY! GET READY!"

The louder it got in the place, the more spastic those two tiny fists of hers got over her shriveled ttits and, when the count got down to eight, seven, six - off she shuffled for the door.

"GO, GO, GO...GO, GO, GO!"

Your could see from the looks we were all giving one another every one was on the same page. We all thought this proved it, what we'd known all along about the hag, about her being a dork too dumb to be real. Our Karen was a real seniority clown, too ugly even to have slept her wrinkly butt into that cubbyhole office of hers.

Still, everybody went with her, the whole lot of us barging along behind her. She looked, with her head down and her elbows in at her sides, like she expected the whole place to collapse on her as she shuffled and jiggled toward the door laughing and shrieking...

"...GO, GO, GO!"

And you know - it was just us out there!

You never saw Monroe more deserted.

Nobody else went. There probably wasn't another bar the length of the Avenue with a gangling gang of fools out front dancing around and shouting in 2010. Just us. Just Krazy Karen's Krew dancing around on the sidewalk, blowing horns and making asses of ourselves.

Some one should have got video.

Madame Karen going round and round, hand in hand and jumping up and down getting everyone to join her, adding one after the other to her circle of satan.

And, yeah, that should have been a hoot and a half! Except that she'd got us all doing it with her.

All of us kiddies, as she calls us, who'd asked her to come, to meet us for New Years so we could see what the bag looked like soused and, maybe, get a few good pics to post of her passed out in a doorway or head over a toilet barfing. There we were, instead, out playing ring-around-Rosie with T Rex, herself.

Talk about your disgusting!

The whole thing would have been a total disaster - only there was this guy there.

After a while people did start coming out to smoke and get out of the hoopla for a bit, out if for nothing else to make those calls they make just after midnight. In a bit the sidewalk in front of Oxfords had sprouted quite a crowd, after all. Traffic on the Avenue was flowing big time, again, like you would expected it to on one of the choice party nights of the year and there was a black stretch pulled up to the curb about to pile out a party.

Our Karen, the Management Mummy, was in the middle of it all trying to organize a chorus line and get them all to kick on command. And, wouldn't you know, she was having a blast doing it, being all instructive like she always is and flitting from one end to the other corralling this one and that. Half the faces weren't our lot at all any longer but just any one she could grab. And half our lot had wandered off back into the bar, maybe, or they were here and there in the crowd hooking up with other people, again, or just staggered about silly stoned on their own with drinks in their hands they shouldn't have had out on the street.

Tristan and several of the staff were busy retrieving the bar's glassware and reining in the losers.

Grandma didn't seem to notice or care that none of it was going according to plan.

"Now, on three - kick!" the cadaverous old choreographer would holler out in front of her soused section.

The half of them would fall over to one side or the other or somebody would kick the wrong way.

Mommy Mummy would just giggle.

"No, no, kiddies," she'd say. "It's left kick, right kick!"

And she'd sway showing them,

"One, two - THREE kick up street; one, two - THREE kick down street. Let's try it again."

Our Missy was looking most cock-eyed and had got in with this lot gatheed together at the corner of the Pub. Half were sitting on the window ledge and all of them wore smug sneers and relaxed attitudes like they weren't part of everything that was going down. Under her auburn bangs she was watching all their faces closely and seemed to be trying to follow what they were saying, their intimate, superior little conversation.

There was this gang out in the middle of the street trying to cross to Oxfords from the Standard Lounge up the street and not getting any where with the traffic that was trying not to run them down. And there were late arrivals hustling around to Oxfords from the alley way up the street. The door in the rear of the limo at the curb opened and some woman in a gorgeous dress was climbing out.

This great guy was standing there, off to the side. He was standing even further off to the side than that little gang Missy may have thought she was in with.

He had stepped out from the other side of the doorway next to the Pub in this sweet brown leather jacket. He looked a little like that Vin Diesel guy's shorter cousin only darker - maybe caramel.

Oh, he was fine! Dressed fine; looked fine. You could see him driving off in a BMW. Very exec but kind of kick-boxer, too.

And he says, in this very mature voice,

"I wonder if they know how young they all look."

Missy with her baby-doll bangs and the lot she was with - the guy with the goatee that is supposed to make him look older than twenty-two and his big Seth Rogin pal. His other friend out on the street in shirt sleeves and holding onto a bunch of party balloons, very apple cheeky and gangly thin. Limo girl dressed for the prom and accompanied by her ball cap date in the striped shirt and corduroy sports jacket. The porky crowd of black leather clad rappers with their shades after midnight and their exclusive attitudes on that were passing arm and arm.

The whole lot out there, actually.

Oh, yeah!

"Such kids," I had to agree.