Sunday, February 21, 2010

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.