tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34295921913135316672024-03-08T18:30:33.149-05:00The Oxford Square | Rochester New York Monroe Ave | Creative Non-Fiction & Short StoriesRochester's Monroe Avenue Village CorrespondentEdro the subLimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02195922730921267607noreply@blogger.comBlogger41125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-71706150541580633602012-09-25T13:14:00.001-04:002012-09-25T13:14:26.860-04:00Several Diff'ent Dudes on Monroe SEVERAL DIFF'ENT DUDES ON MONROE.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Wid Mark other day 'nd he's, like,<br />
<br />
"Dude!"<br />
<br />
'Cuss there's this cheapass shit in the windah at Rite Aid.<br />
<br />
"Gawdahavit," he says.<br />
<br />
'N'I'm, like,<br />
<br />
"Dude?"<br />
<br />
'Cuss it's totally cheapass.<br />
<br />
I'm, <br />
<br />
"Dude!"<br />
<br />
"Cuss he's gawdbe shittin' me.<br />
<br />
Bud, he's,<br />
<br />
"Nawgawdahavit!"<br />
<br />
'N'I'm laffin',<br />
<br />
"Dude!"<br />
<br />
'Cuss I know he's shittin' me.<br />
<br />
Bud he's,<br />
<br />
"I'm so buyin' it, dude!"<br />
<br />
Bud, then, dude....What? We don' go in?<br />
<br />
'N'I'm, like,<br />
<br />
"Dude?"<br />
<br />
Bud, he's, like...pointin' ...in the doorway? 'N'he tells me,<br />
<br />
"Dude in 'ere put me out for swearin' other night."<br />
<br />
'N'I'm,<br />
<br />
"No-o-o-o!... Dude! Tha's bullshit!"<br />
<br />
"Swear," he tells me.<br />
<br />
So, jist aft'd that, we're at Ghost Dog 'n' I'm,<br />
<br />
"Dude..."<br />
<br />
'Cuss 'ere'sa bitch of a bong 'ere in the windah.<br />
<br />
Toh-dally not cheapass!<br />
<br />
So....<br />
<br />
Dude?<br />
<br />
Whud're you bin doin'?paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-76260123669951357502012-05-23T02:34:00.001-04:002012-05-23T02:34:31.626-04:00THEYTHEY.<br />
<br />
They were in a rush to be where they were going.<br />
They didn't so much turn the corner into his street as cut it.<br />
Together, almost immediately, they were back down again off the curb and crossing Boardman Street diagonally.<br />
<br />
They had gone to Enright's, further down Monroe, when they could have gone to Oxfords, across the street from where they had agreed to meet and had that conversation.<br />
His first suggestion was Oxfords. But, then, immediately said...they might, instead, go to Enright's.<br />
One time or another, she had been in both bars, of course, with friends and the thought occurred to her that the smaller Enright's might, in fact, be the better choice. She didn't say so. His expressed thought, too, was that, a Wednesday night, Enright's might not be as crowded.<br />
And she agreed that that would be fine.<br />
He had noticed how she was casually dressed in new jeans and a plain black jacket with sharply tapering lapels; how her dark hair came down to her shoulders, straight but not stringy or without some real body.<br />
He thought how, in that outfit, she looked petite and unaffectedly attractive.<br />
For her part, she had already noted his lack of visible tattoos; how his brown hair, waved over to the one side of his brow, wasn't unruly. She liked it that he was dressed to go out with her in much the same manner he dressed for campus; that he wasn't dressed as he might be just kicking with his guys or going out tot he bars with his roommate.<br />
<br />
They had some beers and conversation and got to know one another. They were two kids from similar suburbs of cities not so far from Rochester who shared the same High School years. Though they had quite different majors and career goals, both were enjoying University life in much the same manner. They had similar friends, both at school and at home, and were quietly, dryly amused in much the same way about most of them.<br />
They said little about it and only in stray remarks. But they were both, it seemed, similarly inexperienced.<br />
In a context of stories about his senior year, he mentioned an old girl friend. But it was a story of graduation week frustrations with partying and pals getting in the way of any real intimacy. All his more recent socializing seemed to do with his roommate, Adam, or something....<br />
She had a quiet way about her that wore well with the way she looked and the way she dressed. Her smile was shy and casual and she asked him few questions, offered the conversation little direction. For the most part, she was only responsive to his own suggestions and inquiries when it came to herself. But she seemed quick and suddenly witty in those moments and conversation with her was easy and painless.<br />
<br />
They angled over Boardman at a moment with out traffic so that they came in the same straight diagonal line they had cut the corner with to the very door-step of his building only a little ways up the street.<br />
Having met ont he corner, she couldn't have know where they were going, what building was his. But he noticed how she followed him like a dancer taking a partner's lead. The whole way across and up Monroe, of course, his longer stride had put him a step ahead. Still, she kept pace with a more hurried step. And he sensed, without looking back, in the effort she carried more tension in her shoulders than he was carrying.<br />
It made her seem even more eager than he was to be going.<br />
And that made the smile over his face go all the further up into his cheeks. His eyes must, he knew be bright with it.<br />
His face had brimmed with an entire comedy of otherwise unexpressed laughter and joy the whole of the way from the bar. He was glad to be ahead of her; hoped his glee wouldn't show and perhaps offend her even now.<br />
He told himself he should quit laughing; not to jinx the thing.<br />
But he couldn't keep from grinning.<br />
It had become such an amazing night fresh, cold and clear.<br />
This was, he was certain, the most marvelous night of his life.<br />
<br />
They had only been out together something less than an hour.<br />
When they came out of Enright's he couldn't recall how the night had seemed when they had walked there. It couldn't have been any less silken black or the lights of the street any less bold and bright than they now seemed.<br />
It was still before midnight. But the hour was one, he noticed coming back out into it, when the crowds between bars and the traffic on the avenue seemed most alive. The voices of the passing crowds had a well-temper ring and vehicles, too, rushed along and even gathered to wait at the light with an equivalent excitation.<br />
Everything was so fresh, crisp and clear to him.<br />
That was when he began to smile, really smile.<br />
He had looked at her with that smile just the one time, standing in front of the bar, and she had smiled, too. He didn't look at her again all the way to his front door step, not wanting to risk it.<br />
Inside the bar, just before leaving, a smile had grown on his face, too, briefly, off course, when he understood what she meant.<br />
"You know, maybe we should go to your place," she suggested, "and see what happens."<br />
She had said that intimately and without any preamble and had looked down when she had half said it and, then, looked up, again, whe she had finished saying it.<br />
A moment later that made him smile when he understood.<br />
And he agreed that that would be fine.<br />
He had thought her perfectly innocent and bold looking as she waited to see what he would say to her suggestion. There had seemed no pressure in it when she suggested it that way in a voice that seemed shy of too much meaning and yet unreserved and allowing.<br />
<br />
They were so early still in coming back to his place.<br />
He was certain Aaron wouldn't be home yet. Not on a Wednesday night; on an Oxfords Wednesday night Aaron surely wouldn't be home as early as eleven-forty-five.<br />
And, he noticed, crossing Boardman, how their second floor front wndow was dark.<br />
The most marvelous night of his life, it couldn't be otherwise than it was turning out to be.<br />
She was still the same single step behind him coming down the well-lighted hallway to the foot of his stairs.<br />
"Y' know..." he heard her begin to say.<br />
But he had already begun to speak himself.<br />
Only as he turned smiling, as he heard his voice speak, did it occur to him they hadn't spoken a word since coming out into that bright black, sparkling and amazing night.<br />
"I wasn't," he allowed himself to laugh, "...expecting to be back so early."<br />
That she only smiled back up at him and that there was a gleam in her eye that couldn't have been only a trick of thelight in the hallway, reassured him and he took the next, the first step up the stairs.<br />
It wasn't like any other step he'd ever taken. Something went up inside him, a feeling of elevation he had never felt before going up to his room on those stairs or at any other time he could recall in all his years.<br />
<br />
He, of course, felt wonderful and different after.<br />
He felt the same different he had felt going up the stairs with her only with another feeling of elation. He was certain that everything, now, was changed in his life and that his life had begun again and better.<br />
<br />
<br />
They - Jared, Marlon, Chris - were all different, she thought.<br />
They were different from one another and they differed, too, from this latest boy.<br />
Now that it was after, she thought how it was the ways in which this latest boy was different form the others that was the more important thing.<br />
When she was sixteen it was twisted fun to always call Jared "Mr. Sparks." Flirting with this guy who wasn't out of college, an apprentice-teacher sitting in the back of Mr. Millay's Math classes and taking notes. It had been mostly a dare she made herself to begin with. It set her apart from the other watching and giggling girls, to go boldly over and call him that and ask if he minded if she sat with him at Barb and Jon's, the diner that backed on to the school athletic field they all went to all the time.<br />
They only sat together than one time. And she had only ever told one of her friends just how far things went after that.<br />
But, then, after she had, Marce McDonough smirking, saying,<br />
"Guess we'll see him on Predator 2015," sort of put her off the whole thing.<br />
Though, by then, his assignment and the school year was just about over, anyway.<br />
So, older guy, sort of....<br />
And Marlon...black.<br />
Not even community college black, at that. Just a friend of a Freshman year friend. And, it turned out, that friend's supplier of weed and pills. Just the second time they saw one another, he was hitting on her.<br />
"Nevuh fa'git such a fine..." he said.<br />
What happened there, she told herself, had been all about being high at the time and curious. Another challenge to herself, another betcha won't. It had only been a few times that time as well. There had been, too, a phone conversation with her mom wher she'd dropped hints while it was happening.<br />
Yes, she was seeing some one...<br />
She had been certain she heard a wonderful, delightful uneasy in Mom's voice after that.<br />
Then, they were pulled over on Monroe Avenue and he tried to pass her something to hold for him, something she refused to touch. Whatever it had been, nothing came of it.<br />
But no more dates. Her choice.<br />
So, older guy...black guy...<br />
Chris, another older man; one closer to her father's age. A summer employer with a fast food franchise, kids and a wife. Her big summer romance. Being sleazy in the old home town. And all very old school with a motel room and after noon delights at his family lake house....<br />
Just a summer fling.<br />
Older guy...black guy...family man....<br />
The boy was different.<br />
At first she had had a gay vibe from him. His approach had been so innocuous, so merely companionable. He had seemed so clean-cut and unexceptional. Bi, perhaps, or gay and just trying to see if he might be Bi. And it had been that thought of her being his closet hope,she had first taken interest from. She would add hag to her resume; Messing around added to her roles as Lolita, Kardashian and Joan Crawford....<br />
Until an hour ago that had been the assumption she 'd been going with.<br />
Even in the bar, with all his talk of his roommate, Adam, was it? He was big, he was gay guy who just didn't know it. But, then, the stories he was telling about himself, even though they weren't stories about his experience with other girls, began to reveal him as just a guy like any other she'd grown up going to school with. She knew him.<br />
They were so much alike, he and she. One, at last, at least, who was presentable. One to bring a laughable release of beaming laughter to the concerned faces of Mom and Dad.<br />
It made her smile to think of them letter out their long held breathe in relieved laughter.<br />
That ws when, devilishly, she thought, well, why not? And went into what she called her act.<br />
But, it was also when she thought, well, isn't it time, too.<br />
<br />
He asked her, the first who ever had.<br />
She laughed.<br />
"You're something to text home about..."<br />
<br />paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-8090342448365900352012-02-12T01:36:00.003-05:002012-02-12T03:16:19.264-05:00"In A Charitable Mood."So, last Thanksgiving week I'm back in Rah-cha-cha.<br /><br />And, things about to turn drowsy as some dimwit stuffed with Turkey, I'm down for OXFORDS on Monroe Ave the Tuesday night before the big holiday.<br /><br />Y' gotta pick your nights.<br /><br />Let's face it, 'Chester's a dull boy and the Avenue ain't what it was.<br /><br />Y' land there, you'd better know when 'n' where the gittin's good or there is no fun in the burg at all.<br /><br />All you going to get right close up t' one of these 'family' holidays is stool-sitters. Not bad if you're into sad stories. Maybe a decent bitch comes in with some guy and gives it the old try, shaking it to "All Right Now,' or some other oldie good for getting loose to a little.<br /><br />Since I'm looking for a little life 'fore all these clowns go off motor-boatin' in the bosoms of their loved ones - it's Tuesday I go out lookin', the night before the night before the big day is what I'm figuring.<br /><br />And, when I'm right, I'm right.<br /><br />Hauling up to the Pub, something like 'leven, it's like I said. Whole length of the place, foot of the bar to dart board, is deep in young stuff. The place is rockin' out. The window front I'm coming up on is a panorama of decadence - in motion. A dark-filter, wide-screen, neon highlighted shadow play of t'day's best imitation debauchery.<br /><br />I could almost be proud of those half-assed kids.<br /><br />So, 'min the bar. And what do you gots?<br /><br />Y' gotcha couples; y' gotcha crowds; y' gotcha regulars.<br /><br />You can't say anything about yer regulars and couples hasn't been said already. Any bar the regulars are in there every night, no matter. And y' always got y' couples. Not the same ones. But couples are all the same Tolstoy's good families. They're all about the one thing, couples, and that's each other. They're not looking for anything but what each other has got.<br /><br />Now, your crowds are another matter.<br /><br />Crowds are a whole can of worms and snakes. A bunch of people, more or less friends of not necessarily long standing, decideto get together and go our partying in a bar. Right there that's a potent breweven 'fore you add the alcohol and stir.<br /><br />Mostly, this night, y' got yet kids about to go be boring. Mom and Dad's no longer little ladies and laddies off on their own in the big, bad burg and about to be home-bound for the holiday. They're under pressure to let loose. They're feeling like they gotta go out and be wild wid their own kind this one more night.<br /><br />It's like they got to put enough booze down their gullets to keep buzzed the whole coming sad ritual.<br /><br />Y' know: 'over d' river end through the woods...'<br /><br />Some of them, it's like, somehow, they're thinking this is thelast time they ever get to be how they think they want to be. It's like they're sure just going home will turn 'em back into what they've always been destined to be - the graying folks, shoulder-to-shoulder over the roast bird on a platter, imitation hearth behind them in a two-story Cape Cod on Accountant Lane.<br /><br />It's never the gals in the fandango skinny slacks or the glitzy dresses that barely cover their asses. The few of them ain't already agents of quiet desperation know they're not skating forever from their born destiny And they're the ones really cutting it loose.<br /><br />They're none of them worrying about it.<br /><br />No, but - eery one of these crowds has some gloomy guy who's in that other party mood, the one where all the enforcedfun is over his head. The go-along guy not saying much and smiling less. He's even dressed for the part; like he didn't even bother to dress down for getting down. 'Cuss he knew ahead he couldn't. He's just not in the mood.<br /><br />He's the guy knows things aren't working out the way he thought they would. He's the guy who's going 'over d' river end through the woods...' thinking that he's not coming back the same as he went out.<br /><br />So, I'm in the bar and it's like:<br /><br />"'Ey, long time no see..." to one's I've seen before.<br /><br />And I'm looking at nothing special here as I've just been explaining....<br /><br />'Til I see this one crowd. It's not even a crowd exactly. It's a combination. One I seen before.<br /><br />Brothers. Brothers on the Town.<br /><br />Oh, yeah! That's always fun.<br /><br />Y' got the Older Brother, the Younger Brother and the Brother-in-law. The father, son and HOLY GHOST! of the American Family. Hell, for all I know, this happens in bars in Leipzig, Liege and Limerick, too. Probably does - with accents, a' course.<br /><br />Anyhow, older brother is, and always has been, better looking, better built and is 'he who must be impressed.' Probably home from out-of-town, first time in a couple of years. He's Butch. In a charitable mood I should feel something, a kinship with the guy. Only this is an arogant son-of-a-bitch and he's on some kind of throne.<br /><br />Well, so am I - 'n' mine's higher!<br /><br />So - still tryin' to be charitable - maybe he's put there. It's the Younger Brother, the Kid, who's paying and playing up, and showing off the old home-town's latest best to Butch, the Lone Wolf. Or, at least, he's trying awfully hard to, not that Gary can show Butch anything he hasn't seen before and better.<br /><br />And the Brother-in-law? Stan or Steve or Sean? He doesn't belong. He shouldn't even be there. He can talk. But nobody's really listening. Whose ever shoulder he stands next to or ass he runs into, he's outside the circle.<br /><br />Most of the time, when I'm near enough to catch their act, they're standing at the one place on the bar puttin away bottles fast enough to grow a crop of empties every little while. It's Gary does most of the talking. And, ever' now and again, Stan chimes in - that it matters.<br /><br />And that's how it goes - 'til it's about half-past one.<br /><br />Ole Butch is back to the bar with elbows behind him. Gary is talking still and standing sideways to his big bro with the back of his broad white shirt to Stan who's foot ont he rail and elbows beneath him on the bar no longer even chiming.<br /><br />I can't see, at that moment, younger brother, Gary's face, but I can imagine.<br /><br />Gary's looking up at Btuch and he's talking worried. His big brother, the Handsome Devil with the lean and hungry look, has a bit of smile cutting back into his jaws and he's not looking back and he's not listening, either. Gary's talking, butits about nuthin' Butch has in mind.<br /><br />Ole Garr's not even looking in the right direction Butch is.<br /><br />And, what's he looking at.<br /><br />There is this crowd just there off the bar, just opposite where Ole Butch is lounging like he owns the place and is about to claim his birth-right.<br /><br />And one of the glitzy-dressed babes is feeling 'Alright, Now,' full body. So much so, she's flashing the occasional sliver of tightie-whitey nylon where the flashy hem of her dress stretches more than it should while she swings it this way and that with her hair and boobs whipping that way and this.<br /><br />The couple of other gals in the crowd she's with are all smiles and feeling a bit of 'Alright, Now,' themselves. They're moving with it a little but mostly just admiring Veronica and her action. And there is a couple of three of the well-dressed down boys got their arms up and shoulders swaying along with her.<br /><br />To the far side, their gloomy guy just watches and mopes.<br /><br />I don't know.<br /><br />Maybe Butch figures Ronnie's action would be improved if she had a bit more freedom to swing it out there his way and the other way. Anyhow, with his conceited leer, he goes off the bar. And, leaning over, he extends the old middle finger to assist the next time she throws it in his direction.<br /><br />Call it the 'Hemlift Maneuver.'<br /><br />WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!<br /><br />HEY!<br /><br />That whole crowd is suddenly seriously upset.<br /><br />None more so than the gloomy guy who shoves Butch's shoulder before he can straighten back up laughing.<br /><br />All in one motion, Butch swings that shoulder round this way and his fist round the other clocking the gloomy guy in the upper lip and nose. Gus goes down a bloody stain on his face.<br /><br />Y' gotta admire those bouncers they got at Oxfords. Two of them move right in. And three and four others follow right after. The whole lot of them move the American Family out the front door of the place in another all-in-one motion.<br /><br />Now, I know what's coming and I'm near enough to the door, myself, so I'm outside just ahead of the rush - always a pretty thing to see.<br /><br />No fuss; no fight. Just out the door with the two brothers. The one that's just grinning it off, shining it on and the one tha's saying that it's all a big misunderstanding, his big brother didn't mean any harm. Long Stan, now, not even included in the family ouster, comes along behind.<br /><br />I've gotten off to the side of thelot of themn on the sidewalk. Okay, maybe just a little slow in going and having to step back a little awkward to keep my toes from being trampled on.<br /><br />Butch is, at first, left just standing there in his leather jacket, grinning and with his back to the doorway. Ole Garr' is the worried looking one who wants it understood:<br /><br />"We weren't looking for any trouble. Guy shove my brother and - "<br /><br />A-n-n-d -<br /><br />"Y're out...."<br /><br />There is only the one bouncer still. The others have gone back to the kid with the bloody nose and lip and to the crowd he's with to be sure everything's calmed on that end. But he is one big bouncer. Big as a door and he's making a face as closed as a door would be shutting those guys out.<br /><br />After grinning a bit at Monroe, at the Avenue he's back out on, Ole Butch turns it around and, standing off about the middle of the side walk, grins, too, watching a bit longer while Brother Gary explains things.<br /><br />Like it matters, Stand comes up on Butch's shoulder half pleading,<br /><br />"Come on. We can still get in another bar. There's time. We can still get in another bar, guys."<br /><br />Then, for a time, Butch, himself, steps up to the Closed Door, saying, all grinning and calm like,<br /><br />"I got a beer on the bar."<br /><br />"No y' don't."<br /><br />"Yeah, I got a beer on the bar - and a guy I gotta see."<br /><br />"No y' don't."<br /><br />"Yeah, I got a guy I gotta settle with."<br /><br />"No y' don't."<br /><br />And Gary touches his brother's shoulder, saying,<br /><br />"It's no big deal. It's almost closin'. There's no point -"<br /><br />Butch knows what he's about.<br /><br />"Guys gotta come out," he says - not to Garr' even now. "And I got something to settle with him."<br /><br />The Closed Door doesn't even bother to say, no, he doesn't. He's just a closed door and doesn't even look down. And, then, another big face looks out, around the Closed Door. Tater, with his big moon face, grins a look that wonders, is there a problem here?<br /><br />And Gary says,<br /><br />"Come on, it's almost closin'. We'd be going, any way."<br /><br />And Stan says,<br /><br />"We got time. We can get a beer. We can get a carton of beer. There's still time..."<br /><br />Like it matters.<br /><br />"This guy I got something to settle is coming out," Butch tells the Door and Tater.<br /><br />And so it goes a while longer.<br /><br />If no body else is, I'm looking around. It is getting down to closing and, sure enough, the cops are pulled up across the street at the Gulf, one of the places they like to pull in and sit at waiting on the turn-out at two.<br /><br />So, when Btuch tells them,<br /><br />"I got something to settle- and I'm going to be right here."<br /><br />I'm the one walks by him saying,<br /><br />"No you're not."<br /><br />Tossing my head the Gulf of Monroe ways with a grin of my own right back at him, saying,<br /><br />"'Cross the street."<br /><br />He might, in his way, just grin back my way. But Brother Gary doesn't. And he actually takes a look.<br /><br />Anxious, now, he says,<br /><br />"Come on, come on, we'll just get busted, man!"<br /><br />And Stan chimes, pleading,<br /><br />"We'll be going any way."<br /><br />I walk myself right on out of it. I walk on down to the corner of Wilmer, almost across from the two cops in cars and turn to stand there and watch.<br /><br />Ole Butch is still grinning. And for a while its myway he's lookin. It's that same stoned out wolfish grin he's had all along. But he isnot saying anything, now. It's the other two who are saying. They're up around him on both sides and Gary has his hands on Butch's shoulder and back and, I suppose, he's cajoling his big brother.<br /><br />Like that, they eventually move Butch off to the side, move him up the avenue. They msut have parked further up toward Oxford Street, or around in the back, down the alley at Poster Art. Because that is the way they move him off to. They get him to go up a couple of doorways though he won't go any further. He's probably saying how he still expects that guy he's got something to settle with has got to come out. Like that guy hasn't already been either hustled out the pub's back door or invited to stay t' the party that always goes on past closing inside once the front door is locked.<br /><br />Myself, I could go back inside, too. A familiar face, all I'd have to do is go up and knock.<br /><br />But I hang around. I'm curious how long Butch can keep grinning and waiting for what isn't going to happen.<br /><br />Closing comes and goes and Oxfords empties out everybody who isn't staying after hours. The Bros 're still there 'side the second doorway above the bar. So i go and stand up in the doorway between.<br /><br />Some crowds come out of the bar and stand about in front of the doorway ahving those conversations about going on to here and there. Where we going? Going to Gitsis'? Smoking cigarettes and making cell calls. Looking for cabs to flag down - and, then, having those conversations about where they're going and who's going and who's got cab fare.<br /><br />None of those groups of people have that guy who's probably already out the back door in them, by the way. And, probably, even the Lone Wolf doesn't any longer expect him to be. But he's still there, in that door way up from me. He has still got what's left of a hard grin on his chops. But the other two have relaxed. They know there's ntohing going to happen, now.<br /><br />Everything quiets way down. Even the sound of the music of the party in the bar is quiet now that the front door is locked and isn't opening to let out fresh crowds.<br /><br />One of the last of those is standing around having those conversations, smoking those last cigarettes together, when this old lady panhandler comes around. She might be an old guy with her gray hair cropped the way it is and her Salvation Army clothes hanging on her the way they do. And she isn't exactly a panhandler, either. I've seen her around. She's picking up butts people leave on the street. She'll, maybe, ask for a light if she gets a good one. And she'll, maybe, ask for change if he gets the light.<br /><br />She walks on by he latest crowd that's out front smoking and deciding where to go next. Wandering on, searching the gorund, she fins a good enough one to ask a light of the Brothers.<br /><br />It's a no go. So, she wanders back to where the last crowd is just moving off.<br /><br />"'Ey!"<br /><br />Butch has his grin back in full and he calls after her.<br /><br />This old lady has one of those red, weathered faces with a look on it you can tell she's not all there. She looks back at the three of them with the same wonder that is always on her face because so much that happens doesn't ge through to her.<br /><br />"'Ey, y' wanted to make five dollars?"<br /><br />It's a joke Butch is making. Only she doesn't know that. She doesn't know what it is yet. But she looks and wonders. She doesn't expect it is anything good. But she wonders, maybe, it is.<br /><br />"'Y wanted to make dollars?" Butch asks her.<br /><br />And he tells her how, too.<br /><br />It's a joke; a real funny joke. Not that she gets it at first. And even when he repeats the joke, she only knows it's a joke because he's grinning at her.<br /><br />"Five dollars; the three of us," he tells her.<br /><br />Her faces makes her own shy smile and she tells him,<br /><br />"Naw, I don't do that," a little uncertain yet.<br /><br />"Come on, it's five dollars. Three more 'n it's worth!"<br /><br />"Naw, I don't do that."<br /><br />She has still got the good one. She wonders of me,<br /><br />"Got a light?"<br /><br />I got smokes; I can spare one.<br /><br />"Rather have a fresh one?"<br /><br />And I got a light, too.<br /><br />I guess, maybe, having made his joke, Butch is satisfied. At any rate, laughing, he's letting his brothers move him on again, further up the Avenue.<br /><br />Like I say, 'Chester's a dull boy and Monroe ain't the avenue it used to be.<br /><br />I don't know why I go there.<br /><br />If I had any place else to go, maybe I wouldn't.<br /><br />They got an expression on the Avenue. Everybody says, after they or anybody else has said bad of anyone who's on the street, 'but he's an alright guy.' No matter how goofy or good for nothing a guy may be on this street, he's an alright guy.<br /><br />And I'm in a charitable mood.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-7925185237474762082010-11-06T23:41:00.002-04:002010-11-07T00:54:16.401-04:00Last Night on Monroe in the RainLast night on Monroe in the rain a surprizing lot was happening.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Last Call, too, was on the minds of the Runners.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The one in the middle threw hands up on the front hood and, laughing out loud, apologized,<br /><br />"Sorry! Godda make Last Call, bro!, while running off.<br /><br />He stumblingly turned almost around doing it and laughed about that, too.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />People were going in and coming out of Rite Aid and I might have been one.<br /><br />As I was nearing the sliding doors and in-store brightness knowing I wouldn't be going inside yet, there was a clatter.<br /><br />The clatter got her attention - for a moment she glanced back across Monroe not over or down her shoulder but around it and down.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />I might have mentioned them, mentioned Dan's, and had even turned and lifted a small greeting in her direction.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Bright jacket had found and dialed a number and was,<br /><br />"Where the fuck you at...?"<br /><br />...and,<br /><br />"Thought you were comin' right back...."<br /><br />...and,<br /><br />"No, <em>I'm </em>not there; I lef' there. I thought you were comin' right back...!"<br /><br />A wide-guy had come out of Enright's door, a few yards up the block, and ws on his cell, too.<br /><br />"Guy dohn' mean nothin' by that...!"<br /><br />...and,<br /><br />"If y're gonna git pissed ev'r little thing guy says...!"<br /><br />And a second, narrower guy comes out and paces back and forth, too, out of the doorway with cell,<br /><br />"...y're on Alexander y' just kee on to Monroe..."<br /><br />...and,<br /><br />"Y' got a light on Monroe at Averill, a light at Meigs and just passed Goodman...."<br /><br />...and,<br /><br />"Enright's, y' see it on your left just passed the light...."<br /><br />Short guy with bushy hair traveling fast coming out of Cornell with his head down and his cell to his ear is positive,<br /><br />"I wanna shop, too!"<br /><br />It's Closing and every one is on their cells. There is still half a night left to fill, Saturday morning.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />It is closing time and she is never off her cell.<br /><br />The sliding doors at the drug store sprung open and I went inside the brightness.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"Fits," he said, seeing and agreeing to something that hadn't occurred to him before, perhaps.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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....<br /><br />"You can't DO that. YOU CAN'T do that in a CIVILIZATION!...."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />Saturday night, 12:48.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-32912030208607970202010-10-30T20:19:00.002-04:002010-10-30T21:23:17.550-04:00HELLO-WEEN JACKHello-ween Jack,<br /><br />Just in time for Halloween.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />It is worth experiencing and what better season than this.<br /><br />Of course, Keith Richards will never be seen in such a place.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />How could he?paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-36279989116551736672010-10-24T19:58:00.002-04:002010-10-24T20:51:49.077-04:00There Was This OneShe 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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,<br /><br />"Since when is Enright's a college bar?"<br /><br />Both wore smiles nd I didn't have to explain a thing to them.<br /><br />"We were just figuring the same thing!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Maybe the one they called Danielle took her cue from them or, as likely, her own moves got them going.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Among the last to go after, one voice asked,<br /><br />"What are we going in here for?"<br /><br />And a second laughed,<br /><br />"I don't know but we're going!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />She was by no means extinct but only dormant with eruptions yet within her.<br /><br />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,<br /><br />"Ju see that girl; the one they called Daniella?"paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-80790436621402929502010-02-21T16:42:00.002-05:002010-02-21T17:53:55.068-05:00People In the StreetIt was that hour between two and three and it was a Saturday night.<br /><br />Everyone on the Avenue at that hour seemed young and stupid.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"'EY, WHERE WERE YOU?"<br /><br />And,<br /><br />"DON'T BE GOIN' OFF LIKE THAT!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />And, then, some one said,<br /><br />"Some people in the road!" meaning out in the street.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Some in line, who were in a good mood, shouted,<br /><br />"DON'T PLAY IN TRAFFIC!"<br /><br />And,<br /><br />"IF Y' COMIN' OVER, COME OVER!" with the traffic going by southbound.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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,<br /><br />"Don't anybody touch her."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />A party of young guys made it most of the way across Woodlawn on their way to Meigs.<br /><br />One of them stopped and asked with a smirk,<br /><br />"What's this going on out there?"<br /><br />Another asked,<br /><br />"What happened?"<br /><br />He looked, too, like he wanted to know the joke.<br /><br />"Someone has been hit. Some girl was knocked over by a car."<br /><br />"No," one of the boys grinned. "That's too big; gotta be a guy!"<br /><br />"Blotto musta fell down!" another one laughed. "Some schmuck fell down crossing the street!"<br /><br />They all laughed and went on toward Meigs.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"What's this all about?" he wanted to know.<br /><br />But the others in his party were leaving and he left with them after only a little more staring.<br /><br />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,<br /><br />"What happened here?" before going along to get into the line with the rest of her friends.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />Later, in 7/Eleven a big kid came rushing in for a bag of chips complaining,<br /><br />"Is it always as crazy as this?"<br /><br />John, who has grown his dirty blond pony about to the small of his back, turned around behind the counter and told him expansively,<br /><br />"Aw this? this is Naw-thin'! Gist wait tah Sommer!"<br /><br />Mike, his fellow clerk on the night shift, smiled with his big, round and tender lipped face.<br /><br />"That's when it really gets crazy here."<br /><br />He grinned straight across to the Old Guy, Steve, who would know, too.<br /><br />"Yer all up and down, you must see a lot more."<br /><br />Steve told them there had been an accident in the next block.<br /><br />"Naw!" John made a concerned stare. "Whot hoppend?"<br /><br />Steve told them how a girl had stepped out and had been knocked over by a car.<br /><br />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.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-38846336386007518052010-02-21T16:10:00.002-05:002010-02-21T16:35:40.048-05:00An Altogether Fine and Silent NightIt was an altogether fine and silent night we were having on Monroe.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />It hadn't yet lightened the brown slush at the curbs and street corners.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Oxfords' close sloping awnings above them had been painted a clinging white.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />A young couple was coming by Enrights.<br /><br />He was complaining,<br /><br />"I don't want to go there. I haven't any money."<br /><br />"Why can't you just be quiet," she walked ahead saying.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-88439697527752791702010-01-28T01:37:00.002-05:002010-01-28T03:19:50.389-05:00In With the NewOur Karen was all excited.<br /><br />You should have seen her.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />That was the Big Thing!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"C'MON, C'MON, C'MON!" she was urging us.<br /><br />Leaning down and laughing, she wanted all our heads together with hers.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />We should all get...<br /><br />"...CLOS'T...DOOR!"<br /><br />We had to all...<br /><br />"RUSH OUT..." on to the street as the..."...BALL DROPS!"<br /><br />Her fists shaking adamantly, excitedly, she was insisting,<br /><br />"'AT'SWAY Y' DO IT!"<br /><br />We all had to go out on the street...<br /><br />"SHOUT HAPPY NEW YEAR!"...as 2010 was erupting behind us.<br /><br />The lot of us would lead the orgy of celebration out into the night.<br /><br />Boss Lady said,<br /><br />"'AT'S HOW'S DONE!"<br /><br />Because, being older than sin itself, Mother Monster had seen more decades in than any of us kiddies had fingers and toes, y' know?<br /><br />"ALL'A US, EVERYBODY, EVERYBODY!"<br /><br />So, as usual, we all had our work assignments.<br /><br />Alright, enough, Kathy Griffin, you wanted to say to her fool face.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />She was still givng the orders, wasn't she?<br /><br />Blah, blah, blah!<br /><br />The elderly evil bitch was still in charge, wasted or not.<br /><br />"She's enjoying herself!"<br /><br />"WHAT?" Melinda took her eyes off the big screen, made annoyed looking brows beneath that cock-eyed silver tiara planted in her hair.<br /><br />"SHE'S ENJOYING HERSELF!"<br /><br />That brightened her fat face.<br /><br />"YEAH, ISNIT A HOOT!"<br /><br />"Oh, it's a riot, alright!"<br /><br />"WHAT?"<br /><br />"IT'S A RIOT!"<br /><br />"YUH, AHOOT!"<br /><br />I swear...!<br /><br />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,<br /><br />"GET READY! GET READY!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"GO, GO, GO...GO, GO, GO!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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...<br /><br />"...GO, GO, GO!"<br /><br />And you know - it was just us out there!<br /><br />You never saw Monroe more deserted.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Some one should have got video.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />And, yeah<em>, that </em>should have been a hoot and a half! Except that she'd got us all doing it with her.<br /><br />All of us <em>kiddies, </em>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.<br /><br />Talk about your disgusting!<br /><br />The whole thing would have been a total disaster - only there was this guy there.<br /><br />After a while people <em>did</em> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Tristan and several of the staff were busy retrieving the bar's glassware and reining in the losers.<br /><br />Grandma didn't seem to notice or care that none of it was going according to plan.<br /><br />"Now, on three - kick!" the cadaverous old choreographer would holler out in front of her soused section.<br /><br />The half of them would fall over to one side or the other or somebody would kick the wrong way.<br /><br />Mommy Mummy would just giggle.<br /><br />"No, no, kiddies," she'd say. "It's left kick, right kick!"<br /><br />And she'd sway showing them,<br /><br />"One, two - THREE kick up street; one, two - THREE kick down street. Let's try it again."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />And he says, in this very mature voice,<br /><br />"I wonder if they know how young they all look."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The whole lot out there, actually.<br /><br />Oh, yeah!<br /><br />"Such kids," I had to agree.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-1825383446352201982009-09-19T23:43:00.002-04:002009-09-20T00:33:57.123-04:00Last Night On Monroe, DanielleI was seeing and hearing things.<br /><br />With some sarcasm an ice-cream blonde, her hair close-cropped and cell phone to her ear, challenged with certainty any one of three dark companions standing slightly off from her and away from the corner of the Sports Page.<br /><br />"I know what you gotta do!"<br /><br />There was 'yes, I do, too' in her voice.<br /><br />In the bar doorway, a young man with the certainty of his not having acted improperly, answered, presumably, another young lady's accusation,<br /><br />"Did I fuck you that night?"<br /><br />The 'no, I did not,' that he found unnecessary to add he, apparently, thought conclusive.<br /><br />I had to dodge wide to the curb to avoid the young man who was walking broadly and blindly toward me from Meigs and Mark's. His bicycle-walking companion beside him was telling him that he had, certainly, to go to,<br /><br />"Alexander and East; near there..."<br /><br />I was thinking how, somehow, all these encounters and the young woman eating at a fully occupied booth in Mark's front window were all so Monroe nearing two a.m. But with no idea how I might use any of them and, hurrying to be at the Convenience down at Averill before that two in the morning closing, I could only make note of them as I made the next crossing.<br /><br />Then, too, in solemn silhouette, there was the memory of three companions I'd seen keeping them selves apart, away from the crowded Avenue. They were a trinity of sorts, variously sitting and standing half-back in the lot toward the old Rite Aid location. What might they be about?<br /><br />Trinity, I jotted along with the rest.<br /><br />But it was later, after I was turned around from returning to Oxford's by those two siren-sounding Blue-and-Whites that spun about up Meigs, that I had my most real encounter of the evening.<br /><br />Crossing Goodman, I was over taken by a trim and hurrying young woman and her hungry male companion.<br /><br />"I've seen you walking; I've seen you walking everywhere," she said making the corner and turning about to walk along facing her smile back to me, "You write. You carry notebooks in your bags."<br /><br />Mark's was their destination.<br /><br />Her companion, perhaps because he was hungrier or less literary, rather grumbled something about 'this guy.' But she sent him ahead to secure a place for them and he went on ahead of us.<br /><br />We never really stopped walking, either. Because she was so trim and sure of foot, she more than kept up with me, walking along side and, then, at times, turning again to skip backward before me.<br /><br />What sort of things did Iwrite about; did I write about things I heard and saw when I walked around? Was I writing anything at present? She was interested in writing herself.<br /><br />I do write short things I encounter on Monroe. But I hadn't done much of that the last month or more. I told her of the novel, short novel, I had just completed. She was writing a piece, too, for an assignment, rather like a bit of memoir.<br /><br />What was my novel about? How long was it? How many pages? Could I put her up on it? She would like to know what it was about.<br /><br />My short novel is my memory of a party I was once at, it was a moment when a good many funny things happened all at once. They were things that all seemed in some way to do with the feelings I was then having about losing good friends who were beginning to go away. It was one of those moment that you know, even at the time, if you are interested in writing at all, you will want to write about someday and, now, I had.<br /><br />Of course, it's my 'sixties' novel, I confessed; though it is only that in the sense of its environment and not at all in its purpose.<br /><br />She rather challenged me on why I should have had such feelings, naturally. And I tried to explain that that is something that happens when you are nineteen or twenty. You find yourself in a process of transition that is frequently mistaken by those who have not been through any such thing before for something more dire and dreadful, something final and wholly unfortunate.<br /><br />I should have mentioned to her that the party was a farewell for the first of those departing friends, someone who was a linchpin of the small group of people I was very in with and felt deeply about. It was the last of a week's worth of gatherings, both melancholy and riotous.<br /><br />Did I have an e-mail address? We should exchange examples of our writing. We could discuss writing, perhaps.<br /><br />Of course, she told me, she didn't have any paper or pen on her.<br /><br />Those are things I am never without and I gave her my address and told her of my site <a href="http://theoxfordsquare/">http://theoxfordsquare</a>.<br /><br />"Of course, I can never recall all of that but it's 'theoxfordsquare,'" I told her writing, "and you can get there by googling Monroe, I'm told."<br /><br />"Oh, sure..."<br /><br />We were almost to Mark's and she was feeling so hungry, she told me. By the time I was at Mark's I was walking by myself, again, and went on by the officer out of his unit who was parked across the entrance to Woodlawn with his flashers on and a cherry flare burning in the street.<br /><br />On Meigs, halfway to Park, the cops were leaving and the ambulacne that had come was preparing to leave. A patient, a young man, was on the gurney inside and a young woman was at the window on the side of the bus looking in while up on her toes.<br /><br />No, it wasn't an accident; it wasn't an accident yet, one of the two young men in front of the Mayflower told me with cynism. It was only some more drama and I was to understand that he didn't approve of drama. More accurately he was bored with such Monroe drama.<br /><br />"You walk the night?" he asked. "You walk around all night? Don't you ever get bored with all the drama?"<br /><br />I've been on Monroe for something like five years now. And, no, I'm not bored with the drama yet, though, more accurately, the most of it is comedy and that I never find boring.<br /><br />Back at Meigs and Monroe, with the cops gone off earlier elsewhere with lights and sirens in several different directions, there was only the one at Woodlawn who was still in sight. Something like the scenes of summer, scenes from a month or so back, seemed to be developing at 7/Eleven. It was still a long way to three a.m.<br /><br />I decided to stick around on the corner.<br /><br />September 19, 2009.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-16209781955540195902009-09-15T04:40:00.002-04:002009-09-15T06:04:55.431-04:00Incident ReportLEAVING THE SCENE...<br /><br />THERE IS something like a<br /><br /> Crump!<br /><br /> Someone, in a voice more amused than surprised, exclaims,<br /><br /> "HO!"<br /><br />There is some surprised laughter, too, a reactive tittering from as far off as the Gulf Station down and across the Avenue whee the lights are out, the pumps down and cars are jammed in for the after hours scene at Gitsis' Diner.<br /><br /><br /><br />The car that is traveling south on Monroe, passing the end of Wilmer Street, is black and a sleek new model, perhaps a Chrysler. It is occupied at least four times, front and back seats, by young men who are not the driver and who are not caught in the street light from the near street corner, the streetlight that stands in front of Lola's Bistro nearer to the corner than the bus bench where we are.<br /><br />The young man framed in the open driver's side window is white and in his early or mid-twenties. He has curly dark hair and has a lean face with deep set surprised eyes. And, for an instant, he stares out not back at the corner and the rear of the car that was turning into Wilmer, but over at us on the bus bench further on. He looks over at us both shocked and helpless even as the car is accelerating, leaving the scene of the accident it has just had.<br /><br />The look makes him seem almost as though he is and isn't the one doing the driving, making the instant decision to go, go and leave the scene behind.<br /><br />The car speeds off not that much faster than most traffic that leaves the bars this time of night for the expressway and home to the suburbs, for the further sidestreets and the near neighborhoods off Monroe.<br /><br />But it leaves deliberately and without the least hesitation.<br /><br /><br /><br />SOMEONE, near by, perhaps on the far corner of Wilmer or perhpas in the older model black car that was struck, itself, turned half into Wilmer and, now, stopped, exclaims,<br /><br /> "'E 'it you, man!"<br /><br />The car is one of those older, old enough it has a less stream-lined look than those common today. It is one of those reworked but not meant to be classic looking cars that come into the area after hours. This one doesn't yet have the silver hub caps and dual exhausts and only has the polish.<br /><br />It, too, is occupied four or five times.<br /><br />It is a Friday morning, not a Saturday or a Sunday morning, near three a.m., or the Avenue would be more jammed with such traffic than it is now.<br /><br />Now there is only the newer model black car speeding away for Oxford Street and the less occupied end of the Avenue's zone south toward where Monroe rises to the expressway bridge beyond the Hess Station, past the Y and the Branch Library that loom going up to the overpass.<br /><br />After a moment of hesitation, the older car that was rear-ended reverses and backs abruptly, dramatically out again onto the avenue to face southward, too, and shifts into gear.<br /><br />Its engine snarls and the car leaps forward.<br /><br />And, as it jumps and accelerates, for one instant, too, the occupant of its driver's side window is caught in the light. He is young, black and wears a ball cap and a well-filled out white tee-shirt. Poised forward with his hands on the wheel, he, too, is caught looking over at our bench with an uncertain expression.<br /><br />It, too, gives him something of the look of detachment from what he is doing, if only for this one split second.<br /><br /><br /><br />PURSUIT...<br /><br />The car that caused the accident has already passed Oxford at the other end of the long block before the struck car shifts forward.<br /><br />The avenue south toward the expressway is almost dark and nearly deserted.<br /><br />A last party of customers that had emerged and lingered before Oxford's is walking obliviously off between the darkened buildings and the cars still parked beneath them. Over at Rookie's Pizza and further up at the yellow rimmed windows of Subway, a few equally oblivious lingerers are on the sidewalk, too.<br /><br />The pursuit is in stages, the cars receding away two long blocks south where the Hess is a well-lit and open space on the right of Monroe. The pursuit is sequenced with the shifting of the one car's gears, each increase in speed made emphatic with the renewed tearing snarl of an engine straining.<br /><br />And each time the two cars are brought closer even as they become more distant and smaller.<br /><br /><em>"Now where are you going?"</em><br /><br /><em>"Up there."</em><br /><br />By Rutgers the injured car has closed the gap to half the length of the next and final block and, though the pursued is not running for certain, the gap is still swiftly diminishing.<br /><br /><em>"Why? They're going to be gone! No way that boy's going to be stopping now if he didn't!"</em><br /><br /><em>"Don't come!"</em><br /><br />By where Dartmouth and Canterbury come into Monroe on this side, opposite the Hess, the two are one right after the other and traveling like they are one car. The first bears left off into Canterbury at speed and, the purser follows like they are both on one rail.<br /><br />Both cars are done in an instant.<br /><br /><em>"There's not going to be anything to see up there!"</em><br /><br /><em>"Don't follow</em>!"<br /><br />By Oxford Street the first Blue-and-White cruiser has come down Rutgers with neither lights nor siren. Only the swiftness of its passage the long way down alongside the empty lot at Blessed Sacrament, against the darkened and residential porches to the corner parking lot on Monroe suggests purpose.<br /><br />It even stops at the corner before turning up toward the Hess where it pulls in off the street and stops to look around.<br /><br />A second car comes, this time with lights swirling and traveling south on Monroe. It doesn't slow until it comes to Rutgers and turns right up that street's dead-end extension, along the north end of the Hess corner lot. It disappears around the old bricks of the Berkshire Building. <br /> <br /><br /><br />SHOTS FIRED...<br /><br />Because of the Hess, all lit up white and flourescent, all white and Kelly green behind its canopied pumps, the Avenue seems to open up opposite the complex corner of Dartmouth, Canterbury and Monroe.<br /><br />Coming up toward Rutgers more Blue-and-Whites are coming into the area from every direction some even with sirens. They go into the extension and none turns into Canterbury.<br /><br />Up that way one cruiser hangs back and a knot of them with flashing overheads are gathered near the dead ending.<br /><br /><em>"Wonder if they know, now, they're in the wrong place?"</em><br /><br /><em>"Like it makes much difference now!"</em><br /><br />One cruiser that has crept in behind the office furniture store on the south end is returning behind some poor civilian sedan caught back there with a girl doing business.<br /><br /><em>"Some most unlucky son-of-a-bitch!"</em><br /><br /><em>"So, y' got to see something, after all! What do you know!"</em><br /><br />The first cruiser creeps, turning away of the Hess, and travels off across and up Canterbury, at last.<br /><br /><em>"Going to see the same nothing-there-anymore we are!"</em><br /><em></em><br />Coming up to cross Dartmouth, the cruiser is already returning, slow creeping around the point and spot lighting the hedges. The crew-cut and solemn face in the driver window looks over and asks, stopping,<br /><br /><em>"You two fellas hear any shots fired?"</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>"No, but we can tell y' what it was about</em>..."<br /><br /><br /><br />EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION....<br /><br />After the police, all the buildings around the Canterbury point, belwo and up the overpass rise, are silent. The streetlights leading away down Dartmouth on the low side go up that street receding beneath the deep darkness of the tree-tops. Only Hess, across the way, bright in tis expanse of blacktop, is open and inviting and the lone clerk is outside the door talking loudly with a customer pulled up to it. Loud as he is, his words are all garbled in a staccato of rap music blasting from the car stereo.<br /><br /><em>"Guy doesn't pull over and exchange insurance 'cuss y' don't on Monroe at three in the morning and other guy chases after him 'cuss he hasn't. And he, or, one of his friends, gets out a gun which is why the first guy's running..."</em><br /><br /><em>"And...?"</em><br /><br /><em>"Isn't how it's supposta be."</em><br /><br /><em>"Y' gotta wonder! You really are from the country!"</em><br /><br />Canterbury, on the high side, is more open and well lighted. Past the two or three stories of the building on the south corner, the parking for the hardware is back around its east corner and trees don't begin until your are past the end of Westminster coming in from the north. That rap that is blasting and the loud conversation, which are all that is left of Monroe noise and carrying on, now, carries even up that way little diminishing.<br /><br /><em>"Now where are you going?"</em><br /><br /><em>"Whatever happened it was along here."</em><br /><br /><em>"What do y' expect to see the cops didn't not see?"</em><br /><br /><em>"If they got a report of shots fired took them to Rutgers and it ws those two cars turned off up this way, it had to have been right along in here."</em><br /><br /><em>"You expect to find that black car plugged and expiring if the cops somehow missed seeing it?"</em><br /><br /><em>"Hole in rear trunk, street sign; tree trunk with some bark shattered, somebody's front porch column with the paint disturbed...."</em><br /><br />The ejected casing of a bullet it turns out is a thing so small, barely as big as the end of the little finger on a man's hand. Something laying on the black shadow and gray asphalt snake skin of four a.m. still street lit pavement of Canterbury just inches before the end of Westminster. Its brass doesn't even shine in the light. It lies thee and only casts its own little bit more of shadow.<br /><br />Something so small as to seem insignificant that might have meant so much but, now, can only mean something more to add to another dull report.<br /><br /><br />September 15, 2009.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-62014535986831252292009-06-27T11:26:00.002-04:002009-06-27T13:00:37.724-04:00Michael Jackson Is Dead.A storm had threatened in the middle of the afternoon - the atmosphere darkened, wind whipped the tree tops, and, long after, long unfolding black rumbles of distant thunder followed silent flashbulbs of lightning.<br /><br />The storm never came but passed Monroe Avenue and the city by.<br /><br />At the height of the storm that wasn't, and through the usual avenue traffic, a ladder truck and hose truck from Alexander Street station raced through the zone with lights and sirens and blaring horns at cross streets and went up and over the Expressway bridge to Upper Monroe. The sirens rivaled the wind, the horns seemed more threatening than the slow peels of thunder and the red flashing lights were more present and constant than the isolated instants of rare lightning.<br /><br />As the red machines hurtled and bullied through the traffic in desperate rush, it was strange seeing their crews sitting up in them wearing such relaxed and workaday demeanors.<br /><br />Five minutes or so later a Rural/Metro ambulance returned down the hill and avenue in the opposite direction with its lights and its thinly wailing siren but it wasn't certain whether the run was part of the same job or another emergency altogether.<br /><br />Except for the inconvenienced drivers made to pull over and allow them to pass and a few pedestrians who waited and used the wake of the trucks' passage to cross a traffic-free avenue, it is unlikely Monroers paid the sirens any especial attention. They minded no more the seeming approach of a storm.<br /><br />They never do.<br /><br />Long before evening and the setting of the sun, the sky cleared. Mid-evening was serene on Monroe and foot traffic and cars passing up and down the avenue seemed to assume a leisurely gait in agreement with the long and transfixing sunlight. Anyone who recalled the afternoon would have found the leisure and calm remarkable.<br /><br />The light even set in amber and isolated in place a near fight that threatened to break out at the corner of Boardman across from Oxford's Pub. It was between a two-by-four wielding angry man on the corner and the passenger of a mini-van pulled up to the avenue. The van's turn signal flashed and flashed as the driver leaned forward over the steering wheel peering for a lapse in the traffic and his passenger leaned out the door exchanging hot threats and excoriations with the Two-By-Four Man.<br /><br />"Jus' Turn! TURN! Go On!" a woman on the other side of the avenue shouted.<br /><br />And, soon, the driver did.<br /><br />After, there was a flurry of comment from concerned parties lingering before the first house on Boardman and among the loungers on and standing about the chairs set out around the corner in front of Rookie's Pizza. Two-By-Four Man marched about and, eventually, tossed his lumber away in the alley behind the pizza place. He returned to the corner and passed through the gang in the chairs to go back inside the Greek restauant, Astoria, which shares an entry with Rookie's.<br /><br />A big bellied lounger on the bus bench at the opposite corner of Boardman, commented with arms wide over the back of the bench,<br /><br />"And it isn't even ninety degrees!"<br /><br />A Rochester Blue-and-White cruised by and didn't stop.<br /><br />The early evening crowd at Oxford's was largely made up of young people in bold shirts of several colors that had crests over their hearts. Their backs were white with the logos of beer companies and the crests read Summer Ball 2009.<br /><br />"Kick Ball," one of them explained; with a gesture up and down the avenue, he added, "Bars sponsor us."<br /><br />"Yeah, I saw a lot of you guys out here Tuesday night."<br /><br />"Yeah, Tuesday the really competitive teams play, I think."<br /><br />From a car pulling up to the curb a girl wearing one of the pink shirts got out. She had on especially tight, especially slight shorts and all the street eyes followed her into Oxford's door.<br /><br />"Aw, that's healthy!" someone commented for all.<br /><br />"Really!"<br /><br />Thursday is not one of the major drinking nights on the Avenue but all evening long and into the night, crowds were coming out, walking down the dry pavements with their hands in the pockets of long, plaid patterned shorts and khaki cargoes making the bars their destination.<br /><br />The people coming out had their reasons and seemed to treat the evening like any Friday or Saturday night.<br /><br />After hours there was even a small but significant influx of Hip Hop thumping cars to Mark's and Gitsis' from other zones of the city. And, though they had been out in force Wednesday night when the bars offered their specials, the Blue-and-Whites were taken by apparent surprise, put in few appearances and were not needed.<br /><br />Steve, the Old Guy, came down to the street from his room earlier than his usual and in a mood.<br /><br />He walked down through the zone and made his late-night purchases early at the No Name Convenience at Averill and across the Avenue at the 7/Eleven.<br /><br />Leaving the No Name place, he even commented,<br /><br />"I'm out earlier tonight."<br /><br />He knew that the owner marked his arrival as time to close for the night.<br /><br />"Yes," the owner agreed in his accented voice. "You are."<br /><br />The Comedian, one of the streets more entertaining panhandlers, circled about on the corner of Rowley and up on the sidewalk on his bicycle wanting to get through to the line up out in front of the Angry Duck. He had a joke for them but a stubby bear-like dude with a black beard and a ball cap was blocking his passage.<br /><br />"DON'TCHA WANNA MAKE TEN CENTS," the dude was laughing combatively. "C'MON! Y'KIN LICK MY ASS FOR TEN CENTS!"<br /><br />Coming back around and down off the sidewalk out into the avenue on his bike, the Joker almost ran into Steve and excused himself with his usual grin in his voice and on his narrow crumpled dark face.<br /><br />"S'Okay!"<br /><br />The line-up sucking on their cigarettes looked between embarrassed and amused behind the angry dude.<br /><br />He turned to them and in the same loud voice proclaimed,<br /><br />"Y'OUGHTA PAY ME KEEPIN' THAT BUM FROM HITTIN' Y'UP!" He was certain that, "'AT GUY'S NO CRACK ADDICT HE DON'T WANTA MAKE TEN CENTS!"<br /><br />Faintly laughing, one of the Ducks sort of agreed, went along,<br /><br />"It's such a sweet deal, too!"<br /><br />"DAMN RIGHT! THAT GUY'S NO CRACK HEAD!"<br /><br />It was still too early to judge the Last Call Crowd at Oxford's and Steve, the Old Guy, went on along to Starbuck's. On the deserted patio in front, he piled his bags on the metal corner table and turned a chair to be in the area light from the corner of the Plum House next door. Across Monroe and half way down to Oxford's at the other end of the block, the newly opened Standard Lounge was doing business inside but there were and had been all evening no crowds in front of its entry way. Perhaps its patrons were taking seriously that whole 'Lounge' thing. With Monroe Mart and everything else closed for the night, the Oxford Street end of the block is relatively quiet after the last bus of the night pulls up or passes by the stop in front of the convenience at ten to one.<br /><br />Other than late arriving crowds with their hands in their pockets or beery singles, couples and crowds of early home-bound ex-patrons occasionally passing, there were only silently racing late night bicyclists and clattering, leg swinging skate board kids up there.<br /><br />The Old Guy had brought a book in his back pack.<br /><br />Eventually, as Steve should have known would happen, a passing beer-phased single came along. He was representatively moon-faced, curly haired and large size and his hands were in his pockets.<br /><br />His step was slow, wandering away early from the bars, and stopped altogether on the sidewalk just the other side of the railing.<br /><br />With empty confusion, he inquired,<br /><br />"Wha'cha doin'?"<br /><br />"Reading!"<br /><br />His confusion continuing, Mr. Moon wondered, after a long moment,<br /><br />"Why?"<br /><br />"'Cuss there's no news on the cable!" Steve said in his mood.<br /><br />Without blinking, Mr. Moon thought about that, could make no sense of it and wandered on alone homeward once more.<br /><br />It was June 25th, 2009 and at Last Call at Oxford's Pub the last departing crowd of five or six young people stood about on the sidewalk until all of twenty after two or two-thirty. It was a mild night and conversation was casual among them. Few opinions of any note were expressed. Only a short round guy with big glasses was conversing, really, and he was grinning over his own brilliance.<br /><br />"The guy grew up performing. He never did anything else. It has to have screwed him up, y'know? He has to have been screwed up."<br /><br />He grinned, too, through a tale he'd heard about a concert in Africa.<br /><br />"He goes over there - in the jungle and all. They don't even have electricity. And, they're setting up all this stuff. He puts on this show. They've never seen anything like him. They think he's a god or something. They probably still think he's a god over there!"<br /><br />Steve watched them going away. They were going off to Gitsis' for garbage plates the way they always do after hours on Monroe.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-82678177511105933752009-06-21T15:31:00.002-04:002009-06-21T16:52:04.780-04:00More.Saturday night...<br /><br />...well, Sunday now that it is coming on four in the morning, cars are still crowding the lot down at 7/Eleven.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Engines rev and idle and rap radio booms and declares.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />And the Pink Lady is still working there with her hand out.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"Naw, I'm not hiding," he smiles in his quiet way. "I'm just out for a smoke."<br /><br />"Not you; me. I'm hiding out."<br /><br />"Crowds still busy on the Avenue?" he wonders, with maybe an envious, at least a knowing and interested smile.<br /><br />"That, too; but there is somebody I'm trying to avoid."<br /><br />"Oh!"<br /><br />That requires some explanation, even if he seems ready to accept it without.<br /><br />"I had a Monroe Moment just now. I was down at 7/Eleven...?"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"Coming out, there is this wad of bills on the ground...."<br /><br />"Really?"<br /><br />"No big wad. But more than enough that I feel wealthy at having found it."<br /><br />His brows lift further, knowing there is more to it than just that.<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />"Seems reasonable," he concedes.<br /><br />"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?"<br /><br />"That sounds good."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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?"<br /><br />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 -<br /><br />"Excuse <em>me,</em> could you help <em>me</em>, all I need is...."<br /><br />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,<br /><br />"Excuse me...."<br /><br />Aaron's brows lift and widen, his slow grin deepening with recollection.<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />Oh, yeah!<br /><br />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 -<br /><br />"Ex-Cuse Me! Could you give me a doll-ar! All I need is a Doll-ar!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The men are only ever testy and gruff but the women can be aggressive and mean-spirited with her.<br /><br />"Yeah," Aaron recalls, "she's hit me up before."<br /><br />"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...!<br /><br />"I slip it to her as I'm going by!"<br /><br />"Well, that was nice."<br /><br />"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?"<br /><br />"The gods, right?"<br /><br />"'Xactly. Only, I'm almost through the crowd, just about to cross Wilmer and I knwo she's right behind me!"<br /><br />Aaron's eyes arch wondering, anticipating.<br /><br />"She catches me on the next corner, wants to thank me. <em>And -</em> "<br /><br />Because Aaron seems about to say, again, how nice that must have been -<br /><br />"She's got her hand out!"<br /><br />"Oh!" he, now, knows.<br /><br />The flat wheedling little voice that she has; the wide open sorry expressionless but pleading eyes, were all working.<br /><br />"'But, cudjahmakit just a little <em>more</em>?' she says to me. 'All I need is a little <em>more </em>...'"<br /><br />"O, yeah!" Aaron grin and quiet laugh has got it. "She always does that! All you can do is laugh!"<br /><br />"Oh, yeah! That's exactly what I did, too."<br /><br />Head back and laugh out loud; all you can do.<br /><br />"Waved her away and walked off, told her, 'No! That's it! That's all there is!'"<br /><br />"She's done that to me, too!" he confesses. "That's way people get so angry with her."<br /><br />"Persistent!"<br /><br />"Never stops!"<br /><br />"Tell me about it!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />"Y'know, y'd think she'd go home some time."<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />Moving in her tight bee-line manner, she was cutting across the street angling to intercept.<br /><br />"And I just knew!"<br /><br />"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?"<br /><br />Oh, yeah!<br /><br />"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!"<br /><br />Well, if you're on Monroe, you know; if you visit there enough times, you learn.<br /><br />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!'"<br /><br />And all the time,<br /><br />"Say, brother...."<br /><br />"I don't wanna borther y'none....'"<br /><br />If you live on Monroe, you know them; ifyou come there long enoug, you learn.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-38110879136080641772009-05-30T12:52:00.002-04:002009-05-30T14:58:37.175-04:00You Know This Guy?Cass,<br /><br />I think you might know this guy.<br /><br />There was, briefly, the appearance of trouble out in front of Oxford's Pub the other night. But the trouble was never some how real.<br /><br />You know how I am about smiles, how that's always the first thing I notice about someone and all - and, for me, it was the smirk, the sneer this young guy wore the whole time I watched him that made the thing no trouble right from the start.<br /><br />It was that hour around closing and a weekend night and there was a pretty constant traffic on the street and sidewalk, as there always is. The crowd in front of the pub grew and faded and grew again in the usual way over the better part of an hour. And the particular smaller gang of ex-patrons and casual customers that got my attention, changed in number and faces, too, over that time. Most of the folk smoking their cigarettes and talking their parting conversations barely noticed that anything at all was happening.<br /><br />A young guy with a lean and close-shaven jaw and a hard grin was the center of that little gang's attention and its attraction for me.<br /><br />He had been ejected, asked to leave the Pub and he was objecting to that - at least ostensibly. His objection was occasionally persistent and amiably hostile. I'll call him, for the moment, the Ejected. I could call him the Objector but, perhaps, he'd object to that for reasons of political connotation.<br /><br />Given your background and recently deployed status, my guess is your attention would have been drawn to him, too. He'd be familiar to you, you'd have singled him out, too, while others might only see a good looking young guy if they noticed him at all. Part of it would be his physique. You'd have spotted the over all fitness of him and his attitude, the way he presented himself. We get a lot of young guys coming to Oxford's who work out and, weather permitting, like to show off what they've accomplished in gyms and health clubs. They bare their biceps in tee-shirts ignoring the sharp winds of April. They don't dress sloppy casual like most of the rest of the guys who turn out on the avenue evenings. They wouldn't care for the comparison but they are the male equivalents of the girls who bare their shoulders and show off their thighs in short dresses while there are still traces of snow on the ground.<br /><br />There are usually one or two or more every night there is a sizeable crowd.<br /><br />But, out there, you'd have known the Ejected One's form as different and, to you, familiar. There was an overall perfection to the young man's build and set up. His torso and hips and arms weren't honed by a two or three times a week hour or two at World Gym and he wasn't fit just for evening appearances in the bars Friday and Saturday night. Nothing about the guy was just for display. He had been trained more purposefully than that.<br /><br />I guess you could say this guy was uniform. And I think you'll know what I mean.<br /><br />In the crowd he was with, none of the others were that or anything like that.<br /><br />Most were, likely, new friends he'd made while drinking in the bar or guys who had seen him inside and gravitated to him, now that he'd been asked to leave. Some one or two may have been old friends of his one old friend who wasn't out there until later, till after closing, well after closing and with whom he eventually went home.<br /><br />By that time, he had been deserted by the rest.<br /><br />At first, the Ejected and those who went out with him were tight on the sidewalk just out in front of the Pub's doorway.<br /><br />"I said, 'I just want to finish my drink,'" the Ejected One was saying, stating his case. "'N'at fat-fuck wou'dn' let me! What the hell's'at?"<br /><br />But, like I say, he was grinning when he said it. He said it like it was a good joke, after all.<br /><br />The others were in a swirl around him. They were grinning, too, enjoying the joke. They were all sympathetic to his cause and someone or two were urging him to go back inside.<br /><br />"They shouldn'oughta!"<br /><br />"Yeah, man, should call'em on't!"<br /><br />I have said it before - one night when the cops swarmed in front of Oxford's and took away a slight young drunk who got into it with another and was put out by the bouncers. And I'll say it again - in all these situations there is always one guy who thinks he's Mike Tyson and at least one or two more who think they are Alan Derschowitz. Nine times out of ten, the fighter is the one the cops have the least trouble from. The fighters lose what ever animus motivated them with the one punch they throw. By the time the cops arrive they are already wondering what all the fuss is about. The cuffs go on and they take a seat in a squad car looking a little lost and puppy dog staring out the rear window wondering who'll take them home. Unusually, no one hears another peep out of them. The lawyers all want to argue with any cop who will listen to them for a time and 'no,' 'get out of here,' 'leave,' mean nothing to them. Even an officer pointing a finger in their faces saying, 'I've told you three times; you're one second from goin'!' won't get them to more than go up the street a ways dragged along by friends and still arguing about rights and their knowing the law over their shoulders. Even at that, they'll be back at least one more time - just wanting to ask, again, about how bail works. They know all there is to know about the law but bail procedures have to be explained to them two or three times more before calmer heads can get them to a car and away home. It would be interesting to know how many of these Legal Samaritans actually show up in the queasy morning after at the lock-up with actual check books in hand.<br /><br />This occasion, fortunately, there was this young woman who was with these guys for a time but about to leave with another group. She put her arms out and somehow moved the lot of them out away from the door almost to the curb side before going off with her other friends. She was saying things like,<br /><br />"It'll only get the cops here!"<br /><br />And,<br /><br />"The guys, the bouncers are just doing their job!"<br /><br />She wasn't as high or as wide as any one of the guys in that crowd, and they weren't the equal of the Ejected One whose chest she barely came up to. But she did good work out there and, then, followed her friends to Gitsis' Diner where they were going to get in ahead of the after hours crowd.<br /><br />On the curb the Ejected stood and smirked with the Avenue and the after hours traffic behind him and his admirers ranged around him. For the longest time, as closing came and went, they were in that one spot and the conversation took a turn that introduced the expression I now know the Ejected One by.<br /><br />Perhaps the young lady's several times repeated words in favor of bouncers put him off, for a time, talking trash about the fat-fuck who'd put his hands objectionably on him. At least, his objection to the fat-fuck was reduced to one point.<br /><br />"That guy's no bullet-stopper! 'At fat-fuck'd never make a bullet-stopper! Not ever!"<br /><br />The expression delighted the rest of them. To a one, they were the familiar Oxford's clientele in their baseball jerseys and caps and Hollister tees. They asked questions of the Bullet-Stopper with admiring smiles and quickly wanted to know if this one or that one among passersby were likely bullet-stoppers or not.<br /><br />One look and the guy could tell the ones who weren't combatant material and never would be (nearly everyone) from the one or two who might have been at one time or someday might be. It was the game of a few minutes and got the subject off the Bullet-Stopper's having been asked to leave Oxford's before he could finish that final beer. The evaluated ones were guys walking back home with sacks of dinner from Gitsis' or going off to cars parked along the avenue, dashing out into traffic for Rookie's Express pizza parlor over on the corner and there appeared to be no particular reason for any one of them to be singled out.<br /><br />I was drawn into it.<br /><br />I'd passed near by the gang of them on my return to my stoop beside Oxford's from a walk down through the zone while they were just out of the bar. Standing in my place in 640 Monroe's doorway, I'd watched them being moved out to the curbside. I'd heard Iraq and two tours mentioned and had admired the young man's self-confidence and had taken in the looks of unadulterated man-love, guy crush on the other pasty faces around him from that perch. I saw this game of evaluation and the kind of impromptu recruitment talk that followed it as all a part of that starry eyed male adulation for the one who has been where the action is.<br /><br />"'At fat-ass, he'll never stop a bullet," the guy was telling the bright shining eyes after barely glancing around at one of the guys going off with a crowd.<br /><br />A couple of the others had their heads together, I noticed, just then, and they were whispering and grinning in my direction. To the majority of young guys out of Oxford's I'm marked down as a Monroe panhandler, some gray bearded never was.<br /><br />"Him?" the Bullet-Stopper considered when one of the two of them pointed in my direction and asked.<br /><br />"He coulda been in the day!"<br /><br />I was flattered by the assessment, however inappropriately.<br /><br />There was talk of combat pay and the probability of his being rotated yet again over there, or somewhere. There was some back and forth between the Bullet-Stopper and a girl and her girlfriend who were leaving with a party. It was a conversation briefly funny and hostile, the sort of thing that is always going on between young guys who have asked and been turned down and the 'Lesbians' they have approached in the crush of Oxford's.<br /><br />Eventually the changing faces of the small clump of guy-crush friends around him dwindled and the Bullet-Stopper was left making cell calls to someone who wouldn't come down to the Pub this time of night. I got the sense that it was some other young woman, like the young lady who'd moved him away from Oxford's door, and that she was saying some of the same things to him about the bar staff and its treatment of him.<br /><br />After he put up his cell, at any rate, without his crowd of admirers about him, the Bullet-Stopper took his hands out of his pockets and casually swung up to Oxford's doorway for the first time since I'd been watching him. He reached his arms wide, as though about to embrace the place and, still grinning, leaned in and addressed the occupant of the chair that is always set just to the inside of the door.<br /><br />There were no hard feelings.<br /><br />Soon after that he was joined out on the street by his old friend whom he'd told to stay when the bouncers told him he, himself, would have to leave. His old firend was tall and slender and the two of them dodged traffic jogging over to Rookie's. There he remained outside and made a couple of last calls on his cell while his old firend went in and glad handed the counterman. One call repeated the urgings and suffered the rejections of the previous call and ended with the same brief angry spate of words. A little later the Bullet-Stopper was inside Rookie's, in the tight well-lit scene in the pizza parlor, grinning his now familar grin and offering his hand around.<br /><br />Ordinarily, it being the weekend, I'd have already moved on from Oxford's by that time. I was late, now, for the after hours scenes developing down at Gitsis' and beyond on the corner of Goodman. But I hadn't been lured away by the sight of any cop cars gathering with swirling lights out front of Mark's or the congregating of a jumbled mass of tricked-out cars totally crowding the front of the closed Gulf Station. I hadn't heard any angry words break out over the traffic as young gangs coming in to Gitsis' crossed one another on the street as things turned dramatic.<br /><br />I was sticking with this guy, I guessed.<br /><br />Eventually, a taxi van pulled up before Hunan Wok, next door to me at 640, and the Bullet-Stopper and his old friend dodged traffic back to this side of Monroe to get in it. The usual is that cabs arrive and, maybe, there is a discussion between those piling in as to where they are going now that the bars are closed. Or, with a cab secured, there is a late conferral on matters of finance - hands digging into pockets and thin wads of the left over bills of a night out counted and compared. Either the would-be fares get out, again, and start walking home, or, the cabs depart with them.<br /><br />I was getting ready to pull up roots and walk, myself, at last. But the Bullet-Stopper got into the front seat of the cab and sat with his back to the passenger side-door with the pizza box on his lap and a party ensued. The driver, one of the Nigerians, I suppose, smiled and accepted a slice as did the pal in the back seat driver's side and the conversation was warm and friendly having little to do, immediately, with a destination.<br /><br />They were parked out there the whole time I was down at Gitsis' and didn't leave until the pie was gone, I imagine.<br /><br />I liked this guy and I liked him long before he mistook me for a possible former Bullet-Stopper like himself. I liked him the instant I saw him freshly ejected from Oxford's door and grinning over being put out before he could finish his drink. I liked him despite his denigrating the fat-fuck whom I suspected is really a guy I know for a very decent bouncer who is never more agressive than he needs to be and is liked by one and all. I liked the ease with himself he had and the fact that he was laughing at his situation and, maybe, a little, at those around him who were so worshipful and warming themself in the reflection of his glory.<br /><br />I just liked the guy. He was okay.<br /><br />I think you'd have like him, too, having, yourself, been where he was.<br /><br />Perhaps you know him.<br /><br /><br /><br />May 30, 2009.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-43871648346210631472009-05-22T02:50:00.002-04:002009-05-22T03:53:16.245-04:00"There Are Smiles.""KIMBA!"<br /><br />From behind, back at Oxford's door, that annoying Jeremy voice springs after them with a smile in it and Kimberley's slow walk away fades in only two short steps to a stand still.<br /><br />He's come out of the bar after her and, crap! she's going to turn around and go back up to him. He will be just there in front of or just up from the bar entrance in those stupid suspenders , silly, silly toy goatee stuck under his lower lip like a blond smudge. And, now, crap, crap, there's going to be more to this scene.<br /><br />Goddamn and it was over with, too!<br /><br />For the lingering moment, though, Kimberley is only standing looking down a little forward with that same bliss-ed out smiling look on her face that she's had on ever since returned to them from telling Jeremy she'd decided, at last, they should take a break from one another.<br /><br />But, now, she <em>is</em> going to turn back crap, crap, crap!<br /><br />"<em>Kim-BER</em>!" she is warned, not that it'll do any good!<br /><br />And, up ahead of them, where she has trotted off to on the way to the car, tiny Melissa, too, in her knit cap and jacket, looking all candy pink and white like a frosted Christmas cookie, has turned back to them with shoulders hunched in tight against the cold and pleads, too,<br /><br />"<em>Kim-MY</em>! C'mon?" in her mouse voice.<br /><br />Kimberley, in the bar, in Oxford's, deciding, once and for all, that Kimberley and Jeremy needed a time out, was all excited happy. Her head tilted forward, then too, in that moment, hands gripping the sides of the little standing table they were sharing. Her face wore a big old grin - a goddam giddy I'm-going-to-do-it-I-can't-believe-I'm-really-really-going-to-do-it grin. It was like she was going to burst out and say just that. Her eyes glittered with the excitement of what she was thinking. And, then, with it done, she came back with this quiet, accomplished smile, bliss-ed out and half daffy, but in a good way.<br /><br />'Lissa took a picture on her cell to commenorate the occasion.<br /><br />And, like the flash had fixed it, that look hasn't gone away. It doesn't even yet fade when she <em>does</em> turn around and Jeremy <em>is</em> standing there with out even a jacket on having come out after her with only his own goofy smile.<br /><br />God, these people!<br /><br />Again, another useless caution,<br /><br />"<em>Kim-ber</em>!"<br /><br />But Kimmy takes in a breath along with her smile. And she's smiling even more, a smile almost like when she decided there before but not that nearly about to burst. It is like the giddiness of having chosen her course, at last, is still with her but the bliss-ed over with having actually done the thing once and for all is there, permanently, too.<br /><br />And - she goes straight up to him, any way, right up to him standing waiting with his dumb comical grin.<br /><br />God knows what they can have to say to one another! It isn't good that his happy, oh so smarmy confident face keeps right on looking down over her except when ever he says whatever he says and, then, he keeps looking away to one side every time like he can't look at her and say it<em>. What ever IT </em>is!<br /><br />God! Does he even know what a clown he is?<br /><br />Oxford's door stayed open behind him for some reason and ...<br /><br />Inside they are playing 'More Than a Feeling,' that mom-and-dad oldie with the great riff. It comes blasting over them out the door way so there's no telling what it is they're saying to one another.<br /><br />But it can't be good.<br /><br />"Is she coming?" Tiny 'Lissa is returning and is curious and concerned to know.<br /><br />She's drunk, of course. Her little feet mince and wobble. It's like she's walking a line. Like cops have pulled her over and she's walking a line on the pavement, failing a sobriety test.<br /><br />"Who knows<em>? </em>Aaaaagh!"<br /><br />The night is black all the way up to the pinpoint stars.<br /><br />"Well," she asks, still with that curious questioning whine in her voice that becomes especially concerned just at the end, "What are they s-a-ying?"<br /><br />And, now, it is plain. Too, too good to be true but - Kimberley is explaining it all to him again, what she said before. His lips are still smiling looking down on her face but he is only listening, now, and no longer talking at all and looking away at the window glass when he does.<br /><br />"She's telling him it's over!"<br /><br />Maybe it <em>is</em> over. At last!<br /><br />Then, Kimberley, having said her piece and left Jeremy with nothing more he has to say, has turned and is starting slowly back to them.<br /><br />But Jeremy's smile is curled, too, in a new way, now, and he watches her go a moment more looking after her appreciatively before going back into the bar. And, then, too, downward cast and private, Kimmy's blissful smile has a thoughtful sly look about it now.<br /><br />"'Snot over!" little 'Lissa declares with sad certainty and cynicism.<br /><br />No, it isn't over.<br /><br />"Le's go," Kimmy says, walking right by them along with that smile, the small sly part of it a secret thought she thinks she's keeping to herself.<br /><br />God! Fuck it!paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-75007839803531934112009-05-04T02:10:00.002-04:002009-05-04T03:05:50.715-04:00It's Sunday; That Explains It.Wouldn'tjah know:<br /><br />It's Sunday night and you can walk by a bar on Monroe without picking your way through a crowd asking for a light, sneaking drinks out on the street, vomiting. You can hear yourself think. You see a panhandler or a crazy person coming you can light right out and cross the avenue without waiting for traffic to clear.<br /><br />I'm down across Meigs and I walk straight by that bar they've put in down there, the Park Bench, without noticing it has opened, at last, till I come to the corner of the building where they have put out a sandwich sign pointing down it's side to the new front entrance.<br /><br />I get what I need from the no name convenience store next door and the clerk and I agree there is a new bar in the neighborhood. Thursday night, he thinks it was that they opened.<br /><br />"They are open now," he informs me in that quiet, careful sounding African accented voice of his.<br /><br />Concerned only with making a living out of his little store and selling gas, it is apparent he hasn't taken all that much notice of his new business neighbor's presence.<br /><br />I have no other reason to do so, but I cross to 7/Eleven because I can without interruption and because of something I was told the other night.<br /><br />I was in Rite Aid Friday or Saturday and the subject was the crowds that were out in the bars and on the street with the fine weather we were having. The subject was mostly all Gitsis' and Mark's and the scene that we expected there would be out in front of those spots after hours. It was largely, too, remembrance of how it had been last summer before the shooting that shut down Gitsis' weekend night after one in the morning.<br /><br />I recalled how the crowds that come on to Monroe for all-night eats when the bars all close in other parts of town took, after that, to going down to Mark's and raiding 7/Eleven for snacks, instead. Without mentioning it in particular, I remembered how, for a weekend or so, the crowd was baffled by the absence of Gitsis' to go to but, then, began pulling into 7/Eleven's parking lot in their polished street machines till there were traffic jams in there and party scenes started up among the snarls.<br /><br />"7/Eleven," I only mentioned, "they had to take on that security guard."<br /><br />"Joe, big guy; he was okay,' the Rite Aid clerk, Aaron, remembered him fondly.<br /><br />"You know John?" he asked.<br /><br />John, the clerk, is 7/Eleven after midnight.<br /><br />"Sure. I started going into 7/Eleven late nights for John - and that guy Dave that worked with him."<br /><br />Aaron looked baffled.<br /><br />"I don't know a Dave," he said.<br /><br />"Tall skinny dude with a beard, always cleaning his nails," I characterized Dave.<br /><br />The subject stayed John - squat, hair to this shoulders and no neck you can see - since we both know him and how he manages the After Midnight at 7/Eleven. John, we both agreed, hates Panhandlers who hang around his store and sneak thieves who pilfer merchandise.<br /><br />"The other night," Aaron told me, "somebody busted out the window over at Rent-a-Center and just started walking away with a flat screen. John was out there and followed the guy. The cops busted him."<br /><br />Now, Sunday night, John, himself, remembers it.<br /><br />"Oh, yeah, yeah," he says, when I mention it, "Wednesday night, it was!"<br /><br />He is raking merchandise in under the UPC reader and making change with both hands. The 7/Eleven is busy if nothing else is on a Sunday night.<br /><br />"Guy," he says, taking it up high, "was walkin' off here like it was nuthin'. I followed him down around there and the cops came and busted his ass!"<br /><br />We agreed that was a very fine thing, should happen more often.<br /><br />Back out on the corner of the store, overlooking Meigs and Monroe, the parking lot foreground is all fast arriving cars and vans and trucks that pull in and sit with their engines running, stereo systems rapping and rocking but the streets beyond are that dark and that empty still, that Sunday night. When I'm ready to, I can cross the long way through the intersection to the New York Stylee corner. I can stroll across that long way unchallenged by so much as a bicyclist with a bell. I can take my time doing that and check out the front of Rent-a-Center though there is nothing there now, of course, to see. I can glimpse that doorway down from there and be reminded of that zombie drunk Friday night who was a good ten minutes angling his key at his lock as I came and went from my beyond Meigs stops.<br /><br />Coming up the dark block toward Woodlawn with its bright corner, Mark's Texas Hots, I'm thinking how it is around Closing Time and there is nearly no one out on the street. There are no gangs of kids pouring out of O'Callaghans to dash through traffic and get in line at Mark's front door. No one is spilling out to hang around in front of Acme Bar and Pizza or the Sports Page, either.<br /><br />Holding the door open at Mark's, is this runty little guy a half inch higher than a midget. He has a small face that comes to a point at the tip of his nose ferret fashion and he is still dressed for winter yet in heavy jacket and a wool cap.<br /><br />Coming through, in the light of the entry, there is this slim Pretty Woman with long straight hair and, instantly, I am hoping she isn't attached in some way to this ferret guy.<br /><br />Then, as she slips out and sidles around the corner to stand and wait, the doorway frames a large tall dude in a bright yellow tee-shirt like two acres of sunflowers seen from a half a mile away. He and the midget are quite the contrast. He is wide as the door, itself, and tall enough to seem to want to stop coming through it. He is hauling a sack of take out that could feed a boat load of Somali Pirates but it is only a snack for this one guy. Slim has her own tiny sack she's holding on to and, I think, she'd better only pick at it when they get where they're going.<br /><br />"Gonafiniszat, Hon? 'mm'mmm!"<br /><br />Scripted in red high on the billboard of this tall guy's Carney shoulders as I follow them up the sidewalk is 'Got You Stimulus Package Right Here!'<br /><br />I'm following the couple of them, but only as far as Acme Bar and Pizza, where they think they see someone they know through the window. Then, it's the reverse and they are coming along just behind me the whole way pass the Sports Page and Country Sweet Chicken and Ribs. I'm hoping that one of these cars parked along the curb is theirs because Hightower doesn't seem to notice there is any one else on the street and I definitely don't want to come between him and his diner.<br /><br />But no such luck.<br /><br />So, corner of Edmonds, I veer right and step off the curb without my usual caution. I don't look around dreading to see a bright sunburst of tee-shirt coming up over my shoulder one nano-second ahead of sprawling on the asphalt with a size nine imprinted on my back.<br /><br />Otherwise I wouldn't be so bold.<br /><br />Instead, this baby blue jeep jitterbugs around the corner just as I've got a foot down in the street. It comes careening off Monroe as though the parking space on Edmonds along side Sol Burrito were the last spot in walking distance of the avenue on a Saturday night.<br /><br />I have to step back.<br /><br />It is a close call - jeep or Sassquatch?<br /><br />Only, as it happens, the Pretty Woman has veered left and taken her large friend with her out into Monroe to cross.<br /><br />He is saying,<br /><br />"What night is this?"<br /><br />"Sunday, Hon, it's Sunday."<br /><br />"That explains it."<br /><br /><br />May 4, 2009.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-55075598571874158712009-04-29T02:24:00.002-04:002009-04-29T04:20:09.985-04:00A Hell of a Thing."Guys?"<br /><br />A Rochester Blue and White is parked in the avenue entrance at the closed and darkened Gulf across from Wilmer Street. The Gulf has only a dim blue-white glow within it and the block next door is dark in the way that brick building are at such five in the morning times.<br /><br />"It's a helluvah thing to ask you, fellas, but..."<br /><br /><em>And one really does hate to disturb you...</em><br /><br />An even dimmer crimson glow is there low within the cruiser's front seat and the officer passenger is shuffling paper work about in the seat between himself and the driver - printed forms, Incident Reports, Tour logs and such one imagines them to be.<br /><br />"...I just came down from my room and...there is this homeless guy in the lobby, the atrium of the building."<br /><br /><em>One really does hate to ask it, to have you disturb him but...</em><br /><br />A bundle was seen through the window in the locked and heavy stairway door coming down, a bundle of some sort in the lobby, the atrium down below beyond the door. In a hesitant instant it was recognizable as a person's shoulders and back in baggy brown jacket. Some one sitting or crouching was there across from the residents' post boxes in the four or five foot square tiled space between the stair door and the outer street door of the building.<br /><br />"It really is a hell of a thing to ask..."<br /><br /><em>To do.</em><br /><br />In a further hesitant instant, the bundle of clothing acquired a leathery-brown face beneath an o.d. wool cap, a suddenly aware face that looked in and up the stairs. And, then, there was no going back, no further second thought of going out the building's back door, instead, into the dark and possibly dangerous parking lot. There had been that incident; someone had been robbed back there a month or so back, the building super had said, had warned.<br /><br />"...an' I hate like hell to ask it..."<br /><br /><em>It is such a thing to cross the street and not just look the other way, keep about one's one business, live and let live...</em><br /><br />"But I know the Super, Gene, would roust the guy if he were awake, up..."<br /><br />His back was in the corner where the plate glass and lockless street door hinges while his heavy shoes were wedged where the stair door hinges open. His knees up, he was trying to fashion another cigarette from too much stringy tobacco piled on a rolling paper and making a mess of it. Strands were falling off and about him to the tile floor. There was an odor, too, much of it tobacco that had already emanated in to the bottom of the stair well.<br /><br />"He says he's just waiting for a bus in an hour...."<br /><br />Finishing the roll and repositioning his thick soled shoes so that the stair door could swing out enough to emit a person were undertaken all together along with explanations of his presence.<br /><br /><em>He says, too, he's from around the neighborhood. That he is known and all right.</em><br /><em></em><br />"But I know Gene...well, I know he'd want the guy rousted. It's just...."<br /><br /><em>Wouldn't have a quiet word to the wise have been better? Is it better to involve them?</em><br /><br />"Which is your building, sir?" is all that the officer driver wants to know.<br /><br />On the angle across the avenue the only light remaining on at this end of the block is there behind the narrow foot deep door stoop surrounded by its rectangle of rough gray stone. There isn't much that can be seen of the postal lobby through the plate glass of the street door. The man within has positioned himself so there is nothing much of him to be seen at any angle from the street.<br /><br />"640, the doorway next to Oxford's."<br /><br />The avenue is so dark and silent and dead at this hour. The officer driver only looks over the street in the right direction and doesn't move to get out or to put the car into gear. The officer rider only continues to shuffle paper.<br /><br /><em>How is it that this happens now? Will this, after all, happen?</em><br /><em></em><br />"It's such a hell of a thing...!"<br /><br /><em>An awkward and awful thing...</em><br /><br />"And I really do hate asking it."<br /><br /><em>Perhaps it is necessary to back away, to leave them to do what they need to do without further involvement, without eyes on them doing it.</em><br /><br />The Blue and White sits motionless just behind the sidewalk on the pavement of the station lot the time it takes to walk down almost to the corner and it only moves to pull out into the avenue when the street is almost crossed to the newspaper box waiting beside Gitsis' diner door.<br /><br /><em>How do such things happen?</em><br /><br />The cruiser half fades into the shadows of the block, of 642 and 646. It goes up even beyond the alley way to the parking lot behind the block, before turning and, then, disappearing altogether into a space among the parked cars well above 640.<br /><br />The wide windowed and brightly lit Gitsis', at this hour of a Thursday morning, pictures a quiet and family friendly diner with greenery potted along the inside of the glass and hanging, too, in decorative pots along the aisles. There are gleaming electric light fixtures that reflect in paneled mirrors on load-bearing square columns and on the walls of the dining room. Of the few customer inside, an old man in beige slacks and a sports shirt, wearing a white canvas hat crumpled on his head is standing paying his check at the register up front.<br /><br /><em>How does such a thing happen?</em><br /><br />One officer and, then, the other are out on the street. They move slowly down toward the unseen door.<br /><br /><em>Lethargically move...unwillingly...laggardly about an unsavory business? Or just routinely about a job?</em><br /><br />The paper from the box has a headline, something about CITY CRIME FIGURES...and the old man's face emerging from the diner door looks surprised anyone might be on the street at this hour of the morning, maybe, even a little concerned. His car is in the side lot and he hurries to it.<br /><br />The two officers are at the doorway and stopping, not walking on beyond it as seemed at first possible. The driver with the light colored hair, the heavy set unresponsive looking face is first and doesn't seem to look within the lobby, doesn't seem to have seen anything of interest. He stands straight ahead, instead, and looks out across the street, hands on his belt.<br /><br /><em>Gone? Did he go? Did he take the word to the wise unspoken and leave after being seen, noticed?</em><br /><br />And, then, it does happen <em>the way it does happen </em>and the officer driver turns and pulls at the door stepping inside while his younger partner following turns, too, in toward the doorway and holds the door open out on the street with a stiff arm.<br /><br />Mark's Hots, where the breakfasts are cheaper than at Gitsis', is a long block and a half down Monroe and on the other side of the street. It is a small square yellow sign hanging out over the sidewalk<em>. It is an awful, awkward thing to have to do, to have done</em>. The night is still black all the way down the avenue. There is light only in the Bruegger's Bagel Bakery with the baker inside in his baker's service cap behind the counter in a half lit and empty shop. All the stores and businesses and bars and eateries are darkened windows with some neon left on in them in places down to Mark's. It is a calm night and fair for early April<em>. If it were February and crazy cold outside, or, March with a lake effect storm whipping down the street off Ontario, it would be different</em>. The traffic is all still single cars and vans and not even traffic yet. There might be but isn't a truck or two but there are no buses <em>in an hour. </em>In less than a hour there will be buses but there are no buses yet. The night is that dark that, when the light does comes, the sky won't soften to rose or gold far down the side streets to the east or be that dark blue above the block north and west of the intersection of Meigs and Monroe. It will be only a dull and ordinary Rochester lead.<br /><br />In Mark's the slinky waitress with the tall face and the blonde and boyish cut hair, the one with rings pierced in her lower lip serves breakfast and the customers are all the usual customers of five-thirty in the morning. At six the sky isn't yet as light as it will be and the African lady is opening the little no name convenience along side Averill for business. Back across from Mark's, Nick's Super Store in the east block is open and lit up and single customers are in and out while, on the corner of Meigs, fares are waiting for a bus downtown.<br /><br />And a Blue and White is backed into the lot along side the Avenue Pub, hidden from south bound traffic by the brick corner of the building.<br /><br /><em>If it had been February, March or raining it would have been different. </em><br /><br />The guys are overseeing the street in this block, now, though it is hard to tell they are looking at anything at all.<br /><br /><em>The stair door lurched shut and locked - but the next person out might not have been careful to watch for it, to be sure it did....The lady on three who comes down to wait for the early bus mornings might not have wanted to go out through the lobby; might not have dared go out through the rear door....There were spent paper matches and tobacco shreds and ash on the tiles and, too often, in the morning, there are puddles of urine to be stepped over or around and for Gene to have to clean up. </em><br /><em></em><br /><em>And, still, it's an awful thing.</em><br /><br />At Wilmer it is full day light with the cut off corner of the Cornell building that looks somehow gothic at night stands in front of the dull dawn's early light. The room on the second floor at 640, left without a light on, will be half shadowy while its windows overlooking the inner building court yard with the Cornell next door will be bright with day. The room will have that stillness of a room half dark at dawn in a still sleeping building.<br /><br />The remembered mess is on the floor of the lobby with out any urine and the remembered tobacco and slightly sour scent is lingering there still and at the foot of the stair well, too.<br /><br /><em>Still, it is a helluvah thing!</em><br /><br /><br /><br />April 29, 2009.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-62104628333664776902009-04-21T20:09:00.002-04:002009-04-21T22:04:41.884-04:00Nichts, Nil, Nada.Ed,<br /><br />I don't know why I'm starting this. I don't have a thing.<br /> 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.<br /> I'm writing and editing in marathon sessions all weekend.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> And it was sort of that way this time.<br /> 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.<br /> I was going to have to walk - and move it, with no time to loll along taking in life along the way.<br /> 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.<br /> As that was happening there was this other matter going on.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> "...s'all back'n'forth, back'n'forth..." he was disdaining at me down his should.<br /> Sitting mid-bench, his arms were out on its back and his legs were splayed before him.<br /> "...it's all 'bout business, business, nuthin' but..." he went on saying, shouting, as I hurried by behind him.<br /> "Don't stop, y'...." he complained after me.<br /> 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.<br /> Goodman Street was the first test of how luck would favor my hurrying - if you don't count that bus against me.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> Once I was pool side I got the scraping.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> I could relax and take my time going home to 640.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> Everything I saw was the same as it had been - only in reverse.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> No, I don't have anything - nichts, nil, nada!<br /> Steve.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-27607162200672793212009-04-15T18:48:00.002-04:002009-04-15T20:10:10.626-04:00Let's Not Get Started.The patrol cars, twirling red and white and blue, sat aligned perfectly pulled up on the avenue all along side the cars parked at the curb before Gitsis' Diner. Bodies were crowding the diner door in the open air and, with the exception of an occasional one working his or her way inside through the rest, all their suddenly silent attention was down the street on the gathering of young officers on the pavement outside one of the blue and white cars. There were some dozen officers and they were standing and milling a car length and a half south of Gitsis' door.<br /><br />It was nearing three in the morning and a young black man of a tall and slender build was stretched out full-length on his stomach on the pavement. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was, from time to time, struggling to roll himself over. When his rocking or his trying to twist his legs and shoulders to right himself became too much, some one young man in a blue uniform or other would either kneel between his shoulder blades with cautions or crouch at his feet to hold his angles.<br /><br />Whether trying to turn or laying as lain, the young man's invective was constant, loud and sputtering.<br /><br />"BITCH! BITCH! YOU A BITCH! NIGGAHS! YOU'RE NIGGAHS!"<br /><br />He bitterly protested,<br /><br />"GODDA SLAVE DOWN ON THE GROUND! THA'S ALL Y'WANT! THA'S WHAT Y'WANT!<br />GIDDA SLAVE DOWN ON THE GROUND!"<br /><br />Those lined along the front of the diner, bunched in the diner doorway to see, nearly all of them black, watched in somber silence. The only time any turned away from the scene for a moment was when one or more people came out of the diner and two or more people in the line that was no longer even so much a line for admittance were allowed in the Gitsis' for food.<br /><br />"NIGGAHS! NIGGAHS! YOU BITCH! I GIDCHEW BITCH!"<br /><br />The crowd of officers was oddly a seemingly relax gathering standing and talking among themselves apparently of nothing immediate or of importance. For them, it seemed, what ever had happened at Gitsis' was over and they only attended the young man at their feet on his repeated efforts to turn himself to where he could struggle erect which wasn't going to happen. None responded to or, even seemed to be cognizant of his on-going angry and repetitive diatribe. Eventually, a strap retrieved from one of the cars bound his attentuated legs at the ankles. A yellow hood faced about with a fine mesh went over his head when he began to hotly spit his anger out at their feet.<br /><br />Through the yellow netting of his hood, the young man's violent face could be seen, his sharp chin lifted up off the asphalt from time to time to warn,<br /><br />"BITCH! I GID YOU BITCH! NIGGAHS!"<br /><br />The young officers appeared, too, to be unaware of the eyes on them from the diner door.<br /><br />Leaving their prisoner to yell and trash about on the pavement of Monroe Avenue so long a time seemed cruel and unnecessary, probably even racial to the spectators. Police attentions to the young man on the ground were perfunctory and clinical and their orders unthreatening. Once the mask and strap had been applied, he seemed forgotten entirely. Leaving their prisoner to yell and trash about helplessly on the pavement of Monroe Avenue so long a time seemed cruel and unnecessary and, probably even, racial to the spectators. That it might have been in anticipation that he might exhaust his anger somewhat before transport to the lock-up where more forceful methods would have to be used to restrain him wasn't likely to occur to them.<br /><br /><br /><br />"'Lo?"<br /><br />"Did I wake you; you sound as if I woke you?"<br /><br />"Yeah. Y'did, kinda."<br /><br />"Sorry."<br /><br />"S'o.k., I didn't sleep much last night - or, at all!"<br /><br />"Another late Saturday on Monroe?"<br /><br />"Yeah, kinda. Had one of those Gitsis' incidents again last night."<br /><br />"Well...."<br /><br />"Something of a racial character, or not, y'could say. I didn't see how it began so I can't comment. But I came home and, what I did see, I had to write down. Not enough for a story though."<br /><br />"Well!...y'know how I feel. I suppose it is fun, exciting living where you do but it's,well, not my thing at all. I wouldn't want it."<br /><br />"It's not...fun -"<br /><br />"That was a poor choice."<br /><br />"...or so much exciting. There is something always to be gleaned, gathered. I just don't know how competent I am to comment on any of that. This matter last night, like Isay, I didn't see how it started so I can't really say anything about that, about the larger issue of it. I'd like to! I wouldn't have written what I did if, what I did see hadn't been so striking and, maybe, complicated enough in its self to do something with. I don't know. I'd like to, but, I don't know...."<br /><br />"And, then, you were up all night."<br /><br />"The writing didn't take all that long. It was just that it seemed it might <em>be</em> something I might make something out of. I couldn't stop thinking. Could I do, say more with it. I imagine if I could find a way, I could use it to say some things I've been thinking about. The race card came up and -"<br /><br />"Imagine!"<br /><br />"Well, like I say, I can't say for sure if there wasn't something to justify it even a little. I know what I saw -"<br /><br />"Let's not get started!"<br /><br />"Yeah, I know. I know how you feel. And, you might be surprised - I mean I know what I saw was, probably, what you'd have seen, too. But there is that other way these things are seen."<br /><br />"Things are what they are. People get liquored up and -"<br /><br />"And that's what I saw. Still -"<br /><br />"...police get called and they have to handle them."<br /><br />"No question. No question about it. I don't fault those guys for what they did or how they did it! Still...there's that other way of looking at things, that other wayof reacting to them. I saw that out there last night, too. Or, at least, I saw people reacting different from the way I was. That matters, too, and I don't think some things are being said about it, about the situation we're in."<br /><br />"I think more is said than should be most of the time."<br /><br />"And I'd agree with that, too - kind of. Some things that do get said that don't help at all. I don't know if it's understood how people like you and I reacted when we hear claims being made we can't see any basis for. And, then, when we're told that even if it doesn't directly apply it should because of second and third hand experiences - that doesn't help any either. That'd be worth writing if I had a way to say it."<br /><br />"Let's <em>please</em> not get started."<br /><br />"We just don't all see the same things. And, the people who see things differently, have their reasons and think they're important, too."<br /><br />"I doesn't do any good to drag race in just because a black person is involved. Crying wolf -"<br /><br />"I know. Of course, that's what I'm saying....It doesn't do any good. Like I say, it's one of the things I'd like to say...if I had a way to. Everytime that happens it only makes it harder to convince some that race does really matter when and where it does."<br /><br />"Wolf!"<br /><br />"Yes. Long as it is understood that there are reasons people make the wrong assumptions, assertions at times and those reason have consequences for us. It matters."<br /><br />"Well....let's just <em>not</em> get started. I've got to know what we're doing this year about Easter, are you planning...."<br /><br /><br />There was sullenness and no small resentment in the unvoiced judgmental stare of the crowd outside Gitsis' door. There was evident defiance in the wide-armed gesture of the broad young man in the long white shirt who stopped mid-Monroe well down from the scene and announced to the police that he was only going to his car to leave. Perhaps, too, there was mockery in the walk and carriage of the heavy hipped woman crossing the street with her home-sack of Gitsis' dinner held up above her waist to dangle and sway at her heavy, dainty stepping, something straight out of vaudeville. Maybe nothing was said....<br /><br />Posted 4/15/09.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-4768554150946682782009-04-03T21:11:00.002-04:002009-04-03T22:05:07.444-04:00OG Says FM!Ok!<br /><br />I'm down at 7/Eleven the other day. One of those sweet days we had last week.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 -<br /><br />Like that.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />And I got my soda, Diet Pepsi, on the top of the plastic trash barrel.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"'S that your Falcon parked out front?" I asked.<br /><br />Forest green and old, old silver chrome it is. I knew the answer but had been meaning to ask for some time.<br /><br />I explained, or merely made the non-conversation drag out a bit longer, saying,<br /><br />"Once knew this guy drove one."<br /><br />They were never that common and Ford didn't make them that many years.<br /><br />"Now y'known two," was what he said.<br /><br />A man of few words you might say. Laconic is the word for it.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.'<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />At least, experience with student photographers would lead me to suppose that, too.<br /><br />And wouldn't you know!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />She asks, of course,<br /><br />"Could I take your picture; would you mind?"<br /><br />And, though her angle seems a bit off, I shoot right back at her a used to it,<br /><br />"Sure."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />But, then, she says, sweetly and unassumingly,<br /><br />"Don't smile."<br /><br />Which is weird as I purposefully wasn't.<br /><br />And, then, I got it!<br /><br />She takes the shot and saying as sweetly,<br /><br />"Thanks!..."<br /><br />...her and the gang go off down the street in their merry way.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />I had assumed that he had gone on into the store. But there he sat a seeming icon of social dejection and damage.<br /><br />Well!<br /><br />I don't care.<br /><br />I am still the very image of Monroe decrepitude!<br /><br />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?<br /><br />Well, I never...!<br /><br />4/3/09.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-81580187723715730562009-04-03T01:02:00.002-04:002009-04-03T01:29:29.801-04:00A Personal Note.I am dreaming more than I used to. I used to sleep more than I do now but, lately, more and more of my snatches of sleep end in near waking dreams and my dreams more often than not are of ones I knew years ago and have not seen or heard from in a long time. I never recall on waking many of the details of my dreams. I only have impressions of them. I dreamed one recent morning of an old friend. She visited me, it would seem, but we weren't here or anywhere together we'd ever been with one another and she took me to meet friends of hers none of whom I knew or liked much. She lives very far from here, if at any anymore, and in places I have never been or am likely to ever visit. So, perhaps, then, that particular part of the dream makes some sense. After waking, of course, my most explicit memory of the dream was of the moments just before it ended with my waking in my chair. It ended with my running away out into a cold but vivid and spectacular dawn in yet another strange-t0-me landscape. A train with lights on was darkly arriving at a station yard before that enormous red and blue day break sky. I needed to get home and was desparate for her to tell me how. I was angry that she wouldn't. This morning I dreamed I was with family. Most of my nearest relations were on hand at the end but I can only recall specifically my step-father, my mother and my grandmother all of whom are gone now. Once, again, I was going off at the end of my dream but ony to smoke in secret a cigar. They were all aware of my purpose but were nice enough to let me keep my secret. In the dream there were conversations I overheard and in some I participated from time to time but I don't recall anything that was said or anything of what was being discussed. I only know, now, that, though, in the dream, I knew what was being said and what it was about, our words had no voices. Perhaps that dream feature, too, is appropriate. All the people who spoke to me and around me I'll never hear speak again and I can not communicate with them now except in dreams. Here, where I'm living now, much of my time is spent observing and contemplating the differences between those of us who are old and those who are young and how we live and are in the world in our different ways. One thing I can say on that subject, I now realize, is that the old have more lost friends and dead than those who are young and we are more haunted.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-45834836134802464392009-02-14T17:47:00.002-05:002009-02-14T19:06:15.096-05:00Perfection.Together, hand in hand, they went out to the Avenue at about a quarter to closing. Only steps up the street from Oxford's there was a doorway with a step up. She said,<br /><br />"Here!"<br /><br />He said,<br /><br />"Fine."<br /><br />They stood in the doorway which was only deep enough for them to stand facing one another in before the glass door to a small lighted foyer. He leaned his back to the stone lentil.<br /><br />"Here?" he asked with a grin.<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />She looked up into his eyes. Her beautiful face was extraordinary with its smile that was at once shy and sensuous; hungry for him she was so completely eager to play. She looked up at him from such an appealingly bashful downward glance. His own look was confident and ready, looking down with his mouth curled in a grin of unhurried expectation. He was waiting for her embrace.<br /><br />It was just a moment and then she leaned her whole body up against him in something like a fulsome physical sigh. Their fit was so complete. He was just that much taller than she; she was just that slight when he laid his hands over her hips and her lips came up to his. Her small hands, her slender arms hugged his, drawing their two bodies even closer into one another.<br /><br />Their eyes were closed for a long moment and then again hers were laughing.<br /><br />She murmured her satisfaction,<br /><br />"Oh, I like that, I like that, I like that! It was as good as I thought it would be."<br /><br />It had been entirely sweet and wet and dark and warm and wonderful.<br /><br />He grinned possesively with his hands caressing up to her waist and down to the tops of her incredible legs, until his finger tips felt the warmth and tenderness of taut tan thighs and asked,<br /><br />"Good enough to try again?"<br /><br />Her eyes promised there would be many agains and she told him,<br /><br />"Carla."<br /><br />Her name was Carla.<br /><br />"Charlie," he laughed and asked her, "How perfect is that?"<br /><br />Her laugh agreed that together they were that and immediately she pressed her whole body and self tighter against him once more. Her face filled the small of his chest and shoulder, her hands found the space between his broad and bowed back and the rough texture of the stone.<br /><br />"How could anything be better, Charlie?" the breathe of her words was warm through the fabric of his shirt.<br /><br />Their eyes had met only moments after arriving in the bar at a little after ten.... "No one goes to Oxford's before ten," they'd been told. "Nothing much ever happens on the Avenue till after ten."....She had the most extraordinary legs - not long but shapely and firm and evenly tan below a short, flaired skirt that was gray and white plaid and pleated around; his hair was kind of crew cut but not so severe and he wore an open dress shirt with brown pin stripes over a black tee and tan trousers, no silly baseball cap or sloganed shirt.... He was already at the bar with his friends ordering their first round of drinks; she was coming in and being led by the hand to the other end of the room by her decidedly plainer looking friend when they exchanged a look in the single moment that they had before losing sight of one another in the crowd. It was a look that made certain neither would hook up with anyone else before finding one another for a second time. It was a glance that said, yes, that's it, that's what I want! coy and dazzled on the one hand and completely self-certain on the other. They continued to glimpse one another near and far through the crowd as they moved about the room and the evening wore on. Each time the look made was the same look and the same promise that, whatever else they would be experiencing over the course of the evening, they were meant to approach one another and come together.<br /><br />When they did, it was a little after one. He had the most wonderful voice and opened with just the right and funny thing to say commenting on all the odd people there seemed to be about them in the crowd. She knew immediately what he meant and said she had been thinking just that same thought though they both agreed the crowd at Oxford's wasn't a half bad crowd. But, just the same, they laughed, it had its share of those who were, as they agreed to call them, undecorative people. Standing together they found these and those whose shapes and sizes, clothes, hair and skin art they found laughable. "Now, he should never come out in anything like that...!" "I would never, ever be seen ....!" All the while, their eyes were on one another, too, discovering finenesses and exchanging anticipations they didn't need to speak of. All the while she was thinking how it would be to feel her fingers not nearly reach round his arms, how her cheek might nestle beneath his wide shoulder. He was imagining the softness of her lips as his own pressed down on them, wondering how her breasts that seemed so right would feel pressed against the abs he had worked so long to harden.<br /><br />And, then, just at the same moment, they both stopped trying to speak. And, their eyes, having taken one another in all over, met just as the words and music around them chorused up and out in an expanding bright burst of song.<br /><br /> "I can see me lovin' no body but you<br />For all my life..."<br /><br />The song so agreed with everything they were feeling and thinking about one another that it seemed some sort of confirmation and miracle. It said to them both Yes! and Now! and it drew the smiles that had never left their lips wide and their hands together in unison.<br /><br />The crowd even seemed to open for them as they made their way out to the street, toward the light outside.<br /><br />"The only one for me is you,<br />And you for me,<br />So happy together,<br />So happy together...."<br /><br />Their embrace was seamless and went on and on as song followed song from the bar mingled with talk and laughter. And, then, while they still embraced and kissed, the music ended and the talk and laughter were left alone to mingle only with the rising and falling choruses of traffic on the Avenue. The sidewalk filed and emptied with one departing crowd from the bar after another, too, as they continued to hold one another and kiss.<br /><br />Everything in the night around them was wholly outside of them and their absolute pleasure in eac other.<br /><br />"Chuck?"<br /><br />Charlie's best pal, Chris, was the one who came closest. The others had all walked on and were gathered up the street knotted on the curb away from the dark buildings to wait while Chris lingered after Charlie.<br /><br />"Godda go, pal!"<br /><br />Maddy, Carla's friend, waited alone patient but abandoned leaning back against the dark glass of Oxford's front window the other side of the entry way. Her purse dangled between her legs and swung in slow time with her gaze down upon it.<br /><br />Parted, even by the briefest space, Carla and Charlie felt so suddenly incomplete. For long moments they could only look at one another with sad knowledge.<br /><br />But, then, their smiles returned. His was that total certainty, self-assurance; hers that sly hunger. His hand touched, grazed down her arm and over her elbow; her hand reached up and traced his shoulder.<br /><br />"I have to...." they both said.<br /><br />And they both laughed sadly.<br /><br />"Yeah," he said.<br /><br />There were backward glances after that and, each time, they found that they had both had the same urge to find one another for one more look.<br /><br />Charlie's Brooks had parked in the lot behind Oxford Square, half way down to the Starbuck's end of the block beneath the low hanging branches of a tree. Maddy's car was around the corner at Lola's in Wilmer Street. Brooks drove them out on to Oxford where there was no traffic and the light at Monroe was green so they turned toward the expressway with out stopping once. Maddy turned off of Harper on to Goodman to take the two of them to her apartment over on Alexander where she was putting Carla up a few days.<br /><br />The others in Brooks' car made only a little small talk at first. It wasn't until they were at the light at Canterbury that Chris, beside Brooks in the front seat, smirked,<br /><br />"Leave it to you, Charlie!"<br /><br />The half-hearted laughter in the car made Charlie shy and he didn't say anything in return.<br /><br />The darkened and silent side streets kept Maddy silent and it wasn't until they were at Park Avenue that she commented,<br /><br />"Only your first night in town...." with an implied smirk.<br /><br />Carla was curled kittenishly down in the seat beside her.<br /><br />"And I didn't want to come out. Thank you, thank you!"<br /><br />Her friend was so clearly still entranced and had spoken so sweetly that Maddy had to feel a bit less left out.<br /><br />"You two seemed to really hit it off," she said with far less irony than she might have spoken with only a moment before.<br /><br />Brooks wasn't too busy taking the car up to the overpass to say with a glance into the rear view that couldn't have found Charlie in the corner of the rear seat,<br /><br />"You two seemed pretty hot and heavy?"<br /><br />Charlie really wasn't feeling yet like talking. He only said,<br /><br />"It was hot."<br /><br />Chris caught the mood his friend was in, if the others didn't.<br /><br />"She looked quite the girl," he said.<br /><br />Charlie found himself saying, knowing how it must sound,<br /><br />"She's everything you could want."<br /><br />Carla confided,<br /><br />"He was just what I needed. He was perfect."<br /><br />Maddy had turned down Park and into the dark of the tree lined section of the Avenue toward Rowley and Meigs and, then, Alexander. Her friend's good fortune was, again, a little wearing and she was silent.<br /><br />Davlin wanted to know,<br /><br />"Could I get her number?"<br /><br />"No!" Charlie said, decidedly and not with any of the usual humor.<br /><br />And, somehow, Chris understood then that Charlie hadn't either.<br /><br />"Did you get her name?" he asked.<br /><br />"Carla...." Charlie remembered.<br /><br />"Carla....?" Chris said and waited but Charlie said nothing more.<br /><br />Maddy, in her mood, almost said,<br /><br />"Too bad you're only here a few days."<br /><br />"An address?" Chris wondered, feeling he had to smile now despite himself.<br /><br />When there was only a complete and total silence from the rear seat, Chris did smile, he even laughed.<br /><br />"Perfect!"paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-76013430520131712422009-02-13T11:24:00.002-05:002009-02-13T12:38:48.903-05:00Yeah, Right!Last Tuesday was slow for Steve but got a little slam bang there for a while at the end.<br /><br />Afterward he came home to 640 Monroe with a sack of grub from Dog Town and decided to check his mail on the way up to his room.<br /><br />The only thing was a blue flyer from Chase Bank down the Avenue.<br /><br />Something like two hours earlier, at the end of the afternoon, he had been rushing to finish some correspondence and found, when he logged off, that he had only a half hour to make it to the P.O. down on Broad Street and post his package.<br /><br />A do-able walk, he had told himself pushing through the heavy door at the foot of the stairs and going out through the one step across lobby along side those self-same mail boxes to get himself out on the street, Monroe.<br /><br />And, then, whuddayuh know? there was a No. 7 bus just pulling into the curb at the corner in front of Lola's.<br /><br />It wasn't there for him; he'd only just come out on the street. But he hardly had to run to catch it.<br /><br />The doors opened and a passenger descended to walk off immediately and disappear. The doors closed. But he got to them just as, tapped on the glass and was admitted to ride.<br /><br />It was a day warm for February, last Tuesday, even if the sky was all over gray and it would have been both wonderful and worth it to walk but, now, with this fortunate convergence of himself and a bus, a dollar fare would leave no question of his getting his package to Virginia off on time. Catching the bus was the right thing, he told himself, while No. 7 growled out into traffic and made for downtown.<br /><br />Seconds later the bus was slowing again as it came up on the red light at Goodman. While they were still moving, beginning to slow down and just passing Enright's Thirst Parlor, Steve noticed out the window on the right a cop couple on stroll patrol shoulder to shoulder going the bus' direction out on the sidewalk. Without cap or coat, the two were blue straight-arrow models for a Police Academy poster this fine afternoon. He was tall and slender and she had her hair tied back and, with her hands together on her belt buckle, her shoulders squared.<br /><br />The two of them were such remarkably fine young officers Steve want to comment on them. But this was a bus full of weary looking late afternoon riders and no kind of audience. All were filling their seats like sacks and staring slumber-eyed straight ahead of them to no where.<br /><br />The bus, held up at the light behind other traffic, wasn't quite at the front of the Chase Bank at the corner and the young cop couple over took and passed it. The light went green just as the boy/girl patrol turned smartly in through the glass outer vestibule door in the bank's cropped off Goodman/Monroe corner where the ATM resides.<br /><br />And, just at the same moment, with the bus crawling out into Goodman gaining speed, Steve saw that there were two police cruisers parked up along the curb just before the Goodman entrance to the bank's parking lot. A funny thought occurred.<br /><br />"Y'don't suppose they knocked over the bank again?" he spoke out loud.<br /><br />The somnolist in the first forward looking seat on the aisle managed to look around where Steve indicated. His hang down face had that patient, enduring look of all veteran bus ridding, health clinic visiting folk.<br /><br />"That'd be third time this year," Steve suggested.<br /><br />Something like a smile came to the traveler's face after all. An appreciative smile, Steve thought it. These days who wouldn't smile at the thought of a bank being robbed?<br /><br />The ride downtown left Steve off just the other side of the Inner Loop overpass in front of the Strong Museum. Across the way the steel construction frame for the new office building going up on the corner of Woodbury was already part of the high rise sky line of the downtown City of Rochester behind and above it. The girders were that rust brown and the building frame was a huge new playground Jungle Gym appropriate for a spot across from a Museum of Play.<br /><br />Steve cut across through the museum grounds. The new skating rink in front of 10 Manhattan Square was a shallow artificial pond once more in the fair for February weather. The thought occurred to him that, when the inevitable next freeze came, he'd want to come down here after dark and take in what the rink looked like with lights all around it and the magic midtown city looming above it against the night sky.<br /><br />There was a line at the post office but he had come in plenty of time and his Valentine package went off to Herndon, VA, with assurances that it would arrive well before Saturday.<br /><br />After, he stood out in front of the office and decided to go home by Alexander Street and Park Avenue. He was still thinking he might walk up Park and revisit Stevers candy store for a little late shopping for more local loved ones.<br /><br />Instead, he turned down Rowley and came home to Monroe that way putting his shopping off to the morning when he would have letters to Penn Yan and Bloomfield ready to go. He was still, then, thinking he'd go home and make a healthful salad for his supper but, then, after he had walked home, he decided instead to walk on up to Dog Town and treat himself to Italian Sausage and an order of fries.<br /><br />"That for here or to go?" he was asked.<br /><br />"Go," he said.<br /><br />There was a plate of home make cookies on the counter as he had hoped there might be and two looked like Oatmeal Raisin.<br /><br />The Canine Commune was busy and several orders were in ahead of his for the Meth Head crew in the kitchen back of the counter to fill. The end of the counter toward the door was especially crowded with others waiting for food to go and the tables toward the front windows and the door were especially full of customers dining on dogs and burgers.<br /><br />Steve was about to pass the time taking in the place's gallery of art, at least the framed photographs of dogs on the walls away the crammed front of the place when he overheard some one ask,<br /><br />"Which bank is this?"<br /><br />"Chase Bank, down here...."<br /><br />One of the owners was standing with his back to the wall in the gap at the end of the counter along side the menu sign that describes the Town's specialty dogs.<br /><br />"...Cops were through here lookin' for the guy. Asked me had I seen anybody suspicious, anybody run by here?"<br /><br />The owner looked all non-plus.<br /><br />"People run by here all the time," he said. And, making a further face, added, "Who don't look suspicious?"<br /><br />"Whole neighborhood looks suspicious!" one of his listeners agreed and the laughter continued.<br /><br />"Third time this year," Steve spoke up.<br /><br />"Second time for this one guy!" he was told.<br /><br />Steve was thinking about what had been said about the neighborhood.<br /><br />"I was in Exxon one morning," he related. "Guy comes in there complaining to a cop having coffee that this dude talking to himself was back out there up the street again. Cop said, 'You're going to have to be more specific.'"<br /><br />It got a good laugh. They were a good crowd and knew Monroe.<br /><br />When Steve came home to 640 and checked his mail the only thing in his box was a blue flyer from the Chase Bank. If he opened a checking acount with them, the bank would give him a hundred dollars.<br /><br />"Yeah, right!"paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-20962537089687079892009-01-11T22:24:00.002-05:002009-01-11T23:01:09.067-05:00THE AVENUE PROMETHEANA city is mankind's forever youthful repudiation of the natural world's various impositions.<br /><br />The other night the Avenue was snow wracked.<br /><br />Snow fell through the streetlight. On the ground it became a still bound and turbulent lake to look at, alienating and stormy in its distortions of the familiar. Monroe's curbs and corners had become buried, all but indistinguishable in rumpled whiteness from the plowed and tire rutted asphalt; the sidewalks, endlessly stumbled though were too often deep piled and tossed about. Traffic rumpled by with its music oddly muffled, its pace just that much retarded that a resident would notice the difference.<br /><br />Still it must be said for the young and foolhardly who turn out at night that they will not be denied. They will have their time. Saturday night is Saturday night and must be had for all it is worth. The bars were open. The traffic slowed but never ceased. And, out of the bars, they wandered into the street when and where they wanted in the snow and blared good naturedly back at the horns of impatient motorists. From bar to bar and to Gitsis', Mark's and even Mr. V's cart behind the bank on Goodman, they waded through the static white surf that foamed over the sidewalks and wore grins rather more than grimaces doing it unless and until their faces turned to stone.<br /><br />They ate hot dogs with snow in their hair and laughed.<br /><br />The traffic backed up for the light at Goodman and a van's side door opened.<br /><br />"'Ey, man, you okay tonight?" I heard.<br /><br />I turned with my cup of 7/Eleven coffee in hand.<br /><br />"Need any money?"<br /><br />"No, I'm good."<br /><br />Only Monroe's ever practical panhandlers had deserted the scene early and what was a night on the Avenue without handing over the broken bills of a bar tab to some colorfully decrepit character?<br /><br />"I'm good," I told them.<br /><br />I went home dodging across Cornell between the cars pulling in, one after another, at the parking lot at Gitsis' and walked by the line up waiting patiently behind the barrier at the dinner door for admittance. They were hugging the plate glass, getting in under the overhang.<br /><br />I crossed Wilmer to the quieter block in front of a now officially closed J. D. Oxford's and noted the same little girl standing on the corner in front of Lola's. It was well after three a.m. and I'd noticed her there more than an hour earlier watching without curiousity the young men who were drifting out of the bar in a crowd.<br /><br />I stood in the doorway at 640 next to the Pub and kept her distant company. I watched the two or three late customers cramming slices and gabbing with the staff in the lighted window of Rookie's Express across the way. The blue circled sign in the window on the side of the building spelled out in red script <em>Open</em> over and over. And, after a while, the pizza chef with the nearly bald head wearing a logo short sleeved shirt ran a pair of boxed pies over to those drinking late in the Pub.<br /><br />"That's okay. We're open to three," he said, leaving.<br /><br />The Rochester Police Department cruised by on the Avenue, went up as far as Oxford Street and turned around to return.<br /><br />I wondered if he had noticed what I had noticed and looked around to find the little girl gone.<br /><br />The cruiser turned into Wilmer and disappeared behind Lola's. Walking down I saw him again darkly through the two cornering panes of deserted Lola's plate glass. He was pulled up in the street and, from the corner, I heard him asking the little girl her name through the lowered passenger front window. He asked her to spell that.<br /><br />It was getting on toward half past. The snow fell more slowly through the streetlight and it was as though the storm had tired of trying to stop the city and its young people.<br /><br />In another three hours or so my Sunday Times would be arriving.<br /><br />January 11, 2009.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3429592191313531667.post-13733034809485185642008-12-25T12:53:00.002-05:002008-12-25T14:30:23.765-05:00Home For the Holidays.Gary had these wide eyes and grin that never left his face when he ran into Mark on Main Street just up from the canal bridge that morning.<br /><br />It hadn't been that long that he'd been out of town and nothing had really changed.<br /><br />But,<br /><br />"It all feels so different," he laughed. "Everything looks the same only - I guess I'm not used to seeing it anymore, y'know?"<br /><br />And Mark did, kind of.<br /><br />Gary had been downstate to school and was now home for the holidays and, though the two of them hadn't really known each other that well in school, Gary seemed genuinely thrilled to have run into Mark and they went around for coffee.<br /><br />Gary had gotten in the evening before. He told about coming up on the Thruway and pulling into the old town, the old neighborhood. He was out, now, he said, just to look around and couldn't get over the feeling of being somehow a stranger to it all. It was great being home but he was a day late getting back because he'd stayed on a day with friends he'd made at school so they could binge together one last time. They'd been out the night before break and decided it just hadn't been enough. They had all stayed on and did it over again.<br /><br />"That was goddam special, let me tell you!"<br /><br />Mark had been commuting across town to MCC and thought he would transfer eventually but wasn't sure where he'd go.<br /><br />They should get together, Gary decided when they were back out on the street. They should go out somewhere, close a bar.<br /><br />"Man, I just can't come down, y'know? I'm not ready yet. I need to JUICE!" he bellowed suddenly and made people stop and stare.<br /><br />They planned to get together that night and go down to Monroe Ave in the city. Gary had been a few times before but never when he was on his own. Mark could, maybe, show him around.<br /><br />"Gona be a blast!" Gary was certain.<br /><br />They arranged to get together and agree that it would be a good night for going because it would be out ahead of the snow that everyone said was coming. When they met up that evening Craig Martin, who had been in their class as well, was with Gary. Gary was still up as before and Craig switched off to the back seat of Gary's car so Mark could sit up front for when they got off the Expressway downtown.<br /><br />Craig had run into Christie Steiger earlier in the day much as Gary had run into Mark. Mark recalled her as another of that crowd. When Craig and Gary weren't recalling their old times together, Craig was on his cell in the back seat with Christie. He wanted her and her firends to make it down to the Avenue and meet up with them.<br /><br />"It's early. Nothing happens before ten."<br /><br />He was on the phone with her again when they left the car in the lot off Oxford Street.<br /><br />"We're here...at Oxford's...on Monroe.... Come on down!... Anytime 'fore closing."<br /><br />When they came out of the alley onto the street they fell in with a crowd crossing from Spike's that had gotten segmented when it tried to ignore the traffic which was heavy both ways. They all went into Oxford's Pub together.<br /><br />Coming down the sidewalk, Gary had noticed that the Mark's across the way on the corner was no longer a Mark's, had become something called Rookie's Express but was still a pizza parlor.<br /><br />The summer before Gary had been 'down here,' with a couple of friends, he told them over their first beers. They hadn't been able to get in anywhere then, but it was one of those summer nights and they hung around anyway. They got an old panhandling bum to buy them some beers in the corner store at the other end of the block up from Spike's and drank them in the lot between the bar and Subway. It was the lot where the bums hang out on the steps of an enclosed porch and stairs up the side of the building. Later they went for slices and sodas from Mark's, sat on the curb and watched stretch limos pull up and unload whole dozens of guys and girls in front of Oxford's.<br /><br />They saw a fight nearly break out that the pub's bouncers broke up. Some faggot in these big strange glasses thought he was part of one of those crowds and kept trying to horn in with them.<br /><br />"But this other guy?" Gary related, "He wasn't havin' the loser. He was going to throw down, go hands with this guy if his friends hadn't held him back. Then the bouncers shooed the dork off the block."<br /><br />"Gil Farnum?" he added. "He nearly laughed his ass of the curb. Actually - off the curb. Dweeb came back up our side of the street. And he's shouting all this shit over there to the bar, y'know. Startin' things back up again. Only one of the bouncers, man. He stepped down in the street and jus' looks at the guy - and he runs off again! Jus' looks! And Gil fell over on my lap he was laughing so hard!"<br /><br />"You knew Gil, right?" Gary asked, his face a mile wide with the memory.<br /><br />"Freakin' Farnum!" Craig called him and pulled on his long neck.<br /><br />Mark said, yeah, he remember Gil but he wasn't sure which one of that crowd Farnum had been. Maybe he was the blond wrestler who shaved his head to look more intimidating.<br /><br />There was a gang from Spencerport next to them in the bar for a time. They were buying rounds for one another and, after Gary shout out how they were all from 'the Port' too - just not saying which port, they were included in on the beers.<br /><br />"We were 'O5," Gary claimed.<br /><br />"'04," Craig corrected him, popping peanuts and grinning.<br /><br />"That's right, '04."<br /><br />Gary got into a running gag with one of that crowd, the two of them sharing memories that had never happened. Perhaps they were memories of things that had happened - just not all in the same school. Some times Craig and Mark were asked to confirm a memory.<br /><br />"Oh, yeah! Sure! Sure - freakin' best time I ever had!" Craig would say.<br /><br />From time to time, Craig would go out on the street for a smoke and to make another of his phone calls to Christie Steiger and her lot. They were always somewhere and might be coming around to the Avenue.<br /><br />Mark would go out, too. At first he would bum a smoke from who ever else was there on the sidewalk but he had never smoked that much and, after a time, even other peoples' smoke made him nauseous. He would go for a walk up the block, instead. For late in December it was a mild night, but he would shove his hands in his pockets and pull his hoodie up over his head and walk along like that. The other end of the block everything was closed and dark. One time he walked as far as the Expressway and stood out on the overpass in the middle with the lights of the traffic whizzing to him on the left and away from him on the right. There was still such a lot of traffic and the cars and trucks traveled so fast that their head lights seemed to streak toward him before disappearing beneath his left foot only to reemerge red eyed and going away beneath his right.<br /><br />He was returning from one of these walks at Last Call.<br /><br />Gary and the Spencerport gang were just then blundering out on to the street. There were, maybe, two dozen people out in front of Oxford's leaving the bar but not going anywhere right away. The front door of the pub was more open than closed then with everyone who was coming out or hurrying inside before it was straight up two a.m. They were doing "Teen Age Waste Land," for last song.<br /><br />One of the 'Port crowd came out later than the rest. He had a slight build and curly hair and stepped around the clot of people who'd come out of the bar last ahead of him. He didn't hurry to the curb side but he walked straight there as if he needed to get where he was going.<br /><br />He stood at the edge of the avenue straight up and still for a long moment waiting. At last his head bowed a bit forward and what he did was more like spitting up than the spewing that usually happens outside a bar at two in the morning.<br /><br />Gary's Spencerport High classmate pointed.<br /><br />"I went to school with that man!" he boasted in the same big voice he'd been using inside the bar.<br /><br />With out looking around, the kid on the curb lifted his right arm in a weakened gesture of triumph and acknowledgment. When he did look around, he wore an accomplished grin and was glad to have that out of his system.<br /><br />Soon different ones were piling together with their arms around one another's shoulders posing for prom night snaps and declaring their Spencerport affiliation. Gary and Craig Martin were among them.<br /><br />There were cheers of,<br /><br />"S-port! S-port! S-port!"<br /><br />And there was laughter.<br /><br />Gary grabbed both Craig and his new friend and called for the girl taking the pictures to immortalize the -<br /><br />"Class of 'O4!"<br /><br />Mark stood up the street and watched.<br /><br />It occurred to him, and he wanted to tell it to someone, that he'd never had a real friend and didn't believe he ever would. He wanted it out in words spoken, too, that he had never been anywhere and that nothing had ever happened to him.<br /><br />He wanted only to go home; but he had to wait.<br /><br /> THE END.<br /><br />Christmas, 2008.paulfrascahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10434613045508371415noreply@blogger.com0