SEVERAL DIFF'ENT DUDES ON MONROE.
Wid Mark other day 'nd he's, like,
"Dude!"
'Cuss there's this cheapass shit in the windah at Rite Aid.
"Gawdahavit," he says.
'N'I'm, like,
"Dude?"
'Cuss it's totally cheapass.
I'm,
"Dude!"
"Cuss he's gawdbe shittin' me.
Bud, he's,
"Nawgawdahavit!"
'N'I'm laffin',
"Dude!"
'Cuss I know he's shittin' me.
Bud he's,
"I'm so buyin' it, dude!"
Bud, then, dude....What? We don' go in?
'N'I'm, like,
"Dude?"
Bud, he's, like...pointin' ...in the doorway? 'N'he tells me,
"Dude in 'ere put me out for swearin' other night."
'N'I'm,
"No-o-o-o!... Dude! Tha's bullshit!"
"Swear," he tells me.
So, jist aft'd that, we're at Ghost Dog 'n' I'm,
"Dude..."
'Cuss 'ere'sa bitch of a bong 'ere in the windah.
Toh-dally not cheapass!
So....
Dude?
Whud're you bin doin'?
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
THEY
THEY.
They were in a rush to be where they were going.
They didn't so much turn the corner into his street as cut it.
Together, almost immediately, they were back down again off the curb and crossing Boardman Street diagonally.
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.
His first suggestion was Oxfords. But, then, immediately said...they might, instead, go to Enright's.
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.
And she agreed that that would be fine.
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.
He thought how, in that outfit, she looked petite and unaffectedly attractive.
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.
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.
They said little about it and only in stray remarks. But they were both, it seemed, similarly inexperienced.
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....
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.
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.
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.
It made her seem even more eager than he was to be going.
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.
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.
He told himself he should quit laughing; not to jinx the thing.
But he couldn't keep from grinning.
It had become such an amazing night fresh, cold and clear.
This was, he was certain, the most marvelous night of his life.
They had only been out together something less than an hour.
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.
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.
Everything was so fresh, crisp and clear to him.
That was when he began to smile, really smile.
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.
Inside the bar, just before leaving, a smile had grown on his face, too, briefly, off course, when he understood what she meant.
"You know, maybe we should go to your place," she suggested, "and see what happens."
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.
A moment later that made him smile when he understood.
And he agreed that that would be fine.
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.
They were so early still in coming back to his place.
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.
And, he noticed, crossing Boardman, how their second floor front wndow was dark.
The most marvelous night of his life, it couldn't be otherwise than it was turning out to be.
She was still the same single step behind him coming down the well-lighted hallway to the foot of his stairs.
"Y' know..." he heard her begin to say.
But he had already begun to speak himself.
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.
"I wasn't," he allowed himself to laugh, "...expecting to be back so early."
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.
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.
He, of course, felt wonderful and different after.
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.
They - Jared, Marlon, Chris - were all different, she thought.
They were different from one another and they differed, too, from this latest boy.
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.
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.
They only sat together than one time. And she had only ever told one of her friends just how far things went after that.
But, then, after she had, Marce McDonough smirking, saying,
"Guess we'll see him on Predator 2015," sort of put her off the whole thing.
Though, by then, his assignment and the school year was just about over, anyway.
So, older guy, sort of....
And Marlon...black.
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.
"Nevuh fa'git such a fine..." he said.
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.
Yes, she was seeing some one...
She had been certain she heard a wonderful, delightful uneasy in Mom's voice after that.
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.
But no more dates. Her choice.
So, older guy...black guy...
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....
Just a summer fling.
Older guy...black guy...family man....
The boy was different.
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....
Until an hour ago that had been the assumption she 'd been going with.
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.
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.
It made her smile to think of them letter out their long held breathe in relieved laughter.
That ws when, devilishly, she thought, well, why not? And went into what she called her act.
But, it was also when she thought, well, isn't it time, too.
He asked her, the first who ever had.
She laughed.
"You're something to text home about..."
They were in a rush to be where they were going.
They didn't so much turn the corner into his street as cut it.
Together, almost immediately, they were back down again off the curb and crossing Boardman Street diagonally.
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.
His first suggestion was Oxfords. But, then, immediately said...they might, instead, go to Enright's.
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.
And she agreed that that would be fine.
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.
He thought how, in that outfit, she looked petite and unaffectedly attractive.
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.
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.
They said little about it and only in stray remarks. But they were both, it seemed, similarly inexperienced.
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....
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.
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.
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.
It made her seem even more eager than he was to be going.
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.
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.
He told himself he should quit laughing; not to jinx the thing.
But he couldn't keep from grinning.
It had become such an amazing night fresh, cold and clear.
This was, he was certain, the most marvelous night of his life.
They had only been out together something less than an hour.
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.
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.
Everything was so fresh, crisp and clear to him.
That was when he began to smile, really smile.
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.
Inside the bar, just before leaving, a smile had grown on his face, too, briefly, off course, when he understood what she meant.
"You know, maybe we should go to your place," she suggested, "and see what happens."
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.
A moment later that made him smile when he understood.
And he agreed that that would be fine.
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.
They were so early still in coming back to his place.
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.
And, he noticed, crossing Boardman, how their second floor front wndow was dark.
The most marvelous night of his life, it couldn't be otherwise than it was turning out to be.
She was still the same single step behind him coming down the well-lighted hallway to the foot of his stairs.
"Y' know..." he heard her begin to say.
But he had already begun to speak himself.
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.
"I wasn't," he allowed himself to laugh, "...expecting to be back so early."
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.
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.
He, of course, felt wonderful and different after.
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.
They - Jared, Marlon, Chris - were all different, she thought.
They were different from one another and they differed, too, from this latest boy.
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.
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.
They only sat together than one time. And she had only ever told one of her friends just how far things went after that.
But, then, after she had, Marce McDonough smirking, saying,
"Guess we'll see him on Predator 2015," sort of put her off the whole thing.
Though, by then, his assignment and the school year was just about over, anyway.
So, older guy, sort of....
And Marlon...black.
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.
"Nevuh fa'git such a fine..." he said.
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.
Yes, she was seeing some one...
She had been certain she heard a wonderful, delightful uneasy in Mom's voice after that.
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.
But no more dates. Her choice.
So, older guy...black guy...
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....
Just a summer fling.
Older guy...black guy...family man....
The boy was different.
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....
Until an hour ago that had been the assumption she 'd been going with.
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.
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.
It made her smile to think of them letter out their long held breathe in relieved laughter.
That ws when, devilishly, she thought, well, why not? And went into what she called her act.
But, it was also when she thought, well, isn't it time, too.
He asked her, the first who ever had.
She laughed.
"You're something to text home about..."
Sunday, February 12, 2012
"In A Charitable Mood."
So, last Thanksgiving week I'm back in Rah-cha-cha.
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.
Y' gotta pick your nights.
Let's face it, 'Chester's a dull boy and the Avenue ain't what it was.
Y' land there, you'd better know when 'n' where the gittin's good or there is no fun in the burg at all.
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.
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.
And, when I'm right, I'm right.
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.
I could almost be proud of those half-assed kids.
So, 'min the bar. And what do you gots?
Y' gotcha couples; y' gotcha crowds; y' gotcha regulars.
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.
Now, your crowds are another matter.
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.
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.
It's like they got to put enough booze down their gullets to keep buzzed the whole coming sad ritual.
Y' know: 'over d' river end through the woods...'
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.
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.
They're none of them worrying about it.
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.
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.
So, I'm in the bar and it's like:
"'Ey, long time no see..." to one's I've seen before.
And I'm looking at nothing special here as I've just been explaining....
'Til I see this one crowd. It's not even a crowd exactly. It's a combination. One I seen before.
Brothers. Brothers on the Town.
Oh, yeah! That's always fun.
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.
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.
Well, so am I - 'n' mine's higher!
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.
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.
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.
And that's how it goes - 'til it's about half-past one.
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.
I can't see, at that moment, younger brother, Gary's face, but I can imagine.
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.
Ole Garr's not even looking in the right direction Butch is.
And, what's he looking at.
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.
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.
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.
To the far side, their gloomy guy just watches and mopes.
I don't know.
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.
Call it the 'Hemlift Maneuver.'
WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!
HEY!
That whole crowd is suddenly seriously upset.
None more so than the gloomy guy who shoves Butch's shoulder before he can straighten back up laughing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
"We weren't looking for any trouble. Guy shove my brother and - "
A-n-n-d -
"Y're out...."
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.
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.
Like it matters, Stand comes up on Butch's shoulder half pleading,
"Come on. We can still get in another bar. There's time. We can still get in another bar, guys."
Then, for a time, Butch, himself, steps up to the Closed Door, saying, all grinning and calm like,
"I got a beer on the bar."
"No y' don't."
"Yeah, I got a beer on the bar - and a guy I gotta see."
"No y' don't."
"Yeah, I got a guy I gotta settle with."
"No y' don't."
And Gary touches his brother's shoulder, saying,
"It's no big deal. It's almost closin'. There's no point -"
Butch knows what he's about.
"Guys gotta come out," he says - not to Garr' even now. "And I got something to settle with him."
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?
And Gary says,
"Come on, it's almost closin'. We'd be going, any way."
And Stan says,
"We got time. We can get a beer. We can get a carton of beer. There's still time..."
Like it matters.
"This guy I got something to settle is coming out," Butch tells the Door and Tater.
And so it goes a while longer.
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.
So, when Btuch tells them,
"I got something to settle- and I'm going to be right here."
I'm the one walks by him saying,
"No you're not."
Tossing my head the Gulf of Monroe ways with a grin of my own right back at him, saying,
"'Cross the street."
He might, in his way, just grin back my way. But Brother Gary doesn't. And he actually takes a look.
Anxious, now, he says,
"Come on, come on, we'll just get busted, man!"
And Stan chimes, pleading,
"We'll be going any way."
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.
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.
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.
Myself, I could go back inside, too. A familiar face, all I'd have to do is go up and knock.
But I hang around. I'm curious how long Butch can keep grinning and waiting for what isn't going to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a no go. So, she wanders back to where the last crowd is just moving off.
"'Ey!"
Butch has his grin back in full and he calls after her.
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.
"'Ey, y' wanted to make five dollars?"
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.
"'Y wanted to make dollars?" Butch asks her.
And he tells her how, too.
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.
"Five dollars; the three of us," he tells her.
Her faces makes her own shy smile and she tells him,
"Naw, I don't do that," a little uncertain yet.
"Come on, it's five dollars. Three more 'n it's worth!"
"Naw, I don't do that."
She has still got the good one. She wonders of me,
"Got a light?"
I got smokes; I can spare one.
"Rather have a fresh one?"
And I got a light, too.
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.
Like I say, 'Chester's a dull boy and Monroe ain't the avenue it used to be.
I don't know why I go there.
If I had any place else to go, maybe I wouldn't.
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.
And I'm in a charitable mood.
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.
Y' gotta pick your nights.
Let's face it, 'Chester's a dull boy and the Avenue ain't what it was.
Y' land there, you'd better know when 'n' where the gittin's good or there is no fun in the burg at all.
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.
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.
And, when I'm right, I'm right.
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.
I could almost be proud of those half-assed kids.
So, 'min the bar. And what do you gots?
Y' gotcha couples; y' gotcha crowds; y' gotcha regulars.
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.
Now, your crowds are another matter.
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.
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.
It's like they got to put enough booze down their gullets to keep buzzed the whole coming sad ritual.
Y' know: 'over d' river end through the woods...'
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.
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.
They're none of them worrying about it.
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.
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.
So, I'm in the bar and it's like:
"'Ey, long time no see..." to one's I've seen before.
And I'm looking at nothing special here as I've just been explaining....
'Til I see this one crowd. It's not even a crowd exactly. It's a combination. One I seen before.
Brothers. Brothers on the Town.
Oh, yeah! That's always fun.
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.
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.
Well, so am I - 'n' mine's higher!
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.
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.
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.
And that's how it goes - 'til it's about half-past one.
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.
I can't see, at that moment, younger brother, Gary's face, but I can imagine.
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.
Ole Garr's not even looking in the right direction Butch is.
And, what's he looking at.
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.
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.
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.
To the far side, their gloomy guy just watches and mopes.
I don't know.
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.
Call it the 'Hemlift Maneuver.'
WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!
HEY!
That whole crowd is suddenly seriously upset.
None more so than the gloomy guy who shoves Butch's shoulder before he can straighten back up laughing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
"We weren't looking for any trouble. Guy shove my brother and - "
A-n-n-d -
"Y're out...."
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.
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.
Like it matters, Stand comes up on Butch's shoulder half pleading,
"Come on. We can still get in another bar. There's time. We can still get in another bar, guys."
Then, for a time, Butch, himself, steps up to the Closed Door, saying, all grinning and calm like,
"I got a beer on the bar."
"No y' don't."
"Yeah, I got a beer on the bar - and a guy I gotta see."
"No y' don't."
"Yeah, I got a guy I gotta settle with."
"No y' don't."
And Gary touches his brother's shoulder, saying,
"It's no big deal. It's almost closin'. There's no point -"
Butch knows what he's about.
"Guys gotta come out," he says - not to Garr' even now. "And I got something to settle with him."
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?
And Gary says,
"Come on, it's almost closin'. We'd be going, any way."
And Stan says,
"We got time. We can get a beer. We can get a carton of beer. There's still time..."
Like it matters.
"This guy I got something to settle is coming out," Butch tells the Door and Tater.
And so it goes a while longer.
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.
So, when Btuch tells them,
"I got something to settle- and I'm going to be right here."
I'm the one walks by him saying,
"No you're not."
Tossing my head the Gulf of Monroe ways with a grin of my own right back at him, saying,
"'Cross the street."
He might, in his way, just grin back my way. But Brother Gary doesn't. And he actually takes a look.
Anxious, now, he says,
"Come on, come on, we'll just get busted, man!"
And Stan chimes, pleading,
"We'll be going any way."
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.
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.
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.
Myself, I could go back inside, too. A familiar face, all I'd have to do is go up and knock.
But I hang around. I'm curious how long Butch can keep grinning and waiting for what isn't going to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a no go. So, she wanders back to where the last crowd is just moving off.
"'Ey!"
Butch has his grin back in full and he calls after her.
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.
"'Ey, y' wanted to make five dollars?"
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.
"'Y wanted to make dollars?" Butch asks her.
And he tells her how, too.
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.
"Five dollars; the three of us," he tells her.
Her faces makes her own shy smile and she tells him,
"Naw, I don't do that," a little uncertain yet.
"Come on, it's five dollars. Three more 'n it's worth!"
"Naw, I don't do that."
She has still got the good one. She wonders of me,
"Got a light?"
I got smokes; I can spare one.
"Rather have a fresh one?"
And I got a light, too.
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.
Like I say, 'Chester's a dull boy and Monroe ain't the avenue it used to be.
I don't know why I go there.
If I had any place else to go, maybe I wouldn't.
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.
And I'm in a charitable mood.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Last Night on Monroe in the Rain
Last night on Monroe in the rain a surprizing lot was happening.
Most of the time it was only a small rain that was falling and the things that were happening were all small things that mattered little except to the people who were doing them.
Coming out of the Gulf that would be closing in minutes, two young men with fresh faces needing shaves were returning home to Boardman Street under the canopy at the convenience pumps and making for the alley in back of the Wilmer. Perhaps they had been to one of the bars north of Goodman, O'Cal's, The Sports Page, one of those bars. Otherwise why carry home a carton of beer bought along the way and not make their last call at the Gulf nearer home. The carrying the carton before him clutched both hand holes and grinned big like at a joke anticipated or just told.
Last Call, too, was on the minds of the Runners.
These three guys came up from Goodman on a stumbling, flailing, laughing run. They were on the east side of Monroe until just before Enrights. Then they were on the west side and held up a green pick-up truck chasing one another across Amherst.
The one in the middle threw hands up on the front hood and, laughing out loud, apologized,
"Sorry! Godda make Last Call, bro!, while running off.
He stumblingly turned almost around doing it and laughed about that, too.
Crossing the same crosswalk, moments later and in the other direction, I looked around and, now, the Runners were crossing for Oxfords, the east side of Monroe, again, hollering and laughing and running, head-long black figures with arms up and silhouetted against the lights of that block.
I took just that one quick look and, then, only heard them arrive at the bar grinning explanations to the bouncer at the door and gaining thankful entry in time. I didn't much notice either the guy on his cell walking along parallel with me on the outside of the parked cars at Gitsis' across the avenue.
All my attention had turned to the girl down at Rite Aid, almost at the Goodman corner of the store. She had on a dark jacket and ws slim, five-eight, five-eight and a half. At first, and from that distance, just passed Amherst, I thought it some wide-collared or too large sweater she had on, for she seemed to be showing most of a white shoulder and the fabric dipped enough below to expose a shallow arc of back as well. Perhaps wearing a boyfriend's borrowed sweater or sweat shirt, I thought. Altogether, not something you expect to see on a night in November with rain however light, nearly not there at times.
There was something, too, in the way she was standing, tall and slender. When I thought I saw the most of her left shoulder and that arc beneath it, she had turned to look after a number of boys who had passed her and were about to cross at the light. Perhaps they had said something.
But the rest of the time, both at first and after that, she only stood close to and facing the store window nearly to the end, almost at the corner far from the doors where people go in and come out. She wanted to be alone, felt alone and wanted to be by herself.
People were going in and coming out of Rite Aid and I might have been one.
As I was nearing the sliding doors and in-store brightness knowing I wouldn't be going inside yet, there was a clatter.
The clatter got her attention - for a moment she glanced back across Monroe not over or down her shoulder but around it and down.
A young man in a bright, open jacket and white shirt had dropped his cell taking it out of his pocket while pacing in front of the Chase parking, the ATM drive-through. Now, he was reaching for it with head pointed toward the pavement, bent at the waist and a little wasted.
The girl in the jacket - I'd already determined it was a jacket with white lined hood thrown back over one shoulder - had gone back to standing close to the window pane and looking down in her pensive, at least her waiting mood. As I passed her to the corner, she had dark hair that went down straight into her collar and hood and a narrow pretty face. She was looking at the packaged traiin sets in the window. Only something to be looked at while waiting for a boyfriend, I supposed.
Still, she might have waited nearer the doors or looked into one of the windows nearer the doors with dolls and other toys and seasonal things on sale in them. And that continued to be interesting.
I thought in passing of the train sets at - Dan's. Dan's Crafts and Things has sets with perfect in every detail miniatures of the locomotives and cars of trains from the past like the Super Chief and the New York Central's Twentieth-Century limited, sleek long passengers cars they built and repaired int he East Rochester Car Shops.
I might have mentioned them, mentioned Dan's, and had even turned and lifted a small greeting in her direction.
Only a dark young man in a brown open jacket was carrying a carton of beer with him coming down from the entrance of the store. The girl in the jacket shifted her hips and turned to join him walking, hands in her pockets and head still a bit cast down in her same unsmiling mood.
They went on around the corner, west on Goodman, in a resumed, a settled into slight bitterness conversation of short sharp words and grudging silences.
Bright jacket had found and dialed a number and was,
"Where the fuck you at...?"
...and,
"Thought you were comin' right back...."
...and,
"No, I'm not there; I lef' there. I thought you were comin' right back...!"
A wide-guy had come out of Enright's door, a few yards up the block, and ws on his cell, too.
"Guy dohn' mean nothin' by that...!"
...and,
"If y're gonna git pissed ev'r little thing guy says...!"
And a second, narrower guy comes out and paces back and forth, too, out of the doorway with cell,
"...y're on Alexander y' just kee on to Monroe..."
...and,
"Y' got a light on Monroe at Averill, a light at Meigs and just passed Goodman...."
...and,
"Enright's, y' see it on your left just passed the light...."
Short guy with bushy hair traveling fast coming out of Cornell with his head down and his cell to his ear is positive,
"I wanna shop, too!"
It's Closing and every one is on their cells. There is still half a night left to fill, Saturday morning.
At the entrance to Rite Aid's parking lot, a hot blonde with long straight hair driving a white compact has slowed to make the turn into the drive to the lot. The car cuts in across the sidewalk but, then, just sits there. The girl is well made up and wears a gray coat that looks dressy and she is smoking a cigarette that is freshly lit and long. She sat across the sidewalk more to take a logn drag or two than looking to see if the traffic behind her will let her back on the avenue to go south.
And it will and does because her pal, a second hot thin blonde who might be her sister, followed her in another white car, a match for hers and she is sitting in traffic waiting and talking on her cell. The first sister completes her turn, backing out and starting off down the avenue all the while with her cigarette compassing theway between her lips. The second white car takes longer to turn and follow, swinging off to the far curb and three-pointing once two or three darker colored cars ahve cut ahead of her.
It is closing time and she is never off her cell.
The sliding doors at the drug store sprung open and I went inside the brightness.
I figured it would be easier to scribble notes in my pocket pad in the unshadowed white light out of the rain and night. My hands would work better out of the cold.
It was the first of two trips I made into the Rite Aid with my note pad, the second to make notes from a walk north of Goodman.
There was a car lit up that pulled into the Edmonds followed closely by the blue-and-white. The car pulled into the alley behind the burrito shopand the cruiser followed him there, too.
The cruiser's overheads spun flashing a blinking rose light down the back alley that showed itself on the fence back of the Sports Page. Some guy was up close and facing the blank wall of what used to Country Sweet Chicken and Ribs sharing the building with the burrito joint. He kept looking over his shoulder but looked back toward the avenue and people passing there. I doubt he ever noticed the light of authority around in dark back of the building.
There was an altercation that begin in the Page or the Acme that flagged other RPD down. A well dressed girl with dark red hair was angry and was being walked away from the scene toward Goodman by people she was with but wanted all along to go back. It was others who flagged down the passing cruiser and reported what had happened to the officer. A man with a shaved head had begun a fight in the bar and pushed a girl around running off back down toward Meigs.
From the description the kids were giving the officer, I thought it sounded like one of a group of three or four skinheads who have been around the block between Rowley and Meigs since last summer. I have seen several incidents between them and kids on the block. The skinheads in their uniform white tee-shirts get into iwth the neighborhood kids and the altercations all end with the Whtie People's Party of Monroe retreating in a pack to their festung.
"It always seems to be racial with these guys. Whenever they get into it, it always has something to do with race, " I said to the witnesses after the cop was gone to put it out with dispatch.
The one guy, who had doen the most reporting, the guy with the back pack over his shoulder, stared thoughtfully back and nodded a bit.
"Fits," he said, seeing and agreeing to something that hadn't occurred to him before, perhaps.
Later and down at Big Deal Pizza's corner, the girl with the dark red hair was back and on her own, still looking pissed.
It took no more than a few words of recognition to put her back in the middle of the scene from before. She shouted her words out and addressed them angrily to the avenue as though broadcasting them rather than having a conversation.
"Some GUY," she gestured, "thinks he can SIT IN A BAR and ABUSE some poor girl, PUSH her around and....Y' try and tell him Y' CAN'T DO THAT. Y' can't THROW some girl around like that and.... He gets in your face, TELLS you he's going to SHOOT YOU IN YOUR FACE....
"You can't DO that. YOU CAN'T do that in a CIVILIZATION!...."
She said her name was Kelly and shook hands while all around us the RPD were prowling about. Blue-and-whites were pulling out of this side street and that and lighting up to U-turn in the other direction on the avenue; or they were turning off to patrol in to the back parking lots and alley way passages.
Before I went up for the night, I noticed the rain falling in the pools of water along the car-less curb above my building. The lakes were black crone fingers with clawed talons and arthritic joints and knuckles. But they shown just enough in the streetlight for the rain to be rippling them with incessant small rings that appeared and winked out replaced by more and more just their likeness.
Saturday night, 12:48.
Most of the time it was only a small rain that was falling and the things that were happening were all small things that mattered little except to the people who were doing them.
Coming out of the Gulf that would be closing in minutes, two young men with fresh faces needing shaves were returning home to Boardman Street under the canopy at the convenience pumps and making for the alley in back of the Wilmer. Perhaps they had been to one of the bars north of Goodman, O'Cal's, The Sports Page, one of those bars. Otherwise why carry home a carton of beer bought along the way and not make their last call at the Gulf nearer home. The carrying the carton before him clutched both hand holes and grinned big like at a joke anticipated or just told.
Last Call, too, was on the minds of the Runners.
These three guys came up from Goodman on a stumbling, flailing, laughing run. They were on the east side of Monroe until just before Enrights. Then they were on the west side and held up a green pick-up truck chasing one another across Amherst.
The one in the middle threw hands up on the front hood and, laughing out loud, apologized,
"Sorry! Godda make Last Call, bro!, while running off.
He stumblingly turned almost around doing it and laughed about that, too.
Crossing the same crosswalk, moments later and in the other direction, I looked around and, now, the Runners were crossing for Oxfords, the east side of Monroe, again, hollering and laughing and running, head-long black figures with arms up and silhouetted against the lights of that block.
I took just that one quick look and, then, only heard them arrive at the bar grinning explanations to the bouncer at the door and gaining thankful entry in time. I didn't much notice either the guy on his cell walking along parallel with me on the outside of the parked cars at Gitsis' across the avenue.
All my attention had turned to the girl down at Rite Aid, almost at the Goodman corner of the store. She had on a dark jacket and ws slim, five-eight, five-eight and a half. At first, and from that distance, just passed Amherst, I thought it some wide-collared or too large sweater she had on, for she seemed to be showing most of a white shoulder and the fabric dipped enough below to expose a shallow arc of back as well. Perhaps wearing a boyfriend's borrowed sweater or sweat shirt, I thought. Altogether, not something you expect to see on a night in November with rain however light, nearly not there at times.
There was something, too, in the way she was standing, tall and slender. When I thought I saw the most of her left shoulder and that arc beneath it, she had turned to look after a number of boys who had passed her and were about to cross at the light. Perhaps they had said something.
But the rest of the time, both at first and after that, she only stood close to and facing the store window nearly to the end, almost at the corner far from the doors where people go in and come out. She wanted to be alone, felt alone and wanted to be by herself.
People were going in and coming out of Rite Aid and I might have been one.
As I was nearing the sliding doors and in-store brightness knowing I wouldn't be going inside yet, there was a clatter.
The clatter got her attention - for a moment she glanced back across Monroe not over or down her shoulder but around it and down.
A young man in a bright, open jacket and white shirt had dropped his cell taking it out of his pocket while pacing in front of the Chase parking, the ATM drive-through. Now, he was reaching for it with head pointed toward the pavement, bent at the waist and a little wasted.
The girl in the jacket - I'd already determined it was a jacket with white lined hood thrown back over one shoulder - had gone back to standing close to the window pane and looking down in her pensive, at least her waiting mood. As I passed her to the corner, she had dark hair that went down straight into her collar and hood and a narrow pretty face. She was looking at the packaged traiin sets in the window. Only something to be looked at while waiting for a boyfriend, I supposed.
Still, she might have waited nearer the doors or looked into one of the windows nearer the doors with dolls and other toys and seasonal things on sale in them. And that continued to be interesting.
I thought in passing of the train sets at - Dan's. Dan's Crafts and Things has sets with perfect in every detail miniatures of the locomotives and cars of trains from the past like the Super Chief and the New York Central's Twentieth-Century limited, sleek long passengers cars they built and repaired int he East Rochester Car Shops.
I might have mentioned them, mentioned Dan's, and had even turned and lifted a small greeting in her direction.
Only a dark young man in a brown open jacket was carrying a carton of beer with him coming down from the entrance of the store. The girl in the jacket shifted her hips and turned to join him walking, hands in her pockets and head still a bit cast down in her same unsmiling mood.
They went on around the corner, west on Goodman, in a resumed, a settled into slight bitterness conversation of short sharp words and grudging silences.
Bright jacket had found and dialed a number and was,
"Where the fuck you at...?"
...and,
"Thought you were comin' right back...."
...and,
"No, I'm not there; I lef' there. I thought you were comin' right back...!"
A wide-guy had come out of Enright's door, a few yards up the block, and ws on his cell, too.
"Guy dohn' mean nothin' by that...!"
...and,
"If y're gonna git pissed ev'r little thing guy says...!"
And a second, narrower guy comes out and paces back and forth, too, out of the doorway with cell,
"...y're on Alexander y' just kee on to Monroe..."
...and,
"Y' got a light on Monroe at Averill, a light at Meigs and just passed Goodman...."
...and,
"Enright's, y' see it on your left just passed the light...."
Short guy with bushy hair traveling fast coming out of Cornell with his head down and his cell to his ear is positive,
"I wanna shop, too!"
It's Closing and every one is on their cells. There is still half a night left to fill, Saturday morning.
At the entrance to Rite Aid's parking lot, a hot blonde with long straight hair driving a white compact has slowed to make the turn into the drive to the lot. The car cuts in across the sidewalk but, then, just sits there. The girl is well made up and wears a gray coat that looks dressy and she is smoking a cigarette that is freshly lit and long. She sat across the sidewalk more to take a logn drag or two than looking to see if the traffic behind her will let her back on the avenue to go south.
And it will and does because her pal, a second hot thin blonde who might be her sister, followed her in another white car, a match for hers and she is sitting in traffic waiting and talking on her cell. The first sister completes her turn, backing out and starting off down the avenue all the while with her cigarette compassing theway between her lips. The second white car takes longer to turn and follow, swinging off to the far curb and three-pointing once two or three darker colored cars ahve cut ahead of her.
It is closing time and she is never off her cell.
The sliding doors at the drug store sprung open and I went inside the brightness.
I figured it would be easier to scribble notes in my pocket pad in the unshadowed white light out of the rain and night. My hands would work better out of the cold.
It was the first of two trips I made into the Rite Aid with my note pad, the second to make notes from a walk north of Goodman.
There was a car lit up that pulled into the Edmonds followed closely by the blue-and-white. The car pulled into the alley behind the burrito shopand the cruiser followed him there, too.
The cruiser's overheads spun flashing a blinking rose light down the back alley that showed itself on the fence back of the Sports Page. Some guy was up close and facing the blank wall of what used to Country Sweet Chicken and Ribs sharing the building with the burrito joint. He kept looking over his shoulder but looked back toward the avenue and people passing there. I doubt he ever noticed the light of authority around in dark back of the building.
There was an altercation that begin in the Page or the Acme that flagged other RPD down. A well dressed girl with dark red hair was angry and was being walked away from the scene toward Goodman by people she was with but wanted all along to go back. It was others who flagged down the passing cruiser and reported what had happened to the officer. A man with a shaved head had begun a fight in the bar and pushed a girl around running off back down toward Meigs.
From the description the kids were giving the officer, I thought it sounded like one of a group of three or four skinheads who have been around the block between Rowley and Meigs since last summer. I have seen several incidents between them and kids on the block. The skinheads in their uniform white tee-shirts get into iwth the neighborhood kids and the altercations all end with the Whtie People's Party of Monroe retreating in a pack to their festung.
"It always seems to be racial with these guys. Whenever they get into it, it always has something to do with race, " I said to the witnesses after the cop was gone to put it out with dispatch.
The one guy, who had doen the most reporting, the guy with the back pack over his shoulder, stared thoughtfully back and nodded a bit.
"Fits," he said, seeing and agreeing to something that hadn't occurred to him before, perhaps.
Later and down at Big Deal Pizza's corner, the girl with the dark red hair was back and on her own, still looking pissed.
It took no more than a few words of recognition to put her back in the middle of the scene from before. She shouted her words out and addressed them angrily to the avenue as though broadcasting them rather than having a conversation.
"Some GUY," she gestured, "thinks he can SIT IN A BAR and ABUSE some poor girl, PUSH her around and....Y' try and tell him Y' CAN'T DO THAT. Y' can't THROW some girl around like that and.... He gets in your face, TELLS you he's going to SHOOT YOU IN YOUR FACE....
"You can't DO that. YOU CAN'T do that in a CIVILIZATION!...."
She said her name was Kelly and shook hands while all around us the RPD were prowling about. Blue-and-whites were pulling out of this side street and that and lighting up to U-turn in the other direction on the avenue; or they were turning off to patrol in to the back parking lots and alley way passages.
Before I went up for the night, I noticed the rain falling in the pools of water along the car-less curb above my building. The lakes were black crone fingers with clawed talons and arthritic joints and knuckles. But they shown just enough in the streetlight for the rain to be rippling them with incessant small rings that appeared and winked out replaced by more and more just their likeness.
Saturday night, 12:48.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
HELLO-WEEN JACK
Hello-ween Jack,
Just in time for Halloween.
You wrote in your last letter of going to see a band from your rockin' days. This last Sunday my Times, the Arts and Leisure section, reviewed Keith Richards' autobiography.
The Ghost of Celebrities Nearly Departed is shown in a half-page profile with partially smoked cigarette leaning from his protruding lower lip. The photographer knew what he was about and shot with black and white film. All I can say is - three-day old corpse. Maybe any photograph of Keith would say that no matter the film, but black and white was the perfect choice.
Obviously, too, the gang in the composition department had their little joke. Keith was the half page above the fold while sweet, fresh-as-a-country breeze Taylor Swift was in the lower left corner leaning on pillows and cast in a golden glow.
I don't know but I find reassuring somehow that Keith has been noticeably decaying these past three decades and more yet still he's here smoking another fag despite the times, they be a-changing. And to imagine I'm old enough to remember when a Stones' album cover, controversial for some reason at the time and before most people alive today were born, pictured the gang and Keith as dissipated Regency Rogues sprawled about after a debauch.
I don't know if you'll find them at all artistic or interesting, but it is Halloween and I just thought I'd send you some photographs, I took myself.
I spent a certain number of mid-summer afternoons and evenings in Mount Hope Cemetery and never visited the place without clicking off dozens of these pictures. If you never heard of it when you visited here and about, Mount Hope is quite an usual place. Perhaps you can tell that from the photos alone without my writing it.
About a third to a half of Mount Hope is, in a phrase I've settled on, a cemetery in a forest. Some would say, perhaps more accurately, a cemetery in a park. It's keepers, however, seem to leave it most of the summer largely natural, as natural as such a place can be. The hill I was standing on for the shot of the wedding party being photographed, I couldn't have easily gotten my own picture from for all the underbrush that was there only a short time before that day along with the trees and fallen stones you see.
The building glimpsed through those trees in the lower left corner is the oldest of the cemetery's chapels and the lush foliage in the background of the scene mask a steep hill side known as the Indian Trail. It backs and over tops the chapel and its statuary fountain and comes around on the other, the right side of the shot to another steep sloped plateau parallel with the hill I was on at the time. That flat topped hill is so densely settled with monuments, mausoleums and obelisks that it might be a small Roman or Greek city of classic antiquity.
If I climbed left on the first hill, following a barely visible track up and around it, I'd be opposite the toga clad lady with the anchor in the next photograph taken from above on her hillside. It, too, is quite a steep and a long climb up those wrought iron steps the gate of which you can make out near the foot of her pedestal. You can, perhaps, tell just how steep from the little bit of hand rail visible. Her plot of ground is only the first of three tiers on the hill, each populated by more such large monuments topped with posed, dramatic figures. Seen from below in the vale, they go narrowly up against another green background, the trees, the forest covering the slopes of yet another hill also planted with stones and monuments in scenes hidden from view until you come to them.
There are, of course, angels everywhere and in all manner of poses. My favorite is Serena, the Angel of Peace. I took endless photographs of her and climbed all about to find every angle I could. The one I'm proudest of is this one I got during a summer evening with the sunset lighting bits of her surrounding trees and other and toppling stones beneath her. I had to climb up to Serena's crest for a close up of her, though, as she would never come down for me.
If there is one photograph that says, 'cemetery in a forest,' it is the one that shows only stones and monuments going up among trees and different angled slopes of a hill. I think it must have been taken around the same hour as the first shot of Serena and I know I was near her place. The same light suggests as much. There is a barely visible trail along the base of the slope face there toward the left and further up that trail is an especially affecting group of monuments. The father was a justice of the State Supreme Court. The parents' stones are larger but their son's is the only one with a figure carved in bas-relief. It isn't a cherub or other symbolic being but a school boy about ten. A doggerel verse declares that he isn't dead but only gone off to school, a school whose headmaster is Christ who will know to guide and protect him. The spot is secluded from any of the roadways that circle through Mount Hope. It is closed about by the angles and turns of the hill. Tree tops above shade them. The path that goes by, like all the paths among the graves, seems unmade by any effort other than the footsteps that have worn it through the years.
Some around here refer to Mount Hope as a spooky place and, I believe, there is to be some sort of Halloween affair over there this weekend. But I can't see it. Somewhere in his writings, Bill Faulkner made comment on how the Victorians, the generations that raised him, had a particular fancy for funerals and all the rites and practices that went along with bereavement. It was those same Victorians who chose this odd piece of real estate on hills coming up to the Genesee as their local place to frolic at that favorite pastime of theirs. Nothing that has been done in that line since has been as poised or as sweet and their thought to put it all down in such picturesque surroundings has just made of it something I can't call at all eerie or chilling.
It is worth experiencing and what better season than this.
Of course, Keith Richards will never be seen in such a place.
He's merely going to petrify some day over his Stratocaster, a cigarette half smoked in his lips. And, unlike the supposed Russian saint in Dostoevsky, he will corrupt no further.
How could he?
Just in time for Halloween.
You wrote in your last letter of going to see a band from your rockin' days. This last Sunday my Times, the Arts and Leisure section, reviewed Keith Richards' autobiography.
The Ghost of Celebrities Nearly Departed is shown in a half-page profile with partially smoked cigarette leaning from his protruding lower lip. The photographer knew what he was about and shot with black and white film. All I can say is - three-day old corpse. Maybe any photograph of Keith would say that no matter the film, but black and white was the perfect choice.
Obviously, too, the gang in the composition department had their little joke. Keith was the half page above the fold while sweet, fresh-as-a-country breeze Taylor Swift was in the lower left corner leaning on pillows and cast in a golden glow.
I don't know but I find reassuring somehow that Keith has been noticeably decaying these past three decades and more yet still he's here smoking another fag despite the times, they be a-changing. And to imagine I'm old enough to remember when a Stones' album cover, controversial for some reason at the time and before most people alive today were born, pictured the gang and Keith as dissipated Regency Rogues sprawled about after a debauch.
I don't know if you'll find them at all artistic or interesting, but it is Halloween and I just thought I'd send you some photographs, I took myself.
I spent a certain number of mid-summer afternoons and evenings in Mount Hope Cemetery and never visited the place without clicking off dozens of these pictures. If you never heard of it when you visited here and about, Mount Hope is quite an usual place. Perhaps you can tell that from the photos alone without my writing it.
About a third to a half of Mount Hope is, in a phrase I've settled on, a cemetery in a forest. Some would say, perhaps more accurately, a cemetery in a park. It's keepers, however, seem to leave it most of the summer largely natural, as natural as such a place can be. The hill I was standing on for the shot of the wedding party being photographed, I couldn't have easily gotten my own picture from for all the underbrush that was there only a short time before that day along with the trees and fallen stones you see.
The building glimpsed through those trees in the lower left corner is the oldest of the cemetery's chapels and the lush foliage in the background of the scene mask a steep hill side known as the Indian Trail. It backs and over tops the chapel and its statuary fountain and comes around on the other, the right side of the shot to another steep sloped plateau parallel with the hill I was on at the time. That flat topped hill is so densely settled with monuments, mausoleums and obelisks that it might be a small Roman or Greek city of classic antiquity.
If I climbed left on the first hill, following a barely visible track up and around it, I'd be opposite the toga clad lady with the anchor in the next photograph taken from above on her hillside. It, too, is quite a steep and a long climb up those wrought iron steps the gate of which you can make out near the foot of her pedestal. You can, perhaps, tell just how steep from the little bit of hand rail visible. Her plot of ground is only the first of three tiers on the hill, each populated by more such large monuments topped with posed, dramatic figures. Seen from below in the vale, they go narrowly up against another green background, the trees, the forest covering the slopes of yet another hill also planted with stones and monuments in scenes hidden from view until you come to them.
There are, of course, angels everywhere and in all manner of poses. My favorite is Serena, the Angel of Peace. I took endless photographs of her and climbed all about to find every angle I could. The one I'm proudest of is this one I got during a summer evening with the sunset lighting bits of her surrounding trees and other and toppling stones beneath her. I had to climb up to Serena's crest for a close up of her, though, as she would never come down for me.
If there is one photograph that says, 'cemetery in a forest,' it is the one that shows only stones and monuments going up among trees and different angled slopes of a hill. I think it must have been taken around the same hour as the first shot of Serena and I know I was near her place. The same light suggests as much. There is a barely visible trail along the base of the slope face there toward the left and further up that trail is an especially affecting group of monuments. The father was a justice of the State Supreme Court. The parents' stones are larger but their son's is the only one with a figure carved in bas-relief. It isn't a cherub or other symbolic being but a school boy about ten. A doggerel verse declares that he isn't dead but only gone off to school, a school whose headmaster is Christ who will know to guide and protect him. The spot is secluded from any of the roadways that circle through Mount Hope. It is closed about by the angles and turns of the hill. Tree tops above shade them. The path that goes by, like all the paths among the graves, seems unmade by any effort other than the footsteps that have worn it through the years.
Some around here refer to Mount Hope as a spooky place and, I believe, there is to be some sort of Halloween affair over there this weekend. But I can't see it. Somewhere in his writings, Bill Faulkner made comment on how the Victorians, the generations that raised him, had a particular fancy for funerals and all the rites and practices that went along with bereavement. It was those same Victorians who chose this odd piece of real estate on hills coming up to the Genesee as their local place to frolic at that favorite pastime of theirs. Nothing that has been done in that line since has been as poised or as sweet and their thought to put it all down in such picturesque surroundings has just made of it something I can't call at all eerie or chilling.
It is worth experiencing and what better season than this.
Of course, Keith Richards will never be seen in such a place.
He's merely going to petrify some day over his Stratocaster, a cigarette half smoked in his lips. And, unlike the supposed Russian saint in Dostoevsky, he will corrupt no further.
How could he?
Sunday, October 24, 2010
There Was This One
She went off into the parking at Rite Aid almost the last of her lot to go. Trailing after her there was only the dude she was with and, answering his cell, he walked slower. Danielle's gait was easy and right along, then, and she held her two hands up, out from her sides and moved them left-right rhythmically as though finger popping. Her head, her whole upper body was back leaning, too, nearly in the attitude called trucking though it's unlikely she'd ever have heard of that. It seemed Danielle was quiescent - not done yet but only between outbursts of pure pleasure.
The word must be oout around some campus, or maybe it was just out on Monroe last night that, of all places Enright's Thirst Parlor ws the place to be, I thought.
After Danielle, the last of her lot, departed, I started into Rite Aid myself and met the two up-front clerks stepping outside. As we passed, I asked,
"Since when is Enright's a college bar?"
Both wore smiles nd I didn't have to explain a thing to them.
"We were just figuring the same thing!"
Maybe the word was only that there was getting to be a good crowd, a young and college crowd there at Enrights, I, myself figured, then, and that there was this one chick.... At times it can take just one having a good time to begin to attract and, then, hold such a crowd in some one avenue bar.
When the crowd that was gathered emptied out on to Monroe at Closing in that mass way peculiar to Enright's at 2 a.m. there must have been something like fifty turned out and nearly to a one they had a sophomoric look about them.
That's not an Enright crowd. An evening crowd at the Thirst Parlor is a Harley Davidson, Tattoo Parlor crowd mingled with some long standing drinkers from the neighborhood. The daylight crowd hikes themselves on to their stools and finds their booths early in the morning and they spend the better part of the day in place. Then, too, Enright's being the only Monroe bar that opens early, they are among the few that closes religiously at two a.m. so they can swamp out, sweep up and be ready for the new day. Beer trucks have been parking on Monroe in front of Enright's first thing in the morning as long as I've been coming in to Rochester - a long time.
The crowd that turned out on the sidewalk last night wasn't old enough or local enough to even remember a few years back when the trees in front of Enright's were still festoon with shamrocks made of tiny emerald lights. It was a crowd, too, that hung around and was Fun Times loud a good half hour longer in another fashion uncommon to the place. They revved no bike engines at the curb for show before roaring away. But, instead, there were fake kng fu fighters, bowers with skinnyarms and scattering, laughing sudden pacifists in and out among the mob for a time and the whole lot seemed to "WHOA!" and "LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT!" in unison when such antics broke out.
Maybe the one they called Danielle took her cue from them or, as likely, her own moves got them going.
Undersized for most of those around her and compactly built shewould go in to a crouch-over with her arms up like a defensive back when she found someone to assault, shout out the bigger person's name and take off running at him with all her enthusiasm. Ten feet on the dead run and she would throw a kick at his flank or a shot at his shoulder or for him. She landed on the chest of one friend and half staggered him back till he swung her about with Danielle biting at his neck vampire fashion. Another she hit from behind and attempted to piggy back ride. Grabbing hold around his lower back, she rode his seat as long as she wanted to stay on with him holding her legs awkwardly, legs encased in skintight light blue jeans.
The crowd was laced through with a suspicious number of half-pint, slight and lovely girls all having the time of their lives. They didn't stay all together and they may not have all been of the same party but a number did seem to know of one another. Danielle was only a little taller and a little less slight than those others but shared, too, their shape and appearance - good asses, no tits to speak of and pretty but not spectacular faces. Danielle was all of that and just a little more of everything than those other girls.
Traffic on Monroe got heavy with the after hours crowd arriving in the zone from out and about and Danielle spotted a boyfriend across the Avenue. He was coming up with others from Goodman along the front of Rite Aid.
She hollered out his name in her fashion and nothing would do but she would get to him, get to him latest. Pound on the front of a cab starting up from picking up a fare and she charged by it and into the street. Amid warning shouts and laughter she started and stopped and started again and made it safe to the other side to make her trackling run at her tallest target yet, her Everest. Her leap at his neck was spectacular and, if he was nearly overwhelmed, she landed it ten.
That stunt drew after her her gang of some half dozen, boys and girls together. They came grinning and trotting out daring the traffic with less unconcern but behind her example and, with them, the most of the enthusiasm finally went out of the crowd in front of Enright's.
For a time the lot remained on the sidewalk at the front door of the drug store. There was talk among them of where they would go next and what they would do later. Danielle was little part of any of that. Fun, for her, was now and a single-minded, kinetic moving about, a meeting and greeting strangers and acquaintances on the sidewalk and out in traffic with all the energy and joy in her. Those forays out in to the lanes drew the others' laugher and concern and, eventually, made some go smiling along with her only with more care and less assurance.
At last it was the automatic sliding doors of the store that drew her away from the side of the street. They sprung open together and she charged through them on sudden and unexplained impulse. Once again, to a one, the loyal guard followed in a string with half exhausted and wondering titters of delight.
Among the last to go after, one voice asked,
"What are we going in here for?"
And a second laughed,
"I don't know but we're going!"
When they emptied back out some ten minutes later the dogged talk returned to whose house they would go to and how they would party.
Danielle, now, was more quiescent and, when her friends strung off into the parking lot for their cars, she was among the last of her crowd to leave Monroe. She was listening to music in her head and looking up at the roof tops and into the overhead lights.
She was by no means extinct but only dormant with eruptions yet within her.
After they went, a dude who'd been making a call on his cell at the corner of the store, met up with two friends and they, too, went off into the lot. As he went with them, the cell dude asked in some awe,
"Ju see that girl; the one they called Daniella?"
The word must be oout around some campus, or maybe it was just out on Monroe last night that, of all places Enright's Thirst Parlor ws the place to be, I thought.
After Danielle, the last of her lot, departed, I started into Rite Aid myself and met the two up-front clerks stepping outside. As we passed, I asked,
"Since when is Enright's a college bar?"
Both wore smiles nd I didn't have to explain a thing to them.
"We were just figuring the same thing!"
Maybe the word was only that there was getting to be a good crowd, a young and college crowd there at Enrights, I, myself figured, then, and that there was this one chick.... At times it can take just one having a good time to begin to attract and, then, hold such a crowd in some one avenue bar.
When the crowd that was gathered emptied out on to Monroe at Closing in that mass way peculiar to Enright's at 2 a.m. there must have been something like fifty turned out and nearly to a one they had a sophomoric look about them.
That's not an Enright crowd. An evening crowd at the Thirst Parlor is a Harley Davidson, Tattoo Parlor crowd mingled with some long standing drinkers from the neighborhood. The daylight crowd hikes themselves on to their stools and finds their booths early in the morning and they spend the better part of the day in place. Then, too, Enright's being the only Monroe bar that opens early, they are among the few that closes religiously at two a.m. so they can swamp out, sweep up and be ready for the new day. Beer trucks have been parking on Monroe in front of Enright's first thing in the morning as long as I've been coming in to Rochester - a long time.
The crowd that turned out on the sidewalk last night wasn't old enough or local enough to even remember a few years back when the trees in front of Enright's were still festoon with shamrocks made of tiny emerald lights. It was a crowd, too, that hung around and was Fun Times loud a good half hour longer in another fashion uncommon to the place. They revved no bike engines at the curb for show before roaring away. But, instead, there were fake kng fu fighters, bowers with skinnyarms and scattering, laughing sudden pacifists in and out among the mob for a time and the whole lot seemed to "WHOA!" and "LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT!" in unison when such antics broke out.
Maybe the one they called Danielle took her cue from them or, as likely, her own moves got them going.
Undersized for most of those around her and compactly built shewould go in to a crouch-over with her arms up like a defensive back when she found someone to assault, shout out the bigger person's name and take off running at him with all her enthusiasm. Ten feet on the dead run and she would throw a kick at his flank or a shot at his shoulder or for him. She landed on the chest of one friend and half staggered him back till he swung her about with Danielle biting at his neck vampire fashion. Another she hit from behind and attempted to piggy back ride. Grabbing hold around his lower back, she rode his seat as long as she wanted to stay on with him holding her legs awkwardly, legs encased in skintight light blue jeans.
The crowd was laced through with a suspicious number of half-pint, slight and lovely girls all having the time of their lives. They didn't stay all together and they may not have all been of the same party but a number did seem to know of one another. Danielle was only a little taller and a little less slight than those others but shared, too, their shape and appearance - good asses, no tits to speak of and pretty but not spectacular faces. Danielle was all of that and just a little more of everything than those other girls.
Traffic on Monroe got heavy with the after hours crowd arriving in the zone from out and about and Danielle spotted a boyfriend across the Avenue. He was coming up with others from Goodman along the front of Rite Aid.
She hollered out his name in her fashion and nothing would do but she would get to him, get to him latest. Pound on the front of a cab starting up from picking up a fare and she charged by it and into the street. Amid warning shouts and laughter she started and stopped and started again and made it safe to the other side to make her trackling run at her tallest target yet, her Everest. Her leap at his neck was spectacular and, if he was nearly overwhelmed, she landed it ten.
That stunt drew after her her gang of some half dozen, boys and girls together. They came grinning and trotting out daring the traffic with less unconcern but behind her example and, with them, the most of the enthusiasm finally went out of the crowd in front of Enright's.
For a time the lot remained on the sidewalk at the front door of the drug store. There was talk among them of where they would go next and what they would do later. Danielle was little part of any of that. Fun, for her, was now and a single-minded, kinetic moving about, a meeting and greeting strangers and acquaintances on the sidewalk and out in traffic with all the energy and joy in her. Those forays out in to the lanes drew the others' laugher and concern and, eventually, made some go smiling along with her only with more care and less assurance.
At last it was the automatic sliding doors of the store that drew her away from the side of the street. They sprung open together and she charged through them on sudden and unexplained impulse. Once again, to a one, the loyal guard followed in a string with half exhausted and wondering titters of delight.
Among the last to go after, one voice asked,
"What are we going in here for?"
And a second laughed,
"I don't know but we're going!"
When they emptied back out some ten minutes later the dogged talk returned to whose house they would go to and how they would party.
Danielle, now, was more quiescent and, when her friends strung off into the parking lot for their cars, she was among the last of her crowd to leave Monroe. She was listening to music in her head and looking up at the roof tops and into the overhead lights.
She was by no means extinct but only dormant with eruptions yet within her.
After they went, a dude who'd been making a call on his cell at the corner of the store, met up with two friends and they, too, went off into the lot. As he went with them, the cell dude asked in some awe,
"Ju see that girl; the one they called Daniella?"
Sunday, February 21, 2010
People In the Street
It was that hour between two and three and it was a Saturday night.
Everyone on the Avenue at that hour seemed young and stupid.
When the light changed at Goodman and he could cross, the young couple waiting on the other side only waited still. They didn't either of them moved to step down off the curb until Steve was almost half way across. Starting up the next block on his way to Meigs, the first party of young people that came at him going in the other direction was led by a young guy with blond hair in a military cut, almost a crew cut. His jacket was open and his leg led to one side, away from the curb, while he stared ahead and down past Steve who was cutting toward the avenue to go by them. The guys and gals behind the blond kid were all smiling over something but theblond kid only looked intent and distant.
The remains of a crowd were smoking cigarettes and talking lined up in front of the Sports Page in winter coats and caps. The most of them were girls who didn't seem to notice the chill on the air and they were lined up facing the avenue taking drags on their cigarettes. But one of the young men was backing up toward the curb and the parked cars. Between times he was stepping forward toward the girls and the door of the bar again. He didn't have a cigarette and he wasn't taking part in the conversation but only listening to what was said and wasn't paying attention whenever he would back up almost to the cars.
Just beyond there and beyond the Acme next door, they were lining up at Mark's Diner behind the shiny rope and the stanchions that it hung off of and that divided the sidewalk in half, into the line of people waiting alongside the front of the diner beneath its windows and the passage out to the curb where people were coming through to get into line or making their way by Mark's to go elsewhere.
Out beyond the cars parked along the curb the cars in traffic were bumper to bumper coming to and from Meigs. In the far lanes they were backing up for the light at the corner while the traffic was nearly as slow coming on in the other direction but still moving. Out in the street, in the traffic, there were kids coming over from O'Cal's across the way and a kid in the middle of the line waiting to get in Mark's was suddenly shouting out to some one in a party going along the sidewalk leaving the bar, going toward Rowley on the other side of Monroe.
"'EY, WHERE WERE YOU?"
And,
"DON'T BE GOIN' OFF LIKE THAT!"
Most of the kids on the line were white and had come over from O'Cal's or from other of the bars up and down the Avenue and most of the kids now coming to get at the back of the line were black and coming around the corner of Woodlawn from cars they had arrived in from other parts of the city and parked in the lots in back of Mark's or in back of Big Deal in the next block.
At the moment, a part of young black girls coming around from the corner to get in line was filling the passage to the curb and smiling.
And, then, some one said,
"Some people in the road!" meaning out in the street.
Some few in the crowd on line stood up to look over the parked cars and one of the black girls looked back over her shoulder, too, for a moment. But most people were too involved in their conversations on going while they were waiting to get inside the diner. And the rest of the part coming around to get in line was too eager to get in palce and too happy that there weren't that many people ahead of them yet and the line didn't go on that far back from the door.
A car, a white car had stopped in the near far lane, in the center of the avenue and a knot of people, young white kids for the most part coming over perhaps from O'Cal's, where standing together out in the street in front of the car. Some were looking about and some where looking down.
They were in the middle of the street, in front of the white car and they were on a line with the corner in front of Marko's door and not quite to Woodlawn Street.
Some in line, who were in a good mood, shouted,
"DON'T PLAY IN TRAFFIC!"
And,
"IF Y' COMIN' OVER, COME OVER!" with the traffic going by southbound.
But there were two legs lying out on the pavement from among the legs of those who were knotted about in front of the white car's bumper and grill. The legs were bent up toward the night sky and the feet were moving about on the pavement but the person was lying flat on his or her back.
The traffic , north and south on Monroe, wa still moving, working its way around the knot of kdis in the center of the avenue. There was only, now, the one furtherst lane to keep moving up onto Meigs and cars trying to leave the curb at O'Cal's were finding it difficult to pull out. The faces of drivers and passengers in cars in the near lane trying to make their way south would look out with concern as they came up to make the passage or to turn off on Woodlawn but it was only to find how they could make their way around.
The security guard from Mark's, carrying a styro-foam cup in his one hand, made his way out into the street to the knot of kids. He had on his blue windbreaker with SECURITY written across the back of his shoulders in white letters and a pair of handcuffs was on his gun belt at the small of his back. He came back to the corner after only a few moments, saying to the kids he was leaving,
"Don't anybody touch her."
Whenever and where ever they could parties were still tripping and walking across through traffic to come over from O'Cal's or crossing Woodlawn hurrying by on the sidewalk north and south.
A party of young guys made it most of the way across Woodlawn on their way to Meigs.
One of them stopped and asked with a smirk,
"What's this going on out there?"
Another asked,
"What happened?"
He looked, too, like he wanted to know the joke.
"Someone has been hit. Some girl was knocked over by a car."
"No," one of the boys grinned. "That's too big; gotta be a guy!"
"Blotto musta fell down!" another one laughed. "Some schmuck fell down crossing the street!"
They all laughed and went on toward Meigs.
The first police cruiser raced up going by thecars that were now stopped coming from Meigs and it pulled up with lights and sirens to face the white car in the other direction. Other cars came with lights and sirens from north and south and a Rural/Metro jeep pulled off Meigs.
When the big red truck from the station at Alexander came with its flashers and siren and blaring its horn for the intersection a white stretch limo was in the way for a moment trying to work its way around the corner to go down Meigs and, then, too, some one of the backed up cars in the near lane was trying to do an U-turn on the block in front of Nick's Super Store.
Young cops were out on the pavement leaving their units parked about the scene and were joining what remained of the knot of kids. The truck from Alexander pulled around int he far lane and parked in the street with its rear flashers about where the white car had been parked. The firemen in their coats and hats, after checking in with the cops on the scene to find out what had happened, began getting a stretcher out. One of the cops was taking a statement from two of the girl's firends with his notebook resting on the truck of one of the cruisers. Red and white lights were batting the air from the overheads and flashers all aruond and the lights were constant, silent and out of sync with one another. They were red shadows on faces and minute white flashes of never-clapped lightning and so numerous and conflicting that the air flickered with them while themen inside it went about their business.
An ambulance crossed Meigs where a cop on traffic detail was putting out road flares in the near lanes at the corner and pulled up. Two of the firemen waited with their stretcher standing on end while the EMTs knelt with the girl who was, now, stretched out full.
Marko went out intot he street to see what he could and had on a grim concern. A guy in shirt sleeves came out of the diner with a party and went down in to the end of Woodlawn to look with wonder out into the street, in to the heart of all the flashing red and white lights.
"What's this all about?" he wanted to know.
But the others in his party were leaving and he left with them after only a little more staring.
He was briefly replaced by an arriving black girl in dark shiny, amply stretched pants carrying a purse. She had made the climb up the sidewalk along the side of Mark's from the parking lot in the rear and came down off the curb into Woodlawn to wonder, too,
"What happened here?" before going along to get into the line with the rest of her friends.
A delivery guy with an empty pouch came along up Woodlawn, too, on the other sidewalk and turned the corner to go into the closed pizzeria where most of the lights were already out. He looked out into the street in passing but didn't stop on his way.
One of the officers was out in the avenue in front of a cruiser parked toward Meigs. He was with several of the late arriving cops and was explaining with hand gestures and twists of his body what had happened.
"The girl, she thought the car had stopped and started to go across and he clipped her and she rolled down the side and fell."
Later, in 7/Eleven a big kid came rushing in for a bag of chips complaining,
"Is it always as crazy as this?"
John, who has grown his dirty blond pony about to the small of his back, turned around behind the counter and told him expansively,
"Aw this? this is Naw-thin'! Gist wait tah Sommer!"
Mike, his fellow clerk on the night shift, smiled with his big, round and tender lipped face.
"That's when it really gets crazy here."
He grinned straight across to the Old Guy, Steve, who would know, too.
"Yer all up and down, you must see a lot more."
Steve told them there had been an accident in the next block.
"Naw!" John made a concerned stare. "Whot hoppend?"
Steve told them how a girl had stepped out and had been knocked over by a car.
The big kid, who had dashed in and on by the counter on his run-in for a snack, returned with his bag of chips, paid for them and went right back out intot he craziness.
Everyone on the Avenue at that hour seemed young and stupid.
When the light changed at Goodman and he could cross, the young couple waiting on the other side only waited still. They didn't either of them moved to step down off the curb until Steve was almost half way across. Starting up the next block on his way to Meigs, the first party of young people that came at him going in the other direction was led by a young guy with blond hair in a military cut, almost a crew cut. His jacket was open and his leg led to one side, away from the curb, while he stared ahead and down past Steve who was cutting toward the avenue to go by them. The guys and gals behind the blond kid were all smiling over something but theblond kid only looked intent and distant.
The remains of a crowd were smoking cigarettes and talking lined up in front of the Sports Page in winter coats and caps. The most of them were girls who didn't seem to notice the chill on the air and they were lined up facing the avenue taking drags on their cigarettes. But one of the young men was backing up toward the curb and the parked cars. Between times he was stepping forward toward the girls and the door of the bar again. He didn't have a cigarette and he wasn't taking part in the conversation but only listening to what was said and wasn't paying attention whenever he would back up almost to the cars.
Just beyond there and beyond the Acme next door, they were lining up at Mark's Diner behind the shiny rope and the stanchions that it hung off of and that divided the sidewalk in half, into the line of people waiting alongside the front of the diner beneath its windows and the passage out to the curb where people were coming through to get into line or making their way by Mark's to go elsewhere.
Out beyond the cars parked along the curb the cars in traffic were bumper to bumper coming to and from Meigs. In the far lanes they were backing up for the light at the corner while the traffic was nearly as slow coming on in the other direction but still moving. Out in the street, in the traffic, there were kids coming over from O'Cal's across the way and a kid in the middle of the line waiting to get in Mark's was suddenly shouting out to some one in a party going along the sidewalk leaving the bar, going toward Rowley on the other side of Monroe.
"'EY, WHERE WERE YOU?"
And,
"DON'T BE GOIN' OFF LIKE THAT!"
Most of the kids on the line were white and had come over from O'Cal's or from other of the bars up and down the Avenue and most of the kids now coming to get at the back of the line were black and coming around the corner of Woodlawn from cars they had arrived in from other parts of the city and parked in the lots in back of Mark's or in back of Big Deal in the next block.
At the moment, a part of young black girls coming around from the corner to get in line was filling the passage to the curb and smiling.
And, then, some one said,
"Some people in the road!" meaning out in the street.
Some few in the crowd on line stood up to look over the parked cars and one of the black girls looked back over her shoulder, too, for a moment. But most people were too involved in their conversations on going while they were waiting to get inside the diner. And the rest of the part coming around to get in line was too eager to get in palce and too happy that there weren't that many people ahead of them yet and the line didn't go on that far back from the door.
A car, a white car had stopped in the near far lane, in the center of the avenue and a knot of people, young white kids for the most part coming over perhaps from O'Cal's, where standing together out in the street in front of the car. Some were looking about and some where looking down.
They were in the middle of the street, in front of the white car and they were on a line with the corner in front of Marko's door and not quite to Woodlawn Street.
Some in line, who were in a good mood, shouted,
"DON'T PLAY IN TRAFFIC!"
And,
"IF Y' COMIN' OVER, COME OVER!" with the traffic going by southbound.
But there were two legs lying out on the pavement from among the legs of those who were knotted about in front of the white car's bumper and grill. The legs were bent up toward the night sky and the feet were moving about on the pavement but the person was lying flat on his or her back.
The traffic , north and south on Monroe, wa still moving, working its way around the knot of kdis in the center of the avenue. There was only, now, the one furtherst lane to keep moving up onto Meigs and cars trying to leave the curb at O'Cal's were finding it difficult to pull out. The faces of drivers and passengers in cars in the near lane trying to make their way south would look out with concern as they came up to make the passage or to turn off on Woodlawn but it was only to find how they could make their way around.
The security guard from Mark's, carrying a styro-foam cup in his one hand, made his way out into the street to the knot of kids. He had on his blue windbreaker with SECURITY written across the back of his shoulders in white letters and a pair of handcuffs was on his gun belt at the small of his back. He came back to the corner after only a few moments, saying to the kids he was leaving,
"Don't anybody touch her."
Whenever and where ever they could parties were still tripping and walking across through traffic to come over from O'Cal's or crossing Woodlawn hurrying by on the sidewalk north and south.
A party of young guys made it most of the way across Woodlawn on their way to Meigs.
One of them stopped and asked with a smirk,
"What's this going on out there?"
Another asked,
"What happened?"
He looked, too, like he wanted to know the joke.
"Someone has been hit. Some girl was knocked over by a car."
"No," one of the boys grinned. "That's too big; gotta be a guy!"
"Blotto musta fell down!" another one laughed. "Some schmuck fell down crossing the street!"
They all laughed and went on toward Meigs.
The first police cruiser raced up going by thecars that were now stopped coming from Meigs and it pulled up with lights and sirens to face the white car in the other direction. Other cars came with lights and sirens from north and south and a Rural/Metro jeep pulled off Meigs.
When the big red truck from the station at Alexander came with its flashers and siren and blaring its horn for the intersection a white stretch limo was in the way for a moment trying to work its way around the corner to go down Meigs and, then, too, some one of the backed up cars in the near lane was trying to do an U-turn on the block in front of Nick's Super Store.
Young cops were out on the pavement leaving their units parked about the scene and were joining what remained of the knot of kids. The truck from Alexander pulled around int he far lane and parked in the street with its rear flashers about where the white car had been parked. The firemen in their coats and hats, after checking in with the cops on the scene to find out what had happened, began getting a stretcher out. One of the cops was taking a statement from two of the girl's firends with his notebook resting on the truck of one of the cruisers. Red and white lights were batting the air from the overheads and flashers all aruond and the lights were constant, silent and out of sync with one another. They were red shadows on faces and minute white flashes of never-clapped lightning and so numerous and conflicting that the air flickered with them while themen inside it went about their business.
An ambulance crossed Meigs where a cop on traffic detail was putting out road flares in the near lanes at the corner and pulled up. Two of the firemen waited with their stretcher standing on end while the EMTs knelt with the girl who was, now, stretched out full.
Marko went out intot he street to see what he could and had on a grim concern. A guy in shirt sleeves came out of the diner with a party and went down in to the end of Woodlawn to look with wonder out into the street, in to the heart of all the flashing red and white lights.
"What's this all about?" he wanted to know.
But the others in his party were leaving and he left with them after only a little more staring.
He was briefly replaced by an arriving black girl in dark shiny, amply stretched pants carrying a purse. She had made the climb up the sidewalk along the side of Mark's from the parking lot in the rear and came down off the curb into Woodlawn to wonder, too,
"What happened here?" before going along to get into the line with the rest of her friends.
A delivery guy with an empty pouch came along up Woodlawn, too, on the other sidewalk and turned the corner to go into the closed pizzeria where most of the lights were already out. He looked out into the street in passing but didn't stop on his way.
One of the officers was out in the avenue in front of a cruiser parked toward Meigs. He was with several of the late arriving cops and was explaining with hand gestures and twists of his body what had happened.
"The girl, she thought the car had stopped and started to go across and he clipped her and she rolled down the side and fell."
Later, in 7/Eleven a big kid came rushing in for a bag of chips complaining,
"Is it always as crazy as this?"
John, who has grown his dirty blond pony about to the small of his back, turned around behind the counter and told him expansively,
"Aw this? this is Naw-thin'! Gist wait tah Sommer!"
Mike, his fellow clerk on the night shift, smiled with his big, round and tender lipped face.
"That's when it really gets crazy here."
He grinned straight across to the Old Guy, Steve, who would know, too.
"Yer all up and down, you must see a lot more."
Steve told them there had been an accident in the next block.
"Naw!" John made a concerned stare. "Whot hoppend?"
Steve told them how a girl had stepped out and had been knocked over by a car.
The big kid, who had dashed in and on by the counter on his run-in for a snack, returned with his bag of chips, paid for them and went right back out intot he craziness.
An Altogether Fine and Silent Night
It was an altogether fine and silent night we were having on Monroe.
A mist of snow showered down to shush the tires of what little traffic traveled by going nowhere fast. The shower had already renewed and softened the contours of the crude heaps of the last week's snow and had sprayed white the bald spaces of sidewalk where snow had been worn away.
It hadn't yet lightened the brown slush at the curbs and street corners.
Standing underneath the remnant marquee of the onetime Monroe Theater, the lights from all the windows of Rite Aid's new store and the streetlight at the corner of Goodman caught straight falling lines of this precipitation and made evident in the air an otherwise stealthy storm. South, and seemingly further away, the block of Oxford Square buildings were dark above the first floors and more obscuring of what was happening. Only the neon medallions in Oxfords' dark windows fronting the street on the first floor were bold colors shining out in the darkness and through the shower that didn't show itself in that direction. They were red, blue, green and yellow in the Pub's black windows.
Oxfords' close sloping awnings above them had been painted a clinging white.
Across the way the black tree branches of Cornell Street arched together in a not quite gothic manner just before the bend that trends that street northward on an angle down a little more than half its length. House fronts on the south side of the street, those just beyond the bend, where there was a little yellow and indirect street light, filled full the arch like scenery seen through the proscenium of an old-time theater's stage, one deserted after the last act of some vaudeville.
A young couple was coming by Enrights.
He was complaining,
"I don't want to go there. I haven't any money."
"Why can't you just be quiet," she walked ahead saying.
A mist of snow showered down to shush the tires of what little traffic traveled by going nowhere fast. The shower had already renewed and softened the contours of the crude heaps of the last week's snow and had sprayed white the bald spaces of sidewalk where snow had been worn away.
It hadn't yet lightened the brown slush at the curbs and street corners.
Standing underneath the remnant marquee of the onetime Monroe Theater, the lights from all the windows of Rite Aid's new store and the streetlight at the corner of Goodman caught straight falling lines of this precipitation and made evident in the air an otherwise stealthy storm. South, and seemingly further away, the block of Oxford Square buildings were dark above the first floors and more obscuring of what was happening. Only the neon medallions in Oxfords' dark windows fronting the street on the first floor were bold colors shining out in the darkness and through the shower that didn't show itself in that direction. They were red, blue, green and yellow in the Pub's black windows.
Oxfords' close sloping awnings above them had been painted a clinging white.
Across the way the black tree branches of Cornell Street arched together in a not quite gothic manner just before the bend that trends that street northward on an angle down a little more than half its length. House fronts on the south side of the street, those just beyond the bend, where there was a little yellow and indirect street light, filled full the arch like scenery seen through the proscenium of an old-time theater's stage, one deserted after the last act of some vaudeville.
A young couple was coming by Enrights.
He was complaining,
"I don't want to go there. I haven't any money."
"Why can't you just be quiet," she walked ahead saying.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
In With the New
Our Karen was all excited.
You should have seen her.
She knew where the whole lot of us were who had come out together and she was around insisting we be together at midnight. As soon as they began with the ball drop on the bar flat screen, the cow was galloping around finding every one of us, the whole lot.
Long as it took for the big moment, nothing would do but that we all gather with her near the corner of the bar and the front door of the Pub.
That was the Big Thing!
The ball hadn't begun to move and you could hardly hear anything being said any longer, the screen being way the hell down at the back of the place, but excitement was mounting and there Krazy Ass Karen was frantically waving those tight little fists of hers and grinning like the gargoyle she is, gathering us even nearer to her.
"C'MON, C'MON, C'MON!" she was urging us.
Leaning down and laughing, she wanted all our heads together with hers.
There was something she just had to tell us and, of course, you could only hear about half of what the ugly elderly elf had to say with all the horns blaring and everybody beginning to shout.
We should all get...
"...CLOS'T...DOOR!"
We had to all...
"RUSH OUT..." on to the street as the..."...BALL DROPS!"
Her fists shaking adamantly, excitedly, she was insisting,
"'AT'SWAY Y' DO IT!"
We all had to go out on the street...
"SHOUT HAPPY NEW YEAR!"...as 2010 was erupting behind us.
The lot of us would lead the orgy of celebration out into the night.
Boss Lady said,
"'AT'S HOW'S DONE!"
Because, being older than sin itself, Mother Monster had seen more decades in than any of us kiddies had fingers and toes, y' know?
"ALL'A US, EVERYBODY, EVERYBODY!"
So, as usual, we all had our work assignments.
Alright, enough, Kathy Griffin, you wanted to say to her fool face.
Some how having the Old Lady out with us, smashed and making an ass of herself, wasn't nearly hoot it was supposed to be even if she was as stupid drunk and uninhibited as we'd hoped she'd be.
She was still givng the orders, wasn't she?
Blah, blah, blah!
The elderly evil bitch was still in charge, wasted or not.
"She's enjoying herself!"
"WHAT?" Melinda took her eyes off the big screen, made annoyed looking brows beneath that cock-eyed silver tiara planted in her hair.
"SHE'S ENJOYING HERSELF!"
That brightened her fat face.
"YEAH, ISNIT A HOOT!"
"Oh, it's a riot, alright!"
"WHAT?"
"IT'S A RIOT!"
"YUH, AHOOT!"
I swear...!
So, then, anyway, the ball was coming down. The menopausal ding-bat, stunted as she is, couldn't possibly see it but some one must have shouted in her ear or, maybe, she just got it from the whole bar's uproar beginning to come together like it did, because she started in screeching,
"GET READY! GET READY!"
The louder it got in the place, the more spastic those two tiny fists of hers got over her shriveled ttits and, when the count got down to eight, seven, six - off she shuffled for the door.
"GO, GO, GO...GO, GO, GO!"
Your could see from the looks we were all giving one another every one was on the same page. We all thought this proved it, what we'd known all along about the hag, about her being a dork too dumb to be real. Our Karen was a real seniority clown, too ugly even to have slept her wrinkly butt into that cubbyhole office of hers.
Still, everybody went with her, the whole lot of us barging along behind her. She looked, with her head down and her elbows in at her sides, like she expected the whole place to collapse on her as she shuffled and jiggled toward the door laughing and shrieking...
"...GO, GO, GO!"
And you know - it was just us out there!
You never saw Monroe more deserted.
Nobody else went. There probably wasn't another bar the length of the Avenue with a gangling gang of fools out front dancing around and shouting in 2010. Just us. Just Krazy Karen's Krew dancing around on the sidewalk, blowing horns and making asses of ourselves.
Some one should have got video.
Madame Karen going round and round, hand in hand and jumping up and down getting everyone to join her, adding one after the other to her circle of satan.
And, yeah, that should have been a hoot and a half! Except that she'd got us all doing it with her.
All of us kiddies, as she calls us, who'd asked her to come, to meet us for New Years so we could see what the bag looked like soused and, maybe, get a few good pics to post of her passed out in a doorway or head over a toilet barfing. There we were, instead, out playing ring-around-Rosie with T Rex, herself.
Talk about your disgusting!
The whole thing would have been a total disaster - only there was this guy there.
After a while people did start coming out to smoke and get out of the hoopla for a bit, out if for nothing else to make those calls they make just after midnight. In a bit the sidewalk in front of Oxfords had sprouted quite a crowd, after all. Traffic on the Avenue was flowing big time, again, like you would expected it to on one of the choice party nights of the year and there was a black stretch pulled up to the curb about to pile out a party.
Our Karen, the Management Mummy, was in the middle of it all trying to organize a chorus line and get them all to kick on command. And, wouldn't you know, she was having a blast doing it, being all instructive like she always is and flitting from one end to the other corralling this one and that. Half the faces weren't our lot at all any longer but just any one she could grab. And half our lot had wandered off back into the bar, maybe, or they were here and there in the crowd hooking up with other people, again, or just staggered about silly stoned on their own with drinks in their hands they shouldn't have had out on the street.
Tristan and several of the staff were busy retrieving the bar's glassware and reining in the losers.
Grandma didn't seem to notice or care that none of it was going according to plan.
"Now, on three - kick!" the cadaverous old choreographer would holler out in front of her soused section.
The half of them would fall over to one side or the other or somebody would kick the wrong way.
Mommy Mummy would just giggle.
"No, no, kiddies," she'd say. "It's left kick, right kick!"
And she'd sway showing them,
"One, two - THREE kick up street; one, two - THREE kick down street. Let's try it again."
Our Missy was looking most cock-eyed and had got in with this lot gatheed together at the corner of the Pub. Half were sitting on the window ledge and all of them wore smug sneers and relaxed attitudes like they weren't part of everything that was going down. Under her auburn bangs she was watching all their faces closely and seemed to be trying to follow what they were saying, their intimate, superior little conversation.
There was this gang out in the middle of the street trying to cross to Oxfords from the Standard Lounge up the street and not getting any where with the traffic that was trying not to run them down. And there were late arrivals hustling around to Oxfords from the alley way up the street. The door in the rear of the limo at the curb opened and some woman in a gorgeous dress was climbing out.
This great guy was standing there, off to the side. He was standing even further off to the side than that little gang Missy may have thought she was in with.
He had stepped out from the other side of the doorway next to the Pub in this sweet brown leather jacket. He looked a little like that Vin Diesel guy's shorter cousin only darker - maybe caramel.
Oh, he was fine! Dressed fine; looked fine. You could see him driving off in a BMW. Very exec but kind of kick-boxer, too.
And he says, in this very mature voice,
"I wonder if they know how young they all look."
Missy with her baby-doll bangs and the lot she was with - the guy with the goatee that is supposed to make him look older than twenty-two and his big Seth Rogin pal. His other friend out on the street in shirt sleeves and holding onto a bunch of party balloons, very apple cheeky and gangly thin. Limo girl dressed for the prom and accompanied by her ball cap date in the striped shirt and corduroy sports jacket. The porky crowd of black leather clad rappers with their shades after midnight and their exclusive attitudes on that were passing arm and arm.
The whole lot out there, actually.
Oh, yeah!
"Such kids," I had to agree.
You should have seen her.
She knew where the whole lot of us were who had come out together and she was around insisting we be together at midnight. As soon as they began with the ball drop on the bar flat screen, the cow was galloping around finding every one of us, the whole lot.
Long as it took for the big moment, nothing would do but that we all gather with her near the corner of the bar and the front door of the Pub.
That was the Big Thing!
The ball hadn't begun to move and you could hardly hear anything being said any longer, the screen being way the hell down at the back of the place, but excitement was mounting and there Krazy Ass Karen was frantically waving those tight little fists of hers and grinning like the gargoyle she is, gathering us even nearer to her.
"C'MON, C'MON, C'MON!" she was urging us.
Leaning down and laughing, she wanted all our heads together with hers.
There was something she just had to tell us and, of course, you could only hear about half of what the ugly elderly elf had to say with all the horns blaring and everybody beginning to shout.
We should all get...
"...CLOS'T...DOOR!"
We had to all...
"RUSH OUT..." on to the street as the..."...BALL DROPS!"
Her fists shaking adamantly, excitedly, she was insisting,
"'AT'SWAY Y' DO IT!"
We all had to go out on the street...
"SHOUT HAPPY NEW YEAR!"...as 2010 was erupting behind us.
The lot of us would lead the orgy of celebration out into the night.
Boss Lady said,
"'AT'S HOW'S DONE!"
Because, being older than sin itself, Mother Monster had seen more decades in than any of us kiddies had fingers and toes, y' know?
"ALL'A US, EVERYBODY, EVERYBODY!"
So, as usual, we all had our work assignments.
Alright, enough, Kathy Griffin, you wanted to say to her fool face.
Some how having the Old Lady out with us, smashed and making an ass of herself, wasn't nearly hoot it was supposed to be even if she was as stupid drunk and uninhibited as we'd hoped she'd be.
She was still givng the orders, wasn't she?
Blah, blah, blah!
The elderly evil bitch was still in charge, wasted or not.
"She's enjoying herself!"
"WHAT?" Melinda took her eyes off the big screen, made annoyed looking brows beneath that cock-eyed silver tiara planted in her hair.
"SHE'S ENJOYING HERSELF!"
That brightened her fat face.
"YEAH, ISNIT A HOOT!"
"Oh, it's a riot, alright!"
"WHAT?"
"IT'S A RIOT!"
"YUH, AHOOT!"
I swear...!
So, then, anyway, the ball was coming down. The menopausal ding-bat, stunted as she is, couldn't possibly see it but some one must have shouted in her ear or, maybe, she just got it from the whole bar's uproar beginning to come together like it did, because she started in screeching,
"GET READY! GET READY!"
The louder it got in the place, the more spastic those two tiny fists of hers got over her shriveled ttits and, when the count got down to eight, seven, six - off she shuffled for the door.
"GO, GO, GO...GO, GO, GO!"
Your could see from the looks we were all giving one another every one was on the same page. We all thought this proved it, what we'd known all along about the hag, about her being a dork too dumb to be real. Our Karen was a real seniority clown, too ugly even to have slept her wrinkly butt into that cubbyhole office of hers.
Still, everybody went with her, the whole lot of us barging along behind her. She looked, with her head down and her elbows in at her sides, like she expected the whole place to collapse on her as she shuffled and jiggled toward the door laughing and shrieking...
"...GO, GO, GO!"
And you know - it was just us out there!
You never saw Monroe more deserted.
Nobody else went. There probably wasn't another bar the length of the Avenue with a gangling gang of fools out front dancing around and shouting in 2010. Just us. Just Krazy Karen's Krew dancing around on the sidewalk, blowing horns and making asses of ourselves.
Some one should have got video.
Madame Karen going round and round, hand in hand and jumping up and down getting everyone to join her, adding one after the other to her circle of satan.
And, yeah, that should have been a hoot and a half! Except that she'd got us all doing it with her.
All of us kiddies, as she calls us, who'd asked her to come, to meet us for New Years so we could see what the bag looked like soused and, maybe, get a few good pics to post of her passed out in a doorway or head over a toilet barfing. There we were, instead, out playing ring-around-Rosie with T Rex, herself.
Talk about your disgusting!
The whole thing would have been a total disaster - only there was this guy there.
After a while people did start coming out to smoke and get out of the hoopla for a bit, out if for nothing else to make those calls they make just after midnight. In a bit the sidewalk in front of Oxfords had sprouted quite a crowd, after all. Traffic on the Avenue was flowing big time, again, like you would expected it to on one of the choice party nights of the year and there was a black stretch pulled up to the curb about to pile out a party.
Our Karen, the Management Mummy, was in the middle of it all trying to organize a chorus line and get them all to kick on command. And, wouldn't you know, she was having a blast doing it, being all instructive like she always is and flitting from one end to the other corralling this one and that. Half the faces weren't our lot at all any longer but just any one she could grab. And half our lot had wandered off back into the bar, maybe, or they were here and there in the crowd hooking up with other people, again, or just staggered about silly stoned on their own with drinks in their hands they shouldn't have had out on the street.
Tristan and several of the staff were busy retrieving the bar's glassware and reining in the losers.
Grandma didn't seem to notice or care that none of it was going according to plan.
"Now, on three - kick!" the cadaverous old choreographer would holler out in front of her soused section.
The half of them would fall over to one side or the other or somebody would kick the wrong way.
Mommy Mummy would just giggle.
"No, no, kiddies," she'd say. "It's left kick, right kick!"
And she'd sway showing them,
"One, two - THREE kick up street; one, two - THREE kick down street. Let's try it again."
Our Missy was looking most cock-eyed and had got in with this lot gatheed together at the corner of the Pub. Half were sitting on the window ledge and all of them wore smug sneers and relaxed attitudes like they weren't part of everything that was going down. Under her auburn bangs she was watching all their faces closely and seemed to be trying to follow what they were saying, their intimate, superior little conversation.
There was this gang out in the middle of the street trying to cross to Oxfords from the Standard Lounge up the street and not getting any where with the traffic that was trying not to run them down. And there were late arrivals hustling around to Oxfords from the alley way up the street. The door in the rear of the limo at the curb opened and some woman in a gorgeous dress was climbing out.
This great guy was standing there, off to the side. He was standing even further off to the side than that little gang Missy may have thought she was in with.
He had stepped out from the other side of the doorway next to the Pub in this sweet brown leather jacket. He looked a little like that Vin Diesel guy's shorter cousin only darker - maybe caramel.
Oh, he was fine! Dressed fine; looked fine. You could see him driving off in a BMW. Very exec but kind of kick-boxer, too.
And he says, in this very mature voice,
"I wonder if they know how young they all look."
Missy with her baby-doll bangs and the lot she was with - the guy with the goatee that is supposed to make him look older than twenty-two and his big Seth Rogin pal. His other friend out on the street in shirt sleeves and holding onto a bunch of party balloons, very apple cheeky and gangly thin. Limo girl dressed for the prom and accompanied by her ball cap date in the striped shirt and corduroy sports jacket. The porky crowd of black leather clad rappers with their shades after midnight and their exclusive attitudes on that were passing arm and arm.
The whole lot out there, actually.
Oh, yeah!
"Such kids," I had to agree.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Last Night On Monroe, Danielle
I was seeing and hearing things.
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.
"I know what you gotta do!"
There was 'yes, I do, too' in her voice.
In the bar doorway, a young man with the certainty of his not having acted improperly, answered, presumably, another young lady's accusation,
"Did I fuck you that night?"
The 'no, I did not,' that he found unnecessary to add he, apparently, thought conclusive.
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,
"Alexander and East; near there..."
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.
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?
Trinity, I jotted along with the rest.
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.
Crossing Goodman, I was over taken by a trim and hurrying young woman and her hungry male companion.
"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."
Mark's was their destination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did I have an e-mail address? We should exchange examples of our writing. We could discuss writing, perhaps.
Of course, she told me, she didn't have any paper or pen on her.
Those are things I am never without and I gave her my address and told her of my site http://theoxfordsquare.
"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."
"Oh, sure..."
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.
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.
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.
"You walk the night?" he asked. "You walk around all night? Don't you ever get bored with all the drama?"
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.
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.
I decided to stick around on the corner.
September 19, 2009.
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.
"I know what you gotta do!"
There was 'yes, I do, too' in her voice.
In the bar doorway, a young man with the certainty of his not having acted improperly, answered, presumably, another young lady's accusation,
"Did I fuck you that night?"
The 'no, I did not,' that he found unnecessary to add he, apparently, thought conclusive.
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,
"Alexander and East; near there..."
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.
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?
Trinity, I jotted along with the rest.
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.
Crossing Goodman, I was over taken by a trim and hurrying young woman and her hungry male companion.
"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."
Mark's was their destination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did I have an e-mail address? We should exchange examples of our writing. We could discuss writing, perhaps.
Of course, she told me, she didn't have any paper or pen on her.
Those are things I am never without and I gave her my address and told her of my site http://theoxfordsquare.
"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."
"Oh, sure..."
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.
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.
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.
"You walk the night?" he asked. "You walk around all night? Don't you ever get bored with all the drama?"
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.
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.
I decided to stick around on the corner.
September 19, 2009.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Incident Report
LEAVING THE SCENE...
THERE IS something like a
Crump!
Someone, in a voice more amused than surprised, exclaims,
"HO!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it leaves deliberately and without the least hesitation.
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,
"'E 'it you, man!"
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.
It, too, is occupied four or five times.
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.
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.
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.
Its engine snarls and the car leaps forward.
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.
It, too, gives him something of the look of detachment from what he is doing, if only for this one split second.
PURSUIT...
The car that caused the accident has already passed Oxford at the other end of the long block before the struck car shifts forward.
The avenue south toward the expressway is almost dark and nearly deserted.
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.
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.
And each time the two cars are brought closer even as they become more distant and smaller.
"Now where are you going?"
"Up there."
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.
"Why? They're going to be gone! No way that boy's going to be stopping now if he didn't!"
"Don't come!"
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.
Both cars are done in an instant.
"There's not going to be anything to see up there!"
"Don't follow!"
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.
It even stops at the corner before turning up toward the Hess where it pulls in off the street and stops to look around.
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.
SHOTS FIRED...
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.
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.
Up that way one cruiser hangs back and a knot of them with flashing overheads are gathered near the dead ending.
"Wonder if they know, now, they're in the wrong place?"
"Like it makes much difference now!"
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.
"Some most unlucky son-of-a-bitch!"
"So, y' got to see something, after all! What do you know!"
The first cruiser creeps, turning away of the Hess, and travels off across and up Canterbury, at last.
"Going to see the same nothing-there-anymore we are!"
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,
"You two fellas hear any shots fired?"
"No, but we can tell y' what it was about..."
EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION....
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.
"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..."
"And...?"
"Isn't how it's supposta be."
"Y' gotta wonder! You really are from the country!"
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.
"Now where are you going?"
"Whatever happened it was along here."
"What do y' expect to see the cops didn't not see?"
"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."
"You expect to find that black car plugged and expiring if the cops somehow missed seeing it?"
"Hole in rear trunk, street sign; tree trunk with some bark shattered, somebody's front porch column with the paint disturbed...."
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.
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.
September 15, 2009.
THERE IS something like a
Crump!
Someone, in a voice more amused than surprised, exclaims,
"HO!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it leaves deliberately and without the least hesitation.
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,
"'E 'it you, man!"
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.
It, too, is occupied four or five times.
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.
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.
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.
Its engine snarls and the car leaps forward.
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.
It, too, gives him something of the look of detachment from what he is doing, if only for this one split second.
PURSUIT...
The car that caused the accident has already passed Oxford at the other end of the long block before the struck car shifts forward.
The avenue south toward the expressway is almost dark and nearly deserted.
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.
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.
And each time the two cars are brought closer even as they become more distant and smaller.
"Now where are you going?"
"Up there."
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.
"Why? They're going to be gone! No way that boy's going to be stopping now if he didn't!"
"Don't come!"
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.
Both cars are done in an instant.
"There's not going to be anything to see up there!"
"Don't follow!"
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.
It even stops at the corner before turning up toward the Hess where it pulls in off the street and stops to look around.
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.
SHOTS FIRED...
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.
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.
Up that way one cruiser hangs back and a knot of them with flashing overheads are gathered near the dead ending.
"Wonder if they know, now, they're in the wrong place?"
"Like it makes much difference now!"
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.
"Some most unlucky son-of-a-bitch!"
"So, y' got to see something, after all! What do you know!"
The first cruiser creeps, turning away of the Hess, and travels off across and up Canterbury, at last.
"Going to see the same nothing-there-anymore we are!"
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,
"You two fellas hear any shots fired?"
"No, but we can tell y' what it was about..."
EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION....
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.
"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..."
"And...?"
"Isn't how it's supposta be."
"Y' gotta wonder! You really are from the country!"
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.
"Now where are you going?"
"Whatever happened it was along here."
"What do y' expect to see the cops didn't not see?"
"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."
"You expect to find that black car plugged and expiring if the cops somehow missed seeing it?"
"Hole in rear trunk, street sign; tree trunk with some bark shattered, somebody's front porch column with the paint disturbed...."
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.
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.
September 15, 2009.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Michael 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.
The storm never came but passed Monroe Avenue and the city by.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They never do.
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.
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.
"Jus' Turn! TURN! Go On!" a woman on the other side of the avenue shouted.
And, soon, the driver did.
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.
A big bellied lounger on the bus bench at the opposite corner of Boardman, commented with arms wide over the back of the bench,
"And it isn't even ninety degrees!"
A Rochester Blue-and-White cruised by and didn't stop.
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.
"Kick Ball," one of them explained; with a gesture up and down the avenue, he added, "Bars sponsor us."
"Yeah, I saw a lot of you guys out here Tuesday night."
"Yeah, Tuesday the really competitive teams play, I think."
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.
"Aw, that's healthy!" someone commented for all.
"Really!"
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.
The people coming out had their reasons and seemed to treat the evening like any Friday or Saturday night.
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.
Steve, the Old Guy, came down to the street from his room earlier than his usual and in a mood.
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.
Leaving the No Name place, he even commented,
"I'm out earlier tonight."
He knew that the owner marked his arrival as time to close for the night.
"Yes," the owner agreed in his accented voice. "You are."
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.
"DON'TCHA WANNA MAKE TEN CENTS," the dude was laughing combatively. "C'MON! Y'KIN LICK MY ASS FOR TEN CENTS!"
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.
"S'Okay!"
The line-up sucking on their cigarettes looked between embarrassed and amused behind the angry dude.
He turned to them and in the same loud voice proclaimed,
"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!"
Faintly laughing, one of the Ducks sort of agreed, went along,
"It's such a sweet deal, too!"
"DAMN RIGHT! THAT GUY'S NO CRACK HEAD!"
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.
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.
The Old Guy had brought a book in his back pack.
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.
His step was slow, wandering away early from the bars, and stopped altogether on the sidewalk just the other side of the railing.
With empty confusion, he inquired,
"Wha'cha doin'?"
"Reading!"
His confusion continuing, Mr. Moon wondered, after a long moment,
"Why?"
"'Cuss there's no news on the cable!" Steve said in his mood.
Without blinking, Mr. Moon thought about that, could make no sense of it and wandered on alone homeward once more.
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.
"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."
He grinned, too, through a tale he'd heard about a concert in Africa.
"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!"
Steve watched them going away. They were going off to Gitsis' for garbage plates the way they always do after hours on Monroe.
The storm never came but passed Monroe Avenue and the city by.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They never do.
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.
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.
"Jus' Turn! TURN! Go On!" a woman on the other side of the avenue shouted.
And, soon, the driver did.
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.
A big bellied lounger on the bus bench at the opposite corner of Boardman, commented with arms wide over the back of the bench,
"And it isn't even ninety degrees!"
A Rochester Blue-and-White cruised by and didn't stop.
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.
"Kick Ball," one of them explained; with a gesture up and down the avenue, he added, "Bars sponsor us."
"Yeah, I saw a lot of you guys out here Tuesday night."
"Yeah, Tuesday the really competitive teams play, I think."
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.
"Aw, that's healthy!" someone commented for all.
"Really!"
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.
The people coming out had their reasons and seemed to treat the evening like any Friday or Saturday night.
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.
Steve, the Old Guy, came down to the street from his room earlier than his usual and in a mood.
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.
Leaving the No Name place, he even commented,
"I'm out earlier tonight."
He knew that the owner marked his arrival as time to close for the night.
"Yes," the owner agreed in his accented voice. "You are."
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.
"DON'TCHA WANNA MAKE TEN CENTS," the dude was laughing combatively. "C'MON! Y'KIN LICK MY ASS FOR TEN CENTS!"
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.
"S'Okay!"
The line-up sucking on their cigarettes looked between embarrassed and amused behind the angry dude.
He turned to them and in the same loud voice proclaimed,
"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!"
Faintly laughing, one of the Ducks sort of agreed, went along,
"It's such a sweet deal, too!"
"DAMN RIGHT! THAT GUY'S NO CRACK HEAD!"
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.
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.
The Old Guy had brought a book in his back pack.
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.
His step was slow, wandering away early from the bars, and stopped altogether on the sidewalk just the other side of the railing.
With empty confusion, he inquired,
"Wha'cha doin'?"
"Reading!"
His confusion continuing, Mr. Moon wondered, after a long moment,
"Why?"
"'Cuss there's no news on the cable!" Steve said in his mood.
Without blinking, Mr. Moon thought about that, could make no sense of it and wandered on alone homeward once more.
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.
"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."
He grinned, too, through a tale he'd heard about a concert in Africa.
"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!"
Steve watched them going away. They were going off to Gitsis' for garbage plates the way they always do after hours on Monroe.
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