Angelus

An autumn evening, an instant before rain and darkness, a No. 7 bus pulled into the shelter mid-block between Oxford and Rutgers streets on the Avenue. The driver, broad bottomed and wearing white ankle socks, had a clever touch on the throttle and brake; he was a bus surfer's delight.

At the wheel of a square-jowled city bus, no one could have ceased all that metal mass to the curb, brought that bulk to any smoother halt than he managed.

The rear door sprung.

Steve, lighting a cigar, swung out and was under the shelter roof all in one, clockwork motion and that, too, just as rain broke storming down, hitting hard over pavements and everything and everyone around.

Everywhere, that is, but in where Steve had come to be.

The atmosphere was dimmed in an instant several shades of gray toward dusk. The remains of the day's brightness had gone above, a glow below the smudged cloud cover lipping in silver the flat brick roofs of the buildings, backlighting the crowning heads of neighorhood trees and - giving that old No. 7 forging off grumbling in pursuit of its schedule something more to chase after up the Avenue.

The shelter was an old familiar place, a neighborhood spot.

Notched into the parking at Corpus Christi Parochial, the shelter was a narrow plate glass house beneath a ridged glass roof. In it one was pretty much out of the elements but still so very much in the open and right on Monroe where everything, everything was happening - even when everyone was only running to get in out of the rain.

With a bus just gone there wouldn't be another to wave along for twenty or thirty minutes, a good time to sit and smoke and take in the Avenue. He had Monroe from the gray-flannel side four lanes wide it takes by the Branch Library up at the 490 Overpass to below Show World and the rain wouldn't be long, a cloud burst. If he sat and smoked, he would soon be out with the long-in-the-tooth girls who haunt the bank of phones up on the corner of Rutgers. The girls who between times and around various corners climb up into the cabs of old-man pick-up trucks to do kind but not charitable duty.

He would be out, too, with those snicker lipped lads from the high schools of Pittsford and Penfield and Webster who unload from cars they park in the parochial lot to run and jump the railing and make eager ways to Elab Smokers Boutique...

Steve was thinking of the rain, heavy but only a cloud burst, fiercely falling but over, likely, in minutes, when a narrow runner splashed through the devils of the downpour and, cutting closely round the corner, came in under the shelter at its other end. Slender with caramel face and bushy head of wet hair he was dressed for a day that wasn't yet autumn and wasn't raining and he carried a plastic grocery sack.

It occurred that these were leftovers and that the latest supper at Blessed Sacrament, Oxford Street's modest baroque cathedral behind the bulk of the school, was letting out.

"Is there a bus?" he hoped, meaning - will there be a bus coming soon?

"There is always a bus," slipped out of Steve and was instantly regretted.

Though daylight was steadily, inexorably diminishing, and the other's face was obscured in the streetlight shadow of the shelter, it was plain this new, stranded sailor, looking more than a little drown, was too dire and disappointed for anything other than commiseration or assurance. Irony, wit would go by him.

"A bus just left." Steve told him. "Won't be another for half an hour...."

...Or, longer this time of the evening.

With, "Oh," only, the guy took a seat midway on the bench to wait however long, it didn't matter.

The rain wouldn't be much longer but he damp and chill it would bring to the dusk would be.

"Mind my smoke?"

The answer, "Nawidohmin'," was small, somewhat distracted and all that needed to be said.

When the rain was no longer falling, ceasing as swiftly as begun, more grubstakers began coming along from the church basement. Some trailed along down Oxford Street in their small gangs of after gathering fours and fives, their partnerships of twos and threes. The trash collectors rode bicycles with wire baskets they could balance bags of bottles and cans for redemption on. Some drew along now empty shopping cards they tow behind their bikes.

Some few others come to the shelter between Rutgers and Oxford to crowd inside and wait, bulky shapeless sacks of clothing in out of the streetlight with the traffic and crowds hurrying by and the neon and traffic lights behind to glow out and speckle and streak the scene with red, green, gold.

"Is there a bus?"

They severally ask, because no one on the avenue ever carries a schedule, or wears a watch to check a schedule against. No one, either, has a lighter for the butts they've picked up, here and there, the smokes they'll bum.

"You wouldn't have a...." they ask.

"Just this cigar," Steve tells them.

Some, too, even lack the buck-twenty-five for the ride they're waiting on.

"Excuse me, please?"

Steve was sure that was what it was about. The voice was polite with just a touch of sing song to it. Steve thought he could hear prayers, a communicant's rote responses to a priest's reading of the mass.

He'd seen the speaker led into the other end of the shelter some moments before, guided along by others arriving, too, from the church basement; the speaker had a moon-face stubbled with beard and wasn't looking quite in Steve's or anyone's direction as he spoke. It was a voice that was or affected a childlike innocence.

"Excuse me, please - but I smell a cigar?"

"If it bothers you - " Steve began to say, certain that that wasn't it.

There is no such thing as a cheap cigar to those who hustle change on the street. All cigars are Havana and smell flavorfully of wealth. Cigars are the choice smoke of celebrants prone, it is believed, to be as generous and open handed with others as fate has been with them of late. Cigars, too, are smoked by men with hair on their chests and jack in their pockets - potential providers out to express in everywhere their masculine identity.

The speaker rushed to sing-song,

"No, no, no, it doesn't bother me!" his big head swayed a little side to side above his shoulders. And, "I don't mean to disturb you at all...."

Steve, himself, was just then, discovering that, in fact, two suburban lads had, after all, been all along across in Elab discussing bongs. They were leaving, now, the cube square shack across the way beneath its awkwardly leaning Cigar Store Indian, sprinting to cross the Avenue, angled off toward Rutgers to cut between the shelter and the beech tree on its island just inside the parking lot. They were fresh-faced kids full of their Avenue adventure and carrying away paraphernalia.

"Would it be alright if I ask you your name - please?" the speaker inquired.

"Steve."

"Stephen..." the speaker held it up and was pleased to find..."That's a saint's name."

He then wondered,

"Steve, would you mind if I told you my name?"

"Not in the least."

Of the two fresh-faced kids one had made it tot he lot's low barrier a few feet beyond the south end of the shelter and was set to climb over it, set to step up on the thick metal tube and hike himself over. The other lad, lagging a little behind, a kid in a beret and dark rimmed glasses very pleased with himself, was, it seemed, noticing the shelter and the collection of types within it and taking and interest.

"Mine is a saint's name, too - Matthew. Everybody calls me Mattie."

In the shadows, among and over the bulky old clothes clad bodies of men, and with the traffic thrum and swoosh going by out across the wide sidewalk pavement -the question was suspended, what could Steve do you for Mattie?

"I hate to ask you this, Steve," Mattie asked, his head davening in its small rhythmic pattern, "but I don't have fare....and I need to get 'cross town....to go home...to my home....It's not something I like to ask, Steve."

"Sure."

"But, if you have some change....in your pocket...."

'Cuse me, 'cuse me, Mister, don't mean to bother you none...twice or three times a day, at least, along the Avenue, Steve would hear one variation or another because Monroe is the Panhandler's drag. They work the bars from late afternoon joining those who come out to smoke to long after midnight. They hit up, too, the folk who come for the New Age and retro shops and boutiques, the college kids and Starbucks loungers. They feel themselves welcome, entitled even on the street where almost anything seems to go and kids with peacock green hair come to get tattoos and hang out.

That kid in the beret and glasses had turned aside and come over tithe shelter with his smart grin and his chin poised forward of his chest avid for any experience that's going.

"You believe me, Steve? You believe I don't like askin'?"

Mattie, your come-on is more elaborate and has more style than almost any. You're a true master or the art - or you're a sincere sonofabitch. It is no longer hard to say no, the occasion being so common.

"I don't happen to have any change at present, Mattie," Steve has to tell him.

There are times, too, when it necessary to give a little.

"But I have a day pass I won't be riding any more now that I'm home. If you can use it, you're welcome to it."

"Anything is welcome, Steve!"

The bus pass had already begun its journey down the bench, smudged hand in frayed cuff to smudged hand.

"I really don't like to panhandle, Steve."

Both Mattie's hands were casually on his slender reed of a cane before him where he was standing near the other entrance to the shelter.

"If you don't mind my asking - do you believe that there are things that are sinful, Steve? Because some people don't believe there are!" Mattie declared with wonder.

"I'm not sure I could say, Mattie."

The last hand reached up and touched Mattie's nearest hand and that hand, unsurprised and deft, took what was offered it and pocketed the pass.

"I know that when a thing is wrong it’s a sin. I believe that and some say that panhandling is wrong. But I asked Father and Father told me, Steve, that I was God's Panhandler!" Mattie exulted. "He says it is alright for me to sometimes ask for hand outs when I really need them."

Both Steve and the Beret, too, had noticed when the strand sailor went into his pocket and slipped a folded bill into the hand of the person seated next to him on the bench with a gesture that it, too, should be passed along to Mattie.

"Do you think that's right, Steve?" Mattie wondered.

"I wouldn't know."

"I put my trust in Father Tony, Steve."

"You could be right."

Sometimes you give a little.

"You could be right."

In a little longer while, a No. 7 ran into the curb and went off, again, with its newest riders seeking seats along its hall-like length suspended up above the Avenue in a bright, detail rich fluorescence.

Beret's pal was seated, still, on the barrier below the shelter concentrating on his nails, impatiently waiting out his partner's whim.

Looking down the length of the shelter where no one was bundled any longer, the young man grinned. He was taking in the trash and cigarette butts, the stains and smudges on the glass walls. An RPD cruiser had come to park conspicuously in the parochial drive behind and to one side of the shelter. Steve could have told the boy that they would be there, one cruiser or another, the rest of the night.

"Where do they all come from - right?" the boy laughed.

"That's an old song," Steve said.

The kid looked around grinning big with that same forward leaning look of his and, then, he, too, was off. He moved so suddenly he was over the traffic barrier before his pal could react and, then, it was Beret laughing, saying,

"Come on, whudayah waitin' 'round for?"

Up the other side of the dark-as-night presence of the giant beech, up on the corner, a prematurely-aged chick with straight long hair and, up close, a few too few teeth , was stalking the phones. Porch lights were on and windows glowed in the houses that come down Rutgers opposite the parking lot bringing the neighborhood almost into the Avenue. Summer sitting porches where they putout flags and suspend platters above collections of odds and ends of furniture.

It all reminded Steve of his favorite shelter moment from his first summer as a resident of Monroe.

A heat wave oven baking his studio room, about midnight he went to sit awhile on the bus bench in the semi-dark with a book on his lap and a cigar for company. It was an early week night with no crowds but plenty of people out and about and even the occasional gang going by. The traffic was unhurried and there were spaces when the street was all but bare and quiet.

The young lady who came along during one of those down times was standing stock still and tall on a skate board. She was an ideal with a slim fair face and long straight blonde hair to below her shoulders and she was balanced so perfectly that she never once had to move or break her glorious pose during her transit. She effortlessly traveled thus clipping along at a steady, slow and smooth roll up from Oxford and by the shelter where he sat. Somehow, someway he couldn't know the manner of she managed, then, a grand looping arc that ran her off into Rutgers and ever on diminishing into the distance one pool of white street light after another after another.

Steve had thought her angelic.

March 25, 2008.

Sunday, Seven-Fifteen, A.M., February.

Along that way, off Monroe, on Boardman, the black trees begin just behind the Avenue broad sidewalk. Burdened with snow that has just for the moment ceased to fall, branches arch over and, nearly, artlessly, mingle above the street and below the thick blue-cold clouds, the cawing crows. It is Sunday morning and this Sunday morning I'm going to breakfast in the South Wedge despite the weather. A ten minute walk that begins with two blocks of Boardman porch fronts and flags out (banners both national and neighborly); then around the deadend corner on to Richard to pass by Rising Place before cutting through the bit of tree canopied sidwalk-park that is alongside the top of the Expressway off-ramp at the Goodman overpass. Starting out, noticing the quiet defying swirl of black birds crowing about the tree tops, in the Avenue left behind, too, I notice the sudden rush and grumble of a bus out to Highland, to Brighton Twelve Corners, to Pittsford village on the canal that is passing. The groan is familiar but there something unfamiliar, too, and, turning back, I see the last of the hall room on wheels escaping by Alladin's on the Avenue and realize the difference is the snow on the pavement so new fall the trucks and traffic haven't gotten to it, yet, muting the tires. Lights illuminate Oxford's front, though the black panes are no longer neon; in an hour the lights may still be there but, with the brightening day, they'll no longer be noticeable. My footprints in the sidewalk snow from the corner may be there still as well, and, perhaps, still be alone. Approaching Pearl, halfway to Richard, a window rises and snow storms from the branches and off the steep pitched roofs. It is a storm of spatters of already fallen snow falling farther from the black tracery of wrought iron branches and snow dust being swept into the air from gables and turrets.

Why I Love Monroe No. 222

I got off the phone to family in Florida just as the chorus of an anthem of the eighties was welling up from the alley beneath my window, all the sudden gathered voices of the bar patrons next door chiming in to show fine spirit so early of an evening for even a Saturday night.

I'd been bragging on my Avenue.

I'd been passing on to golden-age seniors long retired to the secure sameness and supposed sanity of the Republican suburban sprawl of central Florida entertaining images of the weird and lively doings of an Upstate New Yawk city street I've come to live on.

The hard rock and babble of laughter that gusted up after it hinted at happenings transpiring below that I might be missing.

That set me down on the Avenue, my bag over my shoulder and with a cigar to light in my face, not a whole minute later nor a second too soon. There was a full moon and I had noticed a limo bus lurking around the Lola's corner in Wilmer Street explaining the early and exuberant anthem singing.

All that was forgotten the next moment as I turned to take in the Avenue the other way and to light that Blunt and came, more or less, face to face with the Mad Man of the Evening.

A round Irish face with stubble and rumpled brown hair approached with both arms dangling sacks of groceries. I was reminded of Mr. O'Hara, Thomas Mitchell, from Gone With The Wind - a short burly body and the beginnings of Andy Rooney eye-brows. He was strolling along with the side to side motion his counterweight sacks gave him and wore a faintly dreamy expression because he was singing, I suppose.

It wasn't a great voice but it was clear and was carrying his tune with even more ease than he was carrying the products of Wilson Farms.

Marie - the dawn is breaking;
Marie - you'll soon be waking
To find our hearts are aching...

You couldn't tell, as he passed, if he was aware I or anyone else might be listening to him. In a world of his own - on a Saturday night on Monroe Avenue, Rah-chester, New Yawk.

I turned to watch him down the Avenue and noticed two young women coming up from Lola's - slightly flared pants, belted jackets. As they met the Musical Mad Man the one with tawny hair gave him a slight smile of passing notice and even danced her wrist a bit and made a finger popping motion. I could tell, even from the rear, that he paid her's no more notice than he had my attention.

As the girls passed Oxford's and 640, I couldn't help myself. I had to amaze -

"Tommy Dorsey!"

The finger popper continued to smile in her patronizing way at yet another Monroe Mad Man - you meet them all the time down there!

"I don't know," she brushed me off with.

"No!" I told her, definitively, "Tommy Dorsey!"

I didn't bother to added the 'Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,' part - she was so clearly, if politely, not interested.

So, I had arrived on the Avenue through the miracle of coincidence just in time to have for my seniors, surviving members of the Swing Generation, a moment from Monroe that they could uniquely appreciate and that I could use to explain my fascination with it. Any given day, any given hour - there is nothing that you might not see or hear somewhere between Canterbury Road and Meigs. A dingy street of crumbling infra-structure peopled with panhandlers and bar tramps but you never know what is going to turn up when almost anything is allowed and little is left untried.