The thing about a pedestrian city is that one is exposed to his environment. In yesterday’s case, I was unsheltered from the elements, and my eyes were unshielded from some homeless guy’s balls. Exposure has two effects: one, is that a person grows numb to otherwise significant events: drug deals, two men kissing, dog shit on the sidewalk. The other effect is tied in with the sun. Exposed to the sun for too long, skin will burn. With the sun, I can wear sunscreen. But there is no screen in The City—nothing to shield me.
Today as I walked down 6th Avenue, I came upon a scene: three people waving frantically in the street, flagging down a wailing ambulance. As I sped closer to them and the crowd that had gathered outside a restaurant, I was interested in the situation only in finding a path around it. Someone must have choked, or had a heart attack, I thought. Nevermind though, the scene didn’t interest me, and the stairs to the 14th Street subway station were on the other side of the crowd. I weaved through them.
At the bottom of the stairs was a cop crouching over a man in tattered clothing. Underneath the prone man was a dirty crutch. At the crown of his black head was a thick pool of blood the size of a dinner plate. I was on the third step when the numbness sloughed off and I became cognizant of what I was witnessing. The paramedics passed me as I backed up the steps.
At about 11:00p this evening, Brittany and Mike arrived. The six of us (Drew and Sara were there too) sat around and drank some wine and Sam and I swear we were all talking at once. A short time later we hit the street, walking down Bleecker to Mercer and then south until we arrived at Bar 89. In a rare move, the doorman loosened up with us, commenting on our two friends and their Georgia licenses. I forget the joke, but in the end we were all laughing as he ushered us in.
Since this is a holiday weekend many NYkers have left town, and for this reason we spent only 10 minutes at the bar before we were seated at a window table near the front. The boys settled in with their beers and the girls with their ‘Tini’s, and we just talked and talked—with occasional breaks in the conversation to visit the coolest bathrooms in The City. We celebrated the arrival of our friends with much good cheer and laughter; raising hell and turning heads to our little corner table. And with the arrival of my friends a flux of old memories flooded my brain, finally pushing out the image of the man at the bottom of the stairs.
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