Vignettes -2
We’re on the C train barreling through the maze of tunnels that every day facilitates the barreling of four million people around NYC. A hundred feet above us, on teeming thoroughfares, Manhattan huddles against wind-whipped-this-winter’s-never-goin’-to-end snow. We’ve just come from MOMA, that well-appointed art warehouse and symbol of American acquisitive capitalism, crammed with whatever it means when we say; ‘priceless art.’ There, not so much rubbing elbows with chin-tugging art connoisseurs, as elbowing our way through drifting legions of phone-clicking tourists, I witness a near-tears mother finger-waggingly threaten careless-middle-class death – “NO SCREENS for the rest of the day!” – on her five-year-old daughter for attempting to paw one of the many Picassos.
The subway, crammed with blemished humanity, is a more fertile place:
“I thunk y’all says it wuz two … for fih dollar?” a twenty-something African American woman with a fifty-something scowl, snaps at a skinny eight or nine-year-old Hispanic girl in a soiled, pink-fluffy-fleece jacket, a homemade cardboard box tray of eye-catchingly-bright candy hanging from around her neck.
Everyone lurches in unison with the train lurch: The skinny, hard-eyed little girl adjusts her footing, never losing eye contact with her prospective customer.
“Three … fifties,” the hard-eyed little girl says, one hand supporting the cardboard box, the other hovering protectively over her product.
“Three fifty … for one packs a gum?” the woman gasps, shoulders tugging in, torso curving.
The young girl nods.
Her brother, maybe four years old, a tiny-thin human in oversized clothes, darts precariously amidst the much larger, winter-booted, subway-lurching members of our species. He stands behind his sister carrying his own, much smaller, cardboard box tray of candy supported by a homemade plastic-bag rope running around his thin neck. Scowling, the diminutive sibling tugs on his sister’s jacket and looks around plaintively, grey-I-need-sleep bags bulging under his almond brown eyes.
Still mid-deal, his sister’s a-third-bigger-than-his torso twists rapidly, easily freeing his grip.
“Then, give me two,” the woman says, sighing loudly, peeling a $5 bill off her roll of notes.
The girl hands her a packet of spearmint gum.
“Which udder?” the little girl asks, wrestling free from a second, harder, brotherly grip.
“Classic … t’pink an’ red one,” the woman says, her face flipping from a fifty-something scowl to that of a smiling young girl. “I’n givin’ that one ta mah niece.”
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The traffic light flips red against the darkness as we splash, wipers clapping fast-time, through puddles lugged fifteen hundred miles from the Caribbean by the storm lambasting Brooklyn. Stopped on red, from the dim coziness of our car, Like a Rolling Stone bellowsing familiarly, white fingers of streetlight glinting off wet pavement, we see him: A man in his mid-thirties kneeling in the middle of the street; crushed Starbucks’ cup held out imploringly with both hands; homelessly unkempt, too thin, too pale; rain streaming down his gleaming face; lips muttering; tears trickling from beseeching eyes.
He stops time.
The windshield wipers clap over-back…over-back, maintaining this brutally clear scene of human suffering.
We can’t wait for the light to turn.
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I’m leaning against a column in the NYC subway’s 42 Street station warily eyeing a clean-cut, young African American man fast-stepping around the crowded platform staccato-yelling: “RASTA, RASTA, RASTA!”
I try to get sciatica relief by jamming the sole of my winter boot hard against the fourth rivet up on the blue steel column. The man breaks his fast-stepping to talk to a totally-ordinary-in-every-way-except-she’s-rolling-a-joint-on-a-subway-platform-bench, African American woman sitting one seat over from my wife. The two speak rapid-familiarly in a hushed-vernacular that a country-mouse like me stands no chance of catching.
The fast-stepping-man spins around, throws his shoulders back and fast steps away: The totally-ordinary-woman sighs audibly, and, returning to the Rizla paper flattened on the wood bench, spills a mound of marijuana from a slender orange and red packet, then spreads the washed-out-green herb along the paper with her purple, jewel encrusted fingernail.
“RASTA, RASTA!” the words cling to the air above the platform.
A stooped, balding African American man in a yellow high-viz vest emblazoned with “MTA COURTESY SERVICE,” leads a heavyset, older African American woman in a pink faux-fur coat, pulling behind her a full-size shiny pink suitcase, through the RASTA-RASTA-head-twitching platform crowd.
“This is yer alls train now, jes stand here, an’ it’ll be along in … oh …,” the Courtesy man says softly, stopping right in front of me. Propping hands on hips, he leans back to look up at the digital noticeboard. “Jes three minutes now fer t’next downtown C.”
“Thank you, thank … you,” the woman says, lightly touching his arm, her fuzzy pink coated shoulders turning slowly, eyes narrowing as she surveys the platform.
“RASTA … RASTA!” the fast-stepping-man moves in a tightening figure-eight loop.
My boot, not grippy enough for the smooth rivet head slips and slaps the platform. The fast-stepping-man’s eyes dart to my boot, look up, catch my eye. He rushes over holding out his fist to bump.
“King Selassie, … King Selassie,” he whispers, eyes blazing.
His eyes penetrate mine as I lightly bump fists and carefully calibrate our eye contact to keep it just long and short enough to immediately end this tenuous fellowship.
“KING SEL…ASSIE!” he’s off again, fast-stepping, “KING SELASSIE!”
A long, fat joint rolled, the totally-ordinary-woman stands up.
A flame peeks from a dying Bic.
The twisted end of the Rizla flares yellow-orange.
“Y’all be fine here now,” the Courtesy man intones, “one stop’s all ya gotta go, one stop, Penn Station, the el’vator’s….”
“RASTA, RASTA, KING SELASSIE, KIN….”
The C train screams into the station.
Across the packed platform wafts the sweet smell of marijuana.
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I’m walking into a too-brightly lit Cambodian restaurant at 11:00AM on Christmas Day accompanied by a friend with a crushing Naughty List. A clean-cut, college aged Cambodian man, golf shirt tucked into pressed khakis, grabs tall-plastic menus and moves fast to close the distance between us, his face knotting in worry.
In my crazy mind I project his logical mind racing to: “Here they come: Crazy-cussing white men, already drunk on Christmas morning!”
He’s accompanied shoulder-to-shoulder by a fifty-something Cambodian man, so similar looking it’s got to be his father. The older man’s eyes look worried but determined.
“Merry Christmas!” I say as soberly as possible. Then over-straining to not appear to be what I imagine he imagines we are; I add with near manic politeness, “Are you open?”
It’s a patently stupid question: There’s already two tables occupied by Asian families with little kids sloshing noodles out of their soup onto the red Formica topped tables.
“Sure, sure right this way,” the young man’s face barely relaxes as he directs us to a table.
We drag back metal chairs, legs grating across the tiled floor.
“Would you li…, can I get you some water?” the young man says, his father still standing close behind him, as we settle into the table.
“Yes, … yes please!” I keep the forced-I’m-not-one-of-them smile on my face.
Breathing loudly, my friend peruses the drinks’ list on the tall plastic menu: As his eyes move up and down the five items on the list, I feel my breath quicken.
I know he’s not not-drinking: I know he knows I know he’s not not-drinking: Christmas morning under the glaring fluorescent-lights of this Cambodian restaurant could easily veer sharp left.
“Ya know what?” my friend says, his irrepressible smile back on his face, “I’ll have me a good American drink …,” my lungs refuse to release the air they’ve trapped, “I’ll have a Coke!”
I breath out.
“We only do Pepsi sir, is that ok?” the young man says, turning his torso to leave.
“What the …!” my friend’s eyes already so darkened and hardened by life somehow find a way to turn darker and harder. “No Coke!”
“No, sorry sir,” the young man says flatly. “The truck only delivers one or the other. We get Pepsi.”
His father peers in at us over his son’s shoulder.
“Well if that’s the way it goes,” my friend’s hand slaps the red Formica, “I’ll have a …,” my chest tightens, “Pepsi. Cause when life gives you Pepsi, that’s what ya drink!”
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I’m in the gym locker room untangling the cord of my centenarian-in-tech-years earphones, when from the next bay I hear:
“You still here?” It’s an old-guy’s gravelly voice. “What? Ya movin’ in?”
“Ahhh,” a new-old-guy’s voice responds, “that god…damn Murph kept me here talkin’ about pussy. Is he still out there?”
“Murph, who’s he? What’s he look like?”
“Ahhh, Italian blowback hair, honkin’ big nose on him? He does the bike, sits out there pedalin’ an’ starin’ at all t’young ones walkin’ past.”
“I…taal..yan! Thought ya said he was Murph?”
“He is, he’s both, one a them worst a both types, course he’d tell ya he’s t’best a both, just don’t ask none a his three ex-wives!”
Freeing up enough elderly earphone wire to not suffer an hour listening to my inner-critic, I start to walk out to the gym floor, glancing sideways at the talkers: One sits, a plump man in his late seventies, rumpled khakis, saggy sky-blue golf shirt, white-haired, red-faced, eyes and lips set in an I-seen-it-all grimace; the other old guy stands with liver-spotted hands on hips, wispy grey hair, ashen cheeks, thick glasses, his mouth agape, a cotton, navy-blue Red Sox tee shirt hanging off boney shoulders, black sweatpants with grey lint balls dotting the legs.
In short, two grandfathers.
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I’m fast-walking down the too-brightly lit VITAMINS aisle towards the prescription counter at a local pharmacy when I see a skinny fifty-something-hard-years guy in a Carhartt jacket and soiled grey sweats, tippy-toe-leaning so far over the counter that his navy Red Sox wool-hat pushes the clear-plastic-Covid-screen way in over the counter.
“You’re t’one as tol’ me ta get t’FUCK OUTTA HERE,” he erupts, face reddening, breath fogging the plastic-screen, “an’ all I’n askin for … is ta get a simple script filled.”
He waves a small white sheet of paper in his right hand.
Smugly, I drop into this scene driven by a gnarly addiction to witnessing human strife and a self-righteous-who-are-you-to-stop-me need to pick up a white-crinkly paper bag containing big pharma’s finest chemicals. In an average year, a neighborhood pharmacy like this will sell 11,000 white-crinkly paper bags of chemicals to relieved, sad, why-me-angry, or addicted people to fuck with their biochemistry in a fashion kinda-sorta predetermined by big-pharma.
The Red-Sox-Carhartt guy slams the Covid-screen with the flat of his hand, his wedding band clacking off the plastic. The pudgy-faced, white-coated young Hispanic woman behind the counter backs up to the wall of white-crinkly paper bag stuffed bins. She’s not the direct target of the rage which is aimed at the white-coated, bearded, dark-skinned, forty-something man sitting on a lab stool staring at his wall-mounted flat-screen, lightly keystroking.
“YOU … were rude ta me … an’ so I’m GONNA …,” Red-Sox-Carhartt’s mouth opens so wide his stubble-covered cheeks and deep crow’s-feet stretch flat.
“Are you a wanting me to phone the poh…lease,” the white-coated man says, stopping his keystrokes, pursing his lips, but still not looking at his antagonist.
“Ya, call t’cops an’ tell ‘em how you tol’ me to get T’FUCK OUTTA HERE ….”
“I tolled you meester, the pharmacist is … not going ta fill that paper prescrip….”
“Who t’fuck are you people ta tell me what I can….”
“Ok, … I will phone the poh…lee….”
“Fuck you, ya fucken towel head terrorist!” Red-Sox-Carhartt wallops the clear-screen with both hands, then turns and jog-walks down the DIGESTION aisle.
“HEH! HEH! HEH!” a pasty, round-in-the-middle, sixty-something woman yells, as she propels herself out a pharmacy waiting chair. “You can take that talk outta here!”
She pads in her ortho-sneakers, washed-too-many-times pink sweats and matt-purple-puffy jacket down the DIGESTION aisle and stops in front of a floor-to-ceiling DEPENDS display; wagging her pudgy finger, triple-chins quivering, she yells down the empty aisle:
“WE’RE NOT HAVIN’ THIS IN MY TOWN!”
Pursing her lips, and shaking her head, she pads back to the counter.
“They can’t do this in my town, no way, no freakin’ way … my scripts ready luv?” she says to the Hispanic pharmacy tech who’s already back tapping her touch screen as the older woman grabs the Covid-screen with both hands to still its swinging.
“Ya know,” she says, not waiting for the tech to answer, instead turning to an obese, black-sweat-suited seventy-something woman wedged into a pharmacy waiting chair, “I have police in my family, we don’t put up with that sorta sh…tuff.”
“Yours is ready mam,” the tech says, raising her eyebrows interrogatively, “four … right?”
“Me too!” the obese woman says, attempting, and failing, to adjust her girth in the seat, “we gots police too, cousins an’ stuff, I wuz almost thinkin’ a callin’ them there for a few minutes.”
“Yep, four taday, I’ll come back tamorrow for t’others,” the round-in-the-middle woman sighs as she plucks a Visa card from her black leather and gold clasped purse. “How much?”
The pharmacy tech lays two teal fingernails on the black and grey pay-pad on the counter.
The white-coated man stares intently at his computer screen; fingers dancing on the keyboard.
The pay-pad chirps: Under the Covid-screen pass four white crinkly-paper bags.
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I’m on the construction debris covered second-floor of a Boston firehouse fast-scribbling the captain’s complaints about our lower-than-a-snake’s-ankle renovation contractor, when through the August humidity rips a deafening siren.
“Goddamm!” the captain snarls, drops his clipboard and dashes towards the stairs. In on his day off, he brought along his two sons and now, it seems, a fireman, possibly to impress the 8- and 9-year-olds, has flipped on a siren inside the firehouse – a severely stupid thing to do as the siren is that deafening it permanently damages hearing.
The captain skids to a stop at the stair-landing; peers through the dust-caked screen of the open window; then bursts into a two-steps-at-a-time sprint down the stairs. With the siren still blaring and more sirens chorusing behind it, I hurry over to the window.
Below, standing spreadeagled in the middle of the narrow street, is a short-round, bearded thirty-something guy in a black Bruins hat, faded blue jeans and a once-upon-a-time-white Red Sox’s baseball shirt, his pudgy, hairless arms held aloft pointed directly at the windshield of a black Nissan Maxima jammed to a halt fifteen feet from the barrel of his snub-nosed revolver.
Behind the Maxima, as far I can see down the street, police-car blues whirl. Uniformed cops snake-race along the red-bricked sides of the street, Glocks clasped in both hands.
Stopping a few paces back from the driver’s side of the Maxima, a cop yells:
“HANDS, HANDS, I NEEDA SEE HANDS, SHOW ME YERE FUCKEN HANDS!”
The pudgy uncover cop resets his sneakered-stance; his snub-nosed revolver keeping its lethal aim at the Maxima’s driver; his salt ‘n pepper, tightly trimmed beard and shaved-raw-pink throat shudder under a suppressed gulp.
A motorcycle State Trooper – buzzcut blond hair, six feet plus tall, two hundred fifty pounds of muscle and bone in knee-high black boots, blue pants flaring over his thighs – lumbers down the passenger’s side of the car, sky-blue helmet swinging in his hand. He almost casually opens the passenger door. His dropped helmet thuds off the barely paved cobblestones as he yanks a skinny, screaming African American teenager out of the car. The Statey swings the teenager from the car, pauses for a micro-second, then slams his skinny body down onto the ground.
The teenager, yowling in pain, squirms his arms and legs.
From the driver’s door emerges a stocky, thirtyish, corn-rowed, African American man. He shrugs his broad shoulders up and back, then immediately raises muscled arms up in the air.
“Fuck you, you mudderfucken mudder…fuckers,” he sneers at the gun barrels, “put down dem fucken guns an’ I show y’all howta fight!”
Two cops holster their guns and rush at the surrendering driver while the rest, their faces a study in concentration, keep Glocks trained on his chest.
With the driver still “mudderfucken” but now cuffed, lying face down on the street, the undercover cop, lowers his revolver. He whips off his Bruins hat revealing a fish-belly-white scalp and wipes his brow with the back of his hand. Re-hatted, he hikes up his Red Sox shirt and slides the revolver into a black leather, small of the back holster.
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I’m walking the dog down Gallivan Boulevard on a humid summer evening, the sky stretching blue-yellow-orange over Dorchester. Absent four fear-biting convictions, the dog’s a good dog; long bodied, short-legged; completely black, yet named Ginger; hates cats, canines, squirrels; loves humans.
Turning up Carruth Street, I see an older model silver-gray Corolla pulled to an angled stop well onto the sidewalk. Behind the car, sitting handcuffed on the curb, is a pale, ribs showing, no-shirted teenager in black Celtic’s basketball shorts, crudely-whitened Nikes and a black Celtics baseball hat. Standing behind the teenager, in skin-tight, bleached-front jeans, his pink dress shirt hoisted high enough to show a Boston Police badge and holstered pistol, stands a baldy, jowly-faced forty-something African American, the tips of his thick-fingers resting on top of the Celtic’s hat.
Pushed up against the Corolla, hands cuffed behind his black tee shirt, an acned, older teen in once-upon-a-long-time-ago-white Celtics sweatpants sneers at the thirty-something, white soccer-mom in tan khakis and a faded yellow polo. With her hand flat between his shoulders, she whips off the teen’s Celtic’s hat, stares inside, then, her slight double chin shuddering, drops the hat on top of the car.
Presuming this would be a bad time for a biting incident, I cross the road, but keep my head turned so I miss nothing and end up catching the shirtless-handcuffed teen’s stoned eye.
“Nice dawg!” he calls out, “is he friendly?”
“Be quiet,” the cop growls, purses his lips and flattens his hand against the top of his charge’s hat.
Ginger – a rescue from Tennessee, as opposed to me, a rescue from Mayo – reads the situation incorrectly, stops and wags her tail.
“Awwwwhh, he is friendly, what’s he’s name?” the teenager warms to the distraction.
“Please sir,” the cop waves his free hand for me to move along.
“Sorry-sorry,” I tug on Ginger’s leash, leaving behind us the city summer evening.