12:41AM. Streets are quiet. Nothing much on the police scanner. Leaving the train station, get a text from CK. I tell him to take it easy and rest up since he is still nursing a cold. I’m not doing much better. At noon had lunch to make acquaintances with another fellow traveler. Rest of day is a blur. It’s after midnight getting home. I stop by my place just long enough to pour a glass before venturing out into the demimonde.
Near my apartment are two subway stations, ten minutes in either direction. The one to the west is the central line, but it means going through Togano, running the Samaria gauntlet of pimps and pushers. Most people avoid it. It’s a menagerie of midnighters, johns, touts, the syndicate, the cops, the bully pulpiteers, the homeless, and rescue rangers like me. All of us sharing the same track.
The girls are lined up tonight. On every corner they’re waiting. I think I see Aiko near her spot, but I’m not sure.
In front of me a girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, with a short skirt pinching the top of her thighs. Knee socks bunched around her ankles. She’s trying to look much younger. Might as well be wearing pigtails. Can’t see her face. On her phone. She’s about to cross the street, but an oncoming taxi blares its horn.
See a few grizzled fellows here and there huddling in the corners of buildings, but I don’t recognize many faces tonight. One though, I’ve seen him the past few days. The first time he almost seemed to follow CK and me, snarling and flailing his arms against some unseen presence. Yesterday he was on the pavement, lying there wild-eyed. Tonight I pass him arguing with a garbage can.
Then there’s the syndicate on the sidelines. Try to avoid. By their reckoning, I’m no threat unless I slow down their girls with idle chit-chat. Some of them stand out. Brute violence carved into their face I see one now. Possible Snakehead. Among their kind, especially creative in the kind of depravity they can think up to inflict.
At the end of the night, around 5 or 6, the girls will be dead on their feet. Numb and running off fumes. Some nights, coffee and some grub are too good an offer to turn down. Other times, they rear back defensively, scoffing in a false bravado. Like a stray animal taken in, sometimes biting my hand out of reflex.
2:03AM. To read Orwell, the life of a backcountry tramp hitching the rails and getting tossed in the clink might seem downright romantic. Suppose it’s because I have a home to return to, a warm bed. Food in the fridge. Even a heavy coat a Korean guy in my building gave me.
I gerrymander my way past the slums and tenements and near to where even the dilapidated buildings grow spare and trail off into back lots and old railroad lines. “And further still at an unearthly height, a luminary clock against the sky…”
The Colorado Kid, he’s got his wife and kids. Ramone too. Texas Jack Vermillion got hitched to a nice broad a couple years ago. Me, I got this view here.
I look out on her. My city. Can almost feel like one could find some symmetry to her jagged edges.
I’ve been to Manhattan once. Queens, Harlem, Brooklyn, and the rest. Drove by in a hurry. Seemed to be no end to the skyscrapers and the shadows they cast. No shortage of colorful characters either. Luke, Daniel, Colleen, Matt, Frank… Ketch, Marc, Felicia, Jessica… Ty and Tandy, Dwayne and Dakota…
Not to mention the capes. I’m surprised they don’t trip over each other, all bunched up in the same back alleys, caught up in the same tired dialectic.
Word on the street is the Soldier was sighted not far from my grounds. Maybe on his way to some G.I. Joe charity event. Hurm. Nice to know he is somewhere nearby, watching from the rooftops. Rogers is different. He inspires. Wonder what he’d say if he saw me making the rounds hanging out with some at-risk runaway over some cheap coffee and runny eggs. I think about it all the way back to my apartment.
