4-18-09 - Making "friends"

Coming home last night from the laundromat, pushing my clothes in one of those metal fold-out carts, I arrive at my front door, and sitting in a chair to the left of the door is this heavy, round-faced woman who lives in my building. I've seen her before, sitting in this chair, smoking and laughing raspily with the thin, older man who sometimes sweeps up in my building, and she's seen me, and, feeling friendly, I greet her. She promptly asks me for change.

After explaining that I don't, in fact, have any change ("How about a dollar?" she then asks) she finally relents by saying, "Well, I'll look out for you anyway."

4-12-08 One block this morning in Crown Heights

An older, glasses-wearing black man in a natty tan suit stands holding a bible next to a woman in a similarly colored dress on the corner, the man in a heated conversation with a thin man in a yellow, black and green dread tam. The dread says to the bible-holder, in a thick accent, "You can't tell me nothin', because whom God blesses, none can curse, and you don't know me from Adam!"

A fat, balding white man lies on the ground in front of an apartment building, passed out, his pate covered in sores, still breathing, so I observe him for a moment and move on. Not ten yards away, the well-dressed folks in their Eddie Bauer sweats line up in front of the newest hip restaurant in the neighborhood, waiting to get in for brunch.

3-28-08 The Invisibles Contact Me (At Last)

He stands on the corner wearing a brown, army-style jacket with a knitted dread-cap of yellow, red, and green, and he begins speaking to me while I am still in the crosswalk walking toward him, smiling at me all the while like a physics professor attempting to explain a particularly complicated point of string-theory to a promising but slightly obtuse student.

"Four majesties came down on the sun's rays," he says, underlining the names of various deities (Yaweh, Allah, Jehovah, Amen-Ra) with his thick, curved fingernail on a crumpled, photocopied page where texts full of sacred names and alternate histories criss-cross like a dadaist manifesto, "and they created the universe and built the pyramids."

"But the weren't black men," he continues, still smiling gently with yellowed, crooked, but strong teeth, his soft caribbean accent lilting over the traffic hum, "they were aliens and there were four of them, so how could one god create the world?"

I look at his kind face a moment and say, truthfully, "I don't know."

1-26-08 Old Testament R & B

I am in a train with a hobo, and he's singing "Lean On Me". A beggar has just come through the train and sung the same song not moments before, but this guy, the one singing now, is the real deal. He's got a hoarse shout deep in his throat, what I've heard the Irish call the "rarrgh" (or something like that), and when he sings, an Old Testament prophet speaks. He stomps, claps and shouts, says it's the "coming of the holy word," and finally ends his testimony with the phrase, "they say justice is blind, but justice ain't blind, it just takes its time."