When you’re tired in New York it seems one of the most tiring things about living in New York is to be surrounded by all these goddamn people all the time. They look like hell and you worry you look like hell. They talk way too loudly about their undergraduate degrees and you rack your brain in silence, trying to remember if that’s how you’ve sounded. Does my ipod play that loudly through my headphones? Does my messenger back knock people in their sides like theirs does mine or am I just that fucking short?
(yes).
Then a man walks up to me on my way to meet a friend, he just sidles up next to me on the sidewalk as if it were the most natural thing in the world. We walk together and he tells me he is going to 34th st and 8th avenue and he is not taking the train. He says he has seen too many bad things happen to women on the train which I really doubt it why he has elected to walk over a bridge from brooklyn to Herald Square but he tells me he doesn’t give a damn what shoes he’s wearing, just that he’s comfortable and he wishes me a good day.
I almost salute him and smiling like a goon in the cold rain I go down into the subway and there is a man playing a fiddle and singing, Sitting at the Dock of the Bay, and I see two big fat white men with out of date frames on their glasses and the kind of fleece pullovers one can only get for free at a conference. I wonder why they are standing so near this guy, almost rudely, as if they feel like he is in the only place on the platform that they want to stand in and want to punish him for it.
Then the fiddler guy clears the bend of the second first and so launches into the chorus and right as I pass the two out of shape uncles echo what he sings, loudly and with grandeur. They are standing so near him so that they can sing harmony without anyone so much as posing for a picture. I catch the eye of a girl who is much prettier than me and we laugh together and shake our heads as I float, really float, past them.
