NOTE: THIS IS A
WORK OF FICTION.
As such, the actions of its characters in no way reflect the attitudes or proclivities of the Focus paper or the present author.

Is there a point to all this?
Mark grinned and feigned cultured politeness. “Sir, would you care for some brandy or,” looking both ways with exaggerated caution, “aaaah, sackacheeba?”
“Damn,” said Koala, pulling a bottle of Popov from his jacket. “That’s right,” said Mark, pulling a bag from his.
Maggie was getting nervous now. Her mom, Marge, was drunk enough to not exactly give a flying, hairy, two-fisted, jumping damn if the skies came crashing down on our heads at midnight-- Marge was in it up to here. I could see the ragged spread of fear creep up around the corners of Maggie’s eyes. She was still unaccustomed to the city. Hell, so was I. But I was determined to swim in this thing, to drink it in, to sink in it if need be, but not to drown, no. I held firmly to the belief that it wasn’t the tumult of the ocean that got you. It was the fear of its enormity. This was New Years Eve, New York City. This was the Millennium.
“Yeah, you know-- guys, girls, it don’t matter-- they want a date, they come to me. I take care of ‘em. I got my regulars, you know.” Koala smiled a gap toothed smile as he said this and passed me the stuff.
He rattled on. He was drunk and high. He was warm and had someone to talk to. I remember thinking maybe this was all you really needed in life if you were living on the streets. And someone willing, if you were a hustler, which he was. But this fear never tapped me on the shoulder. I never thought he might try to make some money here, or try to scam us in some way. Naive? Perhaps, but the tone was set. We were travelers meeting beside the road. We were standing under the same sky and sharing the spirits.
“How long’ve you been on the streets, man,” I asked.
“Whoa... years. Over twenty years, bro,” he said. He smiled and nodded with pride. “Back in the day, bro, back in the day, hustlin’ was no thing. You gonna hit that, man?”
held it up closer to my face, looking to see how much remained.
“You heard of Jim Carroll,” he continued. I didn’t know if it was a question or a statement. “Dee Dee. You heard a Dee Dee Ramone? Big time, bro. Those cats was down. But they was crazy. They had to get out ‘cause they was crazy. Me, I’m smarter.”
The buildings seemed to rest on their shoulders and kick their feet at the air. The occasional pedestrian slipped past but we were a step removed, two characters in a movie. I didn’t even know what street we were on, only that it was somewhere between Times Square and the Bowery. I put it to my mouth, pulled, offered it to Maggie who shook her head and so I passed it to Mark.
“I’m the only one still here, still on the streets after all this time. Everybody else gone, bro, or dead.” Koala said with pride, with a sense of accomplishment, not arrogance or badass bluster. I wondered if this were possible. Could someone hustle the streets of New York for twenty years and not only live, but live happily?
d up, bro,” a Lexus pulled up to the curb, waxed, brilliant. Koala jogged over and bent to talk to someone inside.
I pulled my plastic bottle of Coke and blackberry brandy from my pocket-- tasted like jet fuel cough syrup but did the job-- and squatted like a general about to scratch war plans in the dirt.
Maggie watched as Koala exchanged small packages with the driver of the Lexus, at me as I downed the brandy concoction, at Mark as he seemed to hold his chest and then slowly stretch into a callisthenic improv, at her mom as Marge raised the lighter. “Mom,” she said. The word began high pitched, dipped slightly, and then soared smoothly into whining stratospheres.
“What?”
“What are you doing, mom? That... bum, just had his lips on that thing.”
Ineresting thought, that.
Marge stared at it and then at the bottle of Popov, which we’d also been passing around. She sipped gingerly at the vodka and looked up as though seeking approval.
On the street The Heat passed slow and cool.
“That’s it.” Maggie grabbed the bottle from her mother and shoved it in Mark’s face. “Look what you guys are doing to my mother. This isn’t her. This isn’t her. Let’s go, mom.”
“Where?”
“Back to the hotel, that’s where. Enough is enough.”
“She’s just having some fun,” offered Mark.
“You guys. Shut. The hell. Up. Or I’m calling the police. I’m calling the police.”
She began looking about frantically, one hand wrapped around her mother’s elbow. The cop car that passed us seconds ago was moving casually up the street. Maggie began waving, jumping in the air.
“Police,” she yelled. “Officer--” The car kept going. Koala’s head shot up and the Lexus took off.
“What the hell will you say? She’s a grown woman,” I said.
“I’ll say you drugged her. You gave her drugs. You’re trying to... do things to her.”
Jesus, I thought. “Hell,” I said. “Take her, Maggie. We don’t care. Take her and go.”
“No,” Marge tried to squirm away from Maggie and somehow tangled her arm around and between Maggie’s legs. “I’m staying here, you little...”
I grabbed hold of Marge, thinking to pull her up but then thought better of it. She herself tried to stand, lifted Maggie half off the ground, and reached out to me for support.
Maggie fixed her sorry, angered eyes directly on mine. “Stay away from her.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to--”
“Stay-- Police!”
While Maggie yelled for the police, Marge slapped fierce, guttural retorts against the uncaring air. Mark was desperately hailing cabs, looking to get the hell away. Koala winced and drew his coat more tightly around him.
“What’s up, bro,” he demanded. “Trying to get us arrested or something?”
This is it, I thought, Rykers before midnight.
A cab stopped at the curb. Seeing the madness, the tangle of bodies, the web of screeches that filled the air, the cabby started to pull back out into the street. Mark already had the door open and was saying something to the man, pleading perhaps.
Maggie and Marge were now more or less upright, still locked together.
“Hold this,” I said, putting my drink in Marge’s hand. She not only held it but managed to get it to her lips, sipping it while looking Maggie dead in the eyes-- a dare, a challenge, a f#*k you. Maggie screamed pure frustration.
“Give me my drink, bro, I’m outta here.”
“Marge--”
“Shut up.”
I pushed mother and daughter towards the open door of the cab. They folded almost neatly into the back seat. Mark lifted Maggie’s feet. I pushed shut the door.
“Don’t worry, they’re family,” I yelled at the front seat.
Someone’s bare foot hit the rear window and the cab jolted away, rolling over the neon painted pavement and Mark offered a last, absurd non sequitur: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.”
Koala chuckled. “Dudes is crazy.”
Minutes later Mark and me sat in a spacious cafe. Green carpeting, light-colored faux-wood tables, ceiling fans-- the sort of generic comfort you could find anywhere in the country. A little regrouping was in order, we’d decided. Five hours of drinking lay behind us already. We needed food, coffee, refueling. Who knew how long this night would last.
I ordered a grilled cheese and some water, figuring that was all I could comfortably stomach, and Mark shoved down a club sandwich. We sat sipping coffees in easy silence and I scrolled recent events across the back of my had.
We had decided-- me, Mark, Furious, and Doc-- to make New Years ‘99-2000 a memorable event. We’d throw ourselves into the diseased heart of the world without plan or design and make it a night worth regretting. There was talk of bombings, of terrorists, of Y2K, of madmen coming out of the proverbial woodwork. An infectious, paranoid fear slowly insinuated itself in the hearts and minds of the public, the politicians, the self appointed representatives of capital “G” god.
There had been unexplained shootings in Tampa, the hijacking of an Indian airliner, FBI terrorist sweeps, George Harrison knifed by a lunatic, a suicide bomber in Lebanon, a karmic growth on Tipper Gore’s thyroid. They were welding the manhole covers shut in Times Square. Eight thousand cops there and a ban on vehicles in an area twenty-four blocks long and three blocks wide.
Y2K; a term so ubiquitous and loaded that it almost became meaningless. A total electronic rebellion, the ghost being kicked from the machine, or simply another binary blip passed and forgotten? Who knew? John Q. was stocking up on the canned goods and fearing the worst. Two thousand cans of Dinty Moore and a night atop the shingles with a shotgun.
Most people I knew expected little from terrorist threats and even less from Y2K but they couldn’t help but wonder. The media’s barrage had been full of the possibility of impending disaster. No matter your logical temperament, your Pavlovian dog was bound to drool fear at the ringing bell of the New Year.
And me? Let it come, I thought. I expected Y2K to be less of a problem than a bad hangover. I expected the terrorists to wait for easier targets. However, the possibility was there. Pack two-expected-million people together in such a small area with alcohol and high emotions added as a catalyst, and you have to expect some of it to hit the proverbial fan. But we were ready for some forced consciousness expansion, some existential drag strip awakening. No sympathy for the devil, as HST said, you buy the ticket, you take the ride.
December, 1999. Mark had already gone back to his Jersey hometown, Furious and Doc to Philly, for the holidays. I made the 500-mile trip north on a Thursday at 3:30 am after waking, whiskey-drunk and delirious, from a dream of falling castles. Traveling on my own in a twenty-year-old graffitied BMW, I wondered if I’d end up in some off-ramp, Virginian, backwater town where they ride horses across interstate overpasses, cowboy hats tipped to the December wind, eyes wide at weak looking Yankees. The rubber horns glued to the dash vibrated like voodoo dowsing rods, mad for expected disaster. Wind whistled through the broken sunroof. I had mainlined myself into the concrete venal system of America’s highways, aiming for its honeycombed, neon heart in NYC. My speedometer was broken so that as I increased speed it became less accurate, wavering wildly between eighty and ninety-five miles per hour. The faster I moved, the less I knew my speed.
I made Mark’s house in Jersey that afternoon, tired but elated and expectant. We had some beers and laughed at the manic hyperbole that dominated the television news.
After sleeping late into the day on the 31st, we called Doc and Furious and made plans to meet at CBGB’s around eight o’clock that night. We ate lunch, warding off Mark’s mother’s warnings like unwanted kisses, and then strapped ourselves into my car for the hour’s drive into the city. We cracked some beers. A hog leg to lean on. We set out with thin smiles and not a care in the damn world. I’ve felt better than that, but not often and not with less reason than that simple and spectacular hubris, that near indifference to possible catastrophe that we felt that day.
We parked at a garage in Newark and took the train into the city. We got off at Times Square and hit one of the first bars we saw. Mark set off through the packed room, looking for drinks and seats, while I headed for the bathroom. I finished and went back down the short hallway to the bar, looking for Mark. The place was roaring-- mainly with the early twenties, college looking type; all upper crust, dapper smiles, all sweaters, eyes like fresh linen. A sizable mob of Brits crowding the bar were the room’s engine. The Americans were too-cool ironic, flashing fashionably cynical.
Mark stood at the other side of the room, in silhouette against the floor to ceiling windows. He talked to a woman who sat alone at a table, his unruly hair bobbing at the top of his lanky frame.
“Hey, Ed,” he said. “This is Marge.” He gulped down half a beer, obviously fighting back a laugh. “Marge, this is my friend, Ed.”
“Hi,” she said. Her face instantly erupted into an absurd smile.
I pulled up a seat and took stock of our drinks: four beers, two gin-and-tonics, and two shots of brown liquor waiting patiently in plastic cups. I drank down half a beer, the shot, the other half of that beer, sipped the g ’n’ t, folded my hands on the table.
“Marge? Where you from Marge?”
“Iowa,” Mark answered for her. Marge nodded.
She was middle-aged-- 42, she would soon tell me-- with hair the color of dried leaves, hewn into a billowy helmet. Her face was attractive if somewhat weathered, her eyes rescuing it from being average. I felt the alcohol rolling down in sheets between my skin and muscles. I smiled.
“You by yourself today?” I asked.
“Her daughter Maggie’s here,” answered Mark, again almost laughing.
“Marge?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “She’s out there. With the policeman.”
She pointed out towards the street. There stood a girl, early twenties, looking not unlike her mother. Maggie stood talking to a cop who leaned against his car with practiced ease. He glanced now and again at the streets, thumbs hooked into his belt. A cop with the inherent S&M vibe that cops possess. The power, the restraint, the tools of manipulation and subjugation...
Maggie turned and smiled, waving as though she were on camera.
“She’s such a flirt,” said Marge proudly.
Over more drinks I learned Marge and Maggie Connor were from upstate New York originally but had moved to Iowa for Mr. Carl Connor’s new job. They’d lived there for two years; father making regional freight deliveries; daughter now attending a local University; mother hanging clothes, playing bingo, letting her vision roll out across the flat plains towards a new nothing of tomorrow.
Maggie and Marge wanted to go back east to the City to visit relatives and watch the apple drop. Carl wanted no part of the City and its crowds, its threats of terror bombs and Y2K mayhem. He endured a day of fits and tantrums and a week of silence before telling them to go without him.
“So where are your relatives,” I asked.
“Tammy,” said Marge, “got too drunk too early and Ron had to stay and hold her hair back. We’ll meet them later after the ball drops. What time is it?”
“About six, I think,” said Mark, looking at the watch that didn’t exist on his wrist.
“Wow,” she said. “How can I keep doing this for another six hours?”
I saw her daughter, now inside, worming through the crowd towards our table.
“Mom!”
“Maggie!”
“Marge?”
“Mark, this is my daughter, Maggie. Maggie this is Mark and,” waving her hand between us, “Ed.”
“Hi,” said Maggie, and then she turned to her mom and launched into a rapid and high pitched description of the cop and his job, his breath, his sexy uniform, his eloquence, his bravery, his--
I looked to Mark. I was ready to leave. I said as much with a glance.
In my pocket: a clutch of pills of uncertain origin. I rolled them between my fingers and wondered what they would do.
Marge was telling Maggie we’d be spending the evening with them. They had two “gentlemanly escorts” now, and interesting company.
“Uh, sorry,” said Mark. “But I think we’re going soon.”
“Oh, no.” Maggie put both her hands on my arm as I lifted my drink. “I thought you were partying here for the night. The apple and--”
“The apple,” I said like it was a Judas friend, and then softened a bit. “We’re meeting some friends.”
The word “partying” had a bad sound to me. Party? We weren’t looking for a party, were we? We were looking for-- what? Where were we to go with these vague notions of freedom and debauchery, of whim and onslaught? Was this courting disaster? Was this orgiastic pleasure? This was prelude, nothing but prelude, and the real thing, I thought, must be out there. It must be-- not waiting, but-- living, watching, wanting to grow, to attract the attracted.
“Why are you here, then?”
This question seemed ridiculous. I finished my drink, looked at Mark and then back to Marge. “Look, I don’t want to sit here and watch the apple drop on television. I could do that at home. And even if we could get out there to see it,” I indicated the legions gathered outside, the barricades that had begun going up hours before (One way: Out, no in.), the looks on their faces out there, “why would we want to? Any alcohol you want you better have on you. You want to go to the bathroom, you better be willing to squat right there in the street. We didn’t come here for that.”
Marge stood, downed Mark’s shot, and put her arm around mine. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Mom.” This was Maggie, short and curt and ignored.
We pushed through the sweaters and out to the street, heading for the subway. People staggered about. People milled and fussed, murmured and shouted. Six barrel-chests pushed down the sidewalk’s center. The girls and Mark moved aside. I stopped and lit a smoke, looking behind me as though waiting. I turned as they parted around me, leering, and I smiled a faint smile.
“Where are you meeting your friends,” asked Marge.
“CBGB’s,” I said. “Punk rock club.”
“Oh,” said Maggie, rolling her eyes. “Punk rock. Lovely.”
“Oh, lighten up, Maggie. This is New Years Eve.”
Marge practically skipped along, occasionally dragging Maggie behind her or stopping to point and giggle. A few years dropped from her face. She was almost physically changing into another person. I had sudden visions of her storming the club stage minus various articles of clothing, drooling, abandoned, doing things she might or might not regret when she returned to the plains of Iowa.
Mark and me consulted and realized we didn’t know exactly how to get to CBGB’s or what subway stop to use. We cleared the barricaded perimeter of the square and hailed a cab. Maggie’s trepidation grew stronger by the minute. We had to practically push her into the cab. The cabby hadn’t heard of CBGB’s. I told him it was in the Bowery-- Bleecker Street, maybe-- and we were off.
We rode for five or ten minutes-- time was going in weird directions now-- when Mark asked the cabby to pull over. We still had time to kill, he said, so why not drink cheaper. We untangled ourselves from the cab and started looking for a place to buy alcohol. Blackberry brandy was Mark’s plan, mixed with soda in a Coke bottle so we could stroll the streets without looking like we were drinking alcohol.
When we came out of the store and stood mixing the drinks, Mark started talking to a man walking by. The man wore dirtied scarf, trench coat, winter cap, and introduced himself as Koala.
“So, uh,” said Mark, again with that barely suppressed smile. “What are you up to tonight?”
Koala smiled a wide smile. “Oh, you know, taking it all in, watching the tourists, waiting for work.”
“Umm.”
“Hustling,” said Koala. “You know. Don’t worry ‘bout me, brother. I’m a lover not a fighter.” And a laugh rattled out of him like coins across the sidewalk.
This is how it is, I thought, a middle aged, Midwestern woman looking for a mid-life crisis; male whores; drinking in the streets. What? What?
So after the girls had freaked and left, I sat there in that bland cafe with Mark, trying to drag myself together, trying to make it all go forward. There was discouragement, waxen and lumpish, settling through my enthusiasm. To think I had thought that some bad chemicals and a f#*k-all attitude would serve as some soul-rocket of reckless endangerment, would sluice off years of turpitude. There was no ecstatic derangement here. Was this the palace Blake talked about? If so, I thought, it’s a cheap show, Rob.
The problem is that people spend too much time planning their fun, buying their fun, thinking about their fun. We were no different, just a twisted subset. You go on vacation for relaxation, you buy things, you take pictures and imagine that this is what life is about. I was trying to take a vacation from that vacation and from the world of clocks and cash registers, from the eternal monologue of bad jokes and stuttered minutia forever playing itself out in my head, in all our heads. I was trying to take a vacation from life. But you can’t do that, can you? Wherever you go, there it is, waiting with a thin smile, shaking its head and saying come on now. Come on and get this over with.
I think that was when I took the pills, swallowed the lot of them with the last of my five-dollar mocha, and pushed myself kicking and screaming back into the night.
In the cab, Mark asked, “What was that all about?”
“What?”
“All that kicking and screaming on the way out the door.”
We made CBGB’s in no time flat, conducted by a cartoon-perfect New York cabby; Brooklyn accent, unlit cigar clamped loosely in mouth, derby cap cocked just so. Doc and Furious, two tilted figures machined from the night, waited on the sidewalk.
Doc; as tall as Mark but thinner, hair always looking as though it had just been unwrapped from a pillow, wavering smile triggered by the same nerves that arced one brow higher up over his right eye. Doc Science, comic book madman, bad B-movie lunatic, descending into his thick-wired basement to produce screeching, stunned, electronic music, to write angry letters to the government, to plot poetic acts of terrorism.
His first gesture was that looping smile, his first words “Guess what? Brought a surprise. We’re ‘riding that train.’”
Damn.
Furious, Mister. Yeah, like the movie. Short hair, alley-dark black, coifed (yes, coifed), sideburns to the broad elbow of the mandible. Mr. Furious with the intense, whip-cracked eyes, intent movements; sliding raking, bled fingers over the fret board. Drowning howl of street poetry roaring over chorded mayhem.
Recaps, updates, all around-- what now? The Doctor said The Mars Bar “...couple blocks from here at most... “
A short walk and we were sitting in a corner bar with almost no lighting-- only a wretched red light above the battery of liquor. The room was long and narrow. We shambled to the far end of the bar, where hard cardboard boxes blocked further progress, and asked drinks of the bartender, a severe girl dressed in a cop’s uniform.
I was sitting next to Doc and we volleyed goodwill and troubles-we’d-seen. Visibility was an arm’s length. I lifted, sipped, shifted, “The bag?”
Dig it. Right there-- pow. Powder in a bag. On the bar. Over the shoulder glance-- no one-- key-dig, quick bump. Bolder, then. Two rails on dirty wood. Me and Doc only-- the others not down with the harder. A cockroach crossed the bar top like a horse with no name and we laughed, how we laughed at its boldness, because that would not happen in most places, because it didn’t matter. Because we knew it didn’t matter.
This all night? No. More. Times Square, then. The one place I wanted to avoid, but I didn’t care now. There was a need. Life feeds on life.
The four of us piled in a cab with an Arabic driver. Over the radio: sinuous, wailing, middle eastern sounds and rhythms with a hip-hoppy pastiche of foreign tongue and the crosshatching of the cab’s CB-- primal, ultra-postmodern. We asked the driver to get us as close to Time’s Square as possible.
“What street?”
“We don’t know the streets.” All of us laughing. “Just get us close.”
On foot again, we found plenty of others with the same idea. Ragged and bundled pockets of people roamed the streets and sidewalks. We loped into a bar for a quick round of Guiness and then went back out to join the shambling current. There was a noise in the air, a subliminal, tinnitic roar.
“Can you hear that,” I asked.
“What?” asked Doc.
“That sound. Like a train...”
“Synaptic overload?” Doc with the smile, the eyebrow.
Furious put an arm around my shoulder, smiled and squeezed, still walking. “That’s the light at the end of the tunnel.”
“No, man. What’s that sound?”
We came to the first in a series of police barricades and then moved back a little, near a stone building, a library, perhaps. We sat atop a stone wall, ten feet above the sidewalk and passed around Furious’s bottle of Dewars. The conversation followed well worn paths but was warped through the night’s environment. Even talk of the weather was somehow charged with hidden threat and meaning. More shivering keys pulled delicately from the baggy.
A doughy dissociation was taking place in my head. I noticed I was clenching my molars. My knees wobbled to the rhythm of thin radio sounds somewhere nearby. My bronchial tubes yawned wide and demanded an unending succession of cigarettes. But my mind, tethered somewhere above the tingling back of my head and bobbing in the winter’s breath, waved dismissively at my body’s high alert.
The edges of the buildings and streets, the curbs and crucibles of light and dark, curved and slanted with newfound grace under a numinous sky. The people-- all those people, seemed suddenly so delicate, wavering in promenade. This was a victory celebration after all, townsfolk emerging from behind blackout curtains in the warm wake of a cold war. I was perched on the edge of chiming bells, ready to be cradled or smashed by the barest of stimuli. The sounds of the city washed into a sea of white noise, a lullaby chorus, invoking my name.
Someone was calling my name.
Mark and Furious were no longer beside me. They were on the sidewalk below. Mark ran sideways-- “Ed... Ed”-- motioning with his arm. I felt the shock of the cement run up my legs and spine and I was beside them running.
People streamed by us in tattered banners of light and sound. Mark was talking, yelling: “...barricade down...make it to the Square... we’re moving...” Furious is hesitant so I grab his wrist, pulling him along like an unwilling child. Where? Forward. Crowd psychology. A vendor’s cart in front of me, its edge bullying my hip as I turn, Furious wrenched away, gone. I run, focused on the back of Mark’s head. There is a curious absence of sound. Something slides hard and quick beneath me and the pavement rises to meet my face. At my feet, a girl wrapped around a fallen barricade railing, now lifted by my hands, her eyes widen, “Your face--” Forward through the slap and hustle until the rapid compression against the next line of barricades. Our momentum, our only chance of success, collapsing against the railing.
Somehow, I was at the front of the mob now, my chest against the cold bars that rose to my solar plexus. To my right was the front left quarter panel of a black van, to my left, a dense mass of frustrated humanity. Cops standing shoulder to shoulder, inches away-- black clad, helmeted, billie clubbed-- held anxious ground and called tersely to one another.
Mounted police came up behind the foot soldiers. The horses snorted steam, avatars of fury. A megaphone was raised to visor’s edge. “MOVE BACK. EASE BACK FROM THE BARRICADES.” Not happening.
The eyes in the helmet above the club before me were nervous, threatening. “You know what’s going to happen if you push this over,” he asked. “I’m going to have to club you.”
“Look,” I said, tensing my stomach, raising my hands. “I can’t help it. This is just me, all right?”
“Well then, you better tell them to move back.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ADVANCE.”
Slow minutes tunneled through the night. Periodically, the crowd would surge forward, grunting and cursing, the cops grunting and cursing. I would wrap my hands around the top of the railing, forcing my torso backwards as if in dissent while actually pushing forward.
In my head: a spacious, droning, comfort that would build in buzzing monotones to a furious crescendo (“That sound!” I wanted to shout it). My veins would stand taut at my temples. Fortissimo! (“Can’t you people hear that sound?”). My hands would be white knuckled on the railing until the inevitable, slow reversal.
We were at stalemate. Irresistible forces. Immovable objects. The cops would talk among themselves, cursing us. Us, the entity before them. Behind me were pleas for advance, for retreat, for running over the cops, overwhelming the badged, faceless entity before us. Them.
“At least we’re warm,” I said, feeling easy.
“What?” The cop, incredulous.
I realized my speech was probably slurred by cold lips and chemical cocktail. “I said ‘at least we’re warm.’ All jammed together like this.”
“Yeah.”
“You got the time?”
The female officer beside him pulled her sleeve back from her wrist and said “Five ‘til.”
A surge. A groaning rebuke.
“You bring the champagne?” I asked her. She caught her smile and pulled it back straight. “Dick Clark’s got nothing on this.”
I felt another surge coming, the anticipatory flexing and shuffling at my back. “Watch out, guys,” I said, trying to sound bored.
In the next crush, the officer’s hand slipped from the bar and his ribs went hard up against the fence, his baton falling down at my feet. When the crowd eased, I bent and lifted the weapon back into his hands.
He nodded. “Thanks.”
The lady cop was looking at her wrist again, counting down from ten. “...three...two...one...” Then casually, her mind maybe on her kids, her husband, her home-- anywhere but here on this street with its polarized, plastic politics-- she said, “Well. Happy New Year.”
A second later came the stuttered pop of fireworks as they bloomed and flowered above the skyscrapers ahead of us. A brief hush, an inhalation, and then a ragged cheer from the crowd. The cops exchanged happy wishes with one another, a couple of them even craning their necks to look at the aerial display behind them. I heard Mark’s voice in the crowd and realized he wasn’t more than five feet away. We exchanged hoarse greetings and then I turned to the officers and offered the obligatory “Happy New Year.”
The lady officer gave the words back to me, the man nodding and giving some sort of smile.
This would be a happy ending.
“PLEASE GO BACK.” From that g*ddamn bullhorn.
And soon they did. As a winter-driven flock of birds will dissipate on reaching the south, so the crowd was released from its primal impetus. In the thinning mass, Mark came to my side and we clasped hands and flashed our teeth. I turned from the barricade to face the rest of the year. I felt the vault of the sky wind out gloriously above my head.
And that’s when they had to go and kick aggro out through the night.
The baton caught me crossways between the shoulder blades. With it came a barked incitement. I turned.
“You. F#*k!” I’m not a violent man. “I talked to you, man.” Mark had me by the arms, pulling me backward. The cop just stood there without expression, like this is how it works, like what did you expect, like come on, man, come on and get this over with.
“I talked to you. Like a person. You’re a person, you f--”
Mark was talking semi-sweet somethings in my ear. I wanted to throw myself at the railing-- not hurt the cop, not assault him-- just smash myself against those iron bars, scrape my teeth along the asphalt, open up my skin. That sound. Could they hear that sound? It came from my mouth. I was in love with the world.
Mark pulled me backwards, little by little. Finally I turned and walked on ahead of him. The failure of words.
Doc was still atop the wall. Furious was nowhere to be found. We searched and waited and searched some more. We hoped Furious would know enough to meet us at CBs and we caught a cab there with our dwindling funds.
There he was, waiting on us with a companion. “I think you guys know her?”
Marge looked as though someone had tied her in burlap and rolled her into a river. “What happened to your face?” she asked.
She seemed ecstatic, gushing. I couldn’t look at her. She went on, “They dunked me in a cold bath, Ed, ‘cause Maggie told them I was smoking the marijuana. But I came. I saw the band. It was beautiful.”
I felt bad, but I couldn’t speak, couldn’t bear to see her. It was failure that I felt most of all. I’d been expecting some ecstatic personal revolution, a break from history, the building of a personal myth. But don’t most myths have some deeper lesson? Don’t most good stories end with an epiphany?
“It was beautiful. This is living.” She wrapped herself around me and wormed her tongue into my ear, nipping at the lobe. “You guys don’t care. Do what you want, you know? What do you do?”
Well then let that be the lesson here—that sometimes there is no lesson. We have the writing, the language, the story as the thing-in-itself. And that’s what we’re left with after the struggle and demolition of all our days.
“Doc,” I said.
“Beautiful.”
“Call her a cab.”
“No--”
“Marge,” I said. “We’re going home soon.”
“But it’s only--”
“Look at me for chris sakes. Do not be like this. Do not.”
Sure. Melodrama. Yes. But whatever was in my voice and on my face-- besides blood, specks of asphalt, besides porcelain eyeballs jammed into tiny orbits-- convinced her. She waited silently and slipped long-faced into a cab with a last, sad glance at us as we scuffed across the sidewalk.
The night didn’t end there, but the rest is epilogue, the rest is anticlimax, refractory period. The rest is all the rest.

-joe sample - mrnonentity@yahoo.com

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