It’s a fancy Japanese restaurant now, some kind of fusion cuisine where diners kneel at the low tables that make dinner an endurance exercise. When I was a boy in 1986 it was an empty storefront with rails and diamond relief metal for steps. That homeless man, he slept on those rusty diamonds and turned his coke bottle glasses to sunlight that crept in between the buildings at certain hours of the day. He was always so grave, so watchful and would salute me when I passed with my step-mother, holding onto her with one hand and returning his greeting with the other. The homeless in New York City are often ignored or feared, but they entertain us on our subway rides and call to us during our commutes like ghosts in the corners of our eyes. They laugh at the air and speak to people we can’t see, share their smells with us on hot subway cars in August or March. Poke at our guilt and privilege, giving us a chance to soothe both with a bright coin in a dirty palm.

George Orwell wrote that beggars are despised not for being indigent, but for choosing a trade at which they make no money.

TriBeCa was almost empty then except for two bars and a ragtag bunch of lost boy artists, some now trying their hands at raising children. Nearby a hardware store had bins of random junk you could buy for a dollar and I rummaged there for hours, finding treasures in bits of stove and car parts, once a mild burn from some mild acid that had leaked all over everything.

He never asked for anything, just lay wrapped in his sleeping bag with an ear turned toward a radio that was always silent. Once after we greeted each other I asked my step-mother why he couldn’t afford batteries for his radio.

“Some of these guys, the real crazies, they have rolls of money in their pockets. The radio probably works fine.”

It’s strange how different a reply is from an answer.

Behind him the empty storefront sat like a cave with a glass door. Open sesame or even a key would reveal a hidden wealth of dust, copper wire and silence.

And one day he was gone.

“Where did he go, mom?”

“Probably just wandered off.”

The landscape of a child’s world is made of many strange things, some of which become the ghosts of adulthood. Every time I pass that Japanese restaurant, now full of light and rice paper, I imagine him reclining still and listening on his radio for a song I’d never hear. I remember his coke-bottle glasses and ragged sleeping bag, the way he never smiled. I will remember him and that New York City forever, no matter how many times they pave it over with boutiques, restaurants and strollers. My fingertips will always recall the difference between a subway token and a nickel from the way they felt in my pocket.

A man wheels a pink Barbie bicycle with sparkled tassles and white training wheels across the gray platform of the L train, heading back toward his apartment off Knickerbocker near the DeKalb stop. He leans over to hold it by one white handlebar, white like his hair, as if it were a toddler and not a toy. He wheels it between late-night commuters, drunks and shrieking gutterkids. Somewhere else on the platform buskers play accoustic guitars and conga drums while a woman slams poetry about mind expansion and positivity.

“Emil, you can’t leave that here. I don’t want her riding in the street.” His daughter had said before he left.

“But she loves it.”

“Take it with you when you go.”

Only two hours later he’d walked next to his peddling granddaughter, one hand on her back as she bounced over the uneven sidewalk, giggling as the cracks in the pavement of 32nd Street and 37th avenue rumbled under the wheels. Her mother had bought her the helmet, black and practical with a high rating for safety.

“Do you like it?” He asked as they took a break for ice cream.

“I love it, granpa. Can I keep it here?”

“We’ll see what your mother says.”

Near dusk he took her back home and read her a story by the yellow glow of a bedside lamp covered with bears. She fell asleep just as the fair maiden collapsed into the hero’s arms, the foul dragon already forgotten. Kissing her hair he stood up to leave.

“Don’t forget.” She sleep-mumbled from the coverlet.

“I won’t.”

“Gnight, granpa.”

“Good night, sweetheart.”

Before he turned out the light and left her room, he opened the closet to make sure there weren’t any monsters. Lifting one of the stuffed bears from her bed, he sat the plush creature between the door and her bed. “You keep watch now.” He told it.

Out in the living room he had coffee with his daughter and she made him promise to take the bike with him.

“I’m…” There was a weight on his chest, pushing his mouth closed and snuffing the words.

“Don’t, dad. It’s too late to get into all that alright.”

“I wish I could see you and her more.”

“Maybe someday.”

He nodded and finished his coffee. He tried to leave without the bike but his daughter caught him at the door.

“I mean it. Take it with you.”

He sighed and took the bicycle by one of its handles and wheeled it past the threshold.

“I love you.” He said before she closed the door.

His daughter sighed. “Goodnight, dad.”

He was halfway to the train station at 36th Avenue before he realized she’d called him dad. How long had it been since she’d done that? A warm smile carried him home.

January and Jazz

The weight’s back across his shoulders the second he opens his eyes and swings his feet to the cold wooden floor, gentle so he doesn’t jostle the bed and wake up his wife piglet snoring next to him. A shower and comfortable shoes, an untucked workshirt and coffee that will wait for the bodega, it’s quieter that way in the cavernous Bushwick loft with holes in the walls big enough to peer through. Winter comes calling often. Before he leaves he looks down at her sleeping form, the big green eyes screwed shut that used to captivate him once upon a time but now it’s all January and jazz in his head. Jazz reminds him of being alone and January reminds him of love and he wonders if bad coffee can mute nostalgia.

When did the ring on his finger turn into forty evenly spaced iron bars and her cunt a shackle?

His day job is sorting mail for a big company in midtown. He comes in the servant’s, pardon, the service entrance. Fluorescent lights and more bad coffee, frustration and paper cuts.

“Have you seen my package?”

“FedEx delivers at the messenger center, sir.”

Darkness comes down at five o’clock without any art at all, just mugs the whole city into an alleyway and he longs for the gentle grift of summer twilight. He changes into steel-toed boots and a black sweatshirt under his leather jacket, gets dinner at a burger joint before the second job he took after…

“We’ve gotta move you back to the mailroom.”

“But I just got married, I got a wife…”

“That department doesn’t want you anymore.”

The bar is sunny and warm, fake frost in the corners of the windows and he wonders if that was her doing, finishes his cigarette as he peers in the window at her. Fragile arms and a laugh like a crow with a bullhorn, tattoos and too much eyeliner, all blond dishwater, pale-blue eyes and swinging hips above her motorcycle boots.

He smiles and remembers that night in the basement. Cigarette gone, he drops his stuff in the back and waves to her, on his way back outside to stand at the door.

“I.D., guys.”

“Yo, for real? I ain’t got mine.”

“Then find another bar.”

“Yo, you’re a dick.”

“Yeah. Have a good night.”

Bored and aching feet, he remembers the night he fucked her in the basement and how smooth her skin was, even across the tattoos. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised but that flickers fast as she closes her mouth around him.

So warm. The basement has the boiler in it. She kisses his wedding ring with a sticky mouth.

A bum leans against the lamppost, two pigeons perch and peer down at him from on the yellow traffic lights.

“You gotta get right with all that, youngster.”

“What?” He asks the bum.

“You gotta get right with life and with god.”

“I’ll get around to it.”

“You got a dollar.”

“I got a cigarette.”

He lights the bum’s cigarette and they puff in silence.

“You gotta get right with god, young man.”

He chuckles. “Maybe some day. Now, do me a favor and find another corner.”

“No problem.”

The bum shuffles off, takes his winter-muted stink with him and the pigeons eventually follow. Eight hours later he hustles the last drunk out the door and gets his shift pay, his shift drink. She smiles at him and inclines her head toward the basement.

Why not? His shift fuck.

Fifteen minutes later he pulls out and cums on the empty Jack Daniels crate between her feet while she coos in his ear with what he can’t imagine and doesn’t try until after he’s put her in a cab without kissing her goodnight.

Grabbing a cab of his own, he unlocks the door of the loft and sees his wife as he left her as if the day had never happened. In the bathroom he washes his mouth and his dick, brushes his teeth and slips in bed next to her. She mumbles and he kisses her sleepy mouth.

“You brushed your teeth.”

“I was smoking.”

“Oh.” She settles back to sleep and as his head hits the pillow he thinks, yeah, I gotta get right with something, but I gotta get up in six hours.

Sitting on a subway bench, he repairs a wheeled walker with a seat using cheap packing twine that he spools out of one of the garbage bags around his feet. The artificial string glows against his skin stained by the dirt worked into the whorls of his fingerprint, the cracks and the nails, like the cheap tar bandages on cracked city streets. He wraps the twine once, twice, tight and straining the shoulders of his cardigan as he binds doen the cables that control the walker’s breaks. Hands on it, he rises to set it back on its wheels before he notices that to do so, he’ll have to stand unsupported. Knuckling his chin, he considers this.

He is still doing so when my train pulls into the station.

Read the news, walk the street last at night when it’s quiet. For so many, the apocalypse comes and goes like the Jersey surf battering a piece of driftwood. It’s not hidden in some holy book, encased in a screen or in the ever-increasing distance. I can smell it in the reeking gusts from the tunnel near where I wait. This end of the platform is a blind-spot, a toilet.

Is oubliette too elegant a word for something that stinks of human shit? I’ve shared this platform with rats and lunatics, both staying just out of reach like cautious dogs. For me, the passage of time is not measured in faces, hands and numbers but in the number of times that I have noticed the subway girders painted a different color, the wet paint signs like fallen leaves in autumn.

Twine or tears? Both white and cheap for binding us to whatever will get us a few more inches down the road, and damn don’t that feel just like the future? Fools in the rear view are closer than they appear.

The train pulls away with me inside, he gets himself and his walker upright, sharing a laugh with nobody. Or maybe with everybody, we just don’t get the joke.

The flowers in the buckets near her feet were never as bright as her smile, the flash of her eyes vibrant in the filth of Orange Street. I could have avoided the whole of it on my way to my work at the shipping company on Cedar Street. Lads like me were wise to stay out of the Points, but each morning I found myself taking my time through what the papers called the world’s worst slum.

She flirted with every tough who stopped, poking his fingers through the flowers in the bucket and talking to her through crooked smiles. How she laughed. I wished I could talk to her like that, wished she’d notice me past my narrow shoulders and pointy nose. What were they saying to her? All my stories were of weight limits on schooners, the full breadth of the hold, and just what weight of cotton and leather it would accommodate. As I watched her laugh and shove these men away, men at whom I was afraid to even look, I knew she cared nothing for shipping. She probably liked tales of duels and fistfights with the coppers.

The only fights I got into were with my own body. Nosebleeds every morning, asthma attacks in the afternoon.

“Thank god you’re here, lad. The books are fucked, we’ve misplaced a cargo and the ships are sitting in harbor under some threat of fine from the harbor master and I know I paid that crooked fuck, but I can’t find the…”

“Okay, sir, just a moment.” I hung my cap and coat and went through the files, chaos now that he’d been at them, and found what was left of my system like a boxer against the ropes. I coaxed it back to life and handed him the correct papers and proofs.

“God bless you, lad. Don’t know how we’d manage with you.”

I bet her toughs couldn’t have saved the morning’s business just like that. I smiled and looked out of the window at the masts in the Hudson River just around the southern tip of Manhattan. After close of business I walked home again, braving the falling shadows to catch another glimpse of her. That evening, like every other, I almost bought a flower. I imagine that she’d ask me if it’s for my sweetheart and I’ll smile and shake my head and a word, but I only looked at her as I passed slowly by.

“I can’t go out tonight, Edward, some of us have to work for a living.”

Edward adjusted his silk cravat, a pearl-headed stickpin through it. “Christ, lad, you’re going to waste away in here. Stay this virginal and some day a knight will try to rescue you, thinking you’re a princess in disguise.”

“He ain’t a prisoner.” My boss shouted from his office.

“I’ve got too much work.”

“No he doesn’t. Christ get him out of here he’s starting to smell funny.”

I cast a hurt look at my grinning boss and Edward rubbed his hands together.

“Excellent. I’ve got just the place.”

The brandy was as warm and plentiful as the women. Dimly I was aware of the piano and Edward’s laughter the way I was aware of being coaxed into bed next to a lady who seemed mostly bosom. I did not even get her name before she slipped me inside her and before I knew it I was back out on the street, sitting on the curb and trying to clear my head before the walk home. I was a man now. Between deep breaths I tried to smile and failed. If I was a man, why were my shoulders as narrow and stooped as ever?

Somewhere near Spring Street I dodged a horse and carriage and heard a familiar laugh. Music seeped from the dancehall and in the alley behind was my flower girl pinned to the wall, legs up and holding onto broad shoulders. He braced her to the brick while she laughed, breathless and delighted, slapping his shoulders and biting at his mouth. I envied his power, his possession of her as he groaned and shuddered, letting go of her hips while she stroked his face and cooed against his collar. He pushed her away and turned to buckle his trousers. She looked at his back and raised a hand, reaching out almost to touch his shoulder but letting it drop. As he walked back inside the dancehall, she slumped to the ground and I expected to see tears on her face at being used so cruelly. There was nothing, just a smile I’d never seen as she lit a thin cigar and I hurried away before she noticed me watching.

In the morning she stood by her flowers the smile I knew in place. I walked over and picked up a single yellow tulip.

“That for somebody special, handsome?”

That smiled turned full on me, my knees almost buckled. Handing her a quarter I smiled and shrugged as I handed it to her. Her smiled flickered and she looked confused as I turned around and walked away.

“You forgot your flower.” She called after me but I kept walking.

The next morning I walked to work on West Broadway, the Points far to my left.