M15

M15



This morning it’s cold.  Not so cold that you shiver, mind.  It’s the sun.  The weak rays brush past your face and hands at an acute angle and take the chill away but don’t quite warm you through.  They also tell me it’s no longer really Autumn outside and that means Winter’s nearly here so I’d better get ready.  Growing up in New York ensures that I will be ready for anything.



Every week I make the trip.  I used to do it with my mother and younger sister but now I’m old enough to do it myself.  So I walk to the bus stop.  I stand up next to the glass and steel shelter with the advertising poster because to sit on the seat would mean I’m in the shade and it’s cold.  This morning I’m thirteen and I think I’m ready and I wait.



Saturday mornings heading uptown is quiet, especially coming from where I do.  The East Village is a far cry from my former address in working-class and genteel Yorkville.  Uptown there were the clean, tree lined avenues flanked by well cared for five-storey tenements and newer, larger residential buildings.  Some even had driveways and doormen.  There were stores selling things from places I could only imagine, places I came across when I worked on my stamp collection; Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia.  Downtown though is different.  Here I’m surrounded by filth and desolation.  There are few trees.  Cars and buildings are burnt out and there are no doormen.  Graffiti is scrawled everywhere.  People with shifty eyes and bad attitudes are everywhere it seems.  Cops don’t even come down here if they can help it and then, no longer in pairs; in threes.  It’s not called Little Beirut for nothing.



Uptown was quiet, safe, predictable.  It wasn’t dull.  You could hear different languages as you walked down the street especially around where I lived; Slovak or Ukrainian mostly.  Downtown is neither safe nor predictable and quiet equates to danger in this part of the world.  You can hear other languages down here too.  One is Spanish; lots of Spanish.  Mostly singing and arguing.  They speak fast.  The other is English but it isn’t any English I had ever heard uptown before.  “Hey man.  What’s happenin’?  Gimme five!”  The blacks speak a lot more slowly than the Puerto Ricans.  They also say Mother-fucker a lot too, especially when they see someone who isn’t black coming toward them.  They seem to be very angry about a lot of things.  It’s not boring in the East Village either.  Here it can either be a circus or a hell, comedy or tragedy depending on the circumstances or what is actually happening but it’s certainly never dull.  Sometimes it can only be described as extraordinary.  Some days we even watch the whole cartoon show from our window in absolute living color.



Sure I don’t actually have to live amongst it myself.  I can avoid it for the most part.  I can stay in my apartment or play with my friends in our segregated play areas.  My family have immigrated downtown.  Build a better standard of housing and attract a better set of residents to the area and perhaps things will improve; a sort of reverse social engineering of the ghetto.  Three brand new modern buildings put down amongst the shifting bedrock of chaos that is the Alphabet City of the late ’60’s.  I’m sure the idea seemed good at the time.  I watch like an outsider for the most part.  If I get involved though I must be in trouble and nothing good will come of it.  I can’t wait to escape, even if it’s only for a few hours a week.  I can stop holding my breath.  I just have to run the gauntlet from Avenue C to First Avenue to do it.



I walk quickly.  I always have.  My dad walks that way and I’ve had to adapt to keep up.  I’m growing now and I’m getting tall; taller than my parents already so it’s not hard anymore.  Walking fast means less time out in the open, less time exposed to the danger.  Walking fast also means my asthma can kick in and leave me desperately incapable of breathing.  As a result I inevitably arrive at the bus stop out of breath and clammy from sweat underneath my too warm clothing, especially in winter and it’s cold and clear; exactly the wrong sort of weather for me.  That’s why I’m going uptown in the first place.  I need my weekly inoculation.  But this morning my trip has been uneventful; until she gets on.



The bus is not full, far from it.  There are maybe three other people here with me including the bus driver but near Bellevue a woman gets on.  It takes her what seems an eternity to negotiate the three big steps into the cabin of the bus.  She’s not an ordinary woman either.  She’s old or seems like it though she probably isn’t.  Life has made her that way.  Maybe she’s about 40.  My young mind can’t decide.  Her clothes are old and ill fitting.  They’re very dirty and they smell a lot.  Her hands and face are dirty too the hair that pokes out from under her hood is dishevelled.  She carries two beat up old shopping bags filled to the brim; with what I’m not sure.  She doesn’t so much walk as shuffle slowly down the aisle of the bus.  Her shoes don’t really fit her.  They sort of surround her feet when she’s standing still but as she takes a step the backs of them fall off while the fronts of them balance on her feet.  She does it slowly and, it seems, painfully.



I know nothing yet of ‘bag ladies’.  They’re not that prominent or problematic in 1969 yet so, to me, she’s just a strange lady, perhaps mentally ill.  Years later I will come to see a great many of them and come to some sort of understanding of how they came to be but for now she is an aberration; another one of the outcasts that inhabit my new neighbourhood.  I’m a little concerned as she walks near to me, heading for the back of the bus.  I watch her carefully, just like I’ve been taught to do always when I feel in the company of danger.  In New York people have a sixth sense about it and I’m ready.  But I needn’t be concerned because that’s all she’s doing; heading for the back of the M15.



I know that during winter these seats are popular with folks who’ve forgotten their coats or poor people because they sit over the engine bay and they are quite warm.  In summer though they are positively awful and most people cram toward the front to escape the heat welling up from them but that’s not the case today.  There is any number of vacant seats and the bus is, unusually, properly ventilated.  It would afford someone a comfortable ride to wherever they are going today, summer or winter.



Her clothes are quite bulky but they certainly don’t appear to be able to keep her warm.  I watch her all the way to the empty back of the bus but she doesn’t sit down at all.  The woman heaves the two bags up onto the bank of five molded seats and they hit the plastic with a clanking thud.  Then she does something totally unimaginable to my young, impressionable mind.  Out of one of the bags she slowly takes out item after item of cleaning paraphernalia.  She places them almost reverentially on the seats.  Cans of spray, bottles of solvent, cleaning rags of various hues, brushes all appear on the blue fibreglass.  Then she proceeds to scrub the seats down in obvious preparation of her sitting down on one of them…I think.



I find myself wondering about this odd woman.  Why is she doing this?  What happened to her to make her this way?  How can she live like this?  Where does she live?  Is she living at all and then, for how much longer until she is beaten up or dies of cold?  What about me?  The woman seems like she was once a normal person, not crazy all her life.  Could I somehow become like this one day?  How would I cope if the things that happened to her ever happened to me?  Here is a woman, probably not much older than my own mother, getting about as best she can, probably without a home or much money to speak of, cleaning the back of the M15.  It scared me.  It didn’t scare me the way Little Beirut did.  It was worse than that.  I didn’t want to become her and I already realize that New York’s a hard place.  It doesn’t take prisoners.



I watch her spray the seats and wipe them.  I watch her get out a brush and scrub them down.  She’s still sponging down the sextet of seats when I pull the cord as I get near my stop back in Yorkville and she still hasn’t sat down yet.  I wonder if she’ll ever be done this unlikely chore.  The green light comes on and I push the middle door outwards and get off.  I look at the bus and the woman through the glass as it pulls away and stare at the advertisement displayed on the back of the bus.  It’s the same advertisement I saw back at the bus stop.  I feel the faintly warming rays of the sun on my face and it feels good.



And then I start to realise that I’m not ready; I’m not ready at all.