Dirty Harry's Uptown Laundromat

It’s about 4 on a Sunday morning.  I’m walking Madison past the intersection with Main when I hear a strange noise every five seconds or so.  It WON’T FUCKING STOP

    ”BOO-hoo-hoo-hoo

    BOO-hoo-hoo-hoo”

It’s a female undergrad SUNYer, bawling her fuck’n lungs out.  She’s wearing a tiny black dress and three inch heels that dig into the cracks in the sidewalk and wobble awkwardly. She pokes her head around the side of the laundromat into a Price Chopper parking lot, presumably toward some drunk Long Island scumbag who has just walked away from her life forever.  Cries out:

    “DON’T GO AWAY, PLEASE!!!

    Don’t leave me here ALOOOOOOONE”

Objectively, she strikes me as a real bitch.  She probably got what was coming to her for being just another skank ho on campus.  I still feel bad for her, though.  No one deserves to have to cry that hard and for that long.  I’m still four miles away from the car, which might have been towed from the mall parking lot by now, so I start to press on toward the city line.  The sobbing never ends, it just sort of fades away to the point where I don’t notice it any more. 

I wonder about that.  Is it possible that I’m actually hearing every sound being made in the entire universe, and some are so quiet as to be effectively imperceptible, but they’re still there in some quantity?  Maybe the ho-bag never stopped crying and I can still hear it (and you can hear it too), but it’s not rattling the little bones in my ears enough for my brain to give a shit.

I should probably go back and check up on her.  Ask if she’s okay, or tell her that everything is going to work out, or that her now-ex-boyfriend is probably a scum sucking pig, or be a real jackass and ask her for a cigarette.  I could be part of the living body of Christ on Earth and all that, take care of a complete stranger and expect nothing, really nothing in return.  I don’t even like her, so it’s not like I stand to benefit from the situation whatsoever.

But I don’t think she’ll get it.  In fact, she’ll probably bitch me out, tell me how I couldn’t possibly understand the pain she’s going through (heh).  Or she’ll make fun of me for being a fat balding hipster wearing button fly jeans and a scarf, a fucking scarf!  Maybe that would make her feel better.  In any case, she probably needs another girl to check up on her, not me.  You know, empathy and all that.

That frustrates me.  I want to comfort someone, but you do it in a different way with guys (you want to get drunk and talk about it?) and I really can’t help girls at all.  They don’t like it, they assume you’re just trying to bury it (to be frank, they’re sometimes right), but honestly I don’t care about my dick too much any more.  I do care about finding some real screwup like myself so that we can be weird together and never change.  Prospects: zero.

Anyway, here are some good vibes sent your way, bitch.  I hope you feel better, even if you don’t deserve it.  Failing that, the stars are out tonight.

They’re beautiful. 

Really beautiful.