By Sarah Frankfurth

The violent wind and rain and hail and thunder and lightning of yesterday left the air charged with fear today.  The city hasn’t settled back into its hum yet and everyone seemed a bit more damaged than usual.  By the time I got home from work I had decided that I’d had enough and needed to hide away from it all in my little apartment and try to stop thinking for awhile.  I pleaded irritability to my friend who was going to take me out for sushi, and decided to watch a movie and eat my favorite pizza instead.   I walked up the hill to rent a movie and noticed how strange my neighborhood looks when you take a  different street.  Just one block and there’s a huge change in who lives there.  I slowly climbed past the large apartment buildings with their gleaming wood and marble floors and I tried to imagine what my life would be like if I lived up there.  It looks so grand and comfortable but I wouldn’t want it if it meant ignorance.  As much as I may be slightly tortured by having my eyes open to the world, I prefer it to blind complacency.

When I descended the hill again I began to feel more comfortable as the streets became noisier and dirtier and the people more ambiguous.  I passed a transvestite whom I’d seen the other morning at Café Algiers.  She had been talking to the man behind the counter about the difference between the Spanish and the Portuguese.  She was dressed tastefully in a straight skirt and a modest white blouse.  She was middle aged and a bit heavy.  Her frizzy red hair was thinning a bit, and her makeup looked thick and clotted, but her manners were impeccable.  I gathered that she found the Portuguese to be a bit rough and distasteful since she described them only in negative terms.  They were short and thick and hairy.  I began to wonder if a former lover of hers had been Portuguese.  She spoke with such assurance on the topic and wouldn’t be swayed from it.  It made me wonder what her life was about.  What she did all day and what she planned to do tomorrow or next week, what she wished for, how she pictured she would be when she was older.   And then tonight I passed her on the street, she was walking with a man and as I passed she said, “I don’t believe that makes any difference at all….”  I wonder what she was talking about.  She seemed sad or frustrated.  A little annoyed perhaps? 

It must be the electricity left in the air from the lightning.

The cops were hassling some street kid in front of the pizza place.  I walked past, idly curious about what was going on.  He didn’t seem to be any different from the rest of the hustlers or drug addicts on the street.  I ordered my slice of pizza and sat down and watched what was happening while I waited.  One cop made him sit down on the pavement and take off his shoes, while the other one brought his backpack inside the pizza place and searched it.  I couldn’t hear what they were saying and didn’t care really.  I was more interested in the pantomime.  The cops gesticulated grandly and plastered condescending smirks on their faces while the kid looked rather relaxed and seemed to be answering them fairly honestly.  I wondered if he was for real or if this was just his cavalier way of dealing with them and maybe he was really dealing drugs or hustling.  But it didn’t seem like it.  Eventually the cops left without the kid and he quickly ducked into the pizza place and yelled for a slice of cheese pizza whenever they got the chance.  Such a strange spot, my favorite pizza place.  It’s a dingy little hole in the wall, run by 4 Arabic men who are always there.  It’s right next door to a homeless shelter, across from the alley where they have a needle exchange and on a block that’s full of hustlers.  There’s always something strange going on at the pizza place.  Whether it’s a table full of drug addled trannies bitching loudly about nothing, or a dirty scabbed up street kid promising the guys that work there that he’ll pay them back someday when he’s got a fat job and making lots of money.  God, it’s heartwrenching because you know he’ll never get off this street, never live long enough to realize the smallest of his crazy dreams.  And all he has to hold on to is a coin with an angel on it, that he got from somewhere and he holds it like a talisman.