Encounters In Grand Central - Part Two

Continued from Yesterday.

I took a breath, shook my head, and looked at the activity below as I stepped with the slowness of a sleepwalker down to the landing at the midpoint of the staircase. The atrium floor is always the same and yet always different. Today, there were many hats, all kinds, swirling about as if in the turbulent confluence of two rushing rivers.

I turned to proceed down the stairs to my right. At the next platform, at which point one is directed to the left down the last flight of stairs to the atrium floor, sat an elderly woman draped in her own hip-length grey hair, lips turned inward lacking the support of teeth, eyes sunken, wrinkles like cracks in pavement, and an outstretched slightly quivering right hand, grasping a crumpled wax paper cup adorned with a blue image of the Parthenon. There was a time when, out of guilt and compassion, but probably mostly guilt, I gave money, small amounts, to the homeless; but ever since Mayor Koch pronounced this was actually a disservice, I no longer place coins in open palms. This is not to say that my charity otherwise has increased. My reliance on this mayoral announcement as an excuse not to pass money directly to the needy is suspect for I do not listen to nor believe anything else the Mayor has said in the past few years. It is nothing but dishonest for me to cite him so I can justify the convenience of avoiding eye and hand contact with the less fortunate. So I turned away from her, my pace quickened, and I raised my head, trying to recover from passing shame. When I was three steps short of the bottom, I saw him.

He was shuffling in my direction, his journey appearing to originate at the round information booth. His hair grey with patches of black, long enough to cover both ears, and it was matted in sausage-like clumps, each was wide as a finger. His beige raincoat, open, was single breasted, and I could make out a wool liner, similar to my London Fog which I haven’t worn in years. The raincoat, with odd looking burn holes on its arms, was too large and it made him look small. His pants were brown, baggy, and held in place by a black belt that was not buckled, although it had one, but was tied in a knot resting high above his belly. The buttons on the pink vest that was tucked into his pants were obscured by the wide paisley tie which was loosened around the open collar of a white shirt. He carried in each bare hand a white plastic bag filled tightly with newspapers, and from the shape it made on the bag in his right hand I discerned a book. He had a funny walk. He didn’t exactly favor one leg, but with every forward movement of his right leg he would bend his knee and lift his right foot unnaturally high in a jerky motion as if he were bouncing a soccer ball straight up with his right knee. His upper body shuffled, but his legs moved like a bad dancer learning the polka. With each bend of his right knee, you could see a very tiny kneecap which betrayed the thinness of his leg.

What immediately struck me about him was his face and in particular his eyes. The faces of the homeless usually have an emptiness, with shallow colorless eyes, grey lips, veined noses, drawn long faces with vertical ravines, toothless, a void particularly concealed by hair fouled with urban soot. But this man’s face, on a little head, was porcelain white, clean shaven and looked as polished as Carrera marble. His nose, straight and thin, was of modest size, not bulbous and red, but sculpted around slender nostrils. His mouth crooked slightly down and was shaped with a narrow grey upper lip and a puffy dry lower lip nearly as pink as his vest. His jaw bone, clearly defined by tight paper-thin facial skin, came straight down from his ears and turned at nearly a right angle to form his chin, which was as flat as that of a schoolboy. But it was his eyes that preoccupied my attention. They were large and round, capped with long lashes, and his lids were drooped at their ends and continued onto his upper cheeks like delicate cracks in an antique china bowl. His eyes each boasted a fluorescent green iris, radiating like traffic lights. Although they motionlessly stared ahead, as if glued in placed, the eyes twinkled, burning with a strange internal alertness.

I did not notice that I had stopped frozen in the middle of the third step from bottom, with anxious commuters maneuvering past on both sides. But when he stopped suddenly and turned to his left, I instinctively moved to my right to not lose sight of his eyes. In so doing, I bumped shoulders with a tall woman wearing a dark blue wool coat that ran to just below her knees where emerged fitted blue jeans which hid the upper part of her black unheeled scuffed boots. She was carrying a Louis Vuitton briefcase in her gloveless left hand which was adorned with several diamond rings and a gold bracelet hanging loosely over the back of her milk white hand. Her thumb nail was long and glistened with clear polish. Our collision did not break her stride. She hurried past in double time and as a consequence I did not see her face, but only her left ear, which was burdened with a large single pearl pierced through a petite lobe. Her hair was cut short at the neck and rose into a golden patch of stalks, about two inches in height at the top. I thought of a field of wheat at sunset interrupted by the allure of a nude woman riding a white horse. I was amused that even when I collide with women, I cannot seem to meet them. As she passed, I noticed a jagged white scar that started at her left ear and ran down the back and around her neck, as if it were a chain of pearls pulled to hang on her backside. It was a faint scar, having healed well, but it could not have been medical in nature. The scar was strangely attractive and I wanted to run my finger along it. Someone no doubt left their signature with a knife.

By the time I recovered from this encounter, I observed that my man with emerald eyes had paused to look straight up briefly, turning as if his eye’s possession was the center of his twirl. His movement was languid and deliberate, but as smooth as a ballerina’s pirouette in slow motion. He then walked with his polka walk in the opposite direction. Two white plastic bags, flanking each side, seemed to act as counter weights assisting the old man in his gawky march.

I wasn’t in a rush home as there wasn’t much to rush home to except what was left of yesterday’s pizza which didn’t fit in the refrigerator and so was lying in its cardboard box on the kitchen table; nothing a microwave oven couldn’t cure. I took the last few steps and finally touched bottom, joining the confusion of people like a molecule in running water. I followed him, keeping my distance, taking a step with each of his. From behind, his walk appeared more sad than funny, and sympathy tempered my curiosity and search for amusement. He headed along the northern wall past the gates and the set of escalators to the Pam Am Building, uninterrupted by the streams of people funneling through the arched portals to their trains, as if the man had an anti-magnetic aura that kept the flow of commuters from hitting him. People didn’t seem to notice him, having become, I supposed, proficient at ignoring the strange and weird, particularly when their single focus is to get home to their houses on half-acre lots surrounded by white picket fences; where normalcy is the norm.

I wanted to see his burning green eyes again, eyes that seemed to contain his entire past, as if the eyes were his last embers of life. I quickened my pace to a cantor like gait, and passed him to my left, no more than a foot away. To avoid betraying my voyeuristic undertaking, I didn’t turn immediately but walked on heading for where the northern wall meets the western wall forming a corner of the Chemical Bank office under the Kodak photo-mural. Unlike the subject of my roving stakeout, no one cared to get out of my way. I felt like a ping-pong ball thrown in a rainstorm trying to reach its destination. After sidestepping several near collisions, I arrived at my reststop, turned and leaned my left shoulder against the wall, a move accomplished smoothly as if I did this everyday waiting for my train. I should have had a cigarette, but I don’t smoke. To mask my real intent, I looked to my left and slowly panned the atrium, past a group of children herded by an elderly woman in white pants and a purple coat, a card table from which pamphlets of some sort were being offered by two women, one sitting the other standing, and in the distance on the western mezzanine I could see my shoe-shine man, his body in the same position, and still no clue as to his physical condition. A woman in loose-fitting blue jeans, black athletic shoes that ran high over the ankles, and a brown leather aviator jacket, walked past to my right. Her brown straight hair was cut to her shoulder and she had a round face, big eyes, and a turned-up nose. She was not the most beautiful thing, and I hardly would have noticed her, except that she was smiling at me. When we made eye contact, her smile increased, as if to show her admiration. Suddenly, she became a rather attractive woman. A sensation appeared in my chest from the quickened heartbeat, a tingling in my face, and certain hormones began to flow. Of course, I stood there and watched her pass. I turned to look over my right shoulder and saw her walk away. She did not have the most graceful movement, and she was a tad short, but all of this was unnoticed, or irrelevant, at the time.

I turned back to find my man with the green eyes and the two white plastic bags. He was gone. I stood straight up and quickly turned in both directions. He could not have passed me. I thought, and he was nowhere down the corridor that led to Lexington Avenue. He must have ducked into one of the gates, and it could have only been the one immediately to my right. As I started to walk toward the gate, I thought, of course, this is where he must be going. I had read on several occasions that the homeless have taken to sleeping in the passageways and tunnels underneath Grand Central. I wondered whether I would be watching him getting on the tracks and walking off into the blackness of an underground alley. I raced along with a crowd of people who were embarking onto a train on the track to the right of the platform. I moved to the left to get out of the fray and a better view of the length of the train. As I was about to walk off in another direction, I saw him from behind.

He was four cars down walking away from me along the train. As sad as he looked, my curiosity took over. How was he going to get onto the tracks and into his homeless underworld without a security guard or stationmaster stopping him? I followed, but this time I moved with a speed greater than his.

When I was one car-length behind he did something that defied expectation. He got on the train. I felt cheated but amused just the same. I moved up to his car and saw him sitting in a seat facing my direction. He placed the two white bags to his left on the empty seat next to him, and proceeded to remove from one of his bags that day’s New York Times. It all happened so fast that I never saw his green eyes again. The doors to the train closed, and the train slowly started its journey to Westchester County.

Sure, I said to myself, the man with the emerald eyes, two white bags, funny walk, matted hair, oversized raincoat and pants tied above his belly with a pink vest tucked underneath was probably going off to a house on a half acre with a white picket fence, and here I was heading for the Lexington Avenue subway to go to a small apartment in Brooklyn. It roiled me. When I returned to the atrium through the gate, I noticed that the train wasn’t going to Westchester at all, but was headed for Greenwich, Connecticut. This aggravated me even more. So much more that I nearly chuckled. What was I doing wrong? I wondered why I pass through this station every night. I took a deep breath and thought of my pizza on the kitchen table and a couple of cold beers and the Knicks game on television that night. I smiled a little smile. I saw the short girl in the brown leather aviator jacket standing at the newspaper stand in the corridor that leads to Lexington Avenue. She was reading a magazine. I took another deep breath and thought for a moment. I then went home to my pizza, my beer and my television.

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Encounters In Grand Central - Part One

I don’t know what came over me the other day, but the moment I saw the little man walking in my direction with his beryl eyes, I was stricken with a desire to scrutinize his every movement. It was late afternoon, a workday, cloudless and bone cold. I crossed Vanderbilt Avenue from Forty-third Street, careful not to slip on the dull, soot-speckled sheet of ice that reminded me of a corroding mirror. The traffic stopped for my traverse, so I picked up my pace to return the courtesy. As I passed through the thin curtain of sunlight that sliced down the centerline of Vanderbilt, I felt the light’s heat peeking through a gap between two tall buildings on the South side of Forty-second Street. I entered shadow again, passing in front of a new dark grey Mercedes-Benz. At it’s wheel was straight shoulder-length hair with a vanguard of bangs, Cleopatra-like, around the pearl-white face of a woman. Large dark glasses shielded her eyes and the tinted windows hid her age. She was wearing red, with lipstick to match.. As I passed in front of her car I instinctively pulled my stomach in and my chin up. She didn’t seem to notice that I was staring at her. Her head did not move a centimeter, and both her bejeweled fair hands in the ten and two positions on the black steering wheel were motionless. The diamond on her right ring finger was almost the size of the old crystal knob on the broken door leading to the cramped bathroom in my Brooklyn apartment. The moment I thought, or fantasized, that she might be following me with her protected eyes, she stepped on the gas pedal, and, after a two second wheel-spin, sped north on Vanderbilt. As I stepped onto the curb on the east side of Vanderbilt, I could see over my left shoulder the New Jersey license plate. I wondered whether she was working or shopping in town.

I entered the car port on the western side of Grand Central Station and walked around a white M.T.A utility truck that yesterday was parked in the same identical location, as if it had been abandoned. I grasped the polished brass vertical handle on one of seven dark oak and multi-windowed doors. The brass burned my gloveless right hand as would be expected on a stingingly clear cold day. I held the door open for a young woman in a yellow ski cap and blue parka with several lift tickets dangling from the bottom zipper. She was precariously holding a baby dressed with so many layers that the baby’s arms were out straight as if they were in casts. She was in an awful rush, looking almost desperate as she ran past me through the door I held open. The baby smiled, as if to thank me, and its little breath was like smoke from a toy train. After four steps and through another set of identical doors, I was inside.

Grand Central Station is my preferred route to the Lexington Avenue subway, which I take twice a day to and from Brooklyn. And this is my preferred entrance which brings you onto the great hall’s western mezzanine. There is a shorter route to my train, but the extra time it takes to pass through the station calms my end-of-the-day nerves better than ten milligrams of valium, a prescription for which my doctor refuses to refill despite my pleas. My pace slowed, and I walked to the top of the staircase that leads to the atrium floor below. I rested my hand on the foot-wide marble banister to the right of the stairtop as I faced it, a position I often take to soak in the drama of the room. My right hand was inches from yellow police tape that was tied to the banister and ran at an angle blocking off most of the southern portion of the mezzanine. There were no chalk lines depicting where a body may have fallen, and no other indication of a crime. I concluded that the police didn’t want people hanging over the edge of the banister or didn’t want homeless people setting up camp at a place with a view.

As I panned this section of the mezzanine on my right, I noticed immediately next to the doors behind me a man sitting on an orange plastic milk crate, his back and head against the granite wall, his eyes closed and mouth open. He wore a light brown corduroy coat with a green cardigan sweater. His feet were flat on the floor in scuffed unlaced black work boots, and his knees and thighs, sheathed by dark brown polyester pants, were spread apart, having fallen to their respective sides. Both his arms dangled straight down to gloved hands whose fingertips were just touching the floor. A wood shoe-shine box, with brushes and cans strewn about, lay at his feet. His face was dark brown, puffy at the cheeks and dusted with grey hair which gave him a soft appearance like a peach. His lower lip was large and moist and exposed pink inner membrane and lower teeth that were black on their sides where each tooth touched the next. His upper teeth were obscured by a thin top lip. It was either lack of business that put him to sleep, or his sleep that caused his lack of business. There was no movement, no breathing that I could tell, in fact no evidence from where I stood that he was sleeping rather than dead. I figured that if he was in the same position tomorrow evening I would know more about his condition.

I heard a woman’s laugh and turned to my left to investigate, leaning my right elbow on the banister at the stairtop. The drinking bar which occupies the northern half of the mezzanine was crammed to the edge with white collar men and women willing to endure what always appears to be a suffocating can of sardines just to have a pre-commute drink. No police tape here. The laugh I heard disappeared like a stone thrown in a rock quarry. Through an opening between that talking heads of upwardly mobile patrons, I discerned a woman sitting at the bar in a grey business suit who had the facial tautness of a just-snuffed guffaw. Her face was rectangular, softened by a rounded chin; cotton-white skin, the kind that marks easily; and large wide lips moistened by clear balm. The tortoise shell glasses, which obscured large dark eyes, and the black-flecked-with-grey straight chin-length hair gave an appearance of intelligence, a middle-age maturity. Her right elbow was on the bar top, her forearm up and her hand sloping down in an arc which ended with her fingertips barely holding the top of a wine glass half filled, I guessed, with Chablis. She alternated between smiling and chuckling as she made circles with her glass and watched the wine twirl. At first I thought her left hand was in her lap. But then it moved with a back and forth stroking-like slowness appearing to caress the thigh of her companion. I backed up a step from the banister to see who the lucky guy was and was irked to discover that he must have been fifteen years younger than me and her. His hair was blond and short, and he had an oval face, not handsome, but jock-like. His face was so clean that it did not appear he ever needed to shave. It was as if he was home from college visiting his mother, except his companion, I thought obvious, was not his mother. I imagined a duffel bag resting at his feet. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a large signet ring on his right finger. I couldn’t get a date when I was his age, and today it would be a miracle for me to meet a middle-aged, intelligent, mature professional woman like the one petting the groin of the college kid. Of course, she might be an idiot and he the rocket scientist, but it didn’t look that way. Most likely he was proficient in other areas where she might have some perverse fantasies.

I turned in frustration to proceed down the staircase, and my motion was helped by a push on my left from a briskly paced woman passing me with great dispatch wearing black boots, long black coat, a black purse to her right, with short burgundy hair and a red hat. As she passed, without a glance over, she said ”sorry” faintly, with more breath than necessary for so short a message. I stopped on the second step down from the stairtop to stare with a sour eye at her burden of accouterments, not to mention the awkward high heels, she glided down the stairs with the speed of a tap dancer, and breezed through Gate 26-27 as if assisted by a strong wind from behind. I had had it with women, for the moment at least.

To Be Continued.

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Iraq Plus Katrina Equals No Legs And A Trailer In The Mud

Harold Horn had lost his legs. It was a roadside bomb south of Mosul in Iraq, and his legs were immediately blasted into a million bits of bone and blood and muscle. The mess made it appear to Harold’s fellow Marines that Harold was surely dead. But Harold raised his head and waved his arm asking for help before slipping into a coma. That was back in July of 2005. Harold’s family in New Orleans went to Walter Reed Hospital to stand vigil while the doctors patched Harold together in 32 separate operations to keep Harold alive. The doctors told Harriet, Harold’s mother, that Harold’s coma was a good thing because it permitted the doctors to operate and operate and operate more. Losing two legs, particularly Harold’s two big football legs, is not an easy thing to deal with, medically, that is. But the hard work paid off. On Christmas Eve, 2005, Harold awoke from his coma to discover himself in a hospital room with three other Marines. Each marine had lost some appendage, an arm, a leg, one had lost his lower jaw. Harold had lost two appendages, two legs. But he felt lucky. Harold thought the guy without his lower jaw was in really bad shape.

In the first week of August 2006, Harold left Walter Reed Hospital and flew by commercial jet with Harriet, his mother, back to New Orleans where Harriet was staying in a trailer with her husband, Jim. Harold learned for the first time that his home, the house he grew up in, was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and that his mother and father had been living in a trailer for almost a year.

Harold was wheeled up to the trailer by Harriet. Harold’s father, Jim, was off trying to get some paid work down at one of the suburban retail stores.

“Mom, stop,” said Harold. Harriet stopped pushing the wheelchair.

“What is it, dear,” said Harriet.

“I just want to look at my new home,” said Harold.

“Oh, this is not your new home. We’re not staying here,” said Harriet.

“How am I going to get into the trailer? Those steps,” asked Harold.

“Oh, jeez. I didn’t think of that. I will go get George. He’s a big man who helps out. Stay here, Harold,” said Harriet as she shuffled off over the dirt to a distant trailer leaving Harold alone in his wheelchair on a dirt patch.

Harold noticed that the dirt was wet and that the wheels of his chair were sinking into the mud. He looked back up at the trailer, his new home. Harold Horn gave his two legs for a righteous cause, he thought. And God took away his parents home and gave them a trailer in the mud. Harold tried not to get angry. His father once told him to always act better than you feel. Harold felt angry, so he tried real hard to not let it reach the surface. He tried hard to look at the whole awful mess and turn it into a beautiful thing. A trailer in the mud. That can be beautiful, Harold thought.

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