Chapter 2. City Strays & Seamstresses
City Strays & Seamstresses
The first time I saw Jay, I was wearing sweatpants and smelt of burnt chestnuts and urine. The smell of New York. I was sitting in the reception area of my mother’s office, just delivered from the police precinct station where I had been brought in for questioning on an attempted mugging—not my mugging of someone, understand, but of someone trying to grab me. I had been out and about in the early morning hours with my partner in lunacy, Freida, wandering through the garment district and the vacant lot across the street from the Port Authority, have-a-heart traps banging against our legs, looking for feline strays among the debris and abandoned recliners that served as people’s beds; avoiding the city gypsies, keeping an eye out for the criminally inclined. We thought both our industriousness and the basically nocturnal habits of these populations would protect us from harm, but we were the victims of our own prejudices.
Our plan was simple and free of any practicality: saved from the cruelty of the research labs or worse, the captured kitties would be carted off to our veterinary student friends who would neuter and vaccinate them, then take them to the shelter to find homes. Their “forever homes”. This phrase, though admirable, meant nothing to me. Forever stretched off into the distance for me. How long is forever when you’re young? How wide is the ocean when you’ve never been abroad? And I was eager to move time and set sail. My mother could not stand this rescue hobby of mine; she said it was part of a nasty streak of self-righteousness that ran through the family reaching its pinnacle with her sister, Jean. Mom was ready to push off my boat and wave goodbye from shore.
She and Dad divorced while I was in college. Mom moved down to New York and Dad stayed in the sticks. She always hated country life, first in Pennsylvania and then later in Vermont. For her, neither place was better than the other, although the latter was more scenic, and I was brought to wonder sometimes why they got married in the first place. After graduating, I moved in with Mom to make my way in the big city. Mom had gone into public relations and ended up a management consultant in the entertainment industry. She felt right at home among the high achievers. They possessed something Dad and the rest of the family lacked.
But back to that mugging and my first glimpse of Jay Burton.
Freida and I were in the lot across the street from the Port Authority. I’d gone into an alleyway around the corner of a nearby building, lifting up half-deteriorated cardboard boxes making sure no litters went undiscovered when a sense of dread flooded over me so strongly I immediately straightened up, senses on full alert. I turned around to see a man—a man much larger than me—six foot something, a damn lumberjack of a man, stoned or drunk or both, blocking my way back to safety. I had often wondered what I would do in a situation like this. I froze, unable to move or scream. This is it, I thought. This man’s going to kill me and so much for forever being a long time—at least for me. A mere 26 years seemed the very short end of the stick. No one would ever really come to truly know me, I thought pathetically; no one would ever fall in love with me, deeply and forever, like I always imagined. I’d just be gone. All because of this wasted bastard the Fates in their wisdom had assigned to me.
Seconds of inaction passed between us before the spell broke. I tried to go by him, saying casually, ‘I’m just gonna go out here,’ but he grabbed me, held me in a choke hold, ripped open my fanny pack and extricated my wallet. I was pressed against him, struggling hard. My effort to free myself caused us to stumble back out into open view. Freida, realizing what was happening, dropped her cages and took off in the opposite direction. Not satisfied with my money, my assailant tried to jam his hand down my pants, to pull them down, but I clutched both my hands over the waistband of my sweats and held on for dear life. What would have happened if an off-duty detective on his morning run hadn’t seen this encounter and intervened, causing my assailant to flee almost as fast as Freida, I could, unfortunately, well imagine.
I went with the detective to the local station to report the crime. Detective Cunningham said there wasn’t much chance of anything being done, and if I ever decided on doing something so reckless again, he would run right past. He let me call my mother from the phone on his desk and gave me cab fare to my mom’s office even though it was just a few blocks away. Mom needed to see her girl alive and in one piece, so, reluctantly, I went off to her office to account for myself.
That’s how I found myself seated in her firm’s reception area fighting an active battle of not thinking the only thought that could possibly be on my mind. Trying not to think at all. Shortly, she walked out of her office with the famous Jay Burton. Why he was actually awake and here at such an early hour instead of Mom going to bird dog him, I later found out had something to do with morning radio. Mom saw me sitting there but ignored me; she always triaged her emergencies. The frontman of the group Yellowbird turned his gaze toward the filthy and fairly odorous person sitting on the sofa. I raised my eyes up toward him and a puzzled expression fluttered about his face in response. This glance between us lasted all of ten seconds before he lost interest, immune to my ragamuffin charm. He turned back to my mom and was gone. Just one more humiliation in a record day of such.
On Mom’s eventual return, I was summoned into her office to tell my story. Her relief at my survival had turned to anger by this time. As with Detective Cunningham, she felt the responsibility for this upheaval of everyone’s day rested solely with me. Why wouldn’t that man want to attack me? Isn’t that what muggers do? No more salvation work for me. From now on I could work in her office, filing photos as they came off the wire, and confine any higher calling to volunteering at the shelter.
Weeks passed, the seasons turned, but I never did regain my sense of normalcy. I just tried to stay out of everyone’s way. Every day I’d get off the train at Penn Station and walk to my mom’s office, up out of the fur district, dodging the men pushing their rolling racks of furs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars down the sidewalks, then past Macy’s and up Sixth Avenue, ignoring the public altercations that always seemed to be taking place between some man in a suit and someone who probably didn’t own a suit. This was also the era of the flyer, every shop or restaurant employing some poor soul to thrust its advertising at passersby. I took it as a point of pride that no one could make me take their paper noise.
Just before I turned the corner to my office, I would pass a mustard-colored building; there were always young women going in or coming out. The women who caught my eye were Asian, but I could not place them more specifically. Sometimes one of them would emerge by herself, but mostly they traveled in groups, and on the rare occasion I could overhear their conversations, it was in a language I couldn’t identify. Maybe because I was lonely and unsettled, I was drawn to these women. I wanted to know who they were. I fell into stereotypical thinking, seeing them emerging onto the street like a flock of graceful birds; I romanticized them, thinking they carried a sadness in their faces, a sorrow in their posture, though I realized reality was likely much harsher and grittier. Over time and repeated crossing of paths, I was able to recognize a few of them as individuals, and they seemed to recognize me. Though we never smiled at each other or looked each other straight in the eye, eventually there came to be some understanding, some acknowledgement as we passed that, Yes, there you are; we’re both on schedule, then. I came to the conclusion that they worked either in a brothel or a sweatshop. Given these limited choices, given my recent brush with unwanted intimacy, I hoped it was the latter.
Image: Up and down the avenue. Source: Photograph by Ᾱn Kassel, edited by J. Weigley
Cool jump after Ch. 1
Thanks.