shopping bag full of urine

He's short, noticeably short, almost like a jockey but with the girth and waggle of a pit bull. Dashing mustache - salt and pepper. He always seems to be wearing matching Bermuda shorts and guayabara and even when he isn't, he looks like he wants to. In colder weather a windbreaker and a cap. He carries either a shopping bag or, if it is a busy busy day, a big, black plastic garbage bag and he goes to all the drug treatment centers and methadone clinics, hidden away on third and fourth and seventh floors of garment district buildings that still haven't upgraded to a better clientele, and he collects all the urine samples and specimens needing to be tested for drugs and disease and occasional health.

So fast emptying locked fridges and tin medical boxes, never caught the act, always seen after the fact usually as he slips into the elevator his shopping bag fuller and fuller of little capped bottles of many people's pee.

Sunday Memories: Macy's Chewing Gum

It was much more proletarian. Whatever you needed - service or clothes - it was there and it was affordable. On the rare occasion something new was about to be purchased we would don our clean and neat apparel and take the IND to Herald Square.

Unlike the spectacle of today, the Macy's then was florescent lights and huge long floors filled with circular racks that spun around like those little pinwheels kids used to play with before video games came around.

Buying new was so significant an event my sister and I both remember the dresses one year we were allowed to choose. Mostly we were sent off to find the loose rubber bands that were discarded by the sales ladies. Florence always needed rubber bands and this was an efficient method of procuring them. Once found, we were then allowed to sit under the racks and in lieu of gum which was "bad for us", chew a couple of our newly found rubber bands while we waited for nothing new to be purchased.

A Car Ride to the Doctor

The day was bright.  There was something clean and crisp in the air.  Not spring.  February.

On any kind of day, it takes an army to get an old person who can’t walk or breathe normally to the corner of Broome and Columbia where the car service waits.

The dispatcher only gives you three minutes to get to the corner. And when you get there the driver insists you were told one minute. Still, on this day the driver waited; sunny, clear days that are not too cold are slow. All the old people who can walk without assistance take the Avenue A bus then.

I greeted this guy with the smile I greet everyone and anyone I have to enlist to help me take care of Florence.  It says: isn't she cute this little old lady practically toppling over and dying in my arms and I'm only 3 inches taller than her but clearly I'm her daughter just look at the cheekbones and we even still dress alike parka, beret, sneakers look how much I'm caring for my old mother aren't we a sympathetic sight?

And like the car service guys before him, this one smiled back and lightened up about it taking us more than three minutes to get to the corner.  That gave me hope he would be good natured about waiting at the Curb of Insanity at Beth Israel's outpatient facility while I dodged a billion other car services and Access-A-Ride vans to run in and find a wheelchair to bring out to the car.

The car zipped onto Delancey. I had about fifteen minutes of not-panicking before we got to the Curb of Insanity.  At the red light, Florence read aloud all the signs in the window of the last remaining Spanish-Chinese restaurant in the city. "Apolo. Restaurant. Lunch Specials. $8.95. That's expensive."

We watched the stores fly by.  Turning up First Avenue, the street looked like an empty Sunday, a wide boulevard of another city maybe in Europe - stately and gracious, the buildings suddenly with character, not tarted-up tenements with $2000 a month rent for a studio.

“The day is beautiful” Florence murmured.

“Yeah,” I said. “Look at those trees.”

"I’m not interested in nature!" she snapped.

pork pie and ersatzlachs on Avenue A

Packed weekend sidewalk filled with thin beautiful young people with Ph.Ds in looking too cool for fuck. The 20-something kid in a pork pie hat walking and talking like an expert, points back to the little candy shop and speaks smugly into his friend's very expensive video camera. "What's an egg cream? Where's the egg? How come they call it an egg cream if there's no egg? I don't know." He acts like his not knowing is the candy store's problem. Not his.

That candy shop on Avenue A was the only thing open at night for twenty, thirty years when A was the dividing line between walking home to Grand Street or being a junkie and/or too poor to move away. Those egg creams were sometimes better than love. Sometimes, they still are.

Sunday Memories: In three acts G dies in Manhattan in 1993

I
He’s in Cabrini on 19th Street. The nurse who loves him the most is six feet tall and just finished becoming a woman. Her hands are huge. She could pick G up when he was bigger and now as he dwindles into the bed she still swoops him up into her arms and we see how much he has left from how small he is in her arms.

His family comes in from Queens to visit. Four of G’s six brothers are wearing his suits. They are either too tall or too short, too thin or too fat for the suits. Looking at them in G’s clothes is like looking at G in funhouse mirrors.

When they leave, G turns to M “Couldn’t they have just waited until I died?,” he asks.

II

I turn the corner onto 14th street to go to the wake at the funeral home and see the big straight brother who hates gay people beating the shit out of the thin delicate gay brother who in his own words is “a screaming queen.” Somebody calls the cops. The gay brother’s suit, formerly G’s, is ripped in many places.

III

It’s the day of the funeral. I turn onto 14th street to go to the church across the street from the funeral home. Cop cars line the street. My heart sinks. It’s only 10 in the morning. More trouble already? When I get to the steps of the church I find out it’s just Law and Order setting up for a shoot later on in the day.

The Map to My Heart

Little Asian girl about four years old, a NY city subway map firmly in her mouth - it protrudes down like a single buck tooth. She holds, with all this commitment, her mother's hand, who juggles a stroller and cell phone, lost on the corner of 27th and Broadway.