Thu 4 Sep 2008
Money Free
Posted by TJ under Foot It
Some days you walk to work and see nothing. Nothing but pure, unadulterated New Yorkness.
Like this morning. I come upon the vagrant who many days can be found lying on the sidewalk outside La Cocina, an old bodega on the corner of Elizabeth and Houston. With shorn dreadlocks and a wiry build, the man is usually near the large vent along the eastern wall. That’s where he is today.
Sometimes he just stands in this spot wearing his familiar uniform of a gray sweat suit and sneakers—sometimes minus the sneakers. He often speaks gibberish in low, pleading tones to his splayed fingers. But he isn’t asking for money. He’s asking a higher power for forgiveness, perhaps, for some past or imagined offense.
This morning he is doing no such thing. Facing the wall of La Cocina, he’s sleeping off a drunk or a nod, maybe, or keeping some demon momentarily at bay.
A thirtyish woman with fair skin and a bushel of reddish-brown hair comes out of the bodega. In dark glasses, tight tan pants and a black blouse, she raises her eyebrows at the prostrate man. She pauses, standing over him. Then she fishes a bill out of her pocketbook. A single or a hundred, I can’t tell, but she places it in the folds of the man’s shirt.
He shudders—and off the bill flies, fluttering in the wind toward the construction-heavy bustle of
The woman throws up her hands and dashes toward the edge of the curb. She manages to seize the cash in midair. Then she hurries back—heels clopping on the sidewalk—and shoves the bill down at the man.
Suddenly his arm juts up as if it’s the only part of him that’s alive. His hand grabs the bill.
“I said,” he growls, “I don’t want it!”
His arm snaps at the elbow like a catapult, and he tosses the money to the wind.
Again, the bill flies off. And again, the woman retrieves it. Only this time she stuffs the cash back into her pocketbook and storms off.
The man returns to his slumber, and I keep walking.