Let me take you back to the night in question, February 27. A Friday, and I’m going home later than usual.

But not because I had to work late.

I’m a little buzzed, actually, because a group of former coworkers and I went to nearby Steak Frites for whiskey and beer. After we part company for good over the rain-slicked sidewalk, I finish my fourth and final cigarette for the evening on the walk home; I vow to quit my lingering, “social smoker” habit.

Soon the bustling energy of Houston Street on a Friday night washes over me. It’s something I know well. Used to, anyway. I look at all these meticulously dressed-down people in their twenties and thirties. A few happily rootless fortysomethings, grayer and paunchier, float through the younger group’s orbit. All of them making plans and meeting up. All of them ignorant of, or indifferent to, the economy crashing down around them.

Not me, though. I just got laid off.

= = =

That’s why we went for drinks.

Some of us got whacked, others survived, but now they’re all “former coworkers.” And we all knew something was up. Weeks earlier, a fee dispute between our client and the agency’s higher-ups had prompted the client to take its business to another shop.

Besides, the timing of Feb. 27 was too perfect. End of the week, end of the month, end of the pay period. Even the benefits drying up dovetailed nicely. There’d been some superstitious chatter among my coworkers and I that the ax would fall Jason-style on Friday the 13^th. But that date came and went without incident. Yet the suspense continued to build.

I take my time getting home. My wife asked me to pick up dinner (“Whatever you want,” she said. “This is your night.”) Before I go to Puebla Mexican up on First Avenue for tortas, I stop by Bowery & Vine Wine & Spirits around the corner from Whole Foods. I know there’s at least one magnum of red wine that sells for less than ten beans.

Inside, I compare a light montepulciano to a bold chianti and go over the day in my head. I think about the dozen of us or so who got jettisoned and the lucky scores allowed to remain aboard. It’s like The Office with an uncredited rewrite by Agatha Christie.

My pal in the traffic department Klodet actually teared up. Her officemate Neal gave me a remarkably crushing bear hug for such a sweet-natured man. I returned to my office after making a round of good-byes in the studio… only to find Carolyn, an office support staffer, and Aleesha, a junior account woman, going through my things.

“I’m not even gone yet!” I mock-shouted from the doorway, startling them.

“Tim!” they cried. “We thought you left without saying good-bye!”

They weren’t ransacking my pen-and-pencil organizer or unplugging my THX computer speakers, though. Hardly. They were scribbling farewell notes to me on Post-Its. Just in case I came back.

Tonight calls for the strength of a chianti, I decide.

I think of my friend and sometime mentor from across the hall, a legendary copywriter and creative director named Harold. Once upon a time he helped craft the still-in-use tagline “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” as well as the iconic Kool-Aid pitcher that used to come exploding through walls.

This morning I informed him that I was being let go following the disbanding of my team. Harold’s gray-mustachioed mouth went slack and his eyes ballooned inside his dark-framed glasses. But Harold isn’t one for crying. In fact, he could always make me laugh—even today. He let the news sink in. Then he nodded at my Iron Maiden concert T with its battle-helmeted skeleton and demon Eddie, and he snapped, “Well, at least you wore the right shirt.”

Unlike Harold, most in the office teed up familiar sayings for the occasion. As in, “one door closes, another opens.” Or “everything happens for a reason.” And then there’s the ever-popular “I’m sure it’ll be for the best in the long run.” I acknowledge that these folks mean well. Regardless, they probably didn’t know what to say. I wouldn’t.

Still, as the rote aphorisms accumulate in my foggy head, I can’t help but think of Jake’s retort to Brett at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Brett tells Jake that if she and he had given their love a chance, they “could have had such a damned good time together.”

“Yes,” Jake says wryly. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Pretty, yeah. Pretty ugly.

= = =

At last I’m home.

I enter the hallway that leads into my apartment. Although it’s difficult to see, I make out a shape wiggling at the end of the corridor. I switch on the hall light.

My wife’s arms are extended around the corner from the living room. Her arms hoist our son in midair. Lil Buddy, he’s smiling at me. And kicking his doughy legs like mad. Finally, my better half steps into view, also smiling, and she’s careful not to let the boy’s happy feet anywhere near her belly.

I don’t even bother to hang up my trenchcoat. I just move into the living room in one giant stride. I kiss them both, put the tortas and the wine down, and thank God my wife still has her job. Then I take Lil Buddy from her. I hold him up high. The legs begin to kick again with renewed zeal. He scrunches his cheeks and brow, crinkles his nose and does his scream-laugh thing.

Even as I realize that not only won’t I be walking to work, I won’t be working, even as I sigh with regret over bidding this column adieu, and even as I wonder what the hell I’m going to do now—it’s an incredible feeling to lift up my little boy.

What could be more incredible?

Two things, actually: one, the belief that I’ll get through this and, second, the fact that, come August, he’ll be a big brother.

—Tim Coleman covers covered the walk-to-work beat, uniquely and eloquently, for Trainjotting. We think he’ll return when he scores a new job.

The guy just wants to help.

Or does he?

It isn’t clear. All I can tell is, he’s banging on a window of the white Pontiac Grand Am idling at a stoplight on Houston where First Avenue turns into Allen. I’m on my way home and walking across Houston.

“Hey!” the man shouts. “Look! Open da door—hurry!”

He looks Asian or Latino judging from his diminutive frame, brownish skin and pitch-black hair. But that, too, isn’t clear. Let’s say he’s from… Peru. His ethnic background does not matter to the story except in one respect: it marks a sharp contrast to the husky white duo in the Grand Am.

In any case, the Man From Peru jumps and yells amid the sea of traffic. A waning red light is pretty much all that stands between the vehicles and the escape hatch of the FDR.

The Man From Peru hits the back door of the Grand Am. “Hey! Open up!” He’s pointing to the undercarriage of the car. That’s as much as I can see.

The guys in the Grand Am, very well-scrubbed with horsey chompers, snicker and growl, “Don’t touch the car!” There’s an epithet in there, too. But I can’t make it out.

I take another step. A gap opens between the lanes of rumbling, gaseous vehicles. At last I see what the Man From Peru is carrying on about: a white shopping bag snagged between the closed back door and frame of the car, dangling just above the pavement. The shapes within resemble a cereal box and a gallon jug of milk.

“C’mon!” cries the Man From Peru.

An African-American man appears in a oversized winter coat, a crushed baseball cap and dirty, foot-dragging trousers. He shuffles past me. Even though this guy moves as if he’s plastered, he sizes up the situation in a matter of seconds.

“Fuck ’em,” he calls to the Man From Peru. “Serves ’em right!”

I reach the south side of Houston. The light turns green.

The Man From Peru shakes his head, scrambling two cars back to a yellow hybrid taxi. He unlocks the driver’s side door and hops in behind the wheel.

Gradually, all the cars begin to roll forward. The guys in the Grand Am are laughing and slap-boxing with each other, oblivious that their shopping bag will, in another several blocks, probably drag against the ground, open like piñata, and spill their purchases out onto the pavement.

They sure showed that little brown guy, though. Tools.

—Tim Coleman covers the walk-to-work beat in Foot It!

I’m picking up dinner—curry from my favorite Indian joint on Sixth Street’s disappearing “Tandoori Row”—when a tidal wave of traffic starts streaming down Second Avenue.

I can make it across if I hurry. I jump off the curb and scoot eastward. I glance uptown to make sure no vehicle will flatten me and see the usual throng of honking cars, trucks and buses. All that swerving and lurching looks like Hollywood’s idea of “New York City.”

But something is different. From the safety of the sidewalk next to Moonstruck Diner, on the other side of Second Avenue, I suddenly realize what it is: the thin designated column of asphalt that stretches toward the Chrysler Building.

It’s one of Manhattan’s bicycle lanes.

And it’s getting used by a fortyish white woman with scraggly red hair, brownish freckles, and a doughy build. She pedals furiously on a basketed two-seater. Small legs ending in green sneakers dangle from behind her. Her daughter, I guess. The kid’s maybe seven, and she shares Mom’s redheady face and hair. The softening up of middle age, however, is still decades off.

Abruptly, Mom brakes. Then her expression contorts in a spasm of righteous fury. She thumb-cracks her ridiculous-sounding bell—ring-a-ling! ring-a-ling!—just as one of those itsy-bitsy Smart cars cuts her off.

Yes, in the bike lane.

The little ovoid auto barely fits in the lane as it soars downtown. But it fits all the same. The vehicle blows by a car-service Lincoln and a rust-bucket Ford van. The Smart surges past me, whipping up a gust of wind and oil fumes. A twentysomething white dude with crooked hair sits behind the wheel displaying a well-rehearsed look of obliviousness.

But Mom, she’s not content to eat his dust just yet. She pedals with more oomph than ever. Her terrified-looking kid clutches the underside of her backseat’s springs. Then the mother-daughter duo squeaks by.

Mom shrieks, “You’ah in the bike lane, ya asswipe!”

The Smart dodges left and turns down Second Street—no signaling for this driver—and Mom pulls a slow-down-and-dip maneuver as if she might give chase.

But no, she then speeds up and heads south toward Houston.

Her daughter’s hands release the seat springs and wrap around Mom’s waist. They go wherever they’re going, I go get dinner, and Mr. Smart goes and drives his dumb-ass self to Alphabet City. 

—Tim Coleman covers the walk-to-work beat in Foot It.

There’s a business on my walk to work that is a vestige of the old, pre-gentrified Lower East Side. The name of the business is Check Ca$hing.

Even though I’ve lived in the area for 11 years—or, perhaps, because I have—I share the transplanted LESider’s mixed reaction to the place, which is on the corner on Houston and Eldridge. I kind of like the grittiness it signifies of a once-rougher neighborhood, kind of loathe it because Check Ca$hing caters to a dodgy, hollow-eyed clientele.

And amid the artsy-indie Sunshine movie theater, pseudo-healthy Chickpea franchise and snooty-chic East Houston Hotel, Check Ca$hing looks like a zit on a fresh (albeit very made-up) face.One time I actually sought out its services. I’d gotten a reimbursement check from Time Warner Cable for $14.61 and was too lazy to foot it to the bank. But whent the clerk behind Check Ca$hing’s bulletproof glass asked me for I.D. so he could put my name “on file,” I decided to walk the extra three blocks to my bank.

This morning I do not have another penny-ante check to cash. But I do notice three sheets of paper Scotch-taped to Check Ca$hing’s transparent façade advertising a new service. A different word is laser-printed on a separate sheet like so:

INCOME

TAX

PREPARED

I pause to make sure I’m reading correctly. I am.

I mosey past Yonah Schimmel’s, breathing in the freshly baking knishes, and ask myself a question: What the hell other types of services might Check Ca$hing offer?

ASSET MANAGEMENT Hand over your guns, knives and velvet paintings. My grandma’s garage in Woodlawn’s got plenty of room for them because she don’t drive no more.  

RETIREMENT PLANNING Rubber-band all loose bills and stuff ‘em into Yuban coffee cans. (Mattresses for blue-chip clients. But no coins, dumb-dumb. They rattle around and draw too much attention.) Bring the cans down to the basement and stack ’em behind the cockfighting ring.

BONDS Like bailbonds, right? Well, you need somebody caught, you talk to my uncle Carlos. He makes Dog the Bounty Hunter look like a pussy. And if you need somebody sprung from Riker’s—somebody like you—we’ll hook you up with some cash. We know Jews.

When I stop trying to amuse myself and finally reach the office, I check CNN.com. Yet another bank has laid off more than 1,000 employees. Damn. Just having taxes to pay suddenly seems less like a joke—and more like a luxury.

Just before I hit the bricks, I hit the deli around the corner for a newspaper. 

When last we spoke, there were layoffs and cutbacks. The whole bit. But that was so 2008, right?

Well, we can hope.

Ah, the New Year. 2009. A whole decade, practically, in the bag. And yet, without any real decade-designation. Coming after the Nineties, what do we even call it? “The Oh’s”? “The Zeros”? In many ways, either works. But whatever you call it, here we are. Freezing our asses off and wondering… Now what?!

Me, I’m walking to work as usual. Today I have to be in at 8:30 a.m. sharp because the president of a certain luxury-goods manufacturer is getting a tour of the agency this morning. We creatives got not one but two e-mails telling us to be in early and to be dressed more presentably than our usual ripped-jeans-and-Iron-Maiden-T-shirt attire. (All right, that’s my typical outfit, but it’s a close-enough approximation of our general garb.)

I’m strolling along this morning, feeling good about myself.

We’re having a coat drive at work that ends today. I’ve got a contribution to make, and it’s sandwiched between my hip and my briefcase. Formerly my wife’s, this coat is a cotton-knit variety checkered in pink-and-black like a cookie from Veniero’s. It’s also cuffed and collared with faux pink fur that looks like the pelt of a Muppet.

See, the coat drive is my little shot at redemption. I missed the pre-Thanksgiving can drive at the office and I’m sure I could’ve gotten off my ass to offer up some baked beans from my cupboard.

Frankly, I’ve been distracted by “those less fortunate” much closer to home. Make that much closer to work: the agency laid off eleven of my colleagues right before Turkey Day. The casualties included Crazy Saul, the ridiculously talented, ferociously hard-working veteran writer with whom I wrote damn near every line of copy.

If you’ve opened a reputable newspaper or magazine in the past 20 years, odds are you’ve read Crazy Saul’s words. His madcap in-person comments are a little less well-known. Sample exchange: “How are you, Saul?” His reply: “Oh, just dying a little more.” Now, like me, Crazy Saul is out pounding the pavement. Unlike me, he is not going to work but looking for it.

The bitter chill gnaws on my cheeks and chin. It feels more Valentine’s Day than Christmas Day.

So the coat I’m donating will no doubt benefit some needy woman. Or transvestite.

I wish I could give more. I’m accustomed to small-apartment living, though. I store my autumn jackets at my in-laws’ house in Brooklyn, bring the winter coats home and repeat the process during the seasons throughout the year. All I have to give is this one item.

My baby boy’s growing so fast I could probably donate his clothes soon. Christ, it pains me to imagine an infant actually in need of a coat.

Suddenly I think of my son and his scare at my father’s house upstate over Thanksgiving weekend. The little guy fell out of his bouncy chair “ass over tea kettle,” as my friend Alan likes to say, but at least the boy was unharmed. Scared shitless, but unharmed.

I shake my head and squeeze my wife’s old coat for comfort—and it isn’t there.

It. Is. Gone.

“Dammit!” I grunt, stopping on Houston. A couple passersby crane their necks in my direction and keep moving, not breaking their stride. I’m halfway to work, halfway home. Did some crafty sidewalker filch it right out from under me? Or did I just drop it?

I guess it doesn’t matter now. It’s lost. At least I wanted to donate it. I tried.

Yoda’s irritating voice sounds off from some galaxy far, far away. “There is no try. There is only do.” As usual, he’s right. I forget about the whole thing and step up my pace to the office. This is the season to count our blessings and definitely breaking my Top 5 is the fact that I still have a job.

For now, anyway. Yes, I escaped the blade, which like tinsel always seems to fly freely this time of the year. There are carols to sing and budgets to slash. Dickens lives.

So here’s to a Merry Christmas and—I mean this—a Happy New Year. For me and you and yours and mine. And Crazy Saul.

And everyone in his hardscrabble shoes.

–Tim Coleman covers the walk-to-work beat for Trainjotting.

So TJ’s grandmother was none too pleased that we dropped an f-bomb in our recent post about taking Little G to the city on Black Friday, buying him a remote control Dodge Charger at Toys R Us, and leaving the f*&$ing thing on Metro-North (Update from MNR Lost & Found: No hint of your Dodge Charger. Try back again soon.)

In my defense, I rarely use the f-bomb. I don’t mind if Straphanger Joe or Foot It Tim does–I know they’re both serious writers who choose their words carefully, and if they see fit to type an f-bomb, I trust it’s for good reason.

I had a debate about the f-bomb earlier this year with one of my big bosses, who has since been downsized, rest his soul. We’d seen the actor/filmmaker Tim Robbins deliver a kick-ass speech imploring the media types in the crowd to focus on real issues, not the latest drug-addled starlet falling out of a limo. Robbins peppered his speech with numerous expletives, including f-bombs. I argued that they served a purpose–they set the tone for a fiery, irreverent speech right off the bat. They got people laughing, which allowed Mr. Shawshank to deliver some controversial statements after he’d turned on the audience’s good humor.

Mr. Big Boss just thought Bull Durham’s expletives were gratuitous and crass. Then again, Mr. Big Boss had one of those swear jars in his office that you had to contribute to every time you cursed.

I actually searched the f-word on Trainjotting, and five links came up: two were Straphanger Joe quoting someone on the F-train (F-bomb train, anyone?), one was long-lost correspondent PeterFromPort quoting some very drunk, rude riders on the LIRR, one was me quoting some woman who specializes in cutting open cadavers on the 7 train (she was not actually cutting the cadavers on the 7 train, just talking about doing so), and another was me expressing my anger at the LIRR disability scandal.  

So I only use the f-bomb when it really, truly applies, like when you’ve had a fun day in the city with your son, and all day long he’s been pestering you to open up his new remote control car, and you’re in the car going home, and he brings up the car again, and you tell him you left it on the train, and his lip starts to quiver.

That deserves an f-bomb. Right?

Anyway, sorry about the “cuss,” Nana. I’ll try to be more careful.

He leads. Then I lead.

Then he leads.

I’m walking to work. I imagine he is, too. We’re both marching headlong down Houston Street—frosty air escaping our mouths in the same ghost-y streams—but he and I are much different.

For starters, he’s black, not, well, ghost-y white like me. I would say  he’s “African-American,” but he might be Jamaican. I used to go out with a Jamaican woman who hated being labeled African-American because while she was black, she was neither African nor American. So this guy, he’s black until I learn more.

I take the lead again.

He retakes it again.

The man is also much younger than me. Low-twenties, probably. White iPod ear buds are snaked up from under his puffy black coat and hidden just below his black doo rag. Kanye West is piping through, I think, but I can’t be sure. Either way, this guy with his thin mustache looks less like Kanye West and more like Ja Rule.

He certainly is wearing Ja Rule’s low-slung navy-blue jeans. Way low-slung. So low-slung, in fact, that his exposed baby-blue boxers are more visible than his white sneakers, which are drowning in the clogged pant-legs of his Levis.

I keep hearing Denis Leary’s shouts ricocheting around my skull. In his 1997 concert special Lock n’ Load, the manic comic repeatedly rebuked such slacks-ers. “Pull up yer pants!” he shrieked.

The droopy-drawers look favored by some black guys (and a few trying-real-hard white dudes) has dubious origins. “The style of sagging one’s pants, or wearing them baggy and low without a belt,” states Wikipedia, “was also style that originated in prisons.” It’s depressing someone would rebel by imitating convicts at any time. But when jobs are scarce and crime might seem more appealing? It’s clueless.

Not that criminalizing someone’s attire makes sense.

According to The New York Post,  “a Florida judge threw out a saggy-pants law in Riviera Beach, Fla., in September after a teen was arrested for showing four to five inches of his boxers.” Yet similar measures have passed in other parts of the U.S. That’s as dumb as the not-passing fad itself. For heaven’s sake, it’s not flashing. And, call me crazy, but wardrobe regulation just feels un-American.

Which brings us to our President-Elect. (No, he does not wear his suit trousers low and shame on you for thinking that.) The incoming commander-in-chief deems such laws “a waste of time.” However, he did add, “Brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing… Some people might not want to see your underwear—I’m one of them.”

And I’m another. But we don’t need a new law. We need a new perspective. So I simply retake the lead from my fellow pedestrian.

This time for good! 

–Tim Coleman covers the street beat for Trainjotting.

Not your average beggar, obviously. For one, she’s not a dude. More bag lady of old, only no bag. Her short, curly hair appears to have once been blonde. Her haggard face coexists somehow with her puffy cheeks. The lips? Pursed in the extreme but open just… enough… to reveal a traffic jam of bent teeth.