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.

I see famous people.

There’s one now: indie filmmaker and downtown fixture Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers). It’s dark, I’m leaving work and he’s moving east on Prince Street. I’ve seen him in my neighborhood before. Today he looks like any other hipster in a dark trenchcoat with a black guitar case strapped to his back. What distinguishes him is the shock of Warholian white hair. It’s part of his brand.

I don’t say boo. Nothing against Jarmusch or his movies, or his current choice of boots, which look like Doc Martens from planet Neptune. I just never come across any celebrities who really interest me. I probably wouldn’t bug them even if I did.

I’ve been put off that crap for years, ever since I recognized horror-movie maven Wes Craven outside Tribeca Grill. I’d written a screenplay and, what the hell, I decided to pitch it to him right then and there. He politely suggested I contact his L.A. office. But his expression said otherwise. The second he realized I wasn’t just a fan, his grin became a grimace and his eyes went gray. He looked… scared. And this is the man who dreamt up Freddy Krueger.

So I leave celebrities alone.

Sure, I couldn’t help but notice comic Louie C.K. pushing a stroller one morning on Wooster Street. I certainly didn’t mind ogling X-Woman Famke Janssen walking her Boston terrier along 6^th Avenue. Ditto Naomi Watts shopping on Bleecker.

Al Pacino I saw dining on the sidewalk at Da Silvano. Strange thing, I made him thanks to his unruly hair, which is reaching dangerously high, Kramer-ish altitudes. And, truth be told, I noticed Pacino because I noticed his attractive lunch companion first.

All right, I’m married, but don’t think I’m a perv for spotting celebrities of the female persuasion. My wife sees the true hotties anyway—Halle Berry on St. Mark’s Place for one, Heather Graham on Bowery for another. The missus even had an opposite-sex celeb sighting of her own recently. Some eye-contact shenanigans on the 6 train with that well-known cad Ethan Hawke. “He was listening to his iPod and he checked me out four times,” she gloated. “Hey, I’m a wife and mother—you have no idea how much it meant to me!”

I try my best not to imagine the Training Day costar frisking my wife.

Instead, I focus on the present. Like Jarmusch. He marches around a bend, going further downtown toward Cleveland Place. I keep heading straight.

By the time I hit Elizabeth Street, another familiar face pops up. A wiry little man. An old friend, perhaps, below the blue-and-white baseball cap and behind the clear-frame glasses?

No. I do know him, but I don’t, well, know him. Then I remember who he is because I own one of his CDs. This diminutive guy is none other than singer, deejay and tea restaurateur Moby. Wow, not bad. Jim Jarmusch one minute, Moby the next. A downtown two-fer on the day. Maybe I should ask Moby when his next album is coming out or if he holds a grudge against Eminem for dissing him in the song “Without Me” or, hell, what Gwen Stefani smells like.

Moby walks by.

I go home.

–Tim Coleman covers the bipedal beat in Foot It!

I take a detour on my walk to work so I can help make history.

That’s right, I step inside the seniors center on Allen Street where I am registered to vote, and my wife and I do our civic duty. The place is choked with a typical Lower East Side mix of burly Latinos and aggressively thin whites, all branching off to voting booths representing this district or that. The noise level is higher than I can remember in past election years. I wait my turn and cast my ballot.

“Yo!” shouts the bicyclist going the wrong way on a one-way.

God am I happy he didn’t ram me with his 10-speed. “Ass-munch,” I mumble.

What is it with you, Bicyclists? I used to ride, too, before my mountain bike was stolen. But I was never as inconsiderate as some of these jerkoffs. You know the type: pedaling right at pedestrians or-criminy!-hopping up onto the sidewalk. (Let’s all say it together now, “Side… walk.”) They weave and they bob. Everyone else, be damned.
It’s like they’re competing with cabbies for Worst of the Road honors.

Which is a shame. I’m one of those guys who believes we could actually use more bicycles on our streets. You know, take a page from other cities around the world that are looking to reduce their carbon footprint. But at the expense of urban amblers like me? I don’t think so.

Ring, ring, calls the mechanical bell of a crunchy-looking woman’s basketed two-wheeler. She’s blowing off a red light to buck the flow of human traffic simply responding to a “walk” traffic signal. I want to kick her rear tire as she rolls by. But I don’t. I’m too much of a wuss.

Once I get to work, I count the number of times bicyclists have nearly run me down-and suddenly, I remember a horrific incident.

It was two years ago. I was strolling to work along Houston as usual. Back then, the ever-present construction was in much fuller swing. Dumptrucks and cement trucks clogged the thoroughfare; orange-vested men and women marched to and fro. Us sidewalkers were always being rerouted.

That day we were, for sure. But not because of anyone taking a jackhammer to the asphalt.

“Sorry, can’t pass here,” a hulking cop said to me. “Gotta go another way.”

Beyond him loomed a single, gigantic dumptruck… and police lights. I noticed more emergency workers converging, as well as clusters of hands-in-their-pocket gawkers at various points.

“Hey, but I work down there,” I told the cop, pointing.

He sort of sagged irritably, then nodded and let me through.

As I made my way alone toward the office, I passed the gigantic dumptruck. Then I spotted a mangled 10-speed propped against a fire hydrant. Its frame was snapped and contorted, the wheels almost artful in their misshapenness.

And beside the enormous tire of the dumptruck lay a human form underneath a white sheet. Not completely white, however: a dull red showed through the fabric from the other side.

I later found out that this dead bicyclist was a recent film-school grad. He’d even gone to college with one of my coworkers.

Scary, yes. But also sad.

But today, I’m thinking only about you, Reckless Bicyclists. And for you I have just two words: Happy Halloween.

—Tim Coleman covers the feet beat for Trainjotting.

Leaving work, I drag my hung-over ass down to King Street for something to eat. I shuffle toward Mekong, a Vietnamese joint on the corner of King and 6th, and I pass Arrojo Studio, Nick “Hairdresser-to-the-Stars” Arrojo’s salon.

Then I stroll by a jittery white dude in his twenties. He’s hunched over on a stoop two doors down, talking animatedly on his cell phone. In blue jeans and a black buttoned-down shirt, the guy also sports a mullet. A charcoal-colored number with a few bedheady spikes, but you can’t fool me—a mullet’s a mullet.

And now his panicked whisper is audible, drawing me out of my daze. Suddenly, he shuts up and darts his finger in the air as if he’s addressing the caller in person as opposed to on the phone.

“Just so you know,” he shouts, “what I do when I leave the salon is no business of yours!”

At first I think he’s talking to me (he isn’t) and then I wonder what he did, well, when he left the salon. Blow off spin class? Drink pomegranate juice right from the bottle? Reveal the winner of Project: Runway to a friend who had TiVo’d it?

I reach Mekong and then something else dawns on me: who the hell works at a salon and has a mullet?

Tim Coleman covers the street beat for Trainjotting

Inside the rear entrance of the building where I work, I just remember I forgot my wallet.

It wouldn’t make a difference if I were entering my building through the usual front lobby. The comically lax security guard there would not only let Osama bin Laden pass through, he’d probably ask for an autograph. But, stupid me, I always go in back. And my work I.D. needed for scanning was left in said wallet.

Yeah, I could leave, walk around the corner of the building to front lobby and explain my situation to, but… Well, I’m just too lazy for that.

Now, I see the security guard stationed in this area—my security guard—most days and usually I wave to him. And sometimes he even waves back. Today I amble up the wheelchair ramp and wave, and he returns it.

Unfortunately, I’ve never had an actual conversation with this man. He just sits behind a desk with a small placard attached to it that states security. (The notice is as stark as dollar signs on bags of money in a Yosemite Sam cartoon.) Or maybe he paces the loading dock, gesturing to the three or four medium-sized trucks dropping off office supplies and equipment.

After a moment of awkward silence, I add, “You know me. I come in this way every day.”

“Yes,” he growls, rising. He begins to walk the twenty feet to the sensor-protected door. “No I.D., though, huh?”

“No!”

“You gonna stab everybody to death! All your coworkers! No? No?”

He waves the magic wand of his badge over the security sensor. “No? You promise me!”

“I promise,” I say calmly, finally clueing in to this guy’s sense of humor.

He opens the door gradually and cocks his head forward, letting me pass through.

“Thanks,” I say, grinning.

He flashes half a smile and closes the door behind me.

I’m in. I make my way to my agency’s private elevator and wait for it to reach the ground floor. As the door opens and I step inside, I realize one small thing: I never got the guard’s name.

Tomorrow, I will. Tomorrow.

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

They can’t do it. They won’t even be able to do it.

And yet, there they are: two Latino men outside a (surely illegal) construction site on Spring Street between Mulberry and Lafayette. They wave their arms to help a bulldozer operator lift an unwieldy bundle of wood into the site.

The site is an open lot flanked by two brick buildings and blocked by a makeshift wall of thin boards, orange mesh plastic and scrawny-looking posts. Above and behind the wall floats the bulldozer’s bear claw. Winched to a bundle of 50 strips of wood, each maybe 30 feet long, the claw struggles to hoist the bundle over the wall.

It isn’t working.

See, the strips of wood are the same size as the width of the lot. So the bundle can’t clear the sides of the adjacent buildings.

I’m standing across the street. The ex-newspaper reporter in me makes me shake my head. The site is rife with violations of the OSHA laws (OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION); for starters, clueless pedestrians are wandering unprotected below the bundle of wood—a brown, wet-looking monstrosity—and only one of the workers is wearing a helmet.

But instead of asking where the foreman is or putting in a call to my old editor Gene, I just stand there in bewildered awe.

Suddenly, the bundle sways dangerously close to the face of Debra Messing. Well, not the Debra Messing, but her smiling likeness on a poster for her new series The Starter Wife that is stapled to the makeshift wall.

The bundle swings the other way like a giant pendulum over Spring Street, and a passing dumptruck comes to a wheezing stop. The white, goateed driver slaps the steering wheel and slumps his shoulders. His rig idles with the sound of coins in a coffee can. The driver looks set to shift into reverse should the bundle swing back his way.

Then the two workers get an idea. They find a long stick lying on the sidewalk. Using the stick, the men try to prod the bundle up and over the wall. The unseen bulldozer revs and squeals and farts and hisses, waving its bear claw. The ’dozer itself seems to be doing K turn after K turn.

At last, with much skidding on the sidewalk, the workers manage to turn the bundle perpendicular to the lot and guide it over the wall. One of the men lets go of the long stick and uses his bare hand to ensure the job gets done.

The bulldozer growls and backs up. The wood gradually disappears, and the workers file through a gap in the wall after it. The dumptrunk hums and proceeds down Spring. Scores of early-morning pedestrians march by the entire time. Some slow down to glance at the commotion, but none of them stops.

Debra Messing keeps smiling.

—Tim Coleman covers the pedestrian beat in “Foot It!”

—When he’s not schlepping on the L train, Tim Coleman covers the feet-on-the-street beat for Trainjotting.

“Hi, have a good day.”

An obese guy in his twenties says this to me on the corner of Houston and 6th Avenue as I head to work.

Maybe he’s in his thirties. Hell, forties? It’s hard to tell. His facial skin has the windswept texture of middle age and a blemish here and there. He also has doughy matching hands. Yet his attire screams little-kid—khakis, sneakers and a red windbreaker. Likewise, the bowl cut of brown hair.

Clutching a stack of leaflets or brochures, he stares at me, pivoting slowly as I walk by.

I meet his gaze. “You, too.”

Who is this man-child? A Jehovah’s Witness? A Jew for Jesus?

As I round the corner, another thought crosses my mind: is he someone with developmental disabilities? An AHRC Foundation office is nearby. (Those letters silence the harsher-sounding “Association for the Help of Retarded Children.”) Usually AHRC students gather in groups of about ten on the sidewalk outside the location’s glass façade, chaperoned by a more cognizant-looking Somebody.

If this dude in the red windbreaker is getting help from AHRC, he’s on his own today. Something I’ve never seen in more than two years. Why am I so threatened? I guess because stopping in New York can, you know, get you killed.

It would be one thing if every greeter were as warm as my super Lorenzo. This morning I was taking out the garbage, including some items for recycling. One of them, a bottle of balsamic vinegar, must have not been completely drained. As I tossed it, a trickle got on my finger: the quick-hardening amber smear looked more like oil than vinegar.

Then I ran into Lorenzo. “Mr. Tim!” he said, toting a mop and bucket. He stuck out his hand for me to shake.

“Sorry,” I said, “mine’s a little dirty.”

Lorenzo shrugged, thrusting his massive fist at me to bump.

“How about a pound?” he asked.

Suddenly I thought of those idiots at Fox News who disparaged Michelle Obama for her fist-bumping. (Alas, that partisan hole does have an audience—my aunt said one of her tennis partners rejected her fist-bump, explaining, “No, that’s what they do.”)

I met Lorenzo’s fist with mine.

Not everyone is someone you know, of course, much less Lorenzo.

Recently, I was approached by a swami-like fellow. Like Lorenzo, he had a coal-black goatee, with his hair rubber-banded into a ponytail. Unlike Lorenzo, this stranger was not Puerto Rican but Indian. We passed each other on Bedford Street.

Abruptly, the man stopped and turned to face me. He was holding some kind of journal-type volume and, apropos of nothing, said, “You’re a very lucky man.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He stuck out his hand. I paused, shook it once, let go.

“May I read your palm?”

A scam, I thought. “No, thanks. I’m meeting a friend for lunch.”

I tilted my head down the block toward Café Henri.

His eyes were as dark as they were piercing. “Come on, it’ll only take a minute.”

Walking away, I said with a smile, “I can’t, but I hope the very-lucky-man thing still stands.”

The palm-reader continued to stare. Then he marched off in search of another dupe.

Not so the man-child. He just stands in place. It isn’t even clear what he’s selling. God or politics? A new breath mint for test-marketing? Or, perhaps, nothing at all? I would ask him, but I’m in a hurry.

“Hi, have a good day,” I hear him say to another passerby.

“You, too,” says a faint female voice.

The big lug’s so sweet. And so menacing.

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