Penn Station Salvation

It's getting warmer at Penn Station
I sit down outside the 7th Ave. end of Penn Station, and start drinking my coffee.  A street person surrounded by bags is chattering away, chipper as hell, as if his brain was just sprayed with happy juice.  He asks if I want to join him at Heavenly Burgers, his treat!  He launches into a glowing description of Heavenly Burgers, like a radio ad.  I smile but ignore him.

Then a kid in a red t-shirt walks up, with a plastic-sleeved Metrocard hanging "ID style" from his neck, always a bad sign.  He says his name is Jason and he's come with a group from Texas to pray for New Yorkers (15 more red shirts are working the area).

I ask "Don't you have enough sinners in Texas?"  He says "Yeah, but don't you need a prayer -- for money, a job, for something -- or is life really so great you can't use one?"

I say "No thanks" again, then point at Mr. Heavenly Burgers and say "How 'bout him?"

I try to not eavesdrop as the two go back and forth for the next ten minutes, but I learn that Mr. Heavenly's real name is Bam-Bam and that he's not married to the idea of Heavenly Burgers, as he tries every debate trick he can think of to get Jason to transform the water of prayer to wine, or at least food or cash.  The exchange seems to end in a draw, with both of them moving on to more promising pasture.

"How 'bout him?"... I love it when my brain does exactly what it should, even before the coffee crop-duster has sprayed its dead gray rows of cotton with happy juice!

Meanwhile, a block away on 8th Ave., an old man in a red
striped shirt airs himself out under the water tank crown

Why I Love Starbucks

I was sitting near the window at Astor Place Starbucks when a wide blond woman stabbed me with her large pointed bag as she squeezed by, scouting for a table.  She inspected and rejected the one in front of me, then finally settled on the one just behind me.

A few minutes later, her lady friend brings back their coffee and a pastry, which has not been warmed to the blond's satisfaction.  She takes it to the counter, and when she gets back she's fuming because the counter people were "rolling their eyes."  Her friend warns her to calm down, "this is a nice place" she says, but the blond's still agitated and warns she's ready to "jump over the counter and f*ck them up."

Then she takes in her surroundings and stage whispers "this place is so middle class," like it smells funny.

A few minutes later, after she's related how she's afraid to get into the shower at home, and how all the hooks she puts in the wall fall off... after the coffee and pastry's kicked in... she's in a lot better mood.

Surviving Siberia in Starbucks

One brutally cold day a few weeks ago, I stopped at the sidewalk grate above, on the side of the Municipal Building downtown, and felt heat rising -- from the portal to Hell below Bloomberg's office at City Hall, or maybe the Brooklyn Bridge subway station.

I thought it would be a good idea to make a Google Map of every heat vent in the city, in case I find myself living on the street.  I submitted the idea to Central Processing and fell back on my default strategy for cold -- walking faster.

Then I saw a guy in the Astor Place Starbucks a few days ago, methodically eating his way through a packaged, pink 12" x 12" frosted cake, dense as cheesecake, that he'd cut into a grid but not separated.  I would guess there were 10,000 calories of sugar and fat in that pinkness.  He was eating it with rapid, efficient strokes, shoveling coal into the furnace.

I stared for a whole minute, wondering if he would come up for air.  He didn't bother with air or coffee, and I didn't notice a coat.  By the time he finished the cake, he would have enough stored potential heat -- like a bear burpingly full of seal fat -- to make it to another deli in his t-shirt and buy another cake, then find another Starbucks to sit down in, and shovel that cake into the furnace.

And so on and so on...

With hundreds of Starbucks in NYC, and enough valiant delis holding-on in the chainstore wasteland in between, I see no reason why -- like a charmed hummingbird flying across Siberia -- he won't last until spring.

Sounds like he's got a much better plan than mine!

Mad Style

I couldn't resist taking these pictures, exploitative or not.  It was pretty obvious he was out of his mind, but he seemed to be in a good mood.


(I guess it's considered bad taste to even mention the fact that crazed people wander the streets; we'd rather act like they're invisible -- and let them range "free" -- than make hard, expensive decisions.)

At any rate, he had enough sense of self to dress in this striking black outfit -- somewhere between ninja and nun -- that seems to be made of umbrellas.

Grate Fishing

I finally captured the elusive subway grate fisherman in the act yesterday across from Union Square; closeup of his tackle on the right.