Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Meatwalker
I’d gotten an express bus downtown that morning, so my ride in was fast and furious and I got out as early as possible so I could walk the rest of the way in the open air. Those BX drivers are crazy bastards and I didn’t like rolling with them any longer than necessary; if I didn’t dawdle when they let me out, I could usually even beat the bus to its last stop at the foot of Drumm Street. Plus, it gave me a chance to do the sidewalk fandango with all the other folk strolling the financial district at 9 a.m. It’s always an interesting crowd and I really don’t get out much most days, so on those occasions that I’m lucky enough to catch a fast ride downtown on the BX, I always also look forward with enthusiasm to walking the rest of the way to my office.
Thus: I was hoofing my way in off the BX from Bush and Monty and I’d established a good crowd-cutting clip. If I walk with sufficient purpose, a lot of people just get out of my way. I was slicing along easterly on Bush and I’d gotten to Treasury Alley just off Market Street, when I noticed her. She didn’t look like she was going to get out of my way.
She wasn’t doing anything. She was just standing there, looking cool and glamorous and utterly above it all. She wore a black suit over a white shirt with a black ribbon at her neck; straight black hair framed her classically-proportioned face and black modern-chic bugeye sunglasses shielded her against the sunrise at her back. She was dressed both a little warmly and a little coldly – warm for the bright morning, but in clothes that seemed to render her frigid, austerely elevated, distinct from the rest of us, like a crystallized peak of black ice presiding over the rubble-strewn glaciers of street traffic. She just stood there.
And then I saw that above which she was elevated, lying in the alley directly in front of her: a man stretched out on his belly. His arms curled up toward his head and his feet splayed broadly on the blacktop behind him. He lay right in front of her, perpendicular to the alley, and rather than walking around him, she simply stood and waited for her path to clear. Actually, I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on.
I walked closer and the clues grew more confusing. She had a black silk umbrella, but it was a sunny day and the umbrella looked broken beside her – its bowl was bent up and out, away from her face. No, wait – the umbrella was clamped to a metal stand, carefully pointed away from her. She stood stock-still, not moving at all, even though the workwhistle crowd surged and seethed around her. Her hand was frozen at her hip - she was holding a black leather leash, which dropped to the sidewalk beside her, so far down that she could only have attached to it a weiner dog or some such.
The man lying in the street – he didn’t look like a wasted vagrant. His shoes weren’t ruined and torn, they were fairly new; his pants looked clean. His hands at his head - they held a big Hasselblad. Okay then: He was a photogrpaher, shooting a model from an extreme geoproximate angle. Or, no, he was not photographing her - he was focused on the dog. I had drawn close, the crowd between us thinned. Her dog was not a dog. Rather: at the end of the leash, resting quietly on the pavement in the morning clear, was a raw rump roast, all silverskin and congealing blood and glistening carnality. The photographer was shooting a lot of film as I walked past the lump of raw fatty flesh, and the beautiful woman to whom it was attached. Then I went on to work.
That’s why I like this town, really. Any day, your commute might just take you right past a model walking her meat. And that’s the sort of image a person like me likes to keep very clearly in mind. After all, we’re all walking our meat, each of us, in our own special way. I know I am.
