Tuesday, October 08, 2002

When the Streetlights Started Going Out

It was autumn; night came early.  We were roaming Greenwich Village, college sophomores who knew not their limitations nor believed in any.  I had never seen the City, but Barry’d been there once or twice, and his buddies really seemed to know their way around. I was straining to receive the maximum in stimulation – visual, auditory, tactile, anything. The wind was chilly on my face, but I was warm from the inside out.  I waited at a corner.  Old buildings stood around me, marching lockstep in every direction into eventual dusky dark.  The streetlights were on and I loitered beneath one, waiting for my group to regroup. 

The lightpole seemed to me so typical of that metropolis: tall and thick, showing age and rust through tired paint but still so solid as to have an air of permanence, as if it had been standing there when Gotham was no more than muddy meadows, as if it would stoically remain well after all the masonry and concrete towers looming in the night were empty, crumbled, ultimately leveled by entropic forces, the streetlight persevering, aloof and alone, as the island reverted to a state of nature. 

In the meantime, I stood beneath its glowing orb, traffic speeding by in nearly random patterns, strangely broad sidewalks inviting my wanderings in all the directions at once. 

All this rumination took barely a moment as I waited – then my friends joined me, cruising forward into the night.  I slapped the side of the lightpole as I moved on with them, gloved hand landing flatly on weathered metal.  The sensation I felt was solid and comforting; the sound was deep and resonant.  The light itself went out – extinguished at the moment I made contact with the pole.  I looked up and saw the glass dome fading, red to brown to empty glittering black.  We laughed and left it behind us. 

We wandered the streets for an hour or two, eating and visiting places to buy things.  Eventually, we went into a drugstore some distance from the streetlamp that I’d whacked.  Someone needed toothpaste, and my cohorts filtered down the densely laden aisles while Barry and I waited up near the checkout, watching traffic churn along the street outside. 

A man walked in and confronted me.  He wore a tan trench coat, a stained fedora, old unpolished shoes; his face was grizzled and unshaven.  “You the guy who knocked that streetlight out on Seventh?” His chin bristled as it jutted out at me.  Barry went intensely still – the stillness of cornered prey.  I looked the stranger up and down and answered, “Yes.” “The cops are looking for you, kid.” His cheeks then rounded just a little; hard eyes glittered with unseasonable warmth.  He backed out of the shop without another word. 

Barry grabbed my shoulder.  “We’ve got to get away from here,” he muttered.  “They are looking for you.”

“No, they’re not,” I assured him.

“But that guy just told you that they were,” he replied with urgent tension. 

“That was a joke.  We’re cool.  Be mellow,” I advised him. 

Barry shook his head and grimaced, going on about our doom: separate jails, separate states… But when we finally emerged into the cold night air and saw the whole world swirling round us, laughing and drinking and running amok in a million directions, even Barry realized that there would be no manhunt.  My misdeed would go unpunished.  To this day I bear the onus of malicious mischief. I remain the man who killed the light on Seventh.  But in that city of unending action, one less light, I think, was hardly noticed.