Wintertime In New York

The SHOUT OUT was good.

It seems to be doing quite well. The attendance is up, people are still enjoying themselves. We're still keeping it raw. Things are beginning to look up. Even Cyndi Lauper is behaving nicely. What more can I say about something that I like doing?

THIS: I get on the subway early, thinking that it may take me a little under an hour to go there. I hop on the 1 train, which is a local, and bobble and buck down every station there is in New York to get to the 14th Street Station. I switch from there, and take a long walk down a corridor to the L train which takes me across town to the 3rd Avenue Station, which is just a few blocks from Otto's.

Now consider this a cold fucking day, and I get to Otto's a full twenty minutes before 4:00PM; what am I supposed to do? Go into Kennedy Fried Chicken and get my ass some chicken wings, of course.

This I do, and sit down on the stool there to eat. I stay in this nice warm environment until 4:00 sharp, where I finish my meal and head back outside, hoping that the bartender has opened up. But in fact, no, she hasn't. So I'm left standing in the cold, and much of it by myself, until D2theL and my brother came walking up; And then others after that. I'm still out there shivering like a frozen turkey though. I was grateful when Cyndi Lauper did arrive and let us in as she opens up. Damn, it was cold outside.

Yes this is wintertime. Already. And the bad thing is that the year is far from ending and the new one beginning. That means, the cold weather has not even begun dealing with us. Last year we had an Indian Summer. This year the arctic shuffle. I will not lie to you. I'm happy that I'm in a room with four walls and terrific heat, and I do mean terrific. No shit, It's hotter than a disco in Brooklyn. I open the window but there is no cool breeze coming in to chill out the joint.

I brought fried chicken home and microwaved it to it's original delicious- ness, fucked around online, and then hit the damn hay. The refrigerator and the steam pipe lolling me off to sleep with their noises. I slept hard, solid, like the dead.

ONLY to wake up to the fire alarm. I sat still for a moment, looking around, listening for the voice to say that this is a drill. It never came. I slipped out of bed and got dressed to the smell of smoke. Now I was getting worried. I thought to stop and pack up my baby first. Then I thought, I had better see the extent of this fire before I start doing anything rash. Basically, if fire is leaping around the cracks and crevices of the wall, I'm not going to pack up shit! I'll just snatch my baby.

I enter the hall cautiously, look both ways and see the commotion on my left. Further down the hall, in front of the elevator, is a burning garbage can being tended to by two of the tenants. They are going back and forth between the bathroom and the fire, each holding a saucer full of water, dumping it on the fire. I blink at this. What the fuck is wrong with these two morons? There is a perfectly good FIRE EXTINGUISHER on the floor right in front of the elevator.

I walk up to grab the extinguisher just as the aged brain deficient one reaches into the fire and pulls out the offending, burning item. It is a hoodie, eaten away by the fire from the bottom up, and still burning. The old man runs with the hoodie into the bathroom and throws it into the sink where the other tenant fireman drowns it with water from the sink.

Now, watching these two idiots put out a fire is exactly how fires engulf buildings, I thought to myself. What if this old man's shirt caught fire and he went running up and down the hall like a lit matchstick? The other tenant running behind him with a saucer filled with water to put him out. If it wasn't so tragic, it would be Benny Hill laughable, with the music and all. I check everything to make sure that these yodels DID put the fire out, before planning to go to my room. That's when I heard the fire trucks. Good, the professionals were coming.

The old man is standing there, panting, hands on hips. "We got it," he says. You got it alright. I walk off, back to my room. Paula is standing outside her door, across from mine. As I approach her the old man comes running. He stops at a door to the immediate right of mine. "OH SHIT, I locked myself out!" I look. I thought that that was a closet. It's an apartment adjacent to mine. Shit! There goes my island paradise!

"The Coordinator was looking for you!" Paula tells me. I turn to her, yeah? She came?
Paula's focus is down the hall, to the burnt garbage can. "What's going on?" There was a little fire. Those two 'firemen' took care of it.

"Ahhhh, " the old man sighs, opening his door. "I didn't lock myself out."
"Yeah," Paula pipes up again. "She came last night looking for you." I back into my room, she does the same. How are you liking it, I ask. "I love it, but I'm bored as Hell. All I do is sleep. I'm getting a television next week." You are? "Yeah, they have cable here." I nod. The only use I would have for cable is to hook up a router to it and surf the web. That's an idea. "I'm going back to bed," she tells me.

I hear that. Me too. I close my door. I don't want to hear about some woman going to bed. I know we're neighbors but enough is enough. I sit at my desk, munching on a bowl of cereal and trying to get @home to come up again. It's a cantankerous signal today, going in and out, fucking with me by dropping my connection arbitrarily. I give up after too long a pause and crawl back into bed.

I'll get up later and head for the Big House.

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