Emma Who Saved My Life Read Free Page B

Pigeon Lady,” said Lisa, familiar already with the locals. “She goes around in the gutters and in the trash cans hunting for bread crumbs for her babies, her pigeons in Father Demo Square.” The woman cackled again, scuffling amid the fluttering pigeons. “And look,” Lisa said, nudging me, “there’s a weird one.”
    This old, grizzled man, like so many of the old downtown bums, a scarecrow-man, tattered clothes, gray with unwashed years of soot and street-sleeping, would go up behind someone and lecture them, yell at them, use impassioned gestures, like a Southern senator, except no sound ever came out—it was just a mute pantomime. If anyone turned around, he mouthed “Sorry” meekly and backed away, only to begin haranguing again. We watched him do this until the man reading a paperback got up and left, irritated.
    â€œYet I don’t feel that sorry for him,” said Lisa, musing. “It’s hard to feel sorry for someone whose delusions are … I dunno, authoritarian. What gets you is someone like Dolly.”
    Eventually I saw Dolly. Dolly was the Queen of the Pathetic, one of the regulars on Carmine Street. She was this obese black woman who searched the trash cans of New York City for tattered dresses— thin women’s dresses, little girl clothes, baby clothes even—and she would parade around, holding her find up, press it to her chest, smooth it out, and stop you as you walked by: “You like my dress, my pretty dress? I’m gonna wear this dress. It’s good on me, my new dress, it looks so good on me. You like my dress?” And so forth. After a month you got used to the sounds under your window, six in the morning, “My name is Dolly and this is my pretty new dress. You like my new dress?”
    Lisa sent up a hand for the waitress again, who turned as Lisa mouthed “Check.” “No tip for you, baby,” said Lisa under her breath. “I learned a lesson the other day,” she went on. “I was on the subway and there was this kid, twenty-one or so I guess, but he looked like a sad twelve-year-old. And as the subway got going under the river to Queens where I was looking for a studio to paint in, he got up and, looking weak and sickly, gave this speech: ‘I’m Tim and, like, I’m a heroin addict and, like, it happened in Vietnam and I’m sorry about it but I gotta ask you people for money ’cause, well, like, I gotta eat and, you know, get some stuff. I don’t wanna commit no crimes or nuthin’…’ Gil, I tell you, my guilty white bourgeois heart went out to this kid and I dug deep and gave him a dollar and I looked around me, and all these cold bastard New Yorkers weren’t even looking or listening, pretending he wasn’t there. When they looked they looked at me as if I was the weird one for giving him money.”
    Well it’s a jungle out there.
    â€œYeah right,” she said, rolling her eyes, “and that kid was a con, because last week I saw him again doing a routine about being thrown out of retarded school and his mother being sick and in intensive care and how he can’t take care of his mama. I mean, if you didn’t know, this stuff would break your heart. This one woman across from me just coughed up a handful of coins. I was thinking, hm, first week in town, huh?”
    Strange city.
    â€œThis town,” she said lighting cigarette number three, “particularly the crime, the streetcrud harassing you, the panhandlers and the goddam hippie leftovers—it gets to you, as you trudge back from your $2.50 an hour job, you know? If you stay here long enough, you wanna form a vigilante squad, you want Dirty Harry to come clean the streets. You’re ready for a Goldwater comeback.”
    Now now.
    â€œThree months ago I was a McGovern Liberal. I would have given my body to Eugene McCarthy. Now I sound like my mother back in