R.I.P. BROADWAY STOP BUM

It was the last leg of my evening three mile run, the last ten blocks, the final stretch. The last bit of sunlight splintered and slipped away as I turned the corner of 44th onto Broadway. A cool breeze cut through the thick humidity and I shivered. It was game time. Cue Lady GaGa's PokerFace, and pick up the pace. This is it, this is what we run for. Let's f*cking do this. Gaining speed, I cut through the congested Astoria traffic, weaving around shoppers and loiterers, cutting through the flow of humanity, willing my legs faster and faster, breath quickening, heart pumping. And then I see him.

The Broadway stop bum.

It's odd how the mind works in situations like these. At first, I only saw the crowd of kids. They looked like a group of hooligans from afar, horsing around, making a scene, and I mentally calculated how to dodge them before the catcalls started. Then I saw the man lying spread eagle in the middle of the sidewalk. A black crucifix reaching out, eyes to the sky, palms opened upwards. I stifled a chuckle. Clearly these kids were playing a prank. Look at them all staring, they're laughing at him too. But as I ran up to the scene, I realized no one was laughing. Just staring. A girl clamped a hand over her mouth, as though it prevented herself from coming apart. I stopped in my tracks.

He was dead.

You always think the dead will affect you in some profound, life-altering way. Shock. Disbelief maybe. Sadness. Horror. But it never happens that way. Its just a fact. There is a dead man lying at at my feet. And there's never a question. You never question the dead. You just know. It wasn't the ashy pallor of his skin, or the empty gaze, the dried-out eyes. They may confirm it, but you already knew. You knew in your gut before your brain registered the proof. Its the stillness. The stillness of a human turned object. And all around us, the city kept buzzing, kept whirring like clockwork, dogs barking, traffic horns blaring, children laughing. People kept moving. And I so did I.

I sprinted the last block home.

The Broadway stop bum had been my neighbor for as long as I've lived here. I remember our first encounter -- the summer of '05. I was walking down Broadway, still trying to master my coldass bitch walk, the kind that discourages catcalls and come-ons, but generally looks sexy as hell. I was wearing a short dress and tall platforms, and rocking a killer pair of aviators. I looked good. He was sitting on a red milk crate in front of the corner bodega. I could feel his eyes. I knew it was coming. I walked the concrete like a catwalk, jaw set, eyes forward, all swagger and seething NY attitude. Here it comes.

Hey Baby . . .

I don't flinch.

You want some a this? Come on.

I keep walking.

Come on. I got fooooooood stamps?

I crack a smile.

Yeaaaahhhhhh . . . I know you want 'em. Come on, Baby!

I'm laughing. He's laughing. The entire city block is laughing. All right. A bum with a sense of humor. I dig.

I saw him every day after that. He usually sat on a scrap of cardboard at the top of the stairs wearing a pair of heart-shaped Lolita sunglasses and pink converse sneakers. He was the one who told me It's gonna' be okay when i walked myself home after surgery sans anaesthesia. I saw him suffer through four bitter winters here on the Broadway platform. Some of them I was sure would be his last, but he always made it through. Somehow.


The last time I saw the Broadway stop bum, I was back at the ER at 4AM. Some flagrant kidney infection, if you really care to know. Triage was an absolute nightmare: The fat kid sitting next to me was convinced he had a WhiteCastle burger stuck in his lung, and a sketchy middle eastern man wouldn't stop staring at my tits. I was still in my pjs, which were probably see-through. Come to think of it, that trip to the ER was the first time I saw a dead man. I was being led into a room next to cheeseburger boy, when a nurse wheeled a body by on a gurney. The body was all propped up and zombie-like, mouth stretched open, as though he'd died mid-scream. And I knew. I registered the stillness. The waxy skin. The rigor mortis setting in. Dead man: three o' clock. The nurse wheeled the corpse by and, lo and behold, behind her, snoring loudly on another bed-on-wheels was the Broadway Stop Bum. Muttering, quivering, burbling in the fetal position, his asscrack peering out of a pair of dusty windbreakers. My heart skipped a beat. I could have done a little dance! Ohhh Broadway Stop Bum! So nice to see you! How's life? How's the milk crate? What happened to your shoes, man? It was only a brief moment, but suddenly I knew someone in this godforsaken hellhole. My neighbor. My friend. My Broadway Stop Bum. A nurse covered him up with a blanket, tucking it tenderly in under his chin. He breathed a child-like sigh. Releasing the weight of the world, if only for the night.

It was the last time I saw him alive.

I'm not really sad. Not all that surprised. It's another marker in my history here. May 16, 2009. The day the cat-calls died. The Broadway Stop Bum is dead. Does anybody care? Will people notice that he's gone? If I hadn't gone for my run, would I have even missed him? Where do the bums go when they die? A cardboard box in the sky? Does life as a bum earn you the life everlasting? I don't know, but that's a lot of question marks.

Rest in peace, Broadway Stop Bum. Keep on rockin' those Lolita's.

-WILLA K