Fantastic Metropolis

Roller-bladed men and women, their elbows, knees and backs cushioned by colorful materials, weaved and threaded their way among the waiting traffic, mounting sidewalks, crossing intersections, their heads thrust forward to challenge any obstruction and their faces into the wind.

Matt turned to look down the street.

On the hoarding fronting the park, a young man climbed a tented ladder spreadeagled across the sidewalk to replace a billboard poster piece by piece, the wind one minute ballooning his jacket and pants and the next flattening the garments against his skin, as though all the air had been removed.

The meteorlogical pundits had been predicting bad weather for days but the most that the elements seemed to to have been able to muster was a wind that managed to come, in intervals of mere minutes at a time, from every direction and then none at all. The wind was as playful as a puppy, taking discarded bags and wrappers—and an occasional beret of Fedora—in its maw and whisking them first one way and then another before abandoning them within tantalizing reach of their owners before lifting them up again to someplace else.

Matt studied the man on the ladder as he finished smoothing down the errant edges of what appeared to be sand bedecked with glittering jewels. For some time, the image of this poster would make no sense to the man: it was only when, much later, he would stand back and survey his finished handiwork that he would finally see The Big Picture. Despite himself, Matt smiled. The man would be looking forward to that, and probably to lunchtime, and maybe to the evening, when he could have a beer or maybe two on the way home, forgetting the posters and their strange image of sand and jewels and worlds he was not really privvy to… despite what the ad men would have him believe.

As though sensing someone watching him, the man turned around and looked down at the sidewalk, first one way and then the other. He stretched his back and flexed his muscles, yawning, the wind momentarily causing him to grasp the wooden surround at the base of the billboard. Then, having regained his stability, he unscrewed a thermos and poured steaming coffee into a plastic beaker while he checked his watch.

Matt did the same.

Almost 9.25.

Replacing the thermos cap, the man looked down at the street below… just one street of the many hundereds—maybe thousands—that threaded their way around and about Manhattan, while his hair waved first to one side and then the other.

Now, along those same streets once trodden by Henry Ward Beecher and William Cullen Bryant and Horace Greely, new people would be venturing.

Now, at the same intersections and park entrances passed maybe only yesterday by Ed Koch or Woody Allen or Jimmy Breslin, different people would be moving into the game to fill the gaps left by office and shop workers.

These people were different because, for the most part, they wanted to be different. These were the tenement dwellers, denizens of occasional housing projects and the homeless.

The city held a soft spot for these street people. Sometimes it talked to them, whispering their names out of brown paper bags that smelled of cheap liquor, making rash promises in exchange for even rasher acts, calling them to its dust- and cigarette-butt-festooned skirts where the buildings met the ground and where, if one were careful and not too demanding, one could find protection of a kind and a sense of temporary well-being.

One of them crossed the street directly beneath the scaffolding where the young man was busy attaching the second large square of the billboard poster. He stopped for a few seconds in the middle of the street, staring up either at the poster-hanger or the poster itself, and then crossed over to the coffee shop down from Matt’s apartment house.

Matt hoped the man would enjoy his breakfast and then, frowning, wondered where the thought had come from, thinking why should he care anything about the man or about anyone else for that matter. Maybe it was because every breakfast should be savored, and every coffee and every breath of air and—he watched the young man on the scaffolding—and every poster hung on billboards throughout the land, bringing color to every highway and interest to every journey. Every action and every experience was special.

To Matthew Blenheim, everything was special.

His home on the once fashionable Washington Square area of downtown Manhattan—a special city if ever there was one—was a three-flight walk-up situated between on MacDougal Street, just around the corner from Bleecker, where many years ago the young tow-headed Bob Dylan had arrived from Minnesota to play the Village coffee houses.