We think we know ourselves, but do we really? When something surprising happens we often surprise ourselves. So it was with me as I was to find out late one afternoon on the Lower East Side. I used to teach an anatomy and physiology workshop for massage students who were preparing to take their New York State Board Exam. I’d rent a big room for a weekend in the Ukrainian Sports club (the only sport I ever saw there was cards.) For $100, I would run them through their paces over two rather grueling days. I’d get about fifty students, and that was a nice chunk of change in the nineties. As a prop I used a disarticulated skeleton, basically a back pack full of bones. I had a small satchel for the tuition, your basic bag of money. I also had a container of matzo ball soup from the Second Avenue Deli. The Second Avenue Deli isn’t on Second Avenue anymore. Then again, Madison Square Garden isn’t in Madison Square anymore. We do this to confuse the tourists. Why the soup? There was a child coming into our lives, and pregnant women often have peculiar culinary desires. This one was Shelley’s, and since she was bound to do most of the heavy lifting when it came to labor and what not, the least I could do was pick up some soup when I was in the right neighborhood.

I was pretty tired, but feeling ok. I had just finished the workshop. I had a back pack full o’bones, a bag o’money (quite a lot of it), and a box o’soup. There was no reason why the remains of the day shouldn’t be spent in the comfortable embrace of a martini the size of my head. But one should never completely relax in NYC. Anything can happen, and often does. As I walked out the door onto Second Avenue there was a sudden blur five angstroms in front of my nose as someone flew by at about warp eight. As the figure pounded up the block I wondered, “Who is chasing you?” I looked down the block to see none other than my old pal Waldo charging up with a two by four.

Waldo is well over six feet tall with the kind of big bony face you have to have if you are the crazy villain in an old sci-fi movie. He looked nothing if not impressive in the afternoon light, but looks can be deceiving. I knew him to be a fairly reasonable homo sapien and if he was after someone with a two by four, they likely had it coming. He owned Big Bar around the corner. I figured something bad went down in the bar and Waldo was simply displaying his most sincere disapprobation of such. As these wheels were turning in my head what came out of me, in my best Alpha voice was, “Hey Waldo! You want me to get him?” Who said that? That was an unauthorized communication! I’m not getting involved in a bar fight. But as my rational frontal lobes launched an investigation into what vestigial dinosaur idiot neural remnant was responsible for the words coming out of my lips, Waldo roared, “YEAH!!!!” Ours not to reason why. I set out in hot pursuit of the official bad guy.

One might think that encumbered as I was with a box o’soup, a bag o’money, and a bag o’bones I would have trouble overtaking the perp. It was a challenge. The bag o’bones on my back were rattling like castanets and a big bone, probably the femur, worked its way through the top of the bag and was hitting me in the back of the head with every stride. Likewise it is not possible to run flat out and keep the hand that bears the soup perfectly still. After a good fifty yards a froth began to emanate from the top of the box and I had that sinking feeling that one gets as ones balls are disintegrating.

Notwithstanding the impediments, I am in shape, and he, poor fellow, was not. Before we got up to St. Mark’s church

I was close enough to see that he was disheveled in a way that said, “Heroin addict.” In the Lower East Side they were easy to spot as pigeons, and just as common. I have nothing against heroin addicts. Some of my best friends have been heroin addicts, and that is why I have never tried it. I’ve tried other things,  but

:

I have been horrified and saddened at what I have seen it do to people; people I know personally to be a strong and smart. For some of them, it burned their lives to the ground. Others did manage to claw their way out, but none of them emerged from the experience entirely intact.

While sympathetic, it doesn’t mean I want to touch one of them, certainly not as skanky as this guy. However, it is a fact of life that you cannot grab someone without also touching them. I transferred the soup, which was quite agitated at this point, to the money hand and grabbed the assailant by the wrist and brought him to a halt. The two of us then performed what can only be thought of as a sidewalk pas de duex.

Though I had him by the wrist I sure didn’t want to have him any more than that so I was leaning away from him. For his part he was leaning away from me for reasons that are probably obvious to the reader. When two men of about the same size are pulling away from each other it is easy to end up in a bit of a stalemate. This did not work for my partner who lurched sideways. Always the congenial partner I lurched also and the two of us began to orbit around our one point of contact. It was such a natural thing it was hard to tell who was leading. And then came Waldo.

He raised the mighty two by four high over head and arced it down at my partner with the obvious intent of smashing his brains out. It was then that I had a childhood memory. My dad was a cop, and I remember him mentioning at some point that homicide, while often desirable, is a felony, and that I should never do it, at least not in a way that is obvious and discoverable. It occurred to me that the bashing out of brains on the sidewalk was discoverable, maybe even obvious. My good friend Waldo might go to jail, and I did not want that to happen to him. In retrospect, I could have gone to jail too, as an accessory, but my brain was rather busy and hadn’t the time to consider every little ramification of the unfolding drama. I did the second totally unexpected thing of the afternoon. I let go.

When in the course of human events one person dissolves the physical bands connecting him to another, and the two men are leaning away from each other while spinning, the laws of physics take over. We flew apart, the two by four whistling down in the air between us. I fell back until I bounced off a building,

and the junkie staggered into Second Avenue until he bounced off a cop car.

For all the times in my life I have asked, “Where is a cop when you need one?” I must observe their timing was spot on that day. They had seen the altercation and were pulling over to investigate when one half of the altercation came to them. The junkie rolled across the hood, landed on his feet and took off, followed by the NYPD, Waldo, and me. He barely made it to the opposite curb when he fell and several little bags of a highly suspicious nature fell out of his pocket. The Force descended on him pronto.

As they were cuffing him I had another thought. The soup, frothy though it was, could be easily explained; the bag o’bones and the bag o’money not so much. The femur rested affectionately against the back of my head, quite, as it were, out of the bag. I made a gesture of slicking down my hair and forced the femur back in the bag with one suave move just as the constable glanced up. He looked at me quizzically for a moment, but was preoccupied with his new catch. Quick thinking was called for.

“Officers, do you need any assistance?”
“Ah No. No. We got it.”
“Good work. Finish your tour safe. Waldo, see you later.

I departed the scene as fast as discretion would allow. It was only when I got to Astor Place that my legs turned to water. When I got home there was dialog:

“Oh Honey, what happened to my Matzo ball soup? The balls are all dissolved?”
“Oh Honey, it’s a long story.”

Once upon a time, when normal people could still afford to live in the city, there was a neighborhood called the Lower East Side. It was such a dangerous place that it has been disappeared. Developers renamed it the East Village and populated with galleries, college students, tourists, and artisanal coffee shops, artisanal bakeries, artisanal bars, artisanal eateries and artisanal people. Each cup of coffee is hand crafted from beans that are hand-picked by agnostic Jesuits, brought down the mountainside by golden hoofed donkeys, and roasted by NASA scientists. Each pastry is hand crafted by a member of a Coven of Seventy Sisters who had special training in the French Culinary Institute AND the Food Network AND Hogwarts. Each drink is hand crafted by a young, hip guy with a man bun who learned his trade at the University of Porcelain Springs. Each entrée is hand crafted by a master chef who has honed his skill while creating the last five blockbuster restaurants in New York City. Each entrée is hand delivered by a former cast member of Book of Mormon with a five-hundred-watt smile. That same waiter will be happy to point you to an artisanal bank where you can get an artisanal mortgage to pay for all this. Tompkins Square Park is populated by artisanal babies pushed along by their West Indian nannies or occasionally by their designer/banker/lawyer/mother.

This story is not about that place. On the Lower East Side you got a cup of cawfee from the Stage Diner that was later closed when it was discovered they had cut into the utility lines and had been stealing gas for about forty years. You got your pastry standing on line behind a girl with a chain purse and a pit bull so ugly and scary you might rethink the whole need to get a pastry. (In fairness to the pit bull, if approached it would roll over and wag its stump, giving you a big toothy grin, but most people didn’t know that. Her name was Pumpkin.) You ate at Veselka, whose motto is “We serve soup to nuts.” The bars were usually down a flight of grimy stairs which turned out to be immaculate when compared to the bar itself. The banks were robbed. Tompkins Square Park had a permanent homeless encampment complete with tents, lights and appliances which they powered by tapping into the power grid.

You could afford an apartment. You just couldn’t get to it. The sidewalks were awash with trash of every imaginable kind – and bodies. The bodies were at least partially alive. Most days they were the homeless or junkies, but Sunday mornings were special. There was a truly fabulous club, the Saint, on Second Ave and it would discharge its clientele of leather clad gentlemen into the gutter where they would roll around and puke for a while. This was while the Reformed Church across the street was getting out from morning mass. New York has always been a city of contrasts.

Of all the delights of the old days, nothing could match the Beggars’ Market for street theater. It constitited the last stage of trickledown economics; the redistribution of stolen goods. All week long, hard-working burglars, muggers and crack heads would free the citizenry of its possessions, and then fence said items to the secondary markets of electronics stores, pawn shops and jewelery stores – that is those where no one asked too many questions. (The citizenry would fortify its apartments and cars as much as possible. One battleship-gray car had steel grates on its windows and padlocks on its doors. Another relied on advertising. It had a sign on the window: “Doors unlocked, ash tray gone, glove compartment empty, radio gone, spare tire gone, too late.” But you had to watch your strategy. One friend hid his cash under his stereo. This did not work very well.)

Everything that could not be fenced during the week found its way to the Beggar’s Market, a strip of Second Avenue from Sixth Street to St Marks’s place. On Saturday night the homeless/junkie/alkie/merchants would lay out their wares on crushed stove and refrigerator boxes on the sidewalk, entirely blocking entrance to the buildings. To get in you had to tiptoe, through the stereos, to the front door, trying not to throw up, just tip toe, through the evidence, with me. Sometimes I would get calls; “Oh man, I got hit again. They got my tuner. It’s a Denon. If you see it get it back for me.” On my way home I would scan the market to see if I could reacquire stuff – at rock bottom prices. Such a deal! Anything they couldn’t sell, they just left. On Sunday morning Sanitation would come down with a couple of big trucks and throw everything out (except the disco boys.)

On one such early morning, before sanitation had arrived, a cabbie was starting his shift. He pulled over to get a paper, and while walking to the newsstand, tripped over a box. He opened the box and was surprised to find it was full of human heads, individually wrapped for freshness.  He called the police because, as he philosophically observed, “A box of heads is not something you find every day.” The police were nonplussed. From their point of view they were now six bodies short. However, the desk sergeant noticed “New York Eye and Ear Infirmary” on the side of the box. Based on the deduction that a box with a label often comes from the institution on said label, and that the contents in said box might be the property of said institution, he made a call:

“Hello, this is the Ninth Precinct. Is this New York Eye and Ear?”
“Yes it is.”
“We have a box of heads here and…”
“Oh. We’ve been looking for those.”

Sometimes, for teaching purposes, body parts have to be moved among medical institutions, in this case from Valhalla, NY to New York Eye and Ear. You can’t send heads through the mail. I don’t think you can FedEx them either. Ergo the most expedient method of transportation is to give said dead heads to someone-in this case a doctor- who works at both locations to take the heads for a drive. However, at his destination he parked on a local street and left the heads in his trunk. Might as well have gift wrapped them. No one knows exactly how the box ended up at St Marks, but you don’t have to be Benedict Cumberbatch to make a further deduction. A member of the Wealth Redistribution Society broke into the good doctor’s trunk and absconded with the box, heading straight for St. Mark’s Place, happy in the knowledge that fortune smiles upon the bold. You can imagine his disappointment on opening the box at St. Mark’s. He’s probably still running.