Constant as the stars
(Editor’s note: Hoboken is the name given to the Linden Avenue Hill in Troy, NY)
Walking down Hoboken for years, a dark figure headed down against the sparse traffic. A healthy stride carrying and drinking a Stewart's coffee. An apparent stop on his daily journey. I got to see his face only once, later in the day on a downtown street. By the way he was dressed, he looked like a fighter that did a bit of losing. Yet for several years, he was as constant as the stars as the early morning sky at 5:40 a.m. headed down to I never found out where.
The long greasy-haired man, always on the west side of the street, always wearing a baseball cap and carrying his Coca Cola lunch bag over his shoulder, was constant on First Street. I would see him next, after the man who walked a whippet through the Ida Street darkness at approximately 5:43 a.m. The Asian women who picked the alleys and main streets on the days the garbage men were scheduled. The younger one cleaned up nicely. But when they worked, and work they did, their dress reminded me of two wild and crazy guys from Saturday Night Live, with the hats and all. Somewhere I have a photo I took of them, headed away down an alley. Just across the street from where these women seemed to work from, was a bus stop with a winter figure inside that looked like the tin man from the Wizard of Oz with a shiny silver jacket hat and, at times, pants. A dim figure back against the wall who waited daily for her bus to go to work somewhere in the north part of the city. She was there for about two years and then disappeared. Lights coming on in the steady flow into the Hess Express gas stop just before the Menands bridge. The old looking shabby bearded bottle man patrolled the bridge area and highway. I believe he was homeless and seemed to appear from near the county jail.
Across the river and into Menands, two cars whose drivers pulled together so they could speak out of their driver's side windows and drink coffee with their lights on park are a constant at the corner Mobil mart. Within the past two years, two men lost their lives attempting to steal copper from what appeared to them to be a de-energized electrical substation at the vacant industrial building. Neither of them made the news.
(One day the power company got a call and said that a man walked into a wire and was down on the ground and got burned. So they sent two guys to check for the wire and they couldn't find any wire there. So they went to the house of the guy who called and the guy answered the door. His hands were burned, feet burned. They took him to the hospital and he died. And they realized he was stealing copper wire. About three months later, working in the substation in Menands, they heard the breaker in the substation, and they looked out and saw a guy stagger out in the street and hit the grass and die.)
Always try to keep the speed limit this time of day and see the police car from your left periphery sitting at several spots along Broadway. The Dunkin' Donuts lights come on about this time while up on the hill Mr. Wonderful has already done several reps before he goes to the gym. Lucky he has Shelly to build a fire under his ass to get him moving. People out in the road, looking North for the bus they await. Colder this morning than usual in the fall morning air. Two people at a bus stop far away, not speaking.