The Phone

It sat where it always did, by the lamp in the corner of the TV-room/library. It was a new model, but I still wanted to trace that old pattern on it: 723-5288.
That was E's number, and coming into the house on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, it seemed wild with possibility. A re-connection with her and all my friends, especially in college and immediately thereafter. The phone was a portal that transported me away from Princeton and to the new and better life I had created in DC at the time.
I just called it. The number, said the mechanical voice on the phone, has been disconnected.
That could be the title of my memoirs of the hellish years that have passed like a rushing river since the early 1990s. I am a Dorian Gray that, instead of exploiting my static age, has been ravaged by it. I am starting to grow some gray in my now dark blond/light brown hair.
It should be shock white.

Julie Miller

An old ache re-appeared tonight, and despite the lack of outcome (no pun intended), it's good. There was a girl (definitely young) who looked almost like Julie Miller, whom I had a brief and bad affair with years ago. I looked at her and felt a long-dormant excitement in the loins.
Julie was not beautiful, but cute as hell in that New York Jewish girl way that drove a goy like me crazy. She had gone to Wisconsin with me, and was a self-described "little mouse" at the time. We met again sometime after graduation at a party near Columbia, and experienced a passionate cab-ride home.
We met again a week later, me at a cheap hotel downtown. She was living in Seattle, but was visiting her parents in town. We ended up at that hotel, and I ended up disappointing her. In subsequent communication, I did the male thing and hid in shame, though she seemed still interested.
I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that the girls I was interested in years ago are long gone, and have become mature women. That is what the tapering off of the physical symptoms of anxiety will peal back, and hopefully I can adjust to them. Because I talked to the substitute Julie Miller, and you could see her whipping out the mental wheelchair for me in her eyes. Help me out, Rambler or whoever else reads this page. What's the new age limitations (both up and down)?
(Note to a certain dark-haired minx that sometimes reads this: you are hotter now than ever).

Bullets over Broadway

One of the great Rambler quotes of all time came when the city finally decided to make over Times Sq. He was opposed to it. Why? "Scum have to go somewhere."
Scum made an unwelcome return to the Square on Thursday, when a CD Peddler (read: hustler), was stopped by the NYPD for having no license to sell on the street. The peddler, a 25-year-old dirtbag, was duly seen in a photo with Al Sharpton (a bigger hustler cannot be humanly found)in the NY Post.
To sum up the story, the peddler ran through one of the walkways that take you from the Broadway streetside to a kind of cabbie-arcade entrance midblock at the Marriott Marquis hotel.
A plainclothes cop told the peddler to stop. Instead, the guy whips out a submachine gun that later turned out to have a magazine with 17 bullets in it. The guy gets off two shots, then the gun jammed. The cop then shot the man four times in the middle of Times Square tourists (at about noon) and killed him.
Should this story be read as an example of police over-reaction, it is anything but that. The CD peddlers in Times Square are shakedown artists, pure and simple. They play on the fears of tourists, whom New York needs more than ever right now.
Here's the two big hustles. 1) A guy comes up to you and says he's an up and coming rap artist, signs his name on a worthless CD, then he and his homies surround you. Close, real close, in those menacing extra-large puffy black Michelin tire man jackets. Then they demand $10 for the CD.
2) The friendly approach. The CD has all kinds of fake album-cover art and seems professional. A man says that this is your opportunity to catch a rising talent before anyone else. All this can be yours for the low, low price of $10. Catch him before Wal-Mart does.
The man, 25, was definitely in the first camp. His idiotic raps about killing cops were all over the tabloids yesterday. Hey, Rolling Stone (and Nate Brackett, one of my college editors), here's a moron you can hype as "real" and "from the street!"
The truth is that Times Square is always going to be under siege from the various discontented segments of NY society. Gangs used to go there for initiation wherin you as a prospective member go to mug someone and thus be brought into the gang.
The cops were everywhere in the Square last night, mostly to direct traffic, but also to keep order. Whatever you think of the sanitized new Times Square, the city knows a gold mine (in the form of tourists) when it sees it.
A little irony in this case. When the Marriott decided to put up the Marquis, the Square was still more than a little sketchy. It thus put up a kind of berm on the Broadway side of the building, with the entrance to the hotel mid-block or so. This was to protect tourists from marauding no-goodniks populating the street. You simply caught a cab inside the arcade and went.
These arcades or breezeways or whatever were exactly where the violence went down. Next time try razor wire.