sawed off

New Yorkers always seem boastful of "their" crazy people. In absence of smiling neighbors or kids playing stickball in the street, people on their way to work instead adopt the muttering schizophrenic by the corner store, the panhandler who works the 1 train at the same time each night, or the godawful John Mayer impersonator on the subway platform downtown. Last summer I would see the same bedraggled panhandler doing the same schtick, asking everyone on the train for money and eventually falling to his knees for effect. It was moving the first few times, obviously, but you have to figure the sincerity lets up around the fifth repetition.

I now work just south of Union Square, which features a maze of a subway stop with exits all over the damn place. Take the right turn and you wind up in front of the Virgin megastore; one bad judgment, however, and you're in the park surrounded by a farmer's market, sent through a wormhole to the Catskills.

This morning I got off the N train and stepped up into the maze, for the first time in weeks completely disoriented. At 8:55 a.m., disoriented is not a thing you want to be in a subway station-- you will get run over by kind of crazy people who wield Starbucks cups and pashminas instead of tattered flannel shirts. I turned around a few times and located myself, finally realizing the reason for my confusion: my saw player was missing. The guy who is in the Union Square station every day, after the pan flute player I think, warbling on a saw. He was gone, and without him, I was lost.

Maybe next time I should tip the guy, being my North Star and all, but that would probably ruin my cred with the other commuters. While you always fear that your local schizophrenic will fuck you up if you cross him, it's the middle managers with the spike heels I fear most.