New York II

On my way to the park this afternoon to jumprope (1100 times now!), I passed the old man that makes mosaics all over the East Village. He must have been here for years, maybe even decades. I remember seeing him years ago when I lived on 12th street, he used to sit quietly for hours and painstakingly glue pieces of broken plates and glasses and fruit bowls to government-standard public items. No St. Mark's space was safe; he gleefully attacked every lampost, planter, mailbox -- even designated squirrel homes were littered with multicolored broken remains. No doubt this added some pretty significant points to the charm factor of a regularly urine-scented street, but who knows if he was ever recognized for the sacrifice.

One morning when I walked by, he was sitting on the front stoop of his building, screaming. He had been evicted. Evicted from maybe the only home he has ever known. And he was screaming, long white hair streaming in the summer breeze, screaming. The rest of St. Marks was silent. No one quite knew what to do about our little mosaic artist who had been such an institution. And here, the street he had worked so hard to make beautiful was kicking him out.

I walked by, rubber-necking a bit at the wild man gesticulating across the street. In the following years I thought of him often. Did he ever make it back into his apartment? Did he fight the good fight, come out alive at the other end? Or did he unclimactically move his tattered couch down the five flights of steps to the ground level and find that there was nowhere else to go?

As I mentioned, I saw him again this morning. He's been living under this blue tarp in front of the Holyland Market on the corner of St. Marks and A. With homeless people its pretty hard to tell sometimes if they really are crazy or just down-trodden. In this case, it may be a little bit of both. He's been working so long with broken pieces maybe he just gradually became a piece of his own work.

Anyway, I think he got evicted again. Some young guys in boots were taking down the scaffolding that held up his tarp. I don't know where he can go now. He might actually have to leave 8th street, and it seems like that for him would be a fate worse than death. I wondered sometimes why he picked that spot, of all places. There's a couple planters right there and I'm thinking now that maybe one of them was his favorite of all time, and he just couldn't be without it.