Monday, at about 2:25 in the afternoon, I sat at the counter and immediately felt the stare of an elderly man sitting 3 stools to my left at the far west end of the counter. Yes, he was scrutinizing me, and mumbling things amongst himself and whispering comments to the waitresses.

Believe it or not this kind of thing happens to me with some frequency. I don't know if it is my transparent aloofness, the baggy pants, or my lifelong magnetic attraction to the mentally unstable, but when I walk in public I am often surprised to reach my destination without someone following me or gaping or just taking one look and openly expressing outrage.

I'm under no delusion that this is unique to me, but I'm used to it, and on Monday when the elderly gentleman sat scrubbing his chin analyzing my face and importantly savoring my every movement I simply ignored it and ate my gyro deluxe (no onions) in peace.

But there was something about this guy. He grabbed waitresses by the sleeve and whispered things to them about my shirt. His accent was thick and his fluencies plentiful; when he wandered into English I heard stray words about the coffee stain on my white shirtsleeve, about my bank statement which I was not studying but held studiously in front of my face so as to look busy and remote.

After several minutes he started singing songs. Some were in non-English languages. Others were Mary Hopkin songs I remember from the Danny Stiles show which I listened to at the Parc Lincoln Hotel in 1990 with nothing to pass the days and nights except unanswered phone calls and a clock radio, not to mention the elderly men stationed in the piss-stinking lobby and one of them, early in January, 1991, pointing at me and erupting into impenetrable old-man chuckles.

Then the man at the Asshole Diner sang a song which I definitely recognized:

Goodbye cruel world
I'm leaving you today
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye all you people
There's nothing you can say
To make me change
My mind
Goodbye

I resent the way that song ends, clipped of its final note, as if to draw some kind of parallel between itself and the Beatles' "Her Majesty," from Abbey Road.

He repeated the last lines 10 or more times, dwelling on their sodden-ness and dragging them out for 30 seconds each.

There's nothing you can say

 

 

 

To make me change

 

 

 

 

 

 

My mind

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Goodbye

I almost looked up at him, possibly the only human in his 80s crooning Pink Floyd suicide songs just for the attention.

So on this past Monday my defenses against the man's scrupulous analysis of my facial hair and his genuinely pitiful rendition of "Goodbye Cruel World" almost broke down when, at about 2:40 p.m. he announced that he would leave the place. With some perfunctory fanfare he was quickly outside and walking across town. That was the first time I looked at him. Nothing remarkable to say about his appearance. I can't even describe it, there is just nothing about it that warrants description. His name was Frank Hestor. I know this because he announced it on his way out, but I was ignoring him so vigorously that I might have missed the point of this statement, which was possibly a manipulative lie designed to get some kind of reaction or a late-night phone call from anyone listening.

As the door shut behind him, I don't know where this came from, but I looked at a waitress casting a quaintly desperate look across the diner and then at me. When our eyes met I said "I know what I'll do."

I paid for lunch, and got my camera out of my jacket. The man, Frank Hestor, walked very slowly along 55th Street west toward 7th Avenue. His pace never picked up. I crossed over to the south side of the street and walked quickly ahead of him, then crossed 7th Avenue to the southwest corner and waited until he reached the northeast corner of the intersection.

I took picture after picture after picture of you, Frank Hestor. You turned left on 7th Avenue and made the long walk to Woodstock on 43rd Street, and I was with you every step of the way, knowing for your sake that I might try to be as crazy as you some day. I followed you right to the front door, sometimes coming within a few feet of your face in a vulgar, oblique dance and getting pictures all the while. You made me feel like someone out of a Paul Auster novel, milling anonymously through crowded New York City streets, all of them filled with insane dramas like ours, both of us making uncommitted contact and sorting out the consequences later.

Now it is Tuesday night and I'm sitting at home printing out some of these 137 pictures of you -- and deciding if I want to mail them to you at your hotel with a real suicide note, or hand them to you the next time we're at the Asshole Diner on 6th Avenue.

I'm going to leave that 2nd word from the last sentence as-is. It's a fine, jilted way to say "succumbing."

The last few nights I've hurried home from work to practice music of Alkan. It's funny stuff when you're in the right mood. Ah, Alkan, what a gas.

Of course nothing came of it (huh huh). We did share a dangerous pair of smiles, though; then my mind wandered among the boring reality that it would have been all fucking. When terrifyingly beautiful women like the one on the train tonight pay any attention to me I just assume something is wrong, and I go back to my magazine or my pager.

Which is what I'm going to do right now.