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July 5, 2000
mark thomas On Sunday, I was walking from the Duane Reade on 57th Street between 6th and 5th to Studio 54 at 254 West 54th Street. I had just downed a bottle of grapefruit juice and 2 Tyenol when I stepped onto a subway grate near the corner of 56th and 6th. A gust of filthy wind wafted up from the subway as the N/R train entered the 57th Street station beneath my feet. On the surf of that filthy wind flew some tiny thing that flew straight into my face and down my throat like it was a parking garage. I don't know if it was a maggot or a mosquito or just a big wad of rat lice, but whatever it was it sailed straight down the shoot like it had a map. My eyes watered and the taste of the grapefruit juice that I drank minutes earlier returned. In denial of the fact that I had to barf, I made it as far as the Ziegfeld Theater before evacuating the maggot (and the orange juice, and the Tylenol). What to me was just a little spurt of vomit was, to the maggot (or the mosquito, or the fly, or the bird, or the cow, or the horse), a torrential explosion of biological terror, and that sorry maggot must surely have perished in the avalanche of my bodily acid. A group of 10 people stood about 3 feet away from me when this happened. They were lazy, affluent whites with Gap shorts and leather sandals. As I lurched toward them they expectantly looked at me. But when the vomit flew they turned away from me. Moments later I wanted to stop these people and explain that I was not a wino. But there was no point, and after 1 second of public vomiting I did not really care that much what anyone else thought. On the morning of the first full day that I lived at the Parc Lincoln Hotel in 1992, I opened the front door of the building and stepped out onto West 75th Street to see the gaping anus of a man at the moment he began performing an extravagant bowel movement right onto the sidewalk. I think of that man's ass as if it was trying to tell me something, as if it had the happy smile of a lunatic across it while fluffy, angry feces powered out of it like cold vomit. Minutes after barfing outside the Ziegfeld I met friends who were in town for the weekend and we saw Cabaret at Studio 54. (The main cast was fine, but the busty Kit-Kat dancers ranged from average to poor.) (Not that I am any kind of expert on busty Kit-Kat dancers.) (Actually, only one or two of them were what I would define as "busty.")
That was Sunday. Tonight it is Wednesday. I saw the Tall Ships yesterday. The crowds at the Hudson riverside were so sparse that I thought I was in the wrong town on any other day. I didn't know there was to be a B-52 bomber over the Hudson, otherwise I'd have gotten out there a little earlier. On the walk from the Times Square subway station to the Hudson River I saw a woman installing leather cushion material on top of tree stumps on 42nd Street. She had a bodyguard (or maybe it was just another gawker), so as much as I wanted to talk to her about the idea of relegating trees and bushes to furniture, I did not stop to talk to her about what she was doing, lest her bodyguard kick my sorry ass. I find that people with anything worth saying are the ones least likely to want to spend any time talking with strangers about their work, so they set up the most interference either in the way of live ass-kicking bodyguards or apathetic piss and bile that showers itself everywhere. I also find that I have to go to sleep.
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