Poem/Five Men Who Take a Chance at Pins
Zwaska, James
assed, and there was still no train. John asked if we should get a car. "One of the surface crime cars?" I asked. I hoped that they wouldn't get one, as it would likely mean that I would lose...
...14th and Sixth, where all the homeless sleep, you can't even sit on the stairs...
...I tell them to send it to the mayor...
...You see them go by, dragging pieces of pizza...
...The call was so sudden and insubstantial that John told me it might have been a fake...
...I hoped that they wouldn't get one, as it would likely mean that I would lose them...
...But they said he didn't cut me bad enough for a felony assault charge, and the guy was on the streets four days later...
...No...
...Some guys are too good, speeding and going through red lights...
...A call for a cat on the tracks brought us down into the Delancey Street station...
...34th Street, when they closed it for a while after a rape...
...I've taken cabs, hearses, UPS and delivery trucks, regular cars off the street...
...But no second call came...
...Well, it seems to be kind of an occupational hazard these days," said Timmy in a tone of mild annoyance...
...The only problem I've ever had was with taxis, but I take them 95 percent of the time, and 95 percent of them have been great...
...He pointed to a three-inch slash on his biceps...
...He says—it was a robbery—`Gimme your off-duty gun, I'll go down with you!'"of sleep between shifts on benches at the back of the station, the nighttime traffic of vermin makes it an unrestful place to lie down...
...The rats ran around like they belonged there...
...I got this last year...
...When I had asked John and Tara for the worst rat stations, the answers quickly escalated into a spirited bidding war: "The tunnels in Grand Central—forget about it...
...We'll commandeer one...
...But far more common than physical attack are ferocious assaults on the senses...
...a smart crook might put in an emergency call to concentrate the cops in one area...
...About sixty people a year are run over by trains...
...There are a few suicides and an occasional murder, and kids fooling around are knocked from the platforms or fall between cars...
...While the removal of animal carcasses falls under the jurisdiction of the TA, "any [human] body parts found shall/must not be handled and should be reported to the Transit Authority Police...
...We were unable to find it, and John said, "If it went into the tunnels, the rats ate it by now...
...You can be arrested if you refuse...
...Yeah, I think we should," I suggested...
...The chance of running into the cops in the place he hits is therefore substantially reduced...
...Even at the district, where cops can grab an hour or two The American Spectator May 1992 35...
...The most perfunctory of panhandlers worked the opposite platform, mouthing "Money, please," in a tepid monotone...
...But most are among the benighted legions of schizophrenics and junkies who might roll over in bed, or walk in their sleep, or never really wake up to begin One night on a robbery stakeout on the Lower East Side, I asked John and his partner, another young buff named Timmy, about a 26-year-old cop who was profiled in the Times after having been stabbed for the third time...
...There are some semi-permanent camps, with populations of a dozen or more living in relative comfort, with televisions, hot plates, and refrigerators run on electricity pirated from the third rail...
...One guy scared me, I was gonna make him let me get out...
...103rd and Lex, easy...
...Sometimes cabbies run the meter...
...You can commandeer a vehicle in any emergency situation," John explained...
...The report had been phoned in to 911, quickly and without elaboration...
...It was a Friday night, and the temperature on the streets was over ninety degrees...
...Except for the cops, the station was empty...
...But most of the casualties are homeless people who live in the tunnels—between five hundred and two thousand of them...
...Alas, the train came before anyone could answer, and we arrived back at Delancey Street within a minute...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
