Gladys the Great: An Unlikely New York Treasure

A hot afternoon summer afternoon on Broadway in Soho during a street fair. 

There she sat each day, sometimes on an upturned bucket, sometimes right on the pavement, sometimes leaning against the hot dog or gyro stands, a rare non-moving object in the middle of my mornings several days each week. Most of the time she had a little portable radio with her, worn and held together with ragged bits of electrical tape, plugged directly into her brain with stringy little cords that resembled the tail of a subway rat. She had a pleasantly round face, with the evidence of decades worth of smiles left behind in the lines around her eyes and mouth. Everything about her was a bit round, especially her shiny cheeks that always were covered in a thick veneer of rouge. It seemed that her sole occupation in this world was to sit and exist on the corner of 31st street and 8th avenue, keeping watch over the commuters emerging from Pennsylvania Station. 

I'd pass her by on my way to and from work. After noticing her there consistently for several weeks, I would start making a point to look for her each time I'd pass that particular street corner. Of all the mundane things I'd see each morning, she was the event I looked forward to. Not knowing her actual story, I'd invent narratives about her in my head that were derived from my 45 second glimpses of her. I decided with her enormous eyes and her colorful face, she must have a name like Gladys. It had to be a name with the same level of personality she exuded without even trying. I could imagine her in the Old West entertaining gentlemen of questionable morals in a smoky saloon, thick with the smell of whiskey and tobacco, accompanied by an out of tune piano played by a bald man in a straw hat. She’d come down a splintered staircase in a flashy gown with feathers and rhinestones. In my head, she would sound something like Mae West, but perhaps with a touch more sweetness. She would be "Lady Gladys:" a real classy dame. Of course her fame among cowboys and criminals would be known for miles around. I'd paint these little images in my head as she sat with her legs sprawled out in front of her on the dirty sidewalk, exposing a well-fed belly and a partiality to elastic waist bands attached to garishly colored knit leisure pants, or sometimes unfortunate leggings that made her look like she was trapped in sausage casings. Then the street light would change, and I'd be thrust back into to the race of getting to my office before 9:00, which has always been an immense challenge for me. 

There would be days when Gladys didn't show up. I wondered where else she could possibly be. Was she homeless? Was she just some sort of eccentric? Was she a method actress getting into character, or perhaps someone conducting social research experiments? I could not figure out which seemed to be the most likely, for they all seemed to be equally plausible scenarios. She appeared to be clean, or at least recently bathed. She had all of her teeth which were sometimes very visible when she would fall asleep with her gaping mouth open, her head resting against the menu for lamb over rice and falafel on the side of the food cart. She could afford batteries for her hand held radio and as far as I could tell her wardrobe, although somewhat limited, did vary slightly from sighting to sighting. Gladys was a mystery to me, and I liked that.

There were weeks when she was there every day both in the morning and the evening, and then there were times when she would disappear for a week or two. Each time I'd pass her little corner, I'd anxiously search for her. She brought a strange sense of comfort and continuity into my life. If Gladys was there in the morning, the day had potential and possibility. If she was missing, it was as though she'd taken a necessary piece of my day with her. I know it's probably not healthy to let a stranger with whom you've never even exchanged a single word become such a significant part of your life, but Gladys began to seem more than a stranger to me. There were some days when she would leave the saloon in my mind and be transported into a Parisian cabaret of the 1890's and take on the persona of one of Toulouse-Lautrec's colorful subjects. I could see her serving cognac behind a grand and beautifully decorated bar to dandy gentlemen in bowler hats and long jackets. She'd still sound like Mae West in this scenario, with dark maroon lips, perhaps an American expatriate beguiling foreigners across the sea, escaping some sort of disappointing life in the new world. In my mind, she was happy in these far off settings, but in real life, she also seemed quite content on her street corner, just existing and being in the middle of things. I often wondered if I was so content in my own life.

One morning a couple of months ago, I was hurrying along 8th avenue, trying to beat the clock as usual, and it occurred to me that Gladys hadn't been there in quite some time. She'd have her days and even weeks off every now and then, but she'd never been absent for this long. I began to worry and fret over her. From then on, I'd search for her in the morning crowds each time I'd pass her little corner, with frantic effort. I felt somehow abandoned. Even though I didn't know her, or even know her real name, Gladys had been with me for nearly 2 years. I wondered if perhaps she got into a disagreement with the man who ran the food cart and decided to move on to a new corner, maybe several blocks over, or perhaps she went to visit her cousin Pearl in Florida. She had easy access to the Amtrak trains running under the ground beneath the busy streets that would take her to quiet sunny places, but somehow she didn't phase me as the type of gal who would choose Florida. She seemed more like an Atlantic City type of lady to me, I could see her spending days on end playing the slot machines, drinking pink cocktails and listening to her ancient little radio. She’d really be living, there in the casinos on the old New Jersey shore. I told myself that this must be where she went, as it seemed the happiest of all possible situations that my mind dreamed up for her. She definitely deserved a little vacation. Observing that street corner day after day probably wore her out. We all need a little respite every now and then, and I sincerely hoped that my unconventional friend was getting hers. 

Even though I had half-heartedly convinced myself that Gladys was enjoying her days pulling golden levers and putting her silvery hair up behind a snappy yellow visor, I still searched for her each morning. That little street corner, although filled with hundreds of people running in every direction, seemed empty without her there. 

Just when I nearly gave up hope, I was practically sprinting to work to clock in on time one gloomy Friday morning, and there was Gladys, with a new shade of pepto bismol pink lipstick (which had made it on to her teeth), beating her little radio with one hand, propping herself up against the soda menu of the silver food cart. She was yawning, and her full gaping mouth was back again, in all its glory. She even had acquired some eye shadow since last I saw her. I was so happy, I nearly cried. She didn't abandon me after all. Something compelled her to come back and fill the middle-aged lady shaped void that had been so heavy on my mind for quite some time. I was thrilled beyond belief. Even though I’ve never spoken to this woman, she means the world to me. I hope that Gladys and I have many more mornings together in times to come. 

Le petit New Yorker...

"Quand j'étais un petit garçon, je voulais être un New Yorker/
When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a New Yorker"

When I was growing up, my perception of media was somewhat warped. For the majority of my childhood, my family had a small black and white screen TV with no knobs and no cable to bring us the magic of brain-rotting consumer entertainment. We were the only family I knew of not to have a color TV set, and one of the few still using rabbit ears to bring fuzzy incomprehensible images of late 80's/early 90's broadcast network programming (primarily Star Trek the Next Generation and ABC's TGIF lineup). My parents were quite proud of this. We were more of a radio family, listening regularly to our local NPR affiliate station out of Paonia, Colorado for the majority of our news and "cultural enrichment." Our one window into a wider world of media was our primitive VCR, equipped with a remote control attached to a three foot long chord. I remember walking to the "Q and T" gas station a few blocks down the street from our house which had a small video rental service, boasting of dusty titles mostly from decades past. Ironically, the bulk of the films my mother would let us rent were originally shot in black and white, so the limitations of our colorless television set didn't pose a problem. By the age of five, I was enamored with the personalities of actors like Cary Grant, Kathryn Hepburn, Fred and Ginger, Clark Gable and so many others who I thought of as familiar friends. I had also developed a love for two cities that provided a backdrop to many of the stories that played out on the screen: New York and Paris. In my imagination, I would place myself on the Art Deco balconies of New York or the street cafés of Paris, never thinking that these were places that actually existed in real life. Now that I have made a life for myself in one of the cities of my childhood daydreams, I feel that I owe it to the little boy inside of me to experience the other.

Somehow, last summer I had accumulated a slight savings surplus in my bank account. I am still in shock that it happened, but in late July, after all of my bills had been paid, I had several hundred dollars sitting there, just staring at me, daring me to make some sort of choice. I stewed and I pondered and I turned over the possibilities in my mind of what could be done with the money. It wasn't a large enough sum to even pay a month's rent in my Manhattan apartment, but it was too large to just ignore. I thought of a number of very sensible things that could have been done with the tiny little gift I'd accidentally given myself, but then the little boy inside of me began tugging on my shirt sleeve reminding me of my life-long hope to someday see the "city of lights." I remembered the passport that I gotten six years ago and had never used, and then without even thinking, I was looking up airfares and plotting which cheeses I needed to try. I wasn't about to grow another year older without having at least a stamp in one of the empty pages of my little navy blue travel document, so I booked a ticket that happened to be just the amount of my savings, landing me in Paris 5 days before my next birthday.

For the past six months, I've been dreaming of Paris. I've been revisiting many of the old films that I watched as a child and reviewing museum catalogs for the Louvre. I've gone to many of my favorite museums in New York to brush up on the French painters and sculptors I hope to see while there, and I've even been reaching deep inside of my brain to pull out my dusty college French class vocabulary. I suppose I've always been a bit of a Francophile, which was no easy task to become while growing up in a rural mountain town of Western Colorado, but I am as I am nonetheless. The majority of the fun has been in the hope itself of fulfilling a dream and making it a reality, but a strange thing occurred in my process of indulging in my Paris daydreams, that I had not expected...

For these months that I've been trying to connect with a city across the ocean, I've found more reasons to embrace and experience and love the city in which I live. I have always loved New York, but in searching for Paris, my own city has become so much more alive to me. Whether I've been listening to French language audio programs while on the subways, and taking more time to contemplate the world around me, or sitting in coffee shops and cafés, making time to meet with friends and discuss plans, I've been making more time to slow down and be open to the wonderful things happening here and now. I've even been taking time to sit by myself in public places and make new drawings with no particular objective in mind. I've been taking more frequent little weekend walking excursions with my camera to capture the lovely things I see every day in the city, and becoming giddy over the possibilities of more New York adventures to come. The main new discovery for me has been that now I've lived here for nearly two years, I am finally beginning to feel like this place is my own and that I really do belong to it. There have been many places I've loved, but nothing has ever penetrated deep into the core of my being like this place has. For the first time in my life, I know I am right where I need to be.  If I could ever love a person in the way I love New York, I would be content for the rest of my days.

At the end of this month, I will finally take my long-awaited journey to a city I've hoped to know since I can recall. I am certain that I will find a great deal to love in Paris, but I feel confident to say that my heart will always belong to New York. I am sure while there, I'll be thinking of Josephine Baker, the archetypical American in Paris singing "J'ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris" (I have two loves, my country [America] and Paris), only in my case, I'm a man in love with two cities.

Life and death in the city that never sleeps...

Central Park after the First Snow of 2012

When I was growing up, my mother always did her best to explain the concept of life and death, trying to make it digestible and less abstract, so that when we encountered the passing of a pet or a friend or a loved one, we could be as prepared as possible to deal with all of the feelings surrounding those losses. Being that my mother is a very social person, she probably had more friends and acquaintances than most. With such a large circle of friends and family, we seemed to encounter inevitable losses more frequently than many people we knew. I was one of the few children at school who had attended funerals quite regularly throughout my early childhood, or had seen a corpse. It never felt morbid to me to participate in services for loved ones, because my mother always presented it as a way to celebrate their life and give them a "good send off" to whatever comes next. Although the cold sting of losing someone wasn't any less real, I am grateful that I was taught to embrace the experience and taught not to fear it.

As time passes for me here in my life as a relatively new New Yorker, I continue to encounter a lot of "firsts." I've been fortunate to have met a number of dear people in this great city, and as always, when gaining something of value, like a friendship, one is more vulnerable to the loss of such a dear thing. I am experiencing a new "first" now; the first death of an important friend made in the city, here in my new life. In a city of eight million people, death is all around us in the news and on the lips of strangers overheard in fragmented conversations while passing by. It's another beat in the rhythm of "the city that never sleeps." With so much variety of life co-existing so close together in one tiny space, it shouldn't come as such a shock that not all of the lights twinkling in the beautiful city skyline can stay lit forever, but I still find myself taken aback at the absence of a warm glow that I had grown fond of.

I keep thinking of his little studio apartment on the Upper West Side that he had lived in for at least a decade. He had imbued so much of himself in the little environment he had created, that to separate him from it and have it emptied, painted over and all traces of his life erased from this space seems like such a cold and sterile conclusion of an existence that was vibrant and colorful. I always wondered how he could fit so much "stuff" into such a small space, but it suited him and he was happy there with his menagerie of colored lights, shiny nick-knacks and photos of old movie stars posted proudly next to the images of his mother who had passed away many years before. I wonder what will become of his guitar that he used to play while singing lovely songs in Portuguese, reminding him of Brazil and a home far away. Individually, they are all just  "things," but clustered together, they painted a picture of his little life, which seemed to be a happy one. As with the unexpected conclusion of anything, thinking of the "what-if's" always follows. There's nothing like regret to remind us that we're alive, and I now find myself haunted by a number of feelings of how I could have been a better friend.

The day he passed, was the first snow we'd had in the new year. Having not had any snow yet this winter, it created a great deal of excitement. Although I'm not fond of the cold, I do love how snow in the city causes everything to slow down a bit, and makes the noise seem to lessen and a beautiful glow to be cast on everything. In the quiet of that evening, there was a peace that I had not felt in quite some time. I was walking through Central Park, taking photographs and embracing the beauty of the sun setting, at the same time my friend was transitioning into the beginning of his next great adventure. I didn't know it at the time, but I found out later that the images I had captured during that quiet night in the park were very near the moments when my friend was leaving us. Somehow, they captured a peace and a softness in the snow that felt very tangible. He was a deeply spiritual man with a belief in a beautiful after-life waiting for us all. Whether there is a connection or not between his passing and the beauty of the twilight in the park, I would like to think that if there is a heaven waiting for him, it was reflected in the warmth I felt on such a cold night.