The Adventures of Cowboy Hazel

It’s two a.m. and I should be sleepy but I’m not. Leonard Cohen is on Pandora and Lucy is pawing at my leg trying to get my attention. It might be raining outside. A glass of whisky would be beautiful, but it remains unpoured. While I wait for sleep, let me tell the story of tonight’s journey home.

I was sitting on the uptown 2 train completely lost in my thoughts (mostly self-reproach, but that’s another story…) when an angry yell caused me to look up. I saw two guys throwing punches at each other and quickly falling towards my direction. I stood up, moved away, and watched as they continued to trade punches until someone braver than the rest of us broke it up. One of the guys dashed out of the train and left the other, face completed bloody, standing there calling him a coward. Eventually, the conductor came, escorted him off the train, and the passengers all went back to their conversations and books and iPods. If it wasn’t for the blood on the bench where nobody was sitting any more, you would have never even known anything had happened. Ten, twenty minutes later, we finally get to 116th Street and I climb the stairs to emerge into the drizzling night. A rat scurries past me, I step over a bag of trash. I glance back over my shoulder. The rain has turned the litter strewn across the sidewalks into mush. I see a blanket on the stoop to the left shift and hear a grunt. Another rat runs by. Crossing Fifth, I look downtown and see the unlit Empire State Building standing in the distance.