Easter on Broadway

April 6, 1980

I sit on a park bench facing downtown in the middle of the island on Broadway, dawn spreading its pink fingers down West 62nd Street threatening to expose me.
Easter is not a good holiday for me, although my grandfather once claimed the birth of my uncle, Frank, on Easter 1938 was a sign his luck was about to change – the family then mired in the midst of the Great Depression, having moved out of houses my grandfather and his brother could not sell, into the backroom of his mother’s house where he had to take up duties at the eldest son again.
My ex-wife spent our last Easter together in a hospital room, suffering both from some imaginary illness and the scandal of having been cheating on me and the dread of getting caught.
Most Easters I spent as a kid came with chocolate and marshmallow bunnies, but little faith.
I have less faith now, waiting for the band finish in the Mud Club, lip-syncing a song they recorded with Joey Ramone earlier this year downtown, with the crew from 20/20 TV helping them make a video so they can get an agent and maybe make it big before we all get too old, and fat, and lazy.
I don’t want to be a witness to the crime and so, decided not to indulge in the white powder everybody needs to get through the ritual, and come out here and sip an already cold coffee, feeling out of touch, feeling lonely, needing something more than rock and roll to sustain me, watching the pigeons pecking between the sidewalk cracks for their holy Sunday feast.
On the ground floor of a nearby building, the American Bible Society displays its Easter message telling us all of hope and salvation, which I do not feel, though the tranquility of the early morning seems oddly abstract, as if I no longer occupy the same planet I did, transported not across a river via The George Washington Bridge, but to some alien landscape where the homeless get revealed one by one as the sunlight fills up each deep doorway where they sleep, ignored by the wealthy pedestrians of the most liberal piece of planet, and the rumble of cars and cabs rolling up the street, many carrying the sedated remains of club-goers like those we displaced with our movie-making equipment.
Everybody is a star, my co-workers with the band tell me, buoyed by too long lines off short tables in the backroom. Club management treating us as the interlopers from New Jersey we are, as we steered our gear over the crimson carpet the previous patrons puked on before our arrival, and over the scuffed wooden dance floor dripping red from spilled drinks that looks like blood, our wheels leaving a more of a mark on that world than our music or video ever well.
I am too tired to care.
Their mark is no my mark, and so I sit here taking in the sun, just another bum far from home, catching a glimpse of the bass player and his girlfriend squinting at me from the door of the club, wondering about me and why I’m not with them, and why I seem to remote, unable to take part in this ritual of death, dying and desperate rebirth
Some black guy with thick wrap-around shades pauses to grin at me and then gives me the thumbs up and wishes me a Happy Easter.
I nod back, and feel the beams of sunlight warming my face, hearing the coo of the pigeons around me, and the moan of traffic going on with a life that has nothing to do with what does on in the club, something real, something that I miss from those days when I once lived here. I smell the soft scent of the Hudson River mingling with the fumes of traffic. It is a sweet perfume, something real, something that needs no one to explain, leaving a permanent mark on my soul I can never explain.