after the party was over:
IT WAS AT THE TAIL END OF THE DINNER HOUR...
IT WAS AT THE TAIL END OF THE DINNER HOUR...
ON A TUESDAY EVENING IN SEPTEMBER, AND I'M in a taxi with two female friends of mine, Dafna Priel and Leslie Gelb, moving downtown on Seventh Avenue. The birthday party had come to an end. In the garment district, traffic inched along, blocked by double-parked cars, buses heaving their great bulk across lanes. Horns blare; men curse. A tractor trailer stands across 34th Street like a wall. The large truck moves, and the blocked downtown begins to move. Usually, it's like water rushing from a burst dam. Today, the rush doesn't happen. The lights are blinking all the way to 23rd Street, but there is no clear passage for traffic. On every street, pedestrians are crossing the avenue, ignoring red lights, jaywalking in the center of the block. A bearded older man comes close, allows the taxi to pass within inches, angrily performs his version of the New York finger, as if the taxi were challenging his right to jaywalk. A sock less man with a Jesus beard stands in the middle of the avenue looking at the sky. Our taxi is in the front knot of traffic; the driver is in his fifties, lean and dark, anxious. He is beeping his horn, riding his brake pedal.
This is crazy, I say. The cab driver shakes his head. We slow down at 31st Street. A man reading a newspaper jumps back and curses. The taxi driver crosses 29th, still riding the brake, clearing the path with his horn. Most of the jaywalkers are young, but there's a second group beyond the corner in our lane. Another tractor-trailer is illegally parked at a bus stop, and these people are waiting for the bus. The driver slows, still making bursts with his horn. And then directly in front of us, oblivious to everything, looking straight ahead as she walks west against the red light, is an older woman. Until this moment, she has been screened by those who have hurried to the corner, and now she is suddenly, vulnerably, alone. The driver blares his horn, hits his brakes, attempts to move to the left, finds that lane blocked by another car, and then there is a hard thump, metal smashing into the bone, and the blurred image of the woman as we go by, the woman rolling, brakes screeching. Dafna screams. And we are stopped.
The older woman is on her back. Blood pumps from her mouth. She is shoeless. Her body doesn't move. And then the crowd, frozen in horror, comes alive. The driver is sobbing aloud, his head on the wheel, holding the wheel with both of his hands, gripping it. Oh my God!, he says. He gazes to his left, away from the fallen woman, and then slowly turns, sees the smear of blood. No! he screams, No! No! No! Dafna and Leslie are sobbing now. I try to comfort them, and I hear people shouting, Don't move her! and Call the police, you prick! And then the crowd turns ugly. A young man in a zipper jacket comes to the door on the driver's side, You was doin' seventy miles an hour, Man! What th' fuck is wrong with you? A woman in a yellow coat shouts: Fuckin' cab drivers! You back to your own goddamned country! You fuckin' motherfucker!
I am uncertain about what I ought to do, so I get out of the cab. There are no police on the scene yet and all of this has happened in a couple of minutes. I attempt to calm down the angrier people, explaining that I was in the cab, the taxi driver was not speeding, that the old woman had not responded, that she was clearly walking across the red light. One kid shouted, He should'a gone slower! Another man looks at the kid, I seen him! He was goin' slow! That was the way most New Yorkers respond. An old woman is knocked to the ground by a cab, her life spilling out onto the dirty tar, and people want to hurt someone back. The cab driver explains with some heat about his speed, about his horn, about the red light, but the passions of a mob are stirring in the cold damp air. Mothafucka, another man shouts, you drive like a crazy man...
I tell the driver to get back in the taxi and keep quiet. Then behind him, slowly pushing through the clotted traffic, comes a police car. The crowd transforms into sudden silence. More sirens in the distance. The sense of time slowed becomes that of time swift. Cops and medics work on the stricken woman; her body is covered with rubber yellow sheets for warmth; they press down on her chest. Younger cops move the crowd off of the street and onto the sidewalk, others attempt to get traffic moving. An older cop with a sad grave face picks up the woman's brown high-heel shoes. The cops take a statement. An ambulance arrives from St. Vincent's and the bloody-faced woman is placed on a stretcher and into the back; it moves off with sirens screaming, slowing behind jammed traffic on 23rd Street. From the lofts of the buildings above the avenue, people gaze down at the scene, looking at the two-foot stand of blood, bright red against the dirty tar. The woman's grey-plaid hat has rolled against the curb. I see a policeman's had reach down, circle it with chalk, pick it up. Then he drops it back into place.
The cop shrugs sadly. The driver leans on his cab, his body wracked with dry heaves. The police are also careful; they first want to notify the next of kin. The taxi driver, still waiting for formal questions, hears this: Is - is she dead? The cop says, Yes. The driver moans and falls to his knees and the cop eases him back onto his feet. All the questions had been asked, the forms filled in, names given, witnesses questioned. About an hour had passed. Traffic now moves down the avenue. There is tape where the taxi's wheels had come to a halt, darkening blood and chalk marks and a hat where older woman had come to an end of her life. A young man moves between two parked cars, waits for a break in traffic, hurries across the street...
...As a gust of wind lifts the dead woman's hat and rolls it back against the curb...
...It was not the way that I had expected my birthday celebration to come to an end...
This is crazy, I say. The cab driver shakes his head. We slow down at 31st Street. A man reading a newspaper jumps back and curses. The taxi driver crosses 29th, still riding the brake, clearing the path with his horn. Most of the jaywalkers are young, but there's a second group beyond the corner in our lane. Another tractor-trailer is illegally parked at a bus stop, and these people are waiting for the bus. The driver slows, still making bursts with his horn. And then directly in front of us, oblivious to everything, looking straight ahead as she walks west against the red light, is an older woman. Until this moment, she has been screened by those who have hurried to the corner, and now she is suddenly, vulnerably, alone. The driver blares his horn, hits his brakes, attempts to move to the left, finds that lane blocked by another car, and then there is a hard thump, metal smashing into the bone, and the blurred image of the woman as we go by, the woman rolling, brakes screeching. Dafna screams. And we are stopped.
The older woman is on her back. Blood pumps from her mouth. She is shoeless. Her body doesn't move. And then the crowd, frozen in horror, comes alive. The driver is sobbing aloud, his head on the wheel, holding the wheel with both of his hands, gripping it. Oh my God!, he says. He gazes to his left, away from the fallen woman, and then slowly turns, sees the smear of blood. No! he screams, No! No! No! Dafna and Leslie are sobbing now. I try to comfort them, and I hear people shouting, Don't move her! and Call the police, you prick! And then the crowd turns ugly. A young man in a zipper jacket comes to the door on the driver's side, You was doin' seventy miles an hour, Man! What th' fuck is wrong with you? A woman in a yellow coat shouts: Fuckin' cab drivers! You back to your own goddamned country! You fuckin' motherfucker!
I am uncertain about what I ought to do, so I get out of the cab. There are no police on the scene yet and all of this has happened in a couple of minutes. I attempt to calm down the angrier people, explaining that I was in the cab, the taxi driver was not speeding, that the old woman had not responded, that she was clearly walking across the red light. One kid shouted, He should'a gone slower! Another man looks at the kid, I seen him! He was goin' slow! That was the way most New Yorkers respond. An old woman is knocked to the ground by a cab, her life spilling out onto the dirty tar, and people want to hurt someone back. The cab driver explains with some heat about his speed, about his horn, about the red light, but the passions of a mob are stirring in the cold damp air. Mothafucka, another man shouts, you drive like a crazy man...
I tell the driver to get back in the taxi and keep quiet. Then behind him, slowly pushing through the clotted traffic, comes a police car. The crowd transforms into sudden silence. More sirens in the distance. The sense of time slowed becomes that of time swift. Cops and medics work on the stricken woman; her body is covered with rubber yellow sheets for warmth; they press down on her chest. Younger cops move the crowd off of the street and onto the sidewalk, others attempt to get traffic moving. An older cop with a sad grave face picks up the woman's brown high-heel shoes. The cops take a statement. An ambulance arrives from St. Vincent's and the bloody-faced woman is placed on a stretcher and into the back; it moves off with sirens screaming, slowing behind jammed traffic on 23rd Street. From the lofts of the buildings above the avenue, people gaze down at the scene, looking at the two-foot stand of blood, bright red against the dirty tar. The woman's grey-plaid hat has rolled against the curb. I see a policeman's had reach down, circle it with chalk, pick it up. Then he drops it back into place.
The cop shrugs sadly. The driver leans on his cab, his body wracked with dry heaves. The police are also careful; they first want to notify the next of kin. The taxi driver, still waiting for formal questions, hears this: Is - is she dead? The cop says, Yes. The driver moans and falls to his knees and the cop eases him back onto his feet. All the questions had been asked, the forms filled in, names given, witnesses questioned. About an hour had passed. Traffic now moves down the avenue. There is tape where the taxi's wheels had come to a halt, darkening blood and chalk marks and a hat where older woman had come to an end of her life. A young man moves between two parked cars, waits for a break in traffic, hurries across the street...
...As a gust of wind lifts the dead woman's hat and rolls it back against the curb...
...It was not the way that I had expected my birthday celebration to come to an end...
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