"Soft Spots on a Big Apple"

A few months back I wrote about some of the denizens of my new world, New York City. If you missed that posting I have the link to it at the bottom. I think you will find some humor in that one too.  Since then, I have run into many more "characters" but here are 3 of the most exotic.

The Barking Man:  I have seen him several times on my walk to Hunter College. He frequents the area around 73^rd between Third and Lexington avenues.  I see him walking his dog (terrier of some type) up and down a couple of the residential streets. He is a tall man, in his thirties (I guess) and except for what he is doing, he would not be especially noticeable. In fact, I only noticed him because I heard him. When he is walking his dog, his dog walks obediently beside him and doesn't make a sound. However, as they walk, the man does the barking. He barks for his dog. Every few steps he lets out a couple of loud woofs. Not the bass woof of a big woolly dog, or the shrieking yip of a rug staining yapper. No his is a mid-sized bark all right. All the way down to 2^{nd Avenue} and back again the barking man barks for his dog. I have watched in fascination but I wouldn't dare approach him, what if he does other things for his dog too?

The Debt Collector: This smallish woman is a lot like most of the other lost souls in New York City, that sit on a busy sidewalk corner holding out a cup seeking your money. She sits in front of the busy Starbucks on 75th and 1^st.  Business must be good, she only works five days a week. Like all the street cup holder’s she has the typical teeth optional, sad face, scrawny, pretzel body and it’s pretty easy to see she’s not a former Rhodes Scholar fallen on hard times. However what sets her apart in  the knarly world of “begging” is her tenacity. She demands a response from you as you go by, looks right at you, and says "will you give me some money"? It's hard to pretend she hasn't spoken to you. Being the congenital nice-guy that I am; I give her money. Sometimes if I am in a hurry I'll respond by saying, I’ll catch you later or catch you on my way out. In the Blanche Dubois world of I get by on the kindness of strangers, that's a polite no but not to the debt collector. When you come back out of Starbucks, she lifts the cup right up to you and says, okay here I am. If you try to slip away to the corner she gets up, comes over to you, sticks the cup in your face and says “you promised”. There is no getting out of it; there is no escaping the Debt Collector.  Now, I just bring a dollar, resigned to the lesson I learned early in my life that some people (like me) just always end up paying their debts.

Boot Woman:  At Hunter College there is this cross bridge that goes from the West Building to the North Building. (See picture). It’s fun walking across the walkway and seeing the busy street below and looking off into the distance at downtown or uptown New York. One late afternoon as I was hustling to my art class on the 15^th floor of the West building; I saw a young woman walking towards me. Probably a student there and my guess was she was in her early twenties. That would describe countless young women at Hunter….EXCEPT for what she was wearing. She was wearing a loose, flowing dress just above the knee and cowboy boots. Men know women with good legs in a dress and cowboy boots can be attractive and so at first I thought nice.  That was until she was about 4 feet from me when it became apparent to me that she wasn't exactly wearing cowboy boots. What she had on were shoes up to her ankle that were like the bottom half of a pair of cowboy boots and the top half were two perfectly matched tattoos of cowboy boots. Let me repeat this for the speed readers: She had the top half of a pair of cowboy boots tattooed on her legs. This was hard for even me, Mr.  Avant-garde, to comprehend. I’ve seen her twice since then and both times she was wearing clothes that showed off her legs and "her boots". I started thinking what could I have tattooed on me? All kidding aside, it did  make me think, what if men actually led women to believe that they had something they didn't really have, I mean  what if……..uh……...on second thought, never mind, forget that. Just forget I said that!


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