January 16th, 2007 around 6pm

A homeless man is sitting on the 7th Avenue steps to Penn station. A woman is leaning over him, handing him napkins. He's bleeding. I enter the Duane Reade at the bottom of the stairs and buy some things. I exit, turning to the right, readying to merge into the flow of human traffic to the uptown E. There's the homeless man - maybe he's just drunk, has a home, can't find it - lying on the floor, with a cop staring down at him, mumbling into his walkie-talkie. Everyone who passes by turns 145 degrees to stare at the man on the floor, who is announcing "I'm not going!" but not shouting. I take out my cell phone and pretend to be waiting for someone, but all i'm really doing is eavesdropping. The cop is joined by one and then another of his colleagues. Yet another seems to know the man. "What'd you do this time, Red?" (the drunk has red hair) "Red? What'd you do? Are you drunk again?" The first cop has put on and then taken off blue rubber gloves. He's not going to touch Red after all. "Red. Do you want a bus?" (I know 'bus' means 'ambulance' because of all the Law & Order I watch) "Did you get drunk and fall down the stairs? Do you want to go to the hospital?" Red is nonplussed (the old definition). He doesn't want an ambulance. "Red. There are perfectly decent people out there who need ambulances, and now I've gotta waste one on you." "You don't gotta, I'm not going in any ambulance ya cueball fuck." There is a chorus of 'ooooh's from the fuzz. "Cueball fuck, is it?" (the cop's not even bald) he steps closer to the drunk man and leans over him. "Now you're not getting anything." A higher-ranking officer makes his way to the cluster of blues. "Arthur, it's you again?" Interesting. The other officers are confused. His name is Arthur? "His name is Arthur." and then, to Arthur himself, "He doesn't like when we use his real name, does he?" The sergeant (or whatever he is) leans over "He's HIV too, you know." A murmur. "Arthur, can you get off the floor now Arthur? You can't keep comin' to my station and fallin' down the steps. Do you have a place to go, Arthur?" Arthur hasn't said anything in a while and doesn't seem to want to get up. One of the peripheral officers leans in to help. He grabs Red at the shoulder and hoists him to his knees. "A little help, Red?" Red gropes for the ledge under the Duane Reade window, which is useless as it's covered entirely by a Duane Reade advertisement, and even if it wasn't, you'd only be able to see the copy shop (bakery adjacent) across the way which has filled the 7th Avenue stairway with the aroma of toner and popcorn since as long as I can remember, which is as long as I've hated it. Red/Arthur is struggling to get up and the cop has got him my the back of the coat. "If you fall into this window and it breaks, you're gonna be in a lotta trouble Red." "Mehhh" "If you fall into me, I'm gonna kill you." The boys in blue all laugh. The morphing crowd senses the [police]force coming and a path is cleared somehow. The officer ushers the stumbling drunk to the escalator and the other cops make ready to scatter. Before they do, the last two take a look at each other. Without the slightest trace of irony or acknowledgment of cliché, the sergeant says to the officer who was there all along, "Days like these, I love being a cop." He doesn't mean it.