Kumbaya, Stoners
Get my good side, not my evil one.
4/20
I start too high today.
- I almost forget to take the sign with me. 2. It takes me half an avenue to realize I’m singing in an unsustainable key, breathless and whispery and warbly. I should have tuned up and found my pitch in the elevator, like I usually do, but after going away for a week, I forget how this thing is supposed to work.
This is how it works: I walk down the street and smile and look people in the eye and sing to them. People in front of the Coach store on 5th Avenue avoid eye contact and remain neutral but from some I get the sense they’re embarrassed for me. Across the street, the Anthropologie crowd gives me some smiles.
I think maybe people think I am going to ask them for money or stop and hector them for an hour about the Steele dossier or try to give them a flyer of some sort.
Tour bus! Only one guy has his camera out, a young man who could get easily get profiled and shot in the wrong bar in Kansas. I wave to him, point at myself, pose with a big thumbs up; he takes the picture and thumbs-up back at me.
Are the tour busses emptier than they were? Or do I just want this to be true? In February, I spent an hour every couple of days up at Columbus Circle, on the island in front of the globe with the tour vendors and the shwarma truck. Many Trump supporters from out of town muttered at me. I could’ve said, “Go back to where you came from, you don’t share our values,” but they wouldn’t have appreciated the irony.
Anyway, I understand that international travel to the US is way down, and the American Trump-lovers are staying even further away from the city than they used to. No more coming and seeing Times Square and the Statue of Liberty and making fun of people’s accents to their faces.
I think the thing to do now is to keep moving. Sidewalks are full; between the vendors, the scaffolding, and the giant rat the union keeps inflated in front of that one building, there’s not a lot of room for my grandstanding. Plus, it’s harder to monopolize a moving target. I keep walking briskly, to the office, to the bank, past Coffee Shop, where people are now eating outside, and I sing to them and show them my sign, but only in passing.
(To read Kumbaya, Motherfucker in chronological order, click here.)