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Street By Street
By
Craig Schneider
Things happen street by street, in some cities.
In Adam's, people bed down in the high-letter streets. New, bright brick apartments on Amsterdam, where not even three years ago a wino had been found dead in the empty, weedy, cinder-strewn lot. Two blocks over, most of the old liquor stores and advance payday loan shops have been torn down, and lofts clutter Cleveland. Tucked between them are coffee houses and newspaper shops with marble facades. On weeknights, Nixon through Roosevelt buzz busily with graduate students, and newly re-urbanized thirtysomethings, coming to repopulate the re-brightened, re-whitened downtown.
Eating happens in the low-letter streets. Applebees appeared on the west side of Washington, and Subway sprang up just south. Before new money came to his city, those streets had been a bombed out, boarded up business district where not even the junkies wasted time. Mostly, Adam doesn't mind the changes in the streets. Good to see new places, new faces. He's almost forty and he's never lived anywhere else.
Jobs happen by street here, too. Generally, the closer people worked to First, the more money they made. Adam's a cop in the Sixteenth Street Precinct. He first saw her in April, outside Ted's Shoes on Tenth. She was studying a pair of slick black stilettos in the window.
The next time he saw her she was relaxing in a wrought iron chair outside of Tony's Sidewalk Bistro on Taylor. She was wearing the stilettos. She sat with a woman almost as pretty — as classy looking — as her. He cruised by a few times, once giving his siren a beep to move along a Volvo that had ignored the green light. She looked up and saw him in the cruiser. She smiled, and he felt himself blushing. Him. Blushing.
He saw her next on a Friday night in June. She was strolling down Second Street in a black dress. She moved like a cat, like she dared someone to stop her. Somehow summoning up the nerve, he did. He feigned inquiry after a vague suspicious character. She said she couldn't help him. He thanked her and smiled. She gave him back the smile from Tony's. Somehow, he managed to ask her out. He held his breath while she hesitated. She said yes, and he got tongue-tied during the cell number exchange.
In the Founders District, the beat of the pubs and the clubs power the nights like generators. He took her to Vitorio's, spending too much on wine, but not caring when talk moved to how they grew up. She lightened lulls with quick jokes and built on ones he told. She let no moment get too maudlin. She taught him the word “maudlin”. Class.
They talked it out, before it happened. What they wanted, what they didn't. It was so good that in three months, she was coming straight to his place most nights after work. Her job never upset her, like his did. She would retire while young enough to fully enjoy it.
She made Adam remember he was one year from a college degree. The campus was close to her place — a penthouse apartment on Polk Avenue. Some nights they'd stay there, huddled naked under blankets while her yellow lab slept at their feet. He fought against wanting her too much, against wedging himself between her and her career. Her career made her who she was, in so many ways. He couldn't change it without changing her.
But on Christmas Eve, he asked her to move to Jacksonville with him and get married. Her smile collapsed. She turned away from him before the rest of her face could, too. 'Hookers don't marry cops, Adam."
On Christmas morning she gathered her stuff from his spare drawers and packed up her part of the bathroom. Before she left she asked if he'd ever bust her and he said no. But a few weeks later, he stopped seeing her around. He went by her place on Polk one night and an old German couple answered the door.
You can also visit Pope Craig in his Church of Groove
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