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Even for Summer, that’s Dressing Light

By redjac ⋅ July 1, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

I had, walking home this evening, one of those experiences which could only be described as “only in New York” if only I were more fond of cliche. I turned the corner onto my block, and I was largely insulated from the outside world by virtue of my iPod (which is a replacement for the one I lost to water a couple weeks ago, so I was feeling pretty good about that). When I happen to glance up, it is to see what looks like a nearly naked woman jumping very high to spike a volleyball. Except she’s obviously not doing so, she’s instead hanging by her rather thin, very outstretched arms off the ladder of a fire escape, screaming. She’s clad only in an off-white bra and a pair of navy, horizontally striped panties which, on later reflection, were miss-matched in a not-artful fashion.

Getting closer, I hear her scream “OH MY GOD! SOMEONE HELP ME!” and then drop onto the ground. Undaunted, though, she gets up very quickly and starts running to the corner, screaming as she passes inches from me to yell, “GOD WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!” and then, as I turn to see her pass, she disappears into the fencing and barriers demarcating the construction of the Second Avenue subway. Turning to a woman walking near me, I ask her, “I DID just see that, right?” and she gives me the confirmation that I’m not, in fact, crazy — confirmation I have rarely needed more. There’s a construction worker there, and I ask him what had happened, but he’s looking up at a window from which I only assume the woman had descended. There are a few heads poking out of it, looking down the street, and I ask the construction worker if someone’s called 911.

I notice that I was kind of looking to the construction worker for some sort of guidance, which is kind of funny… that I would consider the construction worker an authority figure, or perhaps that I was so desperate to make sense of the situation I grasped onto whoever seemed least like myself. It was the guy he pointed to, however — a guy who looked fairly like me — who was on the phone with 911. The woman who confirmed my sanity asked if it was bad for her to want to just go on home to her apartment, and I said no, and went on home to mine.

And since my brother might read this, no, she wasn’t that hot.