The Narrator

The rain was whipping up Fourth Avenue, and the air was brittle with salt and impending cold. But here on this third floor it was crazy hot as the radiators sizzled. Everybody was awake, the kind of wound up anticipation to be expected. I was too, certainly, but I was working on staying in character, so I was pretending to sleep, lying face down on one of the beds, wearing nothing but Irish flag colored bikini underwear, my arms stretched out above my head, as I breathed the smell of my own sweat.   When I had found my way here an hour ago after the run through the chill wet streets from the Smith-Ninth Street Station, unexpected routes on both trains and streets, slipping through the narrow alley alongside the Bodega around the corner, climbing the fence and then through the stair window of this place, I'd been soaked to the skin. As I took in the team that would cover me tonight, and make all the collars, I peeled my jeans, my jacket, my shirts, my socks off, ...

I have no idea how many steps lead up to this place from Myrtle Avenue and that old Cathedral, but I've been told that the stone column that towers above me is one hundred and forty-eight feet high, the world's tallest Doric column for those into obscure records. Circling around me, slightly filtered by the haze of July evening humidity, the skyline of New York rises as I struggle to regain my breath. Downtown to my left, accented by the lighted spans and cables of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Midtown to my right, with the Williamsburgh Bridge in the foreground the odd lumpy shape of the 59 th Street Bridge way out there. I am anchored here, after running these massive granite stairs a dozen times down and a dozen times up, at this odd spot where the river bends and New York lies directly north of Brooklyn across the East River. I know my history. I come to this park to rehab the knee that I now feel swelling beneath the huge steel brace, but things that...