Run Away(3)

Like there was a schedule.

It took Simon fifty dollars to meet a man name Dave, one of the seedier street musicians with a huge helmet of gray hair, facial hair that had rubber bands in it, and a braided ponytail stretching down the middle of his back. Dave, who looked to be either a badly weathered midfifties or an easier-lived seventy, explained how it all worked.

“So in the old days, a guy named Gary dos Santos…you know him?”

“The name is familiar,” Simon said.

“Yeah, if you walked through here back in the day, boy, you’d remember him. Gary was the self-appointed Mayor of Strawberry Fields. Big guy. Spent, what, twenty years here keeping the peace. And by keeping the peace, I mean scaring the shit out of people. Dude was crazy, you know what I’m saying?”

Simon nodded.

“Then in, what, 2013, Gary dies. Leukemia. Only forty-nine. This place”—Dave gestured with his fingerless gloves—“goes crazy. Total anarchy without our fascist. You read Machiavelli? Like that. Musicians start getting in fights every day. Territory, you know what I’m saying?”

“I know what you’re saying.”

“They’d try to police themselves, but come on—half these guys can barely dress themselves. See, one asshole would play too long, then another asshole would start playing over him, they’d start screaming, cursing, even in front of the little kids. Sometimes they’d throw punches, and then the cops would come, you get the deal, right?”

Simon nodded that he did.

“It was hurting our image, not to mention our wallets. So we all came up with a solution.”

“What’s that?”

“A schedule. An hour-to-hour rotation from ten a.m. to seven p.m.”

“For real?”

“Yes.”

“And that works?”

“It ain’t perfect, but it’s pretty close.”

Economic self-interest, thought Simon the financial analyst. One of life’s constants. “How do you sign up for a slot?”

“Via text. We got five regular guys. They get the prime times. Then other people can fill in.”

“And you run the schedule?”

“I do.” Dave puffed out his chest in pride. “See, I know how to make it work, you know what I’m saying? Like I never put Hal’s slot next to Jules because those two hate each other more than my exes hate me. I also try to make it what you might call diverse.”

“Diverse?”

“Black guys, chicks, spics, fairies, even a couple of Orientals.” He spread his hands. “We don’t want everyone thinking all bums are white guys. It’s a bad stereotype, you know what I’m saying?”

Simon knew what he was saying. He also knew that if he gave Dave two one-hundred-dollar bills torn in half and promised to give him the other halves when Dave told him when his daughter signed up again, he would probably make progress.

This morning, Dave had texted him:

11AM today. I never told you. I ain’t a snitch.



Then:

But bring my money at 10AM. I got yoga at 11.



So here he was.

Simon sat across from Paige and wondered whether she would spot him and what to do if she bolted. He wasn’t sure. He’d figured that his best bet was to let her finish up, pack up her measly tips and guitar, make his approach.

He checked his watch. 11:58 a.m. Paige’s hour was coming to an end.

Simon had rehearsed all kinds of lines in his head. He had already called the Solemani clinic upstate and booked Paige a room. That was his plan: Say whatever; promise whatever; cajole, beg, use whatever means necessary to get her to go with him.

Another street musician in faded jeans and ripped flannel shirt entered from the east and sat next to Paige. His guitar case was a black plastic garbage bag. He tapped Paige’s knee and pointed to an imaginary watch on his wrist. Paige nodded as she finished “I Am the Walrus” with an extended “goo goo g’joob,” lifted both arms in the air, and shouted, “Thank you!” to a crowd that was not even paying attention, let alone applauding. She scooped the few pathetic wrinkled singles and coins up and then lowered her guitar into the case with surprising care. That simple move—lowering that guitar into the case—hit him hard. Simon had bought that Takamine G-Series guitar for her at the Sam Ash on West Forty-Eighth Street for her sixteenth birthday. He tried to conjure up the feelings to go with the memory—Paige’s smile when she plucked it off the wall, the way she closed her eyes as she tested it out, how she threw her arms around his neck and shouted, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” when he told her it was hers.

But the feelings, if they were real, wouldn’t come.

The awful truth: Simon couldn’t even see the little girl anymore.

Oh, for the past hour he had tried. He tried again now to look at her and conjure up the angelic child he’d taken to swim classes at the 92nd Street Y, the one who sat on a hammock out in the Hamptons while he read her two full Harry Potter books over the three-day Labor Day weekend, the little girl who insisted on wearing her Statue-of-Liberty Halloween costume complete with green face two weeks early, but—and maybe it was a defense mechanism—none of those images would come to him.

Paige stumbled to a stand.

Time to make his move.