STREET PORN

THE WOMAN ON WEST 22ND STREET

The temperature had been riding on ninety for three days in a row which was unusual for mid-spring in Chelsea. It was a Monday in the late morning. The streets were abnormally quiet. After three days of heat and humidity no one was willingly going outside. I was walking east back to the Eighth Avenue subway from a client meeting on West 22nd Street, a renovation I'd been overseeing for the past month. My gaze was mostly toward my feet as I tried to skip from shadow to shadow. The sidewalk was so hot it almost burnt through the soles of my shoes and I had to shield my eyes from the sun. As I lifted my gaze in a moment of shade I recognized the only other person on the sidewalk. It was a woman coming the other way; a middle-aged big black woman dressed in eggplant colored hospital scrubs. I guessed she was Caribbean since she seemed oblivious to the heat. She bounced down the street one arm singing a song its fingers playing the melody, her other hand cradling her cellphone pressed against her ear.  We passed each other about mid-block creating a little breeze for each other in our wake. In that sliver of a moment I caught a part of her conversation her brilliant white teeth gleaming her focus apparently unaware or unconcerned about my presence, "I touched myself and oh my god..." and she was past and out of earshot.

THE GALLERY

The Family Acid
Sunny Silver Man, 1979
Roger Steffens, photographer
Represented by Benrubi Gallery, New York