On Seeing A Man With A Large Axe Walk Down The Street

For reasons complicated and uninteresting, I found myself driving a car around the Lower East Side yesterday morning, looking for a parking spot. Stopped at a red light at Canal and Eldridge, singing along with Soundgarden’s “Fell On Black Days,” which Matt Pinfield was playing on 101.9, I saw a man walking down the street carrying an axe. It was a large axe, not a hatchet. He held it in both hands, handle across his chest, the wide, sharp wedge of it’s blade glinting in the sunshine on an otherwise normal day.

He was a normal-looking guy. A little beefy, tight polo shirt, black wrap-around shades. People passed him on the sidewalk and no one ran away or crossed the street to avoid him. But I wondered what they were thinking. It’s the type of thing, you wouldn’t blink an eye if you were out on a country road in Columbia County. It’d be just a guy heading over to a friend’s back yard, going to get some firewood. But this wasn’t there. And sitting in my car on Canal Street, there was only one thing to think: Huh, that guy’s going to murder somebody. Here we are, on this lovely spring day, and the next person who walks by-maybe that old lady, carrying a bag of rice-this guy in the sunglasses is going stop, turn slowly, no emotion registering on his face, and raise that axe up and swing it like Braveheart and chop her head off. I pictured blood and spilled rice as Chris Cornell wailed from the speakers about the unknowability of fate.

Of course, nothing so dramatic happened. At least not there in front of me. The guy stepped from the sidewalk, crossed Canal at an angle, dug his keys from pocket and opened the backseat door of a very normal-looking red car. He put the axe inside and went around to the driver’s side. The light changed and I drove on to Essex Street, where I made a left and watched a calico cat scamper down a fire escape that was tangled with wires hanging like vines from the building’s roof.

It’s cool, living in New York.