The Gorko Gazette

A Moment’s Hesitation

I don’t know why I have high blood pressure, or if I do. Doc says I do, but how do I know if he knows? Sure, he put that rubber contraption on my arm and pumped it up and made his pronouncement 140 over 90, but how do I know that wasn’t a ruse to keep me coming back? From what I hear, doctors don’t make what they used to.

I smoke about a pack a day, drink beer if you call beer drinking, and I eat fried foods perhaps more often than I should, but the thought that they may harm me is too abstract to be of concern.

Last week I turned 64. Besides some lower back pain, I feel fine.

I take my medicine every day. I don’t want to stroke out. I doubt I would, but the doc said that could happen. And if it did, I’d try to speak, but maybe I couldn’t, and that would be bad because I make my living giving walking tours of Greenwich Village in New York City, once home to people who wanted to change the world, but the world resisted.

I was a lawyer trying a murder case. They call it ‘trying,’ but what a client cares about is winning. I had no chance, so I agreed to marry the witness if she agreed not to testify. No deal. She wasn’t offended by the proposal; she was offended by the prenup. She turned me in.  So now I work for the Big Apple Tours. Mine begins in Washington Square Park. It has this big arch modeled after one in Paris, but this one was built to honor George Washington. I don’t see any point in honoring a dead person; it’s not like he knows, but that’s what we do, and I don’t fight it.

I mention historical facts to people with no interest in history, so years ago I started making some up. I point to any brownstone and say, ‘The Beatles lived there. The first Thanksgiving was held there in a tent where that building, a NYU pool hall, now stands.’

When I was a kid, the history books used the phrase ‘where that now stands’ rather than ‘where that now is.’ I adapted it to sound bookish.  I think of my additional facts as part of the secret history of the village, and that’s why you won’t find it in a book unless, of course, it’s a book of things that haven’t happened.

In any event, because I need the money, and because I use my sick days to get over New Year’s Eve, missing even a day’s work hurts. So, I take my medicine regularly, though it makes me wiz something fierce. Some days, out on the tour, I do that crazy dance just to hold it in.

I don’t owe anyone an explanation, so I’m not giving one. All I’m saying is last Monday, when the tour got rained out, I could have cleaned my apartment, something I never do, catch up on my reading, something I only do in the bathroom, or go to the movies, and that’s what I did. I took my friend Mr. Six Pack with me. Usually, that’s not enough beer to make me piss, much less get drunk, but I didn’t figure in the effects of the new medicine.

Well, I made it through the movie—Bait and Switch. Get this. The guy she married ain’t the guy she thought he was, so she has an affair, after affair, only to discover nobody is who they seem to be.

I could have gotten past the unoriginality of the plot if I were being entertained, but I was watching the struggles of people I don’t know well enough to care about. B-O-R–I-N-G. I guess the only good part of the movie was no one wore clothes for very long.

It was playing at the Jane Street Theater, one of those old-time movie houses that survived the duplex era. Just one men’s room. The second the movie’s over, I hit the can.

Just two urinals and a bowl. I was at one of the two. The other was out of order.

I’m first in. Behind me are like thousands of art students, probably from the Greenwich Village School of the Arts, sketchbooks in hand. I’m guessing that flick was a homework assignment. Practice in drawing the human form.  And I’m assuming they’re in line ’cause they gotta go too.

Things start off well. I brace myself against the wall with my left hand. And I remove my business with my right. Out it comes. And then, ah, there goes the beer like Niagara Falls.

Then, for the life of me, I can’t decide. Do I zip first, or flush first? Is it zip first, or flush first?

Doc said, ‘Don’t mix the medicine with booze,’ and now I know why. Behind me I hear, ‘Hey Mac, other people are waiting.’

‘Just a minute,’ I say, but a minute can last a lifetime when you have trouble seeing the endgame. ‘What comes next? Zip? Or Flush?’

‘Hey, Mac, hurry it up.’

Being pressured didn’t help.

I was not sure of what to do. Then I heard the cavalry approach.

‘Coming through. Excuse me. Coming through.’

One of the more thoughtful students reached over and decided for me. He grabbed my zipper pull and moved it like it was an express elevator to the penthouse, yet the fog hadn’t lifted.

‘Flush,’ he said, sounding exasperated.

I turned.

‘Full house,’ I said, bluffing.

He flushed for me.

One student offered his congratulations.

‘Nice going, champ.’

I assumed he wanted me to take a bow, and I took one.

‘Move it, Mac,’ someone in the back said.

I took the hint, left the theater, and walked home in the summer rain.

Problem solved for then.

But there could be a next time.                                                                                                  

And I might be alone.

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About the artist

Michael writes for T.V. His own.

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Image: 17 E. 126th St, Harlem.jpg