Last night, Elvis and Emma Lee were sprinting down Park Slope’s 5th Avenue, trying to get to the Union Street subway before the rain sunk to bone level. As they picked their way between the puddles, a dude started catcalling. “Miss! Miss!” The midnight rain was serious business, there were few other fools on the street, and Emma Lee remembers thinking “not the time, buddy”…but the hollerer kept hollering. Finally, she turned around and saw two guys and two umbrellas, one of which was cocked to 90 degrees and pointing straight at her. “Really?” She doubled back, never having been so happy to see a $5 sucker, the curved plastic handle and flimsy stalk of the midtown corner vendors. “Really. We have two, and you’re getting soaked.”
Sometimes, New Yorkers are good ones.
While giving props to the man on the street, Elvis also has to tip a hat to the friends in his life. Emma Lee’s friends have stepped up bigtime in this moment of mild tragedy (read: bad break up), with hugs, pasta del mar, desserts (current tally: a box of chocolate, a cupcake, two chocolate bars, two pints of ice cream, three mint juleps, a beer and a martini), and fairly convincing assurances that life will go all right.
After a week in Seattle and a few days of getting-back-into-things New York chores, Elvis is dipping his toes back into the icy waters of his Brooklyn freelance existence. Beside the predicted wind-chill of 0º at midnight, what awaits him in the New Year? Emma Lee knows she will be getting some big news that’s bound to shake things up, about books and graduate schools and boys, but for Elvis, a rock icon that’s had his calendar cleared for thirty-one years, just about anything could be coming his way, via Brooklyn. How does he feel about the uncertainty of the new year? He smiles at Emma Lee and says: Bring it.
