Crossroads by Mary Morris Page B

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t see what the big deal was. Walk to Times Square. Watch some sad people make a display of themselves.”
    He rubbed his forehead. “I really am doing it all wrong, aren’t I? I just haven’t been with a woman in a while.”
    My hand reached up. “You know,” I began, “you can drop out of fine universities and risk your life doing stupid stunts, waiting to make it big somewhere, and make all kinds of profound statements about how other people should live their lives and what they should do and what they need, but in the end I don’t see where your life is any great model for how we should live. You know what you are?” I went on. “You’re a watcher. You look at people and make judgments. You sit back and watch and criticize. No one means anything to you. Nothing means anything to you. That’s why you’ll never be a great actor or director or whatever you want to be. How can you understand someone else if you can’t even understand yourself?”
    â€œDid it ever occur to you,” he said, “that you push people away from you?”
    What was I doing in this mess? I glanced around me and looked at a sign across the street. It was one of a man, the size of a building, continuously smoking, an endless flow of vapor, day after day, year after year, pouring from his mouth. Like some steamy oracle, some deadly pronouncement, he ruled over us. I looked back down at the wad of gum and knew I was being watched on all sides, and those writhing breasts at the entrance to the peepshow seemed to be observing this as well.
    The light above me was green and a sign read WALK , so I walked. I crossed Broadway and left Sean standing in front of the peepshow. I was aware of traffic that came to a halt, of
screeching brakes, and then of people pushing past me. I crossed to Forty-second Street and headed down the steps into the subway. Pimps and hookers in their pink satin heels were doing business on the stairs. Puerto Rican boys, radios blasting, raced down. Theatergoers used the railing, walking arm in arm.
    I went with them all. There was a big procession of us, heading to the token booth. I went down with the Chinese and the Japanese, the blacks and the Chicanos, the tourists and the permanent residents. The rich and the poor. The native New Yorkers. I went down with the cops and the criminals, the runaways and misfits and members of the Racquet Club and the illegal aliens and the professors and the
Times
reporters and the single people and the divorced and widowed people and old people and frigid and impotent people and those who looked like they’d had too much sex altogether and those who looked like they hadn’t had it in years. I walked among the workaholics, the alcoholics, the coffee drinkers, the pill poppers, the weight watchers and Turkish bath users, the chain smokers, the people who’d stopped being chain smokers, the people who’d been hypnotized, terrorized, mesmerized, analyzed, declawed, defanged, who’d improved themselves, exercised themselves, rid themselves of any germ of selfdestruction. They were coming home from night school; they were going out to mug somebody. Everyone was going to improve themselves somehow. Everyone was going to take the same goddamn express train I was going to take.
    Sean was right about one thing. I had only been thinking about myself for a while. But who was he to try and take my mind off it? As I entered the subway, my future suddenly seemed in doubt. The token taker hollered at me as I pulled out a twenty. I fumbled for a five while people standing in line behind me sighed impatiently and someone asked me to move out of the way.
    I decided to get lost, to lose myself underground. I decided to ask the pimp in the pink suit if he could use an extra hand. I walked toward him and he started to smile. All his teeth had been filed to gold points and he