I heard those words coming out of a frail old man who was high-tailing it behind me. He was hunkered over, tiny, crotchety, his face framed with thick black glasses, and in his hand, a loaf of bread. After he uttered “The boy was looking at me…” a slew of incoherent words and sentences continued pouring out of him in a strange Irish or European accent. Soon we were walking side by side, and as we came upon a bus stop he declared at a woman by the bench:
“The boy he wants to touch your leg you should stab him in the rectum… hole!”
The pause before “hole” was the only break in his stream of thought-turned words, an after flourish to his initial declaration as he darted into the middle of the road and continued his exclamatory rambling.
So naturally I wanted this photo and went to get my pictures developed at a place where no one speaks English after the lady at Rite Aid was really rude to me on the phone. (I live in Washington Heights)
They didn’t have my pictures done after an hour so I had to wait while they were taking someone’s portrait. At first, all I saw was a girl in white posing in the other room, and I thought, hmm I wonder what she’s getting her picture taken for. I looked up at the walls at some of their examples of work, and there was a HUGE frame with multiple portaits of a pregnant young woman and her boyfriend/husband whatever kissing her pregnant, exposed belly, standing behind her holding her belly, and laying on the ground with her belly in his hands like a basketball. I thought, that’s… interesting, and nearly silmultaneously upon registering this portrait on the wall, I saw a man appear out of the corner of my eye and enter the photo session in progress. That young woman in white, I realized, was extremely PREGNANT, with her huge bulging belly exposed ready for its close-up. And for the next 15 minutes, the photographer and couple exhausted all possible positions/interactions to photograph a pregnant woman’s belly.