Not feelin' so groovy on the 59th St. Bridge.....

Tonight I went to “Broadway Sessions”, a very popular Thurs night variety type show developed by a talented and funny broadway stalwart named Ben D. My friend Donnie Kehr was doing a short set (famous in NY for The Who’s Tommy, Aida, Billy Elliot among other shows...he and my friend Cori are the brains behind “Rockers On Broadway” a very successful benefit show, but i digress, and i can because it’s my blog!) I was there just to support. After the show I hit the subway which is just around the corner in Times Square. I run my card through for the $2+ ride only to find out they’re workin on the tracks and I can’t have the train I want 
(those MTA apps on all you guys’ iPhones make a little more sense to me now!).

No refund (I’ll save you the time....go fuck yoursefl!) so I have to grab a cab back to Queens.....Astoria to be exact which involves The Queensboro or “59th St Bridge” like the song by Simon And Garfunkel. 

Half way over the bridge traffic comes to a dead stop (WTF!?) and about 3 or 4 cars in each lane ahead of us in the road is this black towncar, completely crushed on the left side, left rear wheel, rubber gone and ground down to the metal hub and the front wheel flat and twisted kinda pretzel like. Totaled. And blocking both lanes. Sideways.

We're stuck and we can’t really see anything initially, it’s 12:15 am and after 5 minutes I’m thinkin’ “this is gonna cost me a forever dollar” so I tell the driver I’ll go have a looksee (always get the cab driver on your side by joking with him or being cheerful, even if you have to fake it). He says fine and I go see what’s up.

There’s about 14 men and 3-4 languages and a fair amount of chaos goin on, some berating the driver, others asking how it happened, blah, blah blah....and I’m like “hey, let’s see if we can push it off to one side and open up a lane 'cause there's a lot of cars piling up behind us”.

So about 7-8 of us try to push the car more to the left, to try and get the right lane clear....it doesn’t budge. By this time more people are out of their cars (mostly men) and cars from the other side are pulling up (“we just called 911” I heard about 4 times) and folks are getting a little hot under the collar, more cars logjamming every second, more chaos and me and my cab driver (he had walked over by then) start trying to conivnce what by now is well over 20 men that “ we can do this, all of us” and “let’s focus”.

About 20 or so of us positioned ourselves around the car so as to give the right lane an opening and it moves!! Now were all excited and yellin’ an’ pushing and it moves twice more, with enough room to get the right lane open and we celebrate our triumph by spouting out things like “gotta love NY”, “only here”. As I’m walking back to the taxi the cab driver said he had turned the meter off and I start tellin’ all the drivers I walk by “one at a time now” and so he starts saying the same thing on the other side of the lane.....good man......we get back into the cab and a very orderly line forms allowing traffic to move smoothly and we can hear the sirens coming but no one got hurt and everything’s cool.....and once again, only in NY......

M. Lanning 6/3/11