Strawberry Fields Forever

Strawberry Fields in Central Park is a playground for the urban hippie—a Disneyland attraction with nary a remnant of the decade that inspired it, noted my collaborator Dr. Venture. Intended as a memorial to John Lennon, who was shot across the street 27 years ago, the Neapolitan mosaic centerpiece is surrounded by a pitiful gathering of undrafted former dorm lawn hacky sack players, second-rate jammers, and random cripples and vets. Way to branch out, guys.

None of this, however, deterred a pretty girl from sitting on a bench across from yours truly and Dr. Venture and reading a book. Rapt in the bloom-in-progress and the spiraling descent of cast-off flower petals, I failed to notice a middle-aged gentleman sit right next to the girl. Gentleman is a stretch. He looked very much like the owner of a take-out kitchen in Curry Hill—a short and stout brown-skinned midget in dark dress pants that didn’t mesh with a wrinkled windbreaker. His ride and mobile home—I thought at the time—a shopping cart filled with trash bags and the bric-a-bracs of an inner city nomad.

The crippled veteran doing doughnuts around the word IMAGINE on his wheelchair had a Yankees game to his ear on a portable radio. “Wang’s perfect through seven!” he exclaimed to no one in particular. The little man on the bench was in full mackin’ mode, his right arm now firmly planted behind the top plank on the bench. I made an instinctive move to get up, but there was no further encroachment. The girl, stoically reading the book at first, was now smiling; pleased at the attention, disgusted by the source. “I do, but guys my own age,” I heard her mutter, shortly followed by “none of your business.”

Dr. Venture sat still, admiring the gall of this pudgy little man with no prospects to open his mouth to a woman without asking for loose change. The shopping cart crammed with trash bags parked next to him turned out to belong to a tousled couple who now claimed it. And then there was me, sitting on the bench, debating whether I am a writer who enjoys and collects these scraps of life, or the hero who eats them up.