WEEKEND COLUMN: CONTEMPLATING SENSELESS VIOLENCE ON 103RD STREET

By Katie Barry

I’m called crazy a lot. Usually for costume choices or competing in bizarre contests. But my friend Eddie Spaghetti dubbed this “passionate crazy,” not “crazy-crazy” which is far freakier than my imagination can ever go.

I was tossing a football around on a Saturday afternoon on a pedestrian island on 103rd and Broadway with a friend while a lady on the bench prattled on to imaginary people on the sidewalk. “I wonder what’s going on in her head,” I thought. My friend whisper-warned me: “I don’t think you want to know.” Does she see everything in neon or deep shades of the color wheel? Are there wild furry animals, villains twice her size or something else that distorts her reality akin to when you drink too much? What happened to her to lead her here? She was once a soft, gooey coo-y baby that someone had to have loved and nurtured at some point — otherwise she wouldn’t be dressed, breathing, and formulating sentences.

These are common thoughts I have towards the “crazies” I see roaming around New York City. My mom always prayed “All but by the grace of God, that could be you” when passing people in public that suffered from mental disabilities. I was raised to be compassionate, gracious and not stare but not necessarily look away.

I made eye contact a few times with the lady, mainly when she screamed something unintelligible, followed by a cackle. “Maybe she’s happy,” I wanted to believe, “lost in her mind where she calls the shots.” Suddenly she leaps from her perch flailing her arms, like she’s guarding a quarterback in a flag football league, taunting, “Whut-whut? You think you can ball, girl? Huh? Huh?!”

I smiled and reached the football out for her to throw — with the gentleness you’d use to approach a toddler. She slaps the ball out of my grip and open-palm right-hand slugs me on my sunglasses. “Oh my god, she hit me! She hit me!” I squeaked out. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.” I was the one then seeing neon and deep shades of rage, as I caught myself from falling over the concrete divider where drivers make left turns on Broadway. “Das right, take that! Take thaaaat!” she squawked at me, now in full ugly cry-mode, dizzy and tonguing my teeth for traces of blood.

There were gaggles of youth soccer players on either side of the street staring, tourists from the hostel looking dumb-founded and worried mothers pushing their strollers faster. This woman, twice my age and half my size, bolted down Broadway holding up her baggy jeans by the belt loops. Someone called the cops. They asked for a description, vowed to go look for her, and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no. I have no health insurance, and felt ill about accruing a stupid ER bill for an already stupid act. My supers probably saved me black eyes, but gave me swollen cheek bones and faint purple bruises on either side of my nose.

There’s something so terrifying about looking crazy in the eye, then being fist-to-face with it. Half a block from where I live. “I want to sob for five hours,” I told my sister Kristy, not sure why because it was over. Done. I couldn’t stop welling up the rest of the night, even in the middle of the batting cages, and again later that night while tent camping with friends on an abandoned airfield in Queens. Staring into the fire as it crackled, I felt gutted. Like when the bottom of a Hefty trash bag gives out and all you see is gross.

I sponged sorrow and sadness for the Colorado movie theater victims, who were maimed or mowed down by a madman. No place is safe from senseless nonsense.  Sure, it’s also a matter of perspective, but no person’s experience should be trivialized or trumped by something more grim or gruesome. It’s the same security breached, body violated and faith in humanity rocked. How do these shattered families heal and resist revenge by roasting the killer on a spit like a suckling pig?

My thoughts ricocheted from sympathy for my attacker to vengeance involving shooting a paintball and potato gun from my fire escape with the help of Kristy and my roommate Robin. But that’s child’s play. I once got in a fist fight when I was eight years old when the fat ginger neighbor bully neglected my request to “stay off my property.” He argued that my parents owned it, not me. I lobbied that they own me, so therefore I am co-land owner.  I punched, he clawed. It was a fair fight, although he lost. Bad. Earlier this year, a grabby married dude at an Upper West Side bar drunkenly slurred, “Can I please see your titties?” I said no, and brushed him off. He punched me in the ribs. I instinctively cleaned his clock, and asked, “What the fuck?” His reason was “I asked nicely. That’s what you get.” The bouncer didn’t throw him out. “Nah girl, I’ll let you have this one. Kick his ass, I’ll back you up,” he said. But that would give me no satisfaction. Just like slugging the lady back. Maybe repeated pummeling plummeted her into this position.

Two days after the altercation, my roommate spotted my attacker on the same park bench while I was headed to see the Batman movie. We sat on the concrete divider, surveying her from her head to her white leather shoes, and snapped several undercover photos. “That’s her.” I approached two cops close by, telling them my tale. They looked at me like I was the crazy one, scoffed, shrugged, and offered zero help. Maybe they were in the school of thought that “Snitches get stitches” and were protecting me. Oh, when will this silly blonde girl learn….

Cop 1: “Uhhhh, what do you want us to do?”

Me: “Um, I don’t know. Be a cop. Do your job. Go talk to her. See where she lives. Give me some sort of comfort.”

Cop 2: “Here’s some scenarios for you. She gets taken to the loony bin today, she’s released tomorrow.”

Me: “Can she be arrested or moved somewhere?”

Cop 1: “If you want that, you’ll have to….(trails off on this labyrinth of legal system steps verbally designed to scare me off from the idea)

Me: “So there’s no justice in the world? Crazy can just hang out wherever?”

Cop 2: “It’s not that…”

Me: “Then what is it?”

Cop 1: “Life’s not fair. What can you do?”

It’s the reason superhero movies are so popular and adored by the masses. Sure, studios paint cops as bumbling doofuses and superheroes as gods. Batman does what Gotham police can’t or won’t. He has no rules governing him. He is the law. He makes his own judgment calls, even tough but necessary ones like killing Harvey Dent.

Craziness can lurk and live anywhere, striking whenever and wherever. What lights the fuse? You can’t know, really. Nothing is safe or sacred, especially in New York. Even on my 1-2-3 subway ride down to midtown for Batman, the subway car lights went out between the 96th street and 72nd street stations. I shrugged. “Oh well, this might be it.” And you have to eat it. As hokey and hippydippy as it sounds, love is the one and only thing that can save the day.