DOWNTOWN PORTRAIT

Tony.

The freight op at 200 Hudson.

Genius denied fruition?

Lonely? Gay?

All of the above?

No matter. Just a few questions that pop into my head.

Though he does like to comment on my weight; how I manage to stay "so skinny", as though my boyish looks (read: figure) don't deceive him at all (which, now that I think about it, is how he'd say it: "That figure don't trick me at all"). I'm as bald as he is, and the voice, the thing that always seems to give me away, must have some privy quality of age about it.

I try to tell him I have very few secrets, but these days I can't really get him to shut up. Today, for instance, he asks me how long I've been in New York: my truck still has its California plates. I never once doubted his talent for observation; you tend to discover this in people who're not so readily available to the world. Tony's tight-lipped, none too affable at the outset, but he's watching things, and that's what I like about him. Always did. It's good to know a Tony. I tell him, "About---" before he cuts me off and tells me how he's saving 200 every half year going with Geico instead of All State. "But the bitch I get on the phone," he says, "keeps saying to me, 'Ohhh, you gotta fill out these forms; you can't switch without---.' She just goes on and on." He waves away the thought, and as we hit 9, he's cranking that hydraulic lever back and forth, shimmying the whole car as he does so, until the lines between the car and shaft line up just so. Only then does he lift the doors and grate and allow me to be on my way.

Today we still haven't finished his insurance spiel once we hit my floor, and the conversation spills out into the foyer where I have to wait for Allie, the receptionist, to come over and open the door marked in bold letters: ALL DELIVERIES THROUGH HERE NO EXCEPTIONS.

"You get auto and health all in one?" I ask him.

"No, my car's different. I got fire and theft on it. Fire I don't care about; it goes up in flames, so what? I'll gladly give it up."

He tells me he's paying eighty-five bucks for theft, which makes me turn.

"Eighty-five??"

"Yeah."

"For the whole six months."

"Yeah."

He can't believe my shock.

"What year's your car?"

"2002."

"Honda?"

"No," he frowns: I'm a fool.

" Lexus."

Then Allie comes round and opens the door. That's my cue. The sooner I get into the studio the sooner I'm out of it.

In the beginning, he never said much at all. "Eight o' clock," was about as much as anyone new to the building would get out of him. Anyone who knows, eight o'clock is the time the dock opens. But if you're in good keep with Tony he'll generally let slide four, five minutes before the appointed hour. Which is to say that he'll open the gate, nothing more.

Meaning the sweep. Long, slow circuits through the vast garage, laying the dust bin down, sweeping, laying the dust bin down again, sweeping. Long, slow Tony at the broom, going about his work in no hurry at all.

Several months on now, he likes to rib me about buying a coffee when I could just pump one out of the canister I bring to the photo shoots. If he's not ribbing me about the coffee, the diet cokes, the cigarettes, my boots, my gray chest hairs, he'll grow expansive again, talking insurance or about his place in Queens. Nice place, nice area, near JFK, off the Jackie Robinson Expressway. I once said I was familiar with it, having driven my girlfriend to the airport on a few occasions now. But no, I didn't know the multiplex, the Greek restaurant on the corner of such and such, and therefore I knew nothing. The other day he tells me about his upstairs neighbors who might be leaving--- anybody I might know who might be interested in moving in??? Three question marks indicate the extent to which his desire is geared toward filling his place in lieu of getting his neighbors' apartment. They've already flooded him out twice and they're Chinese, which unnerves him even more.

He claims that there's a complete disconnect between function and sense encoded in the Chinese gene pool; his evaluation ("You mean 'theory', don't you?" I asked. "No, I don't mean 'theory,' he said. ""Not at all.") is based on a terminal sense of party politics. Socialism, Communism--- whatever--- as a rule, they're not what people want, except for the Chinese.

"Hell of an army, though," I counter, loading my gear back into the bed of the truck.

He's taking his usual stroll down along the dock to the ramp, way over toward the east end of the garage, talking to himself or to me--- it's sometimes very hard to tell. As I said, the garage is vast, but he speaks in the same tone of voice as though we were side by side in the elevator. I get about every tenth word, tops, as he saunters to the far end of the garage and steps casually down the ramp, talking all the while, before heading back over to the front of my truck to finish his elaborate, highly discursive speech about the trouble with traffic come 3pm.

"What happened," I tell him. "Now you're talking traffic."

And he'll politely backtrack, professorially speaking, explaining how he arrived from the neighbors to the state of traffic at 3pm on Hudson St. in the space of time it's taken him to walk from the ramp, to the front of my truck, and on to the gate, where he'll politely push the button to open the gate and let me out.

Then a wave and a nod , distracted by the thought of what he'll possibly do next.

Pete Simonelli lives in New York and is the lead singer of the Enablers.