It was like being a perverted Roman emperor.

Me and my two friends were sitting right outside the bathroom and were being complete asses, making faces at the mirrored wall after people went in and pretending to take photos. I blame the mojito.

But then I was imagining the possible future death of civilization and how unlikely it is that in my lifetime I will remain so lucky as to live in such luxury as I do, and in the horrible post-apocalyptic future where we all have to dress in rags and eat rats and live underground to avoid the bionic alien invaders, I’ll look back at this moment and sigh with gratitude that I savored this particular moment in a warm restaurant echoing with reflections, music, laughter, friendship, as I devoured fancy tom yum and spring rolls with plum sauce and giggled at the people in the bathroom. My friend “qp” remarked the best, or worst, part about the bathroom was realizing that behind you, there was another mirror, and wondering who was looking through its one-way glass.

My favorite performers tonight were Purple Haze and Stef, improvising during the “seduction” phase of the Urban Erotika Four Movements. Then the Universes, who you can catch tomorrow at Henry Street Settlement. (There will be an open mic and food for a late brunch.) And last but not least my 3rd favorite was in the “Raw” movement of the evening – Cake Cash. Her Raw was amazing, witty, and dirty-hot. Somehow, I can’t find her myspace, but I know she’s got one because Mo mentioned it.

It was a fabulous poetic pilgrimage for me. Now if I can get to the Nuyorican Cafe in the next few days, life will be great…

I note that poetry is expensive in New York. 7 bucks for Poetry House. Labyrinth was free, luckily. And the Bowery Poetry Club quite expensive at $20! Yikes.

As you can see from the photo, even in the bathroom at the BPC, I found poetry – this one is by Pedro Pietri.

- The F line is skanky. In fact, the 57th St. F stop is the roachiest, moldiest, most pee-smelling place ever.

- There is a Duane Reade pharmacy every 5 seconds in any direction. In fact if you put together all the Duane Reade pharmacies in New York City with all the Starbucks in San Francisco then you would have a mediocrely caffeinated drugstore the size of a small nation. I am trying to imagine Mr. Duane Reade and failing. He turns out in my imagination like a hideous mixture of the Coca-Cola Santa Claus in a pharmacist outfit, Doc Holliday, and a Horatio Alger story hero, a hero with a pharmacy with a good heart who then somehow accidentally became a franchise tycoon, perhaps after his death. I’m afraid to look up the real person for fear of being disappointed.

- There is construction going on everywhere, at all times of night or day.

- New York people seem aloof at first. They warm up after a while and then seem like human beings.

- The New York people who aren’t aloof at first are either crazy or from out of town.

- If you are lost and ask directions, the other person will very likely also be lost, because they’re talking to you on the street and so are not aloof, and so they are either crazy or from out of town; thus, lost.

She’s set up on Prince St, just west of Mott, and if you are interested in a hat you can email Xiomara at xiom58@yahoo.com.

I like that level of there being many imaginary realities possible to imagine over the one I see, of the accessibility of histories and stories. There’s a huge pleasure in recognition; in having several mental overlays for a landscape. And yet I also bristle a bit at the ways that everybody in NYC seems to buy into NYC as the center of the universe, as a central myth of City, a sort of Harrisonesque Viriconium or Zelazny-ish Amber where everything that happens is more significant and has more merit intrinsically than if it had happened somewhere else.

I wonder if, across the world, blogging will add an extra layer of reality to enough different places to dispel a bit of that concentration of power, as we all write about our own geographies and territories and give them importance, laying their stories bare to the world.

In my memory that was a super fancy tall apartment high rise. It was so intimidating! Going up an elevator to get to your “house”, where the view gave me vertigo. There was a doorman. Unthinkably posh and big-cityish! It loomed. A skyscraper, fancy, sophisticated.

So it’s funny to be there now in the same place, and to see it how I do now, which is that it’s somewhat run down, a regular old apartment building, mostly for student houseing. Really, a little squalid… and only 15 stories.

No – It was people, hundreds of people, waiting for Friday morning, or Thursday night / Friday morning 12:01am, to buy the new Playstation 3. I had no idea!

Meanwhile, some of the guys dragged the dude in handcuffs, a young black man in fancy designer jeans, across the street. They made him kneel against the wall and he looked completely terrified but resigned. I crossed the street and was standing about 20 feet away, feeling that I should witness the scene and document it somehow or at least, make sure they were actually police. I know, like that would be reassuring if they were? I was not close enough to hear anything the guys were saying. Next to the man kneeling with his face to the wall was a black woman in a sort of hat or turban-like headgear, apparently his friend.

At that point, people on the street were starting to talk to each other and one older man asked me what had happened. I explained. One of the “cops” approached us and began yelling at me and a short man nearby who was just kind of standing there. Maybe about 30 feet away. He told us to move away “Or Else”. The short man said that he was just waiting for a friend. “I’ll give you till the count of three. One, two…” I said “It’s a public place, a public sidewalk. Are you a police officer? You can’t make us move, we aren’t doing anything.” He continued yelling and threatening us. I asked to see his identification, and said I was a journalist. He would not say if he was a police officer or not. At that point the short man was sidling away down 6th and everyone else was leaving. I felt that I had no witnesses anymore. I got out my camera to take a photo of the man who was right up in my face screaming and making me slowly back away. The guy was huge. He was not in uniform. A white guy with a mustache and dark hair, in a tshirt and … jeans? pants? and a baseball hat. I was having some pretty severe asthma and my heart pounding a million miles a second.

Dear readers. I am sorry to disappoint you, the man “arrested”, and myself, because I was terrified, and I started walking away at that point. I expect more from myself in a crisis. I stood up to the head of FEMA in Houston, and to Homeland Security goons, and to the Red Cross authorities, and to the police there, doing disaster relief work after Katrina. But in the face of a group of possibly armed men on the street at night, as I considered whether I was going to be thrown to the sidewalk and handcuffed, I lost my courage to stand up to authority and to be a witness. In part, I think, because I could not tell what the authority was. As I began to cross 6th the scary guy screamed at me, “That’s right just get away from here. Hey Girlie, I think someone forgot to finish shaving the rest of your head…” And I kept walking and couldn’t hear the rest of what he was saying.

I hope the guy and his friend are being treated with decency and respect by whoever has them in custody. No matter what they are accused of.

The guys who surrounded him were all white. I am sorry to bring up racial politics but I do feel I have to mention it. It’s not like I’ve forgotten the name of Amadou Diallo. That is part of why I stayed to be a witness.

I’m not sure what is scarier, the thought they were police, or the thought that they might not have been. I thought that as a visitor in NYC I was supposed to be nervous about being mugged by criminals. Instead I am now terrified of the police, who don’t seem to respect the people they are supposed to be protecting.

Is this just the sort of thing that happens regularly here? Or is this horribly unusual? I hope someone can pursue it and can tell the story of what happened at that corner, and I challenge the NY Police Department to explain this incident and the aggression and hostility I experienced while merely standing on the sidewalk a fair distance from the scene … No one could say I was obstructing an arrest… I and other people were intimidated into leaving. It’s not right and again, I challenge the Police to explain – if it was them. If it wasn’t, then they should know about it.

In the cab I also learned more on the topic of NYC neighborhoods. Chelsea is where the gay boys hang out and it’s fun, nice, and chi-chi. Lesbians, being poorer, tend towards the East Village, which is gentrifying but not too horribly fast. I will like Greenwich Village which is studenty and full of bookstores and cafes (says my Wise Guide.) I will like the East Village, which will remind me of the Mission and specifically of Valencia Street in San Francisco. (How did he KNOW?) And I must, must, must, go to a particular Cuban restaurant in Soho, I think on Prince Street but unfortunately I can’t remember, but it’s insanely popular, great, and cheap.

My plans are to walk around, going to libraries, cafes, and bookstores, pausing to write wherever it seems convenient, so it will be a nerd’s eye view. In SF, I blog about random encounters with people, and library trips, literary readings like Writers With Drinks, poetry, and performance events like Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show, life between the sort-of-suburbs and the city, and, well, hanging around writing in internet cafes, time-honored tradition of bloggers everywhere.

I also write for BlogHer, mostly on the topic of what’s going on with Latin American women’s blogs; for other magazine; and for Feminist SF, a group blog about feminism and science fiction.