King's County Clerk

I go to room 189 with two pieces of paper, to get them twice stamped and once signed (and some numbers handwritten in the stamped place). Look: scuffed bulletproof glass in the grand revolving door. Bored cop at the metal detector stares at a screen-full of the curled and nestled insides of everyone’s bag (mine: little nests of computer cords, one tiny pink mitten, pen caps, acorns, tampon, book).

Room 189 is a vast, sad blue. It’s networked with cubicles (a human or two or four in each). “Information: Window #1” says a miniscule sign at the door. But where’s  #1? Here’s “Window #12: wills…” The path winds between cubicle walls, each box hung with a number, but not next to the numbers you’d think. At the back, next to “Window #5: rewiring” (gaunt man waiting eagerly with a pliers in each hand) sits “Window #1: passports.” And next to that, “Window #1 (again): information.”  Empty, both of them. Not even a chair in there.

Wandering back I find accidentally “Window #2: business registration and bankruptcy. And juror information.” That last penciled in…an afterthought? I wait as each soul in line before me is soundly chewed out by the exhausted attendant (rouged orange, wig askew). My turn. I say nothing, just hand over the papers. She sighs mightily, throws up her hands, looks me in the eye and says, “YOU are a pain in my ass all day long.”

“But I just got here,” I offer, trying my best to be winsome. She ferociously stamps both, signs one, fills in the numbers I’ve come for, then turns around and plants herself, arms akimbo. Her cubicle is empty but for a cracked vinyl chair. Her counter: immaculate with its row of stamps and pens on chains.

I grab my papers and skip for the door, jostling out with a huge, delighted family (also fleeing, twin girls dressed going-out fancy, hair braided identically but with opposite parts, dragging grinning grandma). On the way out I pass the snack bar where a blind man sells candy bars by touch, and a woman sleeping soundly in the women’s room doorway (balanced, bent into an L). And then, past metal detectors, through dim revolving doors, into the cold, bright air of downtown Brooklyn.

I’ll take this, I think, and place it up against the cubicles: bright windows full of discount sneakers and baby clothes, women walking arm in arm, wrapped in the same scarf. And against bulletproof glass, I’ll put the boil of teenagers just sprung from school (smacking heads and grabbing hats and bumping strangers and kissing each other like no one can see).

And then, Jay St. Metro-tech. Against Window #2 and pens on chains: the tired-eyed fellow on the downtown F platform picks up a fiddle and makes the whole distracted herd of us tap our toes in unison. When he opens his mouth and closes his eyes to sing, it’s like a jar of honey suddenly poured out all over a bed of pine needles. The look and smell of that, is what he sounds like. The F blasts in and he just keeps going, I imagine, long after we all stand clear of the closing doors closing and balance our various ways home, up and over the elevated bridge, train strung through with setting winter sun.

Here he is, just before he started singing: