Saturday Night

A tiny bar on South Street, walls painted red, white Christmas lights around a dark background behind the stage. The musicians are on the audience's level. Sticky tables with red glass candle holders. Stained-glass ceiling lights, red, gold and orange. Billy Martin, curly hair and beard, rumpled shirt, dark pants, stands in the center of the instruments, other musicians around him. He looks the same here as he does before thousands, concentration and movement, searching through his boxes of percussive instruments to find the right sound.

We share a Malibu and Coke, two of a crowd of twenty or so. As I listen, I feel a part of the city, of Saturday night. Above the streets, in and out of rooms and buildings, down alleys, on balconies.

I imagine the buildings, inhabited and not. The grocery store we went to earlier, with its packages of sliced cheese and capicola, chicken salad and pickles, now silent and dark. The art museum, galleries quiet, paintings and statues alone. My classrooms, lights off or on, chairs tucked beneath tables or not, boards haphazardly erased. The hospitals, bright with pockets of noise and quiet, miracles and tragedies. A grand dance hall now a 24-hour Rite-Aid. The high-ceilinged stations, travelers packed and ready to go.

I think of the subway lines running underground, dark and open until trains rush through to fill and light them. Damp, dripping, construction debris in the corners. Above the tunnels, the layers of the streets, asphalt and rock and brick.

The trains run over bridges. The Schuylkill reflects lights from the bridges' underarches. The Riverlink ferry runs passengers back and forth across the Delaware. The Love Park fountain, turned off, is a still blue pool with "No Swimming" stenciled in black on the bottom.

My students are drinking in dark basements, permanent marker X's on their hands. Wiping tables in smoky restaurants or having serious conversations with potential lovers under amber-colored streetlights. A few studying, jaded or shy, in pajama pants and sweatshirts, books, index cards, highlighters, colored pens spread out around them on the floor.

At the hospitals, women having babies, old men having heart attacks, people experiencing the best or worst news of their lives. Outside, a homeless man with too-bright eyes, asks, "can you spare a quarter? Two pennies?" Another stretches full-length on the sidewalk, head on his arms.

Tourists run up the lit Rocky steps, jumping up and down at the top and yelling, arms raised, feeling silly but doing it anyway. The night air is warm on bare arms.

Lights come up at the Broad Street theaters, the hum and shuffle of satisfied or unsatisfied crowds collecting themselves. Wind sweeps through trees at graveyards full of stones too worn-down to read or thick, rose-colored, polished. Bodies lie underground, ashes or bare bones or boxed-up somethings between bodies and skeletons.

In skinny row houses, round-faced kids stay up past their bedtimes watching the NBA playoffs next to mixing bowls of microwave popcorn. A bar full of patrons collectively yells, "De-troit Bas-ket-ball!"

I am connected to it, the food and the sports and the dark churches and the dark clubs and the cobblestones and the fountains and the paintings and the books and the music most of all. The music, right here, with barefoot Billy Martin hitting curved metal with drumsticks, part of a band a bar a street a city.