The new pedometer told me I’d put in 21,146 steps shortly before midnight when I reached the top of the stairs down to the A train at West Fourth Street.   Many of those steps had been logged during a discussion of how to take a successful and unique program and make it a sustainable business, at least for the two of us who were discussing it.  My Hawaiian shirt had not been dry since 5:40, when I stepped off a downtown A with about 6,000 steps on the pedometer.

I was talking to a friend on my late mother’s state of the art Motorola Razr as I walked up Sixth Avenue.  When I headed toward the steps down to my cool A train home my way was blocked by four people arguing at the top of the stairs.   A hot humid night, two couples arguing, one man stressing, rather pointedly, that the other guy should get out of his fucking face, he wasn’t doing nothing, back the fuck off.

Only the guy he was talking to was a young cop, maybe 25, who had to be hot as hell in that uniform in the brutal humidity, and he was one step below the angry guy.  Next to the young cop was his partner, a blond female cop with her hair in a pony tail, a bit taller than the young male cop.   I didn’t like the way things were escalating, but I also couldn’t very well push past the four of them and head down the steps under the circumstances.  They were directly in my way, I had little choice but to watch and wait.

We live in a racist country, let us face that bitter-tasting truth like adults.  The word “nigger”, once a staple of race relations, is now perhaps the most taboo word in the language.  People get fired for saying the “n- word”.  To me calling it the “n-word” is fucking obscene, excuse me, f-ing obscene, and the squeamish neologism makes talking about our deep history of racism more difficult, not less.   But whatever you think about it, “nigger” is certainly not a word to calm the nerves on a hot and humid NYC night when things are escalating, particularly when two people are black and two people are white.  The cops in this case were both white.  Doesn’t that make things clearer, dear reader?

I’m not certain, but I think the man who was insisting on his right not to be harassed by the police finally crossed the line when he imprudently said “I told you to get out of my face, nigger.”  He said this to the young male cop, who sprang like a lion, shoved the man who’d used that terrible word of disrespect against the chain link fence by the basketball courts, kicked his legs apart, roughly frisked him then shoved him on to the ground and knelt on the man’s back.  He jerked, then twisted, the abruptly face down man’s arms behind his back, and applied the handcuffs.  The woman who was with the handcuffed man said “Oh, I didn’t want this…”  She may have wished misfortunes on her angry companion, but not this, face down on the filthy concrete with his hands shackled behind his back.

I narrated all this to my friend who was on the other end of the phone.  She voiced indignation and horror.  I turned to a guy standing next to me, a young black man, who was watching impassively.  “You got a camera on there?” I asked, pointing to his iPhone.

“That’s foul, what you’re doing is foul,” he said softly to the cops.  The cops were in no mood to hear softly whispered words of reproach.  In fact, they didn’t hear them. The arresting officer’s partner was hovering near the prone, handcuffed man, ready with her nightstick if he turned out to be a foul-mouthed Houdini and slipped the cuffs and the young police officer kneeling on his back.

I noticed one more thing, kind of poignant.  It will not show up in the arrest report or in court later on.  The cop kneeling on the guy’s back redistributed his weight slightly and patted the man’s shoulder reassuringly, as though to calm him.   His hand stroked the blue t-shirt the way you’d comfort an inconsolable child.  It was the damnedest thing.