Angels on Seventh Avenue

By Mark Crimmins

There was an intermittent thunderstorm, but we decided to run through the rain anyway. We ran up the Avenue of the Americas, crossed Fifty-Ninth, and entered the park.
The rain was coming down but not too heavily.
We reached the mall and cruised north.
Rain started coming down in torrents, so we took cover in the bandshell. In the
back of the recess, a guy was playing a djembe. We listened to him for a while, and then he let me play. He liked my polyrhythmic solo. Side by side, he and my girlfriend danced for a few minutes, matching their movements to my beats. The rain fell over the rim of the bandshell like a waterfall. For a short while, the three of us seemed like a tiny society that had moved into a cave behind the falling waters.
Then the rain slowed.
We said goodbye to the drummer and continued our run.
It was a chilly fall day. Aside from the rain, it was perfect for running.
We continued north and turned left onto Terrace Drive, then left again down West Drive. We ran south now, parallel to Central Park West. A kid of about twelve, sheltering under an umbrella behind a fence, watched us as we passed. We veered east inside of Columbus Circle until we got to the crossing at Fifty-Ninth. We jogged on the spot as we waited for the lights to change and then headed down the west side of Seventh. Thanks to the rain, pedestrian traffic wasn’t too bad.
We crossed Fifty-Eighth. Fifty-Seventh. Fifty-Sixth.
The rain was getting heavier again.
Then it came down in sheets.

We took refuge under the canopy of the Park Central Hotel. A few pedestrians were huddled there beneath the sidewalk shelter.
It was then that it happened. My girlfriend noticed it first.
“Hey, check this out! I’m steaming!” I looked at her outheld arm, from which steam was indeed rising. But then I noticed it was rising from her shoulders and head, too. Then she pointed at me. “You’re steaming too! Look at that!”
I looked down at my arms and legs. My limbs were producing steam.
Here we both were, under the canopy, steam rising from our bodies.
An old lady grasping a furled umbrella caught sight of us. Her eyes widened and
she spoke to the others nearby, gesturing towards us with her umbrella.
“Look at these two! They’re steaming—like the racehorses!”
A girl in a funky hat and a rain jacket said we looked like aliens.
“Not for me,” a guy leaning against a wall said. “For me they’re more like ghosts. “It looks like they’re evaporating. They’re vaporizing, right while we watch them!”
Steaming away, we giggled and shifted from foot to foot.
What a couple we made!
The rain kept coming down hard and more people stopped beneath the carousel.
The group gathered around us grew denser.
“We just went out for a run in the rain,” my girlfriend explained. “It must be the
sweat and the cold air.”
An old man peered at us with a languid smile before speaking up.
“I’ve lived in New York for sixty-Hive years,” he said. “I thought I’d seen everything, but I never saw people steam!”
A thin bearded guy said we looked like we were on the Star Trek transporter.
“That’s right!” another bystander agreed. “It’s like they’re being beamed up
somewhere! They’re dematerializing right in front of our eyes, ha ha!”
A young guy in a bright yellow rain jacket piped up.
“They’re visiting from another planet. Their skin reacts strangely to our earth air!”
I stretched out a hand to the group and spoke in a solemn voice.
“We come in peace!”
Everybody laughed.
The Park Central doorman wandered over. When he saw us, he shook his head.
“New York!” he said. “Never a dull moment! We got all kinds here!”
An old lady with a huge golf umbrella stepped forward and addressed the group.
“You know what I think? I think they look like angels! Like angels angels? From
heaven, I mean. Instead of wings, they’re powered by steam!”
A tall young guy with a backpack agreed.
“You’re right! They’re angels—look at them!”
The old lady with the golf umbrella replied.
“Just like I said! You know what—we could use a coupla angels in this town, ha ha!”
A professorial type in a wet trilby spoke through his scholarly beard.
“Angels on Seventh Avenue.”
Another lady responded to this.
“That sounds like one of those old James Cagney movies!”
“Back in the day, we tried to fly here and save Arnold Rothstein,” I said. “But we didn’t get here on time. He was murdered in there.”
I jabbed a thumb towards the interior of the hotel.
Someone confirmed this.
“Hey—he’s right! Arnold Rothstein did die in there!”
“He died two days after he was shot,” I said. “We got here too late to save him.”
A new lady spoke up.
“Wasn’t he a mobster?”
A little old guy in a raincoat and a floppy hat responded.
“He fixed the World Series in 1919. It was quite an accomplishment!”
Steam continued to rise from us.
We stood there, the center of attention on this rainy Manhattan afternoon.
Then the downpour eased, the temperature rose, and our steam started to thin.
One of the bystanders noticed this.
“Hey—they’re running out of steam!”
We looked down at our arms and frowned.
“That’s a good one,” another man said as he threw up his umbrella to take off. “The angels are running out of steam. It’s a sign of the times, ha ha!”
One of the ladies agreed.
“That probably means it’s time to leave. I’m outta here!”
She zipped off up Seventh.
One by one, everyone left the refuge of the canopy.
We were the last to leave.
We jogged off down Seventh Avenue—we might have been running out of steam, but we still had plenty of energy

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