NY adventure

I wouldn't be able to write this post if my mother read my blog, but she doesn't, so I'll tell you what I saw last night. I decided to go to the laundromat, and as usual, left the house at the last possible moment (9:55 pm) to make it before the cut-off (their official line is that they don't let anyone start doing laundry after 10pm. I don't really believe them, but I don't want to be they one they prove it on). There were a lot of people in the hallway, but that's not too unusual in my building. The first thing that tipped me off to something weird happening was when someone lifted my laundry cart down the front steps for me. I looked up to say thank you, and it was a police officer. I wondered what he was doing there (sometimes there are policeman on my block, but it's not an everyday occurrence), and quickly saw that he had a lot of friends with him. I then saw the police tape that had my building and the rest of the block down to Riverside blocked off. The policeman told me I needed to go across the street to walk up to Broadway, and held the tape up for me to duck under, which I quickly did. I then hurried to the laundromat thinking that I hoped they would be done with their drug raid or whatever it was before I got back; having to duck under tape to get to one's building is most inconvenient.
Upon my return at 11:30 things had calmed down a bit. There were only four policeman left, and the taped off portion had decreased to just my building. I walked around to where I could duck back under the tape, hoping the policemen would remember that I lived there, and I wouldn't have to talk to anyone. They didn't pay much attention to me, and as I passed, I saw what they were standing around. There was a corpse about three feet from my front steps. That gave me a moment's pause, not having encountered too many dead bodies in my somewhat sheltered lifetime, but I didn't want to risk having to speak to policemen, so I continued into my building. I scanned through the news programs to see if there was anything about the dead guy on my street, but it was all sports coverage by that time. So, I'll probably never know about what happened in front of my building last night. The scariest thing about the whole experience was actually that I was far more annoyed by the inconvenience to my trip to the laundromat than frightened by the possible/probable violence in my neighborhood. Even with my jaded attitude, that's the second scariest thing that's happened where I live. If you haven't heard about the scariest night I've spent in a NY apartment, let me know, and I'll tell you about it sometime.