In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

some were balancing bamboo poles across their shoulders, the ends
attached with bright balloons of grocery bags that bounced up and
down festively with every step.
At the corner of East Broadway she picked up half a dozen
fresh dumplings from the Dim Sum GoGo take-out window, and
crossed the street to Chatham Square to eat them under the statue of
Lin Ze Xu, the Qing Dynasty Bureaucrat sent to Canton to stop the
spread of opium by imperialist forces. In the end he was only partly
successful, because the other benches of the little square were occupied
by passed out junkies, many of Cantonese origin, and one old timer
sprinkling crumbs to a mob of greedy pigeons. She dipped her
dumplings in the sauce and tried again to decipher the Japanese specs
on the new ear buds, without the annoyance of a shouting weirdo.
Futile, she decided. They were probably just a piece of fancy junk and
another waste of money.
She threw her trash (including the nasty blister pack) into the
can before heading back west up the quieter Grand street. At a sidewalk
stand, the Wa pears in their pretty crepe paper cups were irresistible, so
she bought a couple to munch on along the way.
On the corner stoop, his usual place year round, the homeless
Asian guy in his turban of black garbage bags, who could have been
thirty or three hundred, read the paper. As it got colder, he wrapped his
feet, legs, and neck until only his glinting eyes peeked out from the
bundles of black plastic. Penny never figured out if he was a local nut
or some famous performance artist from the seventies doing a survival
piece. He seemed too on the ball inside his polyethylene cocoon to be
certified.
Finishing the juicy second pear, she crossed Mercer and walked
up to the graffiti covered elevator door around the corner. The dull red
doors were still covered with vintage Samo, a.k.a. Jean Michel Basquiat,
who had also hidden in a downtown basement creating public
nightmares, but with heroin and paint instead of electrical current.
Twenty years had passed since then and the foreign photographers still
stopped by to point and click, get just the right streak of sunlight on the
decaying paper, the fading paint. The elevator arrived with a clunk.
Penny fumbled with sticky fingers to stick her key in the elevator door.
4