At the age of six, I invented an imaginary friend. For several years, my father had tried to convince me that a pig, Evangeline, and a dog, Rover, lived in the hallway of our tenement building. They were the pets, he insisted, of a girl named "Guzza Magoo," who lived by the garbage bins on the third-floor landing. Sometimes, he would pretend that the pig or dog was under our kitchen table. I would roll my eyes and admonish him with a chiding "Daddy!" Eventually, to outdo him, I invented my own imaginary playmate, but mine was defective. I changed her name from Hortensia to Gertrude to Wanda. Nothing seemed right. I tried holding conversations with her, but she was the boring, silent type. Finally I gave up and didn't care if people sat on her or talked loudly while she was sleeping. Anyway, I never understood the purpose of imaginary friends, because my real world was so fascinating. It still is, even now that I'm seventeen, because I live on Bleecker St.—a street scored through the heart of Greenwich Village.
          "New York, you rock!" some guy outside our apartment bellows at 1:14 a.m. In the room where James Agee wrote The African Queen and where (my dad says) I saw his ghost as a baby, I crawl out of bed and go over to the window. From five flights up, I supervise the night. There's the screamer. He has a scruffy beard, a baseball cap and a beer can. He's just another crazy, making my city's music.
          On the street, cabbies honk excessively trying to get to the Peculiar Pub—cabbies like the one who charged my mom five dollars to go three blocks when she first came to the city. I've grown up falling asleep to the symphony of carousing people and sirens and horns. One neighborhood car even plays The Godfather theme on its horn.
          There's the old man across the street, staring down, too. With his bulldog face, he stares out day and night. I wonder if he has watched me growing up. There's Mr. Richard, the homeless man who pets my real dog and tells him, "Lucky, you da coolest dog in town. You just so cool." And there's the pole that I walked into on my first date. (I turned bright red and grew a golfball on my forehead.) There go the local kids, waltzing into Pizza Box. And there's the neighborhood drunk, standing in front of my friend's apartment, cackling to himself. He gives off a cacophony of smells.
          I know every regular on Bleecker St.:  the Asian men who own the drugstore, the Russian lady in the jewelry shop, the Black men who stand in front of A Taste of India restaurant singing oldies. These are the characters who take the place of invented playmates and fuel my imagination.
          From my fifth-floor window, I conduct Bleecker St.