Never forgets

November 27, 1988

Rosy always comes in for coffee and donuts, every morning after a hard night selling cocaine out of the near empty bar she claimed Babe Ruth used to hang out in on the Garfield side of the Wall Street Bridge.

She was a young girl back then, before all the bullshit happened, and she got caught up in stuff she doesn’t talk a lot about, all those years trying to reinvent herself so she can go on with life the way she feels most comfortable doing.

But she always comes back to the Babe Ruth stories, as if that was the last moment when she felt honest about herself, before something snapped inside of her, and she woke up a different person.

She talks about how men from New York used to come to the bar to haul inebriated Babe down the bar’s narrow back stairs, wiping mustard and lipstick off his face in the hopes they could sober him up enough to play the game, and how small she felt in the shadow of a truly great man, a 15-year-old girl in love with a man who would not remember her later, even sober, even the next time he came to the bar and repeated the pre-game warm up, always asking what her name was, and immediately forgetting it. But she never forgot him, not one detail, even in the lonely mornings like this, hutched over the cup of Dunkin Donut counter – staring at me through the glass where I roll out the dough for the next batch of donuts. She never forgets.