Forget it, dear reader, it's Chinatown

Today I saw a guy walking down the street in Chinatown - let me preface this by saying that there are two Chinatowns. There is the Chinatown of Canal St and Mulberry St which is basically a Potemkin village for the tourists (handbag? rolex? handbag?), and then there is the area on the far east side of the island, sometimes referred to as "Two Bridges" because it is between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, which, holy shit, is a different world (if you are tired of this world or your life in it, just go there for a few hours. Mark Helprin knows what I am talking about). If you try to go into a store in real Chinatown, they will just sort of shoo you out, either because they're not interested in your curiosity, round-eyes, or because they just don't speak a word of English, so whatever it is you're looking for they can't help you.

But you can get helped at the grocery store built right into one of the pillars of the Manhattan bridge, and there is a lovely produce market lining the very narrow sidewalk leading down to it.

S'wanyway, I was walking down the street, with my pound of ginger (that's the quantity they sell it in; it comes out to five or six big sticks; I think it cost $1.50), and who crosses my path but this guy, carrying a black duffel bag in one hand, and a semi- automatic handgun in the other, strutting with a purpose, cutting a path through the ginger peddlers and the grocery shoppers. He was accompanied by a guy dressed in a sort of official-looking security guard outfit (Ricky's, $39.99), who also had a gun, but in a holster around his waist. Now, I always assume in this situation that this must be normal, it's just me who finds this insane, I'm the Canadian who is weird about guns, but everyone on the street was stopping and turning and looking too (it probably didn't help that these two guys were the only black people on the street). I wonder where the money came from. I wonder where it was going.