The reporter and I stand quietly in the underground garage. We don’t want to look like we’re interested in shooting anyone, in any sense of that word.

Two minutes earlier the reporter received a call in the deli across the street. His desk told him that the rapper known as "50 cent" had just finished taping upstairs.

"He’s coming down but they said he has to wash his hands…something about making a cast in cement." Says the reporter.

I wonder how far the tentacles of our organization extend that we are getting eyewitness information from the MTV studios upstairs.

"I did that once when I was four," I say. "Made a cast of my hands in clay. My dad still has it."

Three women and two men are standing in the hallway with us; they’re waiting for their cars to be brought up. Everyone is quiet with exhaustion. It’s Friday evening after all. It’s been another long, grim, winter fist of a work week and everyone just wants to get home.

Our heart rates are up, possibly going faster than anyone else’s in the garage. We know that soon, 50 cent will step out of that elevator and we will have to get decisive.

What happens in the next three minutes may become a measure by which I am judged, certainly by the reporter, possibly by myself.

I tell myself that I will try to get between "Fitty" and his SUV and fire off -at the very least- one clear shot without taking a hollow tip to the back of the skull.

I can hear the testimony now: ‘I thought he had a gun…it was small, black; he was concealing it for chrissakes…I had no clue it was a camera’.

Earlier in the week, 50 Cent, an erstwhile crack dealer from Queens, kicked this guy named "The Game" (also a former crack dealer) out of his "posse" for lack of loyalty. The Game is now pursuing his own musical interests and thereby competing with 50 Cent. Shots were recently exchanged between the two artists’ gangs outside Hot 97, an NYC radio station that specializes in creating opportunities for this kind of controversy. One of 50 Cents’ guys was literally ‘capped in the ass’.

Whether you think the "Rap Wars" are publicity events to boost record sales or if you think these are bona fide hate crimes, it’s all theoretical at this point. The fact is there’s been "gunplay", and I am standing in a hallway waiting to ambush a man who has scars from past shootings.

The army of goons in the parking lot are testament to the possibilities.

It starts happening. The giant by the elevator commands us all to clear the hallway. We do what we’re told. We all slowly file outside and stand around in a mercifully tight group. The reporter goes to one side of the double doors. I go to the other. There’s a little bit of a crowd outside. The Black SUV backs up between the buick and the doors. Moments of intense expectancy. The three women want to see who’s coming out, and the Buick owner on the other side is on to me.

She’s whispering to a friend and looking right at me with a conspiratorial smile. "Watch that guy," she’s saying. The reporter and I make intensely brief eye contact. The big gears are stirring.

It’s no longer easy to act casual and some of the goons are starting to notice my furtiveness. Some cops only watch your eyes.

"If you’re with the press," one cops shouts, "show your badges and leave the garage."

There’s no way. I’m rooted.

There’s a little bit of doubt in his command. I can tell he’s not sure if I’m the potential press agent or if someone else in the group is. He’s looking around.

Partially concealed by an innocent bystander, I swivel my camera in front of me and quickly check the settings. There’s no point getting this far, then suffering a technical miscalculation.

A black man in a fur coat, sunglasses and a hat comes whisking down the corridor, through the double doors which are held open. In less than two seconds, he takes the three steps to the door of the SUV and disappears inside. I do my level best. I raise my camera and lunge sideways and over the top of the woman in front of me. Immediately two sets of policemen’s hands are lifted to block my shot.

(One might wonder: why are cops bothering to block my photograph? This isn’t The Pope exiting the Vatican in a compromised state of health. What level of autopilot are they operating on?)

I’m not happy. I’ve missed the shot. No amount of lip service is going to overcome the brutal actuality of this thwarted outcome. I waited. I tried my best on a Friday evening when I could have gone home to the warmth I know.

I’m standing off to the side, looking down and checking the blurry state of my digital failure, and someone quite close says "Hey".

I look up and there is 50 cent, four feet away, the real deal. He’s looking right at me. His hand is outstretched to shake.

I can’t tell you how uplifting this is. Perhaps I need greater perspective but I am, at that moment, elated.

The first guy into the SUV was a decoy. The real deal has a true and palpable animal charisma. He wears a yellow Yankees hat, slightly cocked and has on a yellow-hued fur coat.

I shoot him. I think he thinks I’m a fan. He steps back and poses, I take another shot of him.

He says something, I can’t remember what, (It’s all angelic to me) something like, "Here we go." Then he drapes both his arms around two of the cops who moments earlier had been trying to block my shot. All three smile.

I thank him. I’m deliriously happy at this unexpected act of generosity.

Fitty’s boys all look pissed off, like they’re angry he stopped to talk with a white boy fan, but hey, that’s why they’re not Fitty.

"Don’t be stupid, find out who you fuckin’ wit son ‘Fore we find out where ya bitch gets her hair and nails done"

1. Rage Reacclimation: Waiting in line for a press credential

At the southwest corner of "The Big Tent" in Bryant Park, a snaking, huddled mass of photographers gathers in the cold, waiting for access to the warm, partitioned press cell within. Fashion Week has arrived once again and we, the rabble of visual collection, are worming towards the issuance of glossy laminated press passes without which we can achieve nothing for the next seven days.

While waiting in this line, I am reacquainted with the photographic pool that specializes in Fashion Week. I can say with authority that at least sixty percent of all photographers are mean-spirited, egotistical thugs (significantly better percentages than those of lawyers and politicians). "Cocksuckers," is a sometimes apt description. But amongst the cadre of photographers who attend this event every year, there are individuals who set new standards of untrustworthiness. Looking at this idle group of slouching predators I wonder: Who here has already been through the witness protection program? Then I remember what this week will involve.

There will be a lot of territorial pissing and positioning for a tiny piece of real estate on a press riser the size of my kitchen. There will be hours of utter boredom and waiting while watching near-maddening displays of petty vanity from all points of the compass. There will be whinging. There will be frayed nerves. There may even be another airborne chair incident (Unable to take it any longer, a photographer named Dino once heaved a chair at another photographer’s head at the end of a show). Invariably there will be a photographer who is losing his or her struggle with obesity–a man with a name like "Dooshko"–who will arrive 10 minutes before a show and attempt to insert himself directly in front of me.

And throughout, there will be the celebrity/paparrazzi melee; pariah dogs falling all over themselves to photograph Katie Couric or Nicole Ritchie, possibly together. And for what?

**

2. Racist Note:

It’s always the Italians. Three are cutting the line. They’re ahead of me now. I tell them they’re going to have to go to the end of the line, and one of them looks me in the eye and tells me, in broken, lilting English, that his friends were already here an hour ago but went away to get lunch and he was just saving their spot. I tell him I was here two hours ago and didn’t see them. There’s further abject explaining with pacifying hand gestures. I’m not buying it. There’s a stare down which I think I win.

But they still don’t move.

**

3. The Tyranny of the List:

Nowhere in America are there more ineffectual PR flunkies walking around with lists on clipboards than at Fashion Week. To get in, you’re supposed to be on a list, to go backstage, check the list. While waiting for the show to begin, people will approach you, ask for your identity, and then add you to new mysterious lists. In this way the list-nazis of Fashion Week are taking a cue from the growth industry of national security. Lists–and requisite telecommunication head-sets– are the new talismen of control.

Then I see it: the very first list. It’s in the hands of a Junior Varsity, unassertive PR floozie with heels. She is veering aimlessly through the crowd, a queen bee drunk on royal jelly. She is empowered by her clipboarded list. Like mindless drones, the photographers keep stepping out of line, swarming around her, trying to see if they are on this list.

During all of fashion week 2005, I wasn’t on a single list. My office either neglected to put me on any, or the flak routinely bobbled the ball. Ultimately this didn’t matter. The list is just a ruse, an oar for steering. If you show up with the correct laminated press pass ready to photograph the show, it doesn’t matter if you’ve made the list or bear a terrible resemblance to a former member of Aerosmith. You are wanted inside.

**

4. Serge’s Rude Buddy:

There shouldn’t be fashion shows held in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. Three blocks north of Bryant Park, the Algonquin is a satellite venue for shows, sometimes avant-garde, that want to vamp it up in front of velvet curtains and elaborate tea settings. The problem is there isn’t enough space. The photo area is sadistically small and the models at the "HollyWould" show on the first Friday night did not have enough room to stretch out. They were also moving too quickly.

Frustrated by the speed of the models, some of the photographers start shouting at them to slow down. The median age of the models appears to be 17 and they don’t understand what is being shouted at them. All they appear to pick up on is the anger. They advance even more quickly but with unhappy scowls. The photographers become more abusive. It’s like witnessing the evolution of a doomed marriage in time lapse. In 20 seconds everything’s gone to shit. I’m having a hard time believing what I’m hearing from the photographers. Unrepeatable oaths.

A cell phone rings. It is answered, behind me, by a photographer with a French accent.

"What are you doing calling me now, Serge? I am shooting a show!” Pause. “What do you want?”

I take his photograph instead.

**

5. The Starbucks Troller

I walk down the street to the nearest Starbucks. It’s at 41st Street and Broadway. I throw my stuff down and begin the process of downloading, editing, captioning, and sending my photographs to the office. There’s a game I play, more of a neurotic compulsion, where I try to see how rapidly I can accomplish all the tasks required of the transmitting process and still get a cup of coffee.

A young, pretty, dark haired woman behind me asks in foreign English, "How much does it cost to get a shoot?"

I tell her it depends. I ask her if she wants to be a model.

No, she is just curious. She thinks "the people who run the models" might be untrustworthy. I look in to her face and she stares back at me intensely. I invite her over to my table and she sits down opposite me. The speed routine crumbles. Magda is her name. She’s from Poland on a visitor’s visa. She’s been in the US for two weeks and is looking for work as an au pair. The mere mention of that job title: I instantly ache to take her in to the bathroom and show her my favorite yoga position.

She’s magnificent. I’m married. I also have this thing called a job to attend to.

Magda makes me guess her age. I say 21. She says I’m right; I decide she’s 19. She performs this little trick where she peeks at a well-worn fortune from a fortune cookie, then tries to hide it. I say what does your fortune say. She hands it over. It says, "A friendly chat may lead to romance."

I ask her to tell me a secret.

She thinks about it for a little while, then she releases it, in a whisper in my ear:

"I believe in angels."

**

6. Benjamin Cho show:

The trick is to get to the site of a show early so you can pick your spot. I get to the Benjamin Cho show about two hours early.

This show is happening inside the ABC carpet showroom on Broadway near 19th Street. Soporific, dark-skinned Indian men are slowly moving carpets around on dollys. Models and make-up people are everywhere; the models all appear to be on muscle relaxants and have voluminous hair;

A half hour before the show is supposed to start, someone comes up behind me and starts yanking on the milk crate I’m sitting on.

"Can I have this? If you’ll just get up, I’ll take this."

I’m talking to a New York Times photographer to my left but stop mid-sentence to turn and face this new effrontery. A man with white hair, pale skin and slightly recessed eyes, has descended in to my field of view. I see from the credential hanging around his neck that he’s from Vogue . His name’s Eric. He’s probably 40.

"Are you actually thinking you might take this seat right out from under me?" I ask, incredulous.

"Well yeah, someone left that crate laying around and I want it."

I explain to him that I bought this milk crate at Staples and brought it here for the exact purpose of sitting on it and if he thinks he’s going to take it… I raise and cock my left fist.

I’m the kind of person who wants to see a fist fight break out during fashion week but I’m not generally interested in taking part in one. I don’t like being punched for one thing, especially in the nose, and I’m not a particularly gifted brawler. None the less, I am now fully prepared to unleash a combination of punches on the face of this great white whale before me.

He backs off a little and chuckles insanely–to signify that he’s only kidding.

My desire to hurt him fades. He appears to be suffering from something, an illness of rage and social dementia and it has twisted him inside.

For the next hour I listen to him give genuinely funny commentary about the people passing by our perch. "I know," he says at one point. "But this is my year. It’s the Chinese year of the Cock."

The photographers are tiring, the models too are starting to trip in their heels.

And Salman Rushdie may not get out much, but his wife with the thundering scar on her right arm appears to be everywhere.

**

7. Vanitas, Vanitatum, all is Vanity:

I felt as though I achieved a state of Zen perfection during the Derek Lam show. Every model who approached down a 200 foot runway, stared me down, right in to my glass. Out of 25 models, I was 25 for 25. EVERY SINGLE ONE. As they approached, I felt as though I was the only one in the room and they wanted to give me some…Lam. There must have been 20 still photographers behind me. With the music booming, I went in to a keen and pleasurable state, a trance of visual hunger satiation.

For a tiny, fleeting moment, I know the genius of vanity.

I mill the ‘strong nuclear’ bond that exists between model (shoot me) and photographer (show me)–there is hatred in both sets of wanting.

I paced myself and I drank it in, digitally. And when it was over, I fled out the nearest available exit with everyone else, not looking to left or right, feeling dirty for having been party to so much desire.

*

This essay appears in the just released book, "Lost and Found: Stories From New York."

We crossed the Delaware River, made a tremendous 270 degree turn under the bridge and dropped down in to the city streets.

The plan: stay at Alison’s parents house in Philly that night, wake up early, pick up the two vans from Hertz, proceed to a designated church in the suburban township of Devon for an organizational meeting with members of ACT and then, finally, beginning at around noon, unleash ourselves in to the neighborhoods to get out the vote.

It had recently rained and the streets looked clean. There was very little activity outside – a weeknight. We saw Kerry and Bush signs on front lawns. One house had a Bush/Cheney sign adhered to the clapboards and, to our envy, it looked like the Spruce Goose of political signs.

“Must have been special ordered at Kinkos” said Alison wistfully.

We were encouraged to see Kerry signs had a distinct volume advantage.

We spied two Bush/ Cheney signs half way up a tree on the side of the road. Below these, the torn remnants of two earlier signs flapped in the night air. Assailing hands had found these easily so the sign maker, determined, had used a ladder and stapled these in a full 15 feet off the ground.

Peter and Terry, Alison’s parents, were besides themselves with nervous energy. Peter was hopping around, incanting venom from the couch.

“If that yellow rose of Texas, underachieving little sh-t eater isn’t voted out of office tomorrow, we are going down, all of us, down in to the sewer.”

We told Peter about the tree with Bush/Cheney signs on it, two blocks away, and Peter –unable to contain himself- focused his rage.

“Get the ladder.” He said.

“Don’t get arrested”, shouted Terry from the couch as the four of us –Peter, Alison, Jordan and myself- made for the door.

We strode out of the apartment building with purpose and a ladder; Peter took the lead. A right turn, a left turn, we rounded a corner. Approaching the tree in question, we saw two black police officers standing by a police van, talking with a feral looking white man in a grey wool cap. The man being questioned held a large piece of poster board in his hands, another Bush/Cheney sign. There were tools at his feet.

Peter advanced like an assassin, only stopping to hold his face a shocking half inch away from the other man’s. The Bush supporter shrank back at first, terrified. He thought he was getting whacked. Both men’s eyes bulged. A shouting match erupted.

“What are you doing to my tree?” asked Peter in a frightening voice.

“Your tree? This is my fuckin’ tree asshhole,” frothed feral man.

(Prior to leaving the apartment, I’d given Peter my blue wool hat in an effort to protect his identity. It was purely coincidental that the hat was blue. )

I discovered neck hair I didn’t know about. “Woe there. Woe there?” said one of the cops, rocking back off his heels to get between the two. They were surprised by the ferocity of Peter’s approach. We all were. The other cop looked us over to see if we were just as crazy.

The chill November air felt primed for a dogfight.

“There’s a city ordinance against stapling posters to trees!” shouted Peter

“This is my house,” said the Bush supporter, pointing to a house that literally abutted the sidewalk, “and this is my tree. I can do whatever the fuck I want to these trees.”

“Why don’t you just clear cut ‘em and sink an oilwell,” quipped Peter, not missing a beat.

“Sir. Sir.” The cops did not appreciate being ignored.

Alison stood by her father and argued intensely about the ordinance. A lashing litany of legal terms issued from her mouth, as did modest flecks of spittle. I thought we might be going to jail after all.

Through genius and foresight, I had a video camera, but a maddening technical difficulty kept it from operating. Jordan, meanwhile, was trying, unsuccessfully, to conceal the ladder he held at his side.

The female cop took control of the situation by shouting louder than the two deranged white men in hats. Absurdly, she sided with the other guy by saying that this really was his property. We were looking at a tree growing between the road and the sidewalk. “If you were to break your leg right here on this sidewalk,” she said, “who would you sue?”

It made no sense, but this female cop thought she was being judicious. The Bush supporter visibly puffed.

“Now look, I’m voting the way you are tomorrow,” conceeded the female cop. Some dreadful inner need for checks and balances made her say it. “But would you be this angry if it was a Kerry/Edwards sign up there in that tree?”

“Absolutely!” Peter lied. “Look there’s a city ordinance…”

Gray cap was on his cell phone and it looked like he might be calling in back up of a NASCAR variety.

Jordan and I didn’t like the looks of it and the video camera still wouldn’t turn on so we moved in and grabbed Peter by his shoulders. This caused Peter to strain against us.

Someone had to leave and it had to be us. We turned Peter around and walked back.

“I behaved very badly,” Peter said with a boyish look of glee as he told the whole story to Terry, his wife, back home.

Still amped, we turned on the television at 11:30 pm and watched the news coverage. Flipping back and forth on all the channels, there was a stretch of 35 minutes where we could not find anything other than gratuitously pro-Bush coverage: Anchormen interviewing Republican flak, anchormen outright endorsing Bush, a horsey looking woman at a Bush rally going on and on about why she feels safer in the mall with Bush in office, coverage of ugly push polling tricks, all of them supposedly Democratic. What next? I half expected to see the local bishop and a phalanx of eagle scouts proclaim in harmony that they all wanted to be buried next to Bush when they died.

Alison was tremendously distraught by this out and out one-sidedness; we all were. There was no mention of any of the examples of push polling we’d heard. Alison’s mother had received a message that afternoon from an unknown woman who reported that she’d seen a lot of coverage of Kerry shooting guns in the news lately and she wondered if he was some kind of a “gun nut”, long pause, then “This message was paid for by the Republican National Committee.”

No one slept well that night. I slept in the “high school bedroom” so dubbed by Jordan because it reminded him of the kind of bedroom you’d get action in, while visiting a high school girlfriend. At 4:30 in the morning I got out of bed and opened the shades. Far below, the black ink of the Delaware River sloughed from left to right.

Yes, he was wearing sunglasses inside his tinted command car.

He did not exit the car; he exuded suspiciousness. I could see that he didn’t have much room in there. He was surrounded by banks of monitors and servers. Half hidden, he waited for me to explain myself. I told him my particulars, held out my camera and asked if there was anything he could recommend I photograph.

Stony silence. He remained wedged and unmoving. He told me that perhaps I should first have a look at the bigger conference inside on the 54th floor. I told him I’d do that and maybe stop back afterwards for a tour. I felt like I’d interrupted a significant bowel movement. Like a hermit crab, he shrank back out of view and quietly closed the door.

Three steps inside the lobby, I was approached unexpectedly from the left flank by a man in plain clothes who was clearly something else. He had a microphone in his ear. “Can I help you?"

There it was, my least favorite question, asked in that clipped, authoritative tone that implies much but only ever means one thing: ‘I will not help you’

I told him of my intentions to go up to the 54th floor and he said immediately. “That’s a private function. You can’t go up there."

I stared at him blankly for a two count. "The guys in the command car told me that I should go right on up. They said it’s fine."

"You can try, but they won’t let you in."

Turned out he was wrong.

At the 54th floor, I exited the elevator and approached a table where two dark-haired, attractive women sat stiff and straight. They appeared mildly alarmed at my presence; the camera didn’t help. But I talked fast and unflinchingly until one of them stood up and said, "I’ll get Jennifer."

The room all around was full of men in suits. They were milling stiffly. They ignored me and I stood to one side, arms folded, affecting the air of someone who is very calm and pleased with the current progress of the day. An explanatory poster by the elevator read "L3 Communications. Ticker Symbol LLL"

Jennifer was tall, attractive, sandy blonde and powerful. She may have been 32. She scanned my face and her eyes were like a vacuum of shrewd discerning. Had I been illegitimate, she would have detected my doubt immediately. I told her that all I really wanted was a fun photograph and she seemed to take to that idea. It was a glorious thing to come out on the other side of her keen scrutiny with approval.

We went first to the "Wescam MX-15."

This high-powered surveillance camera, designed to be mounted on the belly of an aircraft, was suspended like a large, metallic, larval cocoon over a window that faced West. It’s encased, telephoto lens was, at that moment, zoomed in on a helicopter flying far beyond the reach of the human eye, somewhere over New jersey. The helicopter appeared on a large 30 inch monitor and filled the frame.

"That news chopper’s about 7 miles out." Said the salesman proudly.

We discussed focal lengths. I expressed amazement and the salesman found his stride, barraging me with data and statistics.

The image of the helicopter on the monitor appeared to waver slightly. Heat and air pollution kept it from appearing crisp. To demonstrate the tremendous range of the equipment, he spun the camera 180 degrees, using a remote control device and pointed it in to the room. There we all were in a wide angle frame.

"Ya wanna see something scary?" asked the salesman in a disconcerting undertone. He flicked a switch and now we were all visible in infrared. This, he explained, was for night vision. The camera was reading our heat. "Bunch of monsters," he said and it was true. When people talked, you could see the movement of blood in their necks and faces. A close up on my face revealed a spidery galaxy of hot capillaries radiating out of one cheek. I was frightened to look upon myself.

The cocoon camera was captivating but it didn’t lend itself to a photograph. Too much backlight. Too many reflections.

A man and a woman behind me were standing over one of those dummies that lifeguards used to learn CPR with. This dummy could blink and had operative internal organs. The two salespeople connected to "Stan the dummy" were good sports and pretending to be resuscitating Stan for my benefit. They wore doctors outfits and one had a stethoscope.

I took a few shots then conferred with Jennifer who had an idea. "There are some guys on the far end shooting guns", she said, leaning in a little to whisper."

"Really? that sounds excellent." I was fully tantalized by her new confidential tone.

"I believe they’re laser guided" she said and she looked at me.

Jesus. Perhaps I only imagined it -or wanted to- here was a brief glimpse of deceit and fertility.

We walked over to the handgun range.

Executives in suits, surrounded by other executives, shooting handguns at digitized targets on screens. There were two types of targets: traditional circular or human. One shooter was a "Vice President of Procurement". He was clearly excited. He was gunning down bad guys and taking a body count. No one was hooting or waving their hats. This was a fairly controlled, senior NRA type crowd. But the good ol’ boy feel was there. It had to be.

With a flourish, one exec. attached to "the system", pulled a previously unseen semi-automatic rifle out from under a table cloth to stifled sounds of surprise and approval. That was fun for a while but the gun’s report wasn’t satisfying enough so the rifle guy warned everyone in his immediate vicinity and put blanks in to the rifle. Then he fired off about 15 rounds in rapid succession, spent shells arcing away as though desperate to flee his proximity. He grinned as he fired and I had a seminal insight in to the term: ‘white devil’. Others on the far end of the wide room looked over, fearful and delighted, at the sound of what appeared to be real gunfire.

Jennifer was at my side again. She indicated another man who was watching. "That man over there is John Shalikashvili. He used to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Clinton."

He was short, shorter than I. His face was so reddened by Rosatia, I involuntarily wondered what it would look like through the infrared lens. He spoke with an accent. I asked him if it would be allright if I took some shots of him firing one of the hand guns and to my amazement, he said "Yes."

On a good day there are moments like these, when you know that this is the shot, that you have actually found, begged, hunted or simply asked for it and it has appeared. My heart was thrilling. I was silently, deliriously excited as John Kalikashvili and I simultaneously steadied our respective weapons, took aim and fired.

Intrigued neighbors milled around the lobby. They wanted to talk; they wanted to show us the terrible condition in their apartments. One rasping woman with asthma and diabetes told us she had lost her baby-sitting license because her apartment was considered a health risk by the city. She eagerly led us inside. The place smelled fungal and sweet. Her floors buckled. Light fixtures hung on wires from the ceiling as though they’d been pulled and twisted in a fit of rage. Jagged holes in the ceiling had never been patched over. Plaster bulged where leaking water pipes lay behind the walls. A chubby boy played quietly by himself on an ancient carpet in the former baby-sitter’s living room. He was dreaming with a toy helicopter. Last night’s bright snowfall covered an empty park in a window behind him. You had to squint to see him.

The stout, Spanish superintendent arrived. He looked like he’d been spackling. He claimed to speak very little English. One of the neighbors, a hanger on, translated for Austin. The super had been hired by the management company three weeks ago. He knew little about plumbing, and had spent his short time there trying, unenviably, to patch over the major difficulties with the building.

He ended the interview by separating from us and knocking on the dreaded door. It cracked open and a woman we would later learn was the grandmother spoke to him in Spanish. Stacked metal bowls were passed out to him. He took them and the door closed for a second, then opened again, and a dark-skinned man in a dirty blue parka coat stepped quickly out. We didn’t know he was the father. I didn’t get a good look at him as he and the super moved purposefully together toward the service exit.

We watched them from a grated window as they hugged the building and walked with the bowls down a basement staircase and disappeared.

Outside of the family’s apartment a small shrine of candles, toys and flowers had been set up by the door. Large pieces of paper had been taped to the wall. On them people left short messages to the dead boy.

Ten minutes later, the father, Juan, shuffled quickly back through the lobby. Austin intercepted him. There was a brief conversation and then Austin asked simply, “Can we come inside?” Juan capitulated. Two enormous holes gaped in the ceiling at opposite ends of the kitchen. Through the holes piping hung wrapped in black plumbers’ tape. The pipes were wet and, after all that had happened, continued to leak. Someone upstairs must have turned the water on. The velocity of the leak increased as we stood there.

Juan was soft-spoken and had a pronounced overbite which caused him to slur his speech slightly. I guessed he was 25. He told us in slow, broken English: “The super sat me down, and he said, ‘Look, I’m telling you this because you’re my friend. The landlord came to the building on Sunday night and he wouldn’t come in to inspect the repairs [of the pipes]. He was here to collect the rent from an apartment upstairs and didn’t want to come in.’”

The landlord had been variously described by neighbors as “a jew”, “a rich guy from Brooklyn,” and “the guy in the hat.” His name was A. Gross. His management company only offered a PO Box in Brooklyn as an address. One neighbor swore he drove an SUV with tinted windows.

In the hallway, camera crews from the TV stations, both English and Spanish, were arriving with their anchors. You can always tell the anchor by their make-up and their myopia. One young Spanish anchor had that crazed look about him. He seemed to be feeling an unwholesome pressure in his forehead. He needed a story.

Rhodesia, the overweight mother, made her way out and sat by the shrine beside her door. She spoke occasionally on her cell phone. An aunt and a grandmother came by, left, returned. I overheard the grandmother, who was 48, speaking Spanish in the kitchen. I knew what she was saying by the vitriol in her voice. Someone was to blame.

No one but the grandmother was outraged. No one was crying. It was all slow and sad and soft. I wondered how had the child been allowed to wander off into that watery kitchen? Hadn’t someone been watching him? These questions were never asked. How could you ask them? The family was in dire circumstances and already had two other children.

Juan curled up in a fetal position on a bed in another room with a false wall. He spoke softly on a phone. His mother, the angry grandmother, sat on the bed next to him. Reporters and cameramen had the run of the place now. They were everywhere, even looking in drawers. Then one of the family members, I think an aunt with blue colored contacts, announced: “Juan wants you all to leave now.” She meant it, if Juan didn’t. We left. Bags, cameras, notepads and all. One man stayed behind. He was short, Spanish and unimposing. He was wearing a sharp gray suit, an undertaker.

Outside, Austin wanted to show me something. On a trash heap in front of the building there was a five gallon grouting bucket exactly like the one the boy had supposedly ended up at the bottom of. On the side of the bucket, in Spanish and English, there was a printed warning over an image of a child climbing into the bucket.

The boy who drowned was named Malik.

They were boilermakers. They were blue collar guys in a labor union "local No. 5" in Queens and they had made a ton of cash by day trading on the market. These guys had done it all legally and legitimately, sort of, doing the same after market trading that Putnam Securities and other mutual funds are now under investigation for, and parleying their 401 K plans in to a collective $2 million gain. I was driving to Queens to photograph their group and I was prepared to shake some weathered, strong hands and congratulate them. A story about blue collar guys making good is such a rarity in the news these days, almost as rare as stories about the homeless. So I was looking forward to this. Hell, I’d ask these guys for a stock tip.

When I got out there a reporter named Ruth was sitting in her blue Volvo station wagon, trying to stay warm.

"The secretary in there is such an idiot," she said. "None of them will come out and talk."

I rang the bell 4 or 5 times and even flashed a prolonged smile and my press tags at the surveilance camera, to no avail.

They didn’t seem to understand that I was a brother and that I had come in good will. 20 minutes passed and during that time I got to know some workers from the concrete factory next door. One guy was named named Rob.

Rob was clearly insane or else extremely excited by my camera. Like a child, he kept asking that I take his picture. At one point he imitated the bionic man.

The boilermakers were supposed to be coming out of a meeting at 4:00 pm.

At 3:50, Rob drove by in a forklift at a speed apropriate for Nascar. He shouted to us: "Watch your back!"

We turned and sure enough, two men came down the stairs and exited the local no. 5 building. We were only three steps away. One guy in sunglasses looked a little like Nick Nolte. "I want you to get off the property," he said in a low and menacing voice. "Do you hear me? I want you off the property."

The property he was referring to was the sidewalk. Ruth, a little tentatively, asked him a question about the day trading successes.

"The SEC is investigating their company. As long as the SEC is investigating, there is nothing to talk about." He was already at his green Buick and opening the door to get in.

The mesmor principle (my own word: it means when the photographer is too fascinated by what he is seeing to take a picture) had set in on me. I had yet to raise my camera, but didn’t like the way this was going.

"But you made so much money," I blurted. "We think it’s laudable."

"You wasted your fuckin’ time coming out here, aright? You wasted your fuckin time."

He was in his car now and was set to drive away. He had established himself as an asshole, so I took two giant steps backwards and raised my 70-200 lens to take an identifying picture. Instantly, before I could shoot, he leaped out of the car and lunged towards me.

There are a few things I can do well in this world, and moving quickly is oneof them. I bolted from the spot and raced around a car.

"Jesus Christ buddy." I said as I stopped and turned to face him.

"Don’t Jesus Christ me." He said. He looked like a man who was capable of unspeakable heights of anger and that was something I could respect.

A dark streak moved in the right periphery. The boilermaker. in his haste to kick my teeth in, had forgotten to put his car in Park. Rob, the crazy concrete worker, leaped in the moving car and stopped the green buick a few feet short of it hitting one of the concrete company’s flat bed trucks. The boilermaker returned to his car and grunted some thanks to Rob. He turned to shout at me one last time and that was when I got my only good shot of him at the edge of the sunlight.

As he drove away I photographed his liscense plate number. Ruth called it in and had the desk run it. The car was registered to the union. No ID on the driver. I didn’t notice it, but apparently the guy circled around and eyed us for a while from a back street. Lord knows what he was thinking about – crushing my head in with a tire iron perhaps. Beware the vagaries of day-trading boilermaker.

Rob the Bionic Man, exits the Buick he has just saved from crashing while its owner chased the taker of this picture around a car.

Even though he had suffered this horrible experience the day before, I looked at the photographs of him flailing on the ground, attached to what he thought was a bomb, and I thought, “This fat, helpless man…must be photographed again.”

I didn’t have a scrap of sympathy for him. In fact, looking at him in the pictures, porcine, panicked and prostrate, I worked myself in to quite a state of hatred for him, which would help to get the job done.

____

The day before, I’d been working a shift for the Daily News. This meant that from 11 am to 6:30 pm I had to be ready to go.

I’d wandered over to Rockefeller center with my bag of equipment to take in an exhibition celebrating 100 years of air and space travel. I was just pushing away from the acrobats when my two-way pager started to chirp. My blood pressure spiked immediately.

Charlie at the desk told me: “There’s some kind of a bomb scare going on at 40th street and 5th ave.”

I ran the ten blocks South through the lunchtime crowds. As I ran, part of me mulled over the topic of health insurance, and my lack thereof.

They were already starting to block off the streets. The cops were putting up the red tape and though several of them barked angrily at me, I stood my ground for a while and tried to discern what was happening. The street up ahead was empty save for a loose sprawl of cops standing immobile, looking around. They looked nervous. A large special ops truck was straddling 5th ave. at 41st street

“If you want to blow up, then you’ll stay right there,” a cop mused loudly.

I shot cops and pedestrians. The pedestrians were relatively calm – just another bomb scare in Manhattan.

A young German man named Felix was standing near me and he said, “I got ze best pictures of ze whole thing.” He’d been in an internet café four blocks up and across the street when things had started to happen. I asked him what he had, and he said, “Everything”.

He seemed confident so I called in to the desk and told them that I was going to look at his film. He’d shot the scene with a tiny camera and I asked if it zoomed. “Yah, zoom’s Good.” He said. He asked me how much the Daily news would pay him for the film, because he and his girlfriend Joanna wanted to get a flight to Miami, and when I told him roughly 150 to 200 dollars, he said oh that’s not enough. He was an Emergency Medical technician back in Berlin and he said, in Germany you get paid 200 to 500 Euros.”

“Have you done this before?” I asked him

“No, this is the first time.”

The Daily News will pay you 200 dollars at the most”.

He said maybe he should go to the New York Times, and I said, maybe he should.

We took his Advantix film to Duane Reade. I paid for the processing and when I came back an hour later and looked at it, I was amazed at Michael Dabbin’s prescience (Dabbin, a co-worker, had casually guessed the outcome).

The shots were taken so wide angle, you couldn’t tell what was happening. In one shot a speck in the bottom left corner was a bomb expert crouching over a bomb. It could have been a dog or a manhole cover, it was so difficult to discern. So much for the right place at the right time.

_____

The next morning, Charlie said, “Go look at the post.”

Front page. Someone named Paul Salazar had taken the most extraordinary photographs of the bank manager on the ground attached to a brief case.

I can say this for whoever Paul Salazar is: Either he didn’t know the risk he was taking, or he is a courageous photographer.

This is how the story was reported in the POST and the Daily News: A well dressed bank robber (he’d overdone it a bit in a tuxedo and bow tie) had gone in to the bank with two louis Vuitton bags claiming that he had a large amount of cash that he would like to open an account with. When the bank manager went to shake his hand, the robber slapped a cuff to his wrist, thereby attaching the bank manager to a brief case which he then claimed contained a bomb. He actually went to the trouble of actually opening the brief case partially to expose a network of wires and painted drumsticks.

He told the bank manager that he too was wired with explosives and directed the banker to take him to the vault. The banker gave a “secret signal” to set off the loud alarm. The robber fled the scene. Meanwhile, the bank manager ran up to the street, burst out in to the daylight and screamed to the police who had already arrived,

“I’ve only got 30 seconds.”

According to the post, police threw him some universal hand cuff keys –no heroics there- and the bank manager, quite on his own, released himself and squirmed away.

______

So here I was the next afternoon, outside this same bank, an HSBC branch, hunting the manager. Amazingly, he’d shown up for work. You’d have thought the experience might have changed him irrevocably, perhaps causing him to seek a spiritual life in the woods upstate, to wander like Siddartha, or at least to take the day off.

Andrew from the DN was there. He covered the front.
Robert was also there from The Post. He and I were covering the same side and rear exits.

As I waited at the corner of 39th Street and 5th avenue, looking back and forth from the Eastern exit to the Southern, I chanted to myself: “Fat bank manager won’t get away. I will bang him this very day.”

A PR lady from the bank approached warily and asked Robert and I what news organizations we were from. We told her. She tried to remain calm and professional, but it was clear that our presence taxed her poise.

“I am trying to assist in one of our employees right’s to privacy ,” she said.

Robert, who is Brazilian and definitely looks the part of a paparazzi, with long hair, tried the persistence bluff. “Even if we don’t get him today, we will come out here every day until we do so he might as well come out now”.

“He hasn’t done anything wrong. In fact, he’s sort of a hero,” I said, lying.

She disappeared, calculating PR ratios.

Eventually a Lincoln town car with tinted windows pulled up and then backed in to a loading bay on the Southern side of the building. Robert and I knew this was the banker’s ride when they closed the hydraulic gate. We made rapid, imperceptible adjustments to our gear. I set my focus to three feet and cranked up my flash.

Two female reporters who realized they wouldn’t be getting a quote, watched us with morbid curiosity as though they were about to witness a beheading. We stood to one side of the loading dock and waited. The gate started to open. Three beefy security men stepped out. Then the car started to roll out behind them. The bank manager was in the back of the car.

Robert and I broad sided the car. We pressed our cameras up against the back windows to reduce reflection and flashed in to the car. Robert was practically on top of the car as it turned and made its way out on to 39th street. The driver gassed it and sped down the block.

This was where I figured I had an advantage over Robert. I sprinted after them.

I got lucky. They were stopped by the light at 6th ave. I ran up to the car again and shot through the tinted glass. Again, the bank manager was holding his hands up in front of his face to protect his identity. This infuriated me. The man had lived through a bomb scare and now he was scared of being photographed? I cursed him as though he were a murderer. I scrambled around the car taking photographs from any angle that might work.
I considered yanking his door open and blasting him that way but…no stylebook would have recommended it. The driver got involved and thrust his hand towards the back to assist in the masking of his client.

Finally, with a squeal of tires, the car pulled away. I went back and looked for Robert but he was gone. One of the reporters who had watched the whole thing said, “Robert jumped in his car and chased after them. Can you believe that?”

I was impressed. Robert had taken it to another level. I imagined him following that town car all the way to Western New Jersey and terrorizing the subject as he shuffled complacently towards his front door.

After all that excitement, I chimped through my frames to discover that I had only one photograph of the bank manager but it was blurry. The tinted windows had made it impossible to avoid obscuring reflections. I was livid. Then the shame crept in.

I imagined what I must have looked like chasing down that car. Specifically, I imagined a girl I’d known in college witnessing the whole thing from a car directly behind the banker’s. ‘Is that Matthew Roberts?’ she might have wondered, aghast. ‘What kind of monster has he become…’

The next day, worried that Robert had scored, I went down to the nearest deli and scoured the papers over a 50 cent coffee. I was relieved to discover that neither of our papers ran a new shot.

And The New York Times, for the second straight day, made no mention of the failed bank robbery.

Rounding the corner in front of the address, I got my first look at the scene; one clean city block facing the park, loosely strewn with five or six disheveled men, none of whom looked like they belonged there, all holding cameras, all looking around warily. I was detected immediately and for a short while, watched closely. With a camera bag around my shoulder as well as a camera, I slowly went through the pointless process of trying to blend in. I checked the exits — there were two, the front and a side service exit. I spoke sparingly with other photographers, asking them how long they’d been there, reading their levels of territorial hatred, their press badges and their equipment choices while we talked.

Two Englishmen from Splash were there and hovered furtively near an SUV parked at the curb. One wore a camera and the other wore a grey and pea green tie.

"I’m the wordsmith," said the tie, and then he chuckled.

The one with a camera wore hungry and pained expressions. Talking looked like it hurt him. I asked him what it was like working for Splash and he said it was all right; there were hard times and good and, ya know, in this business, you’ve got to take them all. He seemed like a nice guy with a short time to live. His eyes were quick in their sockets and unusually watery, as though he had recently been crying.

There was one grey pirate-like man dressed in black who seemed nonplussed yet alert. He looked like a pro, like someone who had seen it all, and was not particularly impressed. He was a little intimidating and something about his demeanor seemed to simmer. Sure enough, he turned out to be Steve Hirsch, from the New York Post. I had seen many good Steve Hirsch photos in the past but this was the first time I’d met him. I praised him for some recent work. He had taken a running shot of one of the three Chinese siblings who were arrested and then released in the mysterious murder of a bouncer, Dana Blake. (Blake was in the process of physically removing a man named Johnathon Chan from an Avenue B night club — Chan had been smoking, in violation of the recent city-wide ban — when he was set upon by Chan’s brothers and one other knife-wielding Philipino man. Blake was stabbed in the groin and died eleven hours later.)

Steve had taken a great photograph of Chan leaving his attorney’s office shortly after being released.

"He said, Don’t take my picture, and you know what I told him? Fuck you," Said Steve. He grinned. I was delighted.

We were standing at the corner so we could see both exits. We waited a long time, maybe two hours. A Swedish video guy from Reuters piled out of a cab with a giant video camera and "sticks" (his tripod). He had a friend who lived around the corner who came by and brought him coffee. The Swede had been all over the world and I liked his humble manner.

Keith arrived.

"Who are you shooting for today?" asked Steve.

"Getty," said Keith. "They called me at 9:00 and said how soon can you get there and I said, I’m leaving now."

"So what took you so long?" asked Steve.

"I stopped and got coffee."

Keith was good at affecting the image of a lazy photographer but I’d seen him run very fast before. He’s probably a good guy but he has the annoying habit of testing his flash constantly on anyone who is standing near him. It is almost a nervous tic, though he ostensibly does it to make sure his flash isn’t too hot.

He takes three pictures, "chimps" (examines the digital pictures on the back of his camera), adjusts his flash, and then takes three more. He’ll squeeze off twenty or more frames this way, every quarter hour. It’s endless. I suspect he’s also collecting images of other journalists and in a way this is a brilliant method of doing it. Steve Hirsch was his subject this time and stared blankly back in to the camera.

"This is no way to live," said Keith eventually, imitating someone. He grinned and lurched off to go speak with the English guys by the SUV.

Around 11:30, a black Suburban with tinted black windows pulled up to the front of the building. It looked as though it would park, then it pulled forward as though it were going to drive away. Just then, Michael Douglas stepped crisply out of the building and made straight for the SUV. I was in a bad position, behind him and tried to scamper past him but he cut me off.

"Thanks for coming out guys," he said and leaped in to his car. It must have taken him three seconds to get from the building to the car and by the end of those three seconds, I think I had a series of seven photographs of the back of his head, and one partial profile of his nose and eye. I had fucked the proverbial pouch. Hirsch and Keith and I think the Splash guy too, had gotten around so that they took shots of him from the front as he approached his car.

After Douglas was chauffered away, there were a lot of excited tourists who wanted to know what was going on; all the photographers were chimping fiercely.

Keith let out a loud and angry explative and then scampered off. I knew I’d fucked it up and was filled with dread, but if Keith missed it too, then I was not alone. A photograph of Douglas alone wasn’t really the money shot, but it would work in a pinch.

All the other photographers disappeared in search of a Starbucks from which they could wirelessly file their photographs. I was left with the Swede from Reuters and his friend and we decided to wait for Douglas to return. A still photographer from Reuters arrived. His name was Chip and he talked very earnestly about different kinds of personal protective body armor with the Swede and the Swede’s friend.

"A jacket lined with steel is only effective until you get shot at close range at a perpendicular angle, then it shatters. Steel is best suited for glancing shots, but ceramic protection is better for direct perpendicular hits. The plastic protective jackets are also effective but they’re exceptionally bulky and it hasn’t been proven outright that they’ll stop a bullet at point blank range from a Kalashnikov."

Chip was voluble. He was an authority on many things and had been shot in the right leg by an Israeli soldier in 2001. "The bullet missed my femoral artery by a centimeter and a half." He knew exactly what would have happened had his artery been severed. Listening to him, I started feeling vaguely ill. He was interesting but he didn’t stop, he didn’t pause. There was no Chip off-switch.

Then the real paparazzi arrived in a beat up rental which they left running in front of a hydrant. They looked haggard and acted as though they were on some kind of cheap meth-amphetamine; definitely unwashed, but colorful. Wow. The real papparrazzi are unbelievable. One of them — a pathologically outgoing man with long hair and fives days’ growth of beard — described a plan he had for tracking celebrity’s cars.

"Look, how expensive can it be to get one of those tracking devices that you slip under someone’s car? I mean, they have the technology; we have all these frickin’ expensive cameras. Can’t we get the tracking equipment too?" he asked.

Everyone liked his idea.

The three paparrazzi debated whether or not they should go to New Jersey where Douglas and Zeta Jones had another house. Cell phone calls were made. Someone said something profane about "Welsh women who go for the money," and then they took off.

The Swede and his friend left. The Swede had to go the UN to cover Hans Blix and he seemed happy about it. I was left with Chip. He mellowed out a little and we got on fine. Fortunately, Michael Douglas reappeared and I got him on the return.

The English guys were back by then and one of them shouted in a desperate voice, "Michael, is she all right?"

"We’re doing great, thanks. Couldn’t be happier," he said as he nimbly returned to the safe-haven of the building.

I saw Steve Hirsch and someone else (Keith?) get their shots from down low. Their cameras were nearly touching and their flashes went off simultaneously. Douglas had to goose step around them.

* * *

Now it’s the next morning and I’m expecting for the phone to ring again. From what I can tell, the money shot, the new baby shot, hasn’t been made yet. There are a lot of hungry photographers still out there, waiting.