Bon Jovi, Springsteen, Short Hills, the malls, the people, the "gardens": New Jersey. No thanks. I get why people hate on the "Garden State". Aside from suburban banality and strip mall tackiness, Jersey seems to be a keeper of people, places and things not gritty or cool enough to hang in the Big Apple, yet many Jerseyians cash in on all of the neighboring benefits...

No offense.

We may end up there.

The worst Jersey offenders must certainly be the ones who cannot properly drive, in New York; the Jersey drivers who run into Mexican food delivery guys on bicycles, (perhaps?) killing them. Those drivers...you'd think that people who need to drive everywhere, would be pretty adept at doing so.

It's nothing other than stunning to see death, perceived and live.

A chain-wearing, tourist-spot-T-shirt-wearing, fat, balding and hairy dolt in a Kia SUV -with Jersey license plates - ran into a delivery guy on a bike at 81st and Broadway, today, August 14. And then he got out of the car and just stood there, bug-eyed: If you hit someone off their bike and send them spinning through the air, landing to their end, wouldn't you make a fantastic, dramatic, or apologetic gesture? Not this guy: bug eyes and shock don't cut it in my book. He hit the bike and body with his Kia SUV; I heard the freakishly-loud, crushing impact of vehicle to metal to ribs. I saw a man fly through the air, double-somersaulting; I heard him thud mid-street on the concrete cross-walk, face down, landing without an utterance or scream. There was no director or "Cut!!!" or set trailer to soften the blow; the man did not get up and bow to a clapping, relieved audience. I and about three other people instinctively screamed from across the street. Five people immediately called 911 on their cell phones. Broadway, usually bustling, became dead-locked and silent.

I love how New Yorkers pull together in tough times.

In flush moments, we curse out one another. We curse the crowded city, the smells of all of its inhabitants on crowded subway cars, the noise, the humid heat, the gray cold; the toxic sewage from the street rain puddles that splash our toes...

We dream of just a tad more space just so that we can swing our arms without hitting a stranger mid-crotch.

Pigeons are crunched under taxi front wheels and no one blinks. Dogs sniffing on sidewalks are spit at. Slow, smelly and demented old people are wished an expedient expiration date, while children in large, cumbersome strollers are eye-rolled and loud-sighed. However, when a man flies through the air like dandelion fuzz and lands on concrete, potentially becoming a paraplegic or worse yet, dead, we act and we act fast. Our phones are flipped, our heads are level: 911 is dialed unfaltering and well. Some sane and well-educated person always steps in, authoritatively giving a calm assessment and steady hand until "the professionals" arrive. And all of this is done shoulder-to-shoulder without any emotive demonstration, or idle chit-chat. We get the job done. The Seventies riots, 9-11, the 21st century Blackout...the daily tragedies that would make front page news anywhere else...we can pull together in a crunch, here.

Three people took cell phone camera pictures of the license plate, as if the driver had any chance of fleeing the scene. Five phones, all at once: "Yes, he is breathing but not moving. 81st and Broadway, North-East corner. Come quickly. Please." Five people quickly went on their ways.

I walked over twenty blocks in the opposite direction, muttering to myself, processing, grief-stricken in the heat. When I walked back a good two hours later, past 81st, towards home, there was nothing left and nothing left resonating in me.

No, not a Garden City.

Not a City of Angels or of wind or lone stars or sunshine or anything golden...

New York: City of Soldiers, empires, and the occasional imperious attitude.