Hammering

Michael looked at his watch. The lunch hour was only 15 minutes away. “Yo, bud,” he said to the guy drilling holes into the two-by-four. “I’m going over to the entrance to hammer nails. See you after lunch, dude.”

He walked around the corner onto Lexington Avenue. Street vendors marked every intersection for as far as he could see – Chinese, burritos, hot dogs, subs, you name it. Perfect place for his setup. He wiped the sweat from his brow – good, his skin would be moist.

He began the hammering. It’d keep him busy right through the lunch hour – good, another good sign. The nails were four-inchers, so each one took a while. After six nails, he’d sweated right through his shirt.

It was time.

He looked out the corner of his eye across the street. Yes, they were all there – the ladies on their lunch hours, looking across the street while they waited in line. Slowly he crossed his arms, grabbed his t-shirt by the tails, and pulled it up over his head. He swiveled his hips a little bit – not much, really – as the shirt came over his head. He turned his chest out toward Lexington Avenue as he did this, making sure his armpits showed and – when the shirt had cleared his biceps – he pulled his hands down just a little bit, so he could flex the biceps for the ladies. And then the shirt was all the way off, and with his left hand (because that was on the far side of his body, he didn’t want to hide his chest from the women) he took the shirt and wiped the sweat off his chest, ending with the left pectoral and then the armpit.

If only he could’ve thrown the shirt into the middle of Lexington Avenue, the ladies would’ve bolted from their lines and pounced on it. Why couldn’t they stop traffic for his performance?

He gave himself a little smile; the ladies had noticed. A few had whooped it up from across the street. He could hear it. And then he turned back to his nails, making sure that his triceps flexed with every hammer.