![]() Because the American experiment had rendered him invisible. ![]() A pain that involved forty arrests for disorderly conduct, fare evasion, and assault.īut on Monday night on the subway, Neely was loud but not violent. The trauma involving his mother being taken from him by a killer who was so cold that he packed her corpse into a suitcase. A pain that had him screaming at the top of his lungs in a subway car on the first night of May, telling anyone who would listen that he was hungry and that he didn’t care and that he wanted to die. The emotional burden of living with hard and cruel knocks that all New Yorkers know, but that, without resources, becomes an abyss that is almost impossible to climb out from. He was betrayed by a heartless and broken system that left him for dead and that looked the other way as he lived with his pain. What few people knew about Neely - and the sad and enraging thing about this goddamned barbaric business is that it took a murderous Marine with a sick smirk and a passion for chokeholding for us to really know - was that the man was significantly troubled. There is no known method of quantifying the smiles he put on so many faces, but the tally surely must reach into six figures. He epitomized the true spirit of this city. ![]() All this made him much more than a casual showtime busker hustling for a few bucks. If you were really lucky, you’d be able to see Neely bust out his steps on a subway car barreling between stations, watching him somehow sustain his center of gravity as the train swayed and careened and buckled. Even if you were in a rush to get somewhere, you’d still need a minute to quietly collect your jaw from the ground after catching the blurs of his flying feet in your peripheral vision. He built up a graceful and resplendent performance from a well-known repertoire that Neely owned with his supple and silent dignity.
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