He was saying in a loud, aggrieved tone of voice to the woman he was with, “I ONLY GOT THIS ONE NOSE.” And though I’ve lived in Manhattan for a long time and heard lots of great mad street cries and wonderful twisted passer-by talk, I still paid enough attention to wonder what led him to mention this.When I told people about the incident a writer friend suggested that the woman had bopped him in the nose. An interesting premise, but in my quick glance I’d seen no evidence that his nose (a serviceable but common enough medium sized specimen—not a pug, not a wild honker) was bleeding or was in any way not “a virgin.”That’s how unbroken noses were described in the South Boston of my childhood, a time and place where it was said that anyone who reached the age of twelve without a broken nose was either a newcomer or a girl.My friend, Liz, who has known me for decades, was inclined to believe that he came from an alternate world where any individual could have a variety of noses and other body parts.
