“Twilight of the Guardian Angels” by Michael Stahl

It’s Friday night in the West Village, the second night of Fashion Week. I’m wearing a red beret and a white T-shirt with red lettering that spells out “Guardian Angels.” At least I match. Walking the Christopher Street patrol at ten o’clock, this is the first occasion in my life when model types have gawked at me.

“It’s a good feeling putting that uniform on,” Benjamin “EQ” Garcia, a Guardian Angel vet and current patrol director, says.

He must be used to it. I’m just anxious, very uncertain about what’s to come tonight.

We walk a few blocks and it doesn’t take long for a tall guy in his late twenties to call us “heroes.” He might be a little drunk, but even though I’ve only been an honorary Angel for ten minutes, it’s nice to hear.

EQ, whose police scanner revealed earlier that a bystander had been stabbed a few blocks away, tells us to “post up.” We form a line, our backs up against a building, looking towards the street.

The Angel next to me is on his first-ever patrol, having just completed his required training. I initially thought he was codenamed “Momo,” then “Mambo,” but would later discover he was in fact dubbed “Mumbles.”

Mumbles is instructing me: “As people walk by, look at their hands and sides for weapons. Look into cars, especially ones with a lot of people in them. Try to remember the type of car it is. And look up at the fire escapes across the street. You never know, someone could throw something down at you.”

Though the gentrified West Village is not the cradle of crime it once was, bad things still happen. My thoughts drift to the shooting death of Mark Carson, an anti-gay hate crime that occurred on West Eighth Street this past May.

In formation, the group marches to the piers, a local hangout spot. Save for a few patches of people sitting on grassy knolls, enjoying the view of New Jersey’s nighttime skyline, it’s quiet — what EQ calls “the best kind of patrol.”

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Curtis Sliwa was a night manager at a South Bronx McDonald’s in 1979 when he founded “The Rock Brigade,” the first incarnation of the group that would soon become The Guardian Angels. Sliwa and I recently spoke in The Bombay Room — a glorious name for a small corner meeting space with an unmemorable view, a tiny TV, and a large table topped with half-foot-high stacks of newspapers and magazines — at Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown Manhattan, across the street from Madison Square Garden. At fifty-nine, Sliwa maintains his trademark swagger along with a verbose speaking style that nevertheless stops short of his outlandish media persona. He admitted that he can be very “theatrical” when on the radio or television, joking that he’s won a Tony Award. However, he swiftly justified his act with: “One must convey their point with emotion and passion..”

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Originally published at narrative.ly. Click the link to read the complete story.