The Social Security Place

I love the long, zigzagging hallway, the barren decor. The beige linoleum floor and the outlets saying do not use. Each number called starts with a frightening burst of feedback. I was 987. 

The man on the other side of the window looked so bored I thought he was going to turn me down and send me home. For no reason. Only that it was the only appropriate gesture for someone so radically detached from what he’s doing. He asked me for this, he asked for that. Jackie’s passport. Mine. I sat at the edge of the chair and wondered if this was a mistake. I need to recalibrate my posture, my speech, I thought, to better match his affect. I eased back an inch or two.

“Here’s your receipt,” he said suddenly. “I suggest you keep it. You’ll get the card in seven to ten business days.”

I thanked him, what’s the word. Not warmly. Emphatically. I gathered up my things, the birth certificate, the passports. Trying not to linger. And then I turned around and walked away.

Day 8

While up in the parasail I observed to Jackie that it almost looked like you could see the curvature of the earth. It was a dumb remark but we were up high, higher than I’d noticed on previous rides. We approached a tiny island with a boat moored nearby. There was no one on its patch of beach. In the distance were the curving white shapes of resorts, Sandals, Hedonism II. I was aghast at how easy it might be to unhook myself from the harness. Or maybe it wasn’t easy. Perhaps safety features were in place, an autolocking mechanism. I didn’t try to find out. It was better to look down.

A bead of water trickled down Jackie’s electric toothbrush after it had been replaced on its stand, probably to gum up the electronics once it reached the charging base, causing a short circuit, starting a fire. I envisioned us naked on the street as annoyed firefighters clambered up the four flights.

No matter what technology you have, smart devices, app controls, computers in the car, nothing works like a toilet.

Jackie had a fortune cookie in her lunch. I unfurled the little wisp of paper, spotted with sauce. Ready for another fortune? it said, and I thought: good fortune. Smart. Did not expect that. Then I realized of course the fortune was on the other side:

Declare peace every day.

Lately when I read a book that’s supposed to be good, I think: this book has been read ten million times. It’s been read to death. I start to worry there’s nothing there for me. I try to reassure myself that every act of reading is unique. It must create its own universe from the reader and the text. I believe that, but still I worry. Hasn’t everything been thought already about these words? Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. I thought this reading “The Sound and the Fury” and now I think it reading “Ragtime.” But then a word or phrase comes round to penetrate my brain. Tonight it was this: The freaks were delighted.

Sara said look at the moon, see the moon? Jackie said it’s almost full. It seems like a couple days ago I was showing her the sliver of new moon out her bedroom window before she went to sleep.

I’m looking at it now, its giant aura shrouded above and below by black clouds.

I’ve always been obsessed with my computer doing things, updating itself, fixing itself, restoring something or other. I thought it was because I want things to work and then I thought maybe it’s because I want them not to work. Just so I can worry. Just so I can care. So I can wake up and see: Is it done yet? Is it fixed? But really I’d just like my computer to count from 1 to infinity. I’d check its progress now and then. Sometimes often, every ten or fifteen minutes—when I’d be working and in need of distraction. Sometimes once a day. I’d see: how far up is it now?

Someone in the park said hey look, the sun is coming out again and minutes later the wind picked up like crazy. A mylar birthday balloon blew out of the woods onto the sidewalk and hit Jackie, shit that’s not supposed to happen—balloons and plastic bags are like pigeons, they always get out of the way. By the time we got upstairs ropes of rain were pounding down and the sun shone straight through the west side of our apartment and out the east. And of course there was a rainbow. 

We looked for the prickly pear and I didn’t remember what tree I planted it by. Finally I found it, lying flat on the dirt and leaves. It was gray and withered but I stuck it back in as best I could, tamped down some dark soil around the bottom of it. Who knows.

I told Jackie and her friend to stay away, it has prickly bits that fly through the air.

“Really?” he said.

“No, not exactly. But be careful.”

Then they took off running down what they called abandoned paths.

I hit my head hard under Jackie’s loft bed today, and bit my lip. I wondered, Is this where I see stars? But I didn’t see stars. I dutifully collapsed on the arm of the big blue chair for a few seconds. But there was nothing wrong with me. I was almost disappointed to realize it. There was nothing to do, really, but to stand up and go on.

During the rare intervals when the English summer sun shines unobstructed it has a venomous ferocity, as though angry at having been veiled so long by clouds. I rolled up the collar of my jacket as I sat in the Hyde Park playground, hoping I wouldn’t get burned. Jackie played on a large swing with a family that I guessed was Iranian. I wondered whether they were very rich or very poor. Probably very rich.

The day before, we went to the London Eye. We had a dreary, sodden lunch, seated around a trash-strewn table by a tree, with rain falling through the branches and the leaves. I ate a tomato and mozzarella Panini that had the peculiar blandness of international tourist trap snack-stand food. Water pounded our Ferris wheel car, forming rivulets that blurred the views of Big Ben and MI6. There was Coca-Cola everywhere, in refrigerated cases along the queue to get in, at the snack bar outside, in the gift shop at the exit.

When we returned to Eddie’s house rain had leaked through a fissure in the ceiling and was dripping on the shag carpeting. We placed a bowl on the floor and suddenly the water went plunk, plunk, plunk. Greeting cards on a side table were soaked, including one of Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus that played “Silent Night” when you opened it.

Drip Cock

There was some new graffiti at the elevated Fourth Avenue stop last Thursday, as Jackie and I rode into the City. Two words on a concrete abutment: DRIP COCK. I processed it as you do any street speech: I noted its vulgarity, its absurdity, also its admirable conciseness. It's a striking phrase, the kind that makes for a good band name. Drip Cock. One-two punch.

It's also interesting that it isn't COCK DRIP. Not just interesting—important. "Cock drip" is mundane; offensive but only in a tedious, juvenile way. By swapping the words, the writer forces us to engage. Maybe it's someone's tag—that'd be great.

Yo yo, guess who hit Fourth Avenue da other day?! Drip Cock, yo!

What kind of cock? Drip cock.

But I’m overthinking already. You sense that the writer has no particular meaning in mind, and this makes the phrase yet more powerful. Is it a command? Or a description? Better not to say. Better not to know. The words inhabit the wonderful and scary world of nonsense.

On the Manhattan side a dishevelled woman stumbled drunkenly on the corner of 17th and Eighth. She appeared to be looking for the wall to orient herself in the universe. Not finding it. Loaded at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning.

On Friday night, at the Philharmonic concert in Prospect Park, I lay down and watched a light move bizarrely in the sky. Blinking erratically too. Why isn’t this a UFO?, I thought numbly. Space aliens, abduction and experimentation. The whole nine. Then I noticed it wasn’t the light that was moving, it was the clouds.

The day began alright but I grew despondent. Something about the heavy wetness in the air, the office not yet fully air-conditioned. I was inattentive at work. But it went by fast. It was after 12 before I knew it, two-thirty-something after that, and then it was time to go.

When I got home Jackie invited me to play Candyland, which really meant just looking at the board and the cards. But that was all right with me.

Home, sidewalk, train, office, sidewalk, train, home. Bed. Sleep. Dream.

Jackie and I met another dad and his daughter on the F train this morning. He seemed old enough to be a grandfather, though I guess I am, too. He had a creased, swollen face, the sort of face that’s seen a lot of board meetings, room service and business-class whiskey. He had a full head of gray-blond hair and was tall and well dressed, with expensive, Italian-type shoes, a trenchcoat, pink cuffs visible under the sleeve of his suit and a crease in his pants like the spine of greeting card. Except his shoes were a little worn and dusty. His hair was a little mussed. His entire outfit seemed a bit off, as though it had come from some other time and place. As though it had been purchased at the estate sale of a dead lawyer in Westchester. The girls were talking about their birthdays and Jackie said mine was in August and I said August 28th and the man said, “Right around the time of Burning Man!”

He was nice, though, with his daughter, Lena. Jackie talked to her, asked her name. Her dad wanted to know what school we were going to, then told us about theirs. When we got to Jay Street to switch trains Jackie gave Lena a hug.

After enrolling Jackie in school we stopped for pastries at the cake place, the place where we got her birthday cake, where they have a picture of Bill Cosby and Lionel Hampton on the wall, blowing out the candles on Lionel’s 80th birthday cake that I guess they made. In the back an old timer was dipping black-and-white cookies. That’s not something you see too often. Feels like something you’re not supposed to see, that’s supposed to stay mystified. Like the way they print a dollar bill, or your parents putting presents in the stockings. Anyway, he dipped the white halves first.

Wish I could remember that dream last night about driving down frozen roads, down a hill, riding the brakes, thinking to myself, “You shouldn’t ride the brakes,” thinking it was someone else in my head, telling me that.

Then I was wandering through a neighborhood of well-kept houses, through the back yards. Trying to get home, I guess. Like the swimmer in Cheever’s story. Ned. I looked it up. His name is Ned.

In the dream I was with Jackie. We were both trying to get home.

After five days a teenager in a Yankees shirt was dragged out of the rubble in Nepal. Meanwhile, we slept, fucked, ate Cheerios, rode the train, worked, in no particular order, and depending on the precise timing.

There I was on the platform, waiting for the train. There I was in the hallway, on the way to the coffee machine. There I was on the sidewalk. Looking over my shoulder. Making sure I wasn’t followed.

When Jackie and I were on our way out at 14th Street there was a commotion around the stairwell. A bigger crowd than usual. There were groans and weary exclamations. It was pouring rain. Just a little earlier it was crystal clear, blue sky. I opened my umbrella and handed it to her. Outside, everything was wet but gleamed a little from the sun.

There’s that very nice freelance copywriter, always remembers my name. So I made a point of learning hers.

We awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of Jackie singing. I didn’t recognize the song, and I couldn’t really hear the words, but her voice was tuneful and clear. I walked in and asked her what was going on.

“I’m singing so I can remember my dream,” she said. Then she began to cry, because she couldn’t remember it now, because she wasn’t singing anymore.

We scrambled onto the train, the weary parents with their little kid. I got on first with Jackie, listing against me the way kids do, and bobbing her head around. She careened dangerously close to the pole, the seat, surfaces surely contaminated with New York City filth.

“Don’t let her put her face on anything,” Sara called out across the car.

I sat down with Jackie and noticed a guy next to me, a young guy, writing something in a notebook. I read over his shoulder.

“Don’t let her put her face on anything,” he wrote.

On the train on the way in this morning I read a phrase over someone’s shoulder and memorized it, at least for a minute. Something about someone pulling up in car, or pulling the car around the block. But it’s gone now.

The F was running on the G so a lot of us got out on Bergen, joining the commuters who were already waiting, two or three rows deep. When the next F came it was packed; only a few people got on.

As I stood waiting with Jackie I observed an interaction between a man and woman, both young, attractive, dark-haired. The man was on the train, evidently having just got on; the woman stood on the platform right in front of us. He was gesturing towards her with his arms open, like, What? What? He said something to her as the doors were closing. Something I couldn’t hear. I wondered whether they were a couple that had been accidentally separated. Two people in love, distraught at having to make it to the city without holding each other’s hands.

“That’s all you have to say?” she replied. “Motherfucker. Asshole.”

He smiled weirdly—a taunting, almost lecherous smile—and nodded aggressively toward her. A fuck you nod.

“Fucking asshole,” she said. Nodding back.

He continued his grimace and flashed her his middle finger, discreetly, low to his waist, as though to be careful no one else could see.

She shook her head. “Fuck you!’

He gave a little shrug as the train pulled away. Still holding his middle finger there. She turned away with a sigh and waited like the rest of us for the next one.

Jackie whispered nonsense words into my ears as we sat in the pizza place, in the sunny booth. I was on a conference call with work. Good thing there was nothing for me to say, as usual, and I had the phone on mute.

We went to hang out in Central Park, a class reunion of sorts for Sara’s high school. It was a radiant, beautiful goddamned day. A little girl there had a sheet of paper with boxes numbered one to a hundred. Jackie counted them to thirty. Nearby, a fat man and a skinny man kicked a soccer ball back and forth, the skinny man much more skilled. A pale woman sunbathed in a bikini and a leg cast. A portly couple sat picnicking, she reading aloud from a hardcover novel as he picked off a grape. We laid out our blue sheet. A couple times, I lay back on it and closed my eyes. For about a minute. Bliss seeping into me.

While Sara talked to her friends Jackie wanted to go play on a big, flat rock, on the other side of the wire-fenced path. Just to be on the rock instead of the grass, I suppose. She said she wanted to climb the rock, but there was nothing to climb. It just rose very slightly higher than the ground, like many other rocks in this contrived landscape. She must like the change in the surface, the fact it feels different underfoot. She’d just learned the word texture.

There were weird round metal disks embedded into the rock, about three inches in diameter. Some bewildering numbers were stamped on them, and also these words: project marker. Jackie lost interest in the rock and went to pick leaves off a tree. After a while I put her on my shoulder and headed back.

We walked through the Coney Island station, Jackie on my shoulders. Above the bustle and the dirt. It was crowded on the sidewalk, too. With big people. Big kids. Big couples holding hands.

A lady with a haunted look panhandled listlessly outside Nathan’s. She might have been pregnant. Or her belly was horribly distended, like a Biafran child’s.

I peered at the go-kart track and wondered if Jackie was old enough to ride with me. Probably not. The sun shone so bright, you could barely see.

We got to the Boardwalk and everything seemed alright. People were having fun. But there was something funny in the air.

I spotted a large man, a biker type, with sunglasses and a goatee. He was clutching some kind of children’s plastic toy—an airplane, or a car, or a water gun maybe. It was made of that bright, brittle, translucent plastic. That material that can only be a toy. I believe it was pink.

Suddenly he threw it to the floor and crushed it under his heel. All the while looking straight ahead, tight-faced, seething. His woman ran up to him and swatted him on the shoulder, like he was a misbehaving boy.

“How could you do that?” she cried. “How could you do that?”