Let 'em Off!

The Times Square platform where the 7 starts and ends was unusually crowded, with no train on either side to board. Finally one pulled in and everyone clustered around its doors.

“Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off!” the conductor shouted over the PA.

What Happened at Work So Far Today

Our morning meeting takes place in the reception area because all the conference rooms are booked. There’s a couch, a big ottoman, two tables, some chairs. People walk through the middle, heading in or out the door or along the hallway from one side of the office to the other. Some hurry their pace a little, as though crossing the sight of a tourist’s camera. Some give a little smile that says: There you are in your meeting, and here I am walking through it.

This morning most of the seats were taken. I sat at the high table by the wall, in the corner behind the electric Menorah. I beheld the four fake, flickering flames as account executives discussed this and that. I studied the bearings of the people who walked through. Their various gaits. The meeting broke up and I knocked out the plug while stepping off the stool. The Menorah went dark. I furtively restored it and looked around. No one seemed to notice.

In the men’s room, someone in a stall was engaged in a conference call on speakerphone.

In the middle of the afternoon a colleague suggested we go to the Christmas event that was taking place in the lobby downstairs. The Nutcracker emanated from some unseen string trio and mingled with the din of the assembly. White-clothed tables, festooned with tinsel, ringed the famous globe and lined the marble walls. They bore trays of gingerbread cookies, cake lollipops with red and green frosting, urns of cider and hot chocolate, pitchers of eggnog. A black-clad attendant stood at each, offering to shake nutmeg, to apply aerated cream, to spoon mini-marshmallows with a little plastic spoon. Their faces strained with the discomfort of doing for people what they should do for themselves.

TROOPS

He had been afraid

TROOPS

his life wasn't horribly ordinary

In my memory La Ciotat, the town on the French Riviera where we spent summers in the early ‘70s, is small and compact, like the town in a children’s book: a road leads down from our house and suddenly you’re on the beach; take a right and you pass some cafés and hotels, a marina, a rocky cove where you can fish or dive or even tie a boat. A little farther off there’s a shipyard, set apart in a maze of docks, where one enormous oil tanker sits on stilts, its hull in patches, as unseen workers pound it with their hammers to break it down for scrap. Clang! Clang! Clang!

I looked at the satellite photo of it today in Google Maps. The coastline conformed plausibly to my image of it but the town itself was vastly more complex and sprawling. Roads in all directions. Schools, museums, parking lots. Major avenues leading into roundabouts and squares. I tried in vain to find the road we lived on. It could be this one, or that one. None seemed the least bit familiar. They all were too urban: heavily populated and girded with infrastructure.

Did the town develop that much over time? Or did my imagination tear it down?

Early this morning, as I stood in the kitchen, I saw a bright white, flashing beacon through the trees.

What happened today?

Felt out of sorts and alienated at work. Sara said she had a bad day too.

Someone got pushed out on the tracks apparently, and died. Survivors were treated for trauma. It was on the Q line. I don't think I've ever taken it.

In many ways it was a nothing day, a treading water day. A day for killing time before you die. A-Rod wil get hip surgery (like an old woman), miss the start of the season. The princess is pregnant.

Jackie fussed and cried, "No, no, no, no, no, no!"

I made a stupendously bland meal and we watched football, Sara drifting off to sleep as her team lost by a point.

There are two bad musicians in the Bryant Park station—one or the other can usually be found in the passage from the 7 to the F. Sometimes both. One is a slight, dreadlocked guitar player. He stands with a Stratocaster weighing heavily against his hip and plays nothing but mumbly-bumbly open chords that dribble out of his little amplifier into a murky puddle on the floor. Not even chords to any song. Not reggae style, not nothing.

The other is a keyboard player who seems beset with mental problems. He plays clumsily, naively, sometimes looking up at the rush-hour crowd as though he were expecting a round of applause. He pounds out each note and chord with the same force, a hamfisted touch. But it must be said: he plays recognizable tunes. Today it was "Killing Me Softly With His Song."

There was some news this morning about the Concorde that crashed—some criminal suit was settled, or dismissed. I remembered the eerie video footage, taken by a trucker on the highway that borders Charles de Gaulle. In my mind I can see the trucker’s shadowy silhouette, alternating his gaze between the road ahead and the object of his camera lens. But of course you couldn’t see him. That’s in my imagination. You could see the stricken SST, head held up in desperation, drifting slowly over the roofs of hotels and factories, its engine a ball of flame.

A Phone Conversation With a Woman Who Has a Funny Verbal Tic

“Good afternoon, sir. How may I help you?”

“I received a notification that we still owe something. I thought we’d paid in full.”

She asked me for my personal details. I provided them.

“Thank you, sir. Let me check on that for you, sir. Would you mind holding for a moment, sir?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Sir, you pretty much still have an outstanding balance—hold on a minute, sir. Please. Just another minute.”

“OK.”

“All right, sir. I’m seeing that you pretty much owe eight dollars and eighty-three cents.”

“Really? Why is that? We paid in full the amount in the last notice.”

“Interest, sir. You pretty much still have to pay the interest. It continues to, um, accrue, pretty much.”

“We were told we had an extension until late November to pay the full amount!” I declared. I heard myself put on, with some effort, a suitable tone of mild indignation. “We paid that full amount. In full!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she replied, just as perfunctorily. “I’m sorry about what you may or may not have been told.”

I fabricated a sigh. “The interest continues to—”

“That’s correct sir. The interest pretty much continues to accrue.”

“So you’re telling me that if I pay eight dollars and eighty-three cents right now, we won’t owe anything further?”

“That’s pretty much what I’m seeing right now, sir.”

I considered calling her out on it. I decided no. Still I pressed on pointlessly, asking dumb, repetitive questions, like a jilted lover.

“You mean if today, I write a check for eight dollars and eighty-three cents. I put it in the mail. Then what happens to interest?”

“All I can pretty much tell you is what you owe, sir.”

“With no more interest accruing?”

She paused, disconcertingly. But then: “That’s what you owe, sir. That’s pretty much all I can tell you.”

“We want to put this matter behind us. Never have to worry about it again. Interest, penalties.”

“I understand, sir. Of course.”

“You’re telling me that will be the case? I pay what we owe, we’re done?”

“Pretty much.”

“I think I’ll do that then. Thank you for your help.”

“You’re welcome, sir! Thank you for calling the Internal Revenue Service. Have a great day now.”

TROOPS

because the marquise was too busy

The breakdown of history into arbitrary, discrete segments called decades or centuries seems silly and misleading. The Sixties didn’t start on January 1st, 1960 and end on December 31st, 1969, after all. Everyone knows they started when Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles on February 9th, 1964 and ended when the Hells Angels sacrificed a young, black man at the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Altamont on December 6th, 1969. Though some argue they started when Sputnik flew on October 4th, 1957 and ended when man last walked the moon on December 14th, 1972. Each of these delineations may be ridiculous. Yet we know what we’re talking about when we talk about the Sixties. Or the Eighties, or the Thirties. Each of us has a clear mental picture, informed by a lifetime of schooling and media consumption, of what each era signifies.

But maybe it’s not so arbitrary. Maybe we don’t, in hindsight, read a pattern in a few signal events that happen to have occurred in the same decade, or century, and interpret that pattern to “mean” something, and attribute that meaning to the entire period. Something else is at play. We are conscious of these periods as we live them, and to some degree we behave—think, believe, act—in accordance to what we believe to be the prevailing spirit of the time. In other words, people did things in the Sixties—drop acid, listen to rock music, protest against the war—not just because that’s where the currents of history had carried them but because they were conscious that they were living in the Sixties and that doing those things, and feeling the way they felt, is what was expected of them as “citizens” of the decade. And when it became the Seventies—on January 1st, 1970, or at least within a few weeks of then—people started to do the sorts of things we now identify with the Seventies—snort coke, listen to disco, swap spouses—because they knew it was the Seventies.

President Obama will be remembered for having dragged the United States—much of it kicking and screaming—into the 21st century.

After the loss I went to the merry-go-round with the wife and kid. The one by the water, under the bridge. During the hurricane, pictures of it had appeared on social media: the ocean churned against the glass box that enclosed it, waves climbing ever higher, while inside the lights were on, illuminating the empty painted horses in suspended animation.

There was little sign that anything had been wrong. The air outside was briny—everywhere we walked had days ago been underwater. But everything was clean. Normal. Three trash cans sat in a neat row along the paved path: garbage, paper, glass.

As we rode, we observed attendants dismantling a child’s birthday party at the corner of the space. A stack of empty pizza boxes. A cross-sected cake. Favors abandoned on chairs and the tissue-papered table. Sara asked me how much I thought it cost.

“Six hundred dollars?” I said after a moment.

In another corner a photo shoot appeared to be taking place, featuring a handsome, rich, young couple. They clasped hands and faced each other as the photographer contorted himself on the ground before them, straining to frame their heads and the cresting of the carousel.

Jackie’s heart didn’t really seem to be in it so we left after a couple more rides. But she insisted on walking.

The platform was crowded with the evening rush, commuters clustered at the optimal spots for their eventual exit or trying to get there before their train arrived, some winding prudently through the crowd, others braving the studded yellow surface at the margins.

There was a commotion on the Queens side. A few men leaned over the edge all in a row, waving their arms as a train emerged from the far tunnel and proceeded unusually slowly into the station. I walked over to the tracks. I knew what I was about to see. But I looked anyway.

A young black man lay on the near rail, about twenty feet to my left. A little crowd had gathered above him, appealing to him, reaching out their hands. He was not bleeding as far as I could tell but he moved very slowly, feebly, as though he were suspended in another world, or just now emerging from a month of slumber. He lifted his head and gazed nowhere. Then he lay back down on the rail. I noted that his limbs were moving—they didn’t seem broken, he wasn’t paralyzed.

The incoming train came to a stop fifty feet or so away. Inside I saw the conductor on a radio handset, making the requisite call. People still peered down at the man, imploring him, mostly without words. He did not stir. But he was alive.

At Herald Square a man threw a huge bag full of empty bottles and cans onto the car and it landed rattling and clanking against the far bench. He ran back onto the platform and grabbed another, threw that one in. And another. And another, as the doors were closing, forcing them back open with his shoulders. 

The Fine Print

Options shown.

Screen images simulated.

Demonstration only. Professional driver.

Use as directed.

Valid in U.S. only.

See store for details. 

 

I often think about how much there is that’s from the past. Deep in the past. Let’s say, fifty years. Sixty, seventy, eighty, more. There’s a lot: Most of the buildings on my block. The park across the way. The street itself—though I guess it’s been repaved. But someone a long time ago invented this street—thought it’d be a good idea. They made it straight—just as straight as it is today. They made it begin somewhere, end somewhere else. They connected it to other streets. They gave it a name—the name we still pronounce in 2012. That dead person—OK, a few people, a few dead people—created our reality, created what we experience as now.

We think we live in a hypermodern world, full of brand-new bells and whistles, the new ever supplanting the old. Yet we’re beholden to the past. Wasn’t it unsophisticated, relatively? Wasn’t it naive? In the past, blacks were slaves. Women couldn’t vote. But men were making blueprints for the world in which we live today.

Had a thought while reading the latest scary article about the presidential race in the Times. Apparently, a third of voters believe Romney has become more moderate since becoming the Republican nominee. If so many voters believe that this 65-year-old, experienced politician has significantly changed his political views in the last six months, why are the polls so close—basically even? “Flip-flopper” has long been a damning label in presidential politics. But the difference between Romney and, say, John Kerry is that Romney is an avowed flip-flopper. I think the American public, by and large, see him as a gleeful opportunist, happy to change his tune to suit his audience, from the liberal voters in Massachusetts to the hyper-conservative ones in the Republican primaries to the moderate undecideds who are the prize target now. It’s OK because he’s doing it callously, connivingly. Like a man. Like a good old, Machiavellian leader. Kerry, of course, got the label hung around his neck in spite of his meek protestations. Like a pussy. Americans will respect—maybe even adore—all sorts of equivocation as long as it’s carried off brazenly. With balls.

Fortunately, the Obama strategy has been to take him at his word for saying he was “severely conservative.” As opposed to any politician who might win, that’s a specific politician who can’t win.

The Enterprise - 46

One December night, Melissa and I sat in the Indian restaurant around the corner from her place. She told me she had been depressed.

“For how long?”

“For a while. For quite a while.”

She’d started seeing a shrink, she said. I asked her if she’d talk to me about her sessions. No.

She’d been prescribed an antidepressant whose side effects included reduced libido.

“Are you on them now?”

“Yes.”

Still, it was over. I knew it. Had been over for months. It was over more than ever. Going to end soon, soon, soon. Still, I was relieved. Maybe the malaise in our relationship hadn’t been my fault. And I allowed myself to be flattered by her confession. Didn’t it mean she wanted me to stay? To play the role of the supportive boyfriend? Could it be that all I had to do from here on out was be there for her?

I told her I’d do whatever she wanted. We’d do whatever she wanted. And that I understood. Hell, I’d felt that way too. Together, we’d get thr—

It was late at night on Valentine’s Day when she told me it was over. I lay in bed beside her, formulating my reply. Staring at that old, familiar ceiling in a whole new way. I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I was devastated. I was elated. I was hungry.

“I feel like I haven’t been myself around you,” I ventured meekly.

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t been acting like me. The person you just broke up with isn’t me.”

I could tell she was annoyed by the way that she was quiet. Like a fool, I persisted.

“Let me show you who I am. Please.”

She took a drag off her cigarette. Women are so cool and cinematic when they’re breaking up with you.

“If you aren’t you, then who the fuck have I been with all this time?”

It was a strong question. Diamond-tipped. All the best questions have no answers. Or answers so obvious no one dares to speak them. This one hounded me into my pants and out the door.

The Enterprise - 45

You could be among the dead. There’d never be shame in that. You could be among the lucky ones, standing one moment at the copy machine, thinking about lunch or sex or how you have to drive all the way to Rhode Island to see your in-laws this weekend—WHAM!, you’re pulverized out of existence. Now you’re a beloved memory. You’re perfect. You’re a face in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of memorials in the paper, a sainted name projected onto the walls and rafters of Madison Square Garden during a performance by U2.

You could be among the survivors. Not among we survivors, who’d watched the towers fall on television. But those who’d scrambled out of the ash and debris, ties flailing over their shoulders, personal effects abandoned, heels snapping off. Those who’d gone down 82 floors in the smoke and the darkness just before the floors had gone down, too. They’d been suddenly conscripted in a one-day war. We were the folks back home.

You could also be a rescuer. Official or not. Anyone could walk past the barriers at 14th Street and volunteer for service. You got a shovel. A face mask, maybe. You could dig through the rubble all day, come back and do it all over again the next. The point was to find someone alive. No one did. But as long as there you were digging, you were alright. Many who did proclaimed that they had no choice, that the disaster site exerted a stronger pull than their families or their jobs or any kind of self-concern. Such duty was obviously hazardous, possibly suicidal. (The maw at Ground Zero was smoldering with bones and hair, with glass, paper, rubber, steel, plaster and asbestos; with nylon, vinyl and formaldehyde; with polypropylene, polystyrene and a thousand more of man’s creations; the disintegrated elements of city. The smell of death and poison, sickly-sweet and acrid, hung over the island for weeks.) Who did this kind of work? Not us. Not me. We weren’t among the dead or wounded, the survivors, nor the saviors.

Still we tried so hard to rise to the event. By talking about it, thinking about it. Writing about it. We took some idiotic pride in having been here, in being New Yorkers, in being able to say, yeah, I saw the planes come in, or I know someone who saw the planes come in, or better yet I know someone who died. Well, don’t know them maybe. A friend of my ex’s brother. Didn’t matter who. Someone. Anyone would do. We’d take anything we could. Gimme gimme gimme. I’ll take it. Did you see the wall of tributes in Grand Central? I sure did. So poignant. It was a thing you could say at a bar next time, or at a party. And then we felt foolish, ashamed even, for this pride. In our darker, honest moments we realized none of this had anything to do with us at all. We wished to be implicated. We were not.

Maybe this was a test. Not by design but anyway. The event that determined once and for all who we were. And we were the consumers. The watchers of TV. We were just like everybody else.

Oh no. Way more than that. Two hundred thousand.

There were a few things that people like us could do. We could give blood, everybody said. My sister and I dutifully presented ourselves at the nearest donation center. A line of like minded souls stretched out the door and around the corner of 67th Street and Second. Inside, perplexed staff members scrambled to manage the influx. We were turned away. Plus: no one needed blood.

So here we were, some coworkers and I, traipsing down Chelsea on a sunny weekday. Kevin towed a Radio Flyer filled with provisions we’d earnestly assembled and purchased at a Duane Reade. Boxes of PowerBars, a case of Gatorade, Bounty paper towels, Advil, Slim Jims, M&Ms and Visine. We were told they needed Visine most of all.

Many years later I passed the Memorial by chance, on my way to a bar downtown. I wasn’t even thinking about it, didn’t remember it was there. And there it was. I had to look. The scene was quiet, inconspicuous. A few people along the railing, no more than you’d see in any little square. I approached the wall with no idea what I was about to see. The ground opened up into a vast, square space and opened up again into a smaller one into the void. Water poured down and down again from every side into the middle. It brought to mind a scene in a sci-fi movie on a barren planet, or maybe Earth post-apocalypse. A structure built outside of time by a civilization not our own. You were scared the hero might fall in.