TROOPS

anymore or they're just too busy trying to raise families

Have a Good Night

As I flipped through the channels on the TV last night I saw that a few weren’t working—they all had “Try again later” error messages on the screen, and there was no trying again later. They didn’t work. I restarted the cable box and watched its mysterious, glacial countdown from behind the kitchen island: L7, L6. L5 for a long time. L4. Finally it turned on again. The same channels were out. I decided to forget about it and go to bed.

Tonight it was still fucked up. And thing is, it wasn’t even anything I wanted to watch. Just some high-number sports and syndication channels. Yet I decided to receive it as deep aggravation. An affront, almost. I knew this was beyond meaningless and vain. But there I was, at the end of another day, another night; the TV’s on the fritz and I’m about to lose my mind.

I called the cable people. As I navigated the automated branches—verify your account, what’s the nature of your call—I felt a strange, desperate anger well up inside of me. I somehow knew I’d explode with rage, eventually, when the rep inevitably asked me to reboot the box again, to stall for time or try to get me to give up. I began to imagine the things I’d say. I’d be cursing—of course—in a harsh and tremulous voice. All my frustration, my rage, my helplessness—it would all be manifested in senseless, anguished demands. Sara would race over, alarmed, asking me what was happening, telling me to calm down. I’m pretty sure I’d smash something. One of those rocks glasses that fit so nicely in the fist. I could see it all. Including later, after I hung up: I’d apologize and cry to my wife, tell her that I had just had a mental breakdown and I didn’t know why.

Finally a woman with a faint accent answered the phone, presumably in far-off Mumbai. She asked me to read the error message on the broken channels so I switched to one. But there was Jerry Orbach following down a lead, crystal clear and beautiful. I switched to another. It worked. And another. Everything was working. The woman graciously credited our account for two days of outage and asked me if there was anything else she could do for me. No thank you, I replied.

“Have I addressed all of your questions and concerns to your satisfaction, sir?” she asked.

“Yes you have. Thank you very much.”

“Well then thank you for calling and have a good night.”

Up to that point there had been nothing unusual about the management training session. Everyone—the facilitator, and the co-facilitator, of course—but the rest of us, too, were playing our roles properly. Professionally. Be cheerful, inquisitive. A little self-deprecating. Try to participate. But try to listen. Try to participate and listen at the same time. Look like you’re participating. Look like you’re listening.

During introductions we were asked to reveal something about ourselves that no one might guess. That game. I can’t remember most of them. Mine was: I was born in France. (I thought I struck the right balance of revelation and impersonality. I thought this is what was expected. What was desired. Don’t you think? At any rate, people smiled and nodded.)

The guy seated to my left said he has an identical twin. His twin sister. Interesting that’s what came to his mind. Then again, not really interesting at all. Perfect.

During the afternoon—I don’t know how we got to this point. Was it the section about giving real-time feedback? The slide about addressing inappropriate behavior? It was a digression, to be sure, but it didn’t seem out of place. Nothing could seem out of place. Everything that was said or done was rapidly subsumed—by the group, by each of us unconsciously—into the set of expectations for the larger exercise. The accepted protocol. The parameters of toleration. Which really meant: You could say anything. Everyone would pretend it was normal.

So here’s what the guy with the twin said: I don’t want to tell any stories. Come on, tell us a story! we said. I don’t want to tell a story that’ll make me sound crazy. The woman seated to his left said: But those are the best stories. And of course, she was right.

So he said once many years ago, his sister got in a very serious car accident. And at the moment that she was in the accident, as the car was veering out of control, he suddenly was inside her mind, and he could hear her thoughts. He heard her say: I don’t want to die. As luck would have it she did not, and went to their parents’ house to convalesce. He got a phone call from his mom. Your sister was in a very bad accident, she said, and he interrupted her: I know she was.

In Your Head?

I got out of the eye doctor early and didn’t have to be at work till 1. So I walked, up from Murray Street through Tribeca.

I came across a construction site, veiled behind that blue plywood wall with the little portholes, just one or two, you know, just big enough so you can peer in if you want but you know they don’t want you to. When I did I saw them directing a nozzle, hung from a crane, that poured concrete into a field of rebar. And so there goes up another fucking building.

A French couple was arguing. The man had a little shopping bag with a baguette sticking out of it. So they hadn’t been arguing for long. And better not be for too much longer. She had the upper hand. Complaining, reproaching. Asking those rhetorical questions that make you feel like an idiot. He didn’t have much to say. I lost them at an intersection when they hung back, preferring to bicker than to watch the crossing signal.

An older man in a Yankees jacket was on the phone. Here’s what I heard him say: “In your nose? In your nose? In your nose? In your head?”

On the way home I was fascinated by the Orthodox couple sitting across from me. She was extremely beautiful. A classic Jewish beauty. Raven-tressed. Petite, stylish. He was large and slovenly, bleary-eyed. His chest and belly bulged in his button-down shirt. His wrists were too big for the cuffs. I wondered what she thought of him. What she really thought of him. They sat placidly together, neither making any visible gestures of affection nor of contempt. She looked around the train, as he did, eyes moving up, down, left, right. Once or twice meeting mine. Then he yawned extravagantly, like a hippopotamus. She didn’t seem to mind at all.

Winter won’t release us into spring. We must endure the greasy streets, the gusts; sidewalks covered in sediment left by the melted snow: napkins, newspaper, straws. And dog shit. Dog shit everywhere.

Is it some particular punishment?

TROOPS

Toward the end of 2005, Cassano promoted Al Frost.

I had management training the entire day at my old office, the main agency, the Mothership, on 42nd Street. As I approached the corner of Third Avenue an ambulance, siren blaring, crept between the vans and trucks stopped at the light. I knew crossing now would be a stupid thing to do, but I knew I might have, if I was a little more mindless than I already was. I sensed the other pedestrians wondering if they could make it; balking for a moment before staying on the curb. Finally it burst into the intersection with about 17 seconds left for us to cross. As I did I looked to my left: a couple blocks up, on the right, smoke poured from a storefront.

TROOPS

The school has been run in a very lax and permissive manner.

We live in the Age of Horror. Beheadings, school shootings, the slaughter of cartoonists. And now an apparently normal young man who turned to the earth to plunge himself, men, women and children to their deaths.

It got warm quick today, from about noon till about mid-afternoon, around the time a gas explosion shook 2nd Avenue at around 7th Street, not far from the old Fillmore East, where other kinds of bombs went off so many years ago.

TROOPS

“He lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing up there. What the priorities were.”

TROOPS

"Payment," Jamie said. "For his nose—plus interest."

TROOPS

All fugitive slaves faced daunting odds

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.

Last night as we lay sunken into the couch, I heard a car horn somewhere down the street. It honked insistently a few times, stopped, and started again. And stopped, and started again. Sara got up to look out the window but saw nothing. It started again, stopped. Started again. A voice isolated from the angry, insistent din that you hear when traffic is backed up at the Holland Tunnel. But with no traffic, no tunnel.

As I gazed dumbly at the TV I tried to imagine what could possibly be going on. A solitary figure in a car, possibly parked, not even running. This person’s mind was breaking. What kind of grief, what kind of horror, must a human contemplate to lose it like that? To sit in a car and honk into the void—to make this wordless howl of anguish—for the better part of an hour?

Then it stopped.

After I dropped off Jackie yesterday I walked along 23rd Street and noticed a slender young woman on her phone, in the corner where some plywood wall or vestibule met the building side. I knew there was something about her. I slowed and stared. I realized she was sobbing.

“Mom, Mom! It’s going to be all right! It’s going to be all right!” I heard her say.

Who Are People?

Went to the Ear Bar today to meet N. for lunch. As I waited for him I observed the others at tables in the front room. Three men in shirts and ties were seated nearby. The waitress recited a list of soft drinks to one of them: “... apple juice, orange juice, water?” I heard her say. She was evidently at the tail end of a very unappealing speech.

“No, no,” the man responded. “Just water, please.”

“Get a drink,” one of his companions suggested.

“No! No. Unless someone else wants tequila. Ha ha!”

The man seated to his left, portly, in his mid-thirties, said in a serious tone, “Tequila on the rocks can be very, very nice.”

There followed some indistinct banter about alcohol.

“Don’t talk to me, I haven’t had a drink in three months,” the portly one said.

“Why not?” asked the older man across from him.

“Trying to lose weight,” he replied.

Which led me to wonder: Who are people? What the hell are they doing? And why?

The shoelace of my left shoe keeps coming undone. I have no idea why. Usually at work. I’ll get up to go get coffee or something and look down to find the laces flapping around and dragging on the floor. Or sometimes I catch them as they’re coming unraveled. The knot has opened like some kind of flower and the laces are slowly growing free. I can almost see it happen.

I have no idea why. Always the same shoe. The left. The right is fastened up the way it should. I walk by some people, wondering whether they notice my disordered state, whether they remember it from the day before. Then I finally find some chair somewhere to prop my foot on to tie them again, nice and tight this time, hoping somehow this will finally do it.

There’s been that vibrant light the last couple of days, that light in the City when the red lights are bright, deep red and the pink of the sunsets is in all the windows.

I overheard a woman on her phone, walking down Sixth Avenue, telling her friend about a couple they both knew, how the guy keeps taking credit for the woman’s accomplishments. Rich. His name was Rich.

The Enterprise - 49

Bob, Fun and I were on our way to Sunshine for lunch when Bob kicked a can into the street.

“You’ve been doing more work with Tom,” he remarked. “How’s that going?”

“It’s going well,” I replied uncertainly.

“I have strong objections to resources with a given skill set drifting into unrelated roles.”

I told him I could see what he meant.

“I don’t think it’s healthy. It isn’t good for the company. It isn’t good for people.”

We continued wordlessly down Fifth Avenue, hands plunged into pockets at the cold, belching plumes of breath like car exhaust. Was that it? I wondered. Did he expect me to prattle on in response? Would he escalate this topic somehow? To Neil?

It was true my role was drifting. Toward product development, toward coding—not real programming of course but coding with the user-friendly interface the engineers out west had created—and away from whatever dubious thing I was originally engaged to do. Actually maybe I was still doing what I was supposed to do, but really doing it now, instead of typing up some dumb paragraphs in a Word document and attaching it to an Outlook e-mail for someone else to laboriously download, open, copy-paste from, reformat into the gizmo, check for errors, and commit to the repository. Now I was using the gizmo. It was inevitable. It saved me time and it saved everyone else time.

We got our falafel. Walked back up Fifth in silence. Then Bob and Lowell started talking about something. Joking around. And that was it. Bob never said a word about it again.