February RantRhapsody
OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS
Mark W. Read
We had been in the holding cell at the 9th precinct for maybe an hour or so when this tall, punk-rock-circa-1983-looking dude (pale skin, gelled spiky jet black hair, metal-studded black leather jacket, metal-studded belt, black denim jeans, leather shitkicker boots) was escorted into the waiting area just outside the bars, a few feet away from us. The lively conversation that had sprung up between my cellmates and I (I was locked up with two fellow riders, Ben and Chris, who had been popped at the same time that I had. This was the first time either of them had been arrested, and they were feeling righteously pissed off, a reaction that I wished on the one hand to encourage- there is nothing more eye-opening and radicalizing than being unjustly arrested- but on the other hand, wanted to quell out of a selfish, though not-unreasonable fear that Ben’s yelling at the cops could very well slow down the proceedings and make our stay both longer and less pleasant) suddenly gave way to pensive observation: what’s he here for? Drunken bar fight? Is he violent? Was he smokin’ pot? Dealing? We watch him as his AO (Arresting Officer. Once arrested, one quickly adopts cop vernacular as primary language) puts him through the bizarre ritual-accounting-for of worldly possessions (one cell phone. One bic pen. One notebook. Wallet containing $53 dollars and 73 cents. One pack cigarettes. Sign here. And here. And here. And initial here. Thank you), and then the yet more bizarre ritual-self-protection exercise (“please remove shoelaces and belt.” “Do I seem like a suicide risk to you officer?” “Just take them off please”).
He completes these steps without incident, is seemingly in full control of his faculties, and appears to be on somewhat cordial terms with his AO. Probably a minor drug bust, I figure. He turns towards the cell, his face impassive, perhaps smiling slightly, and strolls calmly in as an officer (excuse me, PO, Police Officer), opens the sliding cage door. I think it is Ben, ever-pacing and jittery Ben, who engages him first.
“Whatcha in for?” Ben asks, with the requisite irony.
And it’s like turning on a faucet. The guy, this kind of tough-looking big dude, sits down, crosses his legs, puts his hands on the knee of his top leg, and recounts his odd and epic tale of woe:
“Well, it’s kinda weird, really. I mean, really strange, I was in the Virgin Megastore, talking to these girls, right? and you know, we’re kinda gettin’ flirty right? They’re really flirty girls, and it’s all fun and everything’s cool. And it’s gettin’, you know, kinda dirty right? they’re like asking me “how big is your dick”, and "how long can you last in bed, " this kind of stuff. Totally nasty right? And so I’m kinda psyched, cuz this one girl she’s pretty cute, you know? And so I’m kinda getting’ up close to them (Note: by now I am (a) totally amazed that this guy is revealing all of this information to us, and (b) becoming increasingly creeped out by him), and, you know, she kinda touches my leg a little bit, you know, brushes her hand against my leg, right? And so I touch her on, like, not even her ass really, like the side of her ass, like her thigh, right? So, anyway, I get one girls’ number- not the one who, you know, not the one who touched my leg, but her friend- I get her number and then I’m like not even in the same part of the store anymore, and these cops, these undercovers, come up to me, along with the manager, and they ask to talk to me, and I’m like sure. So they take me into this back hallway area, and they arrest me, for sexual assault.”
“Sexual assault?
“Yeah, can you believe it? The little cunt, like, she called the cops on me after she walked away. She’s pressing charges and shit. Can you believe that shit? I already filed a complaint of my own, you know. I mean she touched me first right?”
“you mean you accused her of sexual assault?”
“yeah. I mean, I dunno, I’m thinkin’ maybe that’ll scare her or something, wake her up and bring her to her senses. I’m hoping she’ll just drop the charges and I’ll be able to go home. But my, you know, the guy who arrested me..."
“that’s your AO”
"Yeah, he says that's probably not going to happen. I mean, I’m probably going to get booked and all that shit...."
You get the picture, I suppose, or the gist of it. At least you think you do. I thought I did too, and the picture is this: Party boy here, thinking he's Mr. Smoothe, spies some girls in the Virgin Megastore (which somehow makes this whole thing feel even sleazier, for reasons I can't exactly put my finger on.) Anyway, this guy, this lurky guy, who exudes confidence and calm, tinged with a smarmy-vulture like quality, a greasy, reptilian quality that makes him both amusing and repulsive and also, strangely, attractive, sidles up alongside some nice young (and I'm imagining *very* young) girl and cops a feel.
And here he is telling us all about it, almost pridefully, as though we were all hanging out in a bar together swapping sexual conquest stories, when in reality -- ha ha ha-- he's in JAIL! And this circumstance is actually quite gratifying and elicits in me feelings of genuine wellbeing, because if he is half the creep I suspect he is (and such suspicions will be amply confirmed later on), then hooray! the bad guy is busted, the world is just, the cops are doing their job, life has meaning, and so on and so forth. Of course, all of this sets up a near-migraine-inducing cognitive dissonance, because I"M IN JAIL TOO! For...riding my bike, in the bike lane, obeying traffic laws, in other words, for no fucking reason whatsoever, in moral, or even legal, terms.
(And much of the next 24 hours of my life will be consumed by similarly conflicting waves of feeling, leading me from self-pitying-Jesus-on-the-cross moments to rapturous moments where I will feel kinship and love for all the men trapped in the tombs with me, all the others forlorn and forgotten, stripped of identity and dignity, shitting in a crowded room, sleeping and snoring on cold concrete floors, sneaking tokes of tobacco, trading stories of stupid, petty, victimless crimes. I do not want to be here. This is not some sociological fact-finding mission, not some self-induced time out from my hectic life, not some kind of voluntary political self-education. I was cuffed and jailed like everyone else, and by and large it sucks. But…it does have its moments)
And Gary's story isn't finished. The best is yet to come. Now, I could just direct you to his website, www.datinggurubrad.com, and leave it at that. Not much more really needs to be said (and yes, that really is his website. Brad is his Pseudonym. He told us about it in the clink, and it all checks out, and there is no way he could have been faking this. All the "advice" he gives online there, his whole pitch, he fed it to us verbatim while we were all inside together.).
Anyway, Gary didn’t keep us in the dark for long. I actually think that not being able to fully "explain" the situation was eating him up inside. Like, we weren’t able to see that he was really this super-cool stud, and this getting arrested thing was, well, just an occupational hazard, not an indication of his aptitude with the ladies. Somehow, in his mind, his status as a professional "dating guru" cast the whole episode, and him, in a much more favorable light. Yes, that’s correct, he seemed to feel that his being ARRESTED for SEXUAL ASSAULT was more easily, and sympathetically understood in light of the fact that he was a PRO.
“I mean, these girls weren’t even, like, all that hot, right? I mean, I was just like playing around with them, you know? I mean, I get laid every night of the week by the hottest chicks you’ve ever seen, no problem, right? That little cunt was probably just pissed cause I took her friends number and not hers, but I wasn’t even getting her number to use, right? I was just demonstrating techniques for my students”
“excuse me? There were students?”
“yeah man, this was, like the second night of a three night seminar. I had a full class with me”
“they were watching?
“yeah, they were, like, maybe 100 feet way, with my intern…”
“you have an intern?”
“yeah, he’s a former student actually. He’s gotten pretty good, good enough to teach the seminar I hope. I mean, he’s seen me teach it, like, a dozen times, so he should be ok”
“the class continued?”
“Definitely. I mean, those guys pay a lot of dough to get this info, you know? And he can do it, I mean, he’s like, getting tons of pussy right now. He should be fine. The students will get their money’s worth… Actually, I’ll probably need to refund their money, right? or offer them another seminar for free or something? I mean, I don’t want them talking about this really, that could be bad. Man, I really don’t want this to get around, you know? I mean, there’s like some guys, some competitors of mine, who would really use this against me if they find out. Drag my name down. I could get screwed.”
I am doing everything in my power at this point not to laugh out loud. Ben and Chris have long since stopped trying, and are nearly pissing themselves. Gary takes it all in stride, calmly, realizing on some level that there is irony here, and that its funny, but he is gloriously unembarrassed by it. Seemingly entirely without self-consciousness, much less remorse.
Once the laughter subsides, however, a curious thing starts to happen. Ben, Chris, and our other cellmates, begin to ask Gary questions about his “techniques.” His answers are clear, and sharp, and somewhat… ruthless. This pleases the boys, and, to be honest, I am not immune to the appeal of his rhetoric. The clarity of his vision is thrilling in the way that Machiavelli is thrilling, or Dick Cheney. Kind of crazy, but, you know…focused. Part of me is indeed just a little envious. I do not doubt that Gary gets laid all the time, and he seems to be entirely unperturbed by the postcoital emotional complications that lesser men such as myself might experience . Part of me at least thinks that, well, that would be pretty cool. But then, watching him seek and then soak up the attention lavished upon him by my cellmates, it becomes pretty clear that really this is what Gary is seeking: status, respect, and, above all, the approval and acceptance of other men. Here in the 9th precinct, he has found that, and in return for it, he will regale us with bawdy barroom tales of lust and conquest, far into the wee hours of the morning, at which I and the rest of the boys will laugh and wonder and recoil, sometimes all at once. Throughout it all, though, as I watch Gary perform his way into everyone’s good graces, I am nagged by one persistent thought: “Poor guy. I bet his dad was a real piece of work.”
INVASION OF THE STROLLER FIENDS
Andrew Boyd
When hip white wholesome 20-30-something New Yorkers with good jobs want to breed, they buy a stroller and move to Park Slope, Brooklyn. The stroller is key. I had just moved here the day before, and while I'm white, and passably hip and wholesome, and at one point had had a good job, I was somewhat concerned that I had no stroller. No stroller, no kid, and no compelling inner wash of hormones arousing me to buy a stroller or engender a kid to stroll around.
[SOME BACKGROUND HERE ON NEW ROOMMATE JAMES & MOVING IN, ETC.] It was my first post-Manhattan morning [OR HERE], and I was sitting in the Tea Lounge cafe, a little place a few blocks from my new apartment. There was a pretty young Israeli behind the cafe counter. A gay couple were speaking softly so as not to disturb those of us tapping away on our laptops or reading the paper. Several couches further in, two women in their early thirties were chatting, their six-year olds drawing with crayons. It was a far cry from the poly-verse freak scene I was used to in the East Village, but nice enough. Maybe nice enough to double as an office space for this freelance writer. I ordered coffee, got comfortable, and got to work.
As the two gay men left, they held the door open for a woman with a stroller and kid in tow. I went to the bathroom. I noticed the diaper changing table. How thoughtful. I'd never seen one in a Manhattan bathroom. Maybe it was true what people said, that Brooklyn really was a more neighborly place. Returning to my seat, I maneuvered past another stroller, which had joined a cluster of several others in the middle of the cafe in a little stroller traffic jam, a tiny indoor stroller park. I was trying to write again, U2 was playing on the stereo, an infant was crying in the far corner of the cafe. Another mother appeared at the door. This time there were no kindly gay gentlemen to open it for her, and on her own she couldn't quite seem to lean over enough to open the door and also push the stroller through. I was wondering if there was some kind of high-tech security system that sensed how many strollers were already inside and then ingeniously prohibited entry after a certain maximum number—which by my count was now up to six: a lot for this not-large establishment. Now she was using the stroller like a battering ram. The kid had pulled in his feet and she pushed hard into the door. It opened a few inches, but then closed again from it's own weight and the spring-tension in it's hinges. She pulled back and regrouped for another ram at it. I considered getting up to help her, but figured that by the time I got over there, she was bound to have already pummeled her way in. And anyway, weren't there enough damn strollers and kids and mothers with beatific, infinitely patient ("I'm exhausted but I've found the meaning of life") faces in here already? I realized: I didn't want to help her. In fact, I hoped that there really was an automatic maximum-stroller triggered security system—and hell if I was going to perform a manual override. "Back with ye stroller-fiend!" A satanic-preacher-exorcist voice welled up within me. "Begone! Avert!" It became an invisible battle of wills: Her stroller battering ram against my demonic psychic powers. She slammed hard into the door, causing several nearby non-mother customers to finally turn around and take notice of her efforts. The door pivoted half-open, and she banged side-to-side through the doorway, into the cafe-sanctuary, cum day care center, overpowering the much-vaunted security system and withering my psychic cone of telekinetic resistance.
The Talking Heads was on the stereo, and I was thinking, "Is this my beautiful new cafe-office? Is this my beautiful new neighborhood? How did I get here?" Why did I leave my tiny liver-spotted East Village sublet, and move to this lovely neighborhood of historic brownstones, tree-lined streets, and strollers? Could it be—childless at the cusp age of 39—an unconscious impulse to rub my face in my own ambivalence? Was this neighborhood going to be my Buddha Demon? My own personal return of the repressed?
I'd been putting off the fatherhood decision my whole life. I was never one of those guys who knew he was going to have kids. It was always an open question for me. What I did know for certain, however, was that I didn't want to have children too early—and then blame them for the unlived life I never got to live. I always figured: why not have my life first and then have kids. But with each thing you experience leading to other things you want to experience, it becomes harder and harder to work in enough living before the close of your supposed baby-making years. You can try to beat the clock by living life as furiously as possible: cranking through travel fantasies, fringe lifestyles, multiple careers, extreme sports and designer drugs, and gorging yourself on liquor and sex as fast and as hard as you can¬—I mean, how else are you going to get over yourself enough to really be there for your kids when it counted?—but in the end the logic doesn't really work out, because there I was: 39, surrounded by other people's kids, and still far from over myself.
I watched the stroller-fiend wheel her way through the cafe. She parked her stroller in the tiny stroller car-park and found a seat amongst the congregation of those-who-push-strollers, by now spread out across three sofas, half a dozen chairs and an assortment of knee-high coffee tables.
I could almost taste the fertility in the air. I was thinking there should be health warnings on the street signs leading into the neighborhood: "The Surgeon General has determined that living in Park Slope increases your chances of contracting pregnancy." Maybe I should only have sex in Manhattan, or if I have it here, wear two condoms. Or why not just give up and have a kid. Buy a god-damned stroller. Get happy. Because as I scanned from motherly face to motherly face (somehow there was only one father here), even my evil, par-boiled brain could tell that these women were happy. Dazed and a bit on edge, yes, but happy. Happy and radiant amidst the joyful chaos of their recently languaged charges.
How could they be so perfectly entertained by their kids? By their kids and this life of pushing strollers around and sitting in cafes with other white 20-30-something, wholesome, happy fucking happy women who like Crate and Barrel and exposed brick and their happy kids, and somehow are not bored. These were not suburban Republicans in pink sweat pants with empowerment lobotomies. These were progressive, intelligent, cultured, urban women. How were they not bored pushing strollers and making sandwiches and hanging out with three-year olds all day? And why couldn't I be not bored like this, too? Clearly, there was something here I wasn't getting. And, probably, I was not going to get it—not until I had a stroller of my own, and my own heart-melting, endlessly surprising, little universe to strap in, and stroll around, and batter down cafe doors with. Until then, however, I still had the whole rest of my unlived life to live.
RESTLESS BRAD WILL, REST IN PEACE
Leslie Kaufman
My friend Brad Will was shot and killed yesterday in Oaxaca, where he was working as an independent journalist, covering the popular movement there.
I'd known him for the better part of a decade. I first met him at the Chico Mendez Mural Garden back in 1997, whose bulldozing catalyzed the movement to save New York City's community gardens from development. From that point on, I ran into him continually; we were part of a community of creative protest. I saw Brad at Reclaim the Streets actions and Critical Mass rides in New York; at the WTO demonstrations in Seattle; while dodging tear-gas canisters during the FTAA protests in Quebec City; in jail, after various direct actions to save the gardens.
For me, the classic Brad Will encounter came in 1998, when I was in Oregon doing research on Earth First! for a book I never ended up completing. After working my connections, I was able to visit a backwoods EF! treesit. Even though I was vouched for, I was still greeted warily after hiking miles through the woods to reach the encampment. I was sitting around making awkward activist small-talk, when all of a sudden and to my great surprise, Brad came rappeling down from several hundred feet up. "Leslie!" he cried. "I didn't know you were in Oregon!" and came over and gave me a big hug.
Since my twins were born two-and-a-half years ago, I barely saw him -- I haven't much been in a go-to-meetings-and-actions sort of mode. I'm completely devastated by his death, haunted by the look in his eyes in the news photos that have been published all over the internet.
He was one of the sweetest and most restless people I've ever known. I learned of his death while riding in a car from Brooklyn with my kids last night. I wept, and when they seemed worried and confused, tried to explain to them that I was sad because something very bad had happened to a good friend of mine.
Usually, when they go to sleep, they snuggle with Andrew -- he's always been the Sleep Guy around here. But after we got home last night, Desmond climbed up and fell asleep lying on my chest, while Nini curled up beside me, reaching out to hold me as she drifted off to sleep.
It was so comforting, so sweet -- they so clearly sensed my sadness and wanted to comfort their mommy. It led me to think, too, about the trade-offs that Brad made in his life, and I made in mine. Lying there in the dark, with two warm little critters surrounding me, I kept returning to Brad's rootlessness -- the quality in him that allowed him to go from one political hotspot to the next, immersing himself in struggles for justice everywhere from Prague to La Paz to Oaxaca. I found myself thinking about all the things I've chosen not to do in the time since I became pregnant. I thought about the great courage of the path he chose, but also wondered if he ever longed for a home, for the sense of permanency and stability it brings. But Brad, of course, made friends and community everywhere he went - he may not have had a steady home, but he had quite an extended family.
LOVE AND RAGE
Today was the day the anger over Brad's killing came to the surface -- and was channeled into action. To protest Brad's murder and the ongoing repression in Oaxaca, demonstrators shut down the Mexican Consulate in New York for over an hour, thanks to a cleverly executed lockdown.
It was an action of a sort that hasn't much happened since 9/11 effectively destroyed the grassroots anti-globalization movement: employing risky, confrontational, creative nonviolence.
It was also an action of a sort I haven't really attended since giving birth to my twins: a direct action that relies on the element of surprise, in which anyone can potentially be swept up in an arrest, in which the police are unpredictable and aggressive. I swore off such things after getting entirely too close to tear gas and concussion grenades in Miami when I was four months pregnant, during the November 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas protests there.
But I badly wanted to be at the action today, and I didn't have childcare, so I arrived pushing a double stroller, and spent good parts of the time keeping Nini and Desmond happy with some blueberry cereal bars and small plastic animals.
I arrived just as the arrests begin. My old instincts of where to position myself during an action turned out to be pretty useless when accompanied by toddlers in a massive stroller. I had to do a quick, clumsy retreat when the police started pushing the crowd back; eventually I crossed to the other side of the street and staked out a nice remote corner from which to view the action.
I was most affected by the sight of sweet Tim Doody high up on a lamppost holding a banner with an image of Brad accompanied by the words: "One more night at the barricades," and holding up his fist as the police moved in to arrest him. The text came from Brad's final email missive, and it was exactly the spot where Brad would have been had he been there -- word had it, in fact, that Tim had used Brad's old climbing harness to ascend.
I stayed through the arrests and connected with a whole lot of people I hadn't seen in a very long time, but then it was time to go: The kids had been fabulously patient and good-humored, and it simply wasn't fair to stay.
Not only was it a gorgeous day, it was going to be the last day I got to spend playing with them before we moved away from Manhattan, the last chance to visit our favorite spots in Central Park while it was still our neighborhood haunt. I was determined not to let the morning's grief and anger get in the way of our afternoon.
We had a glorious time together. We ran through the maze at Heckscher Playground and wrestled giggling on the ground. Under a bright blue sky, we made our way up to the forested paths of the Ramble, and I introduced them to the crunchy, aromatic joy of rolling in autumn leaves. They had a grand session sitting on the shore of the lake, floating leaves, dipping branches, and plunking acorns. We finished up the day at the Boathouse Cafe, feasting on a burger, fries, and pumpkin pie. It was one of those charmed and marvelous days when my heart is so full of love for Corinne and Desmond that it almost aches.
At the protest, people were talking about how much they felt the spirit of Brad in the defiance and resistance of the morning. But I think I felt his spirit much more strongly in the golden sunlight of the afternoon. A dour sort of activist might think it self-indulgent to be laughing and playing in the park while the Mexican police were moving in on the people of Oaxaca and my compas here were on their way to The Tombs.
But love and joy and beauty were the things Brad was ultimately fighting for. So, yes, one more night at the barricades. But also one more day in the woods.
LIFE ON THE LEDGE
Ivor Hanson
Passage from CHAPTER TWO:
A spacious second-story apartment, a busy side street in the morning, and tilt-in windows in the shade: one of my favorite workday combinations. The low height, passers-by, and easy panes meant I could enjoy some effortless and extended people-watching, with windows that I didn’t have to worry about. And, as this apartment overlooked a small corner of the Upper East Side, I did have plenty to check out.
Already that Monday morning, I had seen from the living room windows quite a few financial bigwigs walk out from under their building’s front awnings, squeeze into their limos, and be off to Wall Street. Or, perhaps they were lawyers, or bankers, or accountants headed to Midtown. Regardless of who they were, wherever they were going, or whatever apartment house they emerged from, courteous doormen directed the Lincolns, Cadillacs, and the occasional Mercedes into Park Avenue’s stop-and-go slipstream below me. The grey, or green, or blue uniforms with matching, brimmed hats smiled, nodded, and laughed, and then turned and did so again for the next departing resident. I knew the feeling of being accommodating, helpful, and cheerful – even though Christmas tips were half a year away. The customer is meant to be pleased; the customer is always right. Or, more accurately: the customer is never wrong.
The guy whose apartment I was in, however, hadn’t yet departed for downtown. He hadn’t even come out of the master bedroom. This was just as well, since on the few occasions that I had seen him, he had always struck me as a brusque guy in a dark suit with dark hair whose temper I did not want to test. But odds were that when he left through the front door, he would go unseen.
His wife, however, was up and about, looking slim, tan, and fiftyish in a light-brown designer tracksuit. Her blonde hair, freshly frosted it appeared, accentuated her narrow face as she enjoyed her morning coffee. Phoenix, the family poodle, stood at her side, white, tall, and silent; he had gotten his barking out of the way when I’d rung the kitchen door and the lady of the house had let me and Pat in. Apart from talking about the dog and her recent college-graduate son, my conversations with the lady of the house generally revolved around her seemingly unending need for dental work. I had never really sorted out her mouth’s ongoing problems, but then, I didn’t really want to know them either.
Fortunately, she wasn’t a hoverer – the kind of customer that tails me, checking on my work. So, I could count on such talks being brief and her leaving me and my boss alone with her dirty windows. Pat was one room over, working in the dining room that I always made a point to get a good look at. Though its fabric-lined walls of thin, white and creme stripes weren’t my taste, they were impressive nonetheless for their craftsmanship. I’d once heard a contractor complain in another client’s place – out of earshot of the customer, of course – how difficult such work was: “Do you know how God damn hard it is to get the wall to puff out just right?! But nobody ever thinks about that!” These walls and the rest of this apartment, its mahogany antiques and brass candelabras, its dark red leather chairs and built-in bookcases bespoke a cold, costly elegance. The place seemed more like a showroom than somewhere to live.
With the living room completed, I now stood balanced on a radiator in the den. Having decided to get the window with the air conditioner over with first, I’d turned the machine off and unplugged its chord to prevent my being shocked. As I mopped and squeegeed and chamoised the window’s inside pane, I looked down at the sidewalk. A group of girls dressed in their Catholic school’s uniform of blue plaid skirts and white blouses strolled below, off to the start of what must have been close to their last week of classes just down the street. I wondered if they would cross Park in time for the first period bell. Men, women, and children who were nearby rushed past, lost in their thoughts as they dashed off to somewhere else. The building’s young porter who was sweeping away the dirt he found along the building’s edge, however, had certainly taken notice. He’d set his broom aside and leaned against the building, watching the girls as they walked past a dumpster. From my angle, I could just make out a smile. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than them, in his late teens or early twenties. But the girls ignored him as they did everyone else, and he went back to his sweeping, passing beneath me.
I watched a large nanny pushing a tiny stroller, but this time I was caught; the kid, blonde and cute and maybe two years old, had been staring up at the trees that lined the street and managed to spy me at work. She waved a little hand and I quickly waved back and then she and her unaware guardian were gone, down the block and likely off to Central Park. I noticed my smile in the clean interior glass.
I then raised the window and everything went wrong.
Instead of a smooth, silent motion, I felt a sudden jerk in the windowpane and heard the grating sound of metal ripping away. An electric chill shot through me as I shut my eyes and clenched my fists, bracing myself for what I knew was to come: the air conditioner detonated on the pavement a moment later.
“Fuck!” I whispered to myself.
The putty-colored rectangular cube now sat on the sidewalk, spewing a bright-green geyser; it looked bigger down there than when it had been right next to me. A breeze blew through the gap in the window frame where the A.C. had been, and I could feel the air conditioner and the window taunting me, besting me. I chamoised the window as much as to give myself something to do as to deny what I had done.
At least no one had been nailed by the air conditioner. No stroller lay crushed beneath it; no dog paws splayed outward from below; no school or building uniform protruded. I suddenly felt giddy in my relief and luck
“Ive!” Pat yelled as he ran into the den. “What the fuck happened?” He was hyperventilating and speaking very quickly. “I heard the crash and I first thought it was a car accident, but then I saw the –”
“I thought,” I began, “that –”
“What the hell was that?”
It was the lady of the house striding quickly into the room as well, along with Phoenix. Her coffee had stayed behind.
Since I didn’t want to see them, I remained facing the window, pretending to look down at the air conditioner and the small crowd that had begun to gather around it. One or two people pointed up at the open window and me. My eyes were half-closed, opting to stare at a nearby tree limb and its leaves that weren’t going anywhere. I began again.
“I thought that it was in place,” I said. “There was a bar and everything.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. Her understandable impatience gave her already nasal voice an added edge.
Realizing that I now had to come down, I turned away from the window, jumped down from the radiator, and explained how I had believed that the air conditioner had been secured by a metal bar and not the window frame itself. The bar would have allowed me to raise the window, tilt the frame in, and clean the pane without the A.C. falling; it would have stayed in place. I pointed to the steel span the width of the windowpane, still screwed into place across the bottom edge of the window. But the bar was merely cosmetic. Whoever had installed the air conditioner had only made it look safe. Until this morning, Pat had always cleaned this window. He must have told me at some point of the faux safety bar, and I must have forgotten.
As I spoke, the husband walked in and I could hear that my voice was inordinately quiet, even soft. I do that when I’m on the spot; I lower it to keep from being swept away by emotions and the dread possibility of shedding tears. But I think I also simply fear my voice will sound whiny. I wondered as well if it seemed like I was giving a lecture instead of an apology. I realized that I hadn’t even said “I’m sorry” yet. I started over, beginning to explain to him what had occurred, but he cut me off.
“Don’t bother,” he said. His voice was steady and firm, angry but not upset. His hair remained unruffled as well. “I can see the screw-up from here. But look, the important thing is that no one got hurt outside and no one got hurt inside. It is, after all, only a damn air conditioner. But Pat, let me be perfectly clear: you owe me a new one.”
I was relieved. I’d been convinced he was going to chew me out. Of course, I could have been the “screw-up” he had referred to.
“No problem, sir,” Pat said. “Of course, of course. I’ll get you one right away.” Pat then turned to me. “But, Ive, Ive. We’ve got to get rid of it right now.”
“Right,” I said. But before taking a step, I turned to the customer. “Uh, sir, I just want you to know that I’m very, very sorry for all this.”
I tried to put some emotion into the words, but I could hear them sounding flat and detached. I’d try again when we came back up from the street.
“Hey,” he said, “these things happen.”
As we ran out of the den, through the kitchen, down the back steps, past a few of the building’s workers in the cellar, and out the service entrance, I knew I’d been granted a reprieve and tried various apologies in my head. “Again, sir, I’m really sorry. I’m truly sorry. I am so sorry.” I also wondered if our customers had noticed that Pat’s nervous twitch had kicked in. It did so at moments like this and caused the right side of his lip to rise every few seconds. I wondered if Pat knew. I wasn’t going to point anything out.
In the time that it took to get to the sidewalk, the air conditioner’s geyser had subsided to a dribble. At first, I couldn’t believe that pedestrians were simply walking past the A.C. and not stopping to stare. But then they hadn’t seen it fall, they hadn’t heard it hit. To them, I guessed, the air conditioner appeared to be merely abandoned – not lethal. Perhaps they thought that some lazy workers had just not gotten around to tossing the thing in the dumpster. Pat and I knelt on opposite sides of the behemoth and shook our heads.
Though a customer who worked for the city had once told me that it was against New York City law to have an air conditioner extend beyond a window frame (Building Code Article 9, Section 27/313, “Permissible Projections Beyond Street Lines” states than an air conditioner cannot extend more than ten inches from a window frame when the unit is more than ten feet from the ground; four inches when it is less than ten feet; I looked it up), a stroll down most any street in Manhattan with your head looking up will tell you that it is one of the city’s least enforced laws. Looking down at the A.C., I wondered if the building’s Super would ban us from the building.
“Okay,” Pat said. “Let’s get this thing out of sight!”
He was right. Obviously we weren’t going to leave it there. Beyond it now being junk littering the sidewalk, I wanted to be rid of the A.C., my emblem of shame. Hester Prinn suddenly came to mind, but my scarlet letters, “A.C.,” had a greenish sheen.
“God, we were lucky,” Pat said. “It’s fucking rush hour!”
“I know, I know, I know,” I said. I concentrated on looking at the air conditioner since I didn’t want to fixate on his tic. “I can’t believe it. I could have killed somebody.”
Out of the apartment, I could feel myself returning.
“Man,” Pat said, “I heard that sound and I swear, I thought a truck had hit a bus. But then I saw everyone looking toward the building, and then toward the sidewalk. When I saw the A.C. down there, I figured someone up above had lost their air conditioner. And then I thought: Wait! Ivor’s in the other room!’’
Laughing as Pat and I crouched and worked our hands underneath the A.C., I had to admit to myself that trashing the air conditioner had been kinda cool, if only in a ten-year-old sort of way – like when Lars and I blew a leg off our G.I. Joe by setting a firecracker off in his boot. But trying to raise the air conditioner up from the sidewalk cut short my laughter. The cold metal box was quite heavy. I really could have killed someone. On a count of “One, two, three,” we slowly lifted the A.C. The greenish liquid, Freon I believe, made parts of the air conditioner slippery, so we had to take extra care as we struggled to lug it the few feet to the dumpster. As we strained to raise the A.C. above our shoulders to tip it over the container’s edge, I joked that it would only be appropriate for the thing to fall on us, or at least myself.
For the second time that morning, the A.C. fell with a thud, but now at least it was supposed to. An old mattress inside the dumpster softened its landing. Glancing back to where the air conditioner had been, I noticed a small dent in the sidewalk. I shook my head but didn’t point it out. I felt like we had just disposed of the weapon at the scene of a crime. I didn’t want any more evidence to be known about. Looking away, I gazed up at the apartment’s open window and knew I could never wash it again without cringing. My greenish letters would stay with me.
“Hey, motherfucker! You nearly killed me!”
Startled, I looked down and found myself facing the building porter, broom still in hand, just a few inches from me: the someone I had come closest to killing. From the apartment, I hadn’t noticed his height, but now I could see that though he was a couple of inches shorter than me, he was much broader and stronger. Anger had reddened his round sepia face, and sweat had soaked the front of his grey work shirt. His brown eyes were watery.
I had figured he’d be more relieved than upset. In my mind, the fact that nobody had died made this close-call mean very little. But I guess, in a way, I’d been waiting for this: my comeuppance. After all, I hadn’t been the one who’d come very close to dying but ten minutes earlier. “Jose” – his name was stitched across his shirt – pointed a finger at me and shook it. Half-expecting it to become a fist, I took a step back and felt Pat’s steadying hand on my shoulder.
“Man, I am so sorry,” I said. “I thought the air conditioner was safe. I mean, I had no idea it was gonna drop. I’m totally freaked out, too. But, how are you doing? Are you okay? I feel really bad.”
If Jose had decided to whack me with his broom, I wouldn’t have blamed him. He didn’t, but I wondered what might have happened if he had been off-duty, or if Pat hadn’t been standing beside me, if he hadn’t been outnumbered.
“Oh yeah?” he asked. “Well, if you feel so bad, then how come you ran right by me? And how come I saw you and your friend here laughing just now?”
“Hey,” I said, feeling my face becoming flushed, red. “I didn’t see you back there. And the laughing, my boss and I were just feeling lucky that everything was okay. But you’re right. We should have come to you first, but we weren’t thinking. We just felt we had to chuck the A.C. right away. What can I say? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Mark W. Read
We had been in the holding cell at the 9th precinct for maybe an hour or so when this tall, punk-rock-circa-1983-looking dude (pale skin, gelled spiky jet black hair, metal-studded black leather jacket, metal-studded belt, black denim jeans, leather shitkicker boots) was escorted into the waiting area just outside the bars, a few feet away from us. The lively conversation that had sprung up between my cellmates and I (I was locked up with two fellow riders, Ben and Chris, who had been popped at the same time that I had. This was the first time either of them had been arrested, and they were feeling righteously pissed off, a reaction that I wished on the one hand to encourage- there is nothing more eye-opening and radicalizing than being unjustly arrested- but on the other hand, wanted to quell out of a selfish, though not-unreasonable fear that Ben’s yelling at the cops could very well slow down the proceedings and make our stay both longer and less pleasant) suddenly gave way to pensive observation: what’s he here for? Drunken bar fight? Is he violent? Was he smokin’ pot? Dealing? We watch him as his AO (Arresting Officer. Once arrested, one quickly adopts cop vernacular as primary language) puts him through the bizarre ritual-accounting-for of worldly possessions (one cell phone. One bic pen. One notebook. Wallet containing $53 dollars and 73 cents. One pack cigarettes. Sign here. And here. And here. And initial here. Thank you), and then the yet more bizarre ritual-self-protection exercise (“please remove shoelaces and belt.” “Do I seem like a suicide risk to you officer?” “Just take them off please”).
He completes these steps without incident, is seemingly in full control of his faculties, and appears to be on somewhat cordial terms with his AO. Probably a minor drug bust, I figure. He turns towards the cell, his face impassive, perhaps smiling slightly, and strolls calmly in as an officer (excuse me, PO, Police Officer), opens the sliding cage door. I think it is Ben, ever-pacing and jittery Ben, who engages him first.
“Whatcha in for?” Ben asks, with the requisite irony.
And it’s like turning on a faucet. The guy, this kind of tough-looking big dude, sits down, crosses his legs, puts his hands on the knee of his top leg, and recounts his odd and epic tale of woe:
“Well, it’s kinda weird, really. I mean, really strange, I was in the Virgin Megastore, talking to these girls, right? and you know, we’re kinda gettin’ flirty right? They’re really flirty girls, and it’s all fun and everything’s cool. And it’s gettin’, you know, kinda dirty right? they’re like asking me “how big is your dick”, and "how long can you last in bed, " this kind of stuff. Totally nasty right? And so I’m kinda psyched, cuz this one girl she’s pretty cute, you know? And so I’m kinda getting’ up close to them (Note: by now I am (a) totally amazed that this guy is revealing all of this information to us, and (b) becoming increasingly creeped out by him), and, you know, she kinda touches my leg a little bit, you know, brushes her hand against my leg, right? And so I touch her on, like, not even her ass really, like the side of her ass, like her thigh, right? So, anyway, I get one girls’ number- not the one who, you know, not the one who touched my leg, but her friend- I get her number and then I’m like not even in the same part of the store anymore, and these cops, these undercovers, come up to me, along with the manager, and they ask to talk to me, and I’m like sure. So they take me into this back hallway area, and they arrest me, for sexual assault.”
“Sexual assault?
“Yeah, can you believe it? The little cunt, like, she called the cops on me after she walked away. She’s pressing charges and shit. Can you believe that shit? I already filed a complaint of my own, you know. I mean she touched me first right?”
“you mean you accused her of sexual assault?”
“yeah. I mean, I dunno, I’m thinkin’ maybe that’ll scare her or something, wake her up and bring her to her senses. I’m hoping she’ll just drop the charges and I’ll be able to go home. But my, you know, the guy who arrested me..."
“that’s your AO”
"Yeah, he says that's probably not going to happen. I mean, I’m probably going to get booked and all that shit...."
You get the picture, I suppose, or the gist of it. At least you think you do. I thought I did too, and the picture is this: Party boy here, thinking he's Mr. Smoothe, spies some girls in the Virgin Megastore (which somehow makes this whole thing feel even sleazier, for reasons I can't exactly put my finger on.) Anyway, this guy, this lurky guy, who exudes confidence and calm, tinged with a smarmy-vulture like quality, a greasy, reptilian quality that makes him both amusing and repulsive and also, strangely, attractive, sidles up alongside some nice young (and I'm imagining *very* young) girl and cops a feel.
And here he is telling us all about it, almost pridefully, as though we were all hanging out in a bar together swapping sexual conquest stories, when in reality -- ha ha ha-- he's in JAIL! And this circumstance is actually quite gratifying and elicits in me feelings of genuine wellbeing, because if he is half the creep I suspect he is (and such suspicions will be amply confirmed later on), then hooray! the bad guy is busted, the world is just, the cops are doing their job, life has meaning, and so on and so forth. Of course, all of this sets up a near-migraine-inducing cognitive dissonance, because I"M IN JAIL TOO! For...riding my bike, in the bike lane, obeying traffic laws, in other words, for no fucking reason whatsoever, in moral, or even legal, terms.
(And much of the next 24 hours of my life will be consumed by similarly conflicting waves of feeling, leading me from self-pitying-Jesus-on-the-cross moments to rapturous moments where I will feel kinship and love for all the men trapped in the tombs with me, all the others forlorn and forgotten, stripped of identity and dignity, shitting in a crowded room, sleeping and snoring on cold concrete floors, sneaking tokes of tobacco, trading stories of stupid, petty, victimless crimes. I do not want to be here. This is not some sociological fact-finding mission, not some self-induced time out from my hectic life, not some kind of voluntary political self-education. I was cuffed and jailed like everyone else, and by and large it sucks. But…it does have its moments)
And Gary's story isn't finished. The best is yet to come. Now, I could just direct you to his website, www.datinggurubrad.com, and leave it at that. Not much more really needs to be said (and yes, that really is his website. Brad is his Pseudonym. He told us about it in the clink, and it all checks out, and there is no way he could have been faking this. All the "advice" he gives online there, his whole pitch, he fed it to us verbatim while we were all inside together.).
Anyway, Gary didn’t keep us in the dark for long. I actually think that not being able to fully "explain" the situation was eating him up inside. Like, we weren’t able to see that he was really this super-cool stud, and this getting arrested thing was, well, just an occupational hazard, not an indication of his aptitude with the ladies. Somehow, in his mind, his status as a professional "dating guru" cast the whole episode, and him, in a much more favorable light. Yes, that’s correct, he seemed to feel that his being ARRESTED for SEXUAL ASSAULT was more easily, and sympathetically understood in light of the fact that he was a PRO.
“I mean, these girls weren’t even, like, all that hot, right? I mean, I was just like playing around with them, you know? I mean, I get laid every night of the week by the hottest chicks you’ve ever seen, no problem, right? That little cunt was probably just pissed cause I took her friends number and not hers, but I wasn’t even getting her number to use, right? I was just demonstrating techniques for my students”
“excuse me? There were students?”
“yeah man, this was, like the second night of a three night seminar. I had a full class with me”
“they were watching?
“yeah, they were, like, maybe 100 feet way, with my intern…”
“you have an intern?”
“yeah, he’s a former student actually. He’s gotten pretty good, good enough to teach the seminar I hope. I mean, he’s seen me teach it, like, a dozen times, so he should be ok”
“the class continued?”
“Definitely. I mean, those guys pay a lot of dough to get this info, you know? And he can do it, I mean, he’s like, getting tons of pussy right now. He should be fine. The students will get their money’s worth… Actually, I’ll probably need to refund their money, right? or offer them another seminar for free or something? I mean, I don’t want them talking about this really, that could be bad. Man, I really don’t want this to get around, you know? I mean, there’s like some guys, some competitors of mine, who would really use this against me if they find out. Drag my name down. I could get screwed.”
I am doing everything in my power at this point not to laugh out loud. Ben and Chris have long since stopped trying, and are nearly pissing themselves. Gary takes it all in stride, calmly, realizing on some level that there is irony here, and that its funny, but he is gloriously unembarrassed by it. Seemingly entirely without self-consciousness, much less remorse.
Once the laughter subsides, however, a curious thing starts to happen. Ben, Chris, and our other cellmates, begin to ask Gary questions about his “techniques.” His answers are clear, and sharp, and somewhat… ruthless. This pleases the boys, and, to be honest, I am not immune to the appeal of his rhetoric. The clarity of his vision is thrilling in the way that Machiavelli is thrilling, or Dick Cheney. Kind of crazy, but, you know…focused. Part of me is indeed just a little envious. I do not doubt that Gary gets laid all the time, and he seems to be entirely unperturbed by the postcoital emotional complications that lesser men such as myself might experience . Part of me at least thinks that, well, that would be pretty cool. But then, watching him seek and then soak up the attention lavished upon him by my cellmates, it becomes pretty clear that really this is what Gary is seeking: status, respect, and, above all, the approval and acceptance of other men. Here in the 9th precinct, he has found that, and in return for it, he will regale us with bawdy barroom tales of lust and conquest, far into the wee hours of the morning, at which I and the rest of the boys will laugh and wonder and recoil, sometimes all at once. Throughout it all, though, as I watch Gary perform his way into everyone’s good graces, I am nagged by one persistent thought: “Poor guy. I bet his dad was a real piece of work.”
INVASION OF THE STROLLER FIENDS
Andrew Boyd
When hip white wholesome 20-30-something New Yorkers with good jobs want to breed, they buy a stroller and move to Park Slope, Brooklyn. The stroller is key. I had just moved here the day before, and while I'm white, and passably hip and wholesome, and at one point had had a good job, I was somewhat concerned that I had no stroller. No stroller, no kid, and no compelling inner wash of hormones arousing me to buy a stroller or engender a kid to stroll around.
[SOME BACKGROUND HERE ON NEW ROOMMATE JAMES & MOVING IN, ETC.] It was my first post-Manhattan morning [OR HERE], and I was sitting in the Tea Lounge cafe, a little place a few blocks from my new apartment. There was a pretty young Israeli behind the cafe counter. A gay couple were speaking softly so as not to disturb those of us tapping away on our laptops or reading the paper. Several couches further in, two women in their early thirties were chatting, their six-year olds drawing with crayons. It was a far cry from the poly-verse freak scene I was used to in the East Village, but nice enough. Maybe nice enough to double as an office space for this freelance writer. I ordered coffee, got comfortable, and got to work.
As the two gay men left, they held the door open for a woman with a stroller and kid in tow. I went to the bathroom. I noticed the diaper changing table. How thoughtful. I'd never seen one in a Manhattan bathroom. Maybe it was true what people said, that Brooklyn really was a more neighborly place. Returning to my seat, I maneuvered past another stroller, which had joined a cluster of several others in the middle of the cafe in a little stroller traffic jam, a tiny indoor stroller park. I was trying to write again, U2 was playing on the stereo, an infant was crying in the far corner of the cafe. Another mother appeared at the door. This time there were no kindly gay gentlemen to open it for her, and on her own she couldn't quite seem to lean over enough to open the door and also push the stroller through. I was wondering if there was some kind of high-tech security system that sensed how many strollers were already inside and then ingeniously prohibited entry after a certain maximum number—which by my count was now up to six: a lot for this not-large establishment. Now she was using the stroller like a battering ram. The kid had pulled in his feet and she pushed hard into the door. It opened a few inches, but then closed again from it's own weight and the spring-tension in it's hinges. She pulled back and regrouped for another ram at it. I considered getting up to help her, but figured that by the time I got over there, she was bound to have already pummeled her way in. And anyway, weren't there enough damn strollers and kids and mothers with beatific, infinitely patient ("I'm exhausted but I've found the meaning of life") faces in here already? I realized: I didn't want to help her. In fact, I hoped that there really was an automatic maximum-stroller triggered security system—and hell if I was going to perform a manual override. "Back with ye stroller-fiend!" A satanic-preacher-exorcist voice welled up within me. "Begone! Avert!" It became an invisible battle of wills: Her stroller battering ram against my demonic psychic powers. She slammed hard into the door, causing several nearby non-mother customers to finally turn around and take notice of her efforts. The door pivoted half-open, and she banged side-to-side through the doorway, into the cafe-sanctuary, cum day care center, overpowering the much-vaunted security system and withering my psychic cone of telekinetic resistance.
The Talking Heads was on the stereo, and I was thinking, "Is this my beautiful new cafe-office? Is this my beautiful new neighborhood? How did I get here?" Why did I leave my tiny liver-spotted East Village sublet, and move to this lovely neighborhood of historic brownstones, tree-lined streets, and strollers? Could it be—childless at the cusp age of 39—an unconscious impulse to rub my face in my own ambivalence? Was this neighborhood going to be my Buddha Demon? My own personal return of the repressed?
I'd been putting off the fatherhood decision my whole life. I was never one of those guys who knew he was going to have kids. It was always an open question for me. What I did know for certain, however, was that I didn't want to have children too early—and then blame them for the unlived life I never got to live. I always figured: why not have my life first and then have kids. But with each thing you experience leading to other things you want to experience, it becomes harder and harder to work in enough living before the close of your supposed baby-making years. You can try to beat the clock by living life as furiously as possible: cranking through travel fantasies, fringe lifestyles, multiple careers, extreme sports and designer drugs, and gorging yourself on liquor and sex as fast and as hard as you can¬—I mean, how else are you going to get over yourself enough to really be there for your kids when it counted?—but in the end the logic doesn't really work out, because there I was: 39, surrounded by other people's kids, and still far from over myself.
I watched the stroller-fiend wheel her way through the cafe. She parked her stroller in the tiny stroller car-park and found a seat amongst the congregation of those-who-push-strollers, by now spread out across three sofas, half a dozen chairs and an assortment of knee-high coffee tables.
I could almost taste the fertility in the air. I was thinking there should be health warnings on the street signs leading into the neighborhood: "The Surgeon General has determined that living in Park Slope increases your chances of contracting pregnancy." Maybe I should only have sex in Manhattan, or if I have it here, wear two condoms. Or why not just give up and have a kid. Buy a god-damned stroller. Get happy. Because as I scanned from motherly face to motherly face (somehow there was only one father here), even my evil, par-boiled brain could tell that these women were happy. Dazed and a bit on edge, yes, but happy. Happy and radiant amidst the joyful chaos of their recently languaged charges.
How could they be so perfectly entertained by their kids? By their kids and this life of pushing strollers around and sitting in cafes with other white 20-30-something, wholesome, happy fucking happy women who like Crate and Barrel and exposed brick and their happy kids, and somehow are not bored. These were not suburban Republicans in pink sweat pants with empowerment lobotomies. These were progressive, intelligent, cultured, urban women. How were they not bored pushing strollers and making sandwiches and hanging out with three-year olds all day? And why couldn't I be not bored like this, too? Clearly, there was something here I wasn't getting. And, probably, I was not going to get it—not until I had a stroller of my own, and my own heart-melting, endlessly surprising, little universe to strap in, and stroll around, and batter down cafe doors with. Until then, however, I still had the whole rest of my unlived life to live.
RESTLESS BRAD WILL, REST IN PEACE
Leslie Kaufman
My friend Brad Will was shot and killed yesterday in Oaxaca, where he was working as an independent journalist, covering the popular movement there.
I'd known him for the better part of a decade. I first met him at the Chico Mendez Mural Garden back in 1997, whose bulldozing catalyzed the movement to save New York City's community gardens from development. From that point on, I ran into him continually; we were part of a community of creative protest. I saw Brad at Reclaim the Streets actions and Critical Mass rides in New York; at the WTO demonstrations in Seattle; while dodging tear-gas canisters during the FTAA protests in Quebec City; in jail, after various direct actions to save the gardens.
For me, the classic Brad Will encounter came in 1998, when I was in Oregon doing research on Earth First! for a book I never ended up completing. After working my connections, I was able to visit a backwoods EF! treesit. Even though I was vouched for, I was still greeted warily after hiking miles through the woods to reach the encampment. I was sitting around making awkward activist small-talk, when all of a sudden and to my great surprise, Brad came rappeling down from several hundred feet up. "Leslie!" he cried. "I didn't know you were in Oregon!" and came over and gave me a big hug.
Since my twins were born two-and-a-half years ago, I barely saw him -- I haven't much been in a go-to-meetings-and-actions sort of mode. I'm completely devastated by his death, haunted by the look in his eyes in the news photos that have been published all over the internet.
He was one of the sweetest and most restless people I've ever known. I learned of his death while riding in a car from Brooklyn with my kids last night. I wept, and when they seemed worried and confused, tried to explain to them that I was sad because something very bad had happened to a good friend of mine.
Usually, when they go to sleep, they snuggle with Andrew -- he's always been the Sleep Guy around here. But after we got home last night, Desmond climbed up and fell asleep lying on my chest, while Nini curled up beside me, reaching out to hold me as she drifted off to sleep.
It was so comforting, so sweet -- they so clearly sensed my sadness and wanted to comfort their mommy. It led me to think, too, about the trade-offs that Brad made in his life, and I made in mine. Lying there in the dark, with two warm little critters surrounding me, I kept returning to Brad's rootlessness -- the quality in him that allowed him to go from one political hotspot to the next, immersing himself in struggles for justice everywhere from Prague to La Paz to Oaxaca. I found myself thinking about all the things I've chosen not to do in the time since I became pregnant. I thought about the great courage of the path he chose, but also wondered if he ever longed for a home, for the sense of permanency and stability it brings. But Brad, of course, made friends and community everywhere he went - he may not have had a steady home, but he had quite an extended family.
LOVE AND RAGE
Today was the day the anger over Brad's killing came to the surface -- and was channeled into action. To protest Brad's murder and the ongoing repression in Oaxaca, demonstrators shut down the Mexican Consulate in New York for over an hour, thanks to a cleverly executed lockdown.
It was an action of a sort that hasn't much happened since 9/11 effectively destroyed the grassroots anti-globalization movement: employing risky, confrontational, creative nonviolence.
It was also an action of a sort I haven't really attended since giving birth to my twins: a direct action that relies on the element of surprise, in which anyone can potentially be swept up in an arrest, in which the police are unpredictable and aggressive. I swore off such things after getting entirely too close to tear gas and concussion grenades in Miami when I was four months pregnant, during the November 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas protests there.
But I badly wanted to be at the action today, and I didn't have childcare, so I arrived pushing a double stroller, and spent good parts of the time keeping Nini and Desmond happy with some blueberry cereal bars and small plastic animals.
I arrived just as the arrests begin. My old instincts of where to position myself during an action turned out to be pretty useless when accompanied by toddlers in a massive stroller. I had to do a quick, clumsy retreat when the police started pushing the crowd back; eventually I crossed to the other side of the street and staked out a nice remote corner from which to view the action.
I was most affected by the sight of sweet Tim Doody high up on a lamppost holding a banner with an image of Brad accompanied by the words: "One more night at the barricades," and holding up his fist as the police moved in to arrest him. The text came from Brad's final email missive, and it was exactly the spot where Brad would have been had he been there -- word had it, in fact, that Tim had used Brad's old climbing harness to ascend.
I stayed through the arrests and connected with a whole lot of people I hadn't seen in a very long time, but then it was time to go: The kids had been fabulously patient and good-humored, and it simply wasn't fair to stay.
Not only was it a gorgeous day, it was going to be the last day I got to spend playing with them before we moved away from Manhattan, the last chance to visit our favorite spots in Central Park while it was still our neighborhood haunt. I was determined not to let the morning's grief and anger get in the way of our afternoon.
We had a glorious time together. We ran through the maze at Heckscher Playground and wrestled giggling on the ground. Under a bright blue sky, we made our way up to the forested paths of the Ramble, and I introduced them to the crunchy, aromatic joy of rolling in autumn leaves. They had a grand session sitting on the shore of the lake, floating leaves, dipping branches, and plunking acorns. We finished up the day at the Boathouse Cafe, feasting on a burger, fries, and pumpkin pie. It was one of those charmed and marvelous days when my heart is so full of love for Corinne and Desmond that it almost aches.
At the protest, people were talking about how much they felt the spirit of Brad in the defiance and resistance of the morning. But I think I felt his spirit much more strongly in the golden sunlight of the afternoon. A dour sort of activist might think it self-indulgent to be laughing and playing in the park while the Mexican police were moving in on the people of Oaxaca and my compas here were on their way to The Tombs.
But love and joy and beauty were the things Brad was ultimately fighting for. So, yes, one more night at the barricades. But also one more day in the woods.
LIFE ON THE LEDGE
Ivor Hanson
Passage from CHAPTER TWO:
A spacious second-story apartment, a busy side street in the morning, and tilt-in windows in the shade: one of my favorite workday combinations. The low height, passers-by, and easy panes meant I could enjoy some effortless and extended people-watching, with windows that I didn’t have to worry about. And, as this apartment overlooked a small corner of the Upper East Side, I did have plenty to check out.
Already that Monday morning, I had seen from the living room windows quite a few financial bigwigs walk out from under their building’s front awnings, squeeze into their limos, and be off to Wall Street. Or, perhaps they were lawyers, or bankers, or accountants headed to Midtown. Regardless of who they were, wherever they were going, or whatever apartment house they emerged from, courteous doormen directed the Lincolns, Cadillacs, and the occasional Mercedes into Park Avenue’s stop-and-go slipstream below me. The grey, or green, or blue uniforms with matching, brimmed hats smiled, nodded, and laughed, and then turned and did so again for the next departing resident. I knew the feeling of being accommodating, helpful, and cheerful – even though Christmas tips were half a year away. The customer is meant to be pleased; the customer is always right. Or, more accurately: the customer is never wrong.
The guy whose apartment I was in, however, hadn’t yet departed for downtown. He hadn’t even come out of the master bedroom. This was just as well, since on the few occasions that I had seen him, he had always struck me as a brusque guy in a dark suit with dark hair whose temper I did not want to test. But odds were that when he left through the front door, he would go unseen.
His wife, however, was up and about, looking slim, tan, and fiftyish in a light-brown designer tracksuit. Her blonde hair, freshly frosted it appeared, accentuated her narrow face as she enjoyed her morning coffee. Phoenix, the family poodle, stood at her side, white, tall, and silent; he had gotten his barking out of the way when I’d rung the kitchen door and the lady of the house had let me and Pat in. Apart from talking about the dog and her recent college-graduate son, my conversations with the lady of the house generally revolved around her seemingly unending need for dental work. I had never really sorted out her mouth’s ongoing problems, but then, I didn’t really want to know them either.
Fortunately, she wasn’t a hoverer – the kind of customer that tails me, checking on my work. So, I could count on such talks being brief and her leaving me and my boss alone with her dirty windows. Pat was one room over, working in the dining room that I always made a point to get a good look at. Though its fabric-lined walls of thin, white and creme stripes weren’t my taste, they were impressive nonetheless for their craftsmanship. I’d once heard a contractor complain in another client’s place – out of earshot of the customer, of course – how difficult such work was: “Do you know how God damn hard it is to get the wall to puff out just right?! But nobody ever thinks about that!” These walls and the rest of this apartment, its mahogany antiques and brass candelabras, its dark red leather chairs and built-in bookcases bespoke a cold, costly elegance. The place seemed more like a showroom than somewhere to live.
With the living room completed, I now stood balanced on a radiator in the den. Having decided to get the window with the air conditioner over with first, I’d turned the machine off and unplugged its chord to prevent my being shocked. As I mopped and squeegeed and chamoised the window’s inside pane, I looked down at the sidewalk. A group of girls dressed in their Catholic school’s uniform of blue plaid skirts and white blouses strolled below, off to the start of what must have been close to their last week of classes just down the street. I wondered if they would cross Park in time for the first period bell. Men, women, and children who were nearby rushed past, lost in their thoughts as they dashed off to somewhere else. The building’s young porter who was sweeping away the dirt he found along the building’s edge, however, had certainly taken notice. He’d set his broom aside and leaned against the building, watching the girls as they walked past a dumpster. From my angle, I could just make out a smile. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than them, in his late teens or early twenties. But the girls ignored him as they did everyone else, and he went back to his sweeping, passing beneath me.
I watched a large nanny pushing a tiny stroller, but this time I was caught; the kid, blonde and cute and maybe two years old, had been staring up at the trees that lined the street and managed to spy me at work. She waved a little hand and I quickly waved back and then she and her unaware guardian were gone, down the block and likely off to Central Park. I noticed my smile in the clean interior glass.
I then raised the window and everything went wrong.
Instead of a smooth, silent motion, I felt a sudden jerk in the windowpane and heard the grating sound of metal ripping away. An electric chill shot through me as I shut my eyes and clenched my fists, bracing myself for what I knew was to come: the air conditioner detonated on the pavement a moment later.
“Fuck!” I whispered to myself.
The putty-colored rectangular cube now sat on the sidewalk, spewing a bright-green geyser; it looked bigger down there than when it had been right next to me. A breeze blew through the gap in the window frame where the A.C. had been, and I could feel the air conditioner and the window taunting me, besting me. I chamoised the window as much as to give myself something to do as to deny what I had done.
At least no one had been nailed by the air conditioner. No stroller lay crushed beneath it; no dog paws splayed outward from below; no school or building uniform protruded. I suddenly felt giddy in my relief and luck
“Ive!” Pat yelled as he ran into the den. “What the fuck happened?” He was hyperventilating and speaking very quickly. “I heard the crash and I first thought it was a car accident, but then I saw the –”
“I thought,” I began, “that –”
“What the hell was that?”
It was the lady of the house striding quickly into the room as well, along with Phoenix. Her coffee had stayed behind.
Since I didn’t want to see them, I remained facing the window, pretending to look down at the air conditioner and the small crowd that had begun to gather around it. One or two people pointed up at the open window and me. My eyes were half-closed, opting to stare at a nearby tree limb and its leaves that weren’t going anywhere. I began again.
“I thought that it was in place,” I said. “There was a bar and everything.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. Her understandable impatience gave her already nasal voice an added edge.
Realizing that I now had to come down, I turned away from the window, jumped down from the radiator, and explained how I had believed that the air conditioner had been secured by a metal bar and not the window frame itself. The bar would have allowed me to raise the window, tilt the frame in, and clean the pane without the A.C. falling; it would have stayed in place. I pointed to the steel span the width of the windowpane, still screwed into place across the bottom edge of the window. But the bar was merely cosmetic. Whoever had installed the air conditioner had only made it look safe. Until this morning, Pat had always cleaned this window. He must have told me at some point of the faux safety bar, and I must have forgotten.
As I spoke, the husband walked in and I could hear that my voice was inordinately quiet, even soft. I do that when I’m on the spot; I lower it to keep from being swept away by emotions and the dread possibility of shedding tears. But I think I also simply fear my voice will sound whiny. I wondered as well if it seemed like I was giving a lecture instead of an apology. I realized that I hadn’t even said “I’m sorry” yet. I started over, beginning to explain to him what had occurred, but he cut me off.
“Don’t bother,” he said. His voice was steady and firm, angry but not upset. His hair remained unruffled as well. “I can see the screw-up from here. But look, the important thing is that no one got hurt outside and no one got hurt inside. It is, after all, only a damn air conditioner. But Pat, let me be perfectly clear: you owe me a new one.”
I was relieved. I’d been convinced he was going to chew me out. Of course, I could have been the “screw-up” he had referred to.
“No problem, sir,” Pat said. “Of course, of course. I’ll get you one right away.” Pat then turned to me. “But, Ive, Ive. We’ve got to get rid of it right now.”
“Right,” I said. But before taking a step, I turned to the customer. “Uh, sir, I just want you to know that I’m very, very sorry for all this.”
I tried to put some emotion into the words, but I could hear them sounding flat and detached. I’d try again when we came back up from the street.
“Hey,” he said, “these things happen.”
As we ran out of the den, through the kitchen, down the back steps, past a few of the building’s workers in the cellar, and out the service entrance, I knew I’d been granted a reprieve and tried various apologies in my head. “Again, sir, I’m really sorry. I’m truly sorry. I am so sorry.” I also wondered if our customers had noticed that Pat’s nervous twitch had kicked in. It did so at moments like this and caused the right side of his lip to rise every few seconds. I wondered if Pat knew. I wasn’t going to point anything out.
In the time that it took to get to the sidewalk, the air conditioner’s geyser had subsided to a dribble. At first, I couldn’t believe that pedestrians were simply walking past the A.C. and not stopping to stare. But then they hadn’t seen it fall, they hadn’t heard it hit. To them, I guessed, the air conditioner appeared to be merely abandoned – not lethal. Perhaps they thought that some lazy workers had just not gotten around to tossing the thing in the dumpster. Pat and I knelt on opposite sides of the behemoth and shook our heads.
Though a customer who worked for the city had once told me that it was against New York City law to have an air conditioner extend beyond a window frame (Building Code Article 9, Section 27/313, “Permissible Projections Beyond Street Lines” states than an air conditioner cannot extend more than ten inches from a window frame when the unit is more than ten feet from the ground; four inches when it is less than ten feet; I looked it up), a stroll down most any street in Manhattan with your head looking up will tell you that it is one of the city’s least enforced laws. Looking down at the A.C., I wondered if the building’s Super would ban us from the building.
“Okay,” Pat said. “Let’s get this thing out of sight!”
He was right. Obviously we weren’t going to leave it there. Beyond it now being junk littering the sidewalk, I wanted to be rid of the A.C., my emblem of shame. Hester Prinn suddenly came to mind, but my scarlet letters, “A.C.,” had a greenish sheen.
“God, we were lucky,” Pat said. “It’s fucking rush hour!”
“I know, I know, I know,” I said. I concentrated on looking at the air conditioner since I didn’t want to fixate on his tic. “I can’t believe it. I could have killed somebody.”
Out of the apartment, I could feel myself returning.
“Man,” Pat said, “I heard that sound and I swear, I thought a truck had hit a bus. But then I saw everyone looking toward the building, and then toward the sidewalk. When I saw the A.C. down there, I figured someone up above had lost their air conditioner. And then I thought: Wait! Ivor’s in the other room!’’
Laughing as Pat and I crouched and worked our hands underneath the A.C., I had to admit to myself that trashing the air conditioner had been kinda cool, if only in a ten-year-old sort of way – like when Lars and I blew a leg off our G.I. Joe by setting a firecracker off in his boot. But trying to raise the air conditioner up from the sidewalk cut short my laughter. The cold metal box was quite heavy. I really could have killed someone. On a count of “One, two, three,” we slowly lifted the A.C. The greenish liquid, Freon I believe, made parts of the air conditioner slippery, so we had to take extra care as we struggled to lug it the few feet to the dumpster. As we strained to raise the A.C. above our shoulders to tip it over the container’s edge, I joked that it would only be appropriate for the thing to fall on us, or at least myself.
For the second time that morning, the A.C. fell with a thud, but now at least it was supposed to. An old mattress inside the dumpster softened its landing. Glancing back to where the air conditioner had been, I noticed a small dent in the sidewalk. I shook my head but didn’t point it out. I felt like we had just disposed of the weapon at the scene of a crime. I didn’t want any more evidence to be known about. Looking away, I gazed up at the apartment’s open window and knew I could never wash it again without cringing. My greenish letters would stay with me.
“Hey, motherfucker! You nearly killed me!”
Startled, I looked down and found myself facing the building porter, broom still in hand, just a few inches from me: the someone I had come closest to killing. From the apartment, I hadn’t noticed his height, but now I could see that though he was a couple of inches shorter than me, he was much broader and stronger. Anger had reddened his round sepia face, and sweat had soaked the front of his grey work shirt. His brown eyes were watery.
I had figured he’d be more relieved than upset. In my mind, the fact that nobody had died made this close-call mean very little. But I guess, in a way, I’d been waiting for this: my comeuppance. After all, I hadn’t been the one who’d come very close to dying but ten minutes earlier. “Jose” – his name was stitched across his shirt – pointed a finger at me and shook it. Half-expecting it to become a fist, I took a step back and felt Pat’s steadying hand on my shoulder.
“Man, I am so sorry,” I said. “I thought the air conditioner was safe. I mean, I had no idea it was gonna drop. I’m totally freaked out, too. But, how are you doing? Are you okay? I feel really bad.”
If Jose had decided to whack me with his broom, I wouldn’t have blamed him. He didn’t, but I wondered what might have happened if he had been off-duty, or if Pat hadn’t been standing beside me, if he hadn’t been outnumbered.
“Oh yeah?” he asked. “Well, if you feel so bad, then how come you ran right by me? And how come I saw you and your friend here laughing just now?”
“Hey,” I said, feeling my face becoming flushed, red. “I didn’t see you back there. And the laughing, my boss and I were just feeling lucky that everything was okay. But you’re right. We should have come to you first, but we weren’t thinking. We just felt we had to chuck the A.C. right away. What can I say? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
posted by Mark W. Read at 2:03 PM
0 comments
