The Storm

I stuffed plastic bags and duct tape into the cracks of my window frames, turned the fridge down as cold as it would go, packed my little blue suitcase, and left my apartment on Sunday afternoon at the same time as my upstairs neighbor S and her cat. It all felt very familiar. Didn't we just evacuate for a hurricane last year? S said that she was taking her cat to her sister's place in Brooklyn Heights, but that she might come back herself and weather the storm in our building because Irene hadn't been that bad. On the one hand, that is specious reasoning and I did not agree with her with her logic--on the other hand, I left my laptop computer and all my jewelry in my own apartment, so I guess the specious was going around. 

I stood at the bus stop and watched the restaurant put tarps and sandbags down over their cellar doors. Two bulldozers were parked on top of the giant pile of salt across the street. The East River is right on the other side of that pile. Clearly the dock workers thought that shit was about to get real.

Won't the salt just dissolve in a flood?

A guy with a thick beard and horn-rimmed glasses came up next to me evacuating with nothing except a Scrabble box under his arm. He didn't even bother to pack a change of underoos. Hipsters and hurricanes, I thought. He's either the smartest or the dumbest person at this bus stop right now, but there's no way to tell until the storm actually hits. The bus pulled up and away we all went, leaving Flood Zone A and heading for the hills.

In hurricane preparedness, you learn that the most important aspect of surviving a hurricane (after you get to high ground, of course) is to keep yourself occupied. Panic is your biggest enemy. So for all of Sunday and Monday, while the BF and I were crammed into his little uptown studio, I read my books, did yoga, took baths, and groomed like a nervous cat until I'd shed my long hair in every corner of the apartment. And then it was time for a walk.

This was before the storm had made landfall. No one really knew what was coming, so attitudes ranged from the blase to the barely-sane. Vans full of police officers cruised the streets, looking very official and prepared. A crowd of them (what do you call a group of police officers? A pod? A pack? A pride?) came into a pizza place and the BF looked at me with his I-didn't-do-nuttin' face, but they were just getting their lunches. As if they'd be coming for him. They're coming for me if they're coming for anybody. I come from interesting stock. Parents have been warning their children not to play with my family for generations.

After lunch, we went to a grocery store thinking we might pick up a sack of clementines, but the lines were crazy-long and the shelves were almost cleaned out. Almost. Apparently when the end is nigh and civilization totters to the brink, people look at turnips, pineapples and cranberries and say, "Fuck that noise, leave it for the looters."

We got our first hint that this whole storm thing was serious business when the crane blew over backwards in midtown and the BF's family had to evacuate their building.

Witchcraft!

That was Monday afternoon. On Monday night, the tide came in, the hurricane hit, and our troubles began. We didn't know it at the time, though. The BF closed the curtains, turned on the white noise machine, and we had a quiet evening at home ignoring each other while we read our respective books. The lights flickered once or twice and he filled up the bathtub just in case, but we woke the next morning to heat, power, and Internet as if nothing had happened. Our biggest concern was if we'd get the day off or not.

Then we turned on the television.

Breezy Point, Queens. Anyone who makes a Call of Duty or a Mad Max joke is going to hell.

And checked the New York Times online.

Subway station in the Financial District.

 And Googled images of my area of Brooklyn.

Red Hook, the neighborhood just south of my own.

I tried to adhere to my Girl Scout training. We turned off the news and read our books some more. We watched Golden Girls and a re-run of Beetlejuice on television. We even went outside for a walk. Damage was minimal on the Upper West Side, a few downed trees and a lot of untidy leaves in the gutters. But the air pressure was still all weird from the storm and it felt like someone was jamming chopsticks into my eardrums. We went back inside and tried to stay busy, but I was starting to worry about what had happened to my building.

I live in a funny little neighborhood that no one really knows about. Google searches for my street just kept pulling up images of flooded Red Hook, the neighborhood immediately south of my own, and with all public transit shut down and all the bridges and tunnels closed, there was no way for me to get home and check my apartment. Important lessons were learned that day about getting my neighbor's phone numbers and not being so anti-social.

Wednesday was worse. My office was open, but there was no way I could get off the island of Manhattan. The BF got to go back to his normal life because he can walk to his school, but I was stuck in his apartment watching re-runs of X-Files and another round of Beetlejuice when I wasn't watching the news. It was Halloween and I had my costume with me, but I knew there was no way I was going to celebrate. My heart wasn't in it. I couldn't read, do yoga, or even groom. I just sat on the bed and wailed to no one in particular that I wanted to go home.

Fortunately, that was when R called me. "Are you coming over?" Fuck and yes, I was coming over. She lives across the park from the BF, and buses were running again, so I peeled myself off the mattress and hit the road. Traffic was Independence Day gridlock. I hopped a crosstown to the east side, but around Frederick Douglass Blvd my patience ran out and I just decided to walk. I got as far as 96th and 5th Ave. before my patience for walking ran out and I decided to get back on a bus. And it was the exact same bus I'd gotten off of half an hour before. (I recognized the driver and the Halloween costumes.)

When R heard my wailing about not knowing what was happening at my building, she stuffed me full of cookies and tea and we played Scrabble for a few hours. I think that hipster at the bus stop was on to something, because I felt a lot better afterwards. The BF joined us, we ordered take-out, and watched Spirited Away with her neighbor's cats, which is almost like Halloween.

He's dressed as Charlie Chaplin!

Thursday. My fourth day of evacuation. I was determined to make it my last. The night before I'd called the restaurant in my building and asked them what had happened on my street, and the hostess said they were dry, powered, and open for business. That was as much information as I was going to get without being there in person, and public transit was slowly coming back to life, so I put my books and teddy bear back in my little blue suitcase, kissed my BF good-bye, and started off across Manhattan.

I figured I could take the subway south, take a cross-town bus east, another bus south again, and catch one of the shuttle buses that was taking people between Brooklyn and the blacked-out parts of Manhattan. Even in daylight, it was eerie to go below 34th Street and see block after block of dark traffic lights and shuttered stores. It felt like a movie set before the director yells "Action!"

A city divided.

The bus spit me out at Jay Street and I began my walk home because I have never been able to find the start of my bus route in Downtown Brooklyn and the aftermath of a hurricane was a bad time to fight that battle again. Atlantic Avenue looked all right, streets clear, no windows broken or awnings down. I decided to be optimistic and stopped at the grocery store, and then I got pessimistic and stopped at the liquor store.

The bulldozers were still parked on the giant pile of salt, just where I'd left them on Sunday. The bookstore and the restaurant were both open for business, and the super of my building had put away the sandbags. The front door pushed away drifts of leaves when I opened it, but I didn't smell any sewage or mold and there was no mud on the floor. Apparently--impossibly, miraculously--my neighborhood hadn't flooded at all.

My own apartment was toasty as a hippie at Burning Man and everything in my fridge was frozen solid. The bonsai had shed some leaves but was otherwise fine. Every light turned on and the Internet fired right up when I plugged my router back in. I can't be certain, but I think that the heat and power and water was on the whole time I was gone. Would you believe I had more clean-up to do after Irene than I did after Sandy? I had nothing worse to deal with on Thursday than a carton of half-and-half that froze while I was gone and got all grainy when it thawed.

Considering the devastation in other parts of the city--and the lack of power, water, and heat to tens of thousands of people across the state--and the billions of dollars of damage we'll need to repair the damage--and considering that I live a block away from the East River and less than a mile away from a neighborhood that was under 6 feet of water on Monday night--I am one absurdly lucky Big Island Rachel. 

I made my triumphant return to work on Friday and immediately got in a fight with a customer over the phone. It felt good to be back to normal.

Blowing up MTA's email

The Metro Transit Authority--services over 7 million passengers per day. It's the largest public transportation system in the country and has the largest subway fleet in the world. They've got this public transit thing down. Here's why I hate them.

I live a good 15 minute walk from the nearest subway, so in the mornings, I catch the B61 bus to the subway station. (I hate showing up at work sweaty.) But two weeks ago, the MTA reduced service on my route, so now the bus is always crowded waaaaay past capacity, in addition to coming so infrequently that I can't just wait for the next one or else I'll be late for work. This morning, my bus driver said that he didn't like it any more than we did, and we needed to raise hell with the MTA.

"You all are just taking it lying down," he said.

No, I thought, not I! When I got to work, I sat down and wrote letters of complaint to the MTA, my local representative, and I would have written a letter to Mayor Bloomberg except his website crashed my computer, and by the time I'd rebooted I'd already gotten distracted by the free hot dogs they were handing out at the campus bookstore.

I haven't heard back from my representative, Nydia Velazquez, but I did get a reply from MTA that I'll post here in it's full fuck-you form letter glory.

"We apologize for the difficulties you’ve been experiencing with B61 service.

Due to personnel reductions and overtime-pay restrictions made necessary by our current budgetary constraints, we may periodically experience intermittent gaps in scheduled bus service. The severely reduced availability to cover employee absences using “extra” bus operators or bus operators working overtime may result in some service not being operated, with little or no advance notice.

In response to your concerns, we notified our Road-Operations Unit. We requested that they give increased attention to the ____ route, make every effort to keep buses close to schedule and properly spaced, and ensure that bus operators are properly accommodating customers at all stops along the route.

We appreciate your continued support for MTA bus service, and assure you that we will continue to make very effort to provide the best service possible with the resources currently available to us.

Thank you for contacting us."

Apparently it was too much trouble to type in "B61" twice. "Never mind, this is good enough, she knows which bus she rides. Let's go get a hot dog."

Orderly Noise

"Alas, poor Yorick, thine music sucks." Text message from the BF halfway through last night's noise rock concert/reality show taping at the Knitting Factory.

This is going to be a bit heavy on the vitriol.

You don't realize how well the subway system works in New York City until it breaks down. Last night, I took a bus, a train, another train, and another bus to get from my apartment to the Knitting Factory. It took me an hour and a half to go four miles because the F and G trains were out of service, but in different places, with an uneven outness overlap, which can be described by the mathematical theorum: F^G=F(c*B)/G(V-2c) where B is Brooklyn, c is the speed of light, and V is a wandering variable equal to the number of fuck-yous coming out of the MTA at any given moment.

It's not even a journey worth making. The Knitting Factory is in that hipster shithole, Williamsburg. I know Williamsburg is considered one of the better neighborhoods in Brooklyn--and considering that I lived in Bedstuy for a year, I'm not in any position to judge shitholes--but I look at all those shingle-covered houses and chic pubs and ironic beards, and it just makes me what to punch someone in the throat. The only way you can get me to go to Williamsburg is if you pay me.

And the Village Voice was paying me to go, so I went--and walked right into an MTV reality show. That's not a euphemism for getting felt up by the lighting guy in the vestibule. An MTV camera crew was actually there shooting footage for this reality show starring a Pratt student. The network had bribed a bunch of people with the promise of a free concert to come to the Knitting Factory so that it looked like their Star was attending a hot, sold-out event. They shuffled these extras around to heighten the illusion of a packed house, which made me laugh, because there were actually less people there than usual.

Yes, reality shows are staged. Sorry if anyone's world just shattered to pieces around them. You can go cry under a shelf in the bathroom now. I'll wait.

The cameras made it really difficult for me and the other Street Teamsters to do our thing because we didn't want to get in the shots. My life is difficult enough without having to explain a split-second MTV reality show appearance to my friends and family. Plus, it's difficult for me to get into my perky saleswoman persona when I'm being devoured by pity for the subject of a reality show. The Star stopped by our table to sign up for Voice email alerts and get a free mustache, and even though I knew that she'd made the choice and probably actively scrambled for her role on the show, I couldn't help but think that nobody deserves this. To be followed by five cameras when you're hanging around the club--knowing that everyone else in the room is only there to fill in the blanks of your fake life--being constantly surrounded by seething film school graduates who have shelved their dreams of documenting elephant migrations and natural disasters in developing countries because the only work they could get was on an MTV reality show--ugh, the existential angst of the situation was so intense I nearly conceived of a masters thesis in media alienation.

I probably would have enrolled myself in graduate school via my partner's iPhone right then and there if the music hadn't been sucking my will to live. Music at the Knitting Factory has never exactly blown me away with its genius and originality, but my g-d, at least it was never four sets of noise rock before now. I wanted to stand up on my stool and scream, "It's just noise! It's just orderly noise!" That's all it is, amelodic, atonal screaming and grunting and pounding, the soundtrack to Hell, and not the good kind of Hell in Dante's "Inferno," with Florentine artists and Roman poets. More like the music from the Hell of Upside Down Stupid People, where the only food is honey flavored ham jerky, and flaming drops of Mountain Dew and Zima rain down every day at six, just in time for "Jackass" reruns. That Hell.

Three hours was enough of that for me. I pleaded sickness and ran screaming into the night, where I threw myself into a yellow cab because the thought of struggling through another hour-long round of bus-train-bus-train at midnight in Brooklyn was just too much. So half of my paycheck from that evening went to cab fare, leaving me with barely enough left over to do my laundry.

Here's hoping Monday night's Village Voice Off Broadway Awards Ceremony doesn't leave just a huge, gaping wound in my soul.

The Phantom JMZ

I once saw an older man in a gray suit execute a flying karate kick at a closing subway door on the A/C line at Broadway-Nassau. He didn’t make it, but if he had, I’d’ve cheered for him. Not because it was an impressive move to pull off in a suit and tie—and it was the best urban ninja move I’ve ever seen below street level—but because he would have escaped the Broadway-Nassau station in style. I never get to end my adventures there with karate kicks and applause. Usually I just end up crying.
I get off the train here on the lowest level, the A/C line and think, okay, going to transfer to the JMZ. Follow the signs.
The nearest staircase leads up and has a helpful sign: Exit (but I don’t want that, I’ve already paid and I’m only halfway to my destination), 4, 5 (God forbid, the line in New York City most in need of those pushers you see cramming people onto the trains in Japan) and JMZ (train to Chinatown and I hope I haven’t missed the lion dancers, because I’m broke and unemployed and need to feed a dollar to the giant sequined mask so I can get my luck for 2009).
Okay, so I walk up the stairs. Still underground. No problem, here’s another sign: JMZ to Metropolitan, and an arrow indicating a U-turn. Do I want to go to Metropolitan? Or to I want to go to—turn around—JMZ to Jamaica? Metropolitan or Jamaica? What about Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Uptown, or Downtown? Every other line has these concrete geographical categories that let you know where you’re going and where you’ll end up, but I’m in the metropolitan area already and I don’t need to go to Jamaica because I’m going to spend my last bit of cash on the Chinese lion and there won’t be any leftover for marijuana.
I pick Jamaica. Isn’t there a Jamaica in Queens? Queens is north of me, unless the JMZ doubles back through Brooklyn first, but I’m already at the very end of Manhattan, so I’ll know within a couple of stops if I’m not going in the right direction.
Follow the arrow to JMZ-Jamaica. I haven’t taken a turn, I must be walking directly over the A/C line, so why does the arrow now point down a staircase? Didn’t I just pop up from there? Sure enough, I go down the stairs and the signs on either side say stuff like, C to Euclid except late nights. Yeah, no shit Sherlock, I take the C to Euclid every day except late nights, I don’t need to go there yet, I’ve got to get to Chinatown and get my good luck. Where’s my JMZ sign?
Here it is—JMZ, up another staircase. Didn’t I just walk down from the upper level? Why did I need to take the stairs to get from one end of the corridor to the other? Doesn’t matter, I’m sure there will be a corner to turn at the top and I will be walking perpendicular or diagonal to the A/C line and then I’ll be in business.
Follow the arrow up the stairs, JMZ. But what happened to Jamaica? I don’t want to end up on the Metropolitan side, unless I do, in which case should I take a U-turn like the other sign said? Look, I can turn around at the top of this staircase and still see that first—or was it second?—sign. Again, why did I need to go down? No matter, now I’m walking this way, whichever way this is, and I’m following the arrow to the Exit, 4,5 Uptown, JMZ. I don’t want to go uptown on the 4,5, I’ve been on that line and I know that I can’t get to the JMZ from there. There aren’t even any signs to the JMZ once I’ve crossed over into 4,5 territory, because that’s the Upper East Side line and probably pretends it doesn’t have anything in common with the Chinatown line. So onward with the arrow, ignoring the left fork in the hallway that goes to the 4,5. This must lead to the JMZ.
Nope, just another staircase. This one has an iron gate in front of it. Dead end.
Fuck it, then, I’m going in the Metropolitan direction. At least I can get off at the next stop and transfer in the right direction, unless Metropolitan is the right direction, in which case I just wasted five minutes trying to find the way to a subway line that is blocked off and doesn’t go where I want it to anyway.
Deep breath. Don’t go down the stairs to the A/C again, that’s just what they want you to do. There’s nothing down there but the A/C and staircases going up, and you’re up already. Going away from the 4,5 now. That’s a good sign. JMZ, that’s a better sign. Points to another staircase to the A/C—don’t get sucked in, it’s a lie. See, here’s a staircase going up, haven’t seen one of these yet, I must be getting closer. Spring in the step now, lion dancers here I come!
Top of the stairs: another sign: JMZ. U-turn arrow, back the way I came.
No. I say, No! to you, you stupid fucking sign. I do not take a U-turn! I just came from that direction. You can’t tell me to go back! YOU take a U-turn if you’re so goddamn certain about it!
Now I’m starting to cry. I’ve got to get to Chinatown! I need to feed my dollar to the lion or else I’m not going to have good luck again until the next New Year! And if I don’t have good luck I’m never going to find my way to the right subway line and I may as well just lick the third rail now and give the mole people that live in the tunnels a feast of electrified human flesh like they do in Tibetan sky burials where the dead are carved up and fed to the vultures.
Should I cry though? It’s embarrassing to cry in public. I never did it before I moved to New York, but nobody gives a crap if you cry in public here, so why not? One time I was on the subway and a woman had an asthma attack. She starting grabbing and groping people around her for help, unable to breathe or speak, and everyone, even the other women, shoved her away and made those little “Ugh!” noises you make when you pull clods of wet hair out of the bathtub. If no one stops for life-threatening dangers, they won’t stop for a crying woman who can’t find the JMZ.
There are always musicians playing at the Broadway-Nassau station. I think it’s just bands that have gotten lost and decide to spend the rest of their lives down here rather than waste the $2 they paid to get down here to ride trains that don’t exist and follow signs that lead you nowhere.
Just a theory.
I didn’t make it to Chinatown in time for the lion dancers. I bought a hot dog instead.