Down in the lobby, I noticed the ambulances were silently flashing their lights out on Grand Street, which meant another death in the building, another invitation to sit shiva at a grieving son’s house in Teaneck or New Rochelle, another apartment for sale on the community board. A wheelchair stood lonely amidst the antiseptic 1950s cream-on-cream décor of our building’s lobby. We’re all about immobility here in the Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, and so I prepared myself for an intergenerational encounter, thinking I might have to wheel the old fellow out into the early-evening sunshine, produce a few words of my grandmother’s Yiddish.
I backed away. A body badly sheathed in an opaque plastic bag sat in the wheelchair, its head crowned with a pointy pocket of air. The body bag clung vehemently to a pair of slim male hips, and the deceased was huddled forward slightly, as if engaged in the fruitless act of Christian prayer.
An outrage! Where were his caregivers? Where were the EMT workers? I wanted to get down on my knees and, against my better instincts, to offer solace to this former being growing cold in his sickening plastic robe. I beheld the tiny pocket of air above the dead man’s head, as if it were the visualization of his very last breath, and felt vomit rising from my breadbasket.
Dizzy, I walked out into the stifling June heat toward the ambulance guys, the both of them enjoying a smoke by the flashing vehicle bearing the legend “American Medicle [sic] Response.” “There’s a dead person in my lobby,” I said to them. “In a fucking wheelchair. You just left it there. Some respect, guys?”
Their faces were negligible, compromised, vaguely Hispanish. “You next of kin?” one said, nodding at my vicinity.
“Does it matter?”
“He’s not going anywhere, sir.”
“It’s disgusting,” I said.
“It’s just death.”
“Happens to everybody, Paco,” the other added.
I tried to contort my face into anger, but whenever I try to do that I’m told I look like a crazy old woman. “I’m talking about your smoking,” I said, my retort dying swiftly in the humidity around us.
Nothing on Grand could offer me solace. Nothing could make me Celebrate What I Have (Point No. 6). Not the inherent life inside the barely clothed Latino children or the smell of freshly cooked arroz con pollo wafting out of the venerable Castillo del Jagua II. I projected “The Noah Weinberg Show!” again, listened to my friend making fun of our armed forces’ latest defeat in Venezuela, but I couldn’t follow the intricacies. Ciudad Bolívar, Orinoco River, pierced armor, Blackhawk down-what did it mean to me, now that I saw one possible end to my life: alone, in a bag, in my own apartment building, hunched over in a wheelchair, praying to a god I never believed in? Just then, passing by the ochre grandiosity of St. Mary’s, I saw a pretty woman, a little chunky and wide of hip, cross herself in front of the church and kiss her fist, her Credit ranking flashing at an abysmal 670 on a nearby Credit Pole. I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity. I also wanted to kiss her for some reason, feel the life pulsing in those big Catholic lips, remind myself of the primacy of the living animal, of my time amongst the Romans.
I had to cool my stress levels by the time I got to see my buddies. On the way down to the ferry, I chanted Point No. 4, Care for Your Friends, Care for Your Friends, because I needed them by my side when the American Medicle [sic] Response ambulance trundled up to 575 Grand Street. In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.
My äppärät pinged.
CrisisNet: DOLLAR LOSES OVER 3% IN LONDON TRADING TO FINISH AT HISTORIC LOW OF 1€ = $8.64 IN ADVANCE OF CHINESE CENTRAL BANKER ARRIVAL U.S.; LIBOR RATE FALLS 57 BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR LOWER BY 2.3% AGAINST YUAN AT 1¥ = $4.90
I really needed to figure out what this LIBOR thing was and why it was falling by fifty-seven basis points. But, honestly, how little I cared about all these difficult economic details! How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly old book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn’t I have been born to a better world?
The National Guard was out in force at the Staten Island Ferry building. A crowd of poor office women wearing white sneakers, their groaning ankles covered with sheer hose, waited patiently to walk past a sandbagged checkpoint by the gate to the ferry. An American Restoration Authority sign warned us that “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT (‘THE OBJECT’). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.”
Occasionally, some of us were pulled aside, and I worried about the otter flagging me in Rome, the asshole videotaping me on the plane, the asterisk that still appeared when my mighty credit score flashed on the Credit Poles, the continued disappearance of Nettie Fine (no response to my daily messages, and if they could get my American mama, what could they do to my actual parents?). Men in civilian clothes zapped our bodies and our äppäräti with what looked like a small tubular attachment of an old-school Electrolux vacuum cleaner and asked us both to deny and to imply consent to what they were doing to us. The passengers seemed to take the whole thing in stride, the Staten Island cool kids especially silent and deferential, shaking a little in their vintage hoodies. I overheard several young men of color whispering to one another “deee-ny and im-ply,” but the older women quickly shushed them with bites of “Restoration ’thority!” and “Punch you in the mouth, boy.”
Maybe it was Howard Shu’s doing, but somehow I got through the checkpoint without being stopped.
Once disembarked on the Staten Island side, I braced myself for a walk. The main drag, Victory Boulevard, ramps uphill with a San Franciscan vigor. These parts of Staten Island, St. George and Tompkinsville, were once completely off the grid. Immigrants used to wash up here from Poland, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and especially Mexico. They worked the storefronts of their respective ethnic restaurants and also ran dusty groceries, check-cashing places, and twenty-centavo-a-minute phone booths. Outside the stores, black men used to lounge in puffy jackets, tottering sleepily over milk crates. I remember this ’hood well, because when my buddies and I were right out of college we’d all take the ferry to raid this spicy Sri Lankan joint, where for nine bucks you could eat an insane shrimp pancake and some kind of ethereal red fish while baby roaches tried to clamber up your trouser leg and drink your beer. Now, of course, the Sri Lankan place, the roaches, the somnolent minorities were gone, replaced by half-man, half-wireless bohemians ramming their baby strollers up and down the hump of Victory Boulevard, while kids from nearby New Jersey cruised past the outrageously priced Victorians in their Hyundai rice rockets, wishing they could work Media or Credit.
Cervix is exactly what you would expect from yet another stupid Staten Island old man’s bar cleaned up and turned into a hangout for Media and Credit types, fake oily paintings from basement rec rooms of yore, hot women in their early twenties looking to supplement their electronic lives, so-so men in desperately cool clothes scratching the upper-thirty limit and pushing deep into the next decade. My boys fit the bill exactly. There they were, crowded around a table, their äppäräti out, speaking into their shirt collars while thumbing Content into their pearly devices, two curly, dusky heads completely lost to the world around them: Noah Weinberg and Vishnu Cohen-Clark, fellow alumni of what used to be called New York University, that indispensable local educator of bright-enough women and men, fellow romantic sufferers, fellow lovers of spicy words and endless arcana, fellow travelers down the under-lubricated craphole of life.