When the boys moved into their apartment on Flatbush, cheap was the name of the game. Second hand couches, hand-me-down bookshelves and mismatched kitchenware furnished the apartment without any cost. But in a mountain of thrift, the icing on the urinal cake was the ancient television they bought for twenty bucks.
This television, a conglomeration of gray plastic and simulated wood tone, served as the undeniable axis of existence in the apartment, and all were subject to its pull.
Lacking better options, the visual diet vacillated between Demolition Man, Italian horror films, and the occasional Nathaniel Hornblower episode. Anyone seeking to watch network television would be met by �Smackdown!�, and only smackdown. All other channels were filtered through layers of impressionistic static.
As an outside observer, it quickly occurred to me that the television habits in the house were more performance art then entertaining subjugation. It seemed that the question was never what to watch, but rather what would be the stupidest thing we could watch?
Often the answer was an eight-hour marathon of Dario Argento.
While it was amusing to see my friends flagellate themselves with a TV, I couldn�t quite get into cynical detachment with the fervor they farted. And so with a little bit of initiative in my pocket, I bought a pair of rabbit ears on the way home from work one night.
Picture three glossy pairs of eyes, wide as sunflowers, staring at a visual cacophony. Clear as bottled water, every network channel shunting down the thin metal tubes, shooting electrons at phosphor-coated glass. Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, all standing in front of us with nary an errant pixel among them.
The veil was lifted. Enter the renaissance. I am the rainmaker.
With a metallic divining rod, I have brought television to them, and it is everything they hoped it would be.
�To think, all that time we just needed an antenna.�
For the rest of the weekend, nearly every second was spent flipping channels. ABC, NBC, UPN, Fox, CBS, WB, they were all there for the watching. Nick tore himself away for a few hours to celebrate the Sunday Times, but even he could not completely resist the pull.
I just sat back satisfied that my gift to the house, while low in cost, provided incalculable reward. Things were changing around Flatbush, and I was the sunshine bringing it in.
Tuesday morning comes. It�s the day after my little chess game with my employer, and I�m running a little late. Although it�s become a pattern in my life since this time, I do not like being late, and so there is a certain unpleasant anxiety associated with truancy. When I finally caught a Manhattan-bound subway, I found myself willing it to move faster with every turn. As it lumbered over the Brooklyn Bridge, my leg twitched with frustrated energy, eager to get out and run the rest of the way.
It�s not so much actually being late, it�s just being late the first time that�s agonizing. You know it�s going to happen at some point, you just don�t want it to be right now. Anything you can do to nurture the illusion of your competency is satisfying, as if you are in a constant con-game with your employer.
You may be the biggest fuck-up in the world, but if you�re a fuck-up who�s on time, you have job security.
So when the train started into the Manhattan tunnels and then stopped, my anxiety increased a bit. Shortly after, it started moving again, only to halt once more a few hundred yards later. This pattern continued all the way until my station, gradually increasing my frustration to the point of genuine anger.
Sure, I was running late, but these delays were going to make it look far worse then it actually was. I didn�t need to look bad after only a week on the job.
So when the train finally got to my station, I rushed out to work as fast as the meandering crowds would permit. Seething with anger at the MTA, I quickly formulated my apology before stepping into the front door.
�Sorry guys, the trains were all screwed up this morning. It stopped in the tunnel like eight times.�
That�s okay, they replied. A plane just few into the World Trade Center.
Problems are relative to the observer.
A few moments before, being late was an agonizing ordeal, more akin to crucifixion then annoyance, but you sit there watching people burn to death, live on cable TV as another jet rockets into your home and you re-order your existence.
This is perspective.
Being late is unfortunate, but so is being in a head-on collision with an airplane. It�s all about where you�re standing at the time.
The newscasters, for lack of better options, stammered over descriptions of what we were all watching together. Restating the obvious in inarticulate soundbites as we all experienced some sort of communal epilepsy.
The instant replays came shortly thereafter and continued, endlessly reliving the same two moments.
Touchdown Taliban.
Touchdown Taliban.
In a glossed-over side note, they announced that a plane has crashed somewhere in the region of my other home. Vague details came at first, citing the target as everything from the white house to the capitol building, but it seemed like an hour before they finally narrowed it down to the Pentagon.
The two places I call home were quite literally burning, and my mind started listing all the people who could just happen to be in either place. All the family I had in military sidekick positions, all the friends who could be in the wrong place at the wrong time, all the random people who could find themselves inside a target. Phone service being predictably non-existent, I couldn�t call anyone to check.
All the landlines were jammed or severed and every cell in the city was overloaded well beyond capacity. For the first time in over a hundred years, Manhattan was an island.
Then the foregone conclusion came along and dashed all the silent prayers. The house of cards came down, showering upon the earth in fragmented concrete rain. A sandcastle transforming from building to physics experiment, from concrete and steel to particulate dust. Eyes and mouths wide, trying to reconcile how mass becomes motion. How solid becomes cloud.
How fear becomes fact.
People forget that as massive and as strong as they seem to be, skyscrapers are nothing more then networks of empty space. Their largest component is also the least structurally sound: air.
Simple air.
The second building reduced into atmosphere and rubble shortly thereafter. Hope conceded defeat as a cloud of death billowed out over the city. Where two hulking towers stood, there was only a charred wreck scattered about a smoldering crater. A memory where the sum of it�s parts could never be greater then the hole.
I waited until late afternoon before finally giving up on the subway service. It would be a long walk, but there didn�t seem to be any other options for travel, so I started making my way towards the Brooklyn Bridge.
All along the way I passed people coated in building materials, white from pulverized drywall, gray from ash and soot.
Pale from the ordeal.
The crowds thickened as they neared the bridge, collecting in a solemn exodus, everyone breathing the ashes of the dead that hung in the air. Emergency vehicles crashing the waves of people, trailing ash as they sped by to some cause, some need.
I was almost at the bridge when the city finally reopened the subways. The typically aggressive New York Crowds filed respectfully into subway cars in ordered groups, then shuttled off to warm homes and expectant family. Even Flatbush had been tamed. In the short walk from the subway to the apartment, not a single leer, not one insult. Just quiet, simple reflection.
I�d only been here a week, but walking in was like returning to your boyhood home after a years in college.
A certain sense of comfort comes from living in the ghetto. As bad as the streets look, as poor as the people are and as miserable as your existence continues to be, you are assured safety from catastrophic attack.
Nobody bombs the ghetto.
With a heavy sigh, I set down my bag, turned on the TV, and found static on every channel.
What wasn�t widely reported was that the long spire atop the tower was actually the main broadcast antenna for the entire New York City area. Since it was now 1,800 feet from it�s home, there was no broadcast television.
