![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blackout recount backwards
Aug. 16th, 2003 09:09 amI am finally home and with electricity to boot. I still have to clean out the fridge and freezer in their entirety, change the cat litter, do the dishes and basically deal with everything I either couldn't do or now have to do because of the blackout.
The neighborhood my apartment is in was one of the last in the city to receive power, our outage totaling 30-hours. By that point, I was uptown at Kat's house watching Nigel the anaconda guy on some of her animal channels and fielding a range of phone calls, that I was less than equipped to deal with, all while flipping through a National Geographic article on The Marais.
People outside the blackout demonstrated a remarkable lack of comprehension about the seriousness or scale of the event -- asking me if I was making good sandwiches, not realizing that with all the stores closed and temperatures over 90-degrees and the power out that wasn't really an option. My father giggled as he asked me if I was having fun -- this after an arduous trip uptown, 24-hours without power, and several up-close and personal moments that are the hallmark of life in a disaster in NYC.
New Yorkers are notorious for using any little excuse to speak to each other, because we spend so much energy not speaking to each other. Snowstorms, politics, what have you, and we get chatty. The blackout intensified this, and brought out the lonely, drunk and poorly socialized in ways I've not yet seen before.
On the bus a man struck up a conversation with me -- which was fine as we shared information about what we knew. But then as we continued to speak he kept poking at my arm or breast bone to make a point, and he reeked of alcohol and it became clear that not only was he drinking his way through the blackout, he was a bar tender, and I was sad. Eventually I mentioned I work as a stage manager sometimes (I had two shows cancelled and both rescheduled to Sunday) and then he regaled me with a tale of selling t-shirts in the lobby for CATS, what it meant to him to be part of a Broadway show, and how he had teenage groupies in his old neighborhood after a buddy of his told all the girls he was playing the Rum Tum Tugger. Singing fucking cats! How much did I want to beat my head into a wall right then?
This coming just an hour after I decided I had to flee my neighborhood for a number of reasons. First, let me emphasize that where I live is far far far from the worst neighborhood in the city -- however, it is a neighborhood in flux, with people like me being blamed for gentrification, when we live here for the same reasons anyone else does -- we can afford it -- although who knows how much longer considering the doorman building that has just gone up around the corner -- it is patently absurd. At any rate, as the blackout wore on the divide between the west side of the avenue, where so many new buildings are, and the east side, where the bodegas, older buildings and projects are, became increasingly clear. Emo boys sat out in lawn chairs on my side of the block drinking beer and listening to the ball game, as salsa music blasted from the other side of the street. I thought it was funny, and stupid, even if there had been a knifefight in the first hours of the blackout the day before, and a sneaker shop that had been looted in the night. And then I tried to get a slice of pizza.
And despite waiting online I was skipped over, not once but twice, and then I asked what that was about. I was screamed at, told I had to stick up for myself if I wanted to live around here, and it became clear with some rapidity, that as an interloper, who was presumed to have means, I wasn't welcome to food. So for the blackout, I ate muffins I had made in its first hours and seethed. I had wanted to throw the fistful of quarters I had at the time at the man at the register, but they were the only means I had. When I got back to my apartment, I broke down in tears.
A lot of people have been saying the blackout isn't a big deal and wouldn't be if I could remember past ones. But the truth is one of my earliest memories is of 1977 and its blackout, my father insisting my mother and I stay in doors because it was dangerous on the streets and Son of Sam was out there too. We lit Hanukka candles, and I knew something was wrong, but I was hushed when asked about it. That blackout was smaller in scale and last half as long, but what happens on a dark night in New York, was probably forever burned into my mind by it.
On Thursday, when this whole affair was still an annoying adventure, I listened to the street start to grow quiet, the raucus noise of everyone sitting outside quieting as the sun went behind buildings and then silencing completely in the ten minutes before it set entirely. The second it was truly night, sound errupted -- people cheering and screaming, sounds of dismay, and people generally howling into the night to ward of ghosts or their neighbors. I didn't have enough candles to read by, and so I lay in the dark, sweatting on my bed, in the flickering glow of candles Amanda sent me, thinking of when she was here and I was sick and delirious in the same light. I listened to the radio down on the street, which had returned again until the cops ordered it shut off at 12:30, and I watched the patterns of all nature of blinky lights and sirens move across my walls, and I waited, while nothing happened and I couldn't sleep.
The initial hours of the blackout were the most mystifying, as the power flickered out, my first thought was that Con Ed, which has been less than efficient about processing our payments had fucked up again. I looked frantically for the bill and left several cranky messages for my roommate who is and was in Canada (and turns out to have been blacked out as well). Then I stepped into my building's hall, where it was also dark, just an emergency lamp illuminating the hall. The floor was hot, and I, in a panic, thought there was a fire downstairs. I ran down to investigate, but I forgot I live over the laundrey room, which was still eminating heat. Still, I didn't understand what was happening, and went outside.
Cell phones weren't working, but I eventually got a call through to Texas as I watched thick black smoke come from our local Con Ed plant. I figured this was like last summer, a local thing, not thinking that that even while at the same plant had blacked out a different neighborhood. Amanda went to the NYTimes and then told me the whole eastern seaboard had gone dark. Neighbors ran outside to pay their ConEd bills and discovered what I had, and people interrupted my call to ask how I got my phone working. "Texas!" I said and shrugged, which was a bit like "Pirate!", but not really.
By then I was on some random tirade about terrorism and moving to Australia, which isn't worth going into other than to say I was very sincere, and I now know exactly where my current limits for NYC's bullshit are. And Amanda was a trooper, feeding me information until the turned the cell towers off, cutting all of us with battery power off from a signal and in for a long contactless night.
I went for a walk, to buy water, but all the stores were closed. I wound up sitting in a woman's garden listening to her radio and talking about it all. It was a hip hop station in Philadelphia, and children kept riding their bikes through the garden as she admonished them to play more gently, for they all had asthma. I told her about Paris and all the people who had died from the heat this month. And she points, as if across the water. "Paris? In France, right?" and I had to explain how they don't generally have airconditioning there. Later, as I walked around some more, I heard teenage boys discussing it. "There's some country, I don't know... like over the water and shit, and all these people are dying from the heat."
I felt very alone then, and in recounting it all now, am remarkably unsurprised by any of it.
The neighborhood my apartment is in was one of the last in the city to receive power, our outage totaling 30-hours. By that point, I was uptown at Kat's house watching Nigel the anaconda guy on some of her animal channels and fielding a range of phone calls, that I was less than equipped to deal with, all while flipping through a National Geographic article on The Marais.
People outside the blackout demonstrated a remarkable lack of comprehension about the seriousness or scale of the event -- asking me if I was making good sandwiches, not realizing that with all the stores closed and temperatures over 90-degrees and the power out that wasn't really an option. My father giggled as he asked me if I was having fun -- this after an arduous trip uptown, 24-hours without power, and several up-close and personal moments that are the hallmark of life in a disaster in NYC.
New Yorkers are notorious for using any little excuse to speak to each other, because we spend so much energy not speaking to each other. Snowstorms, politics, what have you, and we get chatty. The blackout intensified this, and brought out the lonely, drunk and poorly socialized in ways I've not yet seen before.
On the bus a man struck up a conversation with me -- which was fine as we shared information about what we knew. But then as we continued to speak he kept poking at my arm or breast bone to make a point, and he reeked of alcohol and it became clear that not only was he drinking his way through the blackout, he was a bar tender, and I was sad. Eventually I mentioned I work as a stage manager sometimes (I had two shows cancelled and both rescheduled to Sunday) and then he regaled me with a tale of selling t-shirts in the lobby for CATS, what it meant to him to be part of a Broadway show, and how he had teenage groupies in his old neighborhood after a buddy of his told all the girls he was playing the Rum Tum Tugger. Singing fucking cats! How much did I want to beat my head into a wall right then?
This coming just an hour after I decided I had to flee my neighborhood for a number of reasons. First, let me emphasize that where I live is far far far from the worst neighborhood in the city -- however, it is a neighborhood in flux, with people like me being blamed for gentrification, when we live here for the same reasons anyone else does -- we can afford it -- although who knows how much longer considering the doorman building that has just gone up around the corner -- it is patently absurd. At any rate, as the blackout wore on the divide between the west side of the avenue, where so many new buildings are, and the east side, where the bodegas, older buildings and projects are, became increasingly clear. Emo boys sat out in lawn chairs on my side of the block drinking beer and listening to the ball game, as salsa music blasted from the other side of the street. I thought it was funny, and stupid, even if there had been a knifefight in the first hours of the blackout the day before, and a sneaker shop that had been looted in the night. And then I tried to get a slice of pizza.
And despite waiting online I was skipped over, not once but twice, and then I asked what that was about. I was screamed at, told I had to stick up for myself if I wanted to live around here, and it became clear with some rapidity, that as an interloper, who was presumed to have means, I wasn't welcome to food. So for the blackout, I ate muffins I had made in its first hours and seethed. I had wanted to throw the fistful of quarters I had at the time at the man at the register, but they were the only means I had. When I got back to my apartment, I broke down in tears.
A lot of people have been saying the blackout isn't a big deal and wouldn't be if I could remember past ones. But the truth is one of my earliest memories is of 1977 and its blackout, my father insisting my mother and I stay in doors because it was dangerous on the streets and Son of Sam was out there too. We lit Hanukka candles, and I knew something was wrong, but I was hushed when asked about it. That blackout was smaller in scale and last half as long, but what happens on a dark night in New York, was probably forever burned into my mind by it.
On Thursday, when this whole affair was still an annoying adventure, I listened to the street start to grow quiet, the raucus noise of everyone sitting outside quieting as the sun went behind buildings and then silencing completely in the ten minutes before it set entirely. The second it was truly night, sound errupted -- people cheering and screaming, sounds of dismay, and people generally howling into the night to ward of ghosts or their neighbors. I didn't have enough candles to read by, and so I lay in the dark, sweatting on my bed, in the flickering glow of candles Amanda sent me, thinking of when she was here and I was sick and delirious in the same light. I listened to the radio down on the street, which had returned again until the cops ordered it shut off at 12:30, and I watched the patterns of all nature of blinky lights and sirens move across my walls, and I waited, while nothing happened and I couldn't sleep.
The initial hours of the blackout were the most mystifying, as the power flickered out, my first thought was that Con Ed, which has been less than efficient about processing our payments had fucked up again. I looked frantically for the bill and left several cranky messages for my roommate who is and was in Canada (and turns out to have been blacked out as well). Then I stepped into my building's hall, where it was also dark, just an emergency lamp illuminating the hall. The floor was hot, and I, in a panic, thought there was a fire downstairs. I ran down to investigate, but I forgot I live over the laundrey room, which was still eminating heat. Still, I didn't understand what was happening, and went outside.
Cell phones weren't working, but I eventually got a call through to Texas as I watched thick black smoke come from our local Con Ed plant. I figured this was like last summer, a local thing, not thinking that that even while at the same plant had blacked out a different neighborhood. Amanda went to the NYTimes and then told me the whole eastern seaboard had gone dark. Neighbors ran outside to pay their ConEd bills and discovered what I had, and people interrupted my call to ask how I got my phone working. "Texas!" I said and shrugged, which was a bit like "Pirate!", but not really.
By then I was on some random tirade about terrorism and moving to Australia, which isn't worth going into other than to say I was very sincere, and I now know exactly where my current limits for NYC's bullshit are. And Amanda was a trooper, feeding me information until the turned the cell towers off, cutting all of us with battery power off from a signal and in for a long contactless night.
I went for a walk, to buy water, but all the stores were closed. I wound up sitting in a woman's garden listening to her radio and talking about it all. It was a hip hop station in Philadelphia, and children kept riding their bikes through the garden as she admonished them to play more gently, for they all had asthma. I told her about Paris and all the people who had died from the heat this month. And she points, as if across the water. "Paris? In France, right?" and I had to explain how they don't generally have airconditioning there. Later, as I walked around some more, I heard teenage boys discussing it. "There's some country, I don't know... like over the water and shit, and all these people are dying from the heat."
I felt very alone then, and in recounting it all now, am remarkably unsurprised by any of it.
