Category Archives: slice of NYC life

Friday the Thirteenth Again

Rodney Dangerfield:

When the alarm rang I hit snooze, and the snooze bar came off.  I went into the bathroom,  the door knob came off in my hand.  I was afraid to pee.

It will sound petty and peevish, I know, but I haven’t been sleeping enough the last few weeks.  I’m down about 2 hours every night, it seems.   I was asked to sleep over in SoHo and take care of my sweetheart’s cat while she was away overnight.  I was to stay over and make sure the Baron had his accustomed dinner service, his midnight snack and his continental breakfast.

They are renovating the apartment above.  It worked out better than any alarm clock could, for the cat, because it was impossible to stay in bed directly under the hammer blows, drilling and other banging that commenced three hours before my alarm was set for.  The cat was happy, he had his late breakfast a few hours earlier than he otherwise would have had I not had such a persistent and energetic alarm clock pound me awake.

I’m not complaining, mind you.  I am complaining, let me face that sad fact.  Of course, as my father was wont to point out, I’d complain if I was hanged with a new rope.  All I need is a couple more cups of coffee and I’ll be fine.  Fine, I say.   Whoops, the drilling has moved to over my position here at the computador.  Excuse me, please, I’ve got to get out into the street for some peace and quiet.

 

A Lady With Style

I passed by the Improv after a day of bicycle messengering.  World-weary woman smoking a cigarette at the door, clearly worked there.  I asked what I had to do to get on stage and do my bit.  

“Singer or comic?” she asked.  

“Matter of opinion,” I said.  

“Comic,” she said. “You don’t get to do your bit.  You get to do two minutes of your bit. Get here by 6, sign the list, wait with fifty others, see if you’re called.  They like you, you can come back and do more of your bit.”  

Never took her up on it, but I liked her style very much.

Drown ’em– or at least Waterboard ’em

The U.S. Postal Service, in this instance.

“Your call is very important to us.  Did you know there is a difference between Regular, Certified and Regular Certified Mail?  It’s true.  You can find this interesting information and much more at

http://www.gofuckyourselfwhileyou’reonhold.com

or please continue to hold while we experience more than usual call volume and wait times are expected to exceed one hour.  Or visit us at http://www.suckourcollectiveass.com to learn about more ways the US Post Office is working hard to make things better for you without hiring additional qualified personnel.  Please continue to hold, your business is so important to us we’ve formed a partnership with Fed Ex to serve you even better.  Did you know there is a difference between Regular, Certified and Regular Certified Mail?  It’s true!”

I wrote an email, to my landlord’s automated “helpline”, while listening to this over and over:

I am the tenant in apt. __  at __   _____.  I left a message with Marjorie earlier today and am following up with this email. I’m working on getting my December rent check, mailed weeks ago, back to you ASAP.  
 
The post office returned my December rent check to me on Saturday, in the envelope you provided, slightly crushed, with your address clearly visible and the stamp cancelled.  (see attachments)   [I sent them photos, recto and verso– ed.]  They sent it back to me, instead of to you, the Postmaster said, because “We Care”.   Aggravating to say the least.
 
I just found out that overnight UPS, via the Post Office (only way to deliver to a PO Box) is $32.  I am on hold with the Post Office now, the ones who screwed this up in the first place. So far I’ve been on hold for almost 40 minutes.  Now I’m five minutes into a third wait for a supervisor, requesting a voucher for the price of having this delivered.  So far they’ve offered to let me stand on line at my local post office at the height of the Christmas shipping season so they can correct their mistake.
 
I was fairly confident the Post Office would  offer no help in this matter, even before I was just “transferred” to a supervisor, and my 39 minute call was cut off.
 
If there is a physical office I can deliver this check to (I recall I used to send these to an address at Penn Plaza), I can deliver it to you tomorrow, Wednesday or Friday.
Please advise,
Blah Blah Woof Woof

Bankrupt Democracy

The air is toxic in this sweaty mine shaft where we scratch for the ore democracy used to be made of, my fine feathered friends.  The federal government, once a defender of human rights (as when, a century belatedly, it battled the Klan) and keeper of many valuable public institutions (schools high on that list) and much of the nation’s infrastructure, keeps begging these days to be drowned in a bathtub.  The Free Market, the private sector, is constantly held up (by those with the money to know best) as the best arbiter of what is important and what is worth drowning in a bathtub.  After all, mustn’t we all admit that it’s the extremely wealthy and successful who have the expertise and proven success to tell the rest of us the best thing to do in every sector of  life?

A few days before Christmas, when lines in the post office can be an hour or more long, I got a nice symbol, in my mailbox, of our tax dollars at work.  A large envelope from the post office, with a clear plastic window on one side, showing me the partially mangled envelope I’d sent to my landlord with my rent check for December a week or two earlier.  My landlord’s printed address clearly visible through the window, as is my return address.  The stamp has been cancelled.   The reason my landlord did not cash my rent check this month is that the U.S. Post Office was keeping it, after it was partially ruffled in a government machine, to considerately return to me with this important message on the back:

postal

So, this citizen will spend perhaps $15 on Monday to let Fed Ex do, overnight, the work a 45 cent stamp, and the full faith and credit of our U.S. Postal Service, could not accomplish in two weeks.  And resist the foolish, if understandable, urge to do anything whatsoever to respond to the moronic government robot that signs itself, with sincere regret, after an appropriately Newspeak arbeit macht frei taken directly from the Free Market best practices book,  my postmaster.

 

A Gentle Story

I try to walk at least five miles a day and I have a device clipped to my shirt that encourages me to do so, recording every step and hundredth of a mile (20 steps).   Some days lately walking this distance is about all I manage to accomplish, but, I’ll take my accomplishments where I can and as my father always said of such things “it’s better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.”

Walking in the Bronx last night, looking for a new route around the part of my usual path that takes me under ear shattering elevated trains, I walked down a street I’d never been on.  This empty street, a block or two long, is named Adrian Avenue.  As I reached the end of it I heard cries for help coming out of a window over my shoulder.  

Two women were piteously calling from a window in an alley, their necks thrust out into the night.  “Please help us, we’re locked in!” the younger of them cried as I turned to face them.  

I took out my cell phone.  “Who can I call for you?” was my first idea.

“No,” said the desperate woman, “come into the lobby and let us out!”

It was after 10 pm, the unfamiliar street was empty and quiet.  Two helpless women lure unknown man into lobby where accomplices wait to rob and beat him, I thought, tabloid style.  “How will I get into the lobby?” I asked the women.

“We’ll buzz you in,” the younger one said.

“And how will I be able to get you out if the door is locked?” I asked.

“We’ll throw the key out,” said the woman.

“What apartment are you in?” I said.  She gave me a number on the first floor.  They buzzed me into the small apartment building.  I saw their door and noticed there was no door knob on it.  I heard them inside.  There was no sign of anyone waiting with a blackjack.

Within a moment or two the key slid out under the door.  I turned the key and the door opened.  Both women were so happy to be rescued from their predicament they were practically giggling.  The older woman, in a dressing gown, beamed a grateful smile.  The younger one also beamed gratefully, pumping my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and thanking me profusely.  I smiled too, told them they were welcome, and went back to walking.

Less than 200 steps later I was at the end of Adrian Avenue, and looking left, realized the street did not go through in the direction I needed to go.  There would never be another reason to walk down Adrian Avenue, I realized, which made the odd coincidence of being there to do a good deed a little bit cooler.

Courtesy Call

“Hi,” said the voice, mangling the pronunciation of my invented name.  “Did I pronounce that right?”

I reassured her that she’d been close and then, at her request, pronounced the invented pronunciation she’d  been so far from.  She then pronounced it perfectly and told me she was calling from the medical center where I’m having my colonoscopy tomorrow.

“This is a courtesy call,” she told me and then informed me I would have to make a $100 co-pay before the procedure.

“OK,” I said, “thank you for the courtesy.”  She peeped a little laugh-like peep.  As to my questions about the procedure itself, I would have to call the doctor directly.  “So you are calling from billing,” I said.  

“Yes,” she told me pleasantly and we wished each other a good day.

Ten Minute Drill

Everything, pretty much, is possible.  We can see this from the seemingly impossible things people do– on musical instruments, with their bodies, the things they create.  As my father’s blasé uncle said when his nephews took him to the zoo and excitedly showed him a giraffe:  “who needs it?”

Everything in life is pretty much impossible.   Look how hard it is to do the simplest things for so many people.  You will die unless you lose 50 pounds, live a life of pharmaceutical limbo until you do.   “So?” you say, “I’m going to die anyway.”  True dat.  As much reason not to do the thing as to do it, particularly if it’s a difficult thing.

This, for example.

Hard to tell, in many things, whether we are entering the fifth inning of a scoreless game, or the bottom of the ninth, down by three runs, with two outs and two strikes, the umpire crooked as the local politician.  The driver of that bus, we assume he is not insane, will not come up on the sidewalk amid screams and mow us all down.  Once in a while the bus driver is insane, plows into a crowd somewhere because he just can’t take it any more, for reasons others will be left guessing at once he blows his brains out after the massacre.

Today ten minutes seems like an eternity, forcing words out the way boys in the Boy Scout Handbook sometimes did not let nature take its course, causing them to worry and turn to scout-masters or priests who would ease their concerns about this worrisome behavior.   Sometimes this easing of concerns would scar them for life, but that’s just another example of the sardonic turn of mind instilled in me young by my father, who had it instilled in him with a whip across the face.

Let’s imagine he was only actually whipped once or twice a day.  Does that explain the whole story?   Can the whole story be explained, even summarily, in the 1:30 left on the game clock?  I think not, typing faster and faster, look, suddenly toward the end it all speeds up, goddamn it, if only there was time to reset the clock, get a few of those minutes back, gather my thoughts, rewrite a few lines, start again.  The stories we could tell each other, he thought wanly as the clock, relentless as this hourglass of a life here, ticks down 13…10… and before I can say time…. time!

Business Consultation

I had a friend whose father, a salesman and ad copy writer, alternately chipper and dour, died about ten years ago at the age of ninety.  His name was Al and for the last few years of his life he was pretty much dour.  File that away.

I went to a three pm meeting with a business consultant named David at the New York City Small Business Administration.  This was the first step, according to the website, in setting up a relationship with NYC Small Business Solutions.  The purpose of my visit, as I wrote in my on-line appointment confirmation, was to get help prioritizing the many tasks ahead of me: marketing, recruiting, fundraising, negotiating city government contracts, among other things, and to find out exactly what services were offered.  The website said there was help available, expert advice in all these areas, a pool of pre-screened recruits, meeting rooms there in which we could interview candidates.   A host of classes and business solutions to every challenge faced by every kind of small business and start-up were touted by the website.

At 3:20 David came out, greeted me, we shook hands and I followed him back to his desk at the other end of a large office in the financial district.  He had me fill out the form nobody had handed me during my 25 minute wait, was sheepish after I did, told me he had no idea if anybody even read these.  I didn’t stop to think that this form was close to what I had already filled out on-line.  I noticed his computer screen was blank, with a box in the middle for him to log-in.  

He read all the information I’d written on the form, confirmed that he was reading everything correctly.  He’d read it back fine.   If I’d left then, I would have been slightly ahead of the game.  But determination turned out to be my undoing.  He liked the idea of my program, though he had no inclination to watch the 30 second pitch I had cued up for him on my iPad.

“You have to have a pitch,” he agreed, as I noticed the palsy in both of his hands, the way his lip also twitched.  “You need to be able to give your pitch and be ready to give it over and over again,” he said.  “Very rarely will anyone respond the first time.  When you run an ad in the paper, usually you’ll get no responses until about the sixth time it appears,” he said, speaking from experience.   He’d been in sales, he told me.  

I told him that sales was a talent, and he agreed.   I admitted that sales was my weak suit, a talent I unfortunately did not possess, and he nodded sadly and knowingly. I told him a bit more about the program, talked up how it worked exactly as designed, and delivered all kinds of good things to students, but that I needed an excellent sales person.  Eventually he suggested I needed to hire a salesman, an excellent one, but I’d have to pay him well, or perhaps offer a 10% commission on each sale.  A commission was a good way to get a salesman off his ass, he said, make sure he was out there working, and it also allows you to pay him a bit less, since he’ll make it up in commissions, which don’t really come out of your pocket, since you wouldn’t have the sale without his work anyway.

He logged on to his computer walked me through the website, showed me the listing of classes I could sign up for, for free.   Building my own website, there was a course for that, I should probably sign up for that, every business should have a website these days.  He was impressed that I already had a website.  I told him the problem was getting eyeballs to look at the website, and he nodded solemnly, agreed there is an art and a whole world of specialized skills involved in a successful social media campaign.  I told him about the money I’d thrown away on a kid who claimed to be a social media expert, but was not.   He nodded sadly and knowingly.   I restated my dilemma for him and asked him about the pool of pre-screened recruits, and he called across the office “Gina, we help people get employees, don’t we?”  Gina told him they did, and my hunch, based on what the website had stated, was confirmed.

He then expressed his confusion as to why I’d chosen to form a non-profit. His manner indicated that I’d more than likely made a fatal mistake.  I explained that I’d formed an educational business for a public good and believed the tax deductible status would make it easier to raise money from donors and get grants from outfits devoted to the nonprofit sector.  I suggested, as I looked at his sad, knowing expression, that the jury was still out as to how good a decision I’d made.

Soon after that it dawned on me what had happened.  They had somehow reanimated Al, my friend’s mostly dour former salesman dad, who had died a decade or more ago.  They reanimated him, cleaned him up, put him in a shirt and tie and called him David.   “David” sat across from me, smiling uncomfortably, as anyone would smile having been dead for more than ten years and suddenly shoved behind a help desk at a city agency.  I thanked him warmly for his time, shook his hand heartily and headed out into the cold, grey drizzle.  

For a moment, realizing how close I was to the East River, I thought of dashing over there and throwing myself and the company iPad in.  I decided against it, got something to eat, came home, wrote this, and now I’m going to put my elegant cadaver rebozo back on and see who I can get to chat with me at this shindig coming up in a couple of days.

 

 

Please Tell Me You’re Kidding Me

“So you, a man without a megaphone, with no idea of how to get a megaphone, have as your goal giving a megaphone to poor, feral kids who have no voice in the world?” she said, not as a question.

“An uncharitable way to say it, but yes,” he said.

“Are you starting with the ‘he’ again?” she asked, her smile catlike.

“I leave that to you to figure out,” he said.   These conversations with the internalized victimizer were tedious, but sometimes unavoidable.  The thing was to be patient with the cruel voice in his head, he reasoned.

“Yes,” she said, “be patient with the voice of reality, the voice of the world, the voice of sanity and reason, the voice you’ve made it your life’s work to be deaf to.”

“Of course,” he thought.   It was true he was taking a beating.  No rest in his slumbers, eyes tired as soon as he opened them, the world a slippery uphill slope from the time he put his foot on the floor by his bed.  He could not escape the several ironies, heavy as anvils, clumsy as tortured metaphors.  

“You are so talented!” his friends’ children often told him in childish amazement.  

“You should monetize your art,” many a shrewd friend of a friend had told him years ago.  “Get used to rejection and just keep sending your stuff out, it’s as good, or better, than much of the stuff that’s selling.  You can make a fortune, with persistence and a little luck.”    

It was never a dream, making a fortune, or being loved by rich people.   The dream, somehow, had been making a difference, somehow.  The dream always involved brooding over people, particularly young ones, who were irretrievably fucked by the bad timing and placement of their birth.  

“Bingo!” she said, “now look in the mirror.  Happy Birthday!”

“I take my spirit and I smash the mirrors,” he said, singing Jimi’s triumphant couplet.  The song died in the cluttered room.   There was much to do, but where to start?   He’d heard a spot on the radio about New York City Business Solutions, a great resource for small businesses at any stage of development.  Prematurely thankful for this piece of  luck, he went on-line and got the number.

“The number has been changed,” the recording said and he jotted down the new number.  This new number turned out not to be the number for the office he was looking for, but one in Harlem where he was invited to leave a message.  He left a cheerful message but had no answer on the third business day.

He called 311, which gave him yet another number, which connected him to someone in the wrong office, a bright young man named Adam who promised to set things straight, and by the end of the day, spoke to the supervisor of the proper office who cheerfully promised him an appointment that week, which would be set up by Carlos, cc’d on the follow up email.  

“Thanks so much,” he wrote back three business days ago.  Perhaps they construed it as sarcasm?  

“Are you not used to the fact that virtually nobody ever gets back to you on matters of any importance at all?” she asked, yawning ostentatiously.  

“I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan office,” he said.  

“Sure you are….” she said, letting her voice trail off annoyingly.  “Oh, by the way, that excellent application you wrote to the New York State Small Business Mentor Program, did you ever hear back on that?  It was really a wonderful description of your program and your needs, very well-written and positive sounding.  You put on a good act, anyway.”

“There were some business mentors in Utica, Buffalo, Ulster County, Onondoga County, Syracuse and other places who were sent off as automatically generated possible mentors…” he said.    

“Did you ever hear back from their help desk after you checked ‘please help me with this application’?  Did you ever get a return call on your voice mail seeking assistance?”

“I said, I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan Office,” he said with great determination.   What he was thinking was ‘somebody tell me you’re fucking kidding me with this fucking shit.’

 

 

 

Vacation

I am on vacation, I finally decided the other day, and I am glad to be at rest.  Unpaid vacation, true, but my work is also largely unpaid, so that’s no big deal.  And though I had an offer today from a spamming stranger to visit a site where I can have ‘content’ generated for this blahg automatically, I will continue to do it the old-fashioned way, tapping letter by letter until the words come out on their spindly legs to go through their opinionated paces.   We don’t often stop to think of the miracle of this — 26 symbols, spelling out words that convey enough, properly arranged, to give us information, insight, make us laugh, cry, get mad.   “Mad”, there’s a good bit of meaning in three letters.  

I try to avoid getting mad, though, of course, it can be a challenge sometimes.  I think of that famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald, snapped just as hulking, tortoise backed Jack Ruby lunges forward and pumps a few bullets into Oswald’s guts.  Oswald, face and body language, is the picture of physical agony, as the larger of the two cops escorting him is up on his toes, face a mask of shock, completely taken aback.   I mention Oswald’s face in the context of explaining why it is so important that I take a vacation right now.  Even writing this out may be considered counter-vactionary, and make me eligible for a trip to the gulag of self-flagellation, but I’ve started, and it won’t take long to finish.

I am embarked on a ridiculously difficult mission.  It turns out that creating an innovative educational workshop that functions pretty much as designed, and delights and engages the participants everywhere it operates, was the easy part.  The hard part is learning to be a salesman, manager, marketing expert, CEO, successful social entrepreneur.   The first year was a heady upwards climb, I was constantly thrilled seeing how well the flying machine operated.  During that year I was a cheerful and enthusiastic salesman whenever I had the chance, which admittedly, was not often.  I found myself at the end of that first year amazed that it had only been a year, it seemed like the fullest, most satisfying year of my life had played out slowly and tastily.  One workshop had become three, kindergarten kids proved themselves capable of participating creatively, it was working and everything would work out.  Woken from  a sound sleep I could have chirped cheerfully about the prospects, as I did to the millionaire media mogul who could have been so helpful at the promised second meeting that was never arranged.

The second year was a downward spiral of hard luck and trouble, although the workshop worked as well as ever and I even refined it a good deal.  We went from three sites to zero, got ripped off for ten weeks of work, and found ourselves increasingly frustrated and discouraged.  Eventually my resting face took on the look of Oswald’s in that famous photograph whenever I contemplated my chances, which was often.  It was just as I finally became Oswald, another famous loner, that a couple of old friends leaped into action, arranging interviews, in the dead of summer, with people at two possible sites for the workshop.

The first interview was a very long shot, on a hot and humid day that turned into a monsoon, talking to an entrepreneurial genius who, although doing great things for the poor community where she grew up (and now owns several houses in) is widely disliked there for her brash, brusque, superior style and for, because of her great success and her drive since her ambitious girlhood, being something of an overbearing know-it-all.   She tried to convince me to remake my workshop as something that could be done in a street fair, in an outdoor booth, complete with professionally made banners and a rented tent, to enhance her grand opening (for which she’d received a $100,000 grant)– and to do it for free.  I considered it a successful meeting, though I wound up understanding why this pretty, fit, supremely focused social entrepreneur is widely disliked in her neighborhood.  It was a success because at the end of the ten rounds of nodding and listening to her I was standing and my face wasn’t a bloody mess.   I didn’t look in a mirror, but surely my expression was similar to Oswald’s as  I made my way from the meeting, though I remember feeling relief.

The second interview, a month later, was at a much more promising place, a nonprofit that brings Healing Arts into the lives of people who need it, the aged, the mentally disabled, children.  Most of their funding, it turns out, is for old people in nursing homes and the mentally ill, but they have a school component and currently operate in a number of schools. I was introduced to one of the directors of this 43 year-old nonprofit by an old friend, a member of the board of my nonprofit startup.  She described me in the email as “totally mission driven” and “magical” and she predicted to both of us that our meeting and instant connection would be “magical” too.  My old friend and board member instructed me to call her for details, and I did, but she wasn’t interested in the answer to her question about how things are going.  She cut me off and told me I’d love her friend and that it was a great opportunity.  I remember thinking, after she rang off, that it was too bad she hadn’t thought of this magical connection in the two and a half years we’ve been talking about the difficulty of finding such opportunities.  Timing is, as they sometimes say, everything. 

I understand the need to be alert, positive, interactive, to listen well, to say less rather than more, at a pitch meeting.  I understand that without confidence, optimism and great belief in the value of the product or service you are selling, it is impossible to close the deal.  This must also be reflected in your poised body language and intelligently listening facial expression– a cheerful interest, but not laid on so thick as to look fake.  I was alert, listened well, was interactive, had the sense the discussion had gone fine, though nothing concrete is so far in the works, it is on me to close some kind of deal, if there is to be one.  The door was definitely left open, I’m fairly sure.

Woken from a fitful sleep, urged to a hurry up meeting, on an August afternoon at the program’s desperate low tide, with a woman my friend has known, it turns out, for 11 years or more, just as I am kicked in the balls and wearing the Oswald face much of the time, well, it is not hard to understand why I may have resembled that last photo of Lee Harvey Oswald alive more than I liked as I tried to sell my stalled program to this bright, brusque woman.  I read nothing into the abrupt ending of the meeting, she simply stood up, or the turning away, with perfect comic timing, just as I extended my hand to shake her’s.

Once I send off the pitch I promised her, which is virtually ready to go, it’s vacation time for Bonzo.  And not a moment too soon.