Angry

Tricks

Worse

 

People have been emailing and calling to see how we did. We did okay. The lights flickered four times on that night and the net went out for five minutes. Our modem and new router rebooted themselves. Over the following few days, we did the same.

 

The boys were home, Alex bored over his iPad as he wrestled with a naggy cough and Ned bored just in general. Could have been worse.

 

A few miles in any direction from this apartment people were not bored. Seashore Staten Island a wreck; a hundred homes leveled by a fire in coastal Queens that firefighters could not reach at the height of Sandy; a million or so without electricity, for four cold nights almost half of them in Manhattan south of 39th street. On about three of those nights I remembered to think about all the places I knew south of 39th Street that were suddenly dark.

 

“The kids are home from school for a week,” I tell my sister in Arizona.

 

“Ugh,” she replied. She had a lot of kids.

 

We pick up. “Ned,” says Jill, “check the drawers in your room and see if there’s something we can put in a bag!” The call went out for stuff that was warm – unseasonably cold temps expected later this week, in addition to a Northeaster slated to hit the wreck that used to be seashore Staten Island. All we find is jeans and khakis and an old sweater.

 

“Thank you,” says the lady at the donation station.

 

I email another lady who, when the world was normal, ran a great group for families who live with autism. “Is there something we can do?” I have to send a message on Facebook because she has no power. (When the World Was Normal Department: How did I expect her to get a message at all if the power’s off?)

 

During the week (Ugh!) home, Alex rips a bigger hole in the screen of our living room window and, when we’re not looking, tosses out a plastic pig. He bolts from our apartment (we catch him). He develops a wracking cough that makes people in the street stare at us with wide whatthefuck eyes.

 

After Katrina, I wrote about how Alex would have been treated in the Superdome when it started to come apart. Now the coming apart is happening closer to home and still all I think about is how far south it is on this island – 39th is miles from here – and how I have to remember to plug in the iPad at night.

 

People like Alex and his parents were out there in those four dark nights, and are still out there. “If it had just been me,” I told Jill over a beer or three, “I would’ve taken a notebook and just headed south of 39th the first night!” But there was Alex to bathe and bed. Later I lay on the bedroom floor near him playing “Angry Birds” while he fell mercifully asleep and I looked over the screen of the iPad at the yellow light in the hallway and tried not to think about how it could have been worse.

Storm Shop

Sandy

On Saturday night they announce that I may be trapped in my apartment with both my kids for two days of cancelled school. Talk about natural disasters.

 

Sandy is “barreling” up the East Coast, set to “crash” into New Jersey a few hundred miles south of my living room, with a “left hook” sea surge that threatens to flood a lot of Manhattan. “What floor are you on again?” my friend Jon asks from Buffalo (which, unbelievably, will also feel Sandy). Nine, I reply. “Should be just high enough,” he replies, “to hail a passing Coast Guard cutter.”

 

Then I do what doomed the Donner Party: I forget to buy bread. “Jeff, a storm is coming!” Jill informs me. “People buy out everything. What else do we have to get for this stupid storm?” To further embed her in a pissy mood, the organizers of the Pumpkin Sail – pumpkins with candles inside launched on boards in the nearby Harlem Meer – cancel the annual Halloween event. Jill was looking forward to taking pictures and posting them on Instagram.

 

“There’s not going to much left to buy,” says Ned, heading out with Jill. He would’ve been great on the Titanic. “I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to my office on Monday,” says Jill, as the disasters continue.

 

Irene was just 14 months ago and a bust as disasters go. Wind and rain, and I stepped out at noon and found birds looking for food. No bird is going to look for food if a hurricane is coming back. The sea surge stopped about five inches short of flooding South Street Seaport. All of this annoys me: We don’t live in a quaint seaside town where we can walk the beach easily. We live in the hardest Manmade place on earth, trying to scratch out something in the lower middle class. I moved here from Maine so I wouldn’t have to care about the frigging weather.

 

If they do cancel school, maybe we’ll sleep late. Maybe not: Alex has a racking cough that is more or less entering its second week and won’t leave him alone, and I wonder what’ll happen if the power goes out (Batteries!) and leaves the neb machine dead.

 

On Sunday afternoon, as Sandy closes in, Ned and I go to a bar – he’s spent a surprising amount of time in a bar for an 11-year-old – watching the Redskins’ loss to the Steelers. With Ned, I had the best time ever at a loss – at least until halftime, when the news buttinskis confirmed that NYC public schools will be closed on Monday. Ned and I stop in the wine store on the walk home; it’s quaint to stock up on bottled water and milk and batteries and yadda yadda yadda, but we have kids.