It was Friday. I took a day off from work, so we could take our baby to the passport office to get his passport. Our adult passports, one expired and one close to expiry, can be renewed online, while the bureaucratic hurdles for a baby passport are slightly higher. They require the presence of both parents as well as baby to ascertain, I suppose, that the baby looks to be more or less a baby, is not possessed of any threatening features (e.g., a beard, an evil eye, a look of profound, impetuous dissatisfaction with current political arrangements, not on the baby no-fly-list, etc.).
My morning wide open, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and deliver my beagle’s poop sample, finally secured several days after his diarrhea subsided, to the vet for analysis. I loaded the laundry into the washer downstairs and bragged about this unprecedented level of productivity to my wife. Why, I could be back in the time for the dry cycle and preempt an angry neighbor from tossing our wet clothes unto a dirty chair, secure in the thought that Auggie’s feces were now in the competent hands of medical science.
We availed ourselves of the USPS website, which exceeded expectations by allowing me to make an appointment at the local passport processing agency in less than a minute. Coffees sipped, and diaper bag packed, we were on our way a full 25 minutes ahead of our 10:15 am appointment. It was a rare leisurely stroll down Houston. Most normal people were hunkered down in their offices. The dodgier elements would not be out for another couple of hours and, save for the odd SoHo gentleman or lady of leisure, and the inescapable construction sites, the streets were ours.
As we approached our destination, the Post Office on Varick Street, a Passport Agency sign directed us to keep walking toward Hudson and take the second entrance. We thought nothing of it, but when we walked into a tiny municipal lobby with no wheelchair ramp, we were greeted by a metal detector/x-ray machine combo, the type you see at courthouses and other government offices. Somewhat frazzled, I started emptying my pockets and simultaneously helping Mary with the stroller. The little caddy on the bottom was full of baby accessories.
A line was forming behind us as I kept loading bin after bin with personal belongings. While one security guard, on the “clear” end of the screener, was patient and polite, the “I’ve-seen-it-all-and-can’t-wait-to-retire” guy on the business end of it was testy and curt. It was an unintentional good cop-bad cop dynamic. When I ran out of bins and asked no one in particular where I could get more, the brusque guard gave me a sneering look and sniggered, “LOOK around, Pops.” This set me off—I was triggered.
“How about practicing a little fucking kindness,” came my totally out of proportion response. The captious man shot a cautious glance at the good cop, who seemed to be senior. Whatever message came back about the crazy guy with the baby stroller losing his shit over nothing much, he pulled back, defensively. Mary was aghast—she’d seen this before. I doubled down. “It’s like the fucking DMV.” The line forming behind us patiently waited while I got the bile out of my system. Absently, I threw the last of my belongings into another bin. Mary rolled the stroller through, eager to get it over with.
I looked around, defiantly, and took a step toward the metal detector. Good cop asked, with all undue courteousness, “Sure you got everything out of your pockets?” Graciously, I made a show of sticking my hands in my pockets to show that I was a measured, reasonable citizen who didn’t lash out at government workers at the slightest provocation. Alas, my pockets weren’t empty.
Surprisingly, there was a plastic zip bag in my pocket—How did I miss THAT? What IS THAT? With a subconscious act of self-preservation, I casually pulled out of my Uniqlo track jacket, and placed on the bin, a clear plastic bag containing a fecal diagnostic kit full of my beagle’s 3-hour-old do, collected in the gravelly pits of the Washington Square Park Dog Run. Feigning nonchalance, I left our fate in the hands of a grumpy Federal employee who could have seized his chance to pounce on a guy entering a State Department building with a suspicious lab kit.
As luck would have it (and, perhaps, somewhat disturbingly), the poo sailed through the x-ray unchallenged. We took the elevator up a few flights and entered another municipal hallway to the confusing instructions of a government greeter. Compensating for my shithousing behavior downstairs, I thanked her profusely and got in the next line. When we got to the window, I read out our confirmation number and didn’t blink when the woman behind the plastic glass window informed us that we were in the wrong building. “This is just for expediting. You need to go to the Post Office, on Varick.”
We thanked her and walked briskly back toward the elevators. There was no time to be dejected or defeated. We had a government appointment to keep. At the elevator, two giant Hasids paced nervously right in front of us. Through the Matrix filter of our paranoia, all we saw were two plump black-clad silhouettes with the ones and zeros of MEASLES OUTBREAK flowing up and down their frames. But nothing would stop us from getting to our post office appointment 15 minutes late and getting that baby passport processed. NOT TODAY.
It was December 1989. The Soviet Jewish Immigrant charter bus took us on a grueling journey that seemed like it lasted a week thought it probably took no more than a day or two. The route? Odessa>Uzhgorod (Western Ukraine)>Bratislava (capital of Slovakia). In Slovakia, we boarded what was probably the first inter-city train I ever took in my life. In the cold, dark Slovak night, my grandfather traded a box of Russian vodka to Czech railyard staff in exchange for train tickets.
At one of the departure gates at Laguardia Airport, a middle-aged man in a gray business suit and tie towers over a small boy of 10 or so wearing a striped shirt and jeans. The man’s right hand is on the boy’s left shoulder. He’s speaking, ostensibly to the boy, in an affected manner, as if he’s being recorded for a school video. He keeps sweeping his left arm across some distant horizon. Remember when flying was a hassle, good for little more than watercooler fodder between traveling salesmen? A necessary nuisance for folks reuniting with loved ones or jetsetting on transcontinental adventures? Welcome to the airport of the future, little Billy–and the future is now! Modern technology, no longer limited to your home and business office, is disrupting the way the airport experience is delivered to today’s busy traveler.
“The first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides.”
By 9 p.m., I was at my nephews’ house. My sister-in-law, Yelena, and my nephews, had just returned from Staten Island, where they spent the day helping salvage what was left of her brother’s newly finished basement and car. It was an utter disaster and one of many sad stories we’d be hearing in the coming days and weeks. In the familiar surrounds of their 3rd floor condo, a surprise awaited. Neither Yelena nor my older nephew, Joseph, had any idea where my mom was. They’d just gotten home a short while ago and were unaware of any visits by my mom. Of course, it was possible that she had come and gone, but there was no evidence of her visit whatsoever.
It felt good for Little Brother to be charged with what felt like Big Brother responsibility–rescuing the parents, and Grandpa. OK, fine, so they weren’t in any mortal danger as far as we could tell–but the job had some heft to it. I used the office Internet to locate one of the scant few inter-borough express buses that were said to be running. My brother wished me Godspeed. If all went according to plan (we didn’t really have one), we would rendezvous the next day at his kids’ house (rumors had it that my Sister-in-Law’s condo had full power) for my younger nephew’s 10th birthday party.
Once I had some juice in my phone I called the parents immediately. They lived in evacuation Zone A which, oddly enough, was not particularly well evacuated. This of course I already knew from a jokey conversation with them the day before Sandy made landfall in New York.
The morning after the storm was deceptively normal, the very vision of the quiet apocalypse: probably what Rick and Co. on The Walking Dead feel every morning waking up in a comfortable bed, before booting up and recalling that the world has gone to shit. Still, I went through the rounds of testing out more than one appliance to verify it was still on the fritz. The fallen ancient tree outside, still covering much of Houston at the Wooster corner, was the definitive, stark proof that last night’s tempest was real.
Maybe it’s just the compulsion of the storyteller, but Sandy brought out the documentarian in me. Whether racing from one responsibility to another or calmly watching the storm and the damage it wrought to our city, I kept coming back to the fact that there were thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of stories swirling around like the headwinds of the hurricane itself. I was just a bug in its path—an active participant with the morbid curiosity of a gawker. Surely this strange concoction of perceptions has something to do with my relatively recent change of area codes—even with the lights going down on Lower Manhattan, my experience had little in common with those stark, harsher realities faced by so many of New York’s Zone A dwellers.My tale starts, like so many others, at a bar: GMT Tavern to be exact, the drinking hole closest to my Shire. There, on that fateful Monday, I met my friend K., mere days since repatriated from a three-year adventure working abroad. Just in time for the latest Storm of the Century—which we, of course, laughed off as we sipped our tall pints of English ales. K., who was still in the process of resettlement and apartment hunting, took a cab from the Midtown extended stay bastion of comfort that was his temporary home. Earlier that day, we’d both received very clear word from our respective employers—there’d be no work tomorrow. Not an hour passed and we were parked on our GMT bar stools, watching round-the-clock previews of the storm and toasting to media hyperbole.
BoHeMigrant 