I work a block from Times Square, and you can already see the stacks of sawhorses, piled up on the cross-town avenues, waiting for tomorrow night.
I’ve only done the let’s-watch-the-ball-drop thing once (once was enough!!) – and it was pre-September 11, and even back then, the crowd control was beyond belief. They have it down to a science. We were thousands and thousands of people, jam-packed together, drunk, unruly, thousands and thousands of us … but they herded us about, keeping us to certain paths, keeping us in control … Sure, it took us over an hour to walk 10 blocks, but damn, they kept us in order.
I have no desire to be anywhere near the island of Manhattan tomorrow. None. New Year’s Eve just isn’t my thing, anyway, but New Year’s Eve here? Uhm. No. No thank you.
Since September 11, and probably because I work pretty much right beneath where the ball drops, you can feel the energy change on the streets, and palpably, a day or so before the celebration. It’s like there’s a hunkering-down that happens. You can see it on people’s faces, but it’s more than that – it’s like the air itself hunkers down. There’s a certain tension between the molecules. You can’t point to where exactly, you don’t know what it is … maybe it’s just the piles of sawhorses. Maybe it’s the greater number of uniformed cops on the streets … But you think it might be something more than that.
After all, this is an island of millions of people. Energy is a real thing. It can be measured. So of course, the energy, if you will, of millions of people will have SOME effect on the environment. You can’t help but pick up on it, how on earth do you tune out the energy of millions of people? This is why the city can be so draining. It is very very hard to tune out everyone’s clanging energy … and ALSO keep your heart alive, and open. I’ve seen people get chewed up by this city. In tuning out the masses, they tune out themselves. Millions of people, pushing together on the sidewalks, all feeling, thinking, living, everyone’s LIVES coming right at ya … usually, all of this comes across as just random energy – because it’s diffused, everyone seems so diverse, nobody is doing the same thing, thinking the same thing, but with something like New Year’s Eve approaching, all of that random-ness gets focused onto one object. You can feel it happen. It’s like a scent, or an afterimage. Or maybe like a sonic boom, an echo … something vibrating on a frequency not heard but felt.
A friend of mine who doesn’t live here came down to New York maybe a month or a month and a half after September 11, and she said the feeling of loss and grief was practically like a forcefield around the city. The rest of the country felt the loss, yes, but to be here, day in day out … she said she didn’t really get it until that day. What also made her “get it” was the endless amount of funerals she got stuck behind. At first she thought: “Huh, there are so many funerals today!” And then it hit her … Holy shit. Yes. There are so many funerals here.
That kind of collective energy – of a city, of millions of people, is real. As tangible as one of the 5 senses. We all saw those towers fall. We all have that collective memory. And at times like this – New Year’s Eve, especially – you can FEEL that September day in the air. At least I can. For the most part, you can forget. You don’t walk around with September 11th on your shoulders all the time anymore. There are actually days that go by when it doesn’t cross your mind. Not TOO many days, mind you! But certainly … you are able to move on, you are able to do things without having it flicker across your mind’s eye like a newsreel. But this is only after YEARS passing.
Maybe that’s what I sense in the streets. The hunkered-down faces of passersby, the cops everywhere – on foot, on horseback, in cars, the piles of sawhorses … you can feel the waiting in the air, you can feel the joyless sense of: “All righty then, let’s just get thru this thing”, but more than that, you can feel September 11. The afterimage of that day, the way it was in the days immediately following … the looks of shock, the man in the blue suit you saw staggering to sit down on the curb 2 days after, putting his head in his hands, the lost-looking people holding onto each other … and then, of course, all that immediacy fades. Life goes on. You see people laughing on the streets again, you hear conversations that don’t include the words “towers”, and … at first it seems jarring, or wrong … like life SHOULDN’T go on. But eventually, you realize: it is RIGHT that it should go on, and that people should sit at outside cafes and have a bottle of wine, smoke cigarettes, and talk and laugh … It’s beautiful, actually. But all it takes is some giant event, some huge gathering of a crowd – like the Republican Convention, for example, or like New Year’s Eve … and it is like no time has passed. We are back there. In September. Back then.
Last year, I worked up until 3 or 4 pm on New Year’s Eve itself and the feeling on the streets was almost sickeningly tense. Perhaps those huddled in Times Square, already jazzed up on liquor, in full party mode, whooping it up, wouldn’t have felt it. They would have had NO idea what I was sensing, as I skulked to Port Authority the back way, avoiding Times Square like the plague, using the now saw-horsed paths, following the waving hands of the cops … the cops who were EVERYWHERE … I came up 8th Avenue, which is bleak and gross even on the BEST of days. But that early afternoon, it was deserted. Maybe a couple of cabs meandering up and down, but the sawhorses lined the avenue, as far as the eye could see … waiting for the crowds, the crowds who were, at that moment, descending upon the city. I had to get the hell out of town before they arrived. I mean, 8th Avenue was so deserted that I would not have been surprised to see tumbleweed drifting by. It had a creepy air. Like – none of this is real. All of it could be swept away in an instant.
It was an empty city. A waiting city.
That’s what I feel in the streets today. Waiting. Waiting for tomorrow night to pass … hunkering down.
All of this, I would say, is made even more intense and unreal by the disaster in Southeast Asia and India. It’s unreal, making preparations for a massive celebration, ringing in the New Year, in the wake of such destruction … That’s also what I thought, when I saw the stacked-up sawhorses.
So.
Let’s just do this thing. Let’s get this thing over with.
happy new year!
Whatever you end up doing, have a good time. Maybe the new year will bring some hope and better news.
Still a bit sick, I’ll probably just be at home. Drinking scotch. (You know. For medicinal purposes.) I’ll go up on my roof at midnight – to watch the ball drop across the river. Should be pretty cool.
Kinda wish I could come to Hermosa Pier (or whatever it is, Emily) and chill in the warm weather with you!
But oh well. We have May 6 to keep us going.
Nueva York
If you read anything today, read this. New York City – el corazón del mundo….
As Emily has already said – Whatever you end up doing, have a good time. (Perfecting that medicinal recipe, IMHO, would be a fine idea.)
..but, for me, hunkering down has always been my preferred response to the, particular, approaching date – not one of my favourite times of the year to put it mildly – the cellar will be raided… and I will awake in another time.
My favorite New Year’s ever was at the millennium in Dublin. It was really scatter-brained, and not so INSANE as it is here … we were at a private party, I kissed a random Irish bloke named Tom, we had a blast. I did a jig with an 80 year old man. Life was good.
Not the insane frenzy that New York puts itself through.
Blech.
I mean – happy new year and all that. Of course! Just hunkering down, that’s all.
You know how Im always writing about life’s little gems? Well, you’re what I would call one of those really big little gems.
I was there with you, as usual, while I read this. Gracias, Sheila, y feliz año nuevo.
Did you notice that sort of tension – obviously not the same as post 9/11 NYC but – when you came up north and when you went back south? I remember hearing people say how when they cross the border, they feel lighter, different, and it’s true — well, it is for me. You get so used to living in this weird world with all its paranoias and tensions and guardedness. Then you get on the train and when you cross the border it’s like everyone lets out their breath and their shoulders relax. You walk around and you’re not in that same bubble of what could happen. Reading your post reminded me of that, the energy created – just curious if you picked up on it here.
And Happy New Year!
Carrie –
I definitely felt that. The feeling on the train coming back down south was much more open and giddy … and as the train went north, and it got emptier and emptier, you could feel that tension in between the molecules, like I mentioned.
Half the time, I do not even realize how guarded I am – here in New York – until I get out for a short time. You know? On some level, you HAVE to be guarded here. Otherwise, it will chew you up, grind you up into little pieces, and laugh at the fragments on the sidewalk. It can be brutal.
So if I’m away for … even as short a time as a week … I can FEEL what living in that environment has done to me. It is necessary to get away. Indeed.
Happy new year to you as well … so wonderful to finally meet you at last!
Val –
Thanks, friend. :)
Sheila, I feel your pain. I live two blocks south of Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena. The saw horses have been out and ready for action for a couple weeks. Just laying all disassembled in piles on street corners. The bleachers are up along the Blvd, shrouding churches and blocking parking lots. The port-a-potties are strategically placed in the oddest places. Right on street corners. It’s bizarre. There are tour buses everywhere and the traffic is horrible. I have friends coming from LA tonight to hang out and they have been given alternate directions which are a couple miles out of the way, but will take less time than the normal route. The streets will slowly be shut down beginning tomorrow, until all of Colorado Blvd is closed for the parade. The worst part is afterward. The mess the parade watchers leave is unbelieveable.
On the brigt side of things. The University of Texas is in the Rose Bowl and Texas produces some fine looking folk. Eye candy everywhere! :-) The Michiganders ain’t too bad lookin’ either.
I know what you mean about having to get out. I think I said to you while you were here, my husband likens it to living at the bottom of the ocean. You just adjust to the pressure and don’t realize how much you are actually living under — until you surface. Anniversaries, or crisis times, or build-up to events accelerate the tension; the marching season build up the the 12th is one trigger here, for example, as is the big events in New York where you realize you’re in the perfect target, like New Year’s. How we live with fear and pretend we control it, I suppose. Taming our fears? Like a tamed lion, it’s still got its wild instinct.
Loved meeting you as well, shy girl, ha ha, here’s to meeting again sometime in 2005 :-)
Good luck making it through NYE, Sheila. As you know, I view it as “Open Mike Night at an AA meeting”, so no wild parties for me. My 2 best New Year’s are the one in Dublin (ah… Ciaran … and SHRIEKING Sweet Caroline at the top of our lungs) and one at my apartment where we were watching movies, and in the middle of the movie suddenly realized there were loud noises outside. Our reaction was, “What *is* that?”, and then we looked at each other and said, “Oh, happy new year” and instantly resumed watching the movie. Good times!
I hear on the radio all these ads for bars with wild New Years parties..and they’re just so unappealing. We’ll do what we do every year, go to a friends house in Westchester, drink beer or whatever else, play various board games, drink champagne at midnight (and I remind myself again, just like I do every New Years, while sipping the champagne “I don’t really like this stuff”), then we continue with the games and casual drinking..then we all crash on various guest beds.
I did the Times Square thing twice. Once in 2000, and once in 2002. The changes in security and crowd control were significant, as anyone would expect, but aside from a bit of apprehension, the people were the same.
That night, and several more like it, are largely what proved my conviction that this nation is more or less indestructible.
Happy New Year, everyone.
So it goes.