by Liz Phair
“Okay, I can see his head. Here he comes.” Nick, my son, is crowning.
They wait for another wave of contractions, not bothering to ask me when they’re coming, but instead, following a seismograph printout.
“Okay, push, Liz.”
I push, but not hard enough.
“That’s good, but this time, really bear down!”
I sit up straight and make that eeeeeeeeee sound through clenched teeth. Lying on my back with my legs up doesn’t seem like the correct or logical position for getting a bowling ball out of your puss, but I don’t say anything. Our ancestors certainly didn’t deliver their babies this way, and it makes no use of gravity, but this is how it’s done these days, apparently.
“One more, Liz. You’re doing great.”
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaowwww, ooh that hurts! Unhhhh, I don’t want to feel that!”
I look over at my buddy with the drugs. “Can I get just a tiny bit more, please?”
“Sure!” He adjusts one setting and cranks the party up to eleven. I don’t know how to tell you this, dear reader, but I am now high as fuck. Too high. Wasted.
“I saw you play at the Vic,” Dan the Man tells me. “That was a great show! You rock.”
“Okay, Liz, we’re almost there, give me a big push.”
“Unnnggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
“That’s good, that’s good. Keep pushing. Here comes his head.”
“What was that guitar? Was it a Fender? You play a Fender, right?”
I can’t believe I’m having this conversation right now. It’s surreal. My main problem isn’t Dan, though. I feel like I have to hide how high I am from the doctors and the nurses. I start coaching myself. Don’t let your head tip over. Keep it together, Liz. Get a grip. Just act natural. I feel like I’m back in high school and I’ve come home from a party to find that my parents are still up.
“His head is out! Okay, he’s inverted. Okay. We’re going to need the forceps. Right now. Come on, Anna. Now!”
“I brought my Exile in Guyville CD. After this is over, would you mind signing it? I could leave it at the nurses’ station.”
I look over at Jim. My husband has a priceless expression on his face, somewhere between awe and pure animal panic.
“His shoulder is caught. Right there. No, wait until I say.” My doctor and another ob-gyn each have hold of one arm of the forceps, and they are leaning back, using their weight to pull my son the rest of the way out. I find out later that they were afraid he had the cord wrapped around his neck. I feel a whooshing sensation, and I know he’s out. It’s over. I hear a sharp cry, and I know he’s alive. I pass out.
I come to again, briefly, and have just enough time to see them suctioning his mouth and nose on a warming table, pricking his skin and testing his reflexes, prying apart his eyelids to administer eye drops, and wiping him down with wet cloths. This must be the source of all alien abduction fantasies, I think—some dimly repressed memory of this callous entry into the world. They lay him on my chest for a moment, but I lose consciousness again. I am too weak to tell them that I am dangerously close to death. I have completed thirty-two hours of labor.
The next time I wake up, the room is back to normal, and my mother is holding my newborn, tightly swaddled, in her arms. It’s the sweetest and most loving tableau. My eyes are so filmy that the light behind her head makes it look like she has a halo. The two of them are gazing at each other, and I feel the enormous relief of knowing that if I’m gone, he will be loved. He will be adored. I pass out again.
When I wake up for real, it is nighttime. Everyone has gone home—even Jim, who needs sleep after our marathon ordeal. I am totally alone. I have instructed the nurses to bring me my child if he wakes up and cries, and in about five minutes, a lady softly enters my room and places my baby in my arms. She strokes his head and suggests I try breastfeeding. She tiptoes back out again, quietly closing the door, leaving us to get to know each other. All I can see of him under his little blue hat and little striped blanket is his face. He opens his eyes and stares up at me, perfectly calm. The room is very dim. A soft orange glow from the streetlight outside pours in through the windows.
“Hello there. Hi, baby,” I coo at him. He looks up at me with an expression of pure adoration. I feel like I’ve known him forever, like we’ve been together throughout time. I am flooded with the greatest, most profound love I could ever imagine. I finally understand that there are true miracles, and we are experiencing one. I feel complete. I feel whole. My God. It is worth every bit of it and then some.
Two days later, we go home to our townhouse on Geneva Terrace in Lincoln Park. I’ve had a wonderful time bonding with my child at the hospital, and I am nervous about leaving behind the comforting wisdom and instruction of the nurses. But I’m also eager to recuperate in the privacy of our own rooms. My mother comes over to help us adjust to the new routine. I trust in her guidance. She’s a wizard with children, and when it comes to anything I’m uncertain about in life, she always knows what to do. But since she was never pregnant, she can’t give advice about nursing. Nick has been snacking on breast milk, back and forth between the two nipples, and my boobs are huge, gargantuan. While I go upstairs to change clothes, she stays on the couch, singing softly to him as she rocks him gently in her arms.
I stand in my dressing room, staring at my naked body. It’s been ravaged by pregnancy: a road map of stretch marks and veins, a sullen little pooch where the baby bump was. I’m the kind of person who notices every microfluctuation in my figure. All I want is to have some control back, to feel like I am the master of my own ship so I can focus on caring for my newborn son. Yet on top of everything, I also have to contend with this stranger I see in the reflection. It’s going to take a lot of work to put myself back together again. My tits are the size of cantaloupes. All of a sudden, milk shoots straight out of both nipples, like bullets out of the fembots in an Austin Powers movie, spraying all over the mirror. I clasp my hands over my chest, trying to stanch the flow, but it squirts out between my fingers. I am horrified, and I have absolutely no idea what to do. Tears springs to my eyes. I cry out for the one person I depend on above all others. “Moooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!”
I am leaning out the window of my soon-to-be boyfriend’s fifteenth-floor hotel room, spellbound by the sight of an unlit Central Park at sunset. Dusk is falling, but there are no streetlights illuminating the sidewalks, no traffic signals changing from red to green. Not a single window glows in any of the apartment buildings bordering the vast urban green space. All I see are endless trees and monoliths of concrete. New York City is dark, rustic, preternaturally serene. I feel as though I’m looking out over the Appalachians of Kentucky, not the heart of midtown Manhattan.
I’ve never seen the city so peaceful. There are no ambulance sirens, no police whistles, no taxi drivers honking their horns. No jackhammers pounding, or angry people shouting in the street. I don’t hear a single airplane flying into LaGuardia, or helicopters buzzing back and forth across the Hudson River. The rooftop air-conditioning units stand idle, useless in the August heat.
Instead, I hear birds chirping. I see cyclists and pedestrians cruising beneath the leafy branches of the Seventh Avenue entrance to the park after work, taking their time, moving with ease. These are the rhythms of a bygone era, the pace of life a hundred years ago in the age of horse-drawn carriages, steam engines, and gaslight. I’m looking back through time, imagining my location on a map, contemplating the dimensions of this low-lying island on the coast of the Atlantic. I feel like I can conjure exactly what this area looked like when the early Dutch settlers traded goods with the Lenape Indians in the late 1600s. This will be a night to remember, I think. One for the storybooks.
This pall cast over the landscape is a result of the largest power outage in U.S. history: the Northeast blackout of 2
003. From space, it looks like somebody punched America in the electrical face. The blackout covers most of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Ontario. Millions of people have been dropped into the technological dark ages.
Desperate though our circumstances are, I have never been happier to be stranded somewhere in my life. I stare out at the rooftops and fire escapes, believing that magic still exists in the world. Whatever transpires tonight, I finally know for certain that my guitar player and I are into each other. For weeks now, our interactions have been laced with subtext—a subtle exchange of caring and affectionate gestures. But the way we both spontaneously assumed we’d spend doomsday together cements it: We’re in love. Okay, maybe not in love, but definitely heading in that direction. The problem is, he has a girlfriend.
Matt is on the bed, tuning his instrument. He’s been joking all afternoon that the city is going to turn into Mad Max after the sun goes down. It isn’t funny. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. Like in another cult sci-fi film, Escape from New York, we might wake up as convicts in a Manhattan island prison, with microchips under our skin and a burning desire to kill Snake Plissken. I’m prepared for inconvenience but not for anarchy.
“You’ll have to become my property,” Matt teases me. “It’s the only way I can protect you.”
If the city does go to hell tonight and I’m forced to make my home among the psychopaths, miscreants, and hooligans, I know my band and crew would be good guys to ride with. But New Yorkers appear to have adjusted their routines to the new reality and are hunkered down for the evening. It’s finally calm out there in the streets. Just a few hours ago, you would have thought the world was ending.
Our tour bus pulled up to my hotel, thirty blocks south, in Chelsea, about an hour and a half before the power died. My band and I stumbled out into the sunshine rested, relaxed, excited to play a sold-out show at Roseland Ballroom. Normally, New York is everybody’s favorite stop on a tour. Booking agents plan the route to ensure artists are at their peak in the Big Apple. My eponymous album is getting a big promotional push from Capitol Records and an equally intense negative reaction from the press. It’s a heightened moment for all of us. I have just enough time to check in to the hotel room, spread out my belongings, and change into fresh clothes before the air-conditioning and lights go out.
It takes a few minutes to realize that something is significantly wrong. I try a couple of light switches. Then I notice that the digital face on the bedside alarm clock is blank and the phone charger isn’t working. I assume it’s a hotel issue and sit back down to wait for somebody to fix the problem. It’s the middle of the day, so I read a book and wait. Eventually Aaron, my tour manager, calls to say that the whole city has lost power, that our gig tonight will probably be canceled. He’s going over to the venue now to discuss it with the promoter.
I have the option to remain in my room or come with him. I can tell he wants me to stay put. The hotel will bring up candles and snacks, he says. With the elevators out of commission, carrying my bags down eight flights of stairs to the bus doesn’t make sense until we know more about the situation. Nothing has changed dramatically. But the thought of sitting by myself in a room in the midst of a big city without electricity freaks me out. There’s no telling what we might be facing later, and I don’t want to be separated from the group. I will not—cannot—be by myself tonight. I grab some essentials and race down the stairwell to the lobby.
Luckily, the stairs in my hotel are well lit. They’ve propped open the doors at every landing, letting in light from the large prewar windows. This isn’t an option in most buildings in the city, and it isn’t going to help once night falls. At least I know my son is safe back in Los Angeles with my parents. He’s probably having the time of his life, so I don’t have to worry about him. In fact, he’s been on tour with me so much that it feels liberating not to have to be on my guard, to be able to worry about myself for once. I’m already slipping into primitive thinking. Somewhere in the deepest part of my brain, my survival instinct has kicked in, warning me that the ultimate game of musical chairs has begun—and that, if we’re facing Armageddon, I need to be paired up.
The first floor is in chaos. The staff are stressed. The tense smiles on their faces confirm it. People want information that the hotel is unable to give. When will the lights come back on? Will guests receive a refund? How can they get a taxi? Are the airports still open? Two bicycle cops ride their bikes right into the lobby to give the hotel manager an update, which amounts to little more than “We’re working on it.” The word-of-mouth network is in full swing.
It’s acceptable to talk to strangers now. TVs aren’t working, so anybody with any news is promoted to town crier, repeating what they’ve heard to the crowd. The dude with the battery-powered transistor radio is king. A lot of people are suffering flashbacks to the traumatic events of 9/11. The attacks on the Twin Towers happened less than two years ago. Watching the city break down again is retraumatizing. No one wants to hear the word “terrorism,” but everyone is thinking it.
Matt and some of the other guys have walked down from their hotel in midtown to meet us at ours.
“Okay, here’s the situation,” Aaron says. “Nobody knows what the fuck is going on, why this blackout is happening, or how long it’s going to last. It’s hot, it’s humid, it sucks, so, there’s that. The good news is we have a tour bus with a generator and a full tank of gas; so we have electricity, air-conditioning, a shower, food, beds, and we can leave anytime we want. Maybe just charge your cellphones before you go anywhere, and stay in touch. Those are the main things.”
We stand around him in a loose circle, listening.
“I propose that we wait,” he continues, “and see what happens in the next couple of hours. This could all change in a second. The electricity could come back on, or not. I think the gig is probably going to be canceled, but maybe not. Nobody knows yet.”
We nod solemnly, exchanging glances.
“There are a few things on the schedule that I think are worth doing if possible, like the Good Morning America appearance tomorrow. I’m sure those guys are still broadcasting. I think we should stay in the city tonight and leave in the morning after the performance. That’s my two cents. But whatever you want to do. It’s your call.”
He means me. It’s my call. But I’m blending in with the group, pretending my opinion doesn’t matter. I don’t want the responsibility for this decision. I want to do what everybody else is doing. I want to be the girl. I want to be saved.
“I mean, I’m down to stick around and check it out,” Matt’s brother, our drummer, offers. Everybody feels safe, since we have an escape vehicle at our disposal. We’re the luckiest people in Manhattan: engaging in disaster tourism, camping in a deluxe RV at the dawn of the apocalypse. Our group splits up, with plans to reconvene later. Matt and I go with Aaron to the venue to check on the status of the show. He can’t reach the production office on his cellphone, because the cell towers in the area are overwhelmed by call volume. I’m secretly hoping we get stuck here for a week. I think it would be fun to live like a Jane Austen heroine—fall in love and not have to work. We could probably barter.
My fantasy is short-lived. We step out onto the street and find ourselves in the middle of a war zone. Chelsea was humming along, clean and uncrowded, when we arrived two hours ago. Now it’s mayhem. Customers are pulling food and water off store shelves. No one can get any money out of the bank, because the ATMs are frozen. The subways aren’t running, and people are standing around or sitting down on the sidewalk, because they have nowhere to go or can’t risk the exertion of climbing the stairs again in this August heat. I’m shocked by how quickly civilization’s safety net is unraveling. We need to be resourceful. Everyone’s going to have to pitch in and help everybody else.
We arrive at the venue and collapse against the wall in the
shade. We’re standing in front of a building so resolutely closed that there are tables and chairs stacked up against the front doors from the inside, and a heavy chain, looped twice and padlocked, around the outside handles. If riots do break out later, as everyone is predicting, this club owner has nothing to worry about. It’s clear that people in the rock-and-roll business are prepared for catastrophes.
Aaron is a native New Yorker, not shy about targeting well-dressed businessmen on the street and asking for the inside scoop. “Hi there. Excuse me, sir, I can see you’re in a rush, but I was wondering if you have any information about when the power’s going to come back on? We’re in a band, and we’re supposed to play a show here tonight”—he gestures toward Roseland—“and we’re just trying to figure out if we should stay in the city, or if it would be wiser to get on the bus and leave.”
The magic words come when he admires the person’s appearance from head to toe and adds, “I don’t mean to bother you; you just look like someone who knows something.” The script varies, but once he utters that phrase, everybody stops and reports what they’ve heard, mostly rumor and innuendo. One man shares a guess that proves accurate. “Two days, maybe. Tonight, tomorrow night. That’s what my brother-in-law, who’s an engineer, says. Sorry; that’s all I know. Good luck.” He rejoins the crowd of people, each marching stoically toward one of the city’s bridges or tunnels.
Fear of the unknown eats away at us as the sun slides lower in the sky and the traffic starts to dwindle. Soon it will be as dark as it would have been in a pre–Industrial Revolution era. At the height of summer, New Yorkers are facing a long night without air-conditioning, lights, fans, or refrigerators. Nothing cool or refreshing to drink after walking up dozens of flights of stairs. Sweaty and aching inside their stultifying domiciles, they will have no amusements to distract them from the blackout’s oppressiveness: no television, no stereo, no video games or computers. Lesser inconveniences—no toasters, alarm clocks, hair dryers, or washing machines—add insult to injury. Modern life is proving hard to give up.
