You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  Now look at me. Coming up through Jersey in my Mitsu 3000GT, driving drunk and stoned at not eleven in the morning, and under the veneer of all that drink and all that dope there is something growing in my chest, or rather shrinking, for it is hollow in there, hollow, and so is my stomach, like I have been reamed through, through and through, asshole to throat.

  These fucking people.

  Sinai is dying. What a fucking kick in the ass. Sinai at what, sixty-five, seventy? It’s called multiple myeloma, baby, it’s been with me for years, and now its time has come. And even this pisses me off. With you for years? How the fuck many years? Since I was ten? Since I was twenty? I’ve more or less exhausted the treatments, and it’s time to face up to it. Oh, treated are we? In and out of hospital, getting chemotherapy, passing out with anemia, losing the rest of your hair? And the reason you don’t tell your daughter is what? I’ll stay up in Woodstock for a few more months—see the fall up here if I can. Then Molly and I will move down to Papa’s house in New York so I can be close to Danny and Maggie and Rebeccah and the kids for the winter, and I expect that before spring, one way or another, I’ll be more or less done.

  Uh huh. So that’s the way it is, is it? Danny and Maggie and Rebeccah and the kids, gathered around his bedside while slowly, bravely, he wastes away. Cooking, kidding, caring. Getting close to death, with love. Making those brave little jokes you make, waking at night to change his catheter bag, cooking delicious little meals—high-fat now, we’re not worrying about cholesterol any more!—and every now and again, just every now and again, slipping out into the hallway to let a couple tears fall, just a couple tears, on the shoulder of one of the other brave ones there with you, doing it right, seeing Sinai off.

  And where is Sinai’s daughter in this? Where am I, the only one of his kids he brought up, his daughter and heir? Where am I in this happy little scenario of bravery and love?

  Oh wait, funny girl. Remember? You’re the one who’s been ignoring his letters for two decades and only seeing him when his wife Molly, whom you love, guilts you into it. And he’s been writing you those letters for two decades, now, hasn’t he? Once a day, every day, for the entirety of your life. So maybe you’re not in this little cozy club are you, gathering around the dying Sinai, holding his hand, smoothing his brow, watching him go. But you’re still the only daughter he raised, and you’re still the first to know.

  Baby, I didn’t want to tell you this by email, but you didn’t give me any choice. And I wanted you to know first. Molly knows, but nobody else, and I won’t tell anyone else until I hear from you so please, please baby: get in touch.

  Aha, get in touch, will I? And why? I don’t know what you’re going to do, and I won’t try to dictate your choice. All I can say is that this fall is your last chance to hate your father, there, in person, and I hope you’re going to take advantage of it.

  So. Fuck. For a long time, there, there is darkness. The road under me, the car humming, the music blasting, and for a long, long time there is darkness, a feeling hard and harsh and all-encompassing through me, empty, reamed out, hollow.

  Such a long time that when I am able to think again I am approaching the Holland Tunnel, into New York.

  5.

  And don’t all plans just belong to God? Just like Prince Cuntmuscle liked to say, quoting some piece of Iznik kitsch framed in his living room and worth, no doubt, more than your house. Everyone knows what was about to happen that March 6, 2011, in Greenwich Village, New York.

  Did the protest organizers know—as I, alone of the journalists who covered the event, did—that the protest fell on exactly the anniversary of the deaths of my daddy’s little buddies Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Teddy Gold at 18 West 11th Street, in Greenwich Village, New York, when they blew themselves to pieces trying to make a bomb intended for human targets—the Fort Dix NCOs’ mess—their little way of protesting the war in Vietnam.

  Really, it was amazing that I was there at all. Not only the accidents I already told you about, that brought me to New York to learn that my father was dying, but the others that happened when I got there.

  Nothing, for example, that happens would have happened had not W Hotel lost my reservation, or Little Lincoln never made them, or the Times canceled them so they could put me in a Holiday Inn in Queens, or whatever, and so I have to go down to the Soho Grand.

  Nothing would have happened were I not stoned—although that is arguably not accidental—and am so anxious to avoid thinking about Sinai that I’m afraid to nap, that I just dump my bag, take a shower, smoke a joint, drink a mini from the bar while dressing, gather the tools of my trade—my iPhone and a pack of Marlboro Lights—and leave early for the demonstration, which is due to begin at 3:00.

  Nothing would have happened but that because I am early, I decide to walk, and because I am coming from downtown, my route takes me through Soho to Washington Square Park, the demonstration’s destination.

  Because, see, it is because of all of this, because of all these things that started happening a billion years ago in Saudi fucking Arabia, I happen to be the only person to see that every entrance to Washington Square—Fifth Avenue, Macdougal Street, University Place, 3rd Street—is closed by checkpoints, which you will argue is perhaps not that unusual in post 9/11 New York, but that those checkpoints are manned not by men in blue but by United States Marines in full battle dress and that, moreover, each checkpoint is deploying the signature twelve mounted video cameras of a PVI Array, some seven checkpoints, some eighty-four cameras, each wired into a central CPU housed in a mobile satellite unit and thence to the NSA.

  This stops me in my fucking boots.

  This is enough even to forget Sinai.

  I am on Thompson, coming up from Soho, next to NYU Law School when I see the PVI arrays, and instinct makes me step onto the side of the street. A fully-deployed Patriot Vector Identification Array for this? In Sadr City, maybe. In fucking Kabul, maybe. In Washington after an Al Qaeda chatter intercept.

  But a domestic protest, functioning under city permit?

  I wasn’t sure that a PVI array had ever been domestically deployed for an act of legal dissent.

  I am high, and so a little tachycardic, but as I peer out from beside Bobst Library, watching an advance group from the organizers—white vests and arm bands, holding clipboards—come through, eating hotdogs from a Sabrett cart, walking unheeding through the checkpoint, unaware that if they weren’t so fucking clueless their hotdogs would be congealing in their very stomachs, and fucking should. And as they pass through they are waving gaily at the cameras making crystal clear just how totally fucking dumb they are.

  Not me. I stop and watch this display in horror. By noon tomorrow, I assure you, there is going to be a Homeland Security file opened for every single person here, name, face, Social Security number. Briefly, I wondered what kind of muscle they would bring into effect. NSA metadata mining for sure: email, cell phone, social media. Airline records into every area airport (and I bet they would include Philadelphia) of course, matched up against the video documentation with face-recognition software. E-ZPass records from the highways in and out of town—transponders could be set up to identify cars even if they’re not using E-ZPass. Those two, alone, when compared with the PVI arrays, would capture the identities of a huge majority of the protestors, and data-mining of relevant search terms on email and telephone would bring their match rate up to the 98.9 percent that had become, in the ten years since 9/11, an industry standard. Each picture would drop into a relational dbase with fields for fingerprints, address, passport, police record, occupation. In a crowd like this, the program could flag 80 percent for further data-mining: bank, credit cards, taxes. In 70 percent of the hits, depending on the quality of the health insurance, it would also go for medical records, and synch with commercial databases that contain things such as likely sexual preference.

  And all this, I’m realizing, as I watch the cameras—the tell-tale twelve cameras, each hoo
ked up to a computer that it takes successfully to run the identification algorithm at the heart of PVI—I’m thinking, in some shock: they’ve got PVI out for this?

  But if you’re thinking that I’m thinking this with outrage over this abrogation of First Amendment prerogatives, think again. I don’t give a fuck about First Amendment rights. First Amendment rights are not in my brief. My observation of the surveillance, the collection of authenticating detail down to the make of the cameras and the dress of the camera operators? Strictly professional exactitude, I promise you. Strictly what I need to put five descriptive paragraphs and a conversational panel—overheard at the Occupy protest—into my article tomorrow which I will write on the plane home to London.

  Or so I’m telling myself. Because, in fact, as I circle back down to West 3rd Street then trail up Mercer, avoiding showing myself to the PVI cameras, looking down the cross streets to get an idea of what’s going on, a totally different plan is taking place in my mind.

  As I make my way up Mercer, and then—a few blocks north of the Square, well out of reach of the PVI deployed on its northern perimeter—over on 8th toward Fifth Avenue, which is closed and lined with police, I try to pin down what’s bothering me about this. Besides, that is, the obvious. And after a time, the question materializes: does the NYPD really have this kind of electronic muscle available? And if so, why?

  Did I tell you I am a regular little Tintin? Did I tell you I am the consummate scoop artist of the century? I place a telephone call, one single telephone call, to a Washington DC area code, and by the time I see the sea of people—forty thousand at least—pouring into Washington Square from the south, I see that I didn’t know it, and the Times didn’t know it, but a little piece of American history is going to be made today. Don’t ask me who I called, or what she told me, but I am so sure of myself, that in seconds I am on the phone with my editor at the Times telling her that this is no longer a magazine story, and then I’m waiting while she speaks to her editor, and then I am speaking to her editor and then, on verbal agreement that he will be settling with my agent as I work—I am suddenly very expensive—I am on special assignment to the national news desk at the Times covering the day for tomorrow’s front page.

  Life is this amazing series of accidents, and the most amazing is that I am, this March 6, 2011, reporting the piece of journalism that is going to win me the Porter fellowship.

  6.

  Now I don’t need to tell you anything else about that day. You just go read the damn article: March 7, 2011, New York Times, page A1. And the days following. When the New York Times was defending itself against a suit brought by Homeland Security; when I was named as a defendant in the suit; when I got to spend a charming vacation at Beacon Correctional, an interesting time during which I met Judy Clark.

  None of that is what I want to tell you about. What I want to tell you about is how after the day I learned my father was dying—the day after I had, alone among the American media—interviewed not the forty thousand odd (and I mean odd) protesters who duly filed up 6th Avenue to Washington Square, but rather the policemen and soldiers making up the security; after I had sourced and confirmed—Little Lincoln spent that night up in London, let me tell you—that the entire security operation was running out of the NSA under direct presidential order—see the phone call I made to DC, that’s called an anonymous source; after I had reported, documented, and written the whole thing, filing it at 2 a.m. on a computer in the New York Times newsroom; after that, as I spun back to my hotel in a taxi driven by a young Mr. Khan from Islamabad, sipping from a bourbon mini I had artfully concealed in my pocket, damp with grime and smelling—I have little doubt—like an ammonia-pickled onion; after we went down 7th Ave, hitting every light in the way that will happen in New York on the big avenues, when there’s no traffic, say in the early morning or late night, and no people, but all the city is still on, lights and subways and buses and cars—oh you look so beautiful—and for a moment you feel like you are in a place that is not some aberration of late-stage capitalism, nor some grievous insult to the environment, but the place it once was where everyone, everyone in the world, escaped to be free—after I had spun down to Soho, spent like I cannot tell you, needing a shower, needing a fucking douche—what should I see sitting outside the Soho Grand, just as cute as a little pumpkin?

  I see a black Humvee, with blackened windows, sporting a short-wave antenna, and without a thought, without a second thought, I tell Mr. Khan to drive on.

  I am not so tired any more. I smell just as bad, I’m sure, but I am not so tired. And I do admit that I am scared.

  But being scared doesn’t count. It’s what you do while you’re scared that separates the men from the boys.

  After all, you don’t need to be a hero to know that there’s only one thing to do when you are under surveillance by a big black Humvee sent by the NSA, you don’t need to be an ace reporter, a regular little Tintin like me.

  Here’s what you got to know when you’re under surveillance: first, and most important, you want to avoid that the people looking for you know where you are. This is a key move in escaping capture, perhaps the key move. And if you have been in a position, as I have, of nobody knowing where you are in the first place, well then you go to plan B: you avoid giving up that advantage.

  Having accomplished that, there is one single move left to you: you get a lawyer.

  For the first, then, I get it done in one smooth move by requesting that Mr. Khan drive on, past the Soho Grand, and on downtown, leaving the black Humvee behind us. So far, so good.

  And for the second there’s no sensible course but to call my Aunt Maggie.

  When you are scared, and in imminent danger of arrest, there’s rarely a course as sensible as calling my Aunt Maggie.

  Not the least because when you call my Aunt Maggie, even at six thirty on a Monday morning, my Aunt Maggie answers on the second ring in this sleepy voice softened by the fact she is lying in bed, answers directly and is, instantly, awake.

  “Hey, my lovely. Where ya?”

  “New York, Mag.”

  “Are you?” A little pause while she connects the dots. “Of course you are. You’re doing that piece for Stephanie Delacorte. How’s it going?”

  “Um . . . in a variety of unexpected directions.” It’s funny how reluctant one is to introduce one’s own sordid life to others. I say, carefully: “The short version would be: it’s going very well. But very well in a direction that requires me to get in touch with a lawyer.”

  “And what part of ‘going very well’ requires a lawyer?”

  “The part where you use an anonymous source to break a national news story and then find Homeland Security parked outside your hotel.”

  My Aunt Maggie didn’t need a lecture on the status of the First Amendment in 2011. “I see. Can you name your source?”

  “Can I? Sure.”

  “Will you?”

  “Of course not, Maggie.”

  Any major lawyer would tell you the same. When the demon is at your door, or at least at your client’s door, first thing, you secure the client in a place where she cannot be apprehended, then arrange the representation and then, and only then—when you have privilege—find out what happened. So Maggie doesn’t ask any more.

  “I see. Okay. First of all, you can’t go back to your hotel. Come here. Or wait. Danny, wake up.” This last to my uncle, voice off. “Go look out the front window and see if there’s surveillance.”

  That tells you something about my aunt and uncle, and what it tells you is, that the years that Sinai was underground, they were constantly under surveillance in the hope that he would contact them. Maggie doesn’t bother to talk while she waits. I can see her, in bed, her round, freckled face, once amazingly beautiful, framed by red hair. I hear Danny’s low voice. In response, she says.

  “Uh-huh. Well, lovely, it looks like there’s rather a preponderance of black Humvees here, too. That might not have to do with you. Worth
watching us too. I mean, during a protest. But let’s think.”

  Now it is about 8 a.m., and poor Mr. Khan has been driving me around the Financial District, and—at least by the look of the back of his neck, which I have been staring at for hours—getting rather irate, and I’m listening to my Aunt Maggie and Uncle Danny going back and forth about how I cannot go to a hotel because they’d surely get credit-card records, and about people whom I could stay with who might not be under surveillance, all with the kind of tinny quality in the sound that makes me think they are now in their kitchen, making coffee, until I hear Maggie say and my heart, just like that, jumps instantly into my throat.

  “The safest place is Bedford Street.”

  And Uncle Danny pauses, then says: “That’s not so dumb.”

  And Maggie says: “They probably don’t even know we still own it.”

  And Uncle Danny says: “But how’s she going to get in? We’ll be followed if we go meet her.”

  “Uncle Joe can let her in.”

  “Let me call on the cell, see if he’s home.”

  And this, at last, is when I get my voice back.

  “Stop.”

  “What, dear?”

  “Wait.”

  “Why, dear?”

  Really, even I wouldn’t have suspected it. At the words themselves, Bedford Street, my heart had gone from one side of my chest to the other. I breathe deeply in, then out, and then in again. “Because there’s no way on God’s green earth I’m going to stay at Bedford Street.”