in real time
I’m on the street, at a corner, nice day. Suddenly the corner’s busy, many people jostling against me, and I’m saying I’m sorry for something I did—I bumped against a small woman, dark eyes, dark curly hair, dark skin—then the swarm moves on. But the little woman looks back at me, because I’m apologizing, and her face … her expression … you know, a little weird. She’s definitely surprised. I don’t know why, I smiled big. I know why, stupid Zeke, I was feeling good.
She had just picked my pocket. Right. I’m saying sorry to her, no wonder she’s surprised, she’s met the nicest mark.
The weird thing is I’d been thinking about my wallet all morning, that I should move it from my jacket pocket to my pants pocket, but I didn’t. I was feeling good, and shifting the wallet meant doing something that felt bad, I mean, it showed I was skeptical or paranoid. I don’t get it. I just didn’t switch it, when I knew I should, and kept thinking about it. You know, you do it or you don’t. I do and also don’t. That’s the abulia. My Hamlet shit.
It was a late October day. I’d just worked out, and didn’t want to move my wallet. Those sharp-eyed cons spotted me and swarmed, a plague of human locusts.
I’m sorry, I say to her.
Fuck me. Thirty minutes later, I reach for my wallet to buy something. No wallet. ATM, credit cards. $$. Gone. It’s an empty feeling, really bad. So, I replay the scene in my brain, I’m approaching that corner, I’m feeling good, and there’s a sudden swarm around me, a woman’s close, I take a bump, and, because I was goofin’, daydreaming, I figure it was my fault, I bumped her.
I got mugged.
I launched into action, canceled my ATM card, phoned Amex, found out from them it’d been used—they did it fast, they were fast, pros, and Amex told me at what store, which location, and when—exact time, it was minutes after it happened—and then I walked fast to the store. I almost flew, and located the manager and learned they had video, they gave me the time that the bozo with my card used it. They keep the video for a week, the manager said, and with all this info—oh yeah, the thieves bought over $200 of cosmetics and baby things—I ran to the police station. I tried to report it. Tried is the operative concept. It wasn’t like the precinct was busy, but the cop who wrote up the report was almost asleep, though not actually asleep. Technically, awake, but mentally nowhere. I must have explained and repeated the scene and the info in the same way, same words, five times, and each time he read it back to me he’d got it fucking wrong. I thought I’d lose it. I said, finally, hoping to seem nonjudgmental, OK, I’ll come back tomorrow. He said, Yeah, see Detective Sanchez, she’ll be in. Ask for her. Sure, I said, thanks, and hurried out the door and to a bar where I have a tab and laughed in my beer.
I had everything the cops could want. That’s what I’m thinking. I returned the next day. Detective Sanchez was a genius compared with the first cop. She asked good questions, she repeated my answers correctly. She wrote it all down, and I left feeling there would definitely be some action. She said she’d call me soon. I felt renewed, there’s a case going. CASE number blah blah.
I tell no one about the crime, no one, because being mugged feels girly. I admit it, victim-hood makes putative men feel the way they imagine women feel all the time. Defenseless. Weak. I know, this is ridiculous.
Two full days went by, and where’s Detective Sanchez? I knew the video in that store would be kept a week, so I phoned the precinct, but no one was available because there’d been a murder in the neighborhood, and everyone was out there. The entire precinct except the person answering the phone, who was probably in New Delhi, everyone’s out there, like it’s a picnic. Detective Sanchez, OK, she’s the lead detective, she should be at a crime scene.
Another day, another no call, and I phoned again. Detective Sanchez says they’re working on it. What can I say? OK. Then I look at my bank statement; according to it, I had taken out $2,800 of my savings, in cash, which about wiped my savings. One of them had used my stolen ATM card before I canceled it. It was an inside job. Obvious.
I reported to my branch, in person, and filled out another report, or reports, one certified by a notary in the bank. I spoke to three different bank managers, who told me different things, on two different days, a few days apart. Bottom line: my money would be returned. No problem, they’d cover it. Cool. But my theory that it was an inside job went nowhere. How else did the cons know exactly how much to take out, just under the amount I had? Blank eyes from a dead chorus. Why didn’t the teller think about it, flag it? An unusual withdrawal. Almost closing the account. Why didn’t she say, Are you sure you want to close the account? They always do that.
Did the first bank manager raise an eyebrow? The next? Or next? Nope, because they don’t give a shit, the insurance company pays the bank for these petty losses, why bother, man? OK, that’s the private sector, but the cops, they work in civic space, they’re on the public tit. We pay them. This gets worse. Detective Sanchez? She played me. I called, she didn’t call back, she called back once, said she was still working on it. Finally, I went to the precinct again.
Me: I got you all this info, you could nail those cons.
She says nothing, just looks at me.
Me (twitchy): Look, you had video on those characters. You could have nailed them … You’ll forgive me, Detective Sanchez, and I know this may sound funny, but you could have made a good collar.
She just breaks up. She’s laughing so hard now, I’m looking around at who else is watching. Then she stops—and her smile looks as if it could break her face.
She says: You know, you watch too much Law & Order. (Hahahaha.) But I’ll tell you something. Call me any time you want. I’ll always be happy to hear from you.
I bet she’s still laughing.
I didn’t tell anyone.
Is this accountable or unaccountable? An account means it adds up, this doesn’t.
I have replayed these scenes, reread them, my futile attempts at catching the wrongdoers, the thieves, and, though they used my credit card to buy baby food and Pampers, and I had some sympathy for their baby’s needs, I couldn’t just say, OK, they’re poor, damaged by society’s inequities, and blah blah, because they also cleaned out my bank account, or tried to. How does that merit sympathy. OK, I’m privileged, and have no right to have more than anyone else, and I’m cool with that. But those people didn’t know what I had or didn’t have. I could have been saving all my life, and that money represented IT. They couldn’t know, unless they’d been tracking me and were doing their own kind of Robin Hood–like social justice, and stealing from the rich(er), which is highly unlikely, because they wouldn’t have the organization to have had someone checking me out for weeks before, and then following me until the perfect moment came for their swoop and lift. No way.
Ambiguity up, security down, vagaries in my face.
They’re called “challenges.” Oh, man, yes.
I figured it was also a part of my field work. Life, I told myself, is my field. I’m in it, studying it, interpreting it, actions, reactions. Right, I do watch and have watched too many police shows. I’m an American, I love crime. Mother watched the O.J. trial, if work didn’t interfere. Crime not the way it used to be written, say, in the 1930s, by Raymond Chandler. Or, in the 1940s, crime as portrayed in noir movies. I grew up watching it, in the eighties and nineties: Hill Street Blues; Miami Vice (crime as style); Law & Order; Kojak; Columbo; Homicide; NYPD Blue. The list goes on. The vérité stuff, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line got a convicted man released from prison. Watching crime, I’m not a criminal or committing a crime, or being murdered. Let’s face it, bad things don’t happen to people who watch TV, except their asses spread, they die earlier from heart disease, etc., because they don’t move, except to go to the refrigerator. If Americans didn’t watch TV, more of them might get killed. If they didn’t see ads exhorting them to go to their refrigerators, they’d be a lot healthier. But what’s health until you’re s
ick.
I concentrated on tennis, tearing up the courts, until I got tendinitis, then I became obsessed with Roger Federer, tennis’s Mikhail Baryshnikov, imperturbable and graceful; when down a match, even two, he rose like a phoenix, not kidding, but he wasn’t a machine like Pete Sampras, but so intelligently organized and super-confident. To raise his game, Fed’s choreography turned tighter, he ran the balls down quicker, part of his dance. When he began losing more regularly, my heart felt sick, but I was trying to learn from him how a Master loses, and keeps going. For one thing, he was fading but still brilliant, and he brought out the Tap, a forehand takeback. He used it, and no one could return it.
When Agassi retired from the game, another blow. He was a magnificent wild man, and something about him, though he wasn’t a consistent player like Fed, compelled my sympathy, even when I learned, along with the tennis world, that he hated playing. That killed me. I switched my passion to Djokovic, when Fed lost in a quarter-final, but when Fed raised his game higher, and the two played against each other, conflict.
My animus was directed at Andy Murray. From the moment I watched him play, he annoyed me. I disliked him. He’s a better player, now, bigger, physically, but he reminds me of an animal mildly tamed by holding a racquet, and not a hatchet.
It took me a while to get used to how much the serve dominated the game, it never used to. It was serve and volley, rallying. Andy Roddick, for one, came along, serving aces one after the other. Aces, speed, massive shots and power, now all the men, and some women, notably Serena, hit 125-mile-per-hour serves and return them, they’re all physically powerful. And that means tennis metamorphosed from a game of finesse to power. You still need mental prowess, because tennis is an existential sport, mental like chess, and great players beat themselves as often as they are beaten. Maybe more.
Power underscores everything, everywhere, but I hadn’t included it in my game, or in life, say. I didn’t get it, except as an abstraction. It’s not.
analyst: Being betrayed by a friend is terrible. It is disturbing.
me: Pathetic. I had no idea. I thought everything was cool.
analyst: You trusted them.
me: Because of trust I was powerless. I beat myself. Never again.
I took lessons to master the two-handed backhand. Very hard, mentally and physically, going against your training. And, two-handed doesn’t look as good. But it’s about power.
Changing even one habit is mentally awkward; a habit appends a personality. We are our habits. What isn’t a habit, every thought could be, every habit can stunt the mind and body. After Father died, I phoned home, expecting him to answer, he used to, at night, and of course Mother picked up, and for about a year I felt surprise. I was calling her, I always said. It was out of a habit.
Without a habit, the emperor has no clothes (haha). I’m not naked yet. I decided to try one new behavior each day, drink my coffee ten minutes later, then later. A gradualist’s approach.
I’m alternating realities, not finding an alternative.
Here’s a certainty: most things can never be proved.
Doubt casts shadows, but doubt appears when the sun is out. I mean, when you’re in love. When you feel loved. In life even a tiny alteration can be effective.
theory of atemporal love
People fall in love with images, that’s obvious, all those movie and pop-star and celebrity-personality posters on bedroom walls. Dead, alive. Marilyn Monroe sells more dead than she did alive.
In my role or pose as a social scientist, let me call this phenomenon “image-necrophilia.” I view family pictures, criticize and comment on contemporary photography, but I am also a studied imbiber or guzzler of images. I myself am an image to others and myself, for example, I am a youngish man, who wears black slim jeans and sometimes a brimless hat, sometimes not. Get the image. It wears me.
Love can be out of time. It can reject age, race, nation, etc. It can go against time, it can be without time. This is “atemporal longing” or “atemporal love.”
People fall hard for an image. The image never has to die, unless something comes along to destroy it. The love object dies. Body gone. Grief. But then all love’s disappointments end. Physical body death doesn’t make love die, right. There may be no death of love, ever, in life. Or, any relational dynamic. The beloved can’t change, the image doesn’t, and the living lover never needs to change.
That which doesn’t change can also be narrated, I want to narrate that. I want to tell the ordinary story of stasis, of being stuck.
Pictures of the dead don’t change death into life. Pictures are reminders. Stuck in the mind.
No one can take the dead from us, their images, and “necro-photo-philes,” my term, refer to them with unedited wistfulness.
Spirit photographers used gauze to create the illusion of ghostly spirit oozing from the dead’s mouth or eyes.
New mourners devour pictures of the deceased. Time stops for the dead, and in a way the mourner, who is suspended in time. Time collapses, like the grief-stricken who fall into a timeless abyss; time’s suspension makes space for implausible wishes. Impossible to explain this.
Let’s say there’s safety in image worship, in adoration from afar, which thrives with distance. No one can stalk the dead.
DISTANCE and the zoom lens: it makes the photographer close while far, it allows for a seeming intimacy, which is remote and perfectly anesthetic, and perfectly deceptive. Created by close-ups and zooms, intimacy, poignancy, is a primary effect, and “revealing,” its greatest illusion.
a man of inaction
I’m an oxymoron, moron ox, dumb pun. Who cares.
Theoretical border crossings, shifting fields of inquiry, morph into self-made mind wars. I renounced and claimed and accepted and denied what I once held dear.
Total hedonism, total boredom. OK, pathetic, not cool. I can spend lots of time massaging my fantasies, and thinking about what wastes my life.
Mistakes come to be patterns. Societies have ill-made “patterns.”
Medical researchers and scientists search for one cause, for a patient suffering with various symptoms, or “diagnostic parsimony,” its colloquial handle: “Occam’s razor,” the one-size-fits-all solution. For extremely difficult cases, long-term undiagnosed diseases, ones they can’t find a cure for or even relief, that elude correction, they continue to seek one underlying cause. They haven’t found it yet for cancer, and, compared with some very rare diseases, cancer is simple. And, physicists hope for a unified theory of the universe.
I used to be a patternista. When I was little, with Mother beside me, I solemnly followed the hands of a tailor pinning cloth to the dotted blue lines on a translucent pattern, then cutting away the material, with a large, serrated scissors, and I thought that was so cool, she was cool, also the way she dressed in asymmetrical clothes. Uneven lengths. One shoulder bare. I thought it was because she was Asian. No one said that, but here I was, making cultural (racist) assumptions. Later, I distrusted my assumptions, and now I don’t want to follow patterns.
But I watch some movies again and again, because they don’t change. The movies run on, I can stop them now, I don’t want to. Second and third times, I notice more, or focus on details I hadn’t, because I know the story or, anyway, I know what happens, and don’t need to follow it. By the tenth time, none of this matters. I just watch, calmly soaking up sameness, no matter if it’s The Godfather: Part II or any of the Bourne movies, their violence domesticated by the screen, and familiarity. Almost nothing on view, except a murder or accident in real time, can be completely undomesticated. Twenty-four-hour news cycles make tragedy repetitive, the spectacular familiar.
9/11 was an abstraction for many Americans, it may have happened in real time on TV but it didn’t actually hit them. Oh, yeah, they could hate Arabs more, or Muslims, if they knew the difference, but the experience was remote, repeated and repeated on TV, and fodder for bellicose politicians eager for war.
&n
bsp; The war on terror begins there.
Many people in uptown Manhattan didn’t feel 9/11 the way people downtown, downwind did. No one uptown got covered in ash and soot. A Brooklyn guy whose open windows let in fragments of paper, and who knows what else, split the next day. Everyone in NYC says the day was so beautiful, the sky so blue, and days like that have become a “9/11 kind of day.” Maggie and I were in Boston, and watched on TV. Horror at a distance.
TV, my familiar, and the American family’s biggest picture album, with recognizable characters; some not so much, at first, then they become regulars. Doesn’t matter what’s on it, except for a bulletin or news alert, and then, well, it’s a tragedy that didn’t happen to me. Not yet.
I can watch a screen 24/7—name it, whatever flows and streams. Ethnographers observe, I watch, I spy. Ha.
Moving pictures relax me, a photograph doesn’t let me rest, exactly because it doesn’t move or narrate, and I have to make it into something, this surface, whose “depth” is all question, no answer.
Walking around by day and night, pounding my brain with necessary un-thinking, I returned in spirit to Rock Creek, those feelings, and Clover, and, I swear, she was totally real. It didn’t matter if it seemed crazy. She was real to me. I’m not alone in these feelings, but I thought I had protected myself from this stuff with my “professional outlook.” We who are jaded, we’re the worst, because we deny a need in ourselves for the illusions we work hard to shatter. Super-vulnerable.
I was aware of, even attuned to, psychic phenomena; in my family, it happens, there are many occurrences. I don’t profess the virtues of either the phenomena or my family, but admit the presence, when years ago I didn’t, when I was just a three-dimensional guy who lived in two dimensions. Bandwidths. Love, for one, streamed narrowly.
Can love, as we talk about it, be an instinct? Or is it fear of loss of survivors, or of future guilt? Fear of ostracism by the tribe? Instincts appear altruistic, and may not be: the mother’s done her reproductive work and wants it to prosper.
Men and Apparitions Page 20
