The Moth Presents Occasional Magic

by The Moth Presents Occasional Magic (retail) (epub)

  This story was told on June 4, 2016, at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine. The theme of the evening was You Are Here. Director: Meg Bowles.

  It was December 2001, and I was living in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an old brownstone on Clinton Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. It was a nice place, very affordable. It had three big windows facing the street and got lots of great light.

  There was just one problem with this spot, and it was the honking.

  Endless, nonstop car horns directly beneath my three big windows.

  At the time I was working as a web producer. I was what back then was called a community producer. That was the person who set up and ran chat rooms and message boards and did a lot of the stuff that today you would just call social media.

  I was living and working by myself most of the time in this apartment, and I really got to know the honkers.

  I could tell from just the sound of a honk, without even seeing it, what kind of vehicle it was.

  So the bright major chord with a bit of a dual note—that was the Ford Crown Victoria, the yellow cab. Real blood-pressure spiker.

  The deeper, more bone-jarring, discordant honk—that’s the Lincoln Town Car. One of the worst sounds in the world.

  It got to the point where I felt like I could understand the honks, like I could translate this awful monosyllabic language into actual thoughts and feelings and meaning.

  So the quick honk-honk over there by my living-room window? That’s somebody saying, Hey, buddy, light turned green.

  The deeper hooonk over there by my bedroom window? That’s somebody who’s eight cars back and can’t really see anything and is telling the guy in front, Yeah, you should run over the pedestrians because I’ve got places to go.

  I thought I’d heard pretty much all the honks that you could hear on Clinton Street—had cataloged them, knew them. Then one day I was sitting down to work on a mindfulness and meditation website that I happened to be producing at the time. And I heard this honk that I’d never heard before.

  It was essentially just a HOOOOO­OOOOO­OOOOO­OONK.

  You get the idea.

  Whereas most honks have clear start and end points, this honk was essentially infinite. It didn’t stop.

  So eventually, as the honk passes the three-minute mark, I come up to the window to see what’s going on. I look outside, and I can tell it’s coming from this blue sedan directly beneath my window.

  I notice that this honker is actually honking at a red light.

  This just seems unacceptable.

  I decide in that moment that I’m going to my refrigerator.

  I’m getting a carton of eggs.

  I’m returning to my window.

  And if this honk is still going by the time I get back to the window, the driver is getting an egg on his windshield.

  When I return to my window the honk is still going. So I start pelting. My first egg misses, but I was a pitcher in high school, I feel like I’ve got this. My second egg explodes across the roof of the blue sedan in this very satisfying thud.

  It stops the honk.

  And I probably could’ve left it there. That could’ve been it.

  But I kept throwing. I kept throwing the eggs.

  Now the honker is out of his car, and by the time the egg is actually splattering across his windshield, he is standing in the middle of Clinton Street staring up at my third-floor window going completely ballistic.

  He’s a middle-aged guy, balding, fortyish, indeterminate ethnicity, and his general message to me, which I will have to paraphrase, is, “I know where you live, I am coming back tonight, and I am going to kill you.”

  So…clearly a flaw in my plan that I had not thought about ahead of time.

  The guy drives off, but I’m shaken. I’m agitated, and for the rest of the day I can’t focus. For the next couple of days, I find myself milling about my apartment looking for household items that would make for good self-defense weapons.

  I actually go to sleep with a large plumbing wrench next to my pillow.

  I realize I need a different way of handling the honking.

  So the next time it really starts to bother me, I decide to take some advice from the meditation and mindfulness website that I’m working on. I decide to sit down, take a deep breath, and just observe the honking on Clinton Street. And then I take those observations and I start boiling them down into pithy haiku. Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry, three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Its goal is to observe quietly and leave the reader with a kind moment of Zen.

  I call my poems Honku.

  And it feels good to do this. It feels good to write them.

  My first Honku is simply this:

  You from New Jersey,

  Honking in front of my house

  In your SUV.

  Just a snapshot. The essence of Clinton Street.

  This poem really pleases me, so I print up fifty copies, and I go out very late at night (because I’m sort of embarrassed about this), and I tape the Honku up and down Clinton Street on the lampposts.

  This becomes my regular honking therapy regimen. Whenever the honking really starts to bother me, I sit myself down, I write some Honku. Toward the end of the week, I pick my favorite one from the latest batch, I print fifty copies, I go out very late at night, I tape ’em up.

  It feels like I’m honking back now in my own quiet way, and I have some power over the honkers.

  One night I’m out there taping up my Honku. I’ve been doing this for about a month, and I’m still kind of surreptitious and a little embarrassed about it. I turn around, and I see that a woman is standing near me. She’s been out late walking her dog, and she sees me standing there, caught red-handed with my heavy-duty tape dispenser.

  I brace myself, and she comes up to me and says, “Excuse me, but are you the Bard of Clinton Street?”

  I’m like, “Yeah, okay, I guess so.”

  And she gets very excited.

  She says, “Well, we just love your work. It’s fantastic! We’re so sick of the honking, and my daughters, they’re now writing Honku, too. Would you sign one? Could I get your autograph? My husband would love that.”

  As I make my way down Clinton Street that night, I notice that a few other Honku written by strangers have popped up on the lampposts.

  I’m like, Okay, this is interesting.

  Over the next few days and weekends, many Honku blossom on the lampposts of Clinton Street, and I realize suddenly, I’m not alone here. There are other people who feel the same way.

  The next time I go out posting Honku, I decide to put a website address on my poem:

  Honku.org.

  At honku.org I do my online-community producer thing, and I create a message board. I call it the Lamppost. And within days of my putting this thing online, there are dozens of neighborhood people hanging out on the online Lamppost. They’re chatting with each other about problems in the neighborhood, trading Honku, talking about solutions.

  I say, “Guys, let’s get together in person. Why not? Saturday, eleven a.m. on my front stoop, come on out.”

  About a dozen people actually show up. And it turns out to be this diverse, funny, smart group of people who’d all been living next to each other—in some cases for years—but had never actually met. We’re having a good time, and someone notices that on the lamppost on my own corner there is a sign very high up that says NO HONKING, $125 PENALTY.

  I had seen this street sign before, and I’d never really thought much about it.

  But everybody gets excited about it, like, “Hey, the law is on our side. Let’s make this city live up to its no-honking ideals!”

  So that afternoon I go home and I type up some letterhead for something called the Honku Organization. I fire off letters to my local elected representatives and community organizat
ions, and I decide to attend a community meeting.

  I show up at the monthly community meeting of the Seventy-Sixth Precinct, the police station. It’s probably the least dot-com place you can imagine. It’s got the puke-green subway tile on the walls, the fluorescent lighting, the burly mustachioed cops. I’m easily the youngest person in the room by a good twenty years. The other attendees seem like regulars.

  I’m really nervous, like, What the hell am I doing here?

  But the first guy stands up, and he says, “Look, this new bar that moved next door to me, it’s making too much noise. You’ve got to do something about it.”

  A woman stands up, and she’s complaining about the speeding and the double parking on Court Street. The next guy’s angry about his neighbor’s dogs barking all the time.

  And it slowly starts to dawn on me: These are my people. I have found the place that is possibly where I most belong.

  I’m starting to get up the nerve to raise my hand and speak when, very late into the meeting, in walks this six-foot-five-inch-tall, smiling bearded guy, and the commanding officer of the precinct says, “Hey, everybody, welcome our brand-new City Council member—he’s just been on the job for a few weeks now—Bill de Blasio. Come on in, Bill.”

  If you recognize the name, he is now the mayor of the City of New York.

  Bill sits right next to me, and I notice at the very top of the stack of papers on his lap is a piece of letterhead from the Honku Organization.

  I think, Okay, I’m going to wait and see what de Blasio does.

  He takes the floor immediately, and it’s almost like Bill is my downstairs neighbor on Clinton Street.

  He goes into the most perfect description of the honking crisis. It’s not just a minor quality-of-life issue. This is a serious public-health and safety issue. He firmly but politely asks the police to get out there and enforce that no-honking sign.

  The police say, “How’s a three-week no-honking blitz on Clinton Street sound to you?”

  And I’m like, “That sounds incredible.”

  The next Monday morning, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I oversleep.

  Clinton Street was quiet.

  There were no horns!

  When I do finally wake up, I jump over to my window to see what’s going on. I see that guys from the Seventy-Sixth Precinct are standing there and talking to every single driver coming up Clinton Street.

  You know, the Honku Organization, I’ll just be honest with you, we did not accomplish our ultimate mission of ending horn honking in New York City. That battle is still there to be fought for someone else.

  But we did start making a bunch of changes and fixes on Clinton Street and the streets around it, and this actually became my work and my career—doing advocacy and community organizing and media to make cities better for pedestrians and cyclists and transit riders.

  The real success of Honku, though—the thing that I think was most significant—was that now, when my neighbors and I are walking down Clinton Street, instead of being in our little bubbles of honk anger, we talk to each other.

  Clinton Street wasn’t just a street anymore—it was a neighborhood. And we were really producing community.

  * * *

  AARON NAPARSTEK is a journalist, an activist, a teacher, and the founder of Streetsblog.org. Since its launch in 2006, Streetsblog has informed, inspired, and helped to build a livable-streets movement that is bringing a more human-centered, less automobile-oriented urban-design and transportation-policy approach to cities across North America and around the world. Aaron was a 2012 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and is the author of Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage.

  This story was told on December 6, 2016, at the Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles. The theme of the evening was Conviction. Director: Maggie Cino.

  I fell in love with my husband, John, the third time we met. I knew right from that moment that he was the person I wanted to spend my life with.

  I told him, “I want to be a couple. I want to date.”

  He tried to talk me out of it.

  He said, “I’m not good at relationships. I’ve dated a lot of men”—and he had—“and it didn’t go well.”

  But I wouldn’t be talked out of it, and so we became a couple, and we built a life together. Over the years we talked many times about marriage, but we decided, instead of having a symbolic ceremony, we would only marry if it actually carried legal weight.

  One day John was walking around our condo, and I noticed that his walk sounded different. His left foot seemed to be slapping the floor harder than his right foot. When you’ve been with someone for eighteen years, you pick up on those small things.

  I asked him, “Did you sprain your ankle? Did you pull a muscle?”

  He said, “No.”

  But that slapping sound didn’t go away. So I convinced him to see our doctor, and that started a series of doctor visits and tests that lasted several months.

  One day I was sitting at the kitchen island when he came home from a neurologist appointment. When he walked in the door, I jumped up, hugged and kissed him, and asked how it went.

  The tears started to fall, and his voice faltered as he said our worst fears were confirmed: ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  ALS is a death sentence. There’s no cure and no effective treatment, and most patients die within two to five years of diagnosis.

  Now, John had always been the dreamer, the flighty one. He always saw possibilities and not necessarily reality. That was my job as the practical one—I kept us grounded. Friends liked to describe me as the anchor to John’s kite.

  With his diagnosis we changed roles. He became the practical one. He was the one who talked about what we needed to change, what we needed to do, what we needed to plan for, specifically worrying about me after he was gone.

  When I needed it most, John became my anchor.

  ALS progressed quickly. Barely two years after I asked about that slapping sound, the love of my life was bedridden, incapable of doing anything for himself, and in at-home hospice care.

  I was his caregiver full-time. Every routine we had built over twenty years together was supplanted with a new routine of caring for John, making sure he was safe and comfortable. After all, that’s what you do when you love someone—you take care of them, during the good and the bad.

  A few months later, I was standing next to his bed, holding his hand as we watched the news. We were expecting a decision from the Supreme Court on the Windsor case. The news came out, and the Supreme Court struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act.

  In a spontaneous, joyful moment, I leaned over, hugged and kissed John, and said, “Let’s get married,” and luckily he said yes.

  For us this was so important, because we only wanted to marry when our government would say we exist, would acknowledge our relationship, and that’s what the Windsor decision did. It didn’t bring marriage to any new states, but what it said was that the federal government had to recognize lawful, same-sex marriages for tax returns, federal benefits, Social Security, things like that.

  Now I had to figure out how do I get this bedridden, dying man to another state, just so we could do something that millions of people take for granted?

  So I started to do my research, and we settled on Maryland as the place to get married, mainly because Maryland was the only place that did not require both people to appear in person to apply for a marriage license. My whole goal was to make this as pain-free on John as it could be, so that helped.

  Okay, so now we know where we’re going. How do we get there?

  We live in Ohio, and I wasn’t willing to put him in an ambulance for that long of a trip. It would have been just too physically painful on him.

  He couldn’t fly commercially.

  That left one option for us, a chartered medical jet. And l
et me tell you, if you’ve never priced one of those, they’re not cheap.

  I went to Facebook, and I thought, Maybe one of our friends will know somebody—a pilot, someone who works for a chartered medical-jet company, something—just to make this a little easier.

  And the most amazing thing happened.

  Our family and friends immediately started replying, “Sorry, Jim, we don’t know anyone. We can’t help in that way, but you and John deserve to get married, and we want to help make it happen.”

  Our family and friends banded together, and through their generosity they covered the entire thirteen-thousand-dollar cost of that jet.

  So on a beautiful July morning in 2013, I dressed John in a pair of khakis and a plaid shirt with Velcro closures in place of buttons. I put on a crazy plaid pink jacket, and we rode in the back of an ambulance to the airport. We boarded this tiny jet along with John’s Aunt Paulette, who would marry us. And we flew to Baltimore.

  We landed at BWI Airport and parked on the tarmac.

  I raised the head of John’s gurney so that he was sitting up, and I took his hand.

  And in that cramped medical jet, Aunt Paulette married us, and we got to say those magical words that we never expected to say: “I do.”

  It was the happiest moment of our lives.

  We were on the ground for maybe thirty minutes before we were back in the air flying home to Cincinnati as husband and husband. And we said that word an awful lot. In the days that followed, I don’t think two sentences left our mouths without the word “husband.”

  “Good morning, husband. Would you like something to drink, husband? I love you, husband.”

  And that was all we wanted, to live out John’s remaining days as husband and husband.

  A few days after we married, friends were at a party and ran into a friend of theirs, a local civil-rights attorney named Al Gerhardstein. Our story came up in conversation. Our friends got in touch and asked if we might be willing to meet with Al.