Dark City
Hello subscribers! This week, I’m trying out a new platform for my newsletter (Substack), and over the next few weeks you may notice other changes as I build out the format, tone, and overall feel of it. Perhaps a name change. Perhaps a multi-million dollar sponsorship. Buckle up! Also, a quick note about formatting: one time I read an article about how hyperlinks are turning our brains to sludge. Every time you see an underlined or highlighted link in an article online, your brain is forced to make a tiny decision of whether to click or not click, and it interferes with reading comprehension and retention. For that reason, I will not be linking to sources in the body of the text, and instead will provide a list of sources at the bottom. That way, my words will be more permanently seared into your psyche. Okay! Read on…
On July 13, there was a power outage in New York City. On social media, I saw a video going around of a large choir singing outside Carnegie Hall. Their performance in the legendary venue had been cancelled due to the blackout, so they made the best of it and took their singing to the streets. It was one of those “only in New York” moments, the kind of story that reinforces the idea that the Big Apple is a place pulsing with energy and culture and spontaneity. Suddenly, an inconvenient-at-best, dangerous-at-worst failure of the electrical grid was transformed into an advertisement for the Most Magical City In The World. New York rises to the occasion! A New York without power is electrified!
It reminded me of my own experience during the massive blackout in 2003. I was working on the 38th floor of a high-rise in midtown Manhattan, when suddenly the power went out. My coworkers and I reacted normally at first; we verbally acknowledged what was happening and then quietly waited for it to come back on within a minute or two. But then a minute or two turned into ten minutes. Cellphones started to ring, as friends and family around town began communicating that they too were without power. The mood in my office was light-hearted, everyone happy to have the grind of our boring workday interrupted by this technological quirk. But then, somebody said, “Oh my god, my friend just told me that the power is out in OHIO too.” Immediately, the mood in the office shifted from fun to fear. Ohio? Now we were hearing that parts of Michigan were without power. Was this a terrorist attack? The end of the world? It had only been two years since 9/11, and the muscle memory of that day quickly took over everyone around me.
It became clear this was something big, and it was not going to be fixed quickly. So we decided to leave the building, on foot. Just before we began the slow descent down 38 flights of stairs, I was able to get a text through to my boyfriend at the time, who worked twenty blocks north in the Upper East Side. He said they were going to gather at his boss’s apartment near his office, and for me to meet him there. As I walked through the hot streets, I noticed the looks of confusion and fear on people’s faces. I passed a bodega that had set up a small TV in the entrance for people to see the news. It was like a scene from the movies when a big event happens and everyone crowds around a TV to see the drama.
When I made it to my boyfriend’s boss’s apartment building, I was impressed. It was on Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park, smooth and tall against that sacred green space, as if it was protecting it from the grime of the concrete city. I was not surprised. I knew it was going to be a fancy place, because my boyfriend’s boss was married to a then beloved and prominent figure in New York City: the pre-disgraced Eliot Spitzer.
I was excited to see their apartment. I worked for lawyers who sued public companies for securities fraud. At the time, they regarded Spitzer as a rainmaker. His crusades against Wall Street provided fodder for our civil suits. Even though my main goal at the time was to figure out how to become a famous comedian, I took my day job seriously and sometimes daydreamed about being a part of this wealthy-but-still-the-good-guys club. My bosses were rich, and I assumed they lived in fancy Manhattan homes, but I had never gotten to see any of them. Today was my day to pretend that I was an elite New Yorker, inside Eliot Spitzer’s palace.
Once inside, I was struck by how small it seemed. Tastefully decorated? Yes. Location location location? Yes. Through their living room window I could see the tops of so many green trees, and even parts of the Met. Now that’s a backyard, I thought. But it was not the sprawling palace I had envisioned. Looking back, it was actually quite large by New York standards; anyone who has a separate dining room is living in a relative mansion.
My boyfriend and I, along with two other employees of Mrs. Spitzer, joined her, Eliot, and their housekeeper in the shadowy living room, lit only by the expensive natural light one can only get on high floors overlooking parks. As we arranged ourselves on the plush sofas, in my head, I immediately started redecorating the room to fit my style. I imagined morning coffee on the balcony (even though I didn’t drink coffee). I fantasized about evening soiree’s with important people and fine wine (even though I didn’t drink fine wine). One day, I thought, this will be my life. Daydreaming aside, I was also, in general, excited to be having what I assumed would be a laughter-filled boozy slumber party with Silda and Eliot Spitzer. We’d share stories and they’d give us life advice and promise to become our benefactors and we’d walk away with a bond forged in candlelight. This was to be my real-life bottle episode with New York’s upper crust.
For a few minutes, we made small talk. Eliot was friendly and relaxed. I noticed a painting on the wall. It was a landscape, and whatever its arrangement of colors and composition, it pleased me, and I said so. Upon hearing this, Eliot’s entire body perked up and his eyes gleamed.
“Silda painted that!” he exclaimed. It was as if I had proved some point they had been arguing privately. He looked at her like, see?
“Really? Wow, that is VERY good! ” I said, sincerely, but also with zero authority to decide what is a good painting. “You should paint more!”
Silda waved off my compliment. But Eliot suddenly became intense.
“No wait,” he said, as if he was a detective who had finally connected all the dots to solve the crime. “There’s something to that. That’s it. Silda, you have to paint more. You could auction them for your charity!” Behind his eyes I could see a calculating hum, some internal analysis of this genius new plan for his wife. He seemed like the type of person who had great faith in his own ideas and would stop at nothing to get everyone else on board. She smiled and shrugged at the idea, as if to say “maybe!”
Eliot turned on a battery-powered radio and we listened to Michael Bloomberg tell us that they were working to figure out what was going on. The subways were down, traffic lights not working. It would be impossible to get a cab. An awkwardness settled into the room. Eliot conducted a survey of where we lived. We all lived in various parts of Brooklyn.
I watched his face as he ran the math. I waited for that, “Welp, you’re all staying here tonight! Who wants popcorn?!” but it never came. Instead, he looked at my boyfriend and he said, “You can borrow our minivan to take everyone home.” His breath was tight. It was obvious he didn’t want to have a slumber party.
I was disappointed, but grateful for the ride. Walking home to deep Brooklyn from the upper east side in my business casual flats would have been brutal, and it was starting to get dark. When we got into the van, though, it immediately became clear that walking might have been the better choice. We sat in impenetrable gridlock for hours. Once we finally crossed over into Brooklyn, it was terrifying; I never realized how dependent we are on traffic lights and street lights. We had to approach every intersection like a four-way stop sign, and much of Brooklyn looked eerily abandoned, dark and lifeless.
After almost five hours of driving, the last of our crew agreed to crash with us, because we were incredibly hungry, had to pee, and were so tired of being stuck in a car. We lit a match on my stove and split a particularly sad box of mac-n-cheese, the only food in our apartment. I walked down the block to use a pay phone to call my parents, but it was dead. It was after midnight by now, and, exhausted, I fell asleep in our hot bed.
The next morning, Eliot took a car out to our apartment to retrieve his minivan. He and the family were going to escape to their upstate country home where I assumed he had a generator and the proper space to ride out whatever sort of apocalypse this might turn out to be. But when he arrived, his minivan keys were gone. We tore the apartment up trying to find them, and realized that one of my boyfriend’s coworkers who crashed with us had accidentally grabbed them on his way out that morning. Still without power, there was no way to get in touch. Eliot was annoyed, and I was scared that somehow this would result in my boyfriend losing his job, or me being blacklisted from ever getting to be a rich New Yorker who has soirees.
But almost immediately, I noticed Eliot’s face relax, as he raised his phone to his face and arranged for the car to come back. They would just take a car service upstate, he said. They would be fine, and we shouldn’t worry about them. As I watched him walk down the sidewalk away from our apartment, I thought about how I was definitely not worried about them, and felt the tiny stir of a terrible realization in my gut. For most of us, the city was a trap.
Later that week, when everything returned to normal, and we gathered at work to tell our blackout stories, I was horrified to find out that everyone else experienced the magical New York night I had assumed would be mine. They told tales of dancing in the streets, ice cream shops handing out free melting goodies to whoever walked by, wonderful neighbors sharing food and phone charging stations. My friends got wasted and had slumber parties. They declared it one of the best night of their lives. The spirit of New York - electrified.
I, on the other hand, had spent most of my night trapped in a minivan without food or booze. By the time we got home, my neighborhood was asleep. But at least I got to hang out briefly with Eliot Spitzer! I conceded that it was a bit of a story with a good name drop. What I didn’t know at the time was that it was a story that would get way more interesting five years later, long after my boyfriend had stopped working for Silda, after I had stopped working for the lawyers, after Eliot Spitzer had skyrocketed to Governor. One morning in 2008, we turned on the Today Show to discover that this intense man turned out to also be very intensely into cheating on his wife with prostitutes. My blackout story now had a shocking twist to it.
I wondered about his seriousness that day in his Fifth Avenue apartment. Did I pick up on some other darkness there in that dark living room? Had I noticed some tension between him and his wife? Why did he not invite us all to stay? To feed us and make the best of a weird situation? Am I projecting what I know now onto what was just a meaningless, fleeting moment? Maybe I should have worried about them. There is more than one way to be trapped.
Now I know, for every magical “only in New York” moment, there is a darkness that not even the most sparkly of ivory towers can escape. I wonder if she ever painted again.
Sources:
Choir sings outside of Carnegie Hall
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