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Not Ungrateful

by LEON DISCHE BECKER

"She won't make it," Ahmed Abdullah, an elderly bodega cashier, told me. "No way. They never do." He made Hurricane Irene sound like a clueless Southern lounge singer with Broadway aspirations.

An early drinker entered the store, contorted and hungover. He looked worried: "Why are there so many people outside?"

Abdullah peered down at him: "Don't you watch the news, man? The mayor says a hurricane is going to hit New York City tonight."

"Oh, that shit," the customer said. "I heard about that shit. Don't believe it. They just want people to buy stuff."

"I know!" Abdullah said.

"Or maybe they want to install some secret shit in the tunnel to monitor people."

The mayor was on television telling people to "get out"; the New York Post's cover page bolstered his argument with a close-up of Irene "Zeroing in on New York City!" Very few of the people still in town on Saturday seemed to believe the dire predictions. (Next time, one assumes, even less people will evacuate voluntarily.) Instead many felt entitled to make predictions of their own. The most popular and safe answer: "it's not gonna be as bad as they say it is." A Bangladeshi cabdriver told me that the predicted wind speeds were "a joke" compared to the ones which with he was acquainted from monsoon season at home. Overnight it seemed like almost everyone had acquired a rudimentary knowledge of hurricanes.

There was a lively public discussion on the streets between strangers — small talk about the weather. With the storm approaching, even the most disparate residents had something in common — a condition. The notion of a hurricane hitting the city sounded implausible to most everyone I spoke to, like that much nature couldn't logically establish itself in the big city, like our civilization was too dense for Irene's winds to penetrate. New York confers a claim to toughness. Bloomberg may have insulted that self-perception with his nannyish evacuation advice: "Staying behind is dangerous."

"They shouldn't tell us to evacuate our homes," Albert Consero, a plumber, told me. "Who's gonna clean all that up?" The Daily News captured a classic New York riposte from a family in Coney Island (a grade A flood-zone) doing exactly the opposite of what they were being told: "We'll come out here anyway - we're New Yorkers," crowed Nelson Rolon, 50, of the Bronx, who brought his girlfriend, Tanya Rios, 30, and their daughter, Suehaley, 9, to the beach. "We're like the mailman; no matter what, we're out here."

By Saturday afternoon most evacuees had fled, leaving only those who couldn't afford to flee, those who didn't know the storm was coming, those who wanted to witness the storm and storm skeptics, on the streets of South Williamsburg. As shops neared closing time, the neighborhood went on a final crazed shopping spree. By then the air was humid and smelled of damp pennies, and the sky looked grey and swampy (everything seems ominous when a catastrophic storm is looming). Inside Food Bazaar, an extensive supermarket at the intersection of Broadway and Manhattan Ave, locals stocked up for what appeared to be a nuclear holocaust. The check-out lines reached around the store. Full shopping carts produced miniature traffic jams. Outside, people dashed to buy flashlights, dashed home pushing shopping carts the size of dumpsters.

Then the first rain fell and the streets emptied. I put on my ridiculous rain suit, baggie and black and shapeless, and walked around to research a story on the hurricane (this story).

At 11 p.m., South Williamsburg's streets were largely deserted, except for troupes of ironic twenty-somethings in between hurricane-themed parties, gypsy cabs out to charge hurricane-induced prices, and a segment of the local homeless population, standing in the lights of the few open delis. I spoke to Harold, a Williamsburg native who'd lost his fed-ex job a decade ago for drinking during work hours and since resided outdoors.

"I haven't seen these streets this empty in twenty years, even during the snowstorm last year," he said. I asked him what emptied the streets twenty years ago. "Back then it was always like this," he said. "You'd only see drug dealers and hookers here. Before the white kids moved in. You could get everything."

I asked him if he preferred it now. He snickered at the question. "I'll be honest with you: I liked it more then. It's nicer for girls here today. But for me: much better then. Now you can't even stand anywhere around here anymore without somebody trying to sell you something expensive. Back then you did what you wanted. And you could live here. I had a loft, a big one, right here. 400 dollars!" He looked down the street and smirked. "It's as dark as then, tonight."

Manhattan's squares and shopping miles, empty and dim, were being battered with rain when I arrived shortly after. Here the few remaining pedestrians moved faster than in Brooklyn. In Chinatown, I saw the personnel of a dumpling spot dart out of its doors, wearing makeshift rain suits composed of garbage bags; on the LES I witnessed a man holding his chihuahua to his chest, under his umbrella, and begging him to pee. Nearby, in Washington Square park, a squadron of aspiring hipsters rolled around singing — predictably — "It's Raining Men" in their gym clothes.

One of the drunker exemplars, Josephine Baker, 22, complained about the storm's laxity. "Irene's been a bit of a disappointment, so far, I'm not gonna lie. I hope it gets better." She'd come outside for the 12 foot waves she'd heard about on television, equipped with an ironic but very real boogie board. Her boyfriend wore armbands. They all rallied for whiskey shots, toasted with a chorus of boos — aimed, presumably, at the gods.

But they wouldn't be tempted. Walking around at 3 a.m. I couldn't help but feel like this amounted to little more than "shitty weather, category 3." The buildings appeared as unimpressed with the storms as its residents. Professionally this was a bit irksome, since I'd walked over to the city to cover the hurricane, to chase ambulances as it were (only to the scene, of course). As a mere resident of the city, however, I was pleased to have nothing to cover. Lower Manhattan was a museum, stocked with life-sized models of its parts. A night tour. No coruscated lights to distract from the buildings. Nothing to consume. Just the city: civilization without its usual discontents.

When the downpour became tedious, I sat under some scaffolding and read over my damp notes. An old range rover pulled up and a man climbed out, and ducked under my scaffold. Like me, he was shrouded in a black bi-laminate suit, but he was significantly taller and thinner. He looked down at me and patted his pockets: "Do you have a lighter?"

His name was Andy. He turned out to be 29, a native of Ireland, a gym instructor, and nine-year resident of Far Rockaway. Asked to evacuate, he'd packed all his clothes in his Range Rover, and driven over to Manhattan to survey the flood situation.

"If a disaster goes down in my city, I want to see it," he said, in between hits of a joint. "It is, after all, a big fucking event." He said he planned to check possible flood points all over the city, until the bridges shut. "Maybe I can get a good overview of the situation, and help the police — with intelligence, like."

We drove uptown, ploughing through puddles. Andy started to freak me out a bit when he launched into a monologue about his desire to be on television. Times Square looked to be operating on screensaver. The police pulled us over.

"You shouldn't be on the road," the officer said.

"I'm a trained driver," Andy protested. "And I think I can help you."

"You can help me by staying the fuck off the road," the heavyset mustache responded, with a sense of routine.

Andy and I returned to our previous scaffolding. There he grew increasingly resentful of the system — "ungrateful prack!" — and burned his hands while trying to heat a can of baked beans with my lighter. The wind howled ever so often but it was only a tease. Andy climbed into his car every few minutes to listen to the news updates on 1010 WINS ("a brilliant station!"). By 6:30 he had lost hope. "This thing is never coming, right?" he said, apparently pleading for positive reinforcement. It was the most personal question he'd ask me that night, and I chose to reassure him. Everything could still go haywire. "I hope so," he said. "I need some excitement!" But it wasn't to come, and I'm glad I wasn't with Andy when he realized this.

I gave up on Irene at 9 a.m. that morning, near Union Square. Bowing to keep rain off my face, I stumbled into a squad of giddy police officers in front of a 24 hour donut store. The sky was drizzling. "Is this it?" I asked a bearded ginger policeman. "Yeah. That was it, kiddo. Soak it up." His colleagues chuckled. A female officer approached me, to offer me a more official line: "they're saying there could still be some strong winds coming up."

Soon the streets of Chelsea were visited by couples with dogs, registering the severed branches, the strewn trash, as if they were a bit embarrassed for Irene, all talk, no bite. As the day progressed, more skeptics sneaked out of their houses, going on short survey walks. By the evening the conversation shifted from Irene's underwhelming performance to the mayor's overreaction. Several interviewees of mine used the term crying wolf, as if it all had been a hoax. If you live in the New York bubble, Irene might as well have been: she made a whole lot of noise down south, but hardly registered on the city's discerning radars.

Leon Dische Becker is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. This is his first appearance in these pages.

Photographs by the author.

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