This April I took a multiple-choice test for a temporary job with the census.
In May I attended training at a community hut on the bank of an inland creek in China Basin. It had a direct line of sight to the laboratory where I spent the bulk of my career as a graduate researcher.
One of my fellow trainees suggested the job was a step backwards for someone with a PhD in Biology, but I saw it as opportunity to engage in the study of my own species.
Census Employment office took over a Halal butchery store front.
I also did this for fun. I did it for the sun, the socializing, and the exercise. I got paid to explore the hidden nooks in my neighborhood during the nicest part of the year.
Impervious to these developments an agglomeration of public housing projects (of a flavor called SROs) remains. In other cities, they would have been relocated elsewhere. San Francisco decided to be different by keeping such places central and visible, placing most city housing and social service facilities within a 5 block radius of City Hall (and coincidentally, my house).
A common sight in my neighborhood.
I won’t besmirch the spirit of the urban planning decision, but it’s not without consequence. We’re the tall peak on many of these topo crime maps and every one of my car owning roommates has had a window busted.
Many people who live in San Francisco avoid our area. Many census employees specifically asked not to be assigned to my district. I relished the chance to get to know my neighborhood, to see what was usually hidden, to travel without going far from home.
My beat focused on the SRO (single room occupancy) hotels in the vicinity of 6th and Mission street.
SROs vary in their quality, purpose and clientele. Some house the disabled and the elderly, provide social services, and engage their residents with group activities in common rooms. These tend to be painted in cheerful pastel tones. Some are community centers specialized for a particular demographic, (e.g. low income working Filipino families) and might even have more than one room per unit. Such SROs resemble clean well run college dorms or decent apartment buildings.
The ones I was assigned were very much at the other end of the spectrum. They housed recovering drug addicts, parolees, and the mentally disabled. Many of the residents preferred to hide in their rooms, emerging only to relieve themselves, and even then not always.
Vacant room. The man sitting in the window with his broken leg resting on a dog is the maintenance worker for this SRO. He said, you got to rip out the drywall and floor after every tenant from the abuse the room takes.
Their long hallways of single room units shared one bathroom as the only communal space. It’s these buildings that earn SROs their reputation. These were the rooms I pried open with my questions. Did you live here on April 1st? What is your name, date of birth, ethnicity?
***
Behind each door was a fresh surprise.
One of the many unusual signs that cautioned me not to knock. Of course, I did knock.
“Count me? What for? Everyone knows I don’t count. Just look at me.”
I had to introduce myself four times to an amnesiac during one interview. Each time we got two questions further along, she interrupted urgently. “No, wait, wait… hold on! Who are you?” Rinse and repeat.
I stumped a schizophrenic by asking him how many people lived in his room. “You mean in here?” he said, pointing at his head.
Presuming I was doing genealogical research, an elderly man ebulliently traced out his linage to King Ferdinand of Spain. Then, excitedly, he started mumbling: “Swiss bank account numbers”, passwords, and the whereabouts of lock boxes that would confirm the splendor of his ancestry. He confessed that no one ever believed or understood him. Evidently he had been waiting for someone to arrive at his door and restore him to his rightful place in opulence and history, and now his dream had come true.
I liked the no nonsense talk that established clear expectations. “You know what man. I’m going to slam this door right in your face, and then if you gonna knock again, I’m going to stab you.” But wait! An unlikely assistant emerged from the bathroom. Haggard and female, she looked like half her hair was forcibly torn out. Who better to speak sense to the young man? She addressed the now slamming door, “You can’t [BOOM] treat people who come nice like that. You gotta learn the social rules kid, especially now that you got a kid of your own to feed and make educated. Do you really want a carbon copy of yourself?”
***
The official title of my position with the census was “enumerator” but besides counting people I got to play many other roles.
To “clients” I played a sympathetic ear or the pathetic dummy getting chased away from the door.
A janitor gave me a word of warning as the metal gate of yet another SRO opened with a buzz, “Bad things happen here” and as it slammed shut behind me, “You’re on your own, kid.”
One of the many unusual signs in the hallways of SROs.
In one hallway, I met a curious woman (in more ways than one) who asked me who I was and what I was doing there. Having processed my answer, she stole away into a room around the corner. Audibly, she said, “I think you should go beat up that nice white boy walking down our hallway and take everything he’s got.” Life has taught me to take such amusements in stride. I immediately walked to the room she entered, greeted its occupants with a firm look, and moved along.
I heard this story from a fellow census employee with first hand shelter experience. On the day that the homeless got their public funds checks, buses queued outside. The homeless hurried to get 50$ round trip tickets to a casino in Reno, NV plus an all-you-can-eat buffet. The check cashing place on the corner, the ticket booth for the bus, the casino filling up its down time with the dumb, down and out, low-rollers. A whole niche economy.
***
While many were eager to be interviewed, intentions varied wildly. An older guy was proud to give the date of birth of his younger girlfriend, eager to spill the numbers that reflected so well on his virility. I inadvertently flattered him by trying to infer the relation from the data, “Might this be your daughter?”
“Nah, it’s my girlfriend…
“Pretty good, right? She just got home from the hospital recovering from seizures and shit, so I can’t show her to you right now.”
Two kinds of people routinely slammed the door in my face, yet I’m not sure either would be happy with the comparison. They were repulsive in their shiny shirts and crispy suits or obscene in their birthday suits. In yuppy dwellings (to which I was also assigned) rich snobs “didn’t have the time.” One hid behind his door, the other behind the intercom. The powerless and the powerful both exerted themselves in vain (as I usually got them in the end.)
I came to your door to count you and you turned me away. You told me I’m worthless, that I’m wasting your time. You told me that you will stab me and teach me to avoid you. By now I have learned to expect these things.
You were weak, pathetic to your own self, just wanted to be left alone. “I’m sleeping, I’m always sleeping, I’d rather not wake up,” you’d say.
***
The SRO environment resembled an elementary school on permanent recess. The teachers had given up and classes have long been dismissed… but the news still felt fresh! The students milled about the hallways with a mercantilistic eye for what others had to trade. Cookies? Cigarettes? Services?
Rent was subtracted directly from their SSI benefits and left them with an operational budget of 5$ a day, (approximately the allowance for an average elementary school kid in San Francisco.) They couldn’t afford consumerism as a distraction, so they sought other diversions.
This person is a fixture on Market street. He feeds hot sauce to his rooster.
In front of the building, a story of the same genre unfolded.
A knotted elderly, mentally deranged gentleman held a a cane with its handle to the ground. An array of soda cans was arranged at his feet. He swung his club wildly, missing mostly, but occasionally launching a can high into the air above and then back down into the busy intersection.
A hunched scraggly elderly lady appeared out of nowhere. ”What are you up to today? Causing trouble as always?”
It seemed for a moment as if she was readying to deliver a reprimand, but instead, she sat on the curb, rested her chin in her palms and watched this unique sporting event adoringly, “Fun, fun … what fun!”
***
One of the most memorable lessons from training was not to bribe clients for interviews. When our trainer had participated in an earlier phase of the Census, Operation Homeless, she thought ahead and purchased cigarettes as handouts. Her group leader prevented her from acting on her good idea, saying it was considered a bribe and that “we just don’t do that kind of thing.”
I thought back to her words when I turned down repeated requests for cigarettes in exchange for interviews. But bribery has many guises. If sympathy is a bribe, I expended a lot of it.
One guy asked if I would provide any “services” in exchange for the interview. Evidently, in the world of social welfare they swim in, “services” is a common euphemism. Each is like a treat for jumping through a hoop. “If you cooperate, I may be able to get you some services.”
***
For those that were uncooperative I had to rely on manager’s records to complete the census. In those cases, I spent time interacting with the invariably Indian or Nepali management staff. To the smell of Indian spices and a view of an alter to a Hindu god, we’d kick back in the office and they’d tell me something like, “When you talk to Indian woman, you don’t have to ask her middle initial. All Indian women have middle initial same as husband’s first name”.
I felt like I was cajoling with prison guards. Their removed and judgmental attitudes and positions behind caged windows made them gatekeeper-overlords of this domain.
Presumably there is something wrong with this block, if this message needed to be translated into four languages.
I left a message on this door before.
This time, I heard a voice.
“Come back when I am sober.”
“When’s that?”
“Not sure…”
… and neither am I yet sure of the implications of these Censing experiences, not two blocks from home.
I spent the summer of 2008 in Beijing. I lived 4 blocks from the Olympic village, and I had front row seats to the colossal transformation leading up to the games. I acquired an electric scooter and explored the various parts of the city, biasing my direction towards places I hadn’t been before.
One sweltering day in Beijing, when we were out on another non-specific exploratory scooter patrol with RJ, we came across a peddle powered vehicle with an unbelievably large load. This wasn’t in itself unusual. You see these guys everywhere in Beijing and they make it into all of the tourist photographs. But being right there on the scooters next to such a load presented us with the very real possibility of discovering where all this stuff actually goes.
We tailed this vehicle for a few blocks, riding circles around it in traffic, examining the contents. The driver was dark from spending all his time in the sun and grimy from the Beijing air, beads of sweat reflected the sun on his forehead, his clothes were shredding from wear and acrid sweat. The insides of his knees were calloused from an improper peddling position which undoubtedly also hurt his knees.
His cart was fantastically overloaded with computer monitors, cardboard boxes, sundry electronics, water bottles, stacked tall and precarious. On the top was a slight middle aged female. She was the captain steering the upper story of the ship while the peddler focuses on the chug of the peddles, (in the engine room.) She was a skillful jockey corralling the amorphous pile of stuff, banking it into turns, using her arms and legs as dynamic counterweights, to adjust straps, and to hold on herself.
I’ve seen many such carts but this wasn’t the usual kind. The two person technique allowed them to be particularly ambitous.
We made a northwards turn near Tsinghua University Science and Technology (TUS) park, and passed tall office buildings which house the likes of Google China, Microsoft and Baidu, fancy restaurants, and a language learning boutique called “Wall Street English”.
On the road we spotted several more recycling vehicles, and we started to swim faster that the current chasing down the next and the next one. There were all kinds, electrical, gas, or peddle powered, and even some drawn by donkeys.
When we crossed the train tracks the recycling trickle became a recycling stream — half the vehicles on the road were loaded with recyclables, and when we rounded the next corner, we merged with the main vein of traffic through the heart of a neighborhood we dubbed trash city. The vehicles were no longer driving, but lined up in a long queue.
(This is a video of this crossing, but going in the opposite direction.)
At the head of the line was a weigh station, which the vehicles would mount, get weighed first and tarried after. The load was examined by an inspector whose stomach was exposed by a rolled up blue shirt. (This was the preferred way of cooling oneself.) He would issue a receipt to the driver who now rolled his empty cart onward in search of more filling. A few shouts (or was it signals using gongs and bells and some form of morse code) would summon the relevant section peddlers. Immediately, the monitor kid would run over with a wheel barrow, and the cardboard guy with his donkey, etc.
The economy of the whole neighborhood is dependent on recycling, and the physical layout of the streets and the people that lived there, constitute the recycling factory. If you followed the wheel barrow full of monitors, you’d soon find yourself in an unpaved alley where the disassembly process unfolded in the open air. What used to be whole, now became parts, and the parts were handed down different alleys and eventually out the back on large trucks. I do not know how money flowed through this system, or how much pay the receipt entitled the driver, but we could follow the trail of the material.
The first intersection on Monitor street branched into Plastic Alley left, Monitor Glass Road to the right. Going straight on Electronics Way led to a Circuit square which was also fed by a few other disassembly pipes of electronics from computers, radios, and cellphones.
If you tossed a gps transponder into such a cart anywhere in the city, you could probably track it through the maze of Beijing streets down to trash city, a brief pause at the weigh station, and a short leg to the point of its final transmission. There, typically a young kid would wrench out the critical circuit and toss it in a bin with others like it, and pick up the next circuit board and do the same. And there would be right here, in Circuit Square.
The boards themselves along with other scraps back in to Smelter Cul de Sac and are transmuted to hazardous fumes and a little bit of precious metals.
This place has a remarkable counterpoint in other parts of Beijing in the form “cell phone repair” stores where older masters and young apprentices micro-solder damaged components using stereoscopes. Here, they rip these components off and toss them into sorting bins, to be transported somewhere else. Disassemble and reassemble. Large Motorized Diesel Trucks filled to the brim left from the back of Trash City directly onto the highway.
Trash City had the appealing character that you could return and discover more. You could come back to a place and ask for someone you met there last time, and they would turn up. You could be invited into the run down communal homes where there are no doors to hide behind, but everyone’s business unfolds in full view. In the first room by the entry, there would typically be a computer internet and several people sitting on benches waiting for their turn to use it, to play games, chat or watch videos.
You could come there at 2AM, buy a large beer for 2RMB (then 25 cents) and play a game of pool on the street. There would be kids in their underwear, and people in pajamas crossing the street, brushing their teeth, or walking to the communal toilet around the corner.
The kids and the grownups never let themselves be separated from their most valuable possessions. The cellphone coordinated their work in the day and illuminated their way at night. Everything that was workspace by day was living quarters by night.
RJ and I returned to visit (and photograph) our friends on several occasions. Once, I got a call from RJ telling me to come see another part of Trash City we hadn’t seen before. And it was true. A disjoint orbit, with a different entrance way! The Prosthetics Quadrant and Mannequin Circle, and in the middle of it all was a peculiar kind of mannequin leg jousting match. (Rarely do the kids arm themselves with a prosthetic arm or a hook, as those are actually more complex instruments to wield and not so much suitable as fighting toys.)
It seems like everything I write is an accident report, and I’m not even an emergency professional. Hopefully this is my last one. I am retiring from accidents, and the following is the beginning of an exploration of how.
I’ve got two very large hematomas on my rear end. (On top of never being able to sit still) I will not be able to sit comfortably for at least a few days, and since I am on pain killers my mental game is almost completely shot.
It could have been a lot worse.
Skiing this Sunday, I went up a ramp for a jump. It was my first time on that run, and I had no idea what was on the other side. My mental model was a flat elevated bank. I don’t know why. At the moment I got airborne, I realized just how wrong I was.
The Fall
Given the abrupt drop, I don’t think I could have landed anyways — not that a better skier wouldn’t have been able to handle it. The fact that my trajectory invariably resolved to a large rock bulging out of the mountain, made landing the least of my concerns.
fuzzy sketch. ~15ft from take off to landing.
When we were going up the ski lift, Mike told me of a cliff on this mountain that he almost accidentally skied off the previous year. “I almost died right there,” and pointed at it.
I thought about this as I cradled myself for the fall and in a short time which seemed like eternity, I came to terms with all of it — the blood and the snow, the bone and the rock, and sinew — for what use is there in protesting the inevitable?
not the slope i fell on. it's from my previous run. here to convey the terrain.
But I did protest (on behalf of my whole-ness) as best I could: I crouched; I lifted my hands to my head and let the ski poles stick out over my elbows forming a kind of cavity; I tried to take the first impact on my skis, which I managed, bending my knees to absorb; the second impact on the poles, and then I lost control. The skiis and poles went flying, my rear end significantly clipped the rock and I tumbled past it down the hill, futilely trying to account for my limbs and slow the slide.
When I came to, I didn’t know which side was up. I was both stiff and shaking and the only word that came out of my mouth was “fuck”. It came out loud, “FUUUUCK”. It came out in short sequences, “fuck, fuck, fuck”. And it came out with every breath until I managed to roll myself on my back and lose myself in the cold embrace of the snow. I didn’t see any blood and surprisingly, I could still move my fingers and toes.
Mike, who had been snowboarding behind me, watched me ascend and fall out of view. He appeared at the crest. A couple of boarders who witnessed my inglorious moment told him, “your boy ate it real bad, and probably needs the ski patrol.” Besides the fact that one of my skis skied on without me, there was no way I could make it down the mountain myself.
Damage
The ski patrol came, wrapped me in a stretcher and towed me with a snowmobile to the medical clinic at the base. They made sure I didn’t have any bone or spine damage and let me out of the bindings. When I reached around to palpitate my behind, I felt an unfamiliar bulge and another.
I asked to go to the bathroom, where I turned my back to the mirror and took off my pants. It looked like a pomegranate was glued to my left buttocks and an eggplant was attached to my right thigh. I estimated that a pint of blood filled each shape. My skin was stretched taught and reddish purple. Nothing else looked as bad or hurt as much as those two places.
It was then that I realized that my ass was so big, that I could not get my pants back on. Nor could I bend over sufficiently to take off my skiing boots. I walked out into the hallway in boxers with my pants dangling at my feet.
The doctor helped me with the boots and said these were among the worst hemotomas he has seen and they would likely need to be drained in a few days. He gave me a few Vicadin on the spot and a prescription for more, “you are going to need this.”
Hematoma
For the next 48 hours, I stuffed loose fitting pants with ziplock bags of snow or ice. I attached them with binder clips at my waistline to keep them properly positioned. I slept on my stomach with my rear elevated and iced. As I sit writing this, I’ve folded pillows into complimentary shapes. I’ve been using an ergonomic chair that shifts my weight to the knees. When I go to the bathroom, I dream about a squat toilet. (I record this because it’s important not to forget these pathetic nuances of dealing with basic necessities, to relate to the realities of old and infirm.)
i have reduced this image and obfuscated it to keep it appropriate.
Over the past three days, I’ve taken up valuable time from various people: Mike, the ski patrol, the mountain med clinic, the student health clinic, the ER. My department and graduate advisor have helped with health insurance, (an issue now that I have graduated.) I’m lucky to have this network of support. And I’ve been told by almost each of them of how lucky I was to have gotten off with the damage I have, from the impact I had. And the problem is that I have put myself and such people through this charade already several times.
Lessons
So what’s the lesson here? Obviously, don’t jump without knowing where you are landing. Prepare for tricks by first studying a given run several times. Wear a freaking helmet.
But for me, the lesson is different. I get into these situations too often. If I learn that discrete lesson, new lessons will remain to be learned. And besides, mountains sports are inherently dangerous. The medical clinic was full to the last bed, like an inner city trauma ward, and some of the sights weren’t so pretty. Last time I went snowboarding, I fractured a rib and it hurt to breathe or sleep for almost a month.
So, I have decided to retire from mountain sports. Skiing/boarding is fun. It’s just not for me. I like challenging myself, which would be fine on a basketball or volleyball court, running or playing squash (though I get injured there too). An alternative would be to reflect and consider some behavioral remediation and generally tune down my avarice for risk. But since I actually treasure that aspect of my character, I am choosing to instead restrict the domain of activities I engage in, to those with better exercise/fun/reward vs risk trade offs.
One months ago, I was hanging by the seat belt in a sideways car across the lane of a windy mountain highway in Mexico. Blood was streaming from my elbow. My thoughts were focused on the immediate there and then. Now it’s time for reflection.
Hwy 1 – Baja, Mexico. Jan 3rd.
For most of the longitudinal span of the Baja peninsula, the only paved road is a single lane highway with the lanes heading in opposite directions separated by a dashed yellow stripe. The most frequent sign on the side of this road is curvas peligrosas [dangerous curves]. As frequent as the symbolic are the more realistic reminders of the danger. These come in the form of variously disfigured and discarded vehicles, or the harder-to-spot mechanical entrails, such as headlights and shredded tires, but also dents on the guard rails and scars on the road itself.
From the way people drive you wouldn’t know it. There is a bimodal distribution of speeds on this highway. There were those I glimpsed on their quick approach in the rear-view mirror, swerving around me, and then gaining on the horizon in front.
There were others that were probably as eager to go that fast, but either because they were heavy tractor-trailers or dilapidated jalopies, they just couldn’t push it. These I passed with ease.
Four of us, were returning from a week long road trip in Baja. We had lots of ground to cover in two days. We were planning a layover in LA that night (Saturday), before setting out to SF the following morning. (Sunday) My friend had just completed a 6 hour marathon driving session, and handed over the controls to me in San Quentin, still 200 miles south of the border (Tijuana).
When I started the starlit ascent into the mountains past the valley, the road became windy. A flash rain passed and stopped. Most of the turns were marked well in advance, except for the turn that got me. Because of the change in elevation it was a blind turn and when I finally realized we were heading into a curve, it turned out to be too late. We were driving above 60 mph when I first caught the sharp turn.
Skid, Tumble and Roll
To our right, was a steep drop off. To the left was the mountain face the road was hugging. When I turned the wheel, the car swerved and woke David. As the tired lost traction, he screamed “watch out”. We were skidding with our right side forward, while heading straigh for the mountain.
I turned the wheels in the direction of the skid to regain traction. This jerked the car around into a left side forward skid, at which point I hit the anti-lock brakes so we would not drive forward off the cliff. During the skid a rock on the left margin of the road hit our back tire, and this was enough to send the car tumbling.
At that point, we had lost control. Just brace. All of the peices have been set in motion. Now it’s up to the physical model play itself out and for the peices to land where they may.
When we rolled over all of the windows smashed. I had my elbow resting on the window while driving. Now, I watched as my elbow compressed into a sandwich of broken glass and pavement.
When we toppled on the roof, I felt like my head was dented with a baseball bat. A weightless upside down hang during the tumble, I must have formed a body image coincident with the car’s frame. The windsheild shattered and I could see the road above me and a dark expanse beyond, without obstruction.
We came to a rest on the opposite lane of the highway with our belly exposed. The sounds of crunching metal and sparks came to a stop. The only sound the car emitted was a periodic squeak from the rear windshield wiper. Only the windshield wasn’t there. The wiper was futilely wiping air, and dislodging the remaining fragments of glass.
David immediately asked, “Is everyone ok?” It was reassuring to hear a voice, as I was deathly fearful for our lives. My elbow was numb and I felt a warm trickle on my hand. A “yes” escaped without much thought. I regretted it immediately, hoping I did not speak too soon. Amanda and Rupa also said yes.
How Do I get out?
I turned the key and killed the engine and climbed out first, through the broken window. Time matters. Is the car on fire? Is there a vehicle barreling down the opposite direction? Rupa stood upright in the sidways car and said, “How do I get out?” She was standing on David. I stood on a large rock that lay by the car and lifted her out.
As I turned to set her down, David’s head popped out, “How do I get out?” When I lifted him also from the same rock, I realized that I miscalculated his weight, having practiced only on Rupa (100 lb) and we collectively fell backwards, onto broken glass and rocks by the side of the road. A shared pierced my pants and sliced my buttox.
When I stood up, Amanda pleaded, “How do I get out?” The quiet only underlined how calm we were. The situation was not for panic, but clarity and immediate needs. Amanda was less than a week out of foot surgery and brought along a crutch for the trip.
As I set her down, David asked for his shoes. I recovered a pair with Amanda’s crutches. And used it also to fish out Rupa’s and David’s glasses after they both said, “I can’t see.”
The group now shod and seeing, I recovered our flashlights and headlamps and armed each person with a set.
Mixed with the adrenaline was the elation of being alive. It felt that we were connected in this understanding — that our lives were handed back to us — and it had a calming affect.
When there are enough immediately obvious tasks, you don’t need to think. Yet while I acted mechanically, pulling items out of the car, trying to wedge the foot of the crutch in the catch of the glove compartment to free Amanda’s passport, I had time to realize that I was probably not going to make it home tomorrow, when I had an appointment with my research advisor. We had agreed to meet for a final review of my paper before submission, and it was a moment I had distracted myself from anxiously anticipating, by having gone on this road trip. And I felt seriously bad. I felt this wasn’t an excuse. I wished I could just escape through a teleporter, as if this was all a dream. And when it settled that it wasn’t, I realized how clearly this accident was my fault and that I needed to own up to it. The fact that it was pointless to face my friends an apologize to my friends right there led to more regret. We were all delayed, from work and school and our regularly scheduled programs.
A truck pulled up and a Mexican man asked us if we were ok — yes. needed an ambulance — no. had called the police — no, can you please call? had flares for warning — no, do you?
He spoke clear English, yet, while talking to him, I was still lost to a mechanical focus. I walked around the car to discover that the battery cracked and had leaked all of the fluid. There was so much car part debris on that stretch of road, that I had a hard time determining if it was all ours.
While Amanda, who is a nurse, grabbed the first aid kit and reviewed my elbow situation, Rupa and David were pulling accessible items from the car. There was blood everywhere. All over my body. All over Rupa’s white blanket. A blood smeared pillow lay on the road.
Did these bags of camping supplies and food matter anymore? Were we going to lose them? I had paid 70$ for a special Mexican insurance policy that Amanda looked up on the internet. David was calling the 800 number listed on the printout. Amanda made sure there was no more glass in my elbow, poured some antiseptic and applied a temporary bandage.
The cops arrive
The cops arrived, but their behavior was surprisingly casual, almost bored. Given that it’s Mexico we’re a little lost on protocol, but we figure a tow truck has probably been called, and we’ll have to figure out some ride to a near by town. Some paperwork to be signed here, some more followup tomorrow.
After 20 minutes of chatting to us and on their radio, the officer walks over and says.
“Ok, let’s go. Can one of you drive?”
“Are we getting a tow truck?”
“If you want to wait 4-5 hours for tow truck, be my guest, but I’m not interested.”
“You mean ride this car sideways back to town? Will you follow us?”
“Yes, let’s go.”
One push from three of us set the car rattling back on its tires.
Since the battery leaked the fluid, the car wouldn’t start. The officers pulled over a car and told the driver to jump us.
When it purred and started, he said “Put the stuff back in the car.”
Under the conditions, it was an amusing proposition to drive this totaled hunk of metal down the highway. Where the windshield wasn’t busted, it was contorted, giving the road a Daliesque feel.
David took on the challenge of driving and I played side kick in the passenger seat. His glasses doubled as safety goggles, but to prevent the cascade of broken windshield in my face (which happened with every discontinuity in the road) I had to keep my head outside the passenger window.
Military Checkpoint
Within 20 minutes, we approached a military checkpoint. We thought being a hobbling wreck followed by a police car might get some special treatment, but the military were not phased. They had their orders. “Step out of the car.” They gave it a cursory inspection for drugs and whatever else and sent us on our way.
We drove what turned out to be 45 miles into the city of Ensanada topping out at 30 mph, with an ever growing tail of cars behind us, who were hesitant to pass the cops.
In town, the cops gave us the signal to follow them and immediately ran a few red lights.
Across from the police station was a motel. The clerk on duty said he wasn’t surprised to see us at 4AM, since they get a lot of business from the police station.
While David and Amanda waited for the insurance inspector to arrive, I took this photo in the bathroom.
I took a long hot shower. The water initially pooled crimson from the cuts on my elbow and buttocks. After a self application of neosporen and bandages, I tucked myself in a corner and went to bed.
When we woke up, we were still stranded in Mexico, still uncertain about the fate of the car and our prospects of returning home. Amanda suggested we check if we were sore, since it’s very common for people to suddenly tense up (even rigidify) during accidents and remain stiff for days.
Instead of sore, I felt very relaxed and optimistic that morning. I was lucky to be with people who remained calm and cooperative throughout the accident. Lucky to have friends that cut their road trip further south into Baja short to ferry us back across the border.
A happy tingle of adventure mixed with the rawness of the reality of how close I was to a pulverized carcas had I not worn my seatbelt.
My confidence as a driver was shattered, and I asked myself several times when is going to be right time to appologize. Ironically tristan had called me a “champion driver” the day before, when Amanda asked.
After spending the following night in Pasadena, we rented a car for the last leg to San Francisco. When he got tired of driving, Dave gave me the car on Interstate 5. Last time I was behind the wheel, the car ended up sideways, (and it was my first real accident as a driver.) I made sure to ask if they trusted me behind the wheel, and when they said yes and so comforted me, I apologized.
My friend Felipe took me to a house party in Chile. We arrived at 2AM and it was still just getting started. There was lots of mayhem. The ages of the party goers ranged from 22-24 as those were the ages of the brothers celebrating their birthday. Every possible space was occupied, either with people or empty bottles of Pisco and Coke. Mud was tracked everywhere about the house and the backyard was likewise overflowing with commotion. The music was loud and there was some groping. All of this is along the lines of the expected. What did surprise me was that the parents were present.
Dad was greeting party attendees when I came. And mom was hanging out in the kitchen with some of their friends. I kept noting their behavior. Most of the time they contained themselves in the kitchen, but when things got too loud, dad would emerge and turn down the nob on the stereo, or close a door that wasn’t supposed to be open. As soon as he retreated, it would all go back to the original state. But he didn’t seem frustrated.
I told the birthday boy/host that I had been to house parties like this in the United States, but they usually coincided with the parents being out of town. He seemed puzzled and replied, “I would never think of throwing a party like this when my parents are away.”
fifteen minutes before the opening of the afternoon visa session, i joined the loose assemblage of peoples around the chinese consulate. returning veterans of the morning session clued me in:
i must queue on the right
for the deli machine
which dispenses the numbers
that determine the order
of being seen.
so, i took my place by the entrance, seemingly at the head of the line. yet before i know it, there were 20 people competing for the spot i had occupied alone, an amalgam of me and 19 elderly chinese.
on the other side of the glass doors two security guards were preparing for the onslaught. i could make out the russian names on their tags. the shorter one ‘A.’ had braces, the other ‘R.’ a cigarette in his mouth, and neither was older than 20. their clothes were oversized and since they huddled behind the machine which dispenses the numbers, i imagined them as meat clerks by the deli counter.
i have lost my wallet and all of its contents. the process is inconvenient: call the credit card companies, the bank, get a new id from shool, go through the process of getting it coded, a new license, and a new insurance card; then moan about the cash, receipts, and the wallet itself. so, for the new wallet i started today, i decided to try a little experiment. inside of the wallet, i prominently wrote:
Thank you for finding my wallet!
1. keep the cash, you’ve earned it.
2. give me a call (###) ### – ####
3. collect your reward of 50$
how will the wallet “finding” contingent respond to this?
on another note, craigslist should have a lost/found board.
time has passed, and i have told this story many times. this means that i’ve rehearsed my telling of it, but also that i have gotten tired of hearing myself speak it out. so i write it now, for your benefit.
during a recent visit to moscow, i stayed with the family of my cambridge friend, masha tabak. the tabak’s are very interesting people, one can say, part of the russian intelligencia. as part of this intelligencia, they are defined by their multitude of interesting friends. it is this network of associations that positions you.
their friend sonya, a moscow correspondent for the new york times, was hosting a spring party at a bohemian cafe, all inside a theater, hardly a fifteen minute walk from the kremlin. most of the people in attendance were her fellow correspondents from american media. nbc, cbs, abc, npr, and some of their russian counterparts, such as ‘rea news’ and ntv. but also there was a professor of anthropology from MGU, leading lawyers, … and more that i had not met or do not remember meeting.
this last point is quite serious and takes us to the main cause of my misadventures for the evening. it is not only a stereotype about russia that everyone drinks vodka. it is also the truth. it would have been ingenuine, unmannered, … nay uncivilized for me not to partake of yet another shot to mark a fresh acquaintance.
masha and i had an objective for the evening. we were scoping out potential employers. though she is at cambridge now, and has job prospects at the bbc world service (having already become a regular contributor), she wanted to record some more telephone numbers in her black book of networking and i intended to help her.
perhaps i went about it the wrong way. perhaps i was too ambitious in the amount of people i wished to meet. or perhaps it was the rate of meeting that did me in. or perhaps, the whole episode was inescapable, an inevitability that even the party planners resigned themselves too. for 80 people, the alcohol allowance was such: 10 bottles of wine, 20 bottles of vodka.
anyhow the crux revolves around my relatively peaceful arrival to the party in the company of masha and her father, our individual leave takings, and our diverse adventures on the return home.
the first to leave was yuri, masha’s father. it was 1am and he was aware of the imminence of the last metro train. he was not aware where masha and i were. nor, it seems, was he aware enough to find us. this is surprising because the party was limited to two rooms of one cafe and we were there.
he said he thought we had prolonged our young night’s adventures elsewhere, in the company of some young and daring journalists, contributing to the chaos of the moscow night scene.
he arrived home just short of 2am. in the hallway, his wife asked him where masha and i were. he responded, ‘peretz is with some girls, masha is with some guys. they are fine.’ he did manage to remove his clothes though without regard for where they landed. then he sprawled out on the bed without regard for orientation and immediately engaged in a loud program of snoring.
right about this time, masha was having thoughts of returning home and experiencing similar troubles locating the company she came with. at this point it was just myself that remained. were i was, myself do not remember.
sonya told her that yuri went home, and perhaps masha thought i had left with him. the metro has stopped running by this point, so she caught a car and went home.
in moscow it is possible to transport oneself from origin to destination in a multiplicity of ways. there is the metro, bus, tram, trolley, taxi, route taxi, and also the possibility to ‘catch a car’. catching a car is like hitching for money. usually a much smaller sum than had it been a taxi. many drivers moonlight as cars for hire for a few extra rubles, and many others are not loath to do this on the way home from work.
around 3am. by the time masha arrived at home, i was beginning to gain consciousness. i don’t remember where i was, other than the fact that i had not left the perimeter of the aforementioned two rooms. this was the sequence of my
realizations:
i realized that i was alive.
i realized that i was myself.
i realized that i was in an uncomfortable position.
i realized that i was in an unfamiliar place.
i realized that i was in moscow.
… a few realizations later i had arrived at the one realization that compelled me to rise and take action: i realized that the people i came with were not around, that it was late and probably a good time to go home.
this process of realizations can be understood by analogy to a computer booting up. at some part of the night, my personal computer crashed and it was now rebooting, albeit in ’safe mode’. in safe mode, i did not have access to all of my computational capacities. some went into safekeeping for the night. some did not return until much later the following day. i only had a small network of neurons to work with, and i had to trim my thought process to small digestible comprehensible packets of thoughts.
let me find sonya, i thought. she is the host, she must still be here. she will help me.
i soon realized that my vision was significantly impaired. to overcome this, i gave up on my right eye and closed it. with my left eye i squinted and concentrated as i had seen my grandmother squint when looking at my face to tell me apart from other grandchildren. composed in this way, i followed a relatively simple search algorithm around the rooms (like the algorithm of going through a maze by moving straight, and then turning to the right when
possible.)
rather than me recognizing sonya, it was she who earned a medal for face recognition, having recognized my lopsided squinting face. let’s get you home, she said. masha and yuri have already left. do you have any money?
i checked my wallet and discovered an unusual problem that smelled of world travel. i had 40 dollars (two twenties), 15 euros (a ten and a five) and twenty-five pounds (two tens and a five), but no rubles.
sonya put 200 rubles in my right hand, (for which i am not only indebted but also ooze gratefulness), and i cradled them safely as a five year old may hold on to a hidden piece of candy before life has taught him that chocolate melts in your hand.
outside of the theater, she let me roam around in place, while she flagged down potential cars for hire. the third car agreed to the destination and price, and without further ado, i collapsed into the passenger side seat and bid sonya farewell.
but this is not the end of the story.
the driver soon showed signs of not being such a premium person. when we pulled around the corner, he muttered: show me the loot. in a few logical iterations even in safe mode i made a plan to seem trustworthy, but to avoid this topic directly. i tried to lighten the tension with a conversation on another subject. i opened the window for some air. i closed it because it was cold. but mostly, i realized, it would be best to stay quiet.
then he showed again that he was not such a savory character, and asked you sure you know how much we agreed for? and, you know what happens to people who underpay? with a gold tooth he promised some unmentionable things.
my strategy clearly wasn’t working, but soon i realized why he had been so explicit with the money. he did not know where the place was. make note that it was a particular metro station, ‘nagornaya’, and not some obscure alleyway we were looking for. still, he circled about having lost the sense that we were going in the right direction, disbursing anger in a string of swear words here or a punch at the steering wheel there.
naively, i tried to help and took out the map from my pocket. using the squinting technique, i may have almost located where we were. but even then, i realized it would be hopeless to try to refocus on the street signs (partly because moscow is poorly labeled) and then back on the map. to look straight was already too much to ask of my impaired eyes for the night.
he pulled up to a metro station and said, this is it. he also grunted, give me the money. i did not recognize the place, but it was a metro stop and there was no evidence to the contrary — no clear label naming the stop ‘NOT NAGORNAYA’. besides, moscow metro stations are often expansive, and i figured i’ll go underground and emerge from another entrance where all will become clear.
i unclasped my hand containing the 200 rubles sonya placed there not 25 minutes ago. he took them and then he started to strangle me with the rough hands of a workman. give me another hundred, he said.
maybe i would have given him another hundred, but i did not have any. i was very calm at this moment. maybe because the part of my brain that is responsible for worrying was also out of commission, and if so, that is an important scientific discovery. anyhow, instead of worrying, i thought the following list of things:
i thought i can hold my breath for a long time. when i was younger i placed first and won a coveted ice cream soda at an underwater swimming competition in summer camp. so i have time to think of a plan.
i thought it would be good to make sure the door was unlocked and to locate the handlebar. (i tuned this thought into action, using my right hand.)
i thought it was important to make sure i had my possessions with me, and i tucked the map back into my pocket and tapped my passport and wallet which were in their proper places. (this was accomplished with my left hand.)
i thought, now is a good time to regain my airflow, even at the expense of a proper genial goodbye.
…at this point i mechanically punched the attempted murderer in the nose, jumped out of the car. i ran into the underground where there were many stray dogs warming themselves from the cold.
but even this is not the end of the story. it was a cold night in moscow and the station was not ‘nagornaya’.
40 minutes of mapwork and bipedaling saved me. it was a long 40 minutes filled with many courageous and ingenious navigational moments. at one point i disobeyed a policeman who gave me completely incorrect directions. at another less climactic point, i had to avoid conflict with some drunk hooligans.
when i got home, masha met me by the elevator. there was a trickle of saline fluid on her cheek and i wiped it off. her mother was also waiting up for me in the kitchen. there were crosswords of worry on both of their faces. my fingers were getting numb. we had tea, and we called sonya, and i felt completely sober and happy. happy to be alive.
this is not the end of the story, (but this time) only because it would be a shame to end it without some word of advice. should one avoid hired cars? no, they are helpful and cheap and most of the time a safer and more pleasant experience than mine. make a few reasonable precautions. be more selective with the driver and attempt to coincide with a more premium person. even so, sit in the back seat. this way it is harder for the driver to reach over and strangle you. when possible, carry a gun.
See related article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
for new year, we traveled to the fashion capital of the world, Milan, to report on what’s hot this year:
(the outdoor celebration spanned three plazas, each hosting a diversely themed concert, and the interconnecting network of streets housed all sorts of fan fare.)
in the plazas, we encountered bomb shelling. or so we thought initially. evidently, it is IN to throw firecrackers into crowds of people and to aim projectile fireworks at the same crowd shortly thereafter. (this way, they are sufficiently shocked from the first explosion that if you aim right, they’ll be too disoriented to have any chance of avoiding impact.)
for the more sophisticated, it’s also IN to place firecrackers into beer bottles and throw the bottles as this causes more damage from the ejected shards of glass. no worries, ambulances are near by and will take the victim to fashionable hospitals.
when you are done drinking champagne, of which the cheap variety only costs 5 euros at your nearest peddler in the square, break this bottle too, especially if you have just downed it because the clock reads 12:01 am.
remember, though these activities are fashionable in and of themselves, it is possible to perform them with more or less style. your neighbors will notice; but they will not tell the police.
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Tolerable Insanity.
