Office Workers in the Wild

It reminded me of … things. 

I talked to lawyers today. They think I am idiot, and of course I agree under this and/or any circumstance, but I was satisfied to find that my concerns were at the very least considered legitimate. 

I remember the lawyers with whom I used to interact. Crabby, prickly, one was bafflingly beautiful, mostly (hah, almost said “moistly”) on account of her overheated brain. We worked at the same shapely office building but it was when she approached me at the Canyon Road restaurant on the Upper East Side, interrupting dinner with a friend, that my 20-something brainclot swirled with fantasies of long-awaited legitimacy among women I found beautiful. 

Alas, legitimacy was evasive, and fleeting (almost said “fellating”, Freud). I am not certain I ever saw that woman again, but she talked me up up up in the glass tower, advising certain untouchables of presidential title to send me off to executive school (somewhere in Boston?). 

When I caught word of the Executive School mumblejumble I bought an Ascot-Chang shirt at the like-named store located downstairs. I never wore it. That shirt hangs in my closet, never-worn, a monument to my life unspent at an office, rising ambiguously through the ranks of corporata, failing upward in an artificial orgosystem. 

The above picture, of people I know not, from the 1950s, of a man taking pictures of women’s feet somewhere on a rock in the United States of America, returned my mind to corporate. This is a corporate vacation. Corporate vacating. Let us VACATE. Let us pay a week’s hard-earned wages for guided tours and raftboats, inner tubes. Let us spy on domestic antelope and rhinocerii through our binoculars. 

I was walking over the 59th Street Bridge today when I spotted a kitten, lingering in an open area north of the pedestrian walkway. A Serta pillow, filthy, has sat in that space for months. I stopped to look at the kitten as the memory, surfacing for an instant, of a friend who saves alley cats played in my head. As I stopped to get a closer look at the kitten a voice rose up from the roaring din of vehicles heading into Manhattan. The voice, stupid, shouted “WHAT ARE YOU DOIN’ DOWN THERE? STOP IT!” I turned to see a drunk man, his head lurching from the passenger-side window of a van, blasting obscenities and bile at anyone inferiorly underneath him, which at that moment happened to include me and a kitten. 

The kitten dashed away.

This sound of a siren at the cemetery has lingered in my mind since I caught it a few days ago. It sounds sweet, the siren, and stately as it passes into the distance. Listening to its passage I found myself trying to interpret its slow-moving progress, and I imagined that my fantasy sirens-savant really exists, and that maybe that savant is me.

Some time ago I imagined a young boy with a unique skill. He could read siren sounds. By simply hearing a siren he could identify it as “Police, Berlin, 1960s,” or “Ambulance, South Africa, 1940s.” He was a prodigy, this fantasy child of mine, though in fact I knew a kid in grade school who recognized sirens from around the world, and perhaps that kid inspired this character.

Sirens were a thing of mystery and evocation in my youth. Certain “codes” of the siren were common knowledge, however accurate they may have been. I grew up believing that an ambulance’s siren is turned off when the patient inside has died. I also grew up believing in the superstition that one should hold their breath when they hear an ambulance approach, and not exhale until the siren sound is fully gone, lest the patient inside will die. I believed there was significance to sirens switching from slowly-alternating howls to more rapid-fire sounds, and there I also thought there was symbolism in which side of a car a siren was placed when a portable siren is stuck to the roof of a vehicle.

My fantasy savant goes beyond the superstitions and beyond the parlor trick of merely identifying the type of siren. I imagine him in a room crowded by acoustical researchers and scientists, listening to tapes of sirens recorded in places all around the world, in countries the youngster could never possibly have visited. A typical analysis of his might be “Fire truck, Canada, probably Montreal, 1990s, it’s raining, the firefighters think the blaze is too dangerous, they can’t see 3 infants in the upstairs room, their mother set the fire and gassed herself, they’re going to let the house burn itself out!” Or, “Ambulance, Ireland, 1960s, only one paramedic, the patient was hit by a truck and is looking around the inside of the ambulance, making eye contact with the paramedic…”

The siren sound is not just a warning to other drivers but a physical surface to be interpreted and even handled.

Eventually this strange ability to read deep into the contours of siren sounds drives the boy mad. He never finds another person with his ability to interpret sirens and on account of this he becomes convinced that every siren he hears is sending cryptic messages which only he can hear. In time he becomes paranoid, believing that every ambulance and police car siren he hears is warning him that they are coming for him, or that grave danger looms.

That siren last week, cutting through the hot, windy air of the cemetery, entered my mind as an object for interpretation. Why, indeed, was the vehicle moving so slowly when there was virtually no traffic on the highway? The sound itself has a strange texture. It is bright and I see it smiling, but the sound is mournful.

By John Ashbery
From “Houseboat Days”

The visible books on the shelves are mostly from college, early 1990s, and even high school vintage. “Gray’s Anatomy,” portions of which I had memorized in 1990 and 1991, sits slightly askew in the middle of the shelf. I don’t have all the Latin terms ready to wield like a whipsaw but I remember the os magnum, the carpal trapezium, the metacarpals and capitatum, the semilunar and the unciform — this just a random memorydump of words, issued in no meaningful sequence but to demonstrate how I once had memorized the names of every bone of the human hand.

My interest in the complexities of human hands led me to purchase “Gray’s Anatomy,” a weighty tome through which I wandered other bony realms of feet, skull, ass, and shoulders.

I pursued these interests partly as curious diversion but also in an attempt to understand “the mechanism,” as we called it at the conservatory. The “mechanism” is the complex of gear-like chunks of bone and cartilaginous innards united by physics and artistry to create sound at a piano and on other instruments. The professor with whom I studied used the term “mechanism”. He massaged his right arm any time he said the word. One time he groused about atrophy, and he squeezed his right forearm saying “Sometimes the mechanism isn’t feeling like it used to.” Chopin used the same term in summarizing the characteristics of each finger and the art of fingering. I don’t know if Chopin had much knowledge of anatomy. Was Chopin fluent in the locations and functions of the metacarpals and the unciform? I brandish those terms now with foggy memories of their relationship and their appropriate sequence. I might simply enjoy the sound of the words, a superficial spark which helped draw me in to a fascination with the workings of the human hand.

I became similarly interested in architecture not because I cared for buildings (though I do) but because I was 16 years old when a girl I liked just out of nowhere started blurting out words like “squinch”, “stalactite”, “stucco”, and “Muqarnas”. She also lit up my word-o-sphere with a bunch of terms regarding joints and lathing. “Stucco” was the only of her words I knew, for Stucco was a material commonly used for walls and ceilings in Florida houses. As with squinch and stalactite and other words, “Stucco” could have meant birdshit and I still would have thought it was an awesome word just on account of its sound.

The next book on my shelf is “The White House Transcripts,” purchased for $1.33 on October 9, 1990, at a Tampa book shop. These details (which I assume to be accurate) are known to me because I just stood up to get that book and I found the purchase receipt stuck between pages 142 and 143. Hah, I shall add that relic to my collection of receipts. I never got too far with this book, remembering it mostly for the [expletive deleted] and the [unintelligible] leitmotifs. Watergate became a morbid interest of mine in college on account of my interest in obtaining a copy of a piece of music Richard Nixon wrote for the Orthagonians, a club at Whittier College (why do I still remember this?).

On the same shelf as this book of transcripts is “Music At the White House,” a volume summarizing musical performances at the White House and the musical endeavors of presidents who had such talents themselves. I bought that volume for its reference to Nixon’s piano-playing and for its quote of him saying he composed the aforementioned Orthagonians song. As far as I know Nixon is the only POTUS to have written a piece of music, though I imagine Thomas Jefferson might have tried his hand at composition.

The volume of transcripts from Nixon’s tape recorders seemed monumental in its significance, though I could hardly explain why. A few years earlier, as Iran-Contra unfolded, my grandmother (who talked to me very little) described how dispiriting the Watergate affair had been, and how it slowly uprooted her trust in government and even in America. For her Watergate was painful, and Iran-Contra seemed to her like more of the same.

Elsewhere on that shelf (which I chose to study simply because it is at eye-level): “The Stairway to Heaven”, by Zecharia Sitchin, a volume I found at the same time as Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” and which captivated me in ways which should embarrass me today. A volume which shall remain nameless, but to which I contributed mightily, sits exactly on top of “The 12th Planet,” another in the aforementioned Zecharia Sitchin series of books which attempt to prove that human beings derived from space aliens, and that no other explanation may exist for earthly phenomena like the sudden and inexplicable appearance of agriculture, the abrupt acceleration of human evolution, and the presence (in artistic representations) of what appear to be oxygen tanks on the backs of gods.

A couple of Scrabble books.

The 9/11 Commission Report.

Miss Lonelyhearts.

The Liar’s Club.

The Well, by Katie Hafner.

Why New Orleans Matters.

Rather than stand up again to explore any of these mostly half-read titles I shall return (as I so often do) to John Ashbery, whose poetry always seems to be within arms reach.

I begrudgingly drew upon my life experiences, which seem insignificant to me, but which can tangentially summon observations on the nature of things, or so I came to believe in my self-satisfied pomposities. I suppose that leveraging one’s sense of self-importance is not entirely a bad thing.

I think I look at life, my life, and my experiences, as nothing new. Once I’ve done something, said something, thought something, then there it is, out there, done. What’s said is said, what’s done is done. If I said it then you can say it, and in fact you might as well have said it. If I snapped a picture of something then you can do it, too. Everything done is done.

The only “New”, then, is the unspoken, the unspeakable, the unarticulatable stuff of poetical, philosophical, and even biblical cliché.

I used to have superstitions about the wind. Strong breezes, for a time, seemed always to punctuate milestones, talk of milestones, or even just fantasies about reaching life’s plateaus.

A friend and I stood in the lobby of a concert hall when he told me that his parents had separated. In that moment the front doors of the hall opened and a strong gust of wind blew over us. That, we decided, was a moment of symbolic portent. I can not remember when I stopped noting the gusts and breezes as they embraced those notable moments of life, filling a realm in which words had no power.

I have always loved the wind. The wind is sensuous but not sexual, like a hug from a parent or the head of a stranger landing on my shoulder as he falls asleep next to me on a crowded bus or train. I like to simply watch the wind rampage through foliage and lawn furniture. Last week, in the wind-tunnel between two buildings, a single sheet of paper spiraled up, up, up, how high would it go, I stupidly asked. How high? It rose higher than a 6-story building before suddenly vanishing into a tall tree, yanked out of sight like a kite pulled back to the ground. I am looking at that tree right now, the tree into which the paper twirled with a muscular lopsidedness. All papers get trapped in that tree, I think, and when the accounts of these months are written the academics in charge of creating history might do well to climb that tree and capture all the parchment snared therein, for there would be the literal truth.

August, 1915, Etude Magazine Ad

Joe's S Perette. ULster.5-6463

A 4-Star Exchange Name Sighting is one in which the phone number has been publicly displayed at a place of business since the days of telephone exchange names, and where the phone number can successfully be translated into today’s area-code format to produce the current phone number for the place of business. UL.5-6463 seen above becomes (718) 855-6463, which is the phone number for JOE’s S PERETTE (actually the place is called Joe’s Superette, but the U ran away). 

Exchange name sightings like these prove that a place has been in business for a long, long time and that for whatever reason (pride, maybe?) the owners choose to leave the obsolete numbers on public display. I think it’s pretty cool, and any time I see one of these old numbers I feel like I’ve cracked an old code. 

3-Star: A 3-star sighting is something like this FAirbanks Exchange Name or this ESplanade Exchange. Numbers like these, tucked into the corners of signs and on fences, advertise the company which produced the sign or fence. These exchange names do not usually reflect the geographical area in which they are seen but they do prove that the sign itself, the fence, and/or the place of business has been around for a long time. 

2-Star: 2-Star sightings comprise faded relics such as this ALgonquin sighting or this RAvenswood number. These old bits of signage show numbers for businesses long since gone. When translated into modern area-code format these old numbers usually go to newer businesses or private residences. This creates the intriguing scenario of a modern company or even a random individual whose phone number, albeit in primitive form, lurks in plain sight over New York City. Some businesses might appreciate the obscure form of free advertising, but what of the individuals? 

Another 2-star sighting is when a modern company makes retro-chic use of Exchange Names, as did the Frank Music Company with its JUdson exchange name. 

1-Star: 1-Star sightings comprise historical objects, such as museum pieces, advertisements in old magazines, and certain old photographs showing exchange names either long-gone or preserved for posterity.

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