November 2008 Archives

I lived in Washington Heights during the riots of July, 1992, and have long been impressed by the fact that I did not know about them.

My ignorance comes with a bit of a handicap: I was in Philadelphia the night the riots began, and news in the early 1990s did not travel like it does now.

I came back to New York the next day to find the neighborhood in ruins. Windows of cars and buildings smashed to bits formed a frosting of broken glass on the sidewalk and street. Traffic signs were twisted and toppled. The contents of garbage cans had been set on fire, with charred hulks of I-don't-remember-what sitting at pulverized attention.

The neighborhood was mostly silent as I walked home from the subway, thinking "Looks like they had one hell of a July 4th party."

Aware of the damage I nevertheless thought little of it. I wandered among it like it was normal. The neighborhood was hardly idyllic, and I thought the damage I saw might have meant the street-cleaners had gone on strike or that some other tipping point had been reached.

I eventually became aware of the situation as police patrolled the neighborhood with clubs drawn, anticipating altercations. I watched one police officer warm up for battle on the George Washington Bridge, swinging his club like a baseball bat, chuckling to his fellow police officers that that's what these kids have in store if they come anywhere near him.

I approached Broadway, where stores had been looted and businesses ransacked. The A&P was boarded over and the street felt nervous.

On Broadway, as in other places during the days of the riots, I could always spot someone going about business as normal. Through my window I saw a man who lived in my building amble home with his briefcase in hand, adjusting his gait to dodge piles of shattered glass. Later I saw a postal worker deliver mail by stepping through the frame of a door that had been entirely destroyed.

The riots never got the national attention of the earlier Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. People were hot, unemployed, and frustrated about a lot of things, and when word got out that the New York police had shot and killed a man the stories swirled that the police had brutalized a helpless citizen. Stories I heard at the time told of a dramatic roof-top chase in which the victim was forced to jump from the top of a building.

Few people in my circles of influence knew about the riots. I worked at a company where most of my co-workers lived in Connecticut, Queens, Long Island, and other places which at the time seemed remote. Most people I knew thought Washington Heights was a remote planet, a place beyond "Upper Manhattan" which to them began and ended at 96th Street.

One of the more memorable chores from my youth was cleaning the gutters of the house. There was no screen or netting atop the gutters, so all manner of leaves and sticks from the oak tree clogged the passage, making it functionally useless. The bed of leaves and twigs attracted all manner of roaches and snakes, so my work in shoveling out the leaves was akin to evacuating a well-established community of wildlife.

My attentiveness to chores was poor, and I believe now that certain of my parents' idiosyncracies contributed to my ambivalence. In particular, my father and mother both had a way of just watching me work. It drove me crazy. They would just sit (or stand) and just watch. There was no expression to it, no real interest. I felt naked at these times. No, I felt invisible. That is the irony. The staring was blank and useless, not even rising to the level of apathy, contributing nothing but taking away.

A college roommate and I used to call each other "dorkie." We arrived at that word while discussing something regarding the front "door key," a combination of words which we mashed together to form "Dorkie." "Yo, dorkie, where's the remote?"  It was, as my roommate, so aptly put it, a "takes one to know one" kind of insult. Only a dorkie would call another human being a dorkie.

"Nudnik" seems to be of a similar vintage as our concocted word, a humorous term for what it means, and one of an amazing array of English language words referring to stupidity.

I, for one, do not believe that stupidity exists. I believe stupidity is a construct of feeble minds whose hoarding of knowledge creates unease within itself. I know many well-informed people whose knowledge will die with them, for they are not offered enough opportunities to share their knowledge in a way that suits them. Tremendous depths of human understanding are flushed down the toilet simply for lack of opportunity to share that knowledge in a way that communicates disdain for the lesser-informed. I think a principle difference between knowledge today and knowledge 20 years ago is that questions have become stupid. The answer to virtually every possible inquiry is to search for it on the Internet. This ungainly routine puts information aggregators in the position of cultural spokespeople and shapers of knowledge itself. This is a bizarre role for these companies to have arrived at, and one that could never have been predicted 30 years ago. Nevertheless every single day journalists and reporter sources their stories based almost entirely on what comes up tops in a keyword search.

What am I talking about? I thought I was talking about stupidity, and hey maybe I am.

I am blessed with fabulous teeth. I discovered some time ago that this is not polite thing to brag about. Many people seem to require a trip to the dentist several times a month, and I once irritated to the breaking point one such person when I told him I had gone 10 years between dentist visits. 10 years!

He, like a lot of people, routinely found himself with his mouth pried open, drills and pointy metal things pursuing another dental disaster in his head.

I, on the other hand, not only went 10 years between dentist visits but after that visit I went 7 or 8 years before getting another checkup. Now that I am getting older (and since I have the insurance to cover checkups) I feel I should make the effort to maintain myself more regularly, so I do plan on annual checkups from now on.

After those 7 or 8 years between dentist visits I went again out of concern for some pain in my left jaw. It felt like a cut, not a problem with the teeth, but it seemed reason enough to get it looked at. Having not been to a dentist for so along I was a little nervous. Like a catholic going to confession for the first time in more years than he could recall I admitted to the dentist that it had been years since my last checkup. He smirked a bit, suggesting (humorously) that I was lucky, and that some folks just don't have to see a dentist very often.

He put on his surgical mask, picked up his dental tools and opened my mouth, promptly saying "Nnnniiiiiiiiice!" It was really very funny, his reaction to my mouth was like that of someone seeing a beautifully polished Rolls Royce. I laughed, dangerously, what with his sharp objects in my mouth and the rather prone position I was in. I laughed enough to shake the small table on which the dentist's gear sat. Then I stopped, my nerves relaxed.

A similar incident happened that time when I went to a dentist for the first time in 10 years. The dentist gazed upon the glories of my jaw, holding my mouth open for a moment and waving his assistants in to see it. "Look at this!" he gushed. His assistants stopped what they were doing to behold the perfection, listening to that dentist describe how the spacing of things was so perfect that it was like a self-cleaning mechanism. The assistants seemed genuinely impressed, though not as awe-struck as the dentist himself.

My wisdom teeth, which finally became noticeable in my 30s, have recently made themselves obvious again at the back of my jaw. They point outward and occasionally dig into the sides of my mouth back there. I guess we can call them snaggleteeth, though the use of that words seems to lean toward visibly protruding teeth.