when you awaken at some ungodly hour
ease your way around your dreaming spouse
to sneak through the house like a thief
and put on your running shoes
and even the cats look at you
as though you’ve lost your mind:
you will ask
why am I doing this?
because.
because when you begin to run
down the street
your footsteps will echo
off the sleeping houses.
Category: life itself
My fabulous car crash
So I’m driving along a two-lane highway in upstate New York on a pleasant afternoon in May, with two of my four kids in the back seat: Josie, my stepdaughter, almost nine years old; and my daughter Gabriela, eight. One of them says, hey my iPod battery has run down. Let me see that, say I, and start to fumble with the iPod and a charging device. Now I look up and see I have drifted into the left lane and say oh shit — steering wheel in my left hand, iPod in my right — and overcorrect to the right. Next thing I realize is that we are going off the road, and I have enough time to think, ok, we are going off the road, what next? Next is that terrible sound and sensation of thud. Then I realize that we are upside down, and I am thinking, ok, this isn’t good, and start trying to figure out how to extricate myself, having forgotten for the time being about the girls. That’s the last thing I remember until an indeterminate number of minutes later, when I’m on my back being questioned by paramedics.
According to what I’ve been told, another motorist driving behind us saw the whole thing and came to our aid. We had gone into the ditch on the right of the road and rolled one and a half times. She helped each of us out through the holes where the windows had formerly been. I am told I was conscious and talking, though I remember none of this. She then got my wife Amy’s phone number from Josie, and called her. Amy set out driving the five-plus hours to where we were, with our other two kids coming along for lack of any child care.
I can remember having trouble reciting my address when asked by the paramedics, and being told that we would take a helicopter ride to a hospital better equipped for head traumas than the nearest place, which happened to be half a mile from the site of the accident. Josie and Gabriela were taken there, and got lousy care. Josie had been briefly unconscious and had a gash on her leg below the knee, good for ten stitches; Gabriela had some cuts on her hand but was otherwise relatively unscathed. The personnel attending to Josie should have had the sense to follow standard protocols for kids who have likely concussions, but did not. We got her proper follow-up care after we got home.
The girls told me that as we were about to be loaded into our respective ambulances, I gave them the thumbs-up sign. It’s gratifying to hear that I tried to give them some proper parental reassurance.
I recall some of the helicopter ride, such as lying on the floor as the paramedics cut me out of my clothes. Have you ever had the thought — or had someone tell you — as you were getting dressed, that you should wear nice underwear in case you get into a serious accident? As we were preparing to leave for this trip — the return trip following a weekend at my parents’ house — I was looking around for clean underwear, and had trouble finding some. So I said the hell with it, and pulled on my jeans. It’s a safe bet that the paramedics were unfazed by the sight of my dick.
As we flew along I said to them that I usually had plenty of snappy jokes but was sorry that I could not come up with anything at the moment. They said don’t worry about it. It seems that when we’re in crisis, sometimes our minds want to cling to normality. I have this image of myself as affable and funny, so I wanted to be affable and funny.
I was thirsty and asked them for water. They said, sorry, we can’t give you any because you might have to go right into surgery. I thought it unfortunate that they couldn’t give me water because I was thirsty; I was indifferent to the prospect of surgery. I asked whether the girls were ok, and recall hearing one of paramedics remark to the other that it was the third time in ten minutes I had asked that same question — the point being not that I was annoying but that I had a head injury.
There came a moment in which I thought, this is what is happening and I do not like it, but I don’t have to like it. Just be present to what is. That’s what we call Practice.
The first few hours at the hospital are vague. Someone gave me a phone and I spoke to my wife, and ex-wife, crying into the phone with anguish at having rolled the car with our kids in it. I was assured the girls were OK. I remember being presented with the standard forms on a clipboard, and a pen. I was trying to read, lying flat on my back with the clipboard blocking my light, and no reading glasses. I was particularly interested in finding the agreement to pay clause so I could cross it out and initial it, this being my invarying practice. I tried to sit up to get better light, and got into a bit of an argument with my handlers, telling them I do not sign open-ended guarantees to pay arbitrary sums of money for yet-to-be-determined services, insurance notwithstanding. (In fact, no one should ever agree to these terms, but should resist in self-defense and as protest against the broken healthcare system.) They finally said forget it, don’t sign.
I had a concussion, cervical fracture and scalp lacerations. The neurosurgeon told me I was lucky, which struck me as rather a strange remark until I realized that he meant relative to what might have happened. Curiously, these injuries haven’t been particularly painful. People kept offering me morphine, and I would say, no thanks, what for? I wanted to be lucid to enjoy my wife’s eventual arrival. Finally she did, no thanks to the utter lack of signage pointing the way to this primitive outpost in rural Pennsylvania. She stayed with me as much as she could, and spent the night on a chair in the waiting area when they kicked her out of the ICU.
A guy punched staples into my scalp, in a scene reminiscent of the movie The Wrestler. It was painful, so I was joking that it didn’t hurt, and was that the best he could do? As he finished the job, he said he was done but he could give me another staple if I wanted. Not really, I confessed.
About 24 hours after I was admitted, some physical therapists got me out of bed, walked me around the ward and pronounced me fit to leave. My wife drove us all back home to New Jersey, where I convalesced for a month.
Staying out of work was a pleasure. The first few days were difficult, because I was banged up, but the rest was a joy. If retirement is like this, I’m ready. My neurosurgeon told me we could not even discuss running for two months. After nearly fainting from the initial shock (I am a devoted distance runner), I recovered almost immediately, resigning myself to reality and realizing that worrying doesn’t help.
I spent my days shuffling around the house, gradually doing more activities like housework, and taking advantage of the free time to do more zazen than usual. Paperwork and phone calls about insurance and medical bills also consumed substantial amounts of time. The financial impact of lost wages, replacing the car, etc., is non-trivial but tolerable.
Spending ten hot summer weeks in a neck brace also sucked, but I tolerated it without complaining overly much. I came out of the neck brace in early August; at the end of September I ran a half-marathon within the moderately ambitious goal of 1:40:00 that I had set, finishing in 1:38:48. This result is far from a personal record, but coming just a few months after being airlifted away from an auto accident, I accept it with gratitude.
for Victor (1918-2011)
in the dead man’s closet
trying on his clothes
not bad
South Mountain, November 2010
we run before dawn
two pairs of feet trotting along
dark silent streets,
then up the mountain.
a few feet off the road
three deer
foraging in the woods
silhouetted in the dim cold
they look up for a moment
then ignore us
as we continue down the road
the horizon now swelling pink
through the bare trees.
Why I am a de facto semi-vegetarian
The short answer is The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I was already generally aware of the atrocious ways of meat production in the United States: extreme cruelty to animals; adverse impacts on human health and on the environment. But the gory details were sufficient to compell me to decide not to participate any longer. There is no excuse for treating chickens, pigs, and cattle the way large industrial producers do, and I refuse to be complicit in a system of which I so strongly disapprove. Indeed, it would be hypocritical of me to do otherwise.
That doesn’t mean I am a full-blown vegetarian. Homo sapiens is one of those animals that eat other animals in order to survive, and I have no problem with that in principle. If you can serve me a piece of pork that was once a pig who was raised and killed in as humane and environmentally sustainable a way as is reasonably possible, I will happily eat it, mindful of the pig’s sacrifice. A roasted rabbit, who led a natural bunny life hopping around and eating and fucking until dispatched so skillfully that Mr/Ms Bunny never knew what hit her or him? Bring it! But getting that kind of meat requires substantially more expense and effort than does the supermarket kind, and as of yet I haven’t made the effort, so I have gone without eating the flesh of cattle, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and so forth.
Fish is another matter. Figuring out which kinds are harvested in an environmentally responsible fashion also takes some homework, and they have faces, and they probably don’t like suffocating any more than you or I would. But I am content to rationalize that a sardine does not have the cognitive functioning to realize how bad it’s getting fucked before it ends up in a can. Maybe I will eventually change my position. For now, I need protein and don’t want to depend solely on nuts and tofu. So I eat fish with some qualification.
One might say, let’s see you kill and butcher that animal yourself, and then see how you feel — as Michael Pollan did. I would certainly be willing to give it a try some day — killing my own food sounds kind of cool, in fact. But for now I am a creature who lives in the suburbs, works in a city, and going hunting with my crossbow is not really a practical alternative. The idea is certainly not forever foreclosed, but for now I am content to allow someone else to kill my food animals for me.
Opting out of industrial meat has not required any difficult adjustments in my diet, because I was already eating a lot of vegetarian meals, rarely consuming red meat, and increasingly eating fresh and local food. I have had to renounce that Cambodian style noodle soup from a Cantonese place near my office, a delicious concoction made with sliced and ground pork as well as shrimp and egg noodles in broth probably made from ducks who undoubtedly fare no better than the pigs.
As for eggs, we generally buy the most environmentally correct ones available, and willingly pay a premium over the industrial kind (think of it as insurance against salmonella poisoning courtesy of a mass producer in Iowa who churns out millions of eggs a week — you don’t need to be a Slow Food connoisseur to see the problem inherent in production on that scale). But that’s also a tricky game, since what you read on the carton — “cage free,” for example — may be bullshit. But I eat salads from a deli near my workplace, sometimes containing a hard-boiled egg about whose origins I know nothing. I am not a purist; I compromise. When I eat my kids’ left-over pepperoni pizza, I peel off the pepperoni and eat it, unconcerned about the pizza being tainted with pepperoni residue. And maybe — maybe — when Thanksgiving rolls around I will decide to go along with the program and partake of the turkey. We’ll see.
The result of this modest dietary change is that I feel fine both ethically and physically. I like to burn a lot of calories running, and have kept on setting personal record times since quitting the meat. Over time, I suspect our family will be eating still more local and fresh, and adjusting our diet according to the seasons in New Jersey. The rest of the family might even phase out the industrial flesh consumption. For now, this is working well for me.
South Mountain, May 2010
running
feet and ground
through the damp spring air
infused with honeysuckle
Walking out on sesshin
I signed up for a sesshin, or retreat, at a place called the Zen Mountain Monastery upstate: a week of lots and lots of sitting in a formal and disciplined monastic setting. I wanted to experience someplace other than the one zendo which I have attended exclusviely since I started practicing, and be an anonymous face in a large crowd. I also wanted to hear what the teachers had to say, after being deeply impressed with a couple of talks that I had read online. Two people I know who had trained at ZMM encouraged me to go. One of the founders, now deceased, is regarded as a major figure in western Zen — John Daido Loori.
[An aside for readers not familiar with Zen as practiced by most Western lay people: the core of the practice is sitting, or zazen — seated meditation. It’s important to sit every day, and it is likewise important to do intensive practice as often as your schedule permits: that is, all-day sittings, or zazenkai, and multi-day sittings, which we call sesshin or retreats. During these extended sittings there is no talking, reading, or fooling around with phones or computers. There are periodic breaks (sometimes barely adequate) in the zazen schedule for things like meals and sleep. The idea is to keep practicing around the clock. Sesshin tends to sharpen your skills and, ultimately, make you more acutely aware of where you are and what you are doing. This is also known as being awake. It can be said that Zen is for those who would dare to wake up.]
So I drove up to Mount Tremper, NY, on a rainy Monday afternoon, and sesshin began that night. The next day at about two o’clock in the afternoon I packed my bags and walked, deciding that this was not a fruitful use of my time right about now.
The place had about it a slight fragrance of psychopathy mingled with the incense.
My mattress was seriously fucked up, and made my back hurt. The ratio of showers to people was too low to expect more than one shower over the six days. The schedule was 3:55 a.m. rise, and lights out at 9:30, with a number of short breaks and only one one-hour break for all your rest and exercise. Breakfast and lunch were taken as formal oryoki, an extremely elaborate ritual involving lots of chanting and drumming and bells, folding and unfolding cloths and arranging bowls and utensils in a very particular way.
Maybe I gave up prematurely. I was uncomfortable and got but little sleep my one night there, and sleep deprivation has a pronounced negative effect on my mood (so it is for everyone, but I seem to do worse than most). My lower back ached, although not bad enough to be a crisis. There came a point in the oryoki ritual in which you put a bit of rice on the handle end of your little wooden spatula as an offering to your supernatural imaginary friend the Hungry Ghost. That’s when I realized this was not for me. I deliberated over the next hour or so to give myself a chance to reconsider, but that was pretty much the turning point in which I said fuck this.
If this sesshin regime were a prison, Amnesty International would have something to say about the inadequate opportunities for sleep, exercise, exposure to the outdoors, and bathing. But it is by no means a prison. You go in on a purely voluntary basis for a limited time — and although it is discouraged, you can get up and leave, as I did.
I packed my gear and took it out to the car as people were assembling in the zendo for the next round of sitting, following lunch. Drove down the driveway and found there was a gate that I was going to have to open in order to get out. When I got out of the car, I saw one of the monks walking towards me, and understood that I was going to have to speak to her. I had half-tried to tell myself, prior to escaping, that walking out and hitting the highway was going to be a satisfying act of self-liberation. But when I realized I was going to have to explain myself to someone, I felt a sheet of emotion extending from somewhere around waist level to above my eyes. She asked whether something had happened. I explained as best I could that this just was not for me, not now. She said, why did you come? I knew the question was not rhetorical. She wanted me to consider why I had come in the first place. Unable to recall any reason, I said it sounded like a good idea at the time. She tried gently to dissuade me from leaving, suggesting that I might try hanging around for the afternoon, talking to one of the teachers. I pictured myself re-entering the building with my baggage and re-installing myself in the room, and found the image intolerable. If she had said, come on, I will help you get your stuff back inside, it might have been a closer contest. I told her, as respectfully and tactfully as I could, the same things I just said here. I am attached to my petty bourgeois lifestyle, and have trouble tolerating a week with scarcely a shower and a bed so uncomfortable that it will take my back days to recover once I get home. She said, we could do something about the bed. I said, I am a wordly and unspiritual sort of dude for whom offering blobs of rice to supernatural beings is not the way I want to spend time that I could otherwise be with my wife and kids and cats. I said I understood that walking away from the commitment to stay till the end was not approved of, and could accept it if I was banned for life. She was perfectly gracious about it, and said on the contrary, I was welcome to come back and try again any time.
I was practically in tears as I drove away, because leaving was an anguishing decision, and I felt — rightly or not — a certain shame and humiliation from the failure. It took the rest of the week to process and get over it. It isn’t necessary to justify myself, but I am gonna do it anyway and state for the record that I am not a one who typically quits when faced with adversity or difficulty. I have done week-long sesshin a couple times before, with schedules that were perhaps not as grueling as this one, but certainly not leisurely — and walking out was never under serious consideration. I have kept other tough commitments in this life, like training hard for 20 weeks to run a New York Marathon at a Boston-qualifying pace even when the last 10 kilometers were brutal.
So what happened here? I think this experience can be seen as analogous to a computer crashing under excessive load. Too many hats: father; stepfather; husband; computer programmer; professional court interpreter; distance runner; single-payer healthcare activist; ….Zen monk? Crash!
There is only so much you can do at a given point in your life. You can stretch the container pretty damn far, but we all must reach a limit at some point; then you have to choose between this and that, not both. Far be it from me to find fault with this style of practice. I might even go back and try it again some day, as the monk kindly suggested that I could. For now I belong on my mat at home and zendo, and in my supremely comfortable bed with wife and purring cats.
The Annual Wrap-up
As a committed Zen student whose ego is dropping away just as sure as shit, I like to celebrate myself whenever an excuse arises. What better excuse than the end of the Gregorian year, when it’s natural to look back at all one’s noteworthy experiences over the last trip around the calendar?
-
In February I moved out of my apartment in Jersey City and moved into Amy’s house in Maplewood, NJ. After some 14 years of living in Jersey City, this was a significant transition. I went from living alone (i.e., with two cats and my daughter three nights per week) within a 90-second walk of a 12-minute train ride to downtown NYC to living with my de facto spouse plus her three kids plus my one kid part-time plus two cats plus the semi-full-time live-in babysitter in a three bedroom house in the suburbs, an hour and forty minutes from my workplace. Living in my delightfully disorderly shithole in JC was wonderful, but it was time to move on. Adjusting to the commute was a bit of a challenge, but I handled it. I used to complain of not having sufficient time to read. So I picked up a copy of David Copperfield and made good use of some of those hours on NJ Transit.
- In May, Amy sold her house, and together we bought a bigger one in South Orange. Then we moved into it. Big enough for all our kids, with a home office in which Amy shrinks heads when she’s not caring for children or doing laundry. This 1920-something beast is full of surprises, some of which were overlooked by the home inspector. We marvel at how previous owners could have done the lazy stupid incompetent things they did. But the place has its charms — not the least of these being the people who inhabit it — and within a couple of decades I’m sure we will have everything fixed up to our satisfaction.
- For my birthday — also in May — I got me a nice little pneumonia. I left work so weak I could barely walk to the train, but I was too cheap/stubborn/in denial to take a taxi. Collapsed into bed, lay there trembling and hurting for a night, then woke up with the worst of it over. A few days and a few doses of drugs later, I was as good as status quo ante (only slightly older).
- In June I underwent a vasectomy. Too much information? Gee, I’m sorry. But it’s a pretty cool procedure, recovery is quick and complete, and from then on life is more convenient. (Over six months later, the facility where the procedure was performed is still waiting on Blue Cross Blue Shield to “process” their claim, but keep reading.)
- In October I participated in civil disobedience actions along with other single-payer healthcare activists at the offices of UnitedHealth Group in Manhattan and at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Newark, NJ. Getting arrested in Newark was a breeze; we were in and out in a couple of hours. Getting arrested in New York was another story, as we went through the system and spent the night in jail at the Tombs. Why do this? Because I reached the point where complaining, going to legal demonstrations, donating money to organizations like healthcare-now.org, writing emails to elected officials, and so forth, just wasn’t enough. I had to do something more to help rid our country of its disastrously inefficient and rapacious profit-driven private health insurance industry and replace it with single-payer national health insurance. Did my getting arrested help further this objective? I don’t know. But lying down and giving up is not an option.
- In November I ran the New York Marathon in 3:34:43, fast enough to qualify this 50-something male for the prestigious Boston Marathon. The first third of the race was a test of discipline, and I failed. I got too amped up, ran too fast, and spent too much fuel. The last third of the race was a test of character, and I passed. I had to summon the fortitude to keep up the goal pace even with the tank on empty.
- In December I performed in our organization’s annual Follies for the 17th consecutive year. The show makes fun of the judicial and political system, and modesty aside, we have some talented people and put on a truly funny show. This year I sang a country and western tune, playing the guitar in front of an audience for the first time in over 20 years. For someone who used to play concert repertoire like Bach, strumming a few chords is less than trivial. But I took it seriously and practiced in order to make sure it looked easy.
No doubt about it: I am a lucky bastard to be living this interesting life.
Running the 2009 New York Marathon
I had the privilege of running the 2009 New York Marathon on Sunday, November 1. This was my second marathon; the first was Philadelphia in 2008. I trained for 20 weeks using a program from runningplanet.com specifically designed for a 3:40:00 marathon. In the final week of training I decided to reset my goal to 3:35:59, which qualifies a male in my 50-something age bracket for the prestigious Boston Marathon.
The NY Marathon is a logistical tour de force, with its 40,000-plus runners. Organizers clearly went to great lengths to keep everything moving and avoid excess congestion. Thus the start was divided into three waves, and these in turn were further partitioned into separate routes that only merged several miles later, where the streets were wider and people were naturally spread out more than at the start.
The streets were lined with hordes of cheering people. The atmosphere was highly charged, and despite the fact that I knew better, and even as I knew what I was doing, I committed the classic marathoner’s mistake known as going out too fast. Instead of running around 8:14 per mile, my pace over the first 10K was 7:53.
Gradually I calmed down and ran the middle third of the race at a more reasonable pace. But you can’t change the past, and by mile 18 I knew I was going to have to pay for my earlier lack of discipline. I had taped to my left wrist a timetable showing how much time had to have elapsed at each mile if I was to attain my goal time, and from consulting it I knew I was ahead of the pace throughout the course. But by mile 20 I was fading and the margin of error was getting slimmer. I concluded that I had nothing left, therefore nothing to lose. I would ask myself, can you stand another six miles of this? Yes I can. At five miles to go: can you stand another five? Yes I can. And so on.
The split times over the last six tell a tale of alternately fading, then fighting back. Mile 20, 8:22 — too slow. Mile 21, 8:28 — even slower! Mile 22, 8:12 — excellent, two seconds ahead of the goal pace. Mile 23, 8:10 — great. Mile 24 which is largely uphill, 8:49 — despair! Mile 25, 8:04 — heroic. Mile 26, 8:22 — too slow, but we’re almost home. For the last 0.2 I was running at an 8:35 pace — definitely fading fast.
When at long last the great sign that said Finish came into view, I was so spent that it took me a couple of beats to comprehend what it meant. I crossed the finish line and stopped my watch at 3:34:44: success.
Weaving and unsteady on my feet, I was accosted by a volunteer who led me to the medical tent, where I ended up lying on a cot recovering for about 25 minutes. On the adjacent cot was a guy named John from New Zealand, apparently in his 40s, who had also nailed his BQ (Boston qualifier) at 3:17 — and who had likewise spent everything he had and then some, and landed in the medical tent like me. In a shared state of total exhaustion and elation, we had a wonderful conversation about the nature of this amazing thing known as marathon running. It was a highlight of the whole experience.
During this conversation with John I had an insight: a marathon is at once both a communal, public event — a grand party, an orgy of thousands running through the streets! — and at the same time, as intensely personal and intimate an experience as you can have. It is absolutely solitary, but in a way that is neither good or bad. You drop down into ever deeper realms of your own consciousness and find out about who you really are. Think ten years of psychotherapy compressed into a few hours. Or, for you Zen practitioners, think of a week sesshin crammed into a single morning. No wonder the marathon game isn’t for everyone. I believe that many marathon runners are motivated by nothing other than a search for the Truth. We intuitively understand what Master Bassui teaches: the Great Question cannot be resolved by the discursive mind.
Second-guessing myself, I speculate that I could well have attained the same result or better if I had run a more disciplined, strategic race. It would have been more elegant if I had conserved energy in the first half and had a powerful finish, running the last miles faster, not slower, than any of the preceding. But as experiences go, what actually did happen cannot be surpassed. It was a marvelous adventure.
Going to Jail for Health Care for All
On October 15, 2009, I participated in a nationwide campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience to demand Single Payer health care and an end to the profit-driven private health insurance system. Supported by some 50 legal protesters in the street, 14 protesters entered the lobby of One Penn Plaza in midtown Manhattan, a building that houses offices of the insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, and sat down on the floor. When we refused to leave, police arrested us and loaded us into paddy wagons.
Our group consisted six women and eight men. Of the men, two were in their mid-seventies; one of these was a retired Episcopalian priest, whose bearing and clerical color gave our group an air of respectability and gravitas; the other happened to be a Quaker.
Most people who do civil disobedience hope to get what is known as a Desk Appearance Ticket (DAT), where the police take you to the precinct, check your fingerprints for warrants, and if they find none, hand you a piece of paper like a traffic ticket and send you on your way. The whole process takes typically four to eight hours, and is perhaps only slightly more (or maybe less!) unpleasant than typical airline travel, where you are in a sense imprisoned, and your patience is tested. But we were not so fortunate. It was determined — I don’t know how or by whom — that we were to go through “the system” with the rest of humanity in all its wretchedness. Some of us speculated that this determination may have been political, i.e., someone powerful made a phone call and said that protesters should be discouraged and not given any breaks.
First we were taken to the 9th Precinct, in the East Village, where we were divided by gender and kept in two cells for over 10 hours. For the first five or six hours, morale was high. We had lively and stimulating conversation, got to know one another, sang songs, had some good laughs. After seven or eight hours had elapsed and we still had not been provided water, much less food, we began to complain. Ironically enough, the priest had headed a commission some years ago that promulgated a set of reforms for the New York law enforcement and penal system. Among these was a regulation that any prisoner detained for over five hours between midnight and 7:00 a.m. had to be provided food and water. When the priest pointed this out to one of the officers, she argued that the rule applied only to Corrections and not the NYPD. The priest insisted that it wasn’t so, and encouraged her to consult her supervisor. Eventually, she offered to take a few dollars from us, go to a vending machine in the building and bring some bottled water. I don’t think it took much effort. Shortly thereafter one of the support team was allowed to send in a bag with refreshments: more water, some fruit and energy bars.
In the meantime, the police went through an arduous process of fingerprinting us one by one with a scanner that kept failing to recognize our fingerprints. Whether it was software or hardware that was defective, or both, the machine balked if your fingers were too oily, or not oily enough, or if you were simply too old and your prints were too faint. The cops muddled through with commendable patience for the several hours that it took to fingerprint all 14 of us.
It was approaching 10:00 pm when we were transported downtown to a place known as the Tombs, in the basement of the courthouse at 100 Center Street, too late to appear in night court and be released. The place was packed, and we all stood handcuffed in a slow-moving line for over an hour to be photographed one by one, and finally, around midnight, admitted as a group to one of several large holding cells.
Some of us were still wearing white T-shirts with black lettering that said “Victim of Private Health Insurance” on one side, and “Medicare For All” on the other. We were repeatedly asked by both police and prisoners why we were protesting, and we seized every such opportunity. People were overwhelmingly receptive. (Only the intake photographer at the Tombs was hostile, but then again, from what I was able to observe, he seemed to have hostile attitude towards everyone.) Thus the system handed us an opportunity to promote our cause and continue the very sort of work for which we were arrested.
The Tombs was not particularly pleasant. I was grateful not to have known in advance what it would be like, because if I had, I might have hesitated to get arrested. We were in a windowless rectangle with a built-in stainless steel bench along three walls (the fourth being the bars). There were a lot of miscellaneous arrestees, people sleeping on the floor or on the benches, overwhelmingly black. A group of kids, whom I found vaguely menacing, had apparently been arrested together for drugs; they monopolized one of the two phones. Shortly after we arrived, the guard announced a feeding and let us all out into the hall to collect little boxes of corn flakes and milk. When we returned to the cell there was a confrontation, basically about territorial boundaries. Another prisoner struck one of our group in the face, breaking his glasses and giving him a black eye. Another of our group yelled for the guards, who came promptly and removed both victim and assailant to different cells. This was how our evening at the Tombs began. (Note to those considering doing CD who have an aversion to violence: this incident could surely have been avoided had we exercised a bit more caution.)
A guard came to the bars to ask witnesses about the incident. A couple of us went over and provided a narrative. Then there was some grumbling in the cell about snitches, and I had some fears of getting my white ass beaten. But the whole affair seemed to blow over, and the hours dragged on.
And on. After so many hours under flourescent lights with no windows and little sleep, the time of day reported by my watch became a meaningless abstraction; there was no discernible difference between 4:30 a.m. or p.m. There was a water fountain in the cell, but I distrusted the foul-tasting water and drank sparingly. As for food, it’s too painful to remember and I’d rather not talk about it. Seriously, though, the nourishment provided was evidently designed to keep us from starving and no more. For a good meal you should look elsewhere.
At some point, a handsome, well-dressed, articulate black man was brought into the cell. He and a like-minded friend began to lecture the assemblage about God, and His purpose for us all, and what we had to do to attain true manhood. “Gentlemen,” he said, “there are four attributes that you do not find in a real man. A real man is not a gangsta, a pimp, a thug, or a playa.” This seemed to be directed at the vaguely menacing kids. Eventually, there was a genuine conversation to which everyone who was not asleep appeared to pay attention, many of them participating. We discussed spiritual and philosophic issues and basic personal values. Where we could find common ground, we did so. When our well-dressed friend argued the inferiority of women, we called him on it. It was a remarkably fruitful exchange of ideas. But the preachers outlasted us, and the dialogue degenerated back into a one-sided lecture that became oppressive.
Our Episcopalian priest had been placed in a separate, more private cell — presumably because of his age and status. Towards morning, they put him back in with the rest of us. His appearance apparently humbled the two lay preachers, as they finally quieted down as soon as this real clergyman arrived.
The morning wore on and became afternoon, according to my watch. At last the guards started pulling small subsets of us out to go to court, where a judge released us on our own recognizance. Mine was one of the last three bodies — as we call humans in the judicial/corrections trade — to be summoned. Our lawyer, a volunteer who enjoys representing protesters, stood up for us in court without having had a chance to talk to us beforehand. The prosecutor offered Defendant Yours Truly a plea to Trespass Violation, the lightweight version of the misdemeanor Criminal Trespass, and one day of community service. Community service? Excuse me, I have been serving the community big-time for the last 32 hours. For our septuagenarian Quaker, who has more of a track record than most of us, the offer was seven days in jail. Apparently he is deemed a danger to society and in need of some deterrence. Fuck that. The UnitedHealth 14 will be holding out for much more favorable dispositions.
My brief encounter with the system was sufficient to underscore what I already knew: we live in a profoundly racist society. There can be no justification for the extreme overrepresentation of minorities and the poor in the jail population. If patterns of law enforcement have a disproprortionate impact on non-whites, which they undoubtedly do, that is inexcusable; and if dark-skinned people in fact commit crimes at a greater rate than light-skinned people do, then they must be disproportionately affected by inequality and social problems that make it so, and which must be addressed. Most people would rather make a living wage than spend the night in the Tombs for shoplifting cosmetics from Walgreens.
The experience also reinforced my feelings of gratitude. I knew I was lucky to enjoy a bourgeois life, but after being released from the can, sleeping in a comfortable bed next to my warm and yummy wife, with the cat Master Lin-chi curled up purring next to my legs in all his astounding furriness — this was delicious beyond description. I slept like a god.
When I awoke, the first thought in my head was this: Patients, not profits. Medicare for all. I realized my determination was now all the stronger.
* * *
Since you’ve been good enough to read all these words, you can now be rewarded with pictures and video. An excellent YouTube piece is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vx_Cnw2Wxk, and there are still photos at http://www.antiauthoritarian.net/NLN/photo-gallery/2009_10_14_health/ — scroll down past the silly HCAN stuff about the meaningless public option to see some great shots of the UnitedHealth action.
And yes, there is something you can do: http://healthcare-now.org/ The struggle is far from over and we have no intention of giving up.