A Little Adrift
Today we walked into a branch of LensCrafters to buy sunglasses. As we walked past the slouching security guard, who, if he weren’t a scarecrow, was certainly a strawman, we saw two cops, male and female, weighted down with matériel as to be almost immobile, filling out forms. It seems not much earlier, someone, or perhaps a team of thieves, walked to a shelf and helped themselves to Bulgari and Dior frames. In the store, life was going on as if nothing had happened, and, I suspect in a way that we have grown accustomed to theft that we believed nothing had happened.
I often talk with friends, and they have no idea of the change of mood on the streets of the City. At first, I thought their apathy was a lingering symptom of the dreaded Covid, which had chased so many of them to second or third homes in Southampton, or to the Berkshires, or the Catskills, or sent them packing to their parents’ houses. Then, I realized it was ignorance. It occurred to me that none of them read The New York Post — not even for the Sports Section. It dawned on me that if they glanced at a paper at all, it was the Times. For too many of my well-fed friends, even those who are vegans, or on the keto diet, the Times is their news supplement of choice.
I will admit that the Times can be helpful for tips on trips abroad, and what new regional Chinese or Mexican cuisine should be sampled, or even the art of the moment, but when it comes to street crime, violent crime, run-of-the-mill sexual crimes, these phenomena don’t seem to exist at all, and so are not found in either the paper, or its online version. Should the Times report on a particularly heinous crime — say, the murder of an attractive, white, female student who strayed too far from her Columbia University dorm, and too deep into Morningside Park to buy drugs — the story remains for a day or, perhaps, two, before disappearing into the Paper’s Dead Letter Office.
It’s wishful thinking to hope the City’s dirty little secrets — the daily shootings and stabbings, beatings, etc. — will catch the attention of the City’s dumbed and numbed, to the extent that its increasingly feckless and fearful citizens will put down the Times, a voice that has betrayed them again and again. But they won’t. Times readers are more afraid of global warming than the raving lunatics down the block. They are terrified of the latest iteration of the coming Covid Virus, even before it has been identified. They are ready to roll up their sleeves the moment Art Sulzberger Jr. winks, or Mr. Biden growls something unintelligible. The only time citizens can close their hands into a fist is if someone mentions Donald Trump’s name. Trump spooks the Times’ readers in a way the homeless shitting in the stairwell of their subway stop does not.
My friends have discovered they’re happy wandering in the wilderness, confident their Moses will come and take them home. For reminding them of their former insistence on questioning authority, I’ve been called an idiot and worse. I’ve been laughed at and also exiled from the company of former friends for pointing out how they prefer Ubers to taxis and taxis to the subway, the Pines to the Rambles.
But few things have angered friends more than when I complain how I can I saunter up to Washington Square and buy heroin, Percocet, oxycodone, or virtually any painkiller, legitimate or illegitimate, authentic or counterfeit, but most of my doctors are afraid to prescribe anything stronger than Hydrocodone-Acetamin, to relieve my occasionally debilitating neuropathic pain. You see, they’re in pain, too, and misery loves company.
