And I always tell them, “I am an elevator operator.” I say that I drive an elevator in downtown Manhattan.
The reaction to my announcement varies. Some people smile politely and then move on to more interesting people. Some ask questions about the art of piloting an elevator in a skyscraper, if I ever forget the route, if I ever get lost. Almost everyone quips, “I bet that job has its ups and downs.”

Generally, when that happens, I’m the one to smile politely. And then I respond with some variation of the retort I learned my first day on the job and have repeated many times over the years: “It sure does have its ups and downs, but it’s the jerks in the middle that cause the most trouble.”

Operating an elevator was not my career choice. I actually taught English for 33 years to reluctant high school kids who preferred drinking beer and getting laid to learning English grammar. Teaching I discovered, like the operation of elevators, is also a job where “the jerks in the middle” can be the most difficult.

The reason I tell strangers who ask that I operate elevators is because of first impressions. I figure that people won’t expect much of some “mobile doorman” who also drives them up and down before opening and closing the door. That way if I say or do anything stupid, their reaction will likely be: “Well what can you expect? He operates elevators for a living.” And conversely, if I am witty, charming and brilliant, their after-conversation will go something like this: “He’s so cultured for an elevator operator. He reads books. He appreciates fine wine and he is a great conversationalist!” For me it is a win/win situation.

I did, in fact, operate an elevator at The Equitable Building, a 38-story office in New York City, located at 120 Broadway across from Trinity Church in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The building is a landmark engineering achievement designed by Ernest R. Graham and completed in 1915. Originally it was supposed to be 40 stories high, but it was reduced on the advice of consulting engineer Charles Knox. He determined the lower height as being optimal for its elevators, the very ones I operated for one summer, the year I graduated college and before I started teaching. My friend John’s father worked in the Maintenance Department at the building and he got the job for me, and for Sal, a high school/college friend who was also going to teach in September. After our interview, Sal and I in civilian clothes took the elevators for a spin in the middle of the mid-day rush under the watchful eyes of veteran uniformed operators. We both passed our driver’s test, and reported for duty the following Monday.

The boss, a man named Andy Rattazzo that everyone called “The Rat,” but not to his face, had a glass eye that glittered under the overhead florescent lights and a jutting jaw. He looked like Benito Mussolini, and like Mussolini, The Rat prided himself on keeping his elevators running on time. He had risen from the ranks of elevator operator to become the “boss of all bosses,” the final boss of temporaries and hangers-on in a dying industry, at a time when all the elevators in the building were slowly being automated. Progress meant forced retirement or unemployment for the many who had spent their lives and logged millions of miles going up and down the insides of skyscrapers. It was summer employment for a select few.

That fact that he was on a sinking ship didn’t deter The Rat from running a taut ship. So every day, before every shift, he conducted mandatory inspections of the crews, checking the cleanliness of uniforms, the starch in the collared brown shirts, the shine on shoes and the condition of fingernails. If someone didn’t pass muster, he was banished, with instructions to stick his shoes under the electric polisher or put on a clean shirt, to the Break Room, a dingy sub-basement filled with discarded office furniture and a leaky toilet the operators shared with the rats. It was where we spent time between our shifts, where the old timers griped about their changing lives, complained about the bosses and played practical jokes on the temps.

Spencer Something-son was a particularly favorite target. A big, beefy kid from Utah, he looked like a gorilla with his blond hair and glasses in his brown starched shirt and uniform pants with the satin stripe. Although he had started weeks before Sal and me, Spencer was eager to please and still so naïve he believed all their war stories from the “glory elevator operating days.”

“We used to have these contests in the old days, to shoot up the fastest to the Penthouse without getting caught, or to see who could pack the most people into one elevator.”

“But isn’t that dangerous?” Spencer asked.

“Only if the cable breaks.” They all laughed. “And then there was that contest to see who could wait until the very last minute before putting on the brakes and stopping the levelest at the Main Floor without crashing into The Pit. I think Rattazzo won most of them contests, before he became The Rat, of course. He won a lot of money and he still holds the building record for getting twenty-six people into a car designed for twenty.”

The elevators at 120 Broadway were organized in banks. The Local cars patrolled the ground floor up, stopping at each of the 35 floors of the 38-story building. They were the most difficult to operate because they involved the most stops, the most people and had the highest margin for error. The Express banks left the ground floor and traveled through a dark, enclosed shaft like a vertical tunnel that opened at the floors they serviced. The three Express banks were floors 11 to 20, 21-30, 31-35. There was also a separate, private elevator that went directly to the top three floors where the exclusive Bankers Club was located. Only the most senior operators ever got to drive that one.

As a safety precaution, a large red #3 bull’s eye was painted on the walls of each Express shaft to alert the operator that he was approaching the ground floor. It served as a warning to apply the brakes, which meant returning the control handle to the center position, so the car would glide to a smooth stop that was also level if the operator timed it right. None of the cars had automatic leveling devices, and each elevator had different accelerating and stopping characteristics, so stopping level at any floor depended on the car, the weight inside the car, the speed of the elevator as it approached the floor and the experience of the operator. In the event of an uneven landing, which was not unusual when there were too many people on board, or the driver was new, “leveling off” required slowly taking the car well above the desired floor and letting the weight pull it down again. Sometimes the maneuver had to be done more than once. The hope was that it would eventually settle relatively level with the floor. Failing that, the customary warning to passengers was: “Please watch your step. Jump up! Jump down!”

Stopping level at the ground floor with a full elevator hurtling down the shaft from above required great skill and a greater amount of luck. Seeing that red #3 bull’s eye was crucial to brake the elevator in time and avoid disaster. Of course the people who designed elevators had taken into consideration the possibility that a distracted elevator operator might occasionally overshoot a landing, so they built catchers in each shaft, at the bottom, called The Pit, and top, The Claw, with heavy springs to cushion the impact and steel hooks to hold the car in place until Maintenance was able to free the car and its contents.

What happened to Spencer the day he was fired was the topic of discussion in the Break Room for weeks after the event. Some speculated that he was trying to earn elevator history glory and outdo The Rat by setting two new building records – for most people in an elevator. They later counted twenty-seven. And for waiting until the last instant, which he seriously miscalculated, before applying his breaks. Others said that Spencer likely missed the red #3 bull’s eye and crash landed in the basement at full speed. Whatever the truth, neither the twenty-seven people trying to get out of the building for lunch, nor Andy Rattazzo were amused. The instant my friend John’s father and the maintenance crew freed everyone from The Pit, a shaken and dazed Spencer was stripped of his uniform and sent walking.

The building operated twenty-four hour schedule, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Work shifts and elevator bank assignments were a matter of seniority or favoritism. The career guys, soon to be searching for new careers, mostly opted for Express elevators on weekdays from 9 to 5. The temps got what was left. Daytimes were busy and nighttimes were lonely. Some old timers preferred working the graveyard shift so they could nap, drink or pull pranks on the unsuspecting. A favorite was pressing the call button on every floor to get a new guy in motion, and then scaring him by jumping out of the shadows when he opened the elevator door.

If the Local elevators were the most difficult, the freight elevator was the most peaceful, but only after hours when there wasn’t much freight to move. Temps never got the assignment during the day because the freight operators often got tips. Whenever I got the opportunity in the middle of the night, I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was no roof on the freight elevator, so it afforded an unobstructed view of the entire shaft, all 38 floors, and piloting it was like taking a slow rocket ship into the dark heavens.

During my brief tenure at 120 Broadway, I tried to be a good elevator operator. I showed up for my shifts on time. I worked over-nights. I passed inspection. My shoes were shined and I smiled whenever I interacted with the public. I was even relatively consistent whenever I had to “level off,” accomplishing it with a minimal number of tries. But still there was a part of me that was curious, distracted, a part of me wanted to test the limits, to see just how far I might go up without getting hooked, how low without ending up in The Pit. Of course I didn’t want to kill anybody or myself in the process. Perhaps that was that wonder that caused the problem on my last day of work. Or maybe it was the image of a smiling Spencer climbing the maintenance ladder through the escape hatch in the elevator, wondering how it felt riding full tilt into the springs below. In any event, I missed the red #3 bull’s eye and kamikazed my elevator filled with Japanese office workers from Mitsubishi on the 28th floor into the The Pit. I don’t remember much, but I am sure it wasn’t me who shouted, “Remember Pearl Harbor!” as somebody reported hearing on the descent.
Of course I was fired in full view of everyone.

My friend Sal later told me The Rat gathered everyone in the Break Room and announced that my crash landing made a bigger impact on the building than the one he had witnessed in March 1942. That was when a seven-inch artillery shell fired by an anti-aircraft battery near the East River by mistake struck the 37th floor.
“It was one of eight,” The Rat told them. “The only one to hit. And I was right there when it happened. The other rounds all fell harmlessly into the river. That shell caused less damage, and no injuries.”
So my career came to an abrupt and crashing end. But I did make it into elevator operator lore, and in September I started on a new career path, teaching high school.

© 2011 Joseph E. Scalia

At first I planned for a Netbook to do my writing on the go. Keyboard, long battery life and reasonable price were the enticing factors. I checked out a Netbook on display inside the Staples store on 6th Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. It radiated heat like the Arizona desert on a summer day, while a nearby HP Touch Pad, an iPad-like tablet, felt only slightly warmer than room temperature. The price tag for the TouchPad screamed from the tag $99! But hastily handwritten text in small letters below whispered that it was sold out.

After Hewlett Packard announced the fire sale of discontinued Touch Pads at $99 apiece, the TouchPad rush commenced on the web and in store. My next stop was Office Depot down the block. “Do you sell tablets?” I asked two Office Depot employees,  tall, muscular men leisurely conversing in the empty store. Unsure whether I was inquiring about computers or medicine one of them said reluctantly - “Check downstairs” - a vague reply worthy of my vague question.

Instead I went to Best Buy located on 5th Avenue and 44th street. “If you want the $99 HP tablet, come tomorrow at 9AM”, the Best Buy employee assured me, “We will have 250 of them.”

9:30 AM the next morning, I was there, eager as a boy scout on a treasure hunt. The line spanned about 300 feet, from Best Buy’s front door to the corner of the block. Most people in the line looked young (below 40) and relaxed. They were peering into their smart phones and simultaneously talking to people next to them. It looked like a friendly meeting of like-minded people preferring for some reason to stand in a line instead of a circle. People here owned more than enough computer equipment. Some of them hoped to make a quick dollar but most, it seemed to me, came to buy something that was slated to become an instant antique.

Waiting in line I could not take my mind away from the diminishing supply of the Touch Pads. But soon the serenity of the crowd overtook me. I befriended a young man, a Help Desk team leader at the MBC who arrived here at 7:30AM. He was seventh in line when the store opened. He got his first TouchPad and now was back in the line hoping for one more catch.

Tourists glanced at us and some stopped to inquire what was happening. A tourist with an Israeli accent would not believe that anything with the plug would sell for less than 100 dollars. “99 dollars, 99 dollars” he repeated in disbelieve. “Join us friend, Empire State Building will not run away”, I felt like saying to him.

My biggest surprise was how efficiently the Best Buy people were managing the line. Patrons could get into the store without waiting but the only way to the coveted TouchPads was through our line. The Best Buy man at the door let people from the waiting line inside the store in groups of five. “Go to the man in the yellow shirt “he guided aspiring TouchPad owners in the commanding voice, “don’t deviate”.

Someone tried offering a bribe for the TouchPad to a Best Buy employee who flatly declined. Another employee stopped a teenager who tried to cut into my group of five. The group-of-five idea was a stroke of  Best Buy genius. You may swallow an offence if someone cuts in line in front of you when you're alone, but the party of five together as a group will not tolerate a 6th intruder.

I ended up spending over $200. I bought more memory (you always end up spending more on memory), a wireless keyboard and the docking station for the Touchpad. Still it was a good deal considering it costs HP more than $300 to make one.

At work colleagues looked at my TouchPad with envy and they tried ordering from different websites. They are still waiting for vendors’ assurances that their product is not sold out.

This is the 21st century, but at times there is no alternative to good old legwork.

Stas Holodnak originally from Ukraine now lives and writes in Bay ridge, Brooklyn. Links to his stories can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/stasholodnaklinks/.

I could pretend that it was because business was changing, as the notice letter said, or that there was a need to make more cuts, as my manager—I’ll call him John—explained to me, but I knew better. The company I worked for had reported profits that quarter. On the other hand, trouble had been brewing around me for months and I knew that my position would be eliminated as soon as it was safe to let go of an older woman with a disabling condition.

Earlier that year, a departmental restructure had brought in a new management team that believed in aggressive deadlines and absolute job dedication.

“I come in at 7 a.m.,” John explained to our team as a manner of introduction, “and I leave at 7 or 8 at night. And if something needs to be done during the weekend, I make myself available.”

At first, I stood up to them. “I have a medical condition,” I said to John. No, I cannot work 12-hour days. No, I cannot be available day and night, weekdays and weekends, at the ring of a cell phone or the touch of a remote connection.

“Everyone in this business unit is ranked according to a Bell curve,” John replied, “and every year, 10 percent of employees are rated as ‘need improvement.’” If I couldn’t meet expectations, I would automatically fall into that category and then, “When it’s time to decide on raises or when it’s time to reduce the work force, well,” he added, letting the obvious answers hang at the tip of his outstretched hands, palms up, in a nothing-I-can-do-about-it gesture. He had the flat emotionless tone and the slight smirk that showed up whenever he set ambitious expectations or redefined goals. That’s the way it was going to be. Period.

I had worked as a computer programmer for all of the 12 years I had multiple sclerosis, and had always received satisfactory reviews and raises. Now, for the first time, I needed to find out what my rights were. The country has laws to protect the disabled, doesn’t it? Multiple sclerosis is recognized as a disabling condition, right? It does and it is, but the protection that offers is, as I discovered to my dismay, very limited.

According to the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), a company should make reasonable accommodations to ensure that an employee with a disability can perform her job. So if someone uses a wheelchair, the employer should provide a desk space wide enough to accommodate it. If an individual’s vision is impaired, the employer should provide large character software.

My drop foot and weak right leg make me limp but they don’t prevent me from sitting at a computer terminal, and the numbness in my fingers doesn’t affect my typing abilities. And I can focus, concentrate and multitask as well as any of my peers. But I do get tired. Fatigue is my vulnerability. I need a regular workday and enough rest in order to tackle the next day’s workload.

I also get an injection several times a week. That requires that I medicate myself an hour before, that it be done at a scheduled time and early enough in the evening so that the flu-like symptoms it generates have time to dissipate before the next morning. How could I factor that into 12-hour workdays?

Also under the ADA law, an employee must be able to perform the job functions she was hired for. If I were an hourly employee, I couldn’t be forced to work overtime. But I was a salaried employee. The definition of my responsibilities was “job done,” and if that meant long days and weekend work, as the new management team expected, that’s what I should be able to do. I wasn’t sick enough to go on disability, but not well enough to be recognized as a competent employee.

What did other people with MS do in those situations, I wondered? I roamed the blogs and talked to my friends, hoping for guidance, but found out that there was no simple answer. Some had understanding managers who accommodated their needs or helped them obtain a disability status. Some worked as hard as they were expected to and lived with the consequences. And some quit or were laid off, many falling into destitution and despair as a result.

“Compromise,” the counselor from the MS Society told me after reviewing my situation with a lawyer. “Arrange to work from home several days a week and use the hours saved from traveling to accomplish more of your tasks.”

This would help, but it wouldn’t be enough for a manager who equaled “job done” with “whatever it takes.”

A compromise of sort is also what my manager offered me after I discussed the issue with the Human Resources department. “It’s best if you look for an internal transfer,” he said. “But not in IT,” he added, showing not one iota of appreciation for my skills and my years of experience, “that won’t work for you.”

So I set out to look for another position and found out that, even in this difficult economy, there were several thousand openings. But few were in the location I worked at, (was I willing to move to Mumbai?) and, of those, many were IT related. I knew that even if I got an interview and did well, a single phone call to John was all it would take to dismiss my candidacy. All I was left with were entry-level jobs which would mean a huge pay cut, or training for a different career; neither of which I was willing to do as I was entering my 7th decade.

I trudged along then, working hard while keeping a close watch at both my health and the milestones our team reached. Would I be dismissed after we completed an upgrade to new software, after important tasks were automated, after routine activities were transferred to another group?

But how could they not need me anymore when I was so busy, all day, every day, and when there was so much more work to be done?

I also went through endless mental calculations. How much money would my husband and I need to live comfortably now that he was retired, our children were grown and we had no large debt to worry about? How much longer would I actually need to work? My husband would get Medicare in seven months; I could collect early social security in ten. Would I get affordable medical coverage as a retiree? Would the Obama health plan pass congress and would it be good enough to make a difference?

When John stopped at my desk that July morning and said, “May I talk to you for a minute,” I knew what it was about and I was ready. I understood that my fate had been sealed the moment I said, “I have a medical condition.”

Using the excuse of the economic situation to lay me off was not simply about the new management team’s expectations. The company was taking advantage of the business climate to get rid of employees who were considered trouble, who earned too much, or who did not fit into the mold. In light of my fine working record, finding a reason to let me go would have taken longer and would have been hard to prove. Letting me go with a package was quicker and it eliminated the possibility of a legal case because of age, gender or disability discrimination. The language of the notice letter was tight in that regard. To protest, comment, publicize or disclose any of it would make me lose the benefits I was getting.

I don’t believe that things happen for a reason or that when a door closes another one opens, as many of my friends told me. But I do think that I was lucky. The best thing would have been for me to choose when I wanted to stop working. The next best thing was to be laid off and get a few months of severance pay followed by 26 weeks of unemployment benefits. Together they would bridge us to our 7- and 10-month family milestones. We would not be rich but we would be OK. Compared to families with young children, credit card debt and a mortgage, we were fine.

That evening, my husband took me out to dinner to a family-run restaurant with a friendly Provence atmosphere and the best desserts in the neighborhood. Later I sent a collective email to my children and their spouses. “My job problems are solved,” I wrote. “Cheers.” Better to welcome the next phase of my life.

Before going to bed, I turned off the clock radio. For decades, I had woken every weekday at 6:15 a.m. to weather and traffic conditions, but now my time was mine. I could read late into the night and wake up late in the morning. I could spend lots of time with my grandchildren and my friends. I could be active on issues that mattered to me and do more than signing petitions and sending emails in support of a healthcare public option, more to combat climate change beside using reusable bags and shopping locally. And I could work to improve job protection for people with disabilities.

I thought of my friend and coworker—I’ll call her Sally—who had helped me empty my desk that morning. She was well aware that the workload had not changed and that, with one less person in the team, more duties would fall on her already overburdened schedule.

“It might not feel this way to you right now,” she said, “but you are the lucky one.”

Again, I thought of the possibilities now opened in front of me, the chance to rediscover my aspirations, the time to deepen my commitments. And MS would not be a hindrance. It left me with plenty of strengths; strengths that I had mobilized over the years to remain a diligent and effective employee and that I would now garner to reach my redefined goals.

Emily Azur is the pen name the author uses to avoid retribution from her former employer. She is delighted with her new found free time and continues to enjoy life.

“That means you have made a commitment to silence. The first obligation is to shut off your cell phones. And just because the train stops at a station doesn’t give you the right to turn it back on to listen to your messages. The phone is off for the duration. If by some mistake you didn’t turn it off completely and it rings, you’re not allowed to answer it.

“But don’t worry about not having anything to do. The way this train has been running, we’ll most likely have an eventful trip. We’ve lost our electricity two times on the way here. There’s a good chance we might lose it again. There seems to be more electricity in the sky than in the wires.

“Don’t blame it on Amtrak. Blame it on Con Edison, then the weather. Amtrak isn’t responsible. We guarantee you a safe ride. But if you look at your ticket, you’ll notice there’s no fine print guaranteeing we’ll get you to your destination on time. Luckily, the driver used the train’s momentum to coast into the stations.

“Also, it was helpful that we were going downhill. Unfortunately, the remaining part of our trip is uphill. We’ll just have to wait for the electricity to get turned back on. How long that’ll take, I couldn’t tell you. I work for Amtrak, not Con Edison or the Weather Channel. So thank you for you cooperation. I hope I can thank you again for it when we’re stuck.”

“Oh my god! How the hell did you know!”

I wanted to say, it’s really not that difficult when you date someone for nearly a year. And we did meet through craigslist ourselves. His words got me everytime. Even when placing an ad for a trannie or a woman with a strap-on. I knew it was Luke. And this made him cry. Because we couldn’t make it work between us. He hasn’t come to terms with his sexuality yet. Doesn’t want to deal with his “heteroflexibility” as he likes to call it which I think is really a cop out.

In any case, he is this amazing guy, who dates great women like me, gets bored, ruins the relationship–and goes for these people men, women, somewhere in between, that are after money, a place to stay, not a relationship, not even sex or friendship. He has to double check each time he has a date from craigslist, to make sure that the date isn’t an escort-referencing the escort services section! Half the time they are.

When we first met, his “assistant” was a trannie named Layla. She had nowhere to stay so he took her in after their craigslist fuck. When I came into the picture, she had been around about a month. She stayed another month or so. Free room and bored. MetroCard and lunch money. I was sure she was planning to run a bordello out of his apartment. She tried to break us up from the start. I wanted to feel sorry for her because I knew it wasn’t easy living in transition; between two genders. She made this impossible. She was a pathological liar. Taking and taking and basically feeling it was her right to do so. I spotted her lies the first day. It took Luke much longer. I guess he needs to see the good in people while I see them for what they are.

I still troll craiglist once in awhile–it’s like watching soap operas. Mindless entertainment. I will always be able to pick out Luke’s ads because he writes a certain way and I doubt he will change his character or his desires. I know I freaked him out by picking his ad out so easily, but after all, I chose his ad out of over two hundred when we first met. Words get me everytime.

This is Zoë’s first extended trip. She’ll be introduced to snow and cold, to new beds, to new people. Fourteen days of unfamiliarity and family. What were we thinking?

When we pull up to Elise’s brother’s house in D.C., I sit in the car for a moment and think, Let’s keep driving. Then the front door of the house opens and the relatives are on us. Actually, they’re on Zoë, hugging and kissing and squeezing her. Zoë’s cousins are sick. They’re little faucets of phlegm. The boy cousin holds Zoë by the ears and sneezes. Then he coughs. Then someone tells him to cover his mouth and he does, and coughs and wipes his hand on her head. Zoë just sits and stares. In fact, she’s in love. I love her cousins, too, though I’d like them better now if they were wrapped in plastic.

Zoë gets loads of gifts. The house is wall-to-wall wrapping paper and family. The family cat has gone into hiding. I’m hiding behind a book. I look over at Zoë and see that her cousin is exploring her nose with his tongue. That can’t be good. We should go for a walk. So I wrap Zoë in a snowsuit that makes her look like a yeti and we head out into the searing cold and come back in ten minutes. She naps with her face buried in a blanket.

After two days we cram with Elise’s parents into a car and drive north. We stop in Brooklyn, and visit Elise’s grandmother. Zoë is fascinated by her great-grandmother’s squeaky voice and amazed when her great-grandmother grabs her ears and drags her in for a mouth-to-mouth kiss. After lunch, after another mouth-to-mouth kiss, we head into Manhattan.

We’re on our own, finally. We spend the day in the Village hopping from café to café, searching for hot chocolate and a comfortable place to breast-feed. The first café has weak hot chocolate and hard wooden seats. The next café has hot chocolate you can stand your spoon in but only stools to sit on. We settle at Doma, a café with cozy seats and wide windows looking out on Seventh Avenue. The woman next to us gushes over Zoë. Elise whispers, “She looks like Hilary Swank’s sister.” It is Hilary Swank. She’s playing chess with her husband, and Zoë spends the afternoon tossing her toy under their table and they keep picking it up and giving it back. We spend the afternoon reading books and ignoring the fact that we recognize Hilary Swank. The only problem with Doma is its coffee, a problem for a café, which combines being bad with being expensive.

We spend the next day in more cafés drinking more hot chocolate. Occasionally we bundle up for a walk in the cold. Once we see Sarah Jessica Parker walking down the other side of the street with her baby in her Baby Björn and she waves at us and we wave at her before diving back into a café.

Night comes. Zoë’s nose was already running but now it’s sprinting. She sleeps fitfully, can’t breathe. We hear her wheezing on the makeshift bed of cushions we’ve set up next to our bed in the apartment where we’re staying.

It sounds as if she’s trying to drag the last bits of a milk shake through a straw. By midnight her nose is completely clogged. We get out The Snot-Suction Thing.

The Snot-Suction Thing looks like an onion with a nose. Its light-blue color could be called Hospital Sick. It is medieval, emphasis on “eval.” But when we shove its nose up Zoë’s nose, and release the onion, The Snot-Suction Thing yanks out a satisfying sinewy strand of goo. Zoë feels better and sleeps, at least for the hour until we de-snot her again. During the night, “de-snot” becomes a verb.

In the morning we take five minutes cleaning up the wadded tissues covering the floor. Then we slog out into the cold to visit friends uptown. Zoë is exhausted. We’re not feeling too great either. We make a bed for Zoë on our friend’s bed and she sleeps, then we head downtown and set up another bed at another friend’s house and she sleeps again. As we talk with our friends in the living room we want nothing more than to lounge around and catch up on gossip. But we have become nervous on-call plumbers, one of our ears always tuned to the gurgling from the other room, which at some point will burst into a full-on pipe malfunction that requires our services, our little baby plunger.

We retreat to New Haven, wads of tissues crammed in every pocket. My parents live outside of town on a farm. We spend New Year’s Eve playing charades and pumping snot out of Zoë and wondering how many pints of snot can be in one baby’s head.

Elise has an interview the next day for her predoctoral internship. While she’s gone I wrap Zoë in a blanket and walk around the farm, kicking snow into the air and onto the backs of my parents’ dogs. It’s odd to show Zoë where I grew up and it moves me in a way I can’t quite describe—she’s in a place where she never existed, but was always part of the future story. She’s nowhere but everywhere.

We return home and Zoë naps, snoring like a phlegmatic old man. The Snot-Suction Thing is clogged. It needs a suction of its own. Should I use a turkey baster on it? A turkey baster on my daughter? This is getting ridiculous. In the morning we bundle Zoë and drive up another slushy highway to visit my brother. He and his wife own the general store in a small Massachusetts town. They live above the store and treat it like a pantry, walking down for pints of Ben & Jerry’s whenever they want. I like visiting. But this year I’m walking downstairs to see if the store kitchen has a turkey baster. Zoë may not need anything, though. She’s getting better. Nursing has literally nursed her back to health. Her face is an ugly record of the ten days she’s been through: raw and red and covered with dried mucus that sticks to her skin like yellow lichen on a slick rock. She sleeps through the night. In the morning her snots are hard and I can shovel them out of her nose with the tip of my pinky. I don’t bother with tissues anymore and am wiping the snots on my socks.

Our last stop is in Boston. When Elise goes to another internship interview I stay with Zoë at a friend’s apartment. Another futon, another temporary bed, another pile of dirty clothes and winter jackets. Being in yet another place that is not ours makes me wish that I could pack an entire warm room in my shoulder bag, with Zoë’s bed and clothes arranged neatly inside. It would fold easily in and out, and if I could pack my child in the bag, too, and ensure that she was never sick, travel would be so easy.

Zoë naps and I sit in the kitchen and nurse a coffee and listen to the radio. A man is talking about how his baby got ill and died in her crib so I go check on Zoë. She is flat on her back, immune to her surroundings, breathing easy after all she’s been through. I guess The Snot-Suction Thing did its job. It expired in the process, though. It’s broken, like us. I return to the kitchen and put my head on the table. Outside, through windows fogged with cold, I hear the crunch of boots in snow, the swish of car wheels through slush, the occasional clatter of falling icicles. Inside I hear the asthmatic rattle of the radiator. I close my eyes and picture the produce section of Berkeley Bowl. I picture the tomatoes. I picture tomatoes that are a certain red that is rich and bursting to the point of being so full of color that you can’t imagine a deeper color in the world, where if you put your hands on them you can sense the soil they came from and the sun they must have grown under. I picture the leeks and the radishes, dripping wet. Each color distinct and sharp. And as I daydream my bag full of produce and walk outside into the sun and look up at the hills and smell that bright clean smell that is distinctly California, I want to go home. I want to go home to our home three thousand miles away.

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The above appears in CRAWLING, copyright 2006 Pantheon Books.

We both were given to the electronic medium of connecting, given that substantive “real-time” connections were elusive. I wrote an original poem not for her, but sent it to let her see my thoughts. It was pretty good for off the cuff, written in a few minutes while sitting in the East Asian library during reading week, mere days before finals. Undoubtedly taking a break from studying, putting off the inevitable. The poem was about being a muse, finding a muse – searching for inspiration. Discovering the talent within by way of another.

Later we chatted on the phone. Had the most interesting of conversations about everything. I shared my observations about “The Death of Socrates_”on my visit to the Met. My favorite painting. I recalled how it enthralled me because it crystallized the importance of ideas. I gave an impassioned speech about how the ancient Athenians understood the importance of ideas so much that they sentenced Socrates to death for it. Corruption. Corrupting the Athenian youth. A crime of thought. Death for ideas. Socrates willingly drank the hemlock that forever sealed his fate. She indulged my rant and seemed to enjoy the discourse. We talked some more, off and on for a few weeks. It was fun b/c she was smart and witty with a sense of humor. A self-proclaimed “Dominican valley girl” b/c of a stint living in San Fran. But a true New Yorker at heart. Dominican from Washington Heights. Can’t get more New York than that.

The evening we finally met, I only knew the sound of her voice, yet when she tapped me on the shoulder, and said “hello”, I turned around and I shot her an icy glare. And then said, it’s me, “Aurelis”, and then I flashed a warm smile and we embraced. I later apologized for the giving her the ice grill.

As fate would have it she was absolutely beautiful. I was fortunate yet again with these type of meetings. As we sat down and shared drinks waiting for the poets to reappear, I prayed a silent prayer of thanks. That night was the first we met, but memory of her and our times together have been with me ever since. She enchanted me with her beauty, charm, and personality. I couldn’t get enough of her, the following month, I called her from South Africa just to hear her voice. She seemed thrilled. I could see her gleaming on the other end of the phone half-way across the world.

We went back and forth romantically, though I never could apprehend her…she wanted me not. At least not in any serious way. She made me sick with joy, pleasure, and even agony. I wanted her to want me, but she couldn’t, she wouldn’t. Forever at arm’s length, just beyond the grasp of my fingertips and heart. She broke my heart, several times over. But yet, I yearned for more. It was a tragedy of all tragedies.

But then things fell off. Slowly, but very assuredly. There was the evening of her birthday party. I mumbled some lame excuse about having to study. We didn’t speak for months afterward. Then there was the other party she hosted. Again, poor timing, I explained. Mid-terms were in full-swing. I couldn’t get away, no, not even for a little while. And then we didn’t speak again for months.

Then, I called her one day my last semester at Columbia. We chatted for a while and it was pleasant. We both agreed we shouldn’t let so much time pass between talking again. We promised to meet for lunch at that sushi place on broadway and 112th And soon. Soon was a couple weeks later. After the sushi place, the next time we met was prompted by me breaking her the news. I was moving. Flipping coast. To LaLaland. Los Angeles was beckoning.

And so, a few days before I boarded a flight out of NYC we had dinner. It was uptown in the Heights at a Spanish place. El Caridad. She still looked great. Beautiful as always. She wished me well and I wished her the same. It was bittersweet, our departure. I didn’t want to be with her, because so much had changed between us in the intervening time, both circumstances and personalities – but I would always think fondly of her. And always have. I wanted her so deeply and passionately, like I haven’t anyone else. I was intoxicated with the idea of her. Punch-drunk for the Dominican schoolteacher.

When I moved to L.A. we fell out of touch. I figured it was time to move on anyway. We had such a brief, fleeting romance, so long ago, I decided to let it go. I rarely thought of her anymore. The times I visited the City, it never occurred to me to call her, if only to say hello. I had moved. Literally and figuratively. Undoubtedly, she had moved too. The nature of life is moving – both onward and upward. I filed her away as another chapter in the saga, a forgotten page penned with ink that fades over time. The Dominican bruja no longer had me under her spell. I was free. Like Verizon. And clear from the pangs of desire.

Then one day, out of the blue, it occurred to me, she might have thought of me. More specifically, my family. She knows I’m from Lake Charles and the hurricane went straight through there. I decided to write an email. And so I did. I had no idea what to expect, I just wrote a brief email saying my family was okay and shot it off into cyberspace. And then…my pulse quickened when I saw her name in my inbox. Imagine my surprise. Surprise of all surprises.

Turns out I was right. She had considered my family and their well-being. In fact, her best friend is also from Louisiana, whom I had met, and she too asked about my family. How nice I thought. But admittedly, she supposes that she could have called to find out for sure. (shrugs) I suppose. Anyhow, she wishes me well and that she is still teaching, but has changed addresses. She mentions something about killer rents and then signs off.

I begin to hastily type a reply, excited by the fact that she has finally acknowledged me after all this time, but then I stop. I click out of the email and navigate to the web browser. I navigate to my favorite site, log on and click “post new blog”…

Suzanne Seggerman is co-founder and co-director of Games for Change, a nonprofit organization promoting and supporting the use of video games for positive social change. She and her husband recently made the switch from garaging the Gladiator to dealing with street parking as a cost-saving measure while she grows her company. “Plus we caught our parking attendant watching porn videos in the van one night on our way home from dinner. We just banged on the van and ran away. A couple of days later, they informed us they could no longer fit our van in their lot.” She chuckled. “We don’t know if the two things are related.”

Adding to the temporal and psychic demands of New York street parking, the Gladiator is big. Really big. One of Seggerman’s stepsons has a congenital heart defect and needs to travel with a lot of equipment. “He has an oxygen tank the size of a small oil drum, basically,” said Seggerman. “And a huge ventilator. So we need a lot of space.” In the middle row is a booster seat for their five-year-old daughter. It’s strewn with My Little Ponys and videos like Theodore Helps a Friend, The Road to El Dorado, and Fantasia. There are headphones “so the kids can watch their movies while dad and mom listen to NPR or some obscure folk music.” The van’s third row folds out to a queen-size mattress for the occasional hiking trip.

By 9:36 Seggerman was ready for work. The laptop and Blackberry were out, the adapter inserted into the cigarette lighter. She scrolled down a list of names on her computer. “I’m trying to get on wireless,” she explained. “Piggybacking, they call it. I call it snatching. I like to snatch wireless from an NYU student, so Monday-Thursday is better for me.” She regarded her list of potential hosts. “The Loin, Anti-Bush, I Love Work, New Home, Paris. Most of these are security-enabled. Too bad I can’t get on Anti-Bush. Looks like the best one for me today is probably someone named Shervin.”

Another white van, with New Hampshire “Live Free or Die” plates, pulled up in front of the Gladiator, its rear windows plastered with tattered stickers of American flags and Support our Troops symbols. A young man in a leather jacket got out to stretch his legs. Seggerman leaned out her window. “Hey, did you serve?”

The man stared at her. He approached her van warily. “What?”

“Did you serve?”

“Yeah.”

“Iraq?”

“Afghanistan.”

“You don’t look old enough.”

“I did three years in Afghanistan. MOS 87 Delta. Topography. Complicated stuff.”

“Wow. So what are you doing now?”

He motioned to the equipment in the back of his van. “Some construction. I want to go back to school. Engineering. I wouldn’t want to do topography again. Travel all over the world mapping different countries so we can go in and bomb them.” He shook his head.

Now that he’d warmed up to the blond, black-turtleneck-and-bluejeans-clad founder of a nonprofit for social change, the young vet could have talked all day. But Seggerman ended the encounter by refocusing her attention on her computer. “That happens all the time,” she said. “People chat. It’s very friendly. But I generally try to use this time for conference calls and proposal writing. And look,” she said brightly. “You can watch people walk by with their little yoga pads.”

At 9:42 Seggerman was hungry. If she left the van, she ran the risk of getting a $105 ticket. She looked up local eateries on her Blackberry then punched in the number for nearby Grub. “Hi, this is Suzanne. I’ve called you guys before for this sort of weird request and you’ve done it. I’m in a white van between Bleecker and Mercer and I want to order some food. Okay. An omelet with asparagus, onions, and Swiss cheese. That’s it. Salt and pepper. Thanks so much. Bye.” She hung up. “I actually have a real office,” she said. “Up around Union Square, at Web Lab, where I’m a consultant. But I prefer this one because it’s two blocks from my house.”

At 9:45 her computer buzzed to let her know she had a conference call in fifteen minutes. Fifty yards away, a street cleaning truck swooshed and grunted along Mercer Street. Seggerman’s whole body snapped to attention. “Hear that sound? Whenever I hear that, I get this rush of adrenaline. I hear wheels spinning. I felt it this morning when I was getting coffee.”

At 9:55 a delivery guy walked straight past her van to the one in front of it. She shouted out the window. “Hey hey hey! That’s me.” The delivery guy smiled and approached her. She paid for her food, put the bag down near her seat and headed back to the last row in the van to get ready for her conference call. “I was once on a call with a VP from MTV,” she said, laughing. “And this homeless guy starts pounding on the window asking for money. I told the MTV guy I had a delivery—it was the only thing I could think of—so I could put him on hold and pay the homeless guy off.”

At 10:00 she began a conference call with her co-director, Benjamin Stokes, and a development consultant they’d hired to help them raise funds. Seggerman brought the consultant up to speed on the burgeoning “games for change” movement. She told him about the United Nations’ popular Food Force, where players take on missions to deliver food to a famine-affected country, and the high-profile MTVu project, Darfur is Dying, a game designed to help people understand and take action against the genocide in Darfur. But somebody, she said, needs to bring all these groups together and provide visibility for them. “The same way PBS was there to help people use TV for educational purposes; the same way Sundance was there as the first nonprofit supporting independent film; we’re here to help the community of academics, artists, and activists use games for social change. We’re field builders.”

By 10:30 Seggerman was back in the driver’s seat. She sighed. “If only there was a serious game about extreme parking.” She picked up the omelet and began to unwrap it. A traffic cop pulled up alongside her. She waved at the cop. The cop grimaced back. “She’s the mean one,” said Seggerman. “She once gave me a ticket at 9:31. I was racing back to my car after dropping off my daughter late to school.” The cop drove forward to grimace at the next driver. “Parking cops have severe emotional problems for the most part.” Seggerman pulled out the omelet and cut into it. “Unresolved control issues they’re taking out on the general population.” She took a bite of her omelet, then paused, a bit surprised. “Great omelet.”

After swiftly finishing her breakfast, Seggerman was back on the Blackberry with her co-director, discussing a meeting scheduled for later in the day with a grant-giving foundation. At 10:59 another call came in. “Ben, I have another call coming in and I’m getting out of my car at the 11:00 mark. Can I call you on my walk over to my 12:00 meeting?” These days, who needs an office or a home? Seggerman packed up her electronics, locked the van and headed uptown to her next meeting. If her husband didn’t move the Gladiator on Thursday night, she’d be back Friday morning at exactly 9:29.

No such retrospective would be complete without a look back at the year 2000, when the dot com boom was still jumping, and Snooder Greenberg contributed this affecting story about a woman who wanders into his life, takes it over, and disappears, only to reappear again and again. Greenberg sketches the character so well, you would think she were crashing on your very own couch.

Abigail A. Frankfurt has a question: Why do so many male subway riders insist on spreading their legs as wide as they can, when there is so little space to go around? Frankfurt has fun with their “Cro-Magnon sense of entitlement.”

In 2001, many pieces appeared about 9/11, too many to be able to give all of them their due in this small space. One that might be especially worth going back to is Bryan Charles’s minute-by-minute reconstruction of his last day of work in the Morgan Stanley office at Two World Trade Center.

Elizabeth Grove contemplates the memory, months later, as time insists on pushing forward.

It wasn’t long thereafter that the runup to the Iraq War began, another topic that many great pieces on MBN have addressed. In just one example from 2003, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh encounters bitterness and the murky beginnings of hope during a wartime visit to Duane Reade.

Soon enough, however, the 2004 Republican National Convention pulls into town. Debbie Nathan goes on an excursion with the GOP delegation from Texas.

Mass arrest tactics, on the other hand, require Patrick Gallagher to spend the RNC under even less enjoyable circumstances than Nathan does.

Yet life has to go on, then as now. Rachel Sherman’s chronicle of a 2004 visit to a Korean Japanese-style hair-straightening salon in Flushing, Queens focuses on a deceptively small part of everyday life with wit and intelligence.

As 2004 further unfolds, Stacy Pershall pays a visit to a hospital in Brooklyn when she runs out of medication. The author calls this humane but frightening account “a fine example of a bipolar brain off drugs.”

The sun rises on 2005 and Mr. Murphy sheds light on the arcane system of customs and mores that makes life hell for a doorman at an upscale Manhattan building.

Margaret Wilkie marvels when she encounters tourists in Detroit who are actually there on purpose, and she wonders what it means for the city’s future.

The ‘Hood gets a lot of pieces like the below, in which Kate Angus recounts how she skates the edge of the abyss following an exceptional breakup. This one, from Fall of 2005, stands out for its vivid emotions and amazing style.

That’s quite a selection, but it still feels awfully truncated compared to the total number of pieces to be found deep within the site. In any case, thanks again for continuing to read and submit. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

Historians of the pneumatic tube in New York City generally concentrate their monographs on publisher and inventor Alfred Ely Beach’s efforts to present a pneumatic subway to the city, slighting his earlier innovation of the mail tube. Working in secret so as not to be threatened by the surface transport monopoly, Beach’s crew dug a two block long tunnel under Broadway by City Hall in 1870. He proved his point, but it would be thirty years before political will, commuter demand, money, and the usual chicanery combined in the IRT. However, his much smaller diameter mail tubes took off. The US Postal Service pioneered pneumatic tube connectivity, while private firms like Consolidated Pneumatics and Vacu-Send hooked up private vertical and horizontal systems around the city.

Almost completely lost to memory, the hundreds of miles of three-inch copper tubing that made up the PTS were cared for by the members of the old Pneumatic Tube Maintenance Workers Union (Local 131). Once more than a thousand members strong, the militant local disbanded in 1952. As far as I can tell, there’s only one “tube monkey” living today.

His name is Eddie Villacruz. While researching Local 131 records stored in the Wagner Archives at NYU, I found his name on a list of attendees at a 19677 reunion, and tracked him down as the sole survivor. Living quietly in Queens now, Villacruz was happy to tell me about his days in the union and “on the tubes.”

A remarkable ninety-three years old, he is frail but still vinegary. He walks with a limp from the day he lost his kneecap to cops in a brutal strike in October, 1934. Tube monkeys were famous for their ability to make the best of bad situations, often having to cobble together temporary patches and clear out frequent clogs in miserable circumstances. Villacruz was no exception – in the thick of a pitched street battle, he flattened a beer bottle cap and slapped it on his shattered kneecap with binding tape to hold his leg together. I wince just thinking about it, but he told the tale with such nonchalance you would think he was discussing putting a Band-Aid on a boo-boo.

He began his career as an apprentice at the age of sixteen, during a period that in retrospect can be seen as the swan song of the tubes. It was 1923. Not just the post offices were connected, but skyscrapers in Midtown and the Financial District, factories on the West Side and shipping companies up and down both rivers were tubed together. It was a labyrinth of pneumatic tubes, one that acted like the city’s circulation system, pumping information to and fro. But the heart was aging, slowing down as pipes that were already thirty- to forty-years old jammed and clogged more and more as a matter of course. In addition, the wide-spread use of telephones in corporate offices steadily reduced the amount of inter-office memos shunting up and down, leading to cancelled contracts with tube operators.

The Strike of ’34 was pivotal. Ostensibly about bettering working conditions, it was really a last chance stab at preserving jobs in the field. The union held, but barely, for there were just enough jobs to be had. In a few short years, things would change completely.

On July 15, 1939, two tons of pressurized U.S. Mail erupted out of the 31st Street sidewalk. One person was killed and dozens of passersby were wounded. It was the PTS’s biggest disaster, and one that would be its death knell. Villacruz remembers the infamous Farley Post Office Blow Out very well. “Talk about yer god-damned confetti,” he laughs, but with the bittersweet agony of experience crinkling his eyes. “Like a god-damned massive coronary!” he says, shaking his head and putting his hand over his chest.

The Second World War found local 131 members to be excellent mechanics and engineers. Villacruz was 34 in 1941, and, with his bad knee, even less appealing to the military, but his skills earned him a place on the team that protected what was left of the Postal Service’s system from enemy espionage efforts. He ended up working with the Service through to his retirement under the dome of the old Cunard Lines Building, home of the Bowling Green P.O.

These days, he takes it easy, and scoffs at the newfangled “information superhighway.” “Been there, done that,” he chuckles.