Clipped

Last week my wife and I were hiking Lucifer’s Falls in upstate New York. Who could have guessed that a few days later it would be my morals that would land in the Devil’s hands.

The side streets of my neighborhood look calm enough, but open the wrong door and the lowest behavior presents itself, albeit in a Brooks Brothers suit. When I rented an apartment some years ago, an otherwise innocuous walk up on the next block, almost identical to my building, was busted hosting a brothel. A bustling bar had an even more bustling apartment above it hosting after-hours drinking and gambling. Somebody once actually tried to sell me steaks of questionable ownership out of the trunk of their car.

Through most of my life I’ve resisted most vice, save an excessive beer from a friendly bartender. Then Friday, in broad daylight, I fell.

The purpose of my journey was noble enough—picking up our take out lunch. I had walked the side street to the restaurant a thousand times or more in my life, never really paying any attention to the urban topography. Approaching a still-closed storefront, I saw the masked man, a figure vaguely familiar but hard to identify. As I reached an acceptable social distance, his heavy figure supported a quick flick of his neck causing his nose to point slightly upward—the international sign that he recognized me. My next step toward him trapped me for good. In one swift motion his face turned to a door I had never noticed before while simultaneously saying “Let’s go.” The tone was not one of a kind party invitation.

Whisked through the door, I walked with him through a dirty corridor that hadn’t seen the light of day in a century, or whenever the sagging brick building was built. A hard right took me to another door and no other option but to open this portal and enter into my fate. Coming from the shaded outside, my eyes needed to adjust to the sparkling bright fluorescent lights inside. The place was familiar, but backwards. Looking out to the front door, the metal gate was all the way down, blocking any sunlight. Black garbage bags covered the two large windows that would otherwise provide a view to the street. You couldn’t see outside, and outsiders couldn’t see in. Almost exactly three months to the day since my last fix, New York’s newest den of iniquity was about to deliver—I sat down into the comfortable chair of a barbershop speakeasy.

It didn’t have to be this way. Unshorn for weeks, my hair resembled a cross between Doc Brown in Back to the Future and a rejected Muppet prototype. Yet as the world witnessed our elected leaders decriminalizing curfew breaking, property destruction, and looting, hair cutting was considered not just non-essential but potentially worth a trip to a police cell. Undeterred, my barber went underground, now literally pulling people off the street trying to make a living. He and his compatriot were the only, socially distanced, staff; both were wearing masks and thus complying with all necessary regulations except those pesky executive orders to close.

My journey into this morally deprave morass of personal hair care now took a happily routine turn. We bantered idly as the overgrown mass was expertly coiffed. Another patron asked when the shop decided to go rogue, with the brilliant reply coming, “When I saw Cuomo on TV last week with a new haircut and he didn’t explain how he got it.” Sartorial justice was being served one illegal scissor snip at a time. Besides payment, all the barbers asked from me was to put my mask as I left so that I looked like normal pedestrian. I did the former with a huge tip and the latter to make sure the cops didn’t get on my barber’s case.

There was some salvation later that night when I turned on the news. A reporter was live outside some bars and restaurants breathlessly sharing how patrons were standing on the sidewalk, drinking, laughing, and even eating food without social distancing or using masks. On cue a patrol car rolled slowly by with its lights flashing, and then just as leisurely passed by without so much as a warning to the scofflaws. The nanny-state correspondent could barely hide her disappointment. Whatever numbered “phase” the government has us in needs to move on like the moods of a teenager. Besides, I hear illegal haircuts are just the entry drug to covert indoor dining and group soccer games. In this case, I won’t “just say no.”

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved

A Tale of Two Pressers

It was the best of press conferences, it was the worst of press conferences, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.

Actually, it was just all bad. Yesterday New York’s titular leadership showed the world how utterly inept they are during dueling press conferences.

New York City’s Mayor Bill De Blasio started this race to the bottom in City Hall’s Blue Room, the well-worn space where these events have taken place for decades. Perhaps in an act of mercy to the memory of a real statesman, a neat row of American and City flags hid the portrait of Alexander Hamilton. It’s just as well—he wouldn’t want to see what was about to unfold. Staring blankly, well even more blankly than usual, the Mayor looked into the one camera and warbled on for 15 minutes about peace, love, and understanding (minus the melody of an Elvis Costello cover); maintaining law and order, not so much.

When it came time for questions, it suddenly hit me—there were no reporters at this press conference! I know from experience the Blue Room has plenty of space to accommodate reporters even in this time of social distancing, yet De Blasio took questions over the phone like a bad radio show host. When a reporter asked about witnessing looters going about their business with impunity and without interruption, the Mayor became unhinged. His face recoiled, lips pursed, and he flat out denied that you could possibly characterize the previous night’s ravaging in that way. This would be an odd perspective given the video of looters doing their best Black Friday rush into a boarded-up Macy’s, shopping, literally, with fire in their step.

Adding to this absurdist performance was De Blasio’s denunciation of using the National Guard. Claiming that these profession troops were untrained and unable to integrate into the police command, he saved his greatest venom for last—that this force was…armed. Of course he had just called on community leaders and local clergy to stand up and stop the rioters through the force of their words, a force to which a mob is notably non-compliant when wielding crowbars. Adding to the general menace was the Mayor’s concern that the protests and riots might add to a new out brake of Coronovirus. What was a joke meme on Facebook now overshadowed utter lawlessness on the streets.

Up the Hudson River, the curtain rose on a different kind of off-Broadway show. Opening in March, it featured the tiresome droning of Governor Cuomo and Swedish-colored PowerPoints. Normally Albany is a sleepy beat, concerned with arcane budget matters and other ways to tax the state’s residents out of existence. But the past few months have been a record-breaker with daily national coverage and the Governor acting as a foil to President Trump. The reviews were fawning and it was a socially-distant standing-room only press sellout, like any night at Hamilton. The fanboy press has been polite and raising their hands waiting for the great performer to call their names and answer their not-too-difficult questions.

Tuesday’s performance, however, could only be described as one of the greatest flops of all time.

The sharks didn’t just smell blood. The sharks had sniffed through the chum and were headed straight for kill. Some raised their hands, but all were yelling like the White House press corps when Marine One has its rotors going full tilt. One look at Cuomo’s face and you could tell he knew he was nothing but prey this day.

Blasting both De Blasio and the NYPD for failing to do anything resembling their jobs (a remark about the police for which he would later have to apologize), Cuomo started off feigning strength. But then the question of the day came up: why didn’t he send in the National Guard? What followed was a Cuomo-esque litany of legalese and philosophy. He had offered the National Guard to cities across the state. Well he could have sent in the National Guard, but that meant displacing the Mayor’s authority. He wasn’t ready yet to displace the Mayor’s authority. On it went, as did the looting.

To the press’s credit, they wouldn’t let go. One intrepid reporter threw out a national question—had there been a request from Washington to send New York’s National Guard to the capital to help out with the protests there? The Governor never actually answered that question, but came up with the worst possible answer—he wouldn’t send National Guard troops out of state because they were needed in New York. There was a moment of silence while the circular logic sank in, perhaps the quiet was also a nod to the political death the Governor had just inflicted upon himself. Even his usual ending “Goodbye, I have to go to work” was met not with the usual rustling of papers and shuffling of reporters’ feet out the door but a cacophony of more questions.

Many years ago former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (no stranger to protests or maintaining law and order) described a moment of political and media epiphany. Vacationing in Los Angeles over New Year’s he was watching local news coverage as the clock was about to strike midnight. Then it struck him—the LA stations were replaying New York’s ball drop. What happened in New York definitely didn’t stay in New York, and he used that knowledge as a global platform to promote the city during his mayoralty.

What the world has seen over the past 48 hours, in Times Square and around the entire city, is New York at its lowest, the rotten apple cover of Time magazine those many years ago. The disgrace of rioting and utter chaos points right back at feckless politicians who couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag. Great expectations have devolved into the bleakest of houses.

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.