High Noon: Locking The Doors & Boarding Up The Windows
Woke early this morning and continued troubleshooting installation of this
blogger software, Movable Type, which, if you're a programmer, is probably
P.O.C. (Piece 'O Cake), while if you are a self-taught web designer--read:
moi--it is like trying to thread a needle wearing oven mitts and a blindfold.
Met the boys at Mo's for a 10:15 It's On! football game on Randall's Island,
which we won 13-6 after being down at halftime 6-0. Real character builder, I
might add, and evens our record at 3-3, putting us back in the playoff hunt for
the first time since we won the season opener. Anyway, Rod-Man drove us back to
the city and we did encounter some early east-side traffic, but I'd requested
the early game specifically to get us back before the madness began, and it
worked pretty much to specifications. The boys made plans to shower and meet at
Mo's, and when they asked me what I was doing I told them the same thing I tell
them on the other 3 "Staying Home & Drinking Not" days of the year, which are
(chronologically) The Puerto Rican Day Parade, Halloween, and New Year's Eve.
Now, don't get me wrong, I've nothing against Ireland or the Irish, nor Puerto
Rico or Puerto Ricans (my 2nd wife was Puerto Rican), nor Witches and Goblins
(if they care), nor New Years--whether outgoing or incoming--I've enjoyed a
bunch of them through the years and hope to continue in that tradition. But the
spectacles that accompany these celebrations, especially here in New York City,
can be quite boisterous, to say the least. In the past 23 years I have myself
partaken in many of these celebrations. I have watched the paraders from the
balcony of my penthouse suite (when I had the need for a penthouse suite, which,
happily, I no longer do) assembling down on 45th Street, tuning their tubas and
twirling their batons, and sometimes jumping up and down in place if the weather
was uncooperative. I have walked along the sidewalk while New York's Bravest and
Finest marched proudly up Fifth Avenue, and drank with them in the bars, and
served them in my own when a bartender I became.
Compared with St. Patty's Day, the Puerto Rican Day Parade is a relatively new
tradition, but I can remember back in the late '80s when I did not even know
what it was, and was laying in Central Park and practicing Tae Kwon Do on a
secluded hillside that gradually became crowded with revellers who watched me,
politely, while they celebrated their heritage. I have watched the great parade
in the village on All Hallow's Eve, and enjoyed the costumes and the pretense
and the unbridled spirit of the moment.
But I have also grown weary of the struggles that, more and more, seem attendant
upon these great traditions. I have been caught amidst bareknuckled
prizefighters dressed in green, and read in the Times about young boys beating
another youth to death during the parade. I have had eggs tossed at me from
rooftops and passing cars on Halloween, seen on the six o'clock news videos of
the base and inhuman abuse of girls and women in central park by the few rotten
apples that are inevitable in any barrel as big as this apple, and have been set
upon and swung at by drunk or drugged New Year's revellers who wanted too much
or too soon or too near or too now. I have raised my voice in objection; I have
raised my fists.
I still enjoy the great traditions that these occasions celebrate, I simply
avoid the celebrations. Rather, on these four days only, I sit at home, lock the
doors and board up the windows, content in my memories of celebrations past, and
comforted by the relative safety that can be derived from taking one step back
from the front of the stage, stepping behind the curtain, and finding a crevice
behind the pipes and fixtures, a cozy perch from which to observe the bedlam
that I am no longer missing.