bazima.com: blog

If it seems as though, when I do write, that all I ever write about anymore is my boyfriend and my boyfriend's scooter, then I’ll tell you what happened to me during the Great Blackout of 2003. It has to do with my boyfriend and my boyfriend's scooter. This will be good practice for future special sharing time with grandkids who are bored to tears and acting fresh because of the old-person-smell. Gather ‘round.

I have to just say that when Rocket first got the scooter, I was skeptical. He bought it off of a groomed-to-perfection, wife-beater-wearing, stud-about-downtown who gets paid to take models to all the hottest hot spots and haute parties in New York. Nice work if you can get it. The Professional Model Fucker had a sparkly new Vespa and was about to throw his old Italjet Velocifero in the East River. It was held together with packing tape. It looked like it wouldn't run if the Flinstones tried to make a go of it with their bare feet. But Rocket test rode it and the American Gigolo was willing to sell it to him for 100 bucks. So, what was not to like?

Riding around on the scooter through the city made me nervous most of the time. It rattled and gurgled and choked up beneath me. I’d sit on the back trying to prepare myself for a spontaneous combustion at any moment. I much preferred riding it over winding hilly roads in places like Shelter Island and the scooter seemed to prefer that too. It didn’t have to work so hard to keep it together.

Then the blackout happened.

It was a Thursday and I'd been in an all-day meeting somewhere in Queens. Might have been Long Island City, but I think it was Astoria. I don't know from Queens, you see. I never go there. That borough of New York is to me what Brooklyn is to Choire. Bizarro World’s urban nowhereness so close yet so very far, far, far from home. Farther than I care to go.

At 4:30 when the meeting adjourned I was offered a ride in the direction of a subway station. I was happy to have an early end to what felt like a long day so I could get the hell out of wherever it was that I was and head back home to Brooklyn. Or maybe I'd go downtown to meet Rocket. In the car I called him from my cell just as we waited to make a left hand turn. "I think this stoplight is out," someone said from the back seat. And then Rocket answered my call.

"Hey, ...uh...hm. Right when I picked up the phone all of my power went out," he said. Then we got disconnected.

I got dropped off at a busy intersection that ran right underneath a subway platform – the N/W line -- and I reached Rocket on the phone again as I walked up the station steps. When I got to the gate outside the subway turnstiles it was completely dark, only shadows of people milling around by the abandoned attendant booth or standing confused on the other side of the turnstiles.

"There are no trains running," I told Rocket. "It's completely dark."

"Where are you?" he asked.

"I just got out of my meeting. I'm still in Queens."

"All the power's out. Let me go outside and try and find out what's going on," he said. "I'll call you right back."

When fifteen minutes had passed and I hadn't heard back I called again and first got a busy signal, which was weird. I redialed and heard a familiar recorded voice saying that my call could not be completed at this time. It was the same recording I’d heard over and over again whenever I tried to reach someone by phone on, and often after, September 11th. I stood outside at the top of the subway station and looked out over the intersection. From each of the four corners drivers were trying to navigate their way across without any stoplights. There were people everywhere, on the sidewalks and on the streets, and every third person had a cell phone to their ear trying to get a connection. It would be an hour before I was able to reach Rocket again.

So there I was, no idea where I was or how to get where I should have been. Like, someplace familiar at least. I walked down the station steps and stood on the sidewalk with everyone else hitting redial in vain. I saw no one I knew who'd been at the meeting with me. I hoped that maybe the car full of co-workers who'd dropped me off would come back around. Had I been forced to walk out of there, I wouldn't even have known what direction to head in. There were no buses going into Manhattan and the drivers of the few Queens buses that passed through sporadically were decidedly unhelpful when asked what stops they were making. I had no money on me and knew that the ATMs would be down. The dark insides of the Citibank across the way taunted me. But even if I'd been able to get money, who knows how high the meter on a taxi would run and how long it would take to get anywhere. All the cabs driving by had their off-duty signs anyway. They didn't even want passengers.

Two older men, one black, one white, greeted each other on the corner and gave one another advice about buying ice while they still could and trying to stay calm and cool. The white man was telling his friend how he heard a woman stuck in the elevator of his building screaming for help. Around the corner a handful of people gathered around a sand-colored Cadillac whose shirtless and overfed owner sat in the driver's seat with all the doors open and radio 1010 turned up. I heard "...all five boroughs of New York..." The power was out all over the world. A woman standing next to me in a white linen dress clutching shopping bags and a black leather purse loudly sucked in her breath. "Oh Lord. What's next?" she said. "Look, I have goose bumps."

“Stay calm and keep cool. Drink plenty of water,” Mayor Bloomberg voiced upper-crustily from the whiney depths of his nasal cavity. I just stood.

Finally I got through to Rocket, or he got through to me, I don’t remember which, and the first thing out of his mouth was tell me exactly where you are I’m coming to get you on the scooter. I looked up at the street sign I was standing on, nearly ecstatic just to hear his voice. I told him that I was on 31st and Broadway but that I had no idea where it was in relation to anything else. He found me on his street map and told me that he was heading out but that if I found another way home to just take it because he didn’t know how long he would be coming from Manhattan or if he would even be able to make it. Then my cell phone battery died.

I sat for three hours at that intersection on a ledge outside an Italian restaurant. My back hurt from sitting for so long and hurt just as much standing. I didn’t care to crack open a book to kill time or to sit inside the restaurant behind me. I didn’t want to move for fear I’d miss something, some important piece of information, though nothing was happening. I watched working women in 2-inch heels sweating and limping across Broadway coming from their offices, walking to who knows where for God knows how long. I saw tough guys in sweaty t-shirts fighting for a place in the long line at the one pay phone on the main strip. Very pregnant ladies came out of their nearby apartments in house dresses and flip-flops, leisurely pushing strollers and sucking on spumoni. I saw several near collisions at the intersection. "Fucking cocksucker!" one guy yelled out his window to another driver he almost rammed into. "I hope you get AIDS!" A white SUV kept driving by blaring Nelly’s hit of last summer: “it’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes!”, and all the while, beefcakes on yellow Ducatis kept weaving through the confusion with smugness and ease.

I felt like an idiot in a way. I wasn't stuck in an elevator or in the depths of the subway tunnels. I had people who knew where I was. So, on the one hand, things could have been much worse. But even being on the god forsaken Upper East Side when the power went out would have been better than this. I couldn’t help thinking what if I didn’t have a Rocket? How would I have gotten myself out of this? What about all the people who didn’t have Rockets? I tried to imagine myself pleading with random passersby to take pity on me, approaching some strange cars and trying to convince the occupants to drive me somewhere out of there. Wherever I looked I didn't see anyone else doing that. No one was offering rides and no one was taking them. No one around me seemed to live too far from where they already were. Or maybe they were just all thinking the same things as me.

At 7:30 I started thinking that this might be close to the time when I start to panic. It would be getting dark soon. I didn’t know if Rocket was going to make it. Just then a caught a glimpse of the top of a white helmet on the other side of the street. I stood up quickly and saw Rocket slowly heading in my direction, looking for me. I waved and ran to the corner and he spotted me and smiled and laughed and pulled up in front of me and I grabbed him and he was totally my tired, sweaty, scooter-navigating hero.

He said he'd been standing by the Velocifero on one of the four corners for the last fifteen minutes and couldn't see me. He was thinking that maybe I’d gotten a ride out somehow. But when he thought he heard me calling his name he stayed put for a couple more minutes and that’s when I saw him. Only I wasn't the one calling "Rocket". Thank God for those voices in his head.

As I donned my helmet and strapped my courier bag tighter around me, Rocket noticed a storefront on 31st Street. He pointed it out to me. It was a travel agency with a sign bearing my name. I’d been sitting stuck just a few doors down from Blaise Travel.

It was a harrowing haul out of Queens on the scooter, weaving through heavy traffic and hordes of pedestrians walking in the streets trying to get home, not quite sure of where we were going because Rocket wasn't entirely sure of how he'd found me in the first place. My back was broke and I felt like I had bricks on my knees. It was worse for him who’d made the trip twice by the end of it all, the second time in complete darkness. But he got all three of us home safely, darkly, tiredly.

Once at home back in Brooklyn, my street was pitch black save for one bright spot light powered by its own generator, affixed to one of the “Law and Order” trailers parked on Prospect Park West. A crew was shooting a scene for the TV show when all the power went out. The steps of the brownstone across from mine was decorated with tea lights and I could make out silhouettes of neighbors sitting on the stoop talking in quiet hushes. For once, we could see all the stars out above us. Rocket went down the block for a beer and I took advantage of the calm of candlelights in my little apartment. I stretched out on the bed with my cat Moby and fell asleep to the sounds of silence.

The next day, a Friday, was like a snow day in summer. Power in my neck of the woods had come back on early that morning, but the subways were still out as was much of Manhattan. So Rocket and I quickly left town and headed for the beaches of Massachusetts and we gave the scooter the weekend off.

Monday, sitting in my office feeling cranky and stressed and generally Mondayish, when everything was more or less back to normal in New York, I was actually wishing someone would turn out all the lights again.

Oh. And so, of course, though I don’t want to always ride the scooter, I do have an affection for the thing because it got Rocket to my rescue and both of us back home again. For the condition it appears to be in, it went way above and beyond the call of duty. Which is pretty hot. It's one tough crappy little $100 moto-vehicle. It zips me to and from work often and it scoots the Rocket wherever he needs to go. Not only that, but as it turns out, this little scooter is actually worth a lot more than Rocket paid for it. I don’t remember how much, but I know it’s a lot. Since I have inherently expensive taste that knowledge helps foster a more loving relationship between me and the ol' Velocifero. Brand new shiny Vespa? Who needs it?