View Larger Map
I used to work for an insurance company across from this park, in the building with the stupid cock-eyed red square modern art installation out front, circa 2006.
I didn't actually do anything on my job, because I was a temp paid to sit and answer a phone one hour a day, in thrift store dresses and oddly fitting suits, which no one actually told me not to wear.
My only responsibility on this job was to cover the lunch break of an opera-singer-turned-receptionist, and occasionally label folders while surfing the Internet, and/or writing my first heartfelt journalistic theses.
But I still had to take a lunch break, mainly so they could pay me for one hour less of not working.
Mostly I was broke. On the good days I could buy tempura from the sushi place down the block, which didn't actually sell sushi, and mingle among the stock brokers and executive assistants who all had cooler clothes than me.
On the bad days I just wandered and wished I had enough money for an eggplant curry at the hole-in-the-wall Indian place on Fulton street that still managed to get reviewed in the New York Times.
So I would sit in this park and try to read, but mostly just watch people eat and talk on cell phones, and sometimes catch a few elderly men playing chess, because they had chess boards painted onto some of the ubiquitous granite decor.
And I would rue the world, the hard benches, the tall buildings, the muddy hole whose tragedy wasn't mine, and which I could not really understand, and contemplate my place wearing checkered sun dresses among the suits and blouses and fashionable shoes.
Alienated is not quite the word -- befuddled, distracted, trying to see only parts of this overwhelming whole made up of ill-fitting cubes crammed together -- bored, resistant, yearning. All that stuff.
I think most people must have thought me borderline autistic, or a homeless person passing for employed, which, I sort of was.
I was still fairly new to the New York grungy activist scene then, having only recently been inducted into the circle of desperate defiants, motivated by either principle or by a realization that there was really nothing beyond grey offices and cubicles -- and the terrible discovery that one actually has to make money.
(I knew this, but didn't realize how lame it would be).
At that time, whatever scene I had found had retracted into a skeletal collective of the committed and cynical, grasping for significance in a very small ghetto of self-induced poverty.
Some, most, of the younger ones would eventually wander out to actual employment (me), while others sank deeper into the mire of dysfunction, viciously guarding the only territory they had.
In those days the hub of my activist world was in a dirty office on 43rd street, just above Grand Central.
There I worked, and dithered, sometimes all night, typing at the shittiest computers that one could still turn on, reading page after page of unevenly printed proofs of a newspaper that didn't really need a deadline.
Often we were too poor to buy ink, or if we did, it was, like, paid for by unwitting volunteers who just came into help, and our volunteer proofreading created this dialectic of mistakes and editing that would have been comical (okay it was) except we were tired and working on other people's volunteer time.
It was dim and often uncomfortable, and on the second floor of a building owned by a cult, whose wayward members would occasionally brush past us before returning to the safety of delusion and domination.
I'm not really sure why I didn't see the connection, or mostly ignored it. I think I liked the chandeliers and the large spiral staircases of the building, which had been an old hotel, and had a faint Shining quality about. I grew fond of the creaking elevator, and I heard tell that there was a reflection maze somewhere in the building's nether regions.
I knew my fellow activist colleagues (who I was really only visiting -- I think the word is tourist in the vernacular) were without perspective, and with nothing else to do but throw rocks either aimlessly or at causes that needed more than shouts in the wind.
But throwing rocks is often fun.
For me sitting on that hard bench, that world was still inviting. It seemed true, partly because of its hardscrabble veneer.
I welcomed it as a respite from every other glossy thing. It was a way out, because otherwise I would spend an indeterminate amount of my life sitting at a desk labeling folders, answering phones and making sure I exactly pronounced the four-syllable gauntlet of a name belonging to the she-devil office manager, who eventually retired to a gated community in Florida, to make sure she only mingled with the "right people."
Even in my tempered 30-year-old wisdom, I am still bugged by that.
The protests I went to at that time were either dull, ill-conceived, momentarily thriving before hitting the end of the barricade, or a premeditated circus directed mainly at the selves we wanted to be, screaming cries that meant something, somewhere, but not to Manhattanites and the commuter hoard.
And now, in the park where at 25 I prostrated myself to better things, there are people sleeping in tents, dirty and pissed off and no doubt psychically harassing the business men who quickly walk by.
It may be small. It may be in its zenith of organizational serenity before interest flatlines and the earnest but unprepared file out only to leave the irrationally committed clinging to tents. Mainly because they have nowhere else to go.
But I don't care.
Dirty anarchists and the unemployed white collars, living momentarily in tents, have, apparently, made enough of a dent to confuse the usually dismissive "mainstream" media -- a fairly hilarious term given the all-seeing eye of twitter -- to be more effective than anything I can say I did in my years of organizing/fighting/believing/writing.
More than anything when I marched with big signs and shyly shouted slogans, and tried in an exacting way to speak truth to power, I was doing it for myself. And also because horror and the Bush administration was happening around me, and more importantly to the rest of the world, and what else does one do?
All in all, it was not a bad decision.
But sleeping in a park next to the Nasdaq and a few blocks from Wall Street doesn't seem to be a bad decision either.
I know both sides of that world of aimless activism and mindless business, at least cursorily, and even from 10,000 miles away both still feel like home.
Once, on a lunch break in my park, I read lower Manhattan's tarot cards, or rather, the cards of the bench on which I was sitting , for a reason I can't explain -- well, mainly boredom. And all I saw was death, collapse and the world of inorganic construction, male drive to make towers into the sky, and what happens when they fall.
But I am rooting for the people who are, at least metaphorically, trying to fill that collapsed hole, and replace the edifices that have not yet been torn down, with their honest, inconvenient pleas for something better.
It is more than I could do. And enough to make, at least a part of me, wish I were still doing it.
