Relay: The Great Unraveling

Manhattan, after the midday downpour that caught me ill prepared and quickly sodden on Saturday, was again humid by midnight, and in Times Square the tourists gaped and the panhandlers pitched and the bridge-and-tunnel roisterers swaggered in roughly equal measure as I made my way back to the hotel from the Port Authority terminal, where M. had boarded a bus for the hours-long journey home. Five years after leaving the big city, it can be a bit disorienting to experience it anew. 

Earlier in the evening, a gentle breeze enveloped us as we walked from a delightful Japanese restaurant on East 11th Street to the Lower East Side to hear the Glazzies, a Sag Harbor band. There, moments recalled memories that, while vivid, seem of a past life, or of someone else’s. While we sat at the tiny bar in the back of the subterranean club as the Glazzies delivered a high-energy set, I remembered a thousand nights hauling guitars, amplifiers, and accessories down the 75 steps and into the taxi, and gazing at the skyline as we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, and dragging all that gear into the club, and playing for about 45 minutes, sometimes to 10 or 30 of the band’s circle of friends, sometimes to them and many others, and sometimes to the bartender and sound engineer, and drinking a few pints, and rarely getting paid, and hoisting it all back into a taxi and crossing the river again, and dragging it all back up the 75 steps and into the apartment. 

Sometimes those 45 minutes would make it all worthwhile, and a long and merry afterglow would follow, and other times it all seemed pointless and sad, like a sweltering Sunday night in a concrete jungle when you haven’t felt the ocean’s cool, rejuvenating embrace in years. 

But most of that — the best of times, when I was much younger and rock ’n’ roll music still meant a lot to me — happened long ago, in the last years before thousands died in Lower Manhattan as I watched from the roof, 15 more steps above those 75 in that sixth-floor walk-up across the river. 

Has vagrancy exploded since I left New York? Or are the homeless simply more visible now, policy having veered from Rudy Giuliani’s authoritarian extreme to a hands-off, tolerant-to-a-fault of Bill de Blasio’s? Everywhere we went, it seemed, people slept, or sat, expressionless, the fateful events that led to their present condition summarized in written form on a section of cardboard, held or propped against folded knees. Except for the handmade signage it was reminiscent of sweltering nights of Junes past in pollution-choked New Delhi. While I haven’t passed through Delhi since 2010, contemporary New York would also seem to have a decided edge on vagrants who speak, and more often rant, to those that they alone see. 

The West Side, at least, is quite a bit more chaotic than I remember. On a hot and sticky Seventh Avenue, ’round about midnight, packs of drunken bros guffawing as they lurched from one watering hole to the next, the bright lights of Times Square creating an alien, neither-day-nor-night condition, my attention was drawn to a small, middle-aged woman leaning closely into a Link kiosk, the city’s 21st-century answer to the payphone that offers, among other things, a 911 emergency call button. 

Miss, what is the nature of your emergency?

“LISTEN TO ME! I WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS! I AM AN AMERICAN CITIZEN! YOU DON’T ALLOW THIS TO CONTINUE! YOU TICKET THE RESTAURANT! THEY CANNOT HAVE CRIMINAL PEOPLE STANDING THERE SAYING YOU CAN’T USE THE BATHROOM, OKAY? HE HAS TO GET OUT OF THE WAY! FORTY-SECOND STREET AND SEVENTH AVENUE, McDONALD’S, A TALL MAN, ABOUT 6-FOOT-5, VERY SKINNY, THREATENING ME . . . NO, YOU’RE NOT GETTING MY LAST NAME! I’LL DISCONNNECT THIS CALL!” 

Miss, are you there? 

The woman stared into the kiosk, and then shuffled down Seventh Avenue and into the night. 

All of which furthered a gnawing suspicion that civilization is really, finally cracking up. The Great Unraveling is underway — not the economist Paul Krugman’s dissection of corporate and political malfeasance, though these play a part, more Robert D. Kaplan’s 1994 thesis in The Atlantic on “how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet,” as its subhead posits. 

Amid the noise and the hordes and the endless distractions the air is heavy with fear. Across the land, death by despair is skyrocketing. The embattled president, long accustomed to rule by threat and humiliation, lashes out at his fast-multiplying accusers. The European alliance frays, an ex-K.G.B. spook with expansionist tendencies sows mistrust of the pillars of Western order, and nihilist losers foreign and domestic indiscriminately maim and kill.

Nowhere is safe anymore: not the concert hall in Paris or Manchester, nor Westminster nor London Bridge, nor a Christmas market in Berlin, nor the once-friendly skies, nor the workplace, nor the cinema, nor the suburban baseball field, nor, maybe, the McDonald’s on West 42nd Street. 

I still like being back on the South Fork, and prefer surreptitious forays to living in the city, but increasingly want to hide out, as far from Times Square as one can get, for a long while. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.