My alarm rang at 5:30 AM. Approaching coherency, I tried to remember why.
Then it came to me: it was primary day.
The candidate I would be riding the polls for was running for Brooklyn Borough President. He was not my first choice. If I’d been voting with my head, it would have been for Ken Fisher. If I’d been voting with my heart, it would have been Jeanette Gadson, a wonderful woman who could bring one to tears reading a laundry list (a task which, in her role as Deputy Borough President, she’d often been called upon to perform).
But, my work for the day had been determined not by head or heart, but by stomach; I wanted to keep on eating, and my boss was backing Marty Markowitz, a man I‘d ghostwritten for once or twice, and who I had introduced to a couple of Rabbis.
As Hyman Roth once said, “This is the business we have chosen.”
I cast my vote for Alan Hevesi for Mayor, knowing that when the run-off occurred, I could re-evaluate between the two likely finalists. I then voted for Steve Banks for Council and closed my eyes while my bodily organs debated my choice for Beep.
Once on the road, my first task was to determine whether the coverage we’d been promised in Crown Heights and East Flatbush had actually emerged. At the first stop, a poster in two distinct alphabets told me, “A Vote for Ferrer is a Vote for Sharpton”, which, depending upon where you lived in the neighborhood could have been taken as either a good or bad thing.
The other alphabet on the poster was Yiddish. I sounded out the letters; they spelled out “Yankel Rosenbaum.”
I pulled the poster down, not so much out of outrage, but to keep as a souvenir.
Heading down into Canarsie, I got a call from the Campaign Manager. I gave her a full report. She then said, “by the way, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”
The gravity of the situation did not register. Hadn’t a plane once hit the Empire State Building?
“Really“, I responded, “well it‘s primary day, call me back when you have some important news.”
Soon it became apparent that something else was up. Traffic got worse. My brother called, and then my mother. Then my cell phone died. A large and growing cloud of black smoke filled the sky.
Having run out of instructions, I returned to headquaters on Cortelyou Road. Josh, an attorney known equally for both his scholorship and his mercurial nature (often mistaken by the less discerning for insanity) was on the sidewalk reading the Election Law.
He found the Section he’d been looking for, and predicted the Governor would invoke it and call off the election in progress.
He proved correct.
With no prospect of getting home anytime soon, we ended up at Rhoda Jacob’s house. Her home lacking cable, we watched the only channel which worked, and watched as she fed her husband Jerry (alev ha-sholem) lunch. I looked out jealously, feeling the pangs of the hunger my presence that day was supposed to prevent.
I stepped outside and Josh’s wife (as she was then) took a picture of us holding the anti-Ferrer poster in a pose which purposely aped a famous 20 year old shot of Carl Kruger and a cohort (who, because I like him, will remain nameless) mugging for the camera in front of a sign urging voters to support both the Democratic candidate for the State Assembly and the Republican candidate for State Senate (in Kruger's case, old habits die hard).
I then drove off to get lunch. Passing Yeshiva of Flatbush on Avenue J, I got a rap on my car window from Stevie Cohn, a Council candidate in Brooklyn Heights, who was down here to pick up his son. This, I thought, did not bode well for his prospects of victory.
After lunch at “Essex on Coney”, I slowly and torturously worked my way though the street of Brooklyn, purposely using a route consisting of tertiary roads to minimize encounters with jammed traffic. Hours later, I got home and collapsed.
Waking up in my Cobble Hill apartment, I noticed it was still light. I took a breathe and it smelled like death, a disconcerting aroma to breathe, when, as I did, one lives above a funeral home whose sign advertises “Burials, Cremations and Foreign Shipping.”
I walked outside and went on automatic pilot. When I regained consciousness, I was sitting in my Synagogue next to a pretty young woman whose brother sat next to her. The brother was David Yassky, a candidate for Council (against, amongst others, Mr. Cohn) to whom I not been too kind. I think our hands were joined in prayer. The brother and sister told me their father worked in the Trade Center. If he’d not been out on the street palm carding, he’d probably have died.
When I next opened my eyes, I was entering my favorite pub, the Waterfront Alehouse on Atlantic Avenue. Cheers came as I walked in the door; people who hated my guts rushed to hug me. They knew I worked downtown, and they knew that when work ended I’d be at the bar, and I was not. Some one checked my name off the list of the missing.
Sometime around 2:00 AM, I stumbled home dead drunk. At last, things had finally returned to normal.
Of course, they never really did; neither in the world, nor in my own life, but that’s a story for another anniversary. For this one, we’ll stick to the big picture.
The world is still a dangerous place, probably more so than ever.
Carefully coached, she managed to properly enunciate both Ahmadinejad and Saakashvili, both in a manner which indicated, by its emphasis, how proud she was of this accomplishment.
Too bad no one coached her on how to pronounce “Nuclear”.
The game was given away when she was asked about “The Bush Doctrine”.
It was clear that she thought it had something to do with waxing.
Good thing no one asked her about Brazil.