Ships Etc

I spent the last couple of weeks writing about maritime security. I rang around and talked to truckers Joe and Adam and Lou and to the secretaries who work in shipping yards and customs brokers with their Long and Staten and nasal Island accents: “We are an aennti-tearrorghrist oarganizaiiition,” said one Linda. Then I rang the coastguard press office. Press offices are normally reserved for the species of people who say no to things. Like mules and bouncers, their neutral answer, their starting position is one of great unhelpfulness. But not at the New York coastguard press office.

“Himyname’s Sam-Knight-I’mcallingfromColumbiauniversitywriting-about-oh-you-know-changes-to-maritime-security-and-I-waswellwondering-if-you-I-don’tknow-you-see…”
“That’s great!”
“Uh-huh,” (?) “Right, well I was wondering if I could talk to someone, who would be a good person..?”
“You want one of our MSST’s.”
“A… ?”
“MSST’s, they’re sort of like our SWAT teams, they’re great, we’ll get you out on a boat, try some vessel boarding, drug interdiction…”

And that was that. Last Friday I took the ferry to Staten Island and Fort Wadsworth to meet Lieutenant Chris Boes of Shrike Squadron, MSST 91106, New York’s newest baddest coast guards. Shrikes are, in Boes’s military-capability language, “predatory birds but without the necessary equipment for their mission.” Instead they throw their prey, their mice and rats into prickly bushes or barbed wire fences and pluck from them at their leisure. Boes told me they chose the shrike name because the Commander’s dad’s unit had been called the Shrikes in the Navy in the Second World War. “Initially, when we were thinking of something really scary, we wanted to be called like the Vipers and we had this logo with all these snakes but the Admiral said it was too, it was too…” Intense? “Right, too intense. So we said, you ever heard of a shrike, Admiral? He said no, so we were like, that’s all sir…” And the Shrikes they are.

Going to Staten Island is a bit like going to New Jersey, it’s like pushing through the cardboard scenery of Manhattan and finding yourself in America. On Staten Island there are old fences and wooden houses and clapped out cafes and strip malls and larger cars and people on the bus waiting for payday. It’s not that Staten Island is poor – it’s not, it’s got some of the flashiest bits of New York. It just looks real. More generic. The poverty I’ve seen in New York, in Brooklyn, in the Bronx, has a strong sense of place. Those huge projects in the Bronx only occur in a few places in the US, and with the old train tracks above you with the 2 or the 3 trains creaking squeaking over the Yankees Barbershop, the grime and potholes are well and truly grounded. Same along the Brooklyn waterfront or Sunset Park where the fat Mexican children run with a postcard backing of Manhattan towers and the planes coming into JFK.

Staten Island is greener and it felt more replicable as the bus pulled up Bay Street from the ferry terminal. Lieutenant Boes was 19 feet tall, big like a truck, with a square head, formal blond hair and delicate spectacles. He had the shiny boots on that tell you that civil law and handcuffs belong elsewhere, we’re in shotgun and destroy country. We went into his office which had potplants on the windowsill, Black Hawk Down in the bookshelf and cutesy Army advice posters from decades ago, cheerily asking you to make sure your gun is empty otherwise you’ll lose a stripe! Maybe your eye! Boes sat at his desk and answered the questions like a pro. He described the mission of his team of 73 and their six boats with MS240 machine guns mounted fore and aft and standard M16 firearms and shotguns. He talked about vertical insertion – jumping out of helicopters – diving capabilities – 20 scuba tanks arrived in the mail that morning – and sniper training with the army. He was loving it. “We’re not embarrassed to say it, ‘We are the best of the best.’” At one point his printer did not work as he tried to print out something for me. Boes called in one of his men, the conversation went something like, The printer is not functioning properly, Sergeant. Right sir, I’ll see to that. Very good. (The Sergeant went out and called through the door, “Is that working now, Sir.” Nothing happened. “Negative.”)

Boes was careful and surefooted when we talked about how the coastguard might not be catching as many drug dealers these days (they are spending a third of the time and resources they did in 1999 on drug smuggling) and about the size of its tasks, which include patrolling Guantanamo Bay, securing ports in Iraq and patrolling America’s 95,000 miles of coastline with fewer people than the NYPD. But he let his worldview out when we talked about those ole terroristicals, in his words, the “Abdullah-bad-guys” that he’s out to catch. Asked about how you evaluate risk, he did some analysing. The quotes aren’t word for word, but they’re close.

“You ask yourself whether your house or my house or my brother’s house is going to get attacked and you say the likelihood is pretty poor. So in the grand scheme of things, when we get a boat of timber coming from Canada into the port, we’re not that worried, but when you see you’ve got a container load of North Korean radicals loaded in a port in Kazakhs-bad-stan or some other nasty place, you know that the likelihood of risk is higher.”

“My job is to make it as difficult as possible to attack this port, to make them look elsewhere. I know that Middle Eastern fanatics are not like Kamikazes in World War Two. The Kamikazes just had to take off from their aircraft carriers and they were set ok. The suicide bomber needs to have an 85% or higher rate of mission accomplishment, of taking somebody else’s life with him, to get into Shangri-La or whatever the hell place it is they go. My job is to make it as hard as possible to take that life.”

Whatever that means.

I waited in the wind for the bus back with three men who knew each other well and then made for the Brooklyn Brewery, where we had a little tour and tasted some fine drinks. We played pool in the bar they had downstairs, all picturesque Williamsburg right-on families, art on the walls, organic beer on the tables. As the owner said, “The more educated you are, the more likely you are to drink beer brewed in a micro-brewery.” Which called to mind geniuses in cupboards with their PHDs and Nobel prizes, sipping from tiny-tiny bottles.

The Players

On Friday I made a call and there was word of a German Film Festival launch. What else but? It was a MOMA thing and there were canvas bags full of pencils and pins and red t-shirts saying “Made In Germany.” Unfortunately I gave mine to a girl with glasses called Esther, she was German after all. The launch was at the Player’s Club. And this, my friends, was right on.

The Player’s Club might sound like a bling-go-go-bling-fire-up-your-golden-chains-on-me-sweetheart, but it’s not. It’s more Mark Twain and a snooker cue. Large stately dim dining room with mock-stained-glass windows and 19th century Shakespearean actors knowingly portraited in Richard III outfits. The club was founded in 1888 by this young Edwin Booth, a big tragic actor whose more tragic brother was John Wilkes Booth. John killed Abraham Lincoln in the Ford Theatre in 1865. Edwin loved to play Hamlet. He's in the middle, assassin on the left. The walls are pasted with play bills and woodcuts, the stairways are lined with cream walls and swishing paintings of Katherine Hepburn. There is a library with tables of magazines and oh-so many books and skulls. A photograph of Lawrence Etc with a thank you letter typed on heavy rippled paper: “Thank you so much for the dinner on my last visit, such a pleasure to see my former wife, love, as ever, Larry.” On a locked door a brass sign smudged dark with old smoke and perfume saying that Equity was founded in this room here, by dead secret, during the cold months of 1913.

In the three rooms of reception we swoozled around, drinking gin and talking tall. There was a buffet and a fact-checker from Harpers Magazine and his sour-faced friend. There were German girls with angular faces and their smaller minder from some consulate or other who had no hair at all but a big-pair of glasses. There were Dutch film makers out on the balcony, sucking on the cold air and a cigarette. Amsterdam Frank used to work with John Cage, the big composer, and because my mind / back was still full of the tick – see below – we talked of ticks and the time his cameraman got one in his wrist and they went to a restaurant and burned it out with a cigarette. Comrades, give me the Texan with the corkscrew any and every time. But the Players was good and the pasta was hot and there was whisky and coffee and we never deserved a drop less.

Onto the Beauty Bar, a place where the seats are barber chairs and there are those blow-dry machines if you want to duck out the red light and pushing crowd for a moment. It was a mulletted place of off-jeans and one-off trainers. Girls in 80s jump-suits, guys pushing along all limits of nerdity in their glasses, swooped-over hair and tight-to-me shirts and ties. This was such a knowing-knowing crowd they all looked the same.

The Tick

Matt heated up the corkscrew in the gas flame and then stuck it into my back. He was going to get the tick out that way. He’d done it a few times in Texas, “It’s sort of like a rite of passage there,” he said. I held on to the heating pipe that runs up the wall of the kitchen.

The tick must have crawled under my t-shirt the day before when I was in a forest on the Teatown Lake Reserve in Westchester county. I was carrying things around on a film shoot for a documentary about Mary Pickford.

We were making a reconstruction of the moment when Mary met and fell in love with Douglas Fairbanks in 1917, while they were traveling and making appearances to encourage people to buy war bonds. The two silent film stars went walking on an autumn afternoon. We were focusing on the moment that Douglas picked up Mary and carried her across a rushing stream in his strong Hollywood arms.

I think the tick got under my clothes at lunchtime. I was quietly sitting on a stone wall next to the stream across which Douglas had lifted and re-lifted Mary many times during the morning. I was trying to draw some of the leaves on the ground.

The stream ran down from a Teatown lake which sat under a slanting sun, pasted with summer’s lilies like old ladies’ faces. The water on the lake was so still it looked heavy – you could see the shallow banks, the mulchy slide into the greenness and brownness. Tiny creatures with smaller brains yippered and skitted on the surface, making triangles and leaping half-miles in their minds.

On the far side of the lake, powerlines hung from their grey towers, quite the most purposeful-looking things in the forest because everything else was drunk: drunk on autumn and the end of it all. The good honest strong green leaves of summer had turned wasted yellow and pink, decadent and drifting. And now they wafted in clusters in the light gusts of wind, dancing for the last time before hitting the floor and fading to brown.

After lunch (I assume with the tick on board, crawling like a marine across my back), I had to go up to the top of the stream and control its flow with a wooden plank that served as a sluice. Douglas was having trouble when the water got too high and I lay on one side of the sluice with Gene, the voluble park manager, on the other, slowing the flow of the water to a picturesque little rush.

I never felt the eight legs marching across my innocent skin nor sensed the moment of decision which inspired the tick to chose a little mole on the lower right half of my back and start digging: craftily out of sight and away from the more obvious and eagerly inspected horror patches.

At the lake, only an occasional goose called out – the big birds from the forest had migrated and the ospreys and herons from further north were only here for a couple of weeks to feed before they too carried on south. Only the turkeys would stay on, barging around with the smaller birds like the bluejays.

The lands of the Teatown Lake Reserve used to be owned by the Gerard Swope, the President of General Electric. He started buying patches of forest around Teatown in 1922, two years after Mary married Douglas, for his wife to ride her horses on. Swope’s wife, Mary Dayton Hill, rode on them for forty years. Mary and Douglas were married for ten.

Ticks can live for three years. They live all across the world. There are about 850 species in two families, the soft and hard ticks. Their lives are strung out in three stages, from the larva to the nymph to the adult. Their lives have a pleasing sense of progress, an onward momentum because they transform from meal to meal. They emerge from the egg, tiny and naïve, and seek a meal of blood. Infused and charged with power, they become nymphs and eat once again. As worldly adults, ticks might wait for months, comatose – in “diapause” – wafting on the top of a long stalk of grass, looking out for their last supper. Three square meals, a laying of eggs for the females, and then death.

I like to think the one that got me was on its last meal. Not out of any sense of pity but because of the solemnity with which it must have taken the decision to attack me. In each meal, soft ticks consume blood between 5 and 10 times their bodyweight. Hard ticks can expand to take on 400 to 600 times their bodyweight. A tick’s last meal is quite a thing.

So imagine the destiny and abandon that filled its tickbrain as it buried its body in mine. Head first, mouth whirring, jaws called palps moving from side to side, steadying frames called chelicerae like some Greek princess and the plunging rod, the jagged hypostome, wrecking its way in and sucking out my blood. Behind the head came the pummeling legs, clawing for grip and the wildly growing body, filling with blood, bursting like a planet.

I found the tick in me in the shower the next morning. A night’s gobbling had only taken it so far, its last legs stuck out feebly with its sack of stolen blood. I dabbed at it with tweezers but the mirror made the angle confusing. I woke Matt and he reached without ceremony for the corkscrew and turned on the stove. I made some toast.

And then I took hold of the pipe. As my room-mate nudged and frazzled around in my back I caught a glimpse of my ghastly reflection in the mirror, mouth hurled open like a gargoyle. My only consolation in those reddening moments of pain was how much worse it was for the tick. Meeting the burning corkscrew must have been quite a surprise.

Halloween

There were pumpkins in the supermarket for weeks before Halloween – so long, in fact, that some on the display had tumbled over: vicious smiles turned to scowls near the potatoes in the vegetable aisle. On the big day I hadn’t thought anything at all until I got out of the subway and walked through the gates of Columbia under a mild sky to see Winnie the Pooh walking towards me, bulbous with a face painted the colour of peanut butter. It was ten to nine in the morning.

So it was a day of little sightings – bank tellers dressed like Dracula for the hell of it, until I got home and my street was a wandering crowd of wild people. There had been talk of a parade but I didn’t know it was going to go right past my flat but there were the barriers, the police on horses, the captain with his megaphone, children looking anxious and a man impaled through a big suitcase. The happy cheeky sex shops were overshadowed by the costumes that came by – lots of generic Goths and president masks and trogs and goblins and Leahs and Hans Solos, a big man in a sumo costume with his baby dressed up as a carrot.

Night fell and we got falafels, fairly gawping at the crowds, and then we climbed up two ladders, across the roof and a big-piped heating system and then another fire-escape running very close to people’s bathrooms and kitchens until we were on the slightly sloping roof and puddles of the next door building’s roof. Six stories up and the view ran round and long under the night sky and the helicopters that stammered and chopped around with their spotlights. Sixth avenue – a boring wide road that runs up Manhattan – ran bright and empty from the towers of the financial district and up to midtown. The Empire State was dressed in white and looked on square, wide and strong. The sides of the avenue were packed with the pinheads of people. They said a million people watched the Halloween parade and from above you could see their little faces and hats and dark coats.

At the front of the procession was a man dancing in stilts, forever tempted by the empty road and he gawked around dancing a little too quickly for the rest of his people – and his people came: on rollerskates and skateboards, in Minis and on slow-moving floats decked out like Las Vegas and the Little Shop of Horrors. They came with spider puppets the size of parachutes, their handlers wriggling the legs in the faces of the crowd, they came with a huge models of dogs, dragons, bats, squids and fruit. Oranges and pumpkins came wobbling along and a man dressed as the moon with his planet-head lit up like a lightbulb. I liked the couples who came in matching costumes: two people dressed all in yellow riding sensible bikes. I liked a bunch of black guys on roller blades with Chinese hats on, racing through the procession and pulling wild stunts and falling over. I liked the children’s marching band with red hats and suits and swizzling sticks. I liked the tap dancers who were getting tired and a group of very prim orchestra types who had found themselves stuck behind a raucous beat-driven eco-crowd who wouldn’t let them get any good American songs out at all. Occasionally the parade would stop and cops would allow people to cross sixth avenue at fourth street. One parader, a big Elvis, got caught up in this process and a cop was trying to stop him continuing. As they argued, the parade pulled away and Elvis was left shaking the white arms of his luscious white outfit, stamping his pushing shoes. Finally the policemen let him go and suddenly the parade was gone, the concrete of Sixth avenue lay open and empty, bound by a thousand excited people. And Elvis ran down. Waving like a president.

(By the way, I went looking for a good photo of the parade and there were a few things, but nothing like this, quite the most scary thing I could find -- are those graves up on that hill?).

Later I went to a party in a crushed bar with more outfits and ended up filling up taxis and going to new places and shaking around and meeting new darling people and god wasn’t it so… we handed out roses and hugged and squinted at street signs on the way home.