The debate about the teeth

And now, a little politics. This evening Ron Suskind came in to talk about his book, Paul O’Neill and Bush. I don’t know if the book is big in England, but it’s the warts and all recollections of O’Neill, Bush’s treasury secretary who was fired in late 2002. It gave us the big quote, that Bush in meetings is “a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

Suskind came into class pretty much on time. Dressed in a blue suit, stripey shirt and blue tie. He was small, tightly packed and robust, and he was full of indignation. He sat in one of those university chairs (like these here), plastic as anything with the handy elbow table for taking notes. Suskind boxed himself into the chair and leaned hard against the foldable table: when he was vigorously making some point or another he would lean right forward, chest against the table, and tip the whole chair-table combine down on its front legs, using the table to keep him in place. Sometimes he would tap and whack the table. Thinking back, it was a great piece of furniture for him, and he used it.

Suskind used to work at the Wall Street Journal and wrote a huge book called "A Hope in the Unseen" before he became the terror of the Administration. Then he wrote an article about Karen Hughes, Bush’s former svengaless, for Esquire. Bush called her “High Prophet.” I’m not going to say much more, just give you some Suskind. He was a performer. At first, I thought this was pantomime, he was hamming, but after a while, the rhythms worked their way, and his voice rose and fell and he told us open-mouth stories of how he put the book together and made his moves. The book is based on 19,000 documents that passed through O’Neill’s hands during his two years at the White House, and the transcripts of high level Bush meetings, which were given to Suskind by a cabinet minister, a true deep throat. Suskind is getting sued all over the shop by the government, but he keeps releasing documents on his website.

The debate about the teeth is how Suskind describes the Bush White House’s attempts to control news and the media. They’re powerful, they don’t allow leaks, message message message is relentless – if you break the rules you get fired. But they are cocky too. They’re action men. “Perception lags reality,” according to Ari Fleischer, Bush’s former spin man. Which is scary. The debate about the teeth is that when you make the Bushmen over-reach in your direction, if you make them snarl and show themselves to be huge, then you see how awful they are. You see their fangs.

“We’re up against a pig science,” he said, “a pseudo science of media management. And they’re winning…. No one’s getting anything, they think, you fourth estate people, you’re a special interest, you’re like the prescription drug people…”

One Bush aide met Suskind after another damaging article in Esquire and started a sentence referring to him and his type as “you in the reality based community…”

Suskind still gets calls from big fish in the administration, sizing him up, seeing if they can flip him, or get the documents back after O’Neill gave them to him. He also takes calls from other whistleblowers and angry Bushels. “The phone is ringing off the hook,” he said, “and it’s Republicans calling. They’ve read the book. They read it under the covers with a flashlight, it’s like porn for these guys… and they can no longer stay in the shadow of denial, when they read this, they need to talk to someone, and they call…”

O’Neill’s big thing is the lack of process in the White House. He would meet with Bush and Bush wouldn’t say anything, just let him talk for an hour and leave it at that. There was no fact-based apparatus. Suskind said O’Neill was trying to run a treasury department and there wasn’t even a wall to knock his head against…

“The world was upside down and he was scared. And then 9/11 happens and he runs into ideologues in the hallways and he gets really scared. The tax cuts had a mystical quality about them… he would ask ‘How do we know this is going to work? Do you want some numbers on that?’ And they’d say, ‘No, we’re good,’”

And now Suskind is up against the Feds. They tried to get him on the espionage act, saying that documents he used should have been classified, even though they weren’t. Suskind thinks his phones might be tapped, he just doesn’t know. And all the time the book is in the shops, and it’s selling. Even I’m going to get it.

“They want to kill me and they want to kill Paul,” said Suskind, at the end, “They want to kill public dialogue, it’s the American ideal, informed consent and they want the opposite, they want uninformed consent.”

And with that, it was time to finish. The Suskind show was over and people got up, a little elated. And as the class mingled he called out on more thing.

“Fight well. Bring back bodies.”

I'm writing about some private investigators today. Just dive in at will.

Anarchist Soccer

I saw the ad a while ago on craigslist – America’s all purpose on line listing / loot service, and the ad said “Anarchist Soccer.” I’d been looking for a game and haven’t really penetrated the world of Columbia sport so I thought it sounded just right: football with a little twang, and it was downtown as well.

I said goodbye to Coco at the subway station and bought some trainers with extra padded heels that tip you forward and impel you to start running – just go!

The last email I had was from someone called Oksana and it told me to meet the anarchist footballers at 1pm at 156 Rivington street outside a place called ABC No Rio. The sun was glaring today. New York was overexposed when I walked east from the village and towards Rivington.

There were markets and bargains and the lower east side was full of brunches and various languages. The tenements in this part of town are extraordinary, pillars and curlicues and hobgoblins and Oxford colleges and wrought iron this and that and clouded dusted up oval windows that look like they came out on the wrong side of a revolution. The area has got an edge of arty ingenuity, of leftist colonies, of dirty hair, bicycles and inclusive dieting. As I walked the last couple of blocks towards number 156 there was a disabled man in a motorized wheelchair just speeding top-nip the wrong way down the middle of the street. When the lights changed to allow me to cross in front of him, he didn’t look like he was stopping so I let him whirr past, as he came close I saw he had a black-backed handheld mirror chained to one of his armrests. He sped on.

156 had no number. But 158 had. So I guessed 156 was the one with the iron gate bestudded with cogs and bicycle chains and spraypaint and the twisted portrait of a long limbed baby by the steps. People were coming and going with some authority but I hung back and noticed a woman leaning against the steel shutters of the next door shop. She was called Shawna, with 30’s brown hair mixed with grey. She was wearing jeans and walking boots and was here for the soccer. We were the first and we made conversation.

Oksana turned up about fifteen minutes later. Now with respect and football being what it normally is in England, I had expected Oksana to be a guy, and, to have everything on the table, I thought he would be a black guy with a football and probably some good tricks.

Oksana was about 21, a girl, plump in a nice way, with a meek manner, but nonetheless dressed all in black – jeans with a few chains on them, t-shirt and hoody. She was lightly pierced, nothing freaky, though one of her ears had a large ring right through the fleshiest, palmlike flap. She was a little apologetic, she thought she may have told some people it was two not one. Mike was going to bring the ball. She’d spoken to him yesterday, but now couldn’t seem to get him on the phone.

Anarchists seem to start their conversations asking about where you’re from. “Where are you from?” asked Oskana, nearly immediately. It struck me as a weird question. Shawna replied,
“Do you mean where am I from or where do I live?”
“Where do you live?”
“Oh, I live in New York.”

Oh right.

I gave a little London spiel and the conversation dropped off again. It was about 1:30.

“Do you want to play soccer at the RNC?” asked Oksana. The RNC is the Republican National Convention and it’s coming to New York at the end of August. “It’ll be fun. We’ll probably get arrested…”

Shawna was sort of non-committal. I think I shrugged.

Then a girl whose name I never really caught turned up. I think it was Susan. She was strong looking and she had a bleach stain across the flop of her hair. A few piercings, but not much, a light tattoo on her forearm, green combats, white levis t-shirt and, in general, a bit more anarchism to her than the friendly Oksana. She berated Oksana a little for the whole one o’clock two o’clock thing and didn’t seem to believe in Mike and the football at all. Susan drank from a tall can of ice tea. When conversation sagged she would say to anybody that went by – “Do you want to play soccer?” in quite a spunky way. Sometimes they ignored her, and she would say, plainly, “Snobs.” Anarchism baby.

All the while, more people were going into ABC No Rio with its mural of lopsided earth baby. They were young and off beat. Susan would ask them all about soccer but they all smiled or yelled. They were all going to cook food for homeless people in the area. There was a handout in Tompkins Park at 3. The activity was called “needanumbums” or something. People would come to us at the door and say, “needanumbums?” and we just jerked our thumb inside. Susan and Oksana were getting a bit pissed off at the needanumbums numbers.

“What the fuck is with the needanumbums?” asked Susan.
“I know,” said Oksana, “it’s insanity.”
“All these kids,” said Susan, as if the needanumbums had done some sort of sneaky advertising, like a tobacco company.
“Do you know what they’re cooking?” she asked.

There was a pause.
“And they give it to anybody right?” She sounded a bit hungry.

Susan and Oksana thought it would be good if they made a sign. I don’t know why. I didn’t think it would attract any more numbers. Oksana took out a piece of paper and I lent her my pen. She was thinking of what to write. Then Susan disappeared into 156 and came out a couple of minutes later with a flattened Starbucks cardboard box. No one else seemed to notice the irony of an anarchists advert on a Starbucks box. Susan scrawled “Who wants to * soccer?” in big letters. The * was a football that looked like a beachball. She rigged it up between the handlebars of a bike against the wall and leaped backwards, laughing, her two fists making waist level thumbs up signs. “Yeeeaaahhh,” she said.

About a minute later – or at least eerily soon after the sign had gone up, a big guy with a full, my god a papal, total mohican (bleached yellow, tipped spikes green) walked up with a slightly bilious looking girlfriend. Susan said, “You wanna play soccer?” They said, yeah, they’d heard about it through Alex. Oksana and Susan tried to place Alex. Alan, who was the mohican, said, “Big punk guy,” and Oksana clicked immediately, “Yeah, yeah, I know him.”

“Where are you from?” asked Susan, anarchically.
“California,” said Alan.
“Whooahh, you fucking serious?” Oksana and Susan seemed to say at once.

Conversation died again and Alan took his skateboard into the middle of the street and started going up and down and doing jumps. A big punk guy in a leather jacket, chains hanging off him in all sorts of directions, jagged hair glorious in that sun. His trick was to get up some speed and then lean forward, pushing the front of the board down and the letting the back come up, and then stagger along, arms waving hard, trying to keep his balance. When he ran out of speed he would fall over on to the street. When a car came, he just got off the board and let it go where it may. One time he fell over, a woman having coffee outside a café on the other side of the street, just howled with laughter. Just roared it out. It was brilliant.

It was about 2:02 when they started talking about the rules of football. “Shit, do we have enough people?” asked Susan, (one more had turned up, another girl, from Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn). “We need a goalie,” said Susan, who I was disliking, hard.

“Shit,” she said, “we need two goalies.”

Everyone laughed, “Holy shit,” the anarchists seemed to be agreeing, “now this is getting heavy.” There was talk of offence and defence and maybe we would get a ball off a bookshop about 15 blocks away. Shawna left. Susan went into 156, I think to get some food, and I made some apologies and started to walk, then jog away. Jog, I thought, I’ll jog and make it back in time to see Arsenal beat Portsmouth in the cup, proper soccer.

I jogged away, enjoying the springy heels of my new shoes, full of light. Then I heard the anarchist scream, it was Susan, coming out of 156, hands full of vegan food I’m guessing, seeing her numbers drop from 7 to 5 over the course of a minute.

“Whhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt?????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I was scared and thought, “Stop, keep running? stop, keep runni----???!”

Because my mobile phone, in my handy Velcro armpocket, had decided to ride my springy steps and leap out of my jacket, into that bright light.

Susan was still screaming something – I was scared she was coming after me – when my phone hit the pavement and broke into its requisite several pieces. The battery came to rest on the bars over a storm drain. I scrambled around, picking them up, suddenly hot, suddenly wanting to run so fast.

I yelled -- to say something -- “Well have you got a ball?”, down the street, back at the anarchists, as if, if they dramatically turned one up, I would stay. But I wouldn’t. No way. I put the phone into another pocket, took two steps of walking and then ran all the way home.

Just to say, the "needanumbums" activity at the anarchist's soccer place is actually "Food Not Bombs." But I'm going to leave it how it was.

Before the End of the Chairs

I fear that the chairs in the kitchen are dying and that someone is going to get hurt. We bought them last summer from a flea market in one of those carparks which seem like such a waste of space in Manhattan. We bought them with a matching square table for fifty dollars.

The seller of the set was very keen on the foldableness of the table and chairs but to be honest we weren't that interested. It was an option (and, just to be candid, we did store one of the chairs for a while in the shallow cupboard by the front door) but these were to be permanent additions to the kitchen, to sit under the window in the corner and provide us a place to eat and talk.

But the foldableness of the chairs, less so the table, whose folding mechanism is very mysterious, is part of their character. They are small and flimsy. They are for the pert American eating a croissant or playing some cards, rather than a wider American who might be having a steak and be in the mood to thump a great wet fist down on the collapsible table. The chairs are good for a little sit but they creak if you sway -- they creak like something with fragile bones. The little straps of light metal and their catches on the delicate legs which make up the folding mechanism all strain and rasp in turn when you shift in the chairs. I worry that they are on the verge of springing off onto the white kitchen tiles, exhausted and shattered , glancing over as I fall too, slower and with more to lose, on to the patch of floor near the sofa.

One of the chairs is really teetering. Yesterday I tucked it into the furthest corner of the kitchen, up against the blind-looking large clockface which is beautiful but without any hands. It's impossible to sit in that corner -- the table is bunched in too close, but it's where we keep the third chair for guests to take when there's a gathering. The metal slats which keep that chair taut and standing rather than collapsed and legless are buckling. They alternately sag and straighten at the slightest invitation and I couldn't take the suspense any more.

What can we do? Retire the chairs? Or push through until, one by one, we end up surrounded by their fractured limbs and plastic green seats on the floor. I don't think we can really stack them up in the corner of the flat (of course we could because they are, as we know and fear, very foldable) but it would seem like a waste. I feel like we are providing the final home for the chairs. So we have to keep using them. We should see them through to death. And that's what I'm doing. I sit at the fourth chair in my room when I type at my railroad baron's desk. I have to put a pillow on its narrow behind to counteract the slope of the floor, which sets me some way below the top of my desk. Part of me thinks the pillow softens the wrenches and contortions which will ultimately kill the chair, but another part of me sees the pillow as too large because it flops over on either side. It looks like too much weight -- like the protruding, flourishing backside of the steak eater / table thumper.

But I do worry that it won't be me that clips their chin on the way to the bottom of the kitchen or the dusty floorboards of my room. It won't be me that suddenly gets a view of the side of the bin and the bottom of the kitchen table and, quite possibly, the secret of its more intricate foldability. I worry that it will be a guest.

The other day, when I popped out to the launderette and returned to find Ben and Dee in the kitchen, talking to a surprised and sleepy Matt in the kitchen, I rushed a quick look to check that no one had sprained their ankle or damaged their eye while I was gone. Everyone was safe but there's going to come a day when someone goes down.

Perhaps it will be one of the models who comes to have their picture taken by Mark and Radic during the day. Like the furniture, they are tall and fragile. One of them was very willowy indeed the other day. She was called Ironia or something and was from Brazil. Mark put her in a yellow dress and some high heels and she was like a carnival character, or an exotic marionette, a gangly bright flower careering around the apartment.

Or perhaps it will be one of Matt's friends. We've been seeing a lot of Christian recently who is some kind of colleague or prospective business partner. Christian is full of enthusiasm and often brings round whisky. His movements seem to pose a grave threat to at least one of the chairs, but he's more of walker and a gesturer than a sitter. He brought a girl called Doriana round last night who is Spanish. We were watching The Donald reality show but we turned down the sound in the ad breaks long enough to learn that she was singer. Matt asked her if she would sing and she agreed. Matt immediately asked her to sing the Star Spangled Banner. The reality show started again but she took a grip on it in the next break and she gave a masterly performance, with Matt and Christian miming the shooting off of fireworks from their hips. Exactly the sort of performance that would break a chair.

And then when one of the chairs goes, do we have to retire the rest? Do we have to do a recall, like a car factory? I don't think so. Some of the chairs are stronger than the others -- but, as we have already seen with the one I packed off over by the clock, we don't just push through on each chair, we move around, we mingle, we're breaking them each, piece by piece, swivel by scrunch. In the best of worlds, they will deteriorate pretty much as a group and then collapse like cards or dominos on one sunny Saturday in the middle of a desultory conversation. Once again Matt, Mark and I will have nowhere to sit. And then we'll go to the market.

Forgetfulness forgetfulness forgetfulness forgetfulness

So it sees the light of day

The world being what it is, the Talk of the Town, that Independent on Sunday supplement I wrote a couple of things for, is headed for the tubes. Here's a piece that was supposed to be in it some time around now. It is, I'm sorry, about the sewers, but I'm sure this is the end of it:

There’s always sewer work in New York. Some of the sewers are nearly 150 hundred years old, and with the ground under the city heaving with workmen, digging machines, telephone lines and water pipes, sometimes they collapse. Other times, the city tries to get to them before that.

Last Wednesday I went to see some sewer repairs with Sam Bailey, a business agent for the Timbermen, the union for carpenters who work on sewer jobs. We drove through Brooklyn and Queens, stopping every other block it seemed, to see broken pipes and old manholes.

On the sidewalks there were piles of smashed, muddy pipe-pieces and down in the earth and the seepage there were broken off pipe-mouths: the cracked old bits of a monstrous system.

There are more than 6,300 miles of sewers in New York: big ones, brick ones, small ones, clay ones. If you were a rat and you laid them out end to end and crawled into them, you could go from New York to Alaska and back.

We went to a job in Queens, in a quiet suburban neighbourhood called White Plains. There was snow in the gardens and the sky was high, blue and crackling cold. Victor Carames, the foreman, was replacing an old pipe which ran under the sidewalk, with a new, deeper one to run under the road.

Victor was Spanish with bright blue eyes and the job seemed too small for him. It was only a little sewer he was laying. A big yellow excavator had dug a trench outside a modest bungalow, and with its great claw was nudging carefully around the tiny half-inch pipe that carried water into the house. The owner of the bungalow kept drifting nervously over to see the work, Victor kept driving him away.

Keen to show us more, Victor led us away from the job and had a manhole opened in the middle of a crossroads. Below “NYC Sewer” the manhole cover said “Made in China.” Twenty feet down, a brown, pummelling slick of liquid was rushing along in the gloom.

“A river down there! Down inside the pipe, picking it up, all the water for everywhere, into this motherfucker, you watch that…,” said Victor falling silent, gazing in.

“I dig this kind of pipe eleven years ago, 40 feet down…” said Victor, as we walked back to the site, “It was a gorgeous job, a gorgeous job.”

Around the trench, as the digger heaved and flipped out old sections of dead pipe and rolled them along the road, Victor was the conductor. Over the noise of machinery and saws, he whistled in blasts to his workers. Every time Victor whistled, they paused for a moment (“It means… ‘What I do wrong?’” He explained), corrected themselves and carried on.

Victor’s other trick was his right hand. With a cigarette dangling in his mouth and his gloves in his back pocket despite the gnawing cold, he made constant gestures to Carlos, the digger operator.

Victor’s hand was the digger’s claw: he closed it when he wanted mud picked up and he moved it to the left or the right to guide Carlos through the tightest moments. When the claw was in the trench and Carlos could not see it, all its movements were based on Victor’s hand, nudging ever so gently, inches at a time. When the claw was out of the hole, Victor would yell “Go Carlos! Go!” and Carlos would relax, swing the machine around, dump his load and then smash it down on the frozen asphalt to break up the street for the next section of the trench.

Twelve feet down in the hole, which was shored up by planks of timber and forced outwards by braces, the mud was orange and brown. Through the boards, the bungalow was leaking its fluids. It looked soapy. Maybe the owner had given up trying to oversee the work and was having a shower. A red laser spot helped show the gradient of the trench and it played on our trousers as we crossed its beam. Victor was quieter in the trench.

“Oh yeah, you find a lot of shit down here,” he said, by no means punning, “We find cars, we got trucks buried, big boulders...”

Elsewhere that day we heard other stories of sewer finds. No ninja turtles unfortunately, nor Catholic priests like Father Fairing in Thomas Pynchon’s V, but more mundane, domestic losses. According to one foreman, Greenpoint’s sewers, in Brooklyn, are good for old doorknobs. Otherwise, there is a steady stream of gold and silver spoons, coins and hubcaps.

After telling the story of a big boulder he once found, Victor climbed out of the hole. On the surface he was the conductor again, always moving, whistling, shouting to his labourers (“Amerio, Amerio…a little wider huh?”) before stopping for a moment to warm his hands over a jerrycan and its fire of leftover wood.

An hour later it was time to go, there were plenty more jobs for Sam Bailey to inspect. Victor showed us to the car and as he shook our hands in the road a white New York bus came up behind him. It missed by inches and he saw me flinch.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “they don’t touch me.”