Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Objet d’Art, and Violence


Our Town downtown
July 9, 2007


A vandalized car tells of bygone adventures, and that New Yorkers like to wreck things


I scour the roof of the parking lot at Pier 40 for a moving body. Not a soul. Silently, I flagellate myself for not being able to get my lazy ass out of bed. I’m twenty minutes late for the designated 8 a.m. meeting time. Have I missed him?
An athletic-looking guy rides up the ramp on a mountain bike. I step out of the shadows and away from the cars, to make sure he sees me.
I have absolutely no idea what I’m expecting, but from what I’ve gathered so far about Carter Emmart, I doubt he’d be as square-looking as this guy. The guy rides by, locks up his bike, and gets in his car. Not Carter Emmart.
Let me rewind. A few weeks earlier, I had gotten a call from an artist who parks in the parking lot at Pier 40, saying that I might be interested in a car there that had been vandalized. She didn’t know whom it belonged to, but this was no ordinary car.
A couple weeks later, I decided to check it out. By that point I’d lost the scrap of paper on which I’d jotted the car’s description and location. All I remembered was that it was parked on the top level, and something about a bubble in the roof. But that was all I needed.
From every angle, this car screams to be noticed. Painted on the back of the 1984 Ford station wagon is a waving American flag. The Colorado license plate reads ON2MARS. The bumper is decorated with stickers from the Burning Man festival dating back to 1993.
There is a hole in the roof maybe two feet in diameter, fitted with a Plexiglas bubble – an Austin Powers-esque sun roof.
Orange flame lick the sides, and on the hood, a faded, oversized Barbie in a body suit stands on tiptoe and watches as a mushroom cloud spreads over Los Angeles.
Neat stencil letters on the driver’s side door spell out: “LTC C. EMMART” / “PILOT.” Had this guy been driven over the edge in ‘Nam?
Inside and out, the car is in a shambles. The front windshield has been shattered and partially torn out of the frame, and two windows are missing. Both back tires are completely flat. The paint job is covered in juvenile graffiti: oversized genitalia scrawled on the hood, the word “Petafile” on the side door. Cassette tape trails from the doors and gathers around a tire like entrails.
I try the passenger side door. It’s open. I root around and find maps of Colorado, San Francisco, New York and Indiana, a bill from a Texaco in Boulder, a napkin with a couple names and phone numbers on it, and bingo: a bunch of business cards. They belong to Carter Emmart, Science Visualization/Artist for the Digital Galaxy Project at the Hayden Planetarium. I call him, he answers, we set up a time to meet, and now you have been caught up to date.
People often resemble their cars, so I had high expectations, but the Carter Emmart who shows up 45 minutes late, apologizing profusely, with traces of smeared lipstick around his mouth, and smelling of alcohol from last night’s Independence Day bash, blows them out of the water. This guy is a trip.
“PMS was here,” he sighs, pointing to graffiti scrawled on his Plexiglas bubble. He rolls his eyes and flips his long hair out of his face. “That’s creative.”
When Carter inherited this car from his uncle in the early 90’s, it was beige. “It was the only car I ever owned; I just decided I wanted to celebrate it.” At the time, he worked for NASA, which explains the Mars-inspired license plate and paint job, and the bubble (lying down in the back, he could look through the bubble at the stars). He used the car to travel between jobs, and every year, he’d make the trek to the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert.
“The participation in Burning Man is so positive and aggregate,” says Carter, pausing to let his emotions settle down. “For the most part, people that go to Burning Man sort of understand that it’s something you add into and help others build, as opposed to destroy.”
Carter calls his car an “Ode to America,” but much of that ode, like the atomic bomb on the hood and the gas-guzzling whale of a car itself, is critical. “For me, America is a mixed message,” he says, gingerly picking up the plastic oxygen container from Barbie’s space suit out of the front seat.
It was a continual work in progress. The flag in the back was “redneck control,” so he wouldn’t get his ass kicked in the Bible Belt – and he actually got a lot of thumbs up after 9/11, which he found to be strange. Similar rationale went into the “LTC C. EMMART” / “PILOT” on his door; he was actually saluted once in Las Vegas.
A few months ago Carter lost his wallet, and had his credit card replaced. He didn’t realize that the fee for the lot, which had automatically been withdrawn from his account, was no longer being paid. The lot figured his car was abandoned, and then – no one seems to know who did it or when, exactly – vandals went at it.
“That car that’s kind of funny looking? We don’t know who did it,” the lot attendant told me. “Security’s trying to figure it out. They think it was little kids or something.”
Carter has suspicions that the lot turned a blind eye to the vandalism because they thought his car was abandoned, and it was so freaking strange to begin with.
“I’m not sure what happened, but my feeling is that obviously that car called attention to itself. I think the aspect of it that hurts me is that, I understand that it’s still New York, and it’s not as bad as it used to be in that regard, but you know, people can’t admire something without doing something to it. You know, you always got to carve your initials into some shit.”
“Well, I called her Blazing Glory,” he says, fingering the faded words he and his dad had painted just above the windshield. “And she died a spectacular death.”

A Dip of Baptismal Proportion


Our Town downtown

July 2, 2007


We swam, we bled, we fretted about infection

I have been anticipating my first plunge into the East River for so long now that ever so gradually, it has taken on the significance of a religious rite.
I had a vision of how it would be.
There was a little beach I had noticed in the East River around 20th Street, tucked away in the cove of Stuyvesant Cove Park. It was the perfect spot.
An expert would lead the way, someone I could paddle after like a brainless duckling. I emailed The Swimmer, a guy I had interviewed for this column a few weeks back who swims off of Manhattan almost daily.
He was busy Thursday, he replied, and he had just been swimming the night before.
And just like that I was thrust out into the wilderness on my own. That was a shame, but his response did put to rest, somewhat, the first of my concerns: the potential hazard of swimming in sewage.
It had rained heavily on Wednesday night. Highways were closed due to flooding, baseball games were cancelled. When it rains like that, our sewage system (which is undergoing a major overhaul) still overflows into the rivers. The Swimmer had been swimming for years, and if he was cool with swimming in the rain, that meant immersion in a sewage-tainted river didn’t have any immediately harmful effects on one’s constitution: a good sign.
My second concern was the prospect of being swept away by the current. Growing up, I spent my summers in a lake, and when it comes to staying afloat in the water, I’m perfectly competent. But I was caught, once, in the undertow in Martha’s Vineyard, and a lifeguard had to do a Baywatch-style rescue and drag me out. Recalling that powerless feeling of being tossed like clothes in a dryer, unable to tell up from down, still makes me gasp for air.
In terms of the sewage issue, it would be preferable to swim at high tide, when the cleaner tidal water would be flowing through the river. On the other hand, drowning is less of a possibility at low tide. The issue turned out to be moot, since there was a limited time window on Thursday during which our photographer and I were both free. We would meet at 3:45, just after low tide, when the river would be at its calmest but nastiest.
“I’m not going in after you,” Andrew, the photographer, laughed nervously when we met at the designated point.
We climbed over the railing separating the park’s esplanade from the beach, and dropped down three feet onto the sand. It wasn’t all that hard to get down there, and we didn’t see any No Trespassing signs, but the beach’s inaccessibility made clear that swimming was not encouraged.
Once down at water level, we could see that the concrete bulkhead had been tagged with colorful graffiti. The little beach was littered with plastic bottles and dead branches, but the sand was fine and soft between my toes. I wiggled out of my clothes and waded in.
The sky didn’t open up or anything, but it was no anticlimax, either. The water was deliciously cold. Cold water gives the illusion of crisp, clean water, so it seemed I was frolicking in a pristine mountain river.
When I got in about knee-deep, however, it struck me that the water was sliding past my legs a little more reluctantly than water should. Indeed, it was a bit viscous, like it might coat me if I stayed still too long – but not to the point of being alarming. Had I not been taking mental notes I might not have noticed it at all.
I pursed my lips, closed my eyes tight and dove in. All was silent – the tinny silence of a hundred faraway motors muted by a vast body of water. The drops that inevitably made their way into my mouth when I emerged tasted not unpleasantly brackish.
I swam out maybe thirty yards to the mouth of the cove – my fear of being swept down to the Statue of Liberty kept me from venturing further – and floated on my back over the wake of a tanker. Then I returned to shore, where a handful of people had gathered to observe my baptism, and clambered over a rocky promontory to the remnants of an old pier sticking out of the water. I was gingerly stepping between the rotting wooden supports when a Water Taxi zoomed by, kicking up a wake that made me stumble into the splintery top of one of the posts.
The scratch was superficial. The blood that trickled down my leg did not concern me – until I considered the contents of the water lapping it away. The bacteria from all that fecal matter were right now mingling with my blood cells. It was time to get out.
As we were leaving, a college-aged couple was climbing onto the beach.
“You swimming?” I asked, feeling like I’d encountered brethren.
“That’s the East River,” said the guy. “I’ll get cancer if I go in there.”
When I got on my bike to head home for a shower, I felt like a kid peddling home from the neighborhood swimming hole. The hair on my head and arms already felt stiff with salt, immune to the laws of gravity or respectability. My skin smelled like summer. The city seemed to have lost its immensity and shrunk into my own back yard.
That night, there was some redness around the scratch on my knee. A callous on my foot was itching so terribly that I was reduced to chafing my foot against the exposed brick wall of my apartment – for an hour. Right now, as I type, I can’t keep from rubbing my eyes, which feel irritated.
Coincidence? Perhaps. Hypochondria? May well be.
I’ll keep you posted.