Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Not a good sign.

Some of us at my office went out to the fifteenth floor terrace to smoke a cigarette when the lights went out. Strangely, we were trying to look down to 11th Avenue to see if the traffic lights were working. One guy, Tim, had binoculars (!) on him and confirmed that they weren’t. Then somebody noticed the very ominous black smoke and everybody started to freak. Everybody started trying to use their cell phones and no one could get a call out. Some of the older people in my office with kids scattered around the city made a bee-line for the door. That’s what really got my heart pounding. Then the PA system that’s built into our office’s fire alarm kicked on and told us to evacuate the building. I headed out with Mike, who also lives in the general Slope area.

Now I’ve had to ‘evacuate’ the building before, but somehow didn’t manage to notice this insane 20 story air shaft. I know it’s hard to get a sense of scale from this picture, but standing next to it in the stairwell created instant paralyzing vertigo. Plus it looked like a painted perspective out of an old Fritz Lang silent UFA film.

Once outside, there were a lot of people of the streets, but everyone was pretty calm. Chelsea to the West Village was quiet mellow and there were actually quite a lot of outside diners who kept on eating like nothing was wrong. Though at this point everyone on the street was talking or trying to talk into a cell phone and I was overhearing little snippets of things like ‘terrorist attack’, ‘not a terrorist attack’ and ‘entire Eastern seaboard without power’. So Mike and I were getting pretty nervous. We had decided not to head east right away because from the terrace you could see about a million flashing lights from cop cars. My thought was to avoid Broadway/5th Avenue and Canal Street(because of what turned out to be a SEA of people), while heading to the Manhattan Bridge.

Further downtown, there were suddenly lots more people on the street. It was very strange. Like downtown, yet it looked like Midtown at lunch hour. By the time we hit the Manhattan Bridge, I was soaked with sweat and dying of thirst. There were millions of people and cops and cars driving totally scattershot.

It took almost two hours to get to Flatbush Avenue, where I saw this truck which I thought was hillarious despite the circumstances.

9 pm: Now I am sitting in my pitch black apartment, typing this on laptop battery power. When I got home, I sat on my stoop until the sun went down and read for a while, though there were lots of distractions and the cell phone kept ringing. Now there is no light in the street, though you get an occasional flashlight and you can hear the neighbors on the stoop. Occasionally someone will yell something like, ‘Lashandra! Where are you?!?’ or something. When it was getting dark, I went over to Bobby and Rachels apartment and screamed out their names a couple of times, but I couldn’t see any light inside. Now I’m regretting not giving into that paranoid impulse of ‘preparing’. Since I have no candles (all I can think of is ‘ugh! I should have bought those candles at Yankee Candle Factory in Baltimore when Dan was practically forcing me to buy the ones that smelled like baking cookies’… this would be so much more pleasant if I had the smell of baking cookies) or transistor radio or food in my apartment. And of course the cell phone has stopped working after hours of working fine, though it’s big screen makes a handy flashlight (another item it never occured to me to buy — wait, I take that back. I just found the ViewMaster Show Beam that Kim gave me for my birthday last year. It’s an old toy from the seventies that I think she found at a flea market in Florida. It’s basically a flashlight that also works as a slideshow. This one has a cartridge that tells a story about Popeye. You press a button on the side to progress to the next slide. The thumbnail plot outline is that Popeye and his girlfriend, Jessica, get into some kind of scrape and then a can of boiled spinach works as a deus ex machina to save the day).

10 pm: I don’t know how else to say it, but sounds like the blacks are going wild on the streets. Or at least Prospect Place. Don’t believe me, listen to THIS. The chanting just kept escalating until a cop siren barked a few times and it stopped