A Happy Fun Adventure
I killed a cat today. I was walking Elana back to the J train. She asks if we could go to the cheap fruit stand and buy some pineapple. I tell her it’s a little out of the way, but we go anyway. We turn the corner and walk down Jamaica Ave. under the elevated train tracks. Before we walk ten feet we spot a cat in the road. “Ooh, kitty,” she says in that voice that’s affected for babies and kittens, “get out of the way if you don’t want to get hit.”
The cat looks dazed. It’s walking in front of cars, slowly and off-balance. It stands in front of a car that’s stopped at the red light. The light changes, and the driver has to back up and turn to avoid the cat, who’s barely moving. We surmise that it’s been hit by a car and debate what to do. “There’s an animal hospital nearby,” I say. She starts emptying her bag so that we can have something to carry the cat in, but the cat’s still walking into on-coming traffic. I need to get him out of the road now. I walk towards the cat and bend to pick him up, but I hesitate. He’s a mess. I don’t even know how to carry a healthy cat, let alone a badly injured one.
Some guy yells at me from down the street. He’s carrying lumber, I assume for the construction site two blocks away. “Jus’ pick up da fuckin’ cat,” he yells helpfully, “he ain’t gonna hurtcha.” This guy’s one of these New York characters. I don’t see him picking up the goddamn cat. But I do, finally. I’m not gonna put him in a bag, though, like roadkill. I carry him in my arms. He’s dirty and he smells, and I worry about my dry cleaning bill, to tell the truth.
Elana’s shaken up. She apologizes for not being much help, and says she has to walk ahead of me because it’s too upsetting. I ask her if I’m holding the cat right. She tells me I am. Because she’s walking ahead, she gets to the animal hospital first. When I walk in the lobby, she’s already talking with the vet, who’s explaining the situation. It’s about the delicate matter of the cost. The city-run animal shelter is a few blocks further, he tells us. They won’t charge, but they are required to euthanize strays. We ask him how much money, and he says about $50, just enough to cover the expense, which we agree to pay.
He brings us to an examination room, but he has a few other matters to attend to before he can examine the cat. I put the cat on the table and he starts walking in a daze again. He’s gonna walk right off the table. I hold him down a bit by petting him. “Calm down, kitty,” I say in that baby/kitty voice. I joke with Elana that “I guess I bought myself a damn cat, if he pulls through.” I see the cat’s face for the first time, and see now why Elana had to walk ahead. He’s a gooey mess. His mouth is open in the shape of an “o” and it’s oozing green snot. He’s still restless, but I calm him and he curls his body against my arm.
The vet returns. He feels the cat’s body and doesn’t think anything’s broken. “I’m not sure he was hit by a car,” he says. “If he’s unspayed, he’s probably feral.” The vet checks and is right. This is nobody’s cat. He was sick, and walking in the street to die. Elana leaves the room. The vet asks me to stay with the cat for a moment while he gets the medicine. When he returns, his assistant brings me to another room where I can wash my hands while he puts the cat down.
I join Elana in the lobby. She apologizes again, but she felt dizzy, which is understandable. I tell her I need to go to the ATM. She says she has her checkbook with her, but I tell her my bank has an ATM just two blocks away and that I’ll be back in five minutes.
The ATM is across the street from the fruit stand that we wanted to go to. I go inside, but there are no pineapples. Of course.
When I return to the animal hospital, Elana’s settling up the bill with the vet. It’s only $35. I give her a $20. We leave and separate. She, to Williamsburg; me, to the dry cleaner.
At the cleaners, I empty my pockets and remove my coat. The lady at the counter does the usual inspection. “Missing a button,” she notes. “Yeah, and this pocket’s torn and the lining’s all ripped up,” I tell her to make clear that I won’t hold the establishment responsible for that. “I just have to make do for the rest of the season,” I continue. “Yes, more storms coming,” she says in her Chinese accent, while fishing through a container of loose buttons. “A ha,” she says, as she finds a perfect match for my missing button and smiles.
This story has no moral, except that we should all heed Bob Barker’s advice and spay and neuter our pets. I would have taken that coat to the cleaner another day, and she would have found the button then instead, or I would have just thrown that old coat out in the spring. God does not work in mysterious ways and all things do not happen for a reason. I suppose we gave that cat some comfort in his last minutes, but I didn’t stay for his last minute. I left to wash my hands.
Grave Concerns
Today’s newspaper is sure to make one consider some grave options. First, there’s Hunter S. Thompson, who, before blasting himself away on Sunday, left instructions to have his cremated remains blasted from a cannon. Second, is the far more grim news that the New York City medical examiner’s office has given up identifying the remains of 1,161 victims whose bodies could not be identified or were never recovered from the World Trade Center attack.
Many families of victims have delayed holding services, awaiting discovery of all or part of their loved ones. Others have buried partial remains only to have more parts discovered later.
This post is not meant to take anything away from those families’ grief, or from their desire to mark the lives of the ones they lost. I just don’t understand the need that people feel to have a proper funeral.
If I had a spiritual bone in my body, I would describe myself as a secular humanist, but I don’t, so I’d rather be defined by my lack of beliefs and simply call myself an atheist. As such, I just don’t feel any sense of proprietorship over my body once I’m dead. I don’t feel a need for a proper burial, and I don’t really understand why anybody else would feel the need either.
Cemeteries are pretty. I like to walk around Maple Grove Cemetery, with its well-kept lawns, shady trees, curious tombstones and squirrels, ducks and turtles. Don’t call me morbid. As I’m fond of pointing out to my friends, cemeteries were the first urban parks in the early industrial era. Civic leaders found the idea of people having picnics in cemeteries to be a little distasteful and so parks like Boston’s Public Garden and New York’s Central Park were created.
Most cemeteries aren’t even as pretty as Maple Grove. They’re less historical, less ornate; just big lawns punctuated with concrete slabs. It just seems like a terrible use of real estate, and I don’t want any part.
Consider this my Last Will and Testament. When I die, take my organs (the liver will likely be of no use to anyone, but the lungs are clean), cremate my remains and spread my ashes over the Meadow Lake (the former “Lagoon of Nations” of the World’s Fair) in Flushing Meadows.
If anyone feels the need for a physical marker to remember me (What, I ain’t memorable enough as it is?), be creative! For example, I received a fundraising call from Queens College a few weeks ago. Donors who give at least a certain amount will be memorialized with a brick near Powdermaker Hall. Now, that’s what I consider a fitting marker. Not only would it take up very little space (which is still be utilized for a worthwhile purpose), but it would support a worthy public institution that has benefitted me and in which I truly believe. Moreover, I couldn’t think of better company than the Freedom Ride martyrs Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and Michael Schwerner.
Save the Plaza
There’s long been speculation that the Plaza Hotel would close its doors. Hotels don’t seem to have a very long shelf life these days. New amenities are rolled out by competitors, new audio-visual and networking technologies are introduced, new demands are made of conference and banquet space. New hotels can build for the modern marketplace, but older hotels have to pay a fortune to be retro-fit. Add to that the usual wear and tear that a hotel goes through (carpets wear thin, wallpaper fades and let’s not talk about those mysterious stains that turn up in the strangest places), and you wind up with the need for a hotel to close operations for top-to-bottom renovations every couple of decades. Many hotels decide to forgo the renovations. They close down, tear down, go condo.
The Mayflower, the Stanhope and the Regent Wall Street are just a few of the hotels that have closed their doors in the past year. They’ve been supplanted new hotels like the Mandarin Oriental in the Time Warner Center and the so-hideous-it’s-beautiful Westin in Times Square. This cycle of openings and closings has been going on for a long time, which is why there’s been speculation about the fate of the Plaza for such a long time. The question comes up every time the hotel is sold. Donald Trump made some vague threats to go condo when bought the hotel in 1989, but that was just some macho posturing against the hotel workers union.
The truth is that the hotel has looked the worse for wear for a little too long, so when Elad Properties bought the hotel recently, nobody was surprised when they announced that the hotel would close for renovations in April and reopen as a mixed-use building, with condo apartments, retail space and a much smaller “boutique” hotel in one part of the building.
The hotel workers union rallied in front of the Plaza yesterday. The union has formed a Save the Plaza Coalition. They’re enlisting support from politicians, celebrities and members of the community. They’re filing for landmark status for interior sections of the hotel, but the company was likely to preserve that famous dining rooms like the Oak Bar and the Palm Court anyway.
A spokesman for Elad told the Daily News, “This isn’t about landmarks, this is about losing 900 jobs at the hotel.” So what if that’s the case? Since when are 900 working people’s livelihoods of no concern? That’s 900 people with good pay, health care and seniority. That’s an awful lot of middle-aged waitresses, cooks and room attendants having to compete with younger workers for new jobs that won’t pay nearly as much or have the same benefits and security. Elad’s callousness is astounding.
The Plaza will be saved. The building itself is a landmark and is in no danger of being torn down. The famous interiors of its lobby and dining rooms will likewise win landmark status and will remain open to the public. What is in danger of being lost is hundreds of jobs if the hotel closes the vast majority of its guest rooms to the public. I don’t support tax breaks as a solution to keep wealthy owners making a profit. I do think public pressure might convince Elad that gutting the Plaza is not worth their time, and the publicity might inspire a group of buyers to get together and “save the day.” Maybe Donald Trump will buy back one of his formerly prized possessions. He could make a TV show about the renovations. That might pay for the hotel right there.
Shit In, Shit Out
Harvard President Lawrence Summers is sunk. He’s catching a lot of hell from his faculty and students over some stupid remarks that he made, by way of explaining Harvard’s gender imbalance in the sciences, that suggested that women aren’t as good as men at math and science. The controversy hasn’t let up, and as Summer’s character has been debated in the national press have come repeated complaints of his bullying and autocratic style, and constant reminders of how he chased Cornell West away to Princeton. It’s over for Summers. I’ve seen this movie before.
In my Junior year at Queens College, we brought down our president. Allen Lee Sessoms was appointed in 1995. He was Queens College’s first black president, one of the minority administrators appointed by Giuliani and Pataki in order to dismantle the hallmarks of the CUNY system and kick out thousands of minority students.
Sessoms wanted to break Queens College away from CUNY and make the college its own university, catering to middle class students from Long Island and out of state. He wanted to build dormitories in order to attract these students. He staked his reputation on a state-of-the-art AIDS research center. And he was a vocal supporter of Guiliani’s campaign to repeal CUNY’s 150-year tradition of open admissions (which meant that high school graduates from New York City’s public schools were guaranteed admission to CUNY; if they didn’t meet academic standards, they would have to take remedial courses to catch up, but could study at the university anyway).
When the Bar Association released a study on the open admissions debate in October of 1999, it included this passage:
New York State Education Law 6201, of course, does place a limit on the mission autonomy of the constituent institutions of CUNY. We were,
therefore, somewhat surprised to hear Dr. Allen Lee Sessoms, the President of Queens College, say that Queens is really more of a SUNY college, a “regional” university, than a part of CUNY, with almost half of its undergraduate student body coming from Nassau and Suffolk Counties rather than from the City of New York. Indeed, Queens College draws more heavily from Long Island than from the four boroughs other than Queens. Whatever the merits such an institution might have, this clearly does not fit within the statutory mission of CUNY to serve the New York City urban community and to give access to those who might otherwise be denied a higher education. Dr. Sessoms, however, believes that the key to increased funding is to build a strong connection with the middle class. He said that “the only people who benefit from open admissions are poor people and poor people don’t vote.”With respect to raising standards, Dr. Sessoms was quite blunt in stating his view that excellence is largely to be measured by the achievement levels of the incoming students rather than a value added measure of raising the achievement of those less prepared at the outset: “[Expletive] in, [expletive] out. If you take in [expletive] and turnout [expletive] that is slightly more literate, you’re still left with [expletive].” He said that he was out to build Queens into a great University and the concept of “value-added” as a measure of excellence would not indicate to him that Queens is a great University. Dr. Sessoms has thus made explicit what may well be a large part of the unspoken reasoning behind the proposed Amendment, at least by some of its more vocal proponents in the political arena, i.e. , that standards and excellence can only be raised by reducing access to the urban population for whom CUNY was created and maintained.
The expletive was “shit.” He was calling us “shit.” It took a few weeks after the report’s publication for it to get circulated much on campus, but when it did, boy, was Sessoms in trouble. The teacher’s union was after him. The student groups were after him.
This is from a pamphlet that my own Young People’s Socialist League distributed:
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As the controversy raged, Sessoms sealed his fate by publicly guaranteeing that he had secured funding for his AIDS center. When the deadline for producing the money came and went, he had to admit that he was bluffing. His reputation couldn’t recover, and he announced that he would not seek re-appointment at the end of his first five-year term. Sessoms was gone by the end of the semester.
Summers, like Sessoms, is attempting to change the structure of the university he leads, seeking greater centralization of the university’s mostly-autonomous schools. This means that he came in to the university facing powerful, entrenched opposition. Such arrogance as he displayed is so unwise, it betrays a greater character flaw. Summers better start thinking of how he will finesse his exit, since it seems doubtful that he can change his ways and win back his campus. Allen Sessoms never tried to apologize for the “Shit in, shit out” controversy. He could read the writing on the wall. It was time to leave.