In Manhattan where I live, the block just to the south of us is always being dynamited. Sometimes it happens two or three times during dinner. Then two or three weeks will pass without a single explosion.
At first I used to jump up from dinner and run out to see the damage, and, of course, there wasn’t any. There wasn’t even any curiosity among the street crowds. They were calmly buying magazines, waiting for buses, carrying home pastrami and doing all those normal New York things which New Yorkers go right on doing immediately after hearing the sound of an entire block blowing up. I quickly began to feel foolish.
Buildings were all intact, manhole covers all in place, glass unshattered. Inside our house, the explosion had sounded monstrous; outside, where it must have happened, all was serene. Inquiries were futile. “Explosion? No, I didn’t hear no explosion.”
And yet the sound of the dynamiting went on at irregular intervals. Sometimes it occurred at midnight, sometimes at breakfast. After a while I stopped hearing it. Oh, it still went on, all right, but I had begun to develop the New York ear. The New York ear is the opposite of the ear which afflicted the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart.” This poor homicidal devil became so sensitive to noise that he began hearing the nonexistent heartbeat of the man he had murdered. The possessor of the New York ear becomes so insensitive to noise that he stops hearing whole blocks blowing up and maniacs screaming in his face.
I noticed the change one night during dinner when an out-of-town guest jumped from his chair during the soup and cried, “What in God’s name was that?” I had noticed nothing unusual. True, an instant earlier there had been the sound of an entire city block blowing up just to the south of us, but it had made no more impression than the clatter of spoon against bowl.
I confess to having felt a brief twinge of contempt for the guest, to thinking, “These out-of-towners! How easily flustered they are! How poorly fitted to live in New York!”
By that time I had stopped hearing all manner of noises. The automobile burglar alarms, for example. Do they even exist outside New York? Perhaps I should explain. These are shrill screech emitters which can pierce solid granite for a distance of two blocks. In theory, they are activated when car thieves try to break in, filling the air with their maddened screeches, thus terrifying the felons into flight and summoning policemen. In practice, they go off regularly whenever they feel lonely, which is usually between 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning.
Since the screech may continue for an hour or two before the car owner or policemen find time to tend to it, I used to thrash angrily out of bed and pace the house cursing through the predawn hours until my New York ear became fully developed. Now it is quite different. Not long ago, in fact, I awoke at 2:30 one morning terribly aware that something was dreadfully wrong. The automobile burglar screecher which normally goes off under our bedroom window at 2 A.M. was absolutely silent.
The insane cacophony of the 72nd Street fire engines, which always sound as if they have been summoned against the fire-bombing of the whole universe, was shrieking away at its normal decibellage, which lent an air of security to the night, but the silence of the car screecher was almost unbearable. Fortunately, just when it seemed I might never get back to sleep, the entire block just to the south of us was dynamited. It was more restful than a double sleeping pill.
A few weeks ago there was a fierce gun battle just at dinner in front of our house. I believe it was a gun battle, although it may have been Greeks setting off firecrackers. The Greeks were celebrating their independence day that weekend. We had a guest from the suburbs who called it to our attention, but by that time we were too numb to the sounds of New York to be much interested, and did not go to the window.
“It is either Greeks setting off firecrackers or two motorists waging a gun battle over a parking place,” I pointed out. “If the former, there will be nothing interesting to see; if the latter, it means we shall soon have the usual ambulance siren to soothe us during the dessert course.”
Just the other morning, at precisely 4:15, I was awakened by an unusual sound in the street. It sounded like a tractor-trailer driving through a plate-glass window. I was ecstatic. New York had come up with a brand-new sound which had the power to stir me. I did not rise to investigate, but fell immediately back into sleep when once again came this extraordinary sound as of a giant plate-glass window being smashed by a great truck.
“What’s that?” asked a sleepy child.
“Just a tractor-trailer driving through a plate-glass window,” I murmured. “Oh,” yawned the child, and we drifted off as the entire block just to the south of us blew to smithereens.