Expert Advice on Combating Terrorism
There’s been scaffolding up around the Chelsea for several months now, seriously detracting from the building’s unique gothic splendor. The workers put it up in the early summer, went away for the rest of the summer—it was probably too hot to work—then came back and worked for about two weeks in October. They haven’t done anything since then (I’m writing this in mid-August 2006), although the scaffolding remains up. When the workers were here, they stood on a hanging scaffolding outside my window and yelled back and forth to one another for eight hours a day, when they weren’t scraping or sanding with a machine.
There were two workers stationed outside my window (though there were others elsewhere on the building), a New Jersey guy and a Russian. They hadn’t met each other before this job, and so on the first day they bonded. “My last rap was a misdemeanor, but they kept me in for six months,” the Jersey guy said.
“My last was a felony,” the Russian said, as if it were no big deal.
“And they only gave me three.”
It was comforting to know that if anything went missing, I would at least have someone to blame.
The two workers had to strip and paint the woodwork and paint the windowsills—chores that made perfect sense. But they also had to strip the tar off the gutter—gouging and chipping away at it with their putty knives and then buffing it with a circular sander to reveal the gleaming copper—and then refinish it, all of which made no sense at all, since it had just been refinished earlier that year. The point, apparently, was to change the color from black to gray, maybe to match the paint. The Jersey guy, who was the most talkative, shared my confusion: “Why the hell are we doing this? Why are we making it gray? It’ll be black again in a month anyway!”
I couldn’t do much work with these guys yelling back and forth all day, so I had to resort to transcribing their conversation to kill time. About 90 percent of what they said was bullshit—the Jersey guy had a lot to say about sports and drinking—but once in a while they got onto an interesting topic. At around this time terrorists had just bombed the subway in London, and the cops had started searching people in the subway here.
“They said on TV, if you see somebody who looks suspicious in the subway, let us know,” the Russian said, chuckling.
“Fuck, everybody looks suspicious in the subway,” the Jersey guy said.
“They’re not going to stop it, nothing can stop it.”
“Hell no!” the Jersey guy said. “If I’m a cop and I see some Arab guy with a backpack, I’m not gonna say, open that up. What am I, a fucking idiot? He’ll blow us both up. Just keep going buddy, blow some other place up. I wanna get home to my wife and my kids.”
“I’d search some old lady, instead,” the Russian said.
“Yeah! So the Arab blows some people up, and your boss comes up and says, ‘Hey, why didn’t you stop that guy?’ ‘Oh sorry chief, I must’ve missed him.’ What are they gonna do, fire your ass? Better than being dead. ‘Sorry chief, I’ll do better next time.’”
On this one subject I feel like these guys may have had the proper mind-set to provide us with some insight. They were at least half right about the gutter, by the way: it’s not quite black yet, but it does look pretty goddamn scummy. The black sealant was better because it hid the dirt.
