is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Corkscrews and Cleavers. New York City.
My neighbor, my across the hall neighbor, was tortured to death. Police found broken knives and scissors at the scene. That�s right, BROKEN. He had a corkscrew in his head, lots of other puncture wounds, and a belt around his neck, and his mouth was taped shut. And his 11-year old daughter found him. It�s creepy and sad, and it makes you wonder what he did to make anyone do such things to him. I mean, what could it be? I have no way of knowing. I think I'd like it to stay that way. It�s mysterious and, like I said, creepy.
I didn�t know the guy. I saw him only a few times, and once I even yelled at him a little for waking me up at 12:30 am to ask for the UPS delivery I had signed for for him. He was very excited about his new stereo. It�s one of those details that seems tragic or poignant or something now.
I got home from having dinner with my colleague Q last Wednesday to find my apartment building FILLED with cops. They asked me some questions. I didn�t know anything. I didn�t hear anything.
So apparently someone can be tortured to death in his apartment in a crowded city and no one hears a thing. That freaks me out a bit. This particular freak-out is what I call CSI-Toaster syndrome. I mean, I don�t feel like I�m any less safe than I was before. This doesn't seem to have been a random crime, and there was no sign of forced entry, and so on. But it just reminds me, again, of what you learn from watching CSI: living alone means you might end up dead, electrocuted by your toaster. And no one will notice. Maybe not even for days. Like you�ll be a 42-year-old single woman choking to death on a frozen dinner while watching, of all things, CSI, and no one will be there to do the Heineken Remover on you, and then you�ll be dead, and unless someone wonders why you haven�t shown up to work, who�s going to notice? Or someone will crawl into your apartment and attack you and no one will even hear anything. That�s the SVU version.
It�s why I sometimes sleep with the lights on. Lights-on is one of those comforting remnants from childhood, when lights meant safety. Of course my parents always insisted I turn the lights off, which I suppose is a good strategy for teaching children not to fear the dark. But since I�ve been a grown-up, lights-on is something I�ve always done part of the time. In Berkeley, in San Francisco, in Amherst, Haverford, and here. Some nights are just lights-on nights. This has been a week of lights-on nights. But let�s be clear about it: it�s not because I feel like I�m in danger. It�s just that it�s unsettling to have a terrible story like that unfold across the hall.
My building manager stopped by soon after the cops arrived to see how everyone was doing, and I said something like, �what�s going on?!� and his answer was: �It�s New York City.�
Right. It�s New York City. THAT explains it.
No, that doesn�t explain it at all. Not even if it�s, like, 1977 New York City. 2008 New York City, especially where I live, is not all that treacherous, no matter what they say on Law and Order. And even if this were a dangerous neighborhood, no amount of daily crime would render what happened to my neighbor explainable under any generalization of any kind.
However, speaking of television, as I often do, there was something VERY televisual about it all. It felt like a combination episode of Law and Order, CSI and The Wire. I got canvassed by cops who talked urban-cop lingo at me. The crime scene crew was there for a very, very long time, like 15 hours. And a bunch of detectives, like SIX of them, stood outside my door for those 15 hours discussing the details of the crime� whenever they weren�t complaining about politics in the police department.
It always seems stupid when people say that something real that they witnessed or experienced �felt like a TV show� or a movie. Like when, post-9/11, people said it was like a disaster movie. But I think it only seems stupid to HEAR that, not to say it. Because I�ve come to realize that when people say such things, unless they�re truly being lazy thinkers, it�s because something has happened to them that is difficult to file under any existing rubric of experience. And so you reach for the only point of reference you have. And often that�s some form of visual fiction. Of course it's always possible to come up with better ways of describing an experience than to compare it to a fiction. My point is simply that resorting to the easy comparison may not always be about being shallow or insensitive. It may instead be a grab at straws for the sake of trying to communicate. Visual fictions are, after all, one of the major things diverse people in the U.S. have in common.
Speaking of which, I even had a television news reporter knocking on my door to see if she could get me to talk about my neighbor. I said no.
Oh. And on the same day as the corkscrew murder of the Haitian immigrant in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, a white therapist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was murdered with a meat cleaver. So you know what�s been getting the news coverage.
12:01 a.m. - February 22, 2008
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