Day 117-9: How I Built the Hole in My Career

I banged up the bottom of my car cruising a bumpy back road in too good a mood, so I’ve been inactive and incommunicado for a few days. I’m back at my friends’ house in the Catskill Mountains, rediscovering garlic and ginger. I’ll need a hydroponic spice farm to get through a long quarantine.

An architect wants to know why I quit the profession. Evelyn does, too, so here goes: I got fed up with the tech race. Designers have elevated software above craft. Me, I like a blank sheet of paper. It glows and frightens. It provokes.

OCTOBER IN THE CATSKILLS (Sanford Robinson Gifford, 1880But there’s more to it. My breakthrough career crisis came after the first real estate crash, while swine flu was menacing America. I was working as a young drone at a boutique firm that was excited to have landed a plush gig planning a McMansion in Westchester.

That was when I met my partner Fitch, a more-seasoned architect with a sense of humor that’s so dry it feels like sandpaper. We couldn’t be more different: He writes architectural software for kicks, dreams of hitting it big with a killer modular design. Fitch’s droopy eyes never fail to spot trouble on a project—something he probably picked up when one of his early designs installed an elevator backward. “Treat every assignment as your last,” he counseled me in what seemed the infancy of my promising career. “One of them will be.”

The project that did me in required the removal of several structures—a gorgeous 19th Century Robber Baron manor, a rocky hill, some ancient maple trees, and a timeless, towering oak. The dream residence was to be a showpiece of gadgets, colors, and shapes ripped by the client’s wife from fashion magazines (and revised monthly with much fussing).

Fitch explained that the spouse’s inability to marry any design for longer than eight weeks made this project a slow-motion rush job. “We could be in a hurry for years,” he exulted over free tequila one night at a dive bar he’d designed on the side five years earlier. In a wretched economy, he said, the client he called ‘McMissus’ would fund our lives indefinitely.

Transcendently Trashed

I worked hard, staying at the office later and later at night, drinking more and more to recover from it. One Sunday, I made the mistake of smoking a joint when no one was at the job site and I had to check a detail. The place’s beauty smote me. What Fitch called the Trash Mahal wasn’t funny.

Suddenly the owner drove up in a blue Porsche, alone. The guy turned out to be more of a techie than a hedge funder. He was a rather nice, slightly abstract quant with spiky hair that was prematurely frosting as he designed his firm’s trading programs—its essential identity, I guess. I wasn’t supposed to communicate directly with clients, but he wanted to show me the old mansion. As we toured it like kids in a haunted house (complete with a secret passageway), he volunteered that he hated to tear it down.

My mind exploded with ideas. What if we repurposed the mansion as a classic annex to the modern palace his wife wanted? History could survive by bowing to her gleaming, glass manse. Our client yearned to keep contemplating that oak from the gray stone tower, which turned out to be an ideal spot for contemplative smoking.

At work the next day, I told Fitch I intended to pitch an alternative—a contemporary structure that could coexist dynamically with the old one. He lurched out to smoke a cigarette on the corner—never a good sign—and returned to show me a URL for want ads: Architects were clearly not in demand. Cowed, I decided to wait, possibly forever.

The client was less discreet. He told his wife about my idea. Her excitement was lethal.

I was fired a week later, when I showed up 35 minutes late after having toiled till midnight the previous evening. My boss, a dreamy eyed hypocrite who had regarded me “like a son,” accused me of betraying him by trying to exploit our client for side work. He surely knew that was never my intention.

I wish I had pulled a Howard Roark and marched out, denouncing my profession for its immoral mediocrity. (Watch the Roark speech that Ayn Rand forced Hollywood to film in full when they shot The Fountainhead.) I can’t stand being falsely accused—it makes me crazy. My brother framed me for lots of his transgressions when we were kids, and my parents too often believed him.

I left my office quietly, in shock, and then had to fight my way through lies for months just to collect unemployment. I’ve been a lowly contractor ever since. When there’s work.

Day 120-6: Quickie Crusoe—My Crash Flu Cottage

Just in time, I’ve found and rented my haven, a bungalow in a hamlet about 100 minutes’ drive north of New York City. This place is rural with two capital Rs. Not even a stoplight. It makes my hometown seem trés cosmo.

Mark has been uncommonly useful. He’s handled sales and fed Sneeky while I’m away. Sometimes he helps me pack the car so I don’t get ticketed for double parking. It’s good to get along. I admired him a lot when we were young and he had answers for everything. (He still thinks he does, but it’s easier to fact-check them.)

After each trip, I return to an apartment full of empty beer bottles, smoldering ashtrays, and an iMac loaded with strange software. I can’t tell what the programs do and Mark is lax at explaining. (MacWorld is lush with bootleg programs.) I’ll figure them out in the backwoods, where I’ve arranged satellite broadband service, the best I can get in my chosen cow town. I need sleep.

Instead I just went to that bar I like for a public drink. The place was more subdued than when the yuppies attacked me. I recognized the drummer from the LES DIY and we shared a few rounds.

‘Bruno’ has a haunted demeanor—sunken eyes, deep cheekbones, a haggard grin—but he turns out to be a pretty funny refugee from Buffalo. He’d rather croak than hide from Round Two upstate, but he said this without judgment.

I was horrified to learn that Ric’s business has been failing. My friend hasn’t mentioned problems when I call him. Bruno thinks diners don’t want to eat there because they associate it with “that depressing old disease.” Has helping people cost Ric his dream?

Day 127-31: I Feel Fever Coming & It Ain’t Yellow

I’ve made three further trips upstate, reckon I’m half-resettled. I’ve transferred canned food, rustic clothes (read: too worn for Avenue D), tools, and utensils. I’ve stocked decontamination supplies and filled oil tanks and gas canisters. Foul weather gear and books and music and movies. Satellite service is up. Crusoe would envy me.

My home is taking on a desolate air. Sneeky’s comments have begun to echo. Nina doesn’t even write any more. I reckon she has settled into her job and her new yuppie friends. No need to dredge up confusion from our old life.

YELLOW FEVER: ANOTHER VIRUS THAT FOLLOWS ITS OWN RULESLast night I went to a club to watch a band of once-famous, ever-infamous East Village old-timers for whom Bruno plays drums. I stood in a packed basement full of wriggling hipsters coughing from what I presumed was too much smoke of one sort or another.

I was watching the group play a jolly, lilting—yet somehow nasty-sounding—song that goes something like “I don’t know me and you don’t know you/Maybe we both got reflecting to do/Let’s get started now….”

Suddenly I started feeling pandemic.

I could smell it through the fog of illicit tobacco. I heard it in the desperate throat clearing that rivaled the band’s roar. I saw it in wheezy dancing moves, jittery bloodshot eyes. I tasted it in my beer. The mug was open to every passing breath.

I fled that simmering, oozing, viral pit. This was a full-on premonition, not my customary logical conviction that disease is coming back. I felt I could touch it, that those people are doomed. As I may be, too.

I was all elbows, all the time, all the way home. Empty boxes greeted me like hungry hatchlings.

Tomorrow I’ll start transferring masks and gloves and goggles. Last will come the rest of the food, my stereo, and Sneeky.

I’m staying up too late, reading a novel I bought for a buck from a sidewalk vendor: Josh Russell’s Yellow Jack, about a revolutionary photographer who documents a series of yellow fever outbreaks in New Orleans in the 1840s. Those folks knew how to party during an epidemic. They even paid to have images taken of their beloveds’ corpses, dressed up with dolls, toys, books, and sabers.

It’s fascinating that Yellow Fever now occurs only in South America and Africa, even thought the Aedes aegypti mosquito that best spreads the virus is common in the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific. Another how-can-this-be viral moment, brought to you free—by nature.

Day 132: Swamped by the Flu’s Second Wave

I blew it, horribly—worse than you can imagine.

I hope you’re all safer and better prepared than I was when Wave 2 slammed New York. I’m stuck here indefinitely. A bunch of my goods got stolen in the panic. I have more.

Day 133: Going Nowhere, ASAP—Flu in NYC

Who’d have guessed the public would run amok at the first word that H5N1 is back?

Even as they joked about Swine Flu II, the masses must have been listening to us. Not that we convinced them to take any useful measures, but we evidently scared their daylights out. People responded with passionate denial until the news came yesterday that seven Brooklynites had caught viciously fatal cases of bird flu, with dozens more cases suspected.

GRIDLOCK WHEN NEW YORKERS FEEL HEALTHY & CALM As it happens, I was obliviously loading my rusty old VW Fox with protective gear. The sun was shining, the street quiet. I smiled at some kids and their scruffy dog. I packed so many boxes I couldn’t see much in the rear-view mirror.

Then I drove off without checking the Internet for news. I’ve been trying to be less compulsively informed lately and the radio in my car was stolen years ago. (I just sing Gene Clark’s Radio Song, about how every tune they play is about his lost love while he drives cross-country to find her.

Traffic was weird, intense. It thickened by the second and people were unusually hostile. They were yelling, gesticulating, honking, ignoring cops as they pressed through lights of any color. I’ve never seen worse gridlock, a deafening, throbbing muddle of sirens going nowhere.

In midtown I decided there must have been a terror attack—that the safest thing was to keep going and get the news at a gas station up north. When I saw people wearing masks, I put one on. Any kind of barrier might help against whatever, right?

It took three hours to cover 10 miles to Washington Heights. Access to the George Washington Bridge was frozen, as if it were closed. Unimaginable. Had someone blown it up? Emergency lights and sirens were fired up in all directions.

I opted to head north through the Bronx and Westchester, as did most everyone else.

The End of My Road

Somewhere above 190^th Street, near the bottom of a long hill, a Hummer pressed out of a side street and into my car. He tried to push me out of his way like a stray garbage can. He crushed my right front wheel, backed off, and inched away.

I got out to chase the behemoth, pen and pad in hand. He sat in the block ahead, revving his engine and bumping cars. His windows were smoked. I don’t think that’s legal here. I banged on his door. No response.

I headed to the Hummer’s rear to log the license plate. The side burst open and a fist slammed into my face. A hand snatched my notebook.

I looked back through broken goggles to see people pushing my vehicle out of the road. An old red van rammed my trunk, causing the Fox to lurch into a teenager. I think it broke his leg.

Next thing I saw was a younger kid running off with a box of my masks.

The crowd pushed my car to a bus stop and dispersed. The injured kid vanished. I still had no idea what had set the city off. My nose was bleeding.

I tried to call my insurance company for a free tow to a repair shop, but cell service was jammed. I know the New York Police Department wanted the power to shut down mobile phone service in the event of a terrorist attack. Whatever they did wasn’t quelling public anxiety.

No one would talk to me. They kept their windows rolled up. I closed mine, stood by the car door, hoping someone would pause to explain things.

The End of My Load

Instead three guys showed up with shopping carts and the youngster who’d stolen the masks. As they emptied my passenger compartment and trunk, they let me notice they were armed. No one directly threatened me. Nor did anyone grope for the wad of cash in my pocket. They pretended not to notice I was trembling. Does everyone do that when they’re being robbed?

A short man with a big head explained the furor as best he could: Bird flu was back, unstoppable. This he registered by flapping his hands and coughing with a fatal expression. He took pains to tell me they needed my gear for their families. “Todos para los niños,” he said, holding a box of children’s masks and taking snapshots of little ones out of his wallet.

He pointed to my cracked goggles questioningly, then to my gloves.

I pointed to the empty car and shrugged. I had packed it mostly with masks and some personal stuff, which they let me keep.

As if to prove his honesty and good faith, the man handed me an old taser. He frowned when he saw me wonder if it might be useful on the spot. He grinned when I put it away.

I had to get home by subway. I don’t remember making my way to the station. I was flat-out terrified—of people, the air, noises. I mostly rode between the cars, a crime here. I kept my eyes closed as clammy, sooty August air whipped around me in the tunnels.

I was in shock. If I made it home, I would be trapped there. My lungs were burning from disuse by the time I got my door open and gasped for air. I still haven’t eaten much.

Don’t worry—I have plentiful supplies to sell you. But no car, little money, and a refuge I can’t reach. We’ll all need better luck than I’ve had.