Grynberg has a note

Dear Teacher, Friend, Relative, Larry and Bernie,
Wednesday, 18 August 2010 at 08:13

After I came home from last night's Yankees game (they won), I found I couldn't sleep a wink. This happened the night before, too, but I was sure the game would wear me out. It didn't. I got a headache listening to a bunch of wise-guys behind me trying to predict the Yankees team for next year and a bunch of reckless 30 somethings drinking beer and making inside jokes loudly and nearly pissing themselves. On the two hour ride home (the "N" is local after 10pm.) I was able to "blitz out" a little. God bless Mr. Bloomberg. Now I have so many more chances to be mugged and assaulted by homeless people who get on at stations like "City Hall." Why we are stopping in non-residential neighborhoods and going under the fetid tunnel to do it, I don't know. I thought you saved energy when you went directly from point to point, not stopped and started. Fortunately, there were lots of people on my train discussing sales loudly and keeping their children under the age of one up late on the ride home from grandma. The kinds of noises babies can make never cease to amaze me. This one sounded like an electric toothbrush running backwards. My poor mother kept me off the subways until I was 7 so that I might have normal hearing. Alas, it was all for nought.

There doesn't seem to be a week in my life in which there is not some major catastrophe about to befall me or my friends. This summer brought eviction notices (to friends), the threat of jail for missing jury duty too many times (friends), and the tenderhooks which come from caring for a cat who is sensitive to all kinds of stress and who resists by not eating. (Friend's cat. Larry and Bernie eat.) So, even when you jump away to the Church of Overpaid Athletes and surround yourself in the photos and memories of successes which make your parents, uncles -- all of your forebears -- dreamy-eyed, you can't really escape the tension. Then, of course, I forgot that I moved my medication schedule way up, so that it starts at 10pm. Completely impractical, but some of this tension contributed to this foolish decision. So, just as the game ended, the withdrawal started to kick in. The buzzing in the ears. The inability to complete a thought. The rage at my own stupidity. And for some reason, I get very thirsty.

I got a real deal on a huge bottle of water for one dollar.

But, then my friend wanted to explore for a while and my mind was turning into rabbit food, my feet beginning to swell and my back bend toward the ground. For some reason, I think people can see these symptoms, but since I'm already so short, have huge feet and bad posture, I guess it's only a matter of degrees. I had to insist we go home. Then I had to remember which train to take -- which stairs to go up or down on. There were a lot of MTA people in the station telling us what we already knew. I thought I heard the MTA person tell my friend to just go upstairs and take the four. I got confused and angry and my friend, rightly told me to back off. When we finally reached the train, our place in Yankees mythology now torn away from us, the grimness set back in. Medicine had to be got at the pharmacy. Inadequacies of the Vet bothered my friend and this brought back memories of the loss of my first godson-cat. An afternoon in which he was screaming for attention and it was hard to get it. I wasn't there because I was somewhere with Karen. If I'd've been there I could've kicked up a scene. I'm good at that. That was my job. Instead, my friend was trying to bridge the line between Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi Driver that is the Animal Medical Center and my godson cat collapsed in the process. We lost him the next morning.

I went home angry at myself, my friend, at the doctors and ugly with the feeling that I had let down my dearest friend -- and he was. My own cat Fred, I fear I over-reacted to so many times that it had much the same effect. I am much calmer with Larry and Bernie but they are brimming with health and stamina and curiosity. Where and who I will be when they are frail and desperate I don't know. I promise them the world, but I mean the Disney one. The real one is the color of breath on a late night in the subway. A faint grey, tinged with sweat and impropriety. After all, who cares what happens to the 40 or so people on the "N" after 10pm? If you run a train, slowly, through the ghost stops of the workday, clicking into the routines of the homeless, the desperate and the lonely, what kind of protection can you offer the few people coming home from a sale or a baseball game? If that baby were screaming for attention and the parents got out at Court Street, there would be hardly anyone on the street until they reached the small newsstand down Montague. If they called 911, they'd be taken to over-crowded and under-funded Brooklyn Hospital or to the smaller, but no less crowded Long Island College Hospital. Would the baby have collapsed by then?

All of this does not deflect from my role in the death of my godson-cat. No one can handle anyone's failing health alone. I should never have let his mother go alone without me. But I was on my way somewhere with Karen or was I on my way to work? Work at a school closed in directly inverse proportion to the amount of care that the staff put into it -- it was done quickly and silently with barely a trace. The school that replaced it is a land-mine, out of control and dangerous. The first day they opened a girl brought a knife. But the principal is married to someone involved in the creation of Transfer High Schools. So, despite the fact that there is shouting in the halls and souls are collapsing, it will keep going. I'm told a lot of the new schools are in this kind of disrepair. So everyday, some parent goes home on the subways, clammy with the knowledge that he/she was powerless to save his own child.

So, please forgive me. I didn't sleep last night. I would like to have done things today, but I have to try to sleep. On a night in 2007, after four nights of not sleeping too well, I made a very poor judgement call which nearly put my cats and me in jeopardy. I yelled at someone. I tried to cross through that chaotic barrier of unwillingness and resignation to certain death and say something. But, I was rude, and I was tired and I was crying. So I spent a year and three months in the DOE's Rubber Rooms deciding whether or not I was civilized enough to ever work with people again. I did this, knowing full-well that it was illegal to put a person with Aspeger's Syndrome in the Rubber Room on his/her first offense. As a disabled person, I was entitled to the least restrictive environment. But, I was hoping that the many people who were speaking up for me would make the case. At least, in the end, it got me out sooner and helped me negotiate a settlement. Because no successful person in this country has ever lost his/her temper in public. Not George Steinbrenner, not Billy Martin, not Thurmon Munson, not Lou Piniella, not Michael Bloomberg, not Bill or Hillary Clinton, not Ronald Reagan ("tear down that wall" is a polite request), not MacArthur and not Barack Obama. Never. Curt statements about human rights don't count -- they were done in the proper form. You can't have everyone over for beers. So long as you don't shout, don't cry or show emotions, you’re fine. There are no mediators in most places. And what we need most are mediators, especially if we are going to bridge political, social, emotional gaps and reach across the table between the neurotypical and non. They say Einstein probably had Asperger's Syndrome. He was given a lot of room for eccentricity and assisted in bringing his ideas to the world. If that hadn't happened, well, he'd of been the janitor in "Good Will Hunting," if he were so lucky. Probably not with that hair.

What about the founding fathers, the “Give me liberty or give me death," people, the notion of resisting oppression especially when it’s life threatening. “You gotta do what you gotta do.” You can’t run a country with everyone resisting every five minutes. Well, you could, actually, if people would just be open about what their agenda were from the start. Then you’d know either not to take your cats to that Vet or you could stage a more formal protest against decisions made for reasons. Arbitrariness invites secrets and the theories of luck and favor. Someone once told me it was a particular politician’s “time.” Jesse Jackson used to preach sermons about it being “Morning Time” – time for the country to wake up.
The reality is that time is on a 24 hour clock and it’s either time to go to work or it isn’t. There is no particular “time for a change.” There is a necessity for a change. If you tell someone at a job, “it’s time for a change” and walk away, they might just change the music or ignore you and wait for more specific instruction. If you say, “it’s necessary to make a change,” they can immediately ask of what and why? If you believe it’s “necessary,” you’ll be more convincing and more likely to succeed. No one is going to take care of that cat or baby because it’s time to do so – Mussolini ran the trains on schedule and it helped no one, plus, his example has caused most people to go the other way. Time is now, later or yesterday. And it’s in the moment. No need to call attention to it. People make “To do” lists not “To Time” lists. I’m belaboring the point. We create fake measurements of efficiency in this country by doing so in terms of time, which we then say equals money. In that case, we have no control over either. Time is just a way we refer to something out of our hands. The question is: “How well is this country taking care of its people?” That answer comes in how many are living, how they are living and how many are not living. It is reflected in the number of prescriptions for sleeping pills, tranquilizers and sales of alcohol. A generation Martini’d, tranquilized and otherwise drugged itself through the day. My generation has advanced to variations on our parent’s methods, including more intricate and varied drugs as well as Yoga, etc. It’s all not a very efficient way of trying to do one thing: get attention for a sick child, a sick cat or a loved one. We attenuate our feelings so that we can, as politely and non-offensively as possible, ask for what we think is very necessary and some people are gifted at mediating through this, some people are lucky enough to be provided with mediation. For the rest of, there are the hours of lurking in the slow moving train home, blocking out the noise and the knowledge that should anything happen to us, there’d be nothing we could do about it. And you wonder why Ipods sell so well?

Meanwhile cats and babies pass out everywhere.

I will find sleep eventually. I hope there is time later in the week for the things I have promised today. I am genuinely sorry.