How to Be Alone : Essays

Inauguration Day, January 2001

A couple of Saturdays ago, lacking any better invitation, you might have got up at 5:30 and left your silk scarves and your cashmere coat in the closet, put on your beat-up Red Wings and several layers of old wool, and cabbed up to the Harlem State Office Building, on 125th Street, where twenty young socialists, a shoal of fellow-traveling Fordham students, and two stray Barnard seniors who’d been drinking all night at the Village Idiot were waiting for transportation to Washington.

The transportation, when it came, rather late, proved to be two antique yellow school buses. David Schmauch, a member of the Harlem branch of the International Socialist Organization, was in charge of the operation. Schmauch, who resembles a clean-shaven Kenneth Branagh, was wearing duck boots, a nylon parka, and a goofy stocking cap. He’d paid fifteen hundred dollars out of his own pocket for the buses, and he’d sold nowhere near fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of tickets. One contingent of sympathizers, he said, had backed out when it learned that the buses had no bathrooms. You might have been tempted to sneer at this objection, at the bourgeois primness of it, but after your very slow bus, slowed further by rain and fog, had made a bathroom stop at every service area along the New Jersey Turnpike — each stop dilating into cigarette break and extended snack opportunity — you might have wished, yourself, for a motor coach with self-contained amenities.

On the other hand, the more time you’d sat on a warm, dry bus reading your copy of the Socialist Worker, the less time you’d have had to stand in the mud at Stanton Square, behind the Supreme Court, where the only shelters were the dope-scented porta-potties and the plastic-shrouded gazebo from which warmup speakers for the Reverend A1 Sharpton were fishing for cheers in a sea of four or five thousand wet non-Republicans. Worse weather was imaginable: it could have been raining harder. If you’d lucked onto the slower bus and arrived very late, only your smaller fingers might have been frozen by the time Sharpton took charge of the mike and stirred you, against your will, with the brevity and force of his denunciations. There in the rain, among the wilting placards (“Hail to the Thief!” and “The People Have Spoken — All Five of Them”) and the rain-beaded lenses of Bertolt Brecht eyewear, you might even have warmed to Sharpton’s cheaper shots — his challenge to Dubya “to do more than get messy with Jesse,” for example, or his calculated stuttering of “Clarence T — Tom — Thomas.”

The crowd was all smiles as it formed a column and marched slowly up Maryland Avenue to surround the Supreme Court. If you’d been there, you might have been stirred by the ceaseless chanting of

Racist, sexist, anti-gay,

GEORGE BUSH, go away!

and

Hey, Dubya, what do you say—

How many votes did you steal today?

even if you didn’t actually believe that George Bush was a bigot or that he’d stolen any votes that day. Maybe, long ago, you felt similarly divided at high-school pep rallies. Maybe, although the cheerleaders in this crowd wore dreadlocks and leather pants and those burdensome-looking collections of buttons (those rosarylike skeins of explicit ideology), rather than letter sweaters and pleated skirts, you’d have once again found yourself simultaneously thrilled and repelled. But when the sidewalk surrounding the Supreme Court was fully occupied by drenched protesters, and the chant had shifted to a conga beat of

THIS is what democracy looks-like,

THAT is what hypocrisy looks-like

with hundreds of wet arms pointing at the Court on every shout of “THAT” your irritation with the self-congratulation of the THIS might have been swept away by a sudden, overpowering resentment of the THAT: the marble courthouse that loomed, silent, unlighted, unresponsive, behind a line of cops in riot helmets. You might have been glad you came down here.

But then, as the line moved on and you rounded the south-east corner of the Court, you might have had the deeply weird experience of seeing yourself seeing yourself. There, in the Florida House on the other side of Second Street, behind tall windows hung with patriotic bunting, were men and women waiting for the party to commence, wearing the kind of suits and shoes that you’d left at home, eating the kind of food that you’d eaten in restaurants almost every night the week before, drinking the eighty-proof kind of drink for which you were suddenly thirsting, and peering out with a mix of curiosity and fear and satisfaction at the sodden line of marchers of which you were at least somewhat, if only for a moment, and yet not entirely reluctantly, a living part.

The trip back took seven hours. The young socialists — an installer for Verizon, a bartender who was formerly a soccer star at Brown, a first-year schoolteacher — compared cell phones, read Marx in abridgment (“It saves reading three volumes of Capital for two years”), unanimously praised Friends, and split, along strict gay/straight lines, over the merits of Xena, Warrior Princess. Few pleasures compare with that of riding on a bus after dark, hours behind schedule, with people you violently agree with. But finally, inevitably, you get dumped back in the city. Rain is freezing on the ground, snow covering the slush. You may still be one version of yourself, the version from the bus, the younger and redder version, as long as you’re waiting for the subway and riding home. But then you peel off the thermal layers, still damp, of the long day’s costume, and you see a wholly different kind of costume hanging in your closet; and in the shower you’re naked and alone.

[2001]