There’s nothing quite like a 10 year anniversary to remind you of just how old you are. I remember it like it was yesterday.
Getting day-drunk with my then gay best friend, we were sitting in Fraunces Tavern when the lights abruptly died. The tavern’s location itself is wrought with history and legacy, thereby making it the perfect place to be caught unexpectedly, during what I would soon learn to be the biggest public crisis of the city since 9/11. But we just kept drinking. The bartender assumed the power would eventually cut back on, so she kept a handwritten tab and kept serving. My friend and I looked at each other and grinned.
Five years prior we arrived for the Y2K New Year’s Eve. Perhaps it was the invincibility of our youth, or simply the general malaise of living elsewhere in a land not as thrillingly stimulating as Manhattan, but we figured if the world was going to end and shit was going down, we wanted to be smack dab in the middle of it … in Times Square … which was exactly the first and last time I ever spent New Years Eve in Times Square. The following fall, I moved to the city. A year later, I lived three blocks from my gay best friend when 9/11 happened. Luckily for us, the blackout turned out to be just another New York adventure, and yet, precisely why we reveled in the thrill of living in such an exciting place.
The lights never came back on at the bar. We busted out our — now antiquated — flip phones to call relatives with access to TVs and electricity. All circuits were busy for most people on the east coast, but luckily, I was able to reach my sister-in-law who was, at the time, in Oklahoma. She explained what she was hearing on the news. The restaurant realized the power wouldn’t be coming on anytime soon, so they began giving away all the food that would spoil. Shrimp cocktail it was, along with many more vodka cocktails. Perhaps the ghost of George Washington himself was in that tavern, nudging management to ease the pain of their miserably hot and irritable customers, passing out food and booze for free.
One thing was for certain: all eight million of us were in this together. In the scorching heat. And somehow, we all survived.
My gay best friend had been wanting to bed a neighbor he ran into at the tavern. He climbed 25 flights of stairs for that dick. I, on the other hand, had to find a way back to the upper east side, where, at the time I lived with the worst boyfriend of my relationship history. I went to the water taxis to see if I could find a way. Walking around the city in pitch black did not seem like a safe prospect. But there were no water taxis going to where I needed to be, and I was left standing there all alone as the sun began to set.
A nice man with grey hair in a suit overheard me asking the whereabouts of the water taxis’ destinations and had the courtesy to ask if I needed a ride. He looked harmless enough. His colleague shortly joined us. I soon learned they were part of the general counsel for TD Waterhouse, and had ordered a town car. They had to make it to Connecticut to their wives and kids, who were also without power.
Even though I knew better than to accept a ride from strangers, this was one time where I gladly made the exception and took the risk. I squeezed in the backseat with the two of them, before a third colleague of theirs jumped in the front seat. There were no stoplights, no street lights, no traffic cops, no rules for driving. There was only the hope that people are inherently good. There was only the great expectation that the people of this great city would behave civilly and respectfully toward their fellow-man, working to make it through the darkness together. We made it through 9/11, and we would make it through this too.
They dropped me off on FDR at 63rd Street. I walked in the darkness with adrenaline racing through my body. I could hear the sounds of people in the streets but saw no one. Every once in a while, I would see the spark of someone lighting a cigarette and catch the vague shadow of a tree or the outline of an arm. I followed the voices and my sense of direction. The fear made that walk feel like a decade. Eventually I found my way to First Avenue where glimmers of flashlights beamed through the air along with clouds and wafts of cigarette and pot smoke. Suddenly, I could see more than shadows and I was less and less petrified of the night.
Relief poured over me, along with drunken sweat, as I approached my building on 64th Street. Outside sat a group of my neighbors with candles lit, sharing wine, cheese, ice cream, and whatever other food they had. I couldn’t find my awful boyfriend anywhere, so I walked the five flights of stairs in the dark before feeling my key’s way into the door. I wandered through the maze of boxes packed up to move to our new downtown apartment the next day, the very neighborhood from which I’d just come. So this is what it feels like to be blind, I thought. My bengal cat heard me feeling my way around before I suddenly felt her soft fur weaving between my ankles, signaling for me to feed her. I went to my collection of match books, lit a candle, gave her some food and water, and splashed water on my face. I packed a grocery bag full of what food I had in the fridge, grabbed my guitar, and went back downstairs. We kumbaya’ed, ate, drank, and sang. It was the most fun I could have ever imagined having with that group of people from my building. There was the woman who lived at the end of the hall, whose boyfriend regularly beat her, sitting outside in what was likely, her first moment of peace in years. The carpenter who lived upstairs, never stopped playing Norah Jones while he hammered away at whatever project he was doing, finally found respite, resting his arms and hands. Somehow, the single pregnant lady who was literally about to pop any minute, miraculously made it down the stairs by herself to join us as we sat starving for a cool breeze. The lonely old lady with too much plastic surgery, and two little dogs that yapped all day long, shared two bottles of Dom Perignon with us. Amazingly, she — and her dogs — didn’t seem quite so atrocious anymore. Then there were the annoying obnoxious spoiled twin boys, sitting surprisingly quiet, still and listening, sometimes singing along as I played my guitar. It was this experience, in these moments, when we all felt equal; in which we were all the same. And we were all soothed and comforted knowing we had each other — in knowing we weren’t alone.
The power came back on the next morning around 9AM. That last night in my apartment turned out to be one of the most unforgettable nights I’ve ever had in the city, even while trying to sleep in pools of sweat with the windows open and mosquitos invading my bed.
But I made it. We all made it.
And we made it, together.
I love you, New York.
Do you remember where you were and what you did when the blackout happened?
