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key hostage situation
Wednesday, April 3 2002
This morning in bed Gretchen and I were joking around about various things and I came up with an description in search of a thing to be described. It was "Putting the sin and God back in 'synagogue'." The best application of this description, for the time being, will be the fashionable "Pop-Kabbala" movement in Los Angeles, a movement that has attracted such luminaries as Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell. Last year when Gretchen visited me in LA, Kabbala was still riding a wave of hipness, and even Gretchen's aunt had signed on. But you can always tell that a craze is running out of gas when middle-aged aunties start joining. (Housewives buying dotcom stocks should have been the first sign of the imminent dotcom implosion.) Gretchen tells me that LA's Kabbala temple actually charges $36 for its oneg (post-service snack). Most Jews would consider charging for the oneg tres gauche.
The weather was so lavishly beautiful today that Gretchen and I decided to go visit the little zoo in Prospect Park. It's an inconspicuous zoo adjacent to Sally's normal morning walking path through the Vale of Cashmere. The only evidence I've had of its existence was the tinny crowing of bantam roosters, and one can't expect much of a zoo whose most prominent feature is miniaturized farm animals. But Gretchen insisted the zoo had sea lions and everything.
We showed up at the 2:00pm feeding time of the zoo's two sea lions, who swim around in a smallish pond in the very center of the zoo's main courtyard. The sea lions had to work for their grub, performing tricks like waving their flippers, climbing around on a rocky island, diving from various heights, and doing things with a red rubber ball. As I watched the sea lions wolfing down silvery fish and pink rubbery squids, I found myself developing a craving for sardines. If they'd sold them in the canteen, I'm sure they would have been a popular item.
Most of the people there to witness the sea lion feeding appeared to be elementary school children, most of them about six years old and black. They jostled each other trying to improve their respective views, paying little attention to the finer points of social protocol. So their adult guardians maintained a constant barrage of admonishments, some of them spiced up with threats such as "Ima have to smack you!" Every time the sea lions dove into the water, all the children cheered in a cacophony of grating shrieks.
Around back, we walked down a trail past genuine Australian wallabies and over a boardwalk above turtles and bullfrogs sunning themselves. Somewhere along this trail there was an activity where children could measure their jump against the leaps of various animals. A little white girl kept leaping the distance of a grasshopper and immediately returning to leap again, oblivious to the line of children behind her. This did nothing to alter Gretchen's impression of children, particularly spoiled white kids. "Anytime I see someone with that sense of entitlement, I'm just disgusted," she said.
Further down the trail I drew Gretchen's attention to a piece of matzos someone had dropped. "You know you're in a Jewish area when there's matzos litter," Gretchen later observed.
Today's unusual early April heat wave ended when rain started falling, and everyone visiting the zoo retreated to the indoor exhibits.
We stood for a long time looking at the baboons, mesmerized by their humanlike behavior. One of the females, though, had a grotesquely swollen rump and I wondered what fluid was in there making it stick out so far. Could that really be comfortable to sit on? Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't repulsive to the gentleman baboons.
Soon the rain stopped and we went through the part of the zoo nearest to the Vale of Cashmere, the part featuring miniaturized farm animals. Cows, goats, and chickens aren't exactly exotic to me, but to the city kids who visit, they're as odd as emus and capybaras. The difference, though, is that they're allowed to reach across the fence and pet the farm animals, something that many of the city kids seemed reluctant to do, especially with a critter as big as an angus cow. What with their fat round bodies, short legs, matter-of-fact expressions, big eyes, and long eyelashes, the miniature goats seemed like animatronic fabrications.
Today it became clear that Gretchen and I are facing another neighbor problem in our brownstone, this time with a woman named Jane who lives directly above us. Just so we're all on the same page with her, I'll give a little backstory on the history of her relationship with Gretchen.
Two and half years ago, Jane was secretary of the co-op, though the minutes she kept of co-op meetings had the skewed and rambling qualities suggestive of a psychotic personality. For example, in one set of minutes Jane reportedly compared those who either don't go to meetings or who do go but don't voice their opinions to people who are silent in the face of child abuse. So the co-op president at the time, a woman named Gail, proposed that Jane resign, a motion that Gretchen seconded. This motion was approved and Jane never went to another co-op meeting again. This benefited everyone else, since Jane's Dan Re!tmanesque rhetorical style and obsession with keeping the bylaws had had a constipating effect on co-op meetings in the past. Nevertheless, Jane stayed in the co-op and there was something new and frightening about her personality, especially with regard to those she felt had betrayed her at her last meeting as secretary. Gretchen and then-girlfriend Barbara were so frightened of Jane that, for a time, they avoided going into the hallway if there was any chance that Jane might be there. Their fears weren't just about scowls and grumbles in the hallway; there was also the time that Jane filled her apartment with gas in an apparent suicide attempt.
More recently, about six months ago, Jane actually confronted Gretchen in the hall about grievances remaining from those times. For the most part, though, it's easy to forget one lives among psychos in the brownstone. Usually their psychoses don't manifest in shared space.
But then the other day, Gretchen accidentally left her keys out in the lobby while jockeying her bicycle into position. She didn't realize she'd lost her keys until later, and by the time she checked the hallway, they were gone. Two days passed and then someone put a sign out in the hallway saying, in large block letters, that keys had been found and that if anyone wanted to retrieve these keys, they should call a certain phone number. So Gretchen called the number and reached Jane's answering machine. It stood to reason that the person who had taken the keys would be Jane, since any normal person would have simply left the keys where they were to be picked up by their rightful owner.
A day passed, and Jane still hadn't returned Gretchen's keys. So she left a nice note on Jane's door with an envelope suggesting that she return the keys in the envelope provided. As of tonight, however, the keys had yet to be returned. We came to realize that Jane was actually holding them hostage. It wasn't a big deal, since Gretchen has a spare set, but we're interested in seeing how this story unfolds.
One quickly comes to realize how rich our society is in psychotics and unbalanced people when one deals with one's neighbors, since (in general) neighbors represent a random sampling of the population. If one should find oneself without psychotic neighbors, one should count himself very lucky indeed. My parents, just by way of example, have been shot at (you know, with firearms) by no less than three of their neighbors in the past.
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