We were very tired, we were very merry –
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
To fight droughts, mayors try with varying degrees of success to get New Yorkers to use less water. During one protracted dry spell a frustrated Mayor Bloomberg attempted to make it illegal to wash vehicles, sidewalks, and driveways. Most famously, Mayor Koch endeavored to limit toilet flushing during a 1980s drought with the ditty, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down!” But then he had a flair for publicity. It was said that if they could keep a camera on Mayor Koch in the operating room he would never die.
Flu is the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. But most New Yorkers who eat out regularly contract food poisoning at least once a year. The old saw goes, “Never eat seafood in a month without an R in it.” However, my mother the nurse likes to raise the bar by saying, “Don’t eat seafood unless you can see the body of water it came from out the restaurant window.”
What happens when single people without relatives nearby or health insurance fall ill? That’s where Chinese restaurants come in handy. The patient simply orders white rice, egg drop soup, and plain
steamed chicken off the diet section of the menu, and ginger ale. No one on a diet orders from the diet menu in Chinese restaurants. It’s
just a euphemism for “deathly ill and housebound.” Miso soup and edamame from the Japanese restaurant are also good medicine, but steer clear of the wasabi, which is Japanese for “put the toilet paper in the fridge.”
Cockroaches are known to carry a number of disease-causing bacteria including salmonella and streptococcus, in addition to being a source of asthma and allergies, especially in children. I never saw what’s known as a “common cockroach” until I moved to New York City. Western New York’s official scary bug is the silverfish, a wingless silvery-gray insect that likes to slither out from underneath cans when you least expect it. New Yorkers don’t complain about roaches. The roaches were here before us and they’ll be here after us just like the dedicated perfume sprayers at Bloomingdale’s. We’re used to putting everything in the fridge, from cereal boxes and crackers to candy and chips. The American cockroach, which New Yorkers call a “water bug” in order to distinguish between the two in all our vermin stories, looks like a common cockroach on steroids, and no matter how many times I see one and remind myself it’s not an attack animal, it scares the bejesus out of me.
New York no longer gets hit by plagues, but it still has plenty of rats and mice. There’s a reason every store keeps a cat in the basement. Bodega and deli owners would rather clean a litter box and be fined by the Health Department than have their entire inventory gnawed and consumed without payment.
Chapter 19
Tails of New York
After his handling of 9/11, Rudy Giuliani is probably best known for making the fur fly over pet ferrets by banning them as a health threat. He made it clear that ferret enthusiasts (or “people obsessed with weasels” in his words) should get help because it’s “a sickness.” If anything suspicious ever befalls him the investigation will surely start in the shadowy subterranean world of contraband ferrets, which are allowed in New York State but outlawed in New York City. Oddly, keeping chickens, bees, and pigeons is perfectly legal in all five boroughs.
Pigeons are famously the bane and mascot of New York City. They arrived with the colonists in the 1600s and likewise succeeded in putting down roots and flourishing. There have been pigeon supporters and pigeon detractors ever since. Pigeon raisers, racers, feeders, and rescuers are constantly pitted against pigeon relocators, cullers, sterilizers, and eaters. Building owners erect owl statues, netting, and metal spikes to keep these resilient birds from fouling public spaces. The Metropolitan Transit Authority has tried zapping pigeons with electrical wire, not enough to kill them, but enough to keep them from spattering outdoor subway stations. Pigeons appear to be with us for the long haul, despite the rumor that you never see any baby pigeons. They do not spring to life fully formed, but are very clever at hiding their young, notwithstanding what appears to be a lazy lifestyle of drunkenly weaving through traffic to forage for pizza crusts, French fries, and bagel crumbs. As for the romantic notion that pigeons mate for life, some do,
but like most New Yorkers, they tend to stay together until one finds a better mate. Being an urban pigeon is no walk in the park.
It turns out that it’s not just the coupling and uncoupling of New York young people that makes for popular story fodder. And Tango Makes Three is a 2005 children’s book based on the romance between two male chinstrap penguins living in the Central Park Zoo. Roy and Silo were behaving as a couple, made a nest together, and attempted to hatch a rock. When a male-female couple produced two eggs and couldn’t care for both, zookeepers gave one to Roy and Silo. The female chick was named “Tango.” However, the book relating this story was immediately controversial because Tango had two daddies, and numerous attempts have been made to ban it from bookshelves. Conservatives may not have succeeded in their censorship campaign, but they were surely delighted when Silo was hit with the six-year itch and took up with a female from the West Coast named Scrappy. This sudden change in partners “rocked the gay world,” reported influential commentator Andrew Sullivan.
Further exotica is in the air with the thousand or so monk parakeets that have built colonies throughout the five boroughs. The ancestors of these birds were imported to JFK Airport in crates from South America in order to become pets, but they skipped immigration altogether. Like most things in New York, these upstarts are both loved and loathed. Some residents adore their vibrant colors and cheerful chirping, while others have classified them as a nuisance since they build nests around heat-emitting transformers atop utility poles, which then catch fire. You can probably guess on which side of this debate Con Edison falls.
Petworking: When your social circle and work opportunities come almost entirely from the people you’ve met through your “animal companions.” Despite the fact that locals love to complain, fewer than one in five New Yorkers vote, compared to more than half of the folk in the rest of New York State and slightly under half in the rest of the country. However, one in three owns a pet.
Then there are the less common animals that are more common than you might think in our urban jungle. Elusive coyotes and swoop
ing red-tailed hawks have taken up residence in Central Park. Zelda, the wild turkey named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, blithely struts about Battery Park uncooked, occasionally visiting TriBeCa and Greenwich Village. A poisonous Egyptian cobra that may or may not have escaped from the Bronx Zoo managed to keep up a weeklong Twitter feed about her adventures. A three-foot corn snake popped up in a Bronx man’s nineteenth-floor apartment. Four intrepid Brooklyn women found a python in their home, packed it up in a pillowcase, hopped on the G train, and delivered it to an animal rescue center. Around the holidays it’s possible to see the three camels that star (as themselves) in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular walking down 51st Street.
Then there was the 500-pound tiger kept as a pet in a tiny Harlem high-rise apartment that turned on its owner, Antoine Yates. Yates checked into a hospital saying that he’d been attacked by a pit bull. Animal Control was sent for the tiger while Yates was convicted of keeping dangerous animals in the city and given a prison term. Yates commented: “Ironically we were both placed in cages for the first time.” After serving five months in jail, Yates sued New York City and Police Department for searching his home without a warrant, the loss of his pets, and $7,000 he claimed had been stolen. U.S. District judge Sidney Stein dismissed the case saying that Yates was full of chutzpah.
That alligators dwell in the sewers is a popular urban legend, along with buried treasure on Liberty Island and a ghost ship on the Hudson River. Except that alligators have been found in city sewers and storm drains. A two-foot caiman (a species of crocodile) played hide-and-seek with pursuers for a week in Central Par
k in 2001 until alligator wranglers were brought up from Florida. The parks commissioner designated the reptile “Damon the Caiman.” A four-foot crocodile was found wandering around a Queens park in 2003 but wisely turned himself in to the responding police officers. It’s possible to view and photograph a subterranean gator at the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue subway station where a fanciful bronze sculpture by Tom Otterness depicts an alligator emerging from a manhole cover and biting the backside of a person with a money-bag head. (That urban myth
out of the way, I’ve never seen anyone fry an egg on the sidewalk, even during the worst heat wave.)
Like most urban dwellers, New Yorkers gravitate toward cats and dogs when it comes to house pets. Even if pet owners see one another in the park every day they tend to call each other after the pet, for example, Penny’s mom or Buber’s dad. On the Upper West Side in the 1980s I knew a golden retriever named Freud, a Collie named Manic, a high-strung Yorkie called Schizo, a teacup poodle named Crackers, and a tabby cat called Tofu.
New Yorkers tend to have pets instead of kids. Space is limited and it’s perfectly legal to sell or give away the offspring of your dog or cat. As a result, lots of businesses have sprung up to pamper these beloved pooches and pussycats. There’s doggy daycare, clothing boutiques, pet-icures, holiday photos, Zen classes, and party planners who will throw a splendid Bark Mitzvah. Prospect Park in Brooklyn is home to Dog Beach, where pups of all breeds and sizes can frolic together and perfect their doggy paddle. On the medical front you can get hydrotherapy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and of course psychotherapy. Then there’s dog yoga, which is called (what else?) doga. Let’s just say that no one here was surprised when New York businesswoman Leona Helmsley left $12 million to her Maltese named Trouble, which handlers were always supposed to refer to as “Princess” rather than “the dog.”
One study says that two out of three New Yorkers talk to their pets over the phone. If all the pets in New York find out they’re adopted on the same day the crisis hotlines will be overflowing. Don’t get me wrong, I love animals and have four dogs of my own. However, I think one has to accept the fact that they’re a mixed bag. If I pass out in the apartment they’ll bark and whine for help, and perhaps the spaniel will try the phone. But after a few days they’ll eat me.
The professional dog walker leading a pack of sixteen or so canines to a park is another must-get NYC photo, complete with Labrador retrievers (who already have waterproof coats) dressed in Gucci rain gear. Although you may want to wait until winter when the Pugz (Ugg boots for dogs) come out. Interestingly, I’ve heard
more than one person comment that the dog walkers look happier than the nannies.
New York seems to be the capital of the three-legged dog. I guess the prevailing attitude is that if we can tough it out in this city on two legs, our pets can certainly manage on three.
Chapter 20
Wall Street Bull
What’s known as the Battery at the tip of Manhattan is named for the artillery batteries there that protected the original trading post. This is where Homeland Security originated in the 1600s. The construction of the Battery was followed by the building of a wall by Dutch settlers to protect against a British invasion and attacks by Native Americans, the outline of which is now Wall Street. After the English prevailed, the inhabitants began moving their residences northward in large numbers while continuing to do business in what would become known as downtown Manhattan, and eventually the financial center of the country.
Why did I decide to go to Wall Street in the early 1980s? It was true I had no money, but stocks were still in the doldrums and it didn’t appear to be a place of opportunity. What intrigued me about the markets was probability. As an only child and an only grandchild with no cousins, my mother, father, aunt, and uncle played poker at family gatherings. Even when I was five years old they had no interest in Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, or I Spy. So I was perched atop a couple of phone books dealing seven-card stud at midnight calling, “One-eyed jacks are wild” and telling the person to my right to “cut ’em thin and win” or “slice ’em deep and weep.” Had I offered the cut to the person on my left they would’ve screamed at me since you never give the first card to the person who cut the deck, and poker is dealt left to right. In other words, those vultures didn’t give me any breaks for not yet having
started first grade. And we played for money. My piggy bank could empty or fill with enough for a new tricycle in one night of cards.
In no time I became intrigued by other games of strategy and probability such as chess, backgammon, and blackjack. By middle school I was riding my bicycle over the Peace Bridge to the Fort Erie Race Track in Canada and handicapping the horses. It was hard to pay attention to math lessons in school, but when the objective was winning a game or betting to make money it turned out I could compute probabilities in my head all day long. Games of probability (as opposed to chance) meant taking a bunch of facts and determining what was the most likely outcome in any given situation. So when I first read about stock options, they were no different to me than all the other games I loved, only on Wall Street I wouldn’t have to sit inside a smoky casino and worry about getting thrown out for counting cards, which is perfectly legal but frowned upon, especially by the burly men who were threatening to kick me out.
Much like the sitcom Will & Grace is credited with helping to recognize the equality of same-sex marriage, the sitcom Family Ties presaged the great bull market of the 1980s. The family’s oldest child, Alex P. Keaton, played by Michael J. Fox, rejected his parents’ hippiedom with quotes like, “People who have money don’t need people.” And no one summed up the decade’s confluence of racism, classism, politics, and greed better than Tom Wolfe in his 1987 Bonfire of the Vanities. Meantime, the movie Wall Street had its chief market manipulator Gordon Gekko famously declare that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Jerry Sterner’s play Other People’s Money featured a successful corporate raider called “Larry the Liquidator,” who becomes rich gobbling up companies and selling off their assets by using a computer stock-analyzing program.
The bull began a big run when the galloping inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s subsided and economic growth returned. The real estate and stock markets soared, along with employment, and when interest rates declined there was easy lending. Every financially struggling individual was suddenly preapproved for a dozen credit cards. In short, the cliffs and canyons of Wall Street became the site of a mod
ern-day gold rush with the prospect of easy money pulsating in the air like Michael Jackson’s hit song “Beat It.”
While New York’s homeless population went unchecked, a class of nouveau riche sprang up wearing designer clothes, driving imported cars, bidding up artwork, and attending $1,000-a-plate fundraisers. These impetuous young entrepreneurs and extravagant consumers so defined the new era that Newsweek magazine declared 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie.” (The inevitable backlash, much of which was aimed at those engaged in neighborhood gentrification, would involve “Die Yuppie Scum” T-shirts, protest signs, and graffiti.)
Big egos emerged to go along with the gold collar pins propping up wide red ties, Mabe pearl earrings, and pointy-toed shoes with spiky colored heels. Real estate prices skyrocketed. New York State’s first “parking garage car condominium” opened up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with spots selling for $29,000 in addition to a monthly maintenance fee of $142.66. New York suddenly exemplified the tale of two cities, with street people sleeping in the doorways of multimillion-dollar Park Avenue penthouses. Unlike the gated communities and exclusive enclaves typically inhabited by suburban financiers and socialites, in New York City splendor and squalor have a history of presenting themselves side by side. Legions of homeless people were occupying the Financial District’s Zuccotti Park, formerly called Liberty Plaza Park, long before the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
An endless game of cat and mouse emerged between insider traders and law enforcement that w
ould result in more than a few prison terms and political careers. Most notably, federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani on his path to becoming mayor of New York City (1994–2001) popularized the perp walk for white-collar criminals such as Ivan Boesky (the real-life model for Gordon Gekko) and Junk Bond King Michael Milken. Giuliani’s trajectory is even more remarkable when you consider that his father served time in the maximum-security prison Sing Sing for assault and robbery.
I began my Wall Street career in January of 1984, which, unbeknownst to me, just happened to be the beginning of the biggest bull market in history. It was a time when middle-class individuals start
ed investing in stocks, an arena that had largely been the preserve of people with family fortunes or else high incomes. This would spawn numerous TV shows and even entire networks devoted to the markets. It was also go time for M&A mavens, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, arbitrageurs, corporate raiders, entrepreneurs, and, as it would turn out, more than a few Ponzi scheme operators. My company made a primary market in what are called derivative products. In our case this meant options based on a basket of stocks (or index) that had a high correlation with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. So it was necessary to determine which way the entire market was headed from moment to moment and protect (hedge) our positions by trading other derivative products.
Life in New York Page 14