bikes and bridges

by Craig

Friday, 9/13/02
Fuck, I just got robbed on the Williamsburg bridge. I was stupid, I shouldn’t have ridden over it alone, the trip to Luxx I totally thought about that, about how I should take the L train home then bike from 14th street, but I was all tired and distracted by the boy I’d met and then just as I got to the part where the bridge levels off this dude steps right into my way and points a gun at me. I hit the brakes, destroying one of the pads and my quick release front wheel pops off. Just like me to get mugged in a totally ridiculous way. So I just hand him my wallet, but he says to take the cash out so I give him the 40 bucks that I was so proud to have not spent this week of trying to budget. But anyhow I got to keep my ID and credit cards and he thought my keys were a cell phone but I told him I didn’t have one. So then he says he doesn’t want to do this but he needs to eat and I say I understand, and I’m struggling to get the tire on and can’t so I ask him to hold my bike steady and he does. I can’t get the tire on. Then another biker comes by and he whips out the gun and yells at them but they keep going and he grabs the tire and bike and I’m like “It won’t go” and he says “I’ll make it” and I realize what’s happening and I start pleading, “Dude please don’t take my bike you don’t know what this bike means to me” and he can’t get the tire on and freaks and pulls the gun on me again and is like cocking it or something. He wants me to leave the bike and go but I take the bike and the wheel and walk backwards, asking him to chill. He runs off, I encounter more bikers, tell them, eventually I get the tire on, the one brake pad is destroyed, I ride home.

The bikers I ran into after the incident all had cell phones, and they all wanted to call the police. I had no moisture left in my mouth so talking was difficult, but I’m not sure I would have been able to explain in that moment why I didn’t want to call the cops. Who deserves to go to jail? Who doesn’t deserve the money they need to live? I just said I didn’t want to and left them in a huddle to decide whether they’d bike on or turn around. And how to explain the sadness that overcame me these past few days? I feel so sad for the guy who robbed me, I keep thinking about him waiting anxiously in the middle of this bridge suspended over water, with a gun he seemed barely able to handle, waiting to rob people and apologize to them. I hope he got away, I hope he doesn’t get hurt. I feel sad because I walk around the city and everyone I see seems marked by the violence of poverty, and I wonder who will get hurt, who will hurt themselves.

Sunday, 9/15/02
I know I shouldn’t be drinking but I’ve reached that level of depression in which I want to do dumb things that will make me feel worse – drink beer and listen to mournful Cat Power songs again and again. This is bloodletting or really a purge through indulgence – force myself into a messier, sadder state to get these poisoned feelings out of my system. I woke up with a start twice on Saturday morning, both times the moment of waking up a moment of thinking of – not remembering –what had happened, like I’d never paused to sleep, had never stopped thinking about it. The past two days I’ve felt incredibly sad: heavy and distracted, listless and tired. I spent yesterday at Ananya’s with her and Jeff, then we all went and read in Tompkins Square park but mostly I lay on my back, eyes closed, spaced out. Today I met up with KayCee, we studied at the Hungarian Pastry shop, I cut her hair, met Dean and Amy for dinner at the house. Yesterday I had a long wonderful chat with Katie, we gossiped about our lives and told funny stories. Also Dad called today to check up on me, which was nice.

It’s weird to have this really overdetermined, even trite, experience (“Faggot mugged in New York City!”) and have the available narratives feel so empty. A commitment to an abolishment of prisons and police, a commitment to social justice and anti-poverty work, means narrating our own encounters with violence and “crime” as counter-narratives, understanding that, though it felt scary and shitty, there is nothing wrong with robbing people. What’s wrong are the conditions of poverty and structures of alienation that produce desperation and hunger and violence.

I added my my personal journal entries to this dispatch to balance out what might seem like the cold reserve of my politics. I’m not a robot, and though my writings might unfortunately often sound dogmatic, I hope for a politics that won’t deny emotions, but will engage them. My affective responses have been, I think, what most anyone’s would be – upset and frightened – but I hope I can mobilize these feelings to upend the stagnant response of vengeance and punishment and keep my politics moving towards radical goals.

And I wanted to write this because I know I’m part of a demographic that reads Make: twentysomething white professional class people who have moved from the suburbs to the city. And in our social lives we construct stories about our encounters with a surprising urbanity, stories that can assist or interrupt racist, anti-poor politics of gentrification, or what a fellow tenant organizer calls “socio-economic cleansing.” I’m sure some people will read this and think that I'm just a naive rich white boy, and what happened to me is nothing. And I would nod and agree – my race and class protect me from exactly these experiences; and in the scheme of the world, this is nothing. I certainly expect that the person who robbed me lives a life so much harder and scarier than my own, and I know that throughout the city live people for whom guns have become mundane – the guns of cops, of family members, of strangers. But this is my life, it’s what I’ve got, and I think that something productive can come from these experiences of “waking up,” experiences that in my case interrupt the race and class privileges that ease through my days. Such moments can be used not to turn inward in self-pity and liberal individualism, but can be refracted out into the world. I’m reminded of what Arundhati Roy said in a talk I’d gone to earlier that night, in response to New Yorkers’ mourning after last September: “Welcome to the world.” And the remark was not meant to chastise or belittle the grief of people “waking up” to the reality of warfare that other people know too well. Rather, it was a sincere invitation, an opening up of empathic politics that resists the polarization and demonization of a “war on terrorism,” or in this case, a “war on crime.” Roy writes:

It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. . . .

America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own.