9/11

Are you old enough to remember 9/11? I was in bed and literally paralyzed. I had pulled a back muscle while I was sleeping and so I could not move. I could not reach the phone to tell my boss that I needed a sick day. I could not get to the bathroom. By about three o’clock in the afternoon, I was finally able, painfully, to climb out of bed. It took me several minutes to walk the eight or ten feet to my computer. I opened Outlook to send a message to the programmers that I would not be able to run the show that evening. The first thing I saw was a message from the programmers saying that, in light of the day’s unspeakable events, the show that night was canceled. What on earth were they talking about? I checked the day’s news, and I was mortified.

Two out-of-state friends, unknown to each other, phoned to tell me to leave New York State immediately and to get as far away as possible, else I would be murdered. Now, I had lived in my neighborhood for several years, and I liked it. When I walked to and from shopping, the neighbors would say Hi, and their kids would all wave and say Hi, and I liked it. A day or two after 9/11, when I was barely able to walk again, I noticed something new, and it was as stupid as a scene from the worst possible movie. The neighbors would all scowl at me, and whenever I walked down the street to do my shopping, the kids, all of them, got a look of fear on their faces and they dashed inside their homes and slammed the doors. If you were to tell me that that had happened to you, I would not have believed you. Yet it happened to me. Totally clichéd, but it happened. And it kept on happening, for the next year. It was not until then that I noticed that my neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods were nearly 100% white. I had never thought about it before. I did not know that the neighbors had called the cops, but, hey, the neighbors had indeed called the cops. The cops took their time to answer that call. The cops took a whole year to respond to their call.

It was Tuesday morning, 3 September 2002. I was driving to work when, yet again, I heard a siren and saw the perennial flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. This happened all the time. Every month or two I would be pulled over. After almost sixteen years, I was used to it. This time it was a bit different, though, because I was aware that there was no car in my rear-view mirror. As recently as two seconds before the siren, there had not been any traffic behind me. That cop had been lying in wait. The cop told me that a tail light had burned out, and so he told me to follow him back to Police HQ. He let me use my Sprint PCS to phone the office to say that I would be late, but he would not permit me to say why. I was taken to an interrogation. In front of me, behind his desk, was the police captain, to his left was a police inspector, and behind me, to prevent an escape, was the cop who had apprehended me. They wanted confessions. Have you ever been confused? I mean, like, totally, absolutely confused? They drove me to my apartment and, while the captain and the inspector were careful not to break things, the same could not be said of the officer, who ransacked the place. The investigator demanded to know why I had “Nazi porn” (whatever that is) on my computer and why I had BDSM paraphernalia. I had no such things, but he insisted that I did. “Show them to me,” I requested. He growled, “I don’t have to show you anything!” After about an hour, during which time they confiscated numerous items, the captain called off the search, because he finally found what he had been looking for: my binder of correspondence with my lawyer regarding the Defamation Cinema. The cops let me go, promising that they would “build a case” against me and return the following Monday to arrest me.

That confused me even more. What policeman would tell a suspect that he would return six days hence to make an arrest? Why did the cops say that? It took me a while to figure that out. They said that to me because they knew that when I repeated what they had said, nobody would believe me, because the story was too preposterous. Everyone would conclude that I had lost my mind. I called the film programmers, who ordered me to drive to their house right away, because their daughter was a lawyer, and she would take my case. I was even more confused, and I had not known that they had a daughter, and I had certainly not known that she was a lawyer. The daughter/lawyer heard my story, which I did not so much summarize as replay in its entirety, and when I was done with my lengthy re-enactment, and when she was done taking her notes, she went silent for a few moments, looked straight at me, and told me I was an idiot. I took no offense at her remark. She gave me some advice that was not specifically for me, but for everybody, and she was surprised/shocked that I did not know it already: Never never never never NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER talk to the police. NEVER answer any questions. NEVER let them inside your apartment. She explained to me that police have no interest in crime. The sole interest of the police is getting people arrested, and guilt or innocence is entirely irrelevant. Innocence is never a defense. If, for some reason, the police are unable to arrest the person they were after, then that person becomes the policemen’s new playtoy, and the harassment will be never-ending and it will be dangerous. Solution: MOVE. Immediately. If you don’t move, she said, there would never be an end to the problems. She was right. As I learned just a day or so later, the police had gone around to all the neighbors to repeat the Defamation Cinema’s stories about me. The neighbors literally wanted me dead.

Out of worry, I sent an email to Cher, telling her that I had just had an encounter with the cops, and that she might be questioned as well. After all, she was a witness to the defamations at the Defamation Cinema, and so she could conceivably be questioned or called as a witness should this case ever go to court. She never responded. Ever. She cut me off entirely. The lawyer convinced the cops to drop all charges and to drop the investigation entirely. At exactly the same time, some extremely illegal things happened at the office at my day job, and nobody noticed that I was just one room over and witnessed everything. I was not made into the fall guy, but the effect was no different, and I was in tons of trouble. I sent Cher another email warning, telling her that I was in trouble again, and that if anybody were to question her, could she please reach out to me first? No response.

So I moved. There was a problem with moving. The newspapers were filled with endless ads for “Apartment for Rent,” and I spent days calling those numbers. No response. None. Nobody wanted to talk to me. Except for one. One landlord responded, and so I dashed on over, only to walk into one of the dumpiest, smelliest, filthiest places I’ve ever seen in my life. I couldn’t stomach it, especially not that horrid stale smell of fried pork grease that permeated the walls. There was an advantage to being a pariah: Several people begrudgingly allowed me to live with them rent-free. That allowed me to start saving money. Unfortunately, I had no space to store half of my possessions, and so I tossed them into a dumpster. That hurt.

After that experience, I decided that I do not like the police, any of them, at all, no matter what. I had had minor problems with the police for sixteen years, for the crimes of driving while not lily white or for walking to the grocery store while not lily white. Whether driving or walking, they would pull me over every month or two. Nonetheless, those were the “bad apples,” I thought. Most of them were okay, and I admired them; I was glad they were doing their jobs. Not anymore. I do not like cops. Period. Full stop. End of story.