Times Square was in bloom: the Naked Cowboy, tighty whities coy behind his guitar, strummed in front of the Recruiting Office’s giant neon stars-and-stripes. Cops on horseback stood in file before Aeropostal, guarding a half-dressed model on the big monitor. Elmo hurled epithets at a tourist. Smurfette took a call on her cell. Two identical Woody-the-Cowboys competed for tips, as a Coke bottle competed with anthropomorphic M&Ms above them for facetime on block-long screens.

It was the ultimate commercial takeover of the heart of the city; the domination of Blade Runner via Disney fever dream.

The line to the polka-dotted van stretched back to the red stairs near the half-price ticket booth. “I’m gonna take mine home,” the young man in front of me said. “Why not? I’m only here because of her.” He nodded at his girlfriend.

She grinned. “I’m not taking mine anywhere. I want to see it there.” She pointed at the plaza beyond the van, where two guys with buckets and brushes stepped over a checkerboard of faces.

I, too, looked forward to seeing my face walked on in Times Square—or, rather, a three-by-five-foot black-and-white poster of my face, one of hundreds pasted to the pavement as part of the InsideOut Project.

**

I started on my path to this line a few weeks before, when I watched a documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival titled Inside Out: The People’s Art Project. It introduced me to the work of JR, a wiry, bearded 30-year-old street artist from France, whose trademark look features Wayfarers and a hat that might belong to your grandfather.

In 2011, JR won a TED prize, which gave him funding and a mandate to “Change the world.”

JR had already begun changing various sectors of the world by mounting massive outdoor art exhibits. At 15, he claimed the rooftops of his native Paris with his graffiti. He later found a camera in the Metro, and took black and white photos of some of his fellow “outlaws.” He was 21 when he enlarged and pasted these on the city’s walls, humanizing some of the faces behind Paris’s notorious 2005 riots.

His illegal face-pasting blossomed into a worldwide guerrilla movement. He and his volunteers plastered massive portraits of Jews and Palestinians next to each other on both sides of the wall that separated them. They collaborated to post the work of local artists in Berlin and Cuba. They celebrated women by pasting pictures of their faces, or enormous posters of their eyes, in countries where woman were decidedly uncelebrated.

And then came the call from TED.

You can watch the resulting TED talk at http://www.jr-art.net/jr. As summarized in the documentary, JR answered the call to “Change the World” with a challenge of his own: “I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together, we’ll turn the world…Inside Out.”

Since TED, JR’s Project has included Haiti, Brazil, Tunisia—where the Arab Spring fostered such vigorous “free dialogue” over portrait placement that the volunteers feared for their safety—Rome, Thailand, Guyana, even Juarez, Mexico. The team has photographed and pasted in locales all over the US, including Oakland, CA; a North Dakota Indian reservation; Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx.

And now…Times Square.

**

Our line moved forward, and I chatted with visitors from France, an Upper East Side matron, a guy from Queens, a Japanese tourist. And, of course, the young couple ahead, who lived in the Bronx.

My turn came. I signed disclaimers on an iPad, and a volunteer led me to the back of the polka-dotted van. Inside was a tiny photo booth, where I took a stool opposite a camera imbedded in the wall. The volunteer tapped the mirror; I had six seconds to pull an appropriate face. I recoiled dramatically from the feet destined to troop across my likeness, and the shutter snapped.

I stepped out. My portrait printed and rolled from a slot in the side of the van. The volunteer handed it to me and used my phone to take my picture with it. She rolled it up and told me that the team had a backlog of pictures because it had rained yesterday and they couldn’t paste (When it rains, they remove the old posters from the pavement because they become dangerously slippery). So they’d be pasting yesterday’s posters this afternoon, and ours later this evening or tomorrow morning.

“How long do the posters stay down?” I asked.

“They’re temporary by design,” she said. “But mine stayed put for five days—the weather was dry. Come back tomorrow; we’ll have you pasted by then.”

**

I was disappointed that, unlike the subjects in JR’s movie, I wouldn’t be doing my own pasting. I was even more disappointed that I’d have to wait until tomorrow to see my poster on the ground.

Sure, it was temporary, and nobody would recognize me anyway, and my likeness was far from gorgeous. But still…

Whoa.

What’s with the ego? I asked myself. There is no inherent “meaning” in the Times Square project. It doesn’t highlight the resilience of the Haitians, or celebrate victimized women, or reveal the faces of persecuted LGTB Russians, or remind Equadorians that they have Indian minorities.

Times Square is just…faces.

My picture would be pasted down among hundreds, maybe thousands, then washed away by rain or worn away by feet, or scraped up by JR’s volunteers to avoid injury lawsuits. What was the big deal if I couldn’t paste it down myself? And why did it matter that I wouldn’t see it on the sidewalk the day it was taken?

I was lucky, really: This was Tuesday; we were leaving Thursday for Maine to see Paul’s mom, and I’d have a day to take a picture of myself in the square. I could show it to her; Ev would enjoy that. I could post it on Facebook and Twitter.

**

I returned Wednesday afternoon, my phone set to Camera.

My picture wasn’t there.

People who’d just had their pictures taken were handing their posters to the pasting guys. A few of the subjects seemed to be helping with the glue and brushes.

I asked one of the volunteers where yesterday’s pictures were.

She shrugged. “We’re alternating some of them with the new ones.”

I looked for the older posters. I didn’t see a pile, a box, even a rolled poster—just people handing over their new likenesses, which went straight to the cement.

Mine would get pasted while I was gone, and I’d miss it. I would have no photo for Ev, or Facebook or Twitter.

I suppressed the urge to beg the volunteer to find my poster.

Patience, I told myself. It was probably waiting its turn in the polka-dotted truck.

Or maybe, an evil voice whispered in my brain, it’s in the trash.

**

We left for Maine the next day. We returned on Monday. It hadn’t rained in New York; perhaps my poster had survived the weekend. I took the Q train Tuesday morning to Times Square.

I passed Woody and Woody. I dodged Elmo, edged around two well-endowed, guitar-toting women in skimpy undies—Naked Cowgirls??—and slipped through knots of tourists posing with a bored Smurfette.

The polka-dotted van was busy. The pavement in front of the red stairs was covered with faces, some tattered and some brand-new. A tall, wide building behind the half-price ticket booth was pasted from top to bottom with posters.

I walked every inch of the plaza. I was not there.

I examined the building. I was not there.

Was my face walked on by tourists last weekend? Was it was hidden beneath a new poster? Was it pasted at all?

If a face lies on the pavement in Times Square and nobody recognizes it, does it make a difference?

I stood back and surveyed the square.

It looked…stunning. Dizzying.

Grand.

Here was the ultimate human takeover of the heart of the city; a glorious domination of faces, faces, faces.

My heart swelled.

I didn’t recognize a single one. But I had represented; I had been a tiny part of this in some impermanent way.

That, I realized, was a very cool thing.

“Okay, push!”

Paul and I brace ourselves as the subway car screams to a stop and the doors jerk open. Bodies pour out of the car, a thousand clowns from a phone booth. We, thousands more clowns, charge against them to get in.

I reach the entrance; a woman crams ahead of me. The doors slide, scraping limbs, purses, butts. A man on our side shoves the woman’s back so she is almost fully inside; the man beside her nudges his shoe a half-inch; a student sucks in his backpack; fingers flatten, stomachs draw, hips check. One; two; three–four tries, and the doors shudder together.

We, the Left-Behinds on the platform, inch back—a collective out-breath more than a movement—and the train pulls away.

And we stand, a rank impossibly deep and long, at the edge of the abyss, the long, empty steel rails below us whispering: late, late, late.

**

The subway in Mexico City is cheap—3 pesos, 24 cents, to ride anywhere in the city. An illiterate can read the stops: lines are color-coded and numbered; each stop is paired with a cartoon symbol. We are Line 1, Pink; our stop Juanacatlan, symbolized by a butterfly. The schema inside, on the car wall, shows a fat pink line with our butterfly, followed by a cricket (Chapultepec), followed by a bridge (Sevilla), followed by a bell (Insurgentes), etc. Little arrows with the colors of intersecting subway lines are marked above and below connecting station symbols. It’s a great system.

If you can get on it.

The problem is, the greater metropolitan area of Mexico City is home to more than 21 million people. And all of them, from niños to viejos, are required by law to board a subway train between the hours of 8 to 9:30 a.m.

Or so it seems, when you’re trying to force your way into a subway car at 8:30 a.m.

We were in Tacubaya station, (Tan line, an urn) trying to get to the Auditorio stop (Tan line, a cupola) to take a tour bus to Teotihuacan to an archeological dig. That bus would leave at 9, and we didn’t yet have tickets.

Our landlord had told us about the tour bus. He had told us, Walk to the taxi stand, ask them to take you to our National Auditorium, and catch the bus there. But we saw the stop on the subway map. One station on the Pink line; a transfer to Tan, two stops. Simple. We had used this subway; we had tickets; we were experienced New York City strap-hangers. What could possibly go wrong?

**

We check our watches. 8:45. Late, late, late.

**

Mexico City was a complex of massive lakes more than 12,000 years ago, filled with prehistoric critters, from mastodons to saber-toothed tigers. The lakes shrank, and humanity came to the fore. The still-shifting earth below today’s Mexico City is layered with pre-Spanish civilizations. There are ruins that date well before the birth of Christ, built by people whose names and origins have been lost, who came before the Aztec and Mayans—people whose compounds in places like Teotihuacan, on the hem of the city, are now being re-assembled like three-dimensional puzzles.

The Mexico City subway was begun in 1967, and unearthed artifacts—stone idols, tools, bones. There is a northerly station, Talisman (Blue line), whose symbol is a woolly mammoth figure because it has the bones of one on display. I took the train there a few days ago to see it.

I transferred from Pink to Blue at Candelaria station (duck), a huge interchange that is its own pueblo: bodegas, skin care shops, a McDonalds, medical clinic, pharmacy.

The Metro went above-ground. I watched the city pass below–businesses and houses, wealth and poverty, canals and desert–until the train pulled into Talisman (mammoth).

I had to exit the gates to find the mammoth. The area around the station might have once been handsome: two whitewashed entrances faced each other across a busy street. Each was flanked by a small plaza. In one, dirt and weeds straggled between white cobblestones, which surrounded a broken tree stump. Cracked stone benches slumped at the edges, empty.

On the other side of the street, the station’s plaza was a sun-baked stretch of taxi stand with a lone food cart.

I found the mammoth inside this second entrance.

The display was a pit in the small and otherwise empty lobby. The pit was covered by a plastic bubble. The bubble was yellowed, streaked with dirt and caked with dust. I took a picture, but I can’t recognize the skeleton it depicts.

**

A second train screams to a halt, as jammed with humanity as the first.

Paul inhales. “Ready?”

The doors shudder open. Once again, bodies slam into mine. I am forced back into Paul; the back-thrust overwhelms our surge, and we watch, impotent, as the doors close—open, close, open, close—beyond us.

The train lumbers away, a great red aquarium filled with bodies, heads, limbs, backpacks, all compressed, flattened like octopus suckers against the glass.

Again, the futile out-breath.

I am looking, now, directly down onto the tracks.

There is no one lying on the smooth steel, but it must happen. This craziness repeats itself every day, twice a day. How many people fall into the pit?

Yet…we are all still here. All still waiting. All still…late, late, late.

**

After my Mammoth sighting, I backtracked to Balderas station (Pink, cannon) to visit the crafts market there. Back on Blue; transfer to Pink at Candelaria (duck). Ten stops.

At each stop, vendors climbed aboard.

For a mere 10 pesos (80 cents), they announced, we could own: batteries, back-scratchers, magnetized plastic butterflies, souvenir pencils, scented markers, purses, newspapers, edibles, drinkables. And music. Men punched buttons on CD players and ear-rending music mixes filled the car. Ten pesos a disk. A snatch of one song; the next, the next. Each mix a genre: sixties folk; the Beatles; jazz; Mexican ballads; Italian ballads; salsa; old US hair rock.

Some people bought things. Music, especially.

I bought music on the street once in New York. The disk, I discovered later, was empty.

Perhaps vendors are more honest in Mexico City.

**

8:50: 10 minutes before our bus leaves from Auditorio (Tan, cupola), two stops away.

The train halts two feet to our left.

Doors creak open, bodies tumble out, thrust themselves at us. We charge on the diagonal. I grab the doorframe and throw myself inside against the human block. Paul crushes in behind me, compressing my ribs against someone’s elbow.

My head is in a man’s armpit as he grips the bar above; my back flattened against Paul. His arm is outside—crushed, released, crushed by the door—and he pushes harder, knocking the breath out of me. I apologize to a woman whose foot I stomp. She gives a knowing, tired smile.

I can move nothing; my arms are pinned to my side, my legs wedged against legs and low-held backpacks. I am grateful that it is morning and the man whose armpit covers my head has not spent eight hours hefting bricks.

The doors bang shut, open, shut, open—shut. The train jolts forward.

There will be no back-scratchers. No plastic butterflies. No music. There is no room for vending. There will be no thefts; there is no room for hands to steal into pockets.

Nothing can move. Nothing.

But we will make it to Auditorio (Tan, cupola) in time.

If we can get out.

Mexico is beautiful, Oswaldo (“Call me Waldo, like ‘Where’s Waldo’”) told us as we chatted on the dock at Playa del Carmen. But Poverty, he said, that is the problem in this country.

Waldo operated out of a booth on the pier owned by UltraMar, one of two competing government-owned ferry companies. We planned to take a ferry across the bay to Cozumel tomorrow, and Waldo had a Deal for us.

Everybody has a Deal in the Mayan Riviera. Everybody hustles. Everybody works hard to survive Poverty, from the hawker pulling tourists into a shop on Playa’s Fifth Avenue, to the clerk in the ticket booth at the Tulum ruins—who had just that morning issued us tickets marked “Student Discount: $0 received” when we paid him in pesos for two full-fare admissions.

Everybody here Plays the Game.

Thus declared garrulous, cheerful Waldo.

We took his Deal. We traded him twenty dollars for a receipt entitling us to a snorkeling trip on Cozumel. A deposit, toward the whole total: $60 US—“Pay anytime, with credit card, dollars or pesos; with us here in Playa, or pay in Cozumel,” he said.

He produced an 8×10 glossy: in a spacious boat with a glass bottom, happy passengers chat with a guy whose T-shirt reads “PADI Instructor.” We would get the boat, professional snorkeling gear, expert PADI instruction, plus free margaritas, beers, sodas and snacks, when we sailed with the company Pelusa del Mar.

**

The next morning, we set off early to get cash for the trip.

Playa del Carmen has ATMs on every corner, neon-lit and happy to dispense—for a fee—US or Mexican currency. We’re not stupid; we found a reputable glass-enclosed ScotiaBank ATM. I duly shielded my numbers, and Paul stood behind me in the booth.

We stepped out to see two men and a woman triangulating the ATM, thumb-typing rapidly on their cell phones. No-nonsense but furtive, they paid us no attention, Playing the Game even as both Paul and I snapped their photo.

**

Waldo was not at the UltraMar booth, but we had his receipt, so we bought a round-trip ticket to Cozumel.

We embarked, and I fired up my iPhone to write to TD Bank to tell them that my/their account might have been compromised.

The Free WiFi touted on signs all over the boat would not connect. It was locked. I asked an attendant for the password. “The WiFi kaput,” she said, and frowned.

My distraction made it hard to enjoy the duo who sang to a boombox orchestration of their own CD. Still, I gave them a tip when they asked for it.

We hit the pier running at San Miguel de Cozumel, dodging hustlers who offered Deals on boats, cars, scuba and snorkeling, and grabbed a seat at the first bar that had WiFi. I thumb-typed my concerns to TD Security about my ATM adventure.

Then, relieved, we set off for the elusive Pelusa del Mar.

The pier hustlers told us that Pelusa del Mar sailed from a small dock a half-mile away. It was sunny and breezy, a great day to walk, so we happily wandered the harbor.

There was no sign for Pelusa del Mar.

A store clerk pointed us to a small dock where a woman sat on a collapsible wooden bench.

Yes, the woman said, our boat would come at 1:30. We could pay her—pesos or dollars only—for the expense remainder. And if we showed the receipt to the clerk at the souvenir shop across the street, we would get a discount. “I will not lie; I get a small commission,” she said.

We paid and went to explore the town.

**

A tiny boat with a tattered awning and a huge outboard motor pulled up to the Pelusa del Mar dock at 1:30. Eleven of us passengers stepped into it. The kids crowded around the “glass bottom,” a wooden box the shape and size of a shoebox.

Manuel, our on-board leader, handed out snorkeling gear and told us we would have three dive sites. He introduced a surly young man named Eduardo, who would be our driver.

Surly Eduardo powered up the motor and cruised into the bay. The kids stared through the “glass bottom” box, marveling at wrecks and fish.

We were twenty minutes out, about to stop for our first dive, when Manuel got a call. He conferred with Surly Eduardo, and told us we had to go back for something.

Surly Eduardo opened the motor to its full impressive thrust. He flew across the bay, dodging larger tour boats, scattering clusters of happy snorkelers, drenching us passengers in a constant, frosty spray of water. Ten minutes later, we smashed into the little dock from which we’d launched.

Neither the boat nor the dock, thank Neptune, went down. Two more passengers climbed aboard. We were 13.

Now time was money.

Surly Eduardo powered across the bay, showering us without letup until he pulled up hard at our first snorkel spot.

I had never snorkeled; I have a suffocation phobia. One of my fellow passengers explained the finer points to me. I donned the mask and arranged my mouth around the snorkel mouthpiece, biting down on the disturbingly well-gnawed nibs, my heart beating a mad tattoo against my ribs. Manuel told us to stay together and “avoid the motor, or you will be chopped into hamburguesa”—our expert PADI instruction—and over the side I went.

I was panic-breathing, yanking the snorkel out of my mouth every time I surfaced, when the Picture Lady grabbed Paul and me. She gave Paul a bottle of fish food, motioned us close together, told him to hold the bottle low so fish would swim to us; she’d take our picture underwater.

I mouthed my snorkel and went down. Perhaps it was because she spoke Spanish, or perhaps because he didn’t grasp her intent, but Paul couldn’t get the bottle low enough to suit the Picture Lady. At last, she shoved his hand down, snapped her submersible camera, grabbed the bottle back and moved on. I surfaced. Paul was hacking and retching. “She kept pushing me down,” he gasped. “My snorkel filled up.”

With great trepidation, I re-donned my snorkel and mask.

I dunked my head. I saw fish, and I was captivated. My breathing slowed; my panic dissolved. The water, so cold when it sprayed over me, now felt delicious.

I could do this forever.

But alas: the Picture Lady finished her shooting; Surly Eduardo spun the boat with a mountainous, choking wake, and Manuel led us back up the ladder.

Surly Eduardo peeled away, drenching us all.

Shivering kids crowded the “glass-bottomed” shoebox, but they could see little because of the water in it. I glanced about; there were now, unaccountably, 18 of us.

**

Surly Eduardo sprayed to a stop. Manuel hustled us into the water.

This second dive was a deeper area, with little to see but a grey coral formation far below where two scuba divers hovered.

Ten indifferent minutes later, the boat returned for us. Or on us; had Paul not pitched an ear-rending whistle to catch Surly Eduardo’s attention, we would now be hamburguesa.

Somehow we made it back into the boat safely. All 20 of us.

How had we multiplied? Had other companies abandoned their customers to drown?

**

Vrrrrrrooooommm! Again the deluge, as Surly Eduardo cranked the motor, rocking bevies of happy snorkelers from other, bigger boats, filling their snorkels. I cowered next to poor, soaked Paul. The kids, teeth chattering, fought to see through the now-flooded “glass-bottomed” shoebox.

I was about to ask for my free Margarita when we bucked to a stop. Manuel motioned us overboard, and we went for our third dive—except for the kids, who clung together in protest in a hypothermic huddle inside the boat.

This time, a rainbow of fish zipped underneath me. I blissfully rode the swells kicked up by Surly Eduardo as he motored back and forth, around and through us, and forgot that I could drown or be chopped into hamburgesa. Schools of bright blue fish darted in formation along a reef; round silver fish sparkled like coins in the refracted sunlight.

It was stunning.

Manuel’s hand interrupted my view, signaling me back to the boat.

Sigh.

Manuel handed out Margaritas and tiny bottles of Corona, and we roared off. The Margaritas were weak to the point of virgin, but well-salted by the spray, as Surly Eduardo again played Ahab, monomaniacal slave to the leviathan Time.

We skidded into the dock, and Manuel passed a tip jar. “We depend on tips,” he said. “Tell others about Pelusa del Mar, and Manuel and Eduardo.”

Surly Eduardo scowled from the bow.

**

The Picture Lady stopped us on the dock. “You buy picture?” She showed us our shot—me, eyes bugged in terror behind my mask; Paul drowning; desperate, fat fish.

“No, gracias,” I said, and we pushed past.

We ate dinner and returned to the big main pier to catch the 8 pm ferry home. The lady at UltraMar said the next boat was at 9. The other government-owned competing ferry left at 8, but our return tickets were not transferrable.

It was 7:30. We sat, waiting, on the dock.

A man from a nearby booth struck up a conversation. He told us he represented a hotel in Playa del Carmen that would reimburse us for half our expenses for today. All we had to do was to go there, have a free brunch, and tour the place. He said he would pick us up. He said we didn’t have to buy anything. Everyone wins: he gets a commission, the hotel gets a potential future customer—but no pressure—and we get a lot of money.

We were all just working hard to survive; we just had to Play the Game. How could we pass up this Deal? he asked.

How indeed.

He signed us up.

The email gave no promises that we would be chosen from thousands of prospective volunteers, so we were overjoyed when Paul got a call from a Committee phone-elf asking us to distribute tickets from 2 to 9:30 pm on the Saturday before the inauguration.

She told him there would be follow-up emails with more specifics.

A day passed. Two. No emails.

But…the call really had been specific. So I called our favorite DC hotel for a room for Inauguration Weekend, Friday through Monday night.

The price was $50 higher than usual for Sunday and Monday, and the clerk warned me that it was nonrefundable. I took a deep breath and booked it.

The next day, we got a follow-up email: The Committee regretted to inform us that we had not been chosen to volunteer for Inauguration Weekend. However, our name would be added to a waiting list.

Paul emailed back for clarification.

A second email arrived: the Committee regretted to tell us that we had not been chosen from the waiting list.

Paul emailed back. I emailed an addy called “Questions,” which was supposed to serve confused volunteers.

I emailed again. And again.

No reply; nothing. Nothing.

**

On Friday morning, still unclarified, we took the train to Washington, DC.

Late that night, in our nonrefundable hotel room, I ordered two nonrefundable tickets on-line, a “donation” of $44 each, for the inaugural parade. The tickets entitled us to sit in the bleachers. A splurge—but how many Inaugural Parades would I experience? I’m short—the only thing I see in a crowd at ground-level is shoulders.

We had to pick up the tickets at the DC Convention Center, the place where we’d report as volunteers. If, indeed, we were volunteers.

Saturday morning, we stood in line outside the Convention Center. A man handed us an orange plastic card; we went in and stood in line with others holding orange plastic cards until we reached a room, where we stood in line until we reached a table. A man behind the table gave our names to another man; he walked behind a curtain and returned with tickets to the Green Ticket bleacher section.

The men wore tags around their necks that said “Ticket Distribution Volunteer.”

In the hall, we buttonholed a woman whose little earpiece with a crinkly cord marked her as a leader. We explained our volunteer dilemma.

She said she could use us: we should come back at 1:30 and tell the coordinator Josie sent us.

**

We stood in line at the door at 1:30. When at last we found the coordinator, she didn’t care that Josie sent us, because our names were already in her computer, entered three weeks ago.

The coordinator gave us “Ticket Distribution” tags and sent us to the ticket room. Where a young woman named Brianna, wearing the leaderly earpiece with a crinkly cord, grabbed us and replaced our tags with tags that read “Security.” She hustled us to separate points on a line that snaked around the exhibition hall and, ultimately, to a room on the other side.

For the rest of the day, I checked that people had a blue plastic card, which indicated they’d bought tickets through TicketMaster for the parade or one of the official inaugural balls. People with orange plastic cards, which meant they’d bought their tickets directly from the Committee site, went to a different line.

I sent my blue-ticket people down the length of the hall to Paul; he sent them down the width, to another volunteer. This third volunteer sent them around another corner, to a fourth volunteer, who sent them to the ticket room. It was a long, long walk.

At 3 pm, a great onrush of ticketholders made it a long, long line—one that doubled back on itself, a la Disney World.

But by 8:30 pm, only stragglers were left. Many came directly off planes, trains and buses, luggage in tow, desperate to pick up their tickets before 9, after which they became a true donation. Brianna sent us home, our mission accomplished.

**

On Sunday, we strolled the Mall. The sky was cloudless; the weather warm. Entrepreneurs hawked T-shirts, buttons, Obamacondoms (“Remember the election with your next erection!”). CNN broadcast from a slapped-up booth; tourists craned for a glimpse of Wolf Blitzer and waved at crowd-cams. Elves set up jumbotrons and barricades and plastic flooring for tomorrow’s Big Day. The place swarmed with guys with little earpieces attached to crinkly cords. They didn’t need tags that said “Security.”

**

Monday morning: Showtime. The Mall teemed with humanity. We stood in the shadow of the Washington Monument to watch the inaugural ceremony on a jumbotron. Americana abounded: Dads hoisted babies on their shoulders; children waved flags; families took pictures of each other. Entrepreneurs hawked T-shirts, buttons, Obamacondoms (“A souvenir that’s actually fun!”). It was cold and bright and festive, and as Obama laid his hand on the bible, the screen crackled and went black.

The crowd groaned in near unison. The screen pixilated and sizzled to life, then the sound clicked and skipped, recovered, and cut out entirely. The screen strobed on, off, on. Audio returned, ten seconds behind the video.

“Low bidder,” Paul said.

Obama’s inaugural address hitched and blurred like a train announcement, and the video—when it worked—froze and faded.

Paul suggested that Mitt might be scurrying about, pulling plugs.

We—and most everyone else—gave up before the President left the podium.

We set off to claim our piece of the Green Ticket parade bleachers. It was 12:30; the parade was scheduled to step off at 2:30.

“Plenty of time,” Paul said.

Except we couldn’t get there.

**

We started at 15th Street. The police sent us up Constitution Avenue to 17th. From there, they sent us past Pennsylvania Avenue, where all the bleachers were set up, to I Street. Then down I to 13th Street, to wait en masse for Security to check us through to our Green Ticket zone on Pennsylvania.

In other words, we surrounded the zone, stretching a half-mile trip into a two-mile square (honest: I mapped it out).

Even so, we might have gotten seats before the parade started if Paul hadn’t gotten hungry. We stopped to eat. It took a half-hour, from order to exit. “See? Plenty of time,” Paul said.

At 1:45, we reached the pack of humanity that stretched from 13th and I to Pennsylvania Avenue. Thousands of us crammed into a half-mile, two-lane granddaddy-of-all-lines.

Somewhere up front was a tall wire fence and a white Security tent. Two young doctors who’d been working all night stood beside us. They could see the tent. Paul could see the tent. I could see shoulders.

We stood for 15 minutes, moved three feet, stood. Stood for 20 minutes, moved six inches. Stood. Stood. Stood.

At 2:15, one of the young docs texted a friend, a reporter, who told them the President was still speaking at a dinner.

“Let’s pray he keeps on talking,” said the woman next to me. I agreed: the later the parade started, the better our chance of getting there in time to see Obama wave from his limo. And we all wanted to see Obama wave from his limo; it was why we’d come.

“Maybe Biden will speak,” said the young doc. “That’d be good for an hour.”

At 2:30, we’d inched halfway up the street. Entrepreneurs on the sidewalk hawked T-shirts, buttons, Obamacondoms (“Be a patriot, even when you’re on your back!”). The day grew colder. Paul saw the white tent. I saw shoulders. The parade, amazingly, still hadn’t stepped off.

At 3:00, the doc’s reporter told him the parade had started.

The woman next to me groaned. “Obama’s in the front, or the rear?”

“He’s in the front,” I told her. “It’s Santa’s who’s in back of his parades.”

Still, there was hope: the start was a long way from us.

A gaggle of gawkers filled a low balcony near us. One of the women pointed toward the parade route. “There’s people coming now,” she yelled to us all.

We heard motorcycles. Paul craned his neck to see them pass beyond the white tent. The docs saw them as well. I saw shoulders.

“I think that’s HIM,” the balcony woman yelled. “It’s HIM!” Then, “Oops—not him.”

At 3:30, we were three rows behind the gate in the tall wire fence when a stern-looking man on the other side pushed it closed. “Aw, man—c’mon! We been here two hours,” the guy next to the gate on our side said.

The young docs shook their heads. “I can’t believe we drove all this way—“

The stern man inside stood his ground, saying nothing.

The woman on the balcony screamed, “It’s HIM!” She fanned herself with her hand. “It’s really HIM, and he’s out of the car—“

“Can you see him?” I asked Paul.

“No—I can’t see beyond the tent.”

Far, far away—miles away, a half-world away—just beyond the white tent, on Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd went wild.

And then, silence.

“Aw, man!” said the guy at our side of the gate.

The stern man on the other side listened to an earpiece attached to a crinkly cord. People started to leave the pack. Somewhere behind us, entrepreneurs hawked T-shirts, buttons, Obamacondoms (“Salute the Big Man like a big man!”). I blew on my frozen fingers.

“Can’t you at least let us in to see the rest of the parade?” the man on our side of the gate pleaded.

“I think he’s going to open it,” one young doc told the other. “He keeps nodding.”

“Hunh,” said the woman beside me. “He’s been nodding for the last half-hour. I think maybe he’s on something.”

Five minutes later, the stern man opened the gate. We stepped in, unzipped our jackets, put our electronics on a table, turned front and back so a guy could wand each of us. Four tables; four wand-ers. For a crowd of thousands.

We zipped up, picked up our phones and cameras, and walked off to the Green Ticket bleachers.

They were not full. Obama was long gone.

Which meant me. At 10 a.m., I was the only volunteer in the place.

Occupy Sandy sprang from Occupy Wall Street. They’ve been working with victims of Sandy since the storm hit in late October; in fact, they seem to be one of the few volunteer organizations around here still doing clean-up. Sheepshead is not far from Brighton Beach and Coney Island in Brooklyn, and it’s still struggling. I had tried to sign up on-line to help, but the link on Occupy Sandy’s email update was faulty, so I hoped that the clean-up was still on, even though nobody seemed to be here.

The glass door swung open. A young man with a Brooklyn Hipster look that I’d come to associate with OS—spare body, tight plaid shirt, shaggy hair in a watch cap, lots of piercings—swept in. He introduced himself as Alex. I explained about the faulty link, and he waved his hand. “I don’t know anything about techie stuff.”

He plopped onto a folding chair and punched a number into his cell phone. He spoke, nodded, snapped it shut.

There would indeed be a team of us, and we would do demolition.

I helped Alex drag tables out onto the sidewalk, and was stacking donated goods on them when the rest of my team straggled in—a young Brooklyn couple, Farid and Sherlein, and a Canadian woman named Catherine. We grabbed goggles, disposable masks and coveralls, crowbars and a couple of hammers.

I also took a hard hat. I’d pulled down a ceiling on my last OS adventure, in Rockaway, and the first big piece of drywall had come down on my head. I have a learning curve.

Alex led us around the block, to a neighborhood of small homes.

On the brief walk, I learned that Sherlein was from Ireland, but lived here in Greenpoint, the Polish section of Williamsburg. She worked as a bartender.

Catherine, a drug company rep, came from Ottowa specifically to volunteer her vacation days. “We’re neighbors, after all,” she said. A number of non-residents volunteer; I’ve cleaned yards with southerners, passed out meals with New Englanders, and torn down the aforementioned ceiling with a visitor from Wisconsin.

Farid worked in Human Rights. It turned out that he lived near me. “Oh—you’re Kym’s mom,” he said.

I sighed. I thought I’d regain my own identity when the kids grew up and moved away. But here in Brooklyn, I am once again “Kym’s mom.”

Our assigned house was tiny, 90 years old, three blocks from the water. It was one of many in a neighborhood where the “street” separating house rows was a paved sidewalk; all of them had flooded nearly to the ceilings of the ground floor. For our house, that was the only floor, except for an unfinished attic. It was already gutted to the walls for mold abatement and we were to rip up the floorboards and break out the remains of a cement knee-wall in the front room. Once this was done, the state’s Rapid Repairs program would do the rest.

The knee-wall, backed with wire mesh, had to go before the floor in that room.

My three teammates began on the floorboards in the rest of the house, which had been partially stripped. There was no cellar; I could see a stretch of sand through the joists.

I took my crowbar to the front room and set about smashing cement. The neighbor across the sidewalk had given me wire-cutters for the backing, but they were frozen with rust; ultimately, I snapped the wire mesh with the end of the bar or pried up the nail brackets that held it.

It was all daunting work. By 2:30, they’d levered up most of the floor in the rest of the house, and I was down to one nasty corner.

A fresh volunteer arrived; she gamely took over my hard hat and crowbar, and I walked back to the OS distribution point with Farid, Sherlein and Catherine for lunch.

Catherine had spent the day before at the OS Bay Ridge headquarters, cooking meals for volunteers and community members. They had made the tasty vegetarian kale with garlic that we found in one of two foil casseroles on the outside table (outside, both because the workers inside were refinishing the floor on the OS side, and because OS serves its meals to anybody who might need them, volunteer or not). The other dish was ravioli that was, Catherine confided, canned Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.

Catherine had enjoyed working at the headquarters, but had found OS somewhat baffling. The organization prided itself, as Occupy Wall Street had, in having no set leadership; it was the ultimate democracy. “I asked who was in charge, and they told me nobody,” she said. “Luckily, they had people they called floor coordinators who seemed to know more than others, so I tagged after them and asked them what I could do.”

Farid had gone to a distribution point in Rockaway early in the clean-up process, and found himself alone, manning the place. “It was crazy at first,” he said, “but I admit, I found it very empowering in the end.”

We grabbed water, and hiked back to our assigned house.

I found the new volunteer prying womanfully at the remains of my wall, and a strange woman in disposable coveralls and a respirator mask on the pull-down stairs that led up to the attic from my little room. She descended and introduced herself as an inspector for the EPA.

I had, in my earlier ceiling-demolition gig, met FEMA personnel signing up homeowners. I’d met a pair of wandering OSHA inspectors, who inspected my protective gear and asked me if I’d been coerced into the job. But I’d never met an EPA inspector.

She looked less intimidating than her title: in her 30s, dark-skinned, tiny. “I’m afraid I have to close you down,” she told me. Her voice had a Caribbean lilt. “We have had a complaint. I was just inspecting the attic, and there is a pipe wrapped in asbestos there.”

She launched into a lecture about the dangers of asbestos.

“We’re pulling up the floor,” I said. “The asbestos is in the attic.”

She said there were pipes in the floor. I looked through the joists, and yes: there they were. All quite bare.

Those pipes probably had asbestos somewhere, too, she insisted. “So you cannot work on this house anymore. This is your house, yes?”

I told her I was a volunteer. We were all volunteers. Perhaps she should speak with Occupy Sandy (I mentally wished her Good Luck).

She apologized; the young woman prying cement off the wall had told her I was the homeowner.

“A natural mistake,” I said, “since I’m old.”

The inspector didn’t crack a smile behind her respirator mask. “Well, you cannot work here anymore. You must leave this for the men from Rapid Repairs.”

After the inspector left, the new volunteer said, somewhat sheepishly, “I thought you were the homeowner, so I told her to talk to you.”

“A natural mistake, since I’m old.”

She looked distressed. “Oh, no! I didn’t say—“

I laughed. She smiled, obviously relieved.

We trooped back to OS. There, I told a zaftig young tattooed woman who had replaced Alex at the non-existent helm about the inspector. “She said we should leave it for Rapid Repairs,” I concluded.

The young woman took a puff on her cigarette. “Rapid Repair, my ass! They’ll be here in two, three months. And by then, the mold will be worse.” She blew a long stream of smoke. “You can go back. Just wear a respirator mask this time. The kind she was wearing.”

It was 3:30. I glanced back at my team and the new volunteer. They were preparing to leave. “I think we’re done for the day,” I said. “You should probably warn whoever goes there tomorrow about the mask.”

She waved her hand and sucked on the cigarette. And we left.

I’ve owned, for some years, a blender so powerful that it could grind dinosaur bones. Unfortunately, when I push the button, it blows off its own lid and covers my kitchen with ground dinosaur bones. And that’s just on “Low.” So I scrapped the fearsome blender and wedged the Kitchen Aid into its place on my counter. I took it for a spin, and made two big, primo loaves of olive bread.

Two loaves of homemade bread is one too many for two people. I sliced the second loaf and gave it to various folks in the building, including my upstairs neighbor–call her Maude–an older woman who lives alone.

I hiked upstairs and rang Maude’s doorbell. She wasn’t in, so I rubber-banded the plastic bag of bread to her doorknob. This was the Saturday before Hurricane Sandy, in the early evening.

Maude is 87 years old, Brooklyn born and bred, proud and fierce, a retired RN. She takes flute lessons. She sings in a choir. She volunteers for blood drives and routinely donates her own platelets. She volunteers for the Coney Island Mermaid Festival, an event not for the faint of heart.

When she didn’t answer her door, I figured there must’ve been a choral event, or a blood drive somewhere in preparation for the storm. Or perhaps she was visiting her ex-sister-in-law in Queens. She hadn’t told us she was taking a trip out of the city, so I expected her to return before the first big winds were to hit early Monday morning.

**

On Sunday afternoon, I climbed to the fifth floor and discovered my bread was still on Maude’s door. This made me uneasy. I asked neighbors if they’d seen her. Nobody had. I called her apartment and her cell phone and left messages.

Kerwin the Super had last seen her on Thursday or Friday, and said she hadn’t mentioned taking a trip. He didn’t have a spare key to her apartment, and nobody—not even Paul and I, who know her well—had a number for her ex-sister-in-law.

I called her again. Kerwin called her. No answer.

Paul and I went to the local tavern to grab an early dinner before it closed down for the storm, and I fretted about what to do. Should I climb the fire escape and try to look in her windows? It would feel like snooping. Maude had been in our apartment many times, but I’d never, ever been in hers; it’s her sanctuary, a private space in a crowded world for a very private person. Except for Kerwin the Super, who’s done small repairs for her, she never lets people past the front door.

But what if she was lying on the floor unconscious from a fall, or passed out in her bed from one of her infrequent attacks of heart arrhythmia?

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. There was a voicemail from Amy, a neighbor.

It seemed the dilemma had been taken out of my hands: worried by Maude’s disappearance, Amy had called a relative who was a policeman and asked him what she should do. He told her to call the NYPD.

**

A squad car sat in front of our building. We walked up five flights to Maude’s locked door, where the bag of bread still dangled forlornly from the doorknob. Amy stood in the hallway with two young uniformed officers. Other neighbors had arrived, and they were discussing how to get into the apartment.

The guy who lived next door to Maude wanted to hire a locksmith, but the NYPD doesn’t do locksmiths. They break down doors. And if you call them about a missing senior citizen, they have to do all they can to make sure that citizen is accounted for.

They checked the local emergency rooms. No Maude. They pressed us all for phone numbers of relatives and friends. We had nothing for the ex-sister-in-law, nothing for the brother who lived somewhere up the Hudson.

Paul did find the number for a friend who lived upstate, a woman she stayed with every summer, and we called. She hadn’t heard from Maude.

The young officers eyed Maude’s apartment door.

Kerwin the Super suggested an alternative to breaking it down: he could go up the fire escape, break through Maude’s window, unlock the door for the police, then close over the window with plywood.

And so, as the wind picked up on the Sunday night before the hurricane, I followed Kerwin the Super up the stairs from our fire escape to Maude’s, and held a flashlight on the window as he smashed it with a hammer wrapped in a blanket.

There are only 36 units in our building. The window was not easy to break, and even muffled with a blanket, the impact resounded through the place. Lights turned on; windows opened; heads poked out. I explained, explained, explained. Kerwin the Super stepped through the window, let the officers in, and they went room to room.

No Maude.

This was a relief. We still didn’t know where she was—which was still troubling—but we knew two places where she wasn’t: in some local hospital, or bleeding to death in her apartment.

Kerwin the Super boarded up the window, locked the door after himself, and left.

**

Hurricane Sandy swept in late that night and buffeted the neighborhood throughout Monday, hurling trees about and bursting transformers. We are on high ground, for Brooklyn, and our building emerged nearly unscathed.

The next day, I got a call. It was Maude. She was stuck at her brother’s house up the Hudson. He’d lost power, and the roads were flooded and tree-blocked. She would be later coming home than she’d planned.

Was everything okay at home?

I told her I was glad to hear from her. Very glad. Um…had she checked her cell phone messages?

No, she said. “I never check that phone. I can’t figure the danged thing out–and besides, nobody ever calls me.”

So it fell to me to explain to my neighbor that we’d broken into her private space, the police had walked through every room, and her window was now boarded up.

Trust me: this was not an easy message to deliver.

Silence. “What?” she said.

We had no phone numbers, I told her. No spare keys. No idea where she was. I’d left messages.

“I told Paul I was leaving,” she said.

Paul shook his head. “He doesn’t remember it,” I said.

Again, silence.

She sighed. She said she should probably be glad that people were concerned about her; she knew Paul and I cared, but she was surprised that anybody else would. Still…there was a part of her that felt violated. “I’m sure I told Paul,” she added. “Am I losing it?”

She gave me her brother’s number, which I carefully logged into my cell phone memory. I reassured her that Kerwin the Super, who is the handiest Super in New York, had done a great job boarding her window; I was sure it hadn’t leaked.

I hung up, feeling terrible, knowing what a shock I’d given her. Knowing that she must feel vulnerable and raw. Betrayed. Old.

**
It is now December, a month and a half from the day I followed Kerwin the Super up the fire escape. Maude has been down to visit many times. She has discussed the event, rehashed her feelings about it, reassured us—and herself—that it was not a terrible thing.

Not that she believes that.

Today we took her to brunch, then to Home Depot to buy new blinds for her newly-repaired window. She told the clerk, a sweet and helpful young woman, the story of the break-in, and her voice still trembled. The clerk nodded, and assured her that it was an appropriate thing to do, under the circumstances. I nodded. Maude nodded.

The ground has shifted ever-so-slightly beneath us all; things are okay…but not quite the same.

Tomorrow, I will make bread with my Kitchen Aid mixer.

I want to give some to Maude, but I’m a little afraid.

Shortly after 9 a.m., we walked to the poll in Midwood, to our usual voting place. It’s in the basement of an apartment complex on 17th Street.

Initially, I wasn’t sure if it would be the right place. We’d received several postcards assuring us that, because our area hadn’t been badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, our voting location hadn’t changed. Then someone—nobody seemed to know who—had posted an official-looking announcement in our lobby that we were to vote on 25th Street instead.

As good fortune would have it, a neighbor happened through the lobby as I was puzzling over the notice, and told me he had just voted—on 17th, as usual.

So…Paul and I walked to 17th Street. And there was the reassuring Vote Here/Vote Aqui sign, and its corollary notice that it was illegal to politic within a designated number of feet from the polling place door.

The scene beyond that door was purgatorial. The room was filled with lines of people, milling, kvetching, waiting to vote. I had never, ever seen it so full.

Our polling place is manned by ancient Brooklynites, who sit behind long church-basement folding tables weighted with mountainous Great Books of Names. A woman of 90 or so guarded the door; she asked our address, and directed us to a second nonagenarian behind one of those Great Books.

We stood in line for ten minutes to reach the woman. She peered at her particular Great Book of Names through coke-bottle lenses. “O’Neill.” She shook her head. “You’re not here.” Her tone was accusatory.

“But we always vote here.”

“You’re NOT HERE.” She jabbed a spectral finger at the Great Book, then toward the next table. “Try that line,”  loin, in her Brooklyn-ese.

This second line snaked from the door to the far corner table, near the ballot-scanning machine. We nudged our way back through the crowd and took our places at the rear. An eternity passed, during which the woman at the door cheerfully pointed voters to the second woman, who—lips pursed, magnified eyes disapproving—sent most of them off to dither in our endless loin.

Two women sat behind the far table, their Great Books of Names before them. We finally, finally found ourselves facing one. A surprise: she was young, in her 20s.

“O’Neill,” said Paul.

The young woman opened her ponderous Book. She perused the first page, running her finger down the names, her lips shaping to each. She turned to the second.

“It begins with O,” said Paul.

She frowned and redoubled her efforts.

“Like Obama,” he said. “Only it’s O’Neill. O-N-E-I-L-L.”

The girl pouted and pushed the Great Book away. The woman next to her retrieved it with a liver-spotted hand. She riffled through the pages, stopped, pointed to Paul’s name.

In our voting place, once you find your name in the Great Book of Names, there follows a Mason-esque ritual: you sign; someone examines your signature, another someone fills out an index card and assigns a number that has nothing whatsoever to do with the purpose of voting; there is a discussion about the number; someone else jots it on a separate list—I have never seen this arcane process anywhere but here.

I watched with trepidation, hoping the polls wouldn’t close before I received my ballot. And then, there it was, in my hand—that long white paper, tucked into a short manilla folder for privacy.

The Observer, a solemn fellow who resembled a pterodactyl in a yarmulke, directed us to our booths—tall, narrow podiums, the tops surrounded by plastic privacy screens.

I un-foldered my ballot and reached for the marker to black out those little ovals next to my choices. It was gone; its plastic leash was empty. I raised my hand to catch the eye of the prehistoric Observer. “There’s no pen here,” I said.

He looked nonplussed. He glanced over his shoulder as if one might materialize.

Paul finished voting and told me to take his booth. I did.

The privacy screens have a clear plastic pocket that holds a magnifier to help voters peruse the ballot’s fine print. The pocket in my new booth also held a slick red-white-and-blue-printed pamphlet. I slipped it out: Vote for Romney/Ryan, said the caption below the photos of the smiling candidates.

I raised my hand again and called to the Observer. “There’s campaign literature in the pocket of my booth.”

He sighed. “These people,” he said. He shook his head dolefully. “In time, they will receive their punishment.”

“But—it’s illegal to politic in a voting booth.”

“Maybe someone will check it for fingaprints.” He was serious.

I slipped the pamphlet back into the pocket, unwilling to tamper with evidence. Wondering if I should’ve worn rubber gloves.

When at last I tried to feed my ballot upside-down, as usual, into the scanner, it wouldn’t take it. Another old poll attendant picked the ballot up, turned it over and noted my choices, then fed it in vote-side-up. “You have to be very kind—“ coined—“to this machine,” he said.

Having done our civic duty, Paul and I walked down to Coney Island Avenue to catch the bus that would take us to a second bus that would take us to Red Hook. It was 11:30 a.m.

“You never saw the Romney pamphlet?” I asked him.

“I didn’t look,” he said. “I just wanted to vote and get the hell out of there.”

We stood for 20 minutes at the bus stop, wondering where the bus would stop, if it ever came–given that there was a line of cars waiting for their turn at a gas station six blocks up blocking the sidewalk—

But that’s another story in the annals of Post-Apocalyptic Brooklyn…

Wow. It’s nontraditional. It’s outside the box. It’s supported by the likes of Oprah, and Booker himself, one of its pioneers. It’s the ideal news broker, the site claims, for today’s young people.

I wonder: If I join, will #waywire discover that I’m 65 years old? Is there an #alarm for that? Will it send somebody to my house to rip my WiFi out of the wall—or wherever WiFi lurks—and arrest me for #Impersonating a Youth?

**

I don’t, of course, know Cory Booker, the 43-year-old mayor of Newark, NJ, on a face-to-face basis. I know him through Twitter.

I set up my Twitter account early this year, when I came home from yet another workshop on publicizing one’s book.

Most of these workshops are run by former publishing pros. Some are young; in the present media world, youth does not necessarily protect a publishing pro from waking one day to find he or she is former.

Young former publishing pros become freelance gurus. They love to promote the use of Social Media to market your writing.

I’ve had a FaceBook account for years—well, for Internet Years, which is to real-time much like dog-lifespan-years are to human. Sad to say, it has not yet nudged my book onto the best-seller list.

But Twitter! Marketing for our age! Indispensable! The little marketing guru at the workshop raised his hands, a Priest of Publishing, acne aflame with The Spirit. You must be on Twitter! The ultimate Social Media Tool (Twitter, not the little marketing guru)!

So I set up my account. I am @oneill_susan. Catchy and original. The first tip-off that I’m #Impersonating a Youth.

The second tip-off would be that I had to read the directions.

Twitter is Intuitive for those whom evolution has favored with narrow thumbs fitted to virtual keyboards and the mental dexterity to condense all communication into 140 characters or fewer. To the natural-born Tweeter, A Tale of Two Cities would read: Best/worst times: French revolt. Flawed man saves hero’s head, loses own. Thwack! Mon Dieu. Madam DeFarge: Knitknit. When you add the title, it’s exactly 140 characters.

Those of us who grew up in the age of cryptographs on papyrus speak a different language. Virtual keyboards frustrate our fat, touch-typing fingers, and we cannot tell a story without florid, multisyllabic, mouth-watering adjectives. For us, mastering the Art of Twitter (Twart?) can be a bit tricky.

Luckily, there’s a Twitter 101 on the website. It not only told me what the hell “#” means, it gave me information on sending pictures or quotes or websites in a Tweet, suggested lists of people I might want to “follow,” and included handy tips on getting my own “following.” Re-Tweet, reply, react, it proclaimed. I would begin as an isolated babe in the great Twittering woods, but once I started to re-Tweet other Tweeters’ words of wisdom, and reply and react to their messages, “followers” would flock to my own Twitty postings. Which would, ultimately, give me an audience for my book marketing.

Fair enough.

**

I checked my Twitter stats today: I “follow” 20 Tweeters. These include other writers, one friend, the Park Slope Food Co-op, and a handful of famous people, including the young Mayor Booker—whose astounding Twitter output makes me wonder when he finds time for mayor-ing, never mind eating and sleeping. I’ve secretly suspected that he is not a mere human since the day he rescued a constituent from a burning building.

He is, I suspect, a Superhero.

Beyond sending out his own Tweets, Booker “follows” 61,000 Twitter-ers. Which supports my theory about his Superhero status: no mere mortal could read messages every day from 1,000 people, never mind 61,000.

And yet… He’s holding a Twitter discussion on how New Jersey should kidnap the Statue of Liberty. He’s offering his cell number to a man complaining that no cops come when thieves try to steal his car. He even told one guy who’d lost money to a city-owned vending machine to stop by the office and he’d reimburse him.

It’s a bird…it’s a plane…

If the number of Tweeters I “follow” is un-heroic (there were actually 21, but I “un-followed” President Obama because he kept begging me for money), my “following” is downright pathetic—11. That means 11 people can see what I Tweet. There were 16, until five of my “followers” offered me websites to connect with Hot Young Singles.

Eleven people to market my book to.

I’m just so grateful to have them; how could I bear to spam them with ads?

**

“Following” even 20 Tweeters means reading a lot of Tweets and pursuing a lot of links and pictures. It means a lot of re-Tweeting, replying and reacting, which generates even more Tweets, links and pictures. It’s incredibly time-consuming.

Which brings me back to #waywire.

How can a normal human being with a Twitter following larger than mine but short of Booker’s—the average wired-in Joe or Josephine who balances Twitter, FaceBook, Insta-gram, a “traditional” virtual news outlet or two, the occasional crawl through YouTube to watch cats play piano, and a Tumblr blog, with a job, a family, a meal or two a day, a face-to-face social life and a couple hours of sleep per night, not to mention time spent publicizing his/her book—find time to engage in a brand-new Social Medium that will supply hours of exciting, non-traditional news-feeds?

Perhaps you need super-powers.

Or maybe you really, truly do need to be young…

My husband Paul was across the aisle from me and our three friends, Karen and Martin and their teenaged son Sam, who were visiting from out West, where Subway is a sandwich shop. We were talking across the sparsely-populated car and, I confess, we were using our Outside Voices so we could hear each other over the ratcheting of the wheels and the random conversations of strangers.

Even so, we were taken aback when the little woman turned to Paul and told him he should go sit with the rest of us rather than talking so loud. She’d had a bad day, she informed him.

I can honestly say I’ve never heard anybody on a subway upbraid a fellow rider for being too loud. Unlike Amtrak, the MTA does not offer a Quiet Car. Subways themselves are loud: the wheels, the rattles, the beggars, the babies crying; people yelling into cell phones when the train’s above ground, as it often is in Brooklyn. Being loud comes standard. In fact, sometimes, being loud on a subway is an Art Form.

But more about that to come.

Paul will banter with anybody and everybody, the more so since he retired and only has me to bait—which doesn’t work as well as he’d like because, after 42 years, I’m onto him. Sometimes he’s provocative. Sometimes he’s outrageous. Sometimes he’s very funny. Whatever he says and does, I’m always somewhat amazed—and relieved—that the New Yorkers he deals with cut him slack. In no time, he can jolly, nudge or bully anybody into a smile. Perhaps it comes of being 6’3” and looking a bit like Steve Martin. Or maybe it’s because he’s un-self-conscious and quick to make himself the butt of his own jokes. Little old ladies, random strangers, even the local drug dealer on our corner—almost everybody returns his jests and jibes in kind.

But not the little woman with the book.

It probably didn’t help that, after she upbraided him, he began to whistle under his breath.

“Behave yourself,” I chided him from across the aisle.

Suddenly, she snapped her book shut, rose to her feet, and stood in front of him, her face furious, her clenched fist raised. “I’d punch you in the face if I could, you condescending a**hole,” she said, and stomped off to sit in the next file of seats, near an entrance.

The woman who’d been sitting on her other side raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Now, that’s something.”

Paul shrugged. “She’s had a bad day.”

“I feel kind of sorry for her,” I said. “Except…that really was a bit much.”

“I think that’s ‘assault,’” Paul said. “If she did punch me out, it would be ‘battery,’ right?”

“This is New York,” Martin said. “I’m surprised there’s not a flock of lawyers jumping up and handing you their cards.”

I glanced around. “You’re right. Can it be we got the only subway car in Brooklyn that doesn’t have at least one lawyer looking for a client?”

Sam giggled.

Karen said, “You’ve got to hand it to her: she’s quick. Usually, it takes awhile for people recognize that Paul’s a condescending a—“

“I CAN HEAR YOU ACROSS THE CAR!” the young woman shouted from her new seat.

The train rattled to a stop.

The doors opened, and two young guys marched into the car with a boom box.

Paul and I glanced at each other. “Uh oh,” I said. We’d seen this a million times; we knew exactly what would happen next.

The older of the two kids set the boombox on the floor—right next to the little woman’s foot—and cranked it up past 11, rocking the car with hip-hop. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced–

To the jack-hammer beat of Loudness as Art Form, the younger kid spun on the subway pole while the older kid clapped along. They both danced, flipped on the roof racks, flopped on the floor, yipped, clapped and stomped, and even though the little woman with the book streaked down to the far end of the car when she could get past them, even though she clamped her hands over her ears, I had no doubt she could hear them across the car even more clearly than she could us.

Poor woman. I do feel for her. This city can deal you some really bad days.

Still…there’s something to be said for Karma.

We had visited Quebec City two days earlier, and an ATM there had denied me access to my accounts. I found that curious, because the day before we left for Canada, I’d gone to my local TD Bank branch in Brooklyn. There, I told the Lovely Svetlana, the nubile beauty at the customer service desk, that we would be using Canadian ATMs for a week.

**

TD’s Lovely Svetlana and I had a history that was not altogether blissful. We met last winter, when I’d needed a wire transfer to secure a vacation apartment in Melbourne, Australia.

For three days, the Lovely Svetlana plugged data provided by our future Melbourne landlady into her computer. The transfer refused to go through. “Hmm. I’ve never had a renter run into this problem,” the Melbourne landlady mused, as she emailed yet another line of “required information.”

I’d sent transfers before and I, too, was flummoxed that the Lovely Svetlana’s computer could not perform what I had considered—silly me!—a simple task.

But no. Three days and nothing. I became frustrated; the Lovely Svetlana grew petulant. A large, gruff supervisor—I’ll call him Boris—detached himself from the bank’s shadows to loom over us. “There is a problem?” he growled.

His hooded eyes hinted of deep existential sadness, and special methods to handle truculent customers. I swallowed. “Do you know how to do a wire transfer?”

“No.” He folded his arms, suit sleeves straining over impressive biceps. “But. Svetlana. Knows.”

Such a soulful man, yet so optimistic.

On the fourth day, the Lovely Svetlana discovered she’d been using the wrong form. She clicked a key: heavenly hosts sang Alleluia, and the transfer went through.

**

I had not dealt with the Lovely Svetlana since the wire transfer fiasco, but I had faith that she could convince TD Bank to let me use my ATM card in Canada. It was, after all, a simple task.

Then the Quebec City ATM denied me cash. A fluke, I told myself: it isn’t a TD machine; that’s all. One of our friends swapped me some Canadian cash, so we had enough to get by.

But it was gone when we hit Montreal. And so I found myself at the ATM in Rue Sainte Catherine’s TD Bank, holding a receipt that stated No Transaction.

The teller line was long, but I was determined. The Heineken Tent was only two blocks away; I could power-walk two blocks.

I reached the teller five minutes before the start of Israel Proulx’s set.

I explained my dilemma. She grimaced. “We can’t access your records. Our computers don’t communicate with Brooklyn.” She tapped my ATM card. “Call this number.” She gave me an international prefix and pointed to a house phone.

I called—or tried. Five times. Each time, an automated voice told me I couldn’t make the call as dialed.

I waited for the teller to finish a deposit. She dialed for me. No luck. She again tapped my ATM card. “Try this Collect number.”

Somewhere in the banking universe, a phone rang. It rang for five minutes.

I gave up.

I waited for the teller to deal with a guy who wanted fifty dollars in Loonies. By the time she found a plastic bag for his coins, Israel Proulx was 10 minutes into his hour-long set. I pulled out all my available greenbacks. It was a busy day, the teller apologized; she was out of twenties. I accepted a handful of tens, happy that they weren’t Loonies.

I power-walked to the Heineken Tent and plopped down next to Paul to catch the last twenty minutes of Israel Proulx. The waitress brought drinks, and I paid in Canadian tens.

“What took you so long?” Paul asked.

I rolled my eyes heavenward. “The Lovely Svetlana,” I said.

**

I was wrong.

Last night, I returned to Brooklyn to find a message on my home phone concerning my bank card. I called the proffered 24-hour number.

Ten minutes of cheerful hold messages extolled TD Bank’s Legendary Service, then a young man listened to my tale of woe. “So I’m wondering where the problem lay,” I said. Was it, indeed, the Lovely Svetlana? The wrong form?

“Hmm.” Keys clicked. “No, I can see here on your account that there was a notification you would be gone—“

“Then what the f—“

“Let me put you through to my supervisor.”

Twenty minutes of cheerful hold messages extolled the virtues of a new account. Too bad I had one already. To my sorrow.

At last, a woman named Patty picked up. Yes, she said, my vacation had been noted. “But there’d been suspicious activity in the area where you were, so we put your card on hold.”

I took a deep, cleansing breath. “You mean,” I said, “that when a customer tells you they’re going on vacation, and gives you specific places and dates, and that customer arrives there—where and when they told you they would—and uses an ATM because they need cash on their vacation, TD Bank can arbitrarily decide that the place they’re visiting is unacceptable, and refuse them access to their own money?”

A pause. “I suppose you could put it that way.”

“So if we told you we would need cash, and told you when we would need it, and where we would be when we would need it, we still can’t get it when we get there?”

“We always call the party—“

“You called my home phone. I don’t take it on vacation. The cord’s too short.”

“Perhaps we should have your cell phone number—”

“I don’t use my cell phone on vacation. Have you ever seen the International rates?”

Ultimately, Patty put a note on my account telling the bank to take my note seriously. “I have to warn you, though, this is not a permanent note,” she said.

“How long is ‘not permanent’?” I asked.

“I really can’t say.”

I’m sorry, Lovely Svetlana. I maligned your name without cause. You acted efficiently and effectively.

Alas, they don’t listen to you, either…