I Could Be Wrong, But…

There is no Future.

But of course, you are free to not believe me.

The Future is an idea—a clever idea— but it is just one more of Man’s many clever ideas.

Man invented the Future because it doesn’t exist in Nature, and over time, this became a major inconvenience; very much like the major inconvenience Man encountered when he tried to count past 9, got confused, and had to invent another clever idea—the Zero.

The Zero is a placeholder. The Future is a placeholder. Man invented the place called the Future to hold his hopes and fears. In this way he could better concentrate on hunting for food, hunting for shelter, and hunting for members of the opposite sex to engage in the passing on of their collective DNA.

Oddly, whenever Man is ready to claim the hopes or face the fears he has placed in the Future, it is always the Present.

Think about it. Or don't— there's always something on television.

Once upon a time in the Past—for eleven days in April of 1980—millions of people living on or near the island of Manhattan experienced a transit strike.

What is a transit strike?

It is when all the people holding down the non-managerial jobs of making the trains and subways and buses move, choose not to get out of bed and go to work. They place into the Future, a hope that if they stay in bed long enough, their employers will pony up more money for their paychecks. (And they lie in bed, sleepless, fearing they may lose their jobs.)

The success of staying in bed as a means of achieving one’s goals seems to depend on where your bed is. Staying in bed to get what you want seems to work fairly well in complacent cities, like Rome or Athens, and sometimes works in peevish cities, like Paris or Berlin. However, it almost never works in depressed cities like Moscow or Kiev, where no one notices if the bus drivers or farmers or guards of the decaying nuclear warheads have chosen to stay in bed— because so many other people have chosen to stay in bed.

In New York, when the transit workers employed their strategy of staying in bed, the courts ruled the transit strike was illegal, fined the transit workers’ union $1.25 million—pretty much reducing its treasury to Zero— and for emphasis, fined the union’s leaders and tossed them in jail.

I could be wrong, but I think that all New Yorkers—excluding those in a few specific professions that I’ll leave to your imagination—believe you will never get what you want unless you get out of bed. (This is no doubt why, when John and Yoko chose to give peace a chance by staying in bed, they snubbed the world’s media capital, New York, and stayed in bed in Montréal.)

Something else about New Yorkers: When things are going well, New Yorkers complain. When things are not going well, New Yorkers complain. When things are going really badly, New Yorkers complain. And when things are bad beyond belief, New Yorkers shut up and do whatever needs to be done.

When those thousands of New York transit workers chose to stay in bed for eleven days in April of 1980, they created a big, strange, bad beyond belief mess that brought the term "gridlock" into the lexicon.

But it was wonderful, too.

I was living in a studio shoebox on the top floor of a five-story walkup in the East Village. It was a decent building; the landlord was a post office box, four out of seven days we had hot water, and I could go up the fire escape to the roof, kick aside the spent hypodermic needles, and survey my world, from the Empire State Building, to the World Trade Towers, and all the roiling sea of life between.

I was well off. I slept on a yellow vinyl convertible sofa that I had found on the street and, with the help of three drunken friends, dragged up to my aerie. I owned a Remmington Rand manual typewriter. I had enough "disposable" income to feed Spike, my cat. I had in my possession, as I have always had in my possession since the age of six, a bicycle.

The bicycle in my possession at that time was a brown Raleigh Super Course with a Reynolds 541 steel frame and Brooks leather saddle. It was on this very bike that I came tantalizingly close to travelling at the speed of light.

Back in 1980 I was twenty-two and still smugly confident in my fourth-grade understanding of physics; I believed—knew—that if I could just travel faster than the speed of light—even just a little bit faster, say, 186,001 miles per second—I would reach the Future.

When the transit strike began I, unlike thousands of transit workers, got out of bed. But I, in a kind of solidarity with the thousands of transit workers, did not go to my job.

No. I carried my bicycle down five flights of stairs, got on it, and had the most fantastic ride of my life.

The avenues and streets were solid with cars. Drivers had no option but to sit, wait, creep forward to close the inches of space that opened every few minutes between their front bumper and the back bumper of the car ahead, and sit, and wait. Traffic lights were meaningless.

There were thousands of people riding bicycles who had not ridden bicycles in decades. Many of them wobbled and crashed into stationery cars, pedestrians, or the limits of their own coordination and balance.

Roller skaters danced and feinted, spun and twisted, did fast rings around immobilized cars, not so much to taunt them, as to celebrate their own daring mobility, to say, "Look at me! I have little wheels on my feet! See how fast I go! I can go anywhere I want! And never have to worry about parking when I get there!"

I rode my bicycle for hours, zipping down the center of avenues, dodging, feinting, leaning, threading, standing on the pedals, hopping curbs, braking hard, accelerating hard, missing car doors or truck mirrors or whoosing past pedestrians, shooting forward half a block before hearing behind me, in a mix of amazement and admiration: "You crazy motherfucker!"

More than once, I could feel myself approaching the speed of light. But I couldn’t quite make the leap, couldn’t quite break the barrier…

If only I could find a long, straight line of travel…I could speed into the Future.

I rode through the West Village and up Avenue of the Americas and through the garment district and all over Times Square and into the bicycle swarmed heaven of Central Park…

I came out from the park and in a breath I was passing Columbia University then into Harlem then circling Grant’s Tomb until dizzy and spinning away down along the Hudson up onto the elevated remains of the Westside Highway into the high dark canyons of Lower Manhattan…

But there was never enough straight distance, never a clear path just wide enough for me on my bicycle to pedal fast enough to reach—then exceed—the speed of light…

I came close, so close. But a car door would open and I would dodge in reflex, twist and slow; a pedestrian would stumble from a throng of drinkers at a corner outside of a Blarney Stone, and I would brake, lean, accelerate in a new direction; a blithely day-dreaming roller skater would make a spontaneous dance-step to the left just as I overtook him and I would lean hard right easy on the front brake mutter curses jump the wheel onto the curb and come to a stop inches from a shocked red-faced doorman…

I could not find the necessary straight line; everything was in flux, and finally, exhausted, exhilarated, breathing deep, horny, happy, mystified by being alive, and speechless with good will, I gave up…

Glided into the outdoor plaza by the World Trade Towers. …

Stopped near the fountain, grinning at the big ugly brass sculpture that looked to me like a gold-plated brain with a nose, but was supposed to be a symbol of the earth, man’s brilliance, or some other wonder that I could never see in it…

And the next thing I knew I was walking my bicycle, walking toward the Tower…

I had been inside these Towers, all through these Towers, from the flat tops to the stairs and elevators of their guts to the labyrinth train tunnels of their underground roots. They were living creatures. Some buildings are quiet, quiescent, keeping their sentience to themselves. Not these twin Towers. They were always making bodily noises, breathing, their lungs and bodies expanding, contracting, joints creaking, echoing each other, genetically linked, as all twins are.

I set my bicycle down and glanced up and remembered playing hooky from high school in Connecticut in the mid-1970s, and with two pals taking the train into Manhattan and seeing for the first time the silver-grey gleaming towers that I had not heard of, but that one of my pals told me were the World Trade Towers and his uncle was working on the construction of the Towers, making "good money" doing HVAC, which I also had not heard of and which my pal told me was all about creating miles upon miles of sheet-steel air ducts—the very lungs of the giant Towers…

In a city teeming with millions of lives, purposes, hopes, and fears, in a country created and continually recreated from the prime natural resource, freedom, I just walked up to this living giant building, and leaned my back against the cool metal skin that was as thin, permeable and elastic as my own skin…

And looked up the 110 story long vertical lines of silver-grey metal and blue-grey glass soaring into white-grey clouds speeding across an arching blue-white sky…

And right then—for the first and only time so far in my life—I reached—and instantly exceeded—the speed of light.

But I did not find the Future.

There was no ear-hurting whining roar of low-flying jets; no crashing exploding fireball; screams; flames; poison billowing smoke; 2,000 degrees of heat driving living people to the hopeless choice of burning alive or jumping to death.

The Future is a clever idea, a useful place to hold one’s hopes and fears. But it doesn’t exist; no one can live there. The only time to live is now.

Right now.

>>Back to top<<

From San Diego Writers Monthly publishes California Writers, California authors, new writers, offering readers info on how to get published, from literary agents, writing coaches, San Diego editors on editing, self-publishing how-to, publishing chap books and short-run books, book doctors, ghost writers, San Diego authors events, interviews of writers, book reviews, free readings, book signings, free stories, online fiction, poetry workshops, free novels, free essays, free ideas, science fiction, humorous stories, rants, funny essays, copywriting, freelancing info, and musings about living on this lonely planet circling a lonely star.