I Found a Portal To The 90's That's Hiding In Plain Sight.

Disposable Cameras and Childproof Doors: A Day Without A Phone.

It is Saturday, a week after the Hands Off rally, and again the weather is cold and rainy. I again leave the house without my phone. Unlike the Hands Off rally, when I did this on purpose, this time I simply forget it. But there are no mistakes, as Freud said, unless I am mistaken, and over the course of an afternoon the absence of the phone, which at first seemed of no consequence, lead me to some unexpected places.

It begins with a drive across town in a rented car— me, my wife and and my daughter*, who we drop off at a coffee shop where she is meeting friends. It’s a gratuitous drive. Evangeline had wanted to take the bus. But we insisted. We didn’t have to return to car for a few hours? We wanted car time, and daughter time. Alexander we left at home in his cave.

After we dropped her off, we go for a coffee at an Italian place we choose because there was a parking spot in front of it. It turned out that its chief virtue was a very impressive marble counter. The marble is dark pink, opulent. It was a place that could only exist in Italy or the Upper East Side, which really is a country of its own.

An hour and a half later, we go pick up Evangeline more or less where we dropped her, and drive home. It would have been utterly without event except for two things.

One is the errand of dropping off her disposable camera, which coincides with my realization that we have run out of Cafe Bustelo. Like Zola, but much less productive, I need strong coffee**. All of a sudden, when we are a block away, I announce this need and say that I am going to dash into Fairway while they go to the camera place around the corner.

I run into Fairway, and only when I am in line, paying, does it occurs to me that we didn’t really make a specific plan for where we might rendezvous, other than me yelling, “I will meet you there,” as I dashed away from the car.

This would not be an an issue, normally. but as I have no phone, this lack of specificity is a problem. From Fairway, I run to the camera place. The car is not there. Nevertheless, I burst in, and am about to start describing my daughter to see if she has been there already. But instead of saying anything at all, I come to an abrupt halt and stand there frozen in silence like a mime while a man with a French accent says, “May I help you?”

The problem - the reason for my freeze - is that a song I once knew and liked is playing softly and I can’t place the song. If I could place it, I would be fine. Not being able to name the song while also having an intense reaction to it is destabilizing. It is either Air (Moon Safari) or something else from that same era. Judging from my paralysis, I think it was Air.

The French guy - maybe he was the one who chose Air - had to refer me to the dude in the hat behind the register, who asked for my daughter’s name and then looked through all the envelopes of photos that were waiting to be picked up.

As he looks through the envelopes of developed film, I call out: “I just want to know if she was here and left.”

I state her age, the color of her hair, and am about to describe her further when it occurs to me that this is an absurd situation, potentially creepy, and that if my daughter could see me now she would erupt in volcanic embarrassment and rage.

Really, the whole errand is absurd—if she had been there and left, what good would that do me? The car was not outside. It was somewhere else. I had no way of finding it. The very act of coming into the place to look for her was just a form of having a tantrum disguised as seeking information—this may say something about a lot of quests, or just me.

It was possible she could have not yet arrived I thought for a moment… but of course she had been there and left! I would have rushed straight out the door but this would have been another layer of unbalanced and rude behavior so I stood there a few more moments until I could, in the end, confirm that my daughter had come and gone.

I think there was something else that short circuited me, though: whatever song it was, I had first heard it back in an era when I dropped off film and came back later to pick it up in an envelope, just like the ones the guy in the hat had been leafing through. The whole place, with its frames for sale, its disposable cameras for sale, its film development business, was a throwback. It was like I had burst into a scene and soundtrack from 1998. And that feeling, or at least that aesthetic, is why disposable cameras are popular again with the youth—they want to burst into 1998, too!

I found the car waiting outside Fairway. We drove home. I went upstairs to make a cup of coffee and deposit the football size container of Cafe Bustelo. Then I came down and returned the car.

But there is one other odd detail about this whole expedition that in some way feels more notable than the camera shop*** (by which I mean absurd and memorable): whomever had previously rented the car had flicked the childproof switch on the back doors. As a result, when we first dropped off our daughter, there was a lot of shouting and pulling on the inside handle as my daughter tried to get out of the car and we reached for various buttons in order to unlock it for her, not immediately grasping the problem. In the end, I had to get out and open it from the outside, like a chauffeur. And it happened again because I forgot to locate that little switch that makes it impossible to open the back door from the inside, and flick it off.

We had once used just such a switch in order to contain this very girl, and later her brother, and it felt significant to me that we were encountering it as she approached her graduation from high school.

We had to go through the shouting and wrestling match with the door twice, once for each side. The second time, when we got home, I had to again get out and open the back door from the outside. My daughter, once she emerged, indignant, had the presence of mind to flick the childproof switch to “off” before she walked away. Self-sufficient at last!

What strikes me now, is that it was a rental car, and I was returning it that very afternoon. So she fixed it in time to never use it again, which seems like an allegory for a kid who is soon to graduate high school. I remember feeling that way at the end of college—I finally figured out how to be in this place and enjoy it, and now I have to leave.

—

*I am about to hand in the copy-edited corrections to my next book, Degas At The Gas Station, a collection of essays, almost all of which feature members of my family. Only at the latest stages of preparing the manuscript did I change instances where I had referred to “My wife” and “my Son” and so forth, to Elizabeth and Alexander, and so forth. My initial impulse was to anonymize them. Why? In the book it makes no sense. They are, for better or worse, characters. They have names. But when first publishing these pieces in the New Yorker and New York Times my first instinct was to protect their anonymity. Which is to say, protect their privacy.

But if I wanted to protect their privacy, why was I writing at length of the doings of my family life? There is some connection between these conflicted impulses to disclose and to remain hidden. Perhaps it’s a that plays out in every writer. “Silence, Exile and Cunning,” is what I would like to be my motto. But can I claim any of these virtues—now, or ever?

**Shoutout to my former professor Susan Minot for mentioning in passing that such was Zola’s reliance on ever stronger coffee that by the end of his life he was drinking what amounted to a form of sludge. And for tipping her head back to mimic what that might have looked like, bringing Zola as close to life as I had ever seen him in Columbia’s Dodge Hall, two floors down from where J.D. Salinger had his first big epiphany and started to write his stories. But that is another matter.