01 January 2004

I am up, of a sort, and not hung over. Just a little tired and daunted by the prospects of moving down from the Fifth Floor to the unit by the pool deck. There is a lot to deal with, all this crap acquired through a life of travel, files and curios all conjuring sound and fury and not signifying anything in particular.

I am determined to get organized today. They are lining up in Pasadena for the Rose Parade that precedes the Big Game between USC and Michigan. I will watch that downtown with my older son, but that is hours away. It is a curious thing that having successfully navigated the change of the year in Times Square we have moved to the next big threat. They can't hit us yesterday. So, perhaps it is the Rose Bowl today. This is unending.

I had watched a Three Stooges revival on the American Movie Channel to get close to the mood. I watched it long distance with my best friend. It seemed to help a bit for both of us. I was a little reluctant to engage in the joy tinged with desperation of my neighbors at Big Pink.

There are hundreds of us that live in the great Condominium island built nearly fifty yards into prestigious North Arlington, a great gate separating the poorer South from the affluent North of the county.

Real estate prices being as hallucinogenic as they are, the social chasm between north and south has faded a bit. People live where they can, and they are not making any more real estate close in. Even the little 1930s shoe-box houses can bring a price in the high six figures. Big Pink started as an apartment complex, went Condo in the 1970s.

Nobody makes money on Condos, says the common wisdom, but this is a strange market. The guy I just bought my efficiency from made a cool $70 on his investment. Strange market here, and I hope the same thing happens to me.

Things being the way they are, Big Pink can be a bit of salvation. When I was living out of the trunk of my car, I looked at a lot of apartments. Most were the little garden places, smelling of cat urine in the stairwells and a little seedy. They were still pricey. When a Realtor I contacted in desperation brought me here I knew I was home.

The lobby is polished marble, the concierge desk is staffed with quirky women of a certain age and security is good. There is plenty of parking and the cars are rarely vandalized. The efficiency I was shown that day had great glass windows that flooded the place with light. It was not cheap, but neither was it expensive. I was home.

People fetched up here in big Pink through circumstance, and everyone has a story. I was wondering about mine as I awoke to the mellow tones of the BBC. It was a relaxed show.

Yes, there were the bombings in Iraq and Indonesia, but on the whole the night passed without major incident. The show was relaxed and welcoming. Part of the dance-of to the show, nearing eleven in London, was a chat with an ABC correspondent in the Hawaiian Islands. If the New Year started in Guam and worked its stately way west, Honolulu was the end of the line for the big celebrations.

It was shortly after midnight there and the perky Hawaiian lady was watching the explosions of fireworks from above Pearl Harbor. I thought she was probably calling from Mililani Town, the development on the edge of the pineapple fields not far from where my older son was born. Midnight on New Year's in Hawaii comes with the boom and crackle of fireworks galore. Every family lights strings of firecrackers and the bolder ones launch rockets from the highlands. The noise goes on for hours, part of the tradition of driving the demons out of the new-born year. It was eerie to walk down by the harbor after the parties were done in the fog of acrid smoke, smelling the sweet flowers through cloud of burned black powder.

We thought we might see something more ominous in New York, but we did not. Those brave people who went to Times Square were making a declaration of sorts, as significant as ours to party it out right on the Fifth Floor and launch champagne corks from the balcony.

I had received an invitation to the party down the hall via a note slipped under my door. All the cool folks, were invited: 816, of course, and 729, 725, 627, 616, 619, 621, me in 515, 57, 526, 527, 504, 506, 509 and some people from the ground floor over by the pool. You know, the players.

We partied bravely in 516, the gay and divorced, no children, men and women mostly of a certain age. There was a sprinkling of the young, the ones just starting out in Washington.

But mostly it was us who are old enough to know better. I do not think we would have done it differently, even if we knew what we know now.

Most of the Players were there, awaiting the new year. The Association President, a retired senior Army officer with a southern voice as soft as molasses was there. So was Jack Malarky, the peripatetic cigar-smoking curmudgeon who bears a striking resemblance to the millionaire on the Monopoly board.

There was a woman in my trade, wink wink, who I literally ran into in one of those facilities here in town, both of us scratching our heads as to the context of our acquaintance.

The elegant gentleman with the impeccable apartment on the West Tower was there. He had no companion with him. He is a marvelous fellow, though the women talk about him. There was a crazed Frenchwoman, blonde, in tiny black trousers festooned with zippers. She had ditched her husband of thrity years, married a Navy Captain for nine months, and now only dated a married man for companionship. Certainly not sex.

There were four or five other women there, too, some of them wearing tiaras of silver paper. They were stranded here in Big Pink by career or death or divorce. You know, the usual.

The youngest present was a woman associated with the building trades lobby, part of the Union coalition in town. She had just arrived in Washington from Hartford and had been living in a hotel downtown. I asked her how much it cost to do that. She shrugged and said "$5,000 for three weeks. More than I could afford." I whistled at the cost, though I have lived like that with someone else paying. She beamed. "Tony got me in. You know, Tony from the Ironworkers Executive Council."

I knew Tony. I just bought the unit in the middle of Ironworkers Row down by the pool. He could make just about anything happen here in town. "That's great! The Ironworkers are big here were big in the AF of L- CIO. I said it the way we said it when I was growing up in Detroit.

She pursed her lips, puzzled. "Why do you guys say it that way? You say the "of" in the American Federation of Labor but not the Congress of Industrial Organizations."

I took a sip of my drink and teased her. "Because Walter Reuther only fought for the A-F-of-L at the Battle of the Overpass against Ford's goons in Detroit? I dunno. Maybe they got tired."

The minutes were counting down. When Dick Clark told us the ball was coming down, we swarmed out onto the balcony. I had removed the wires from the champagne bottles and they were live rounds, ready to be fired at the parking lot far below. Some of the women defiantly removed their shirts and waved from the balcony, hoping to be noted in the Red Book at the concierge desk as a disruption of the public order.

We drank and we shouted and we kissed one another as an assertion of our love for life. Jack grabbed the young woman from the building trades and planted a kiss on her that was a lot more than a fatherly celebration of the new year. Her eyes got round. Jack may be in his 70's but he still has quite a reputation as a Lady's Man, you know.

I wandered back to the unit after eating a portion of black-eyed peas for luck. I drank a nightcap and gazed at images from elsewhere in the dim glow. I heard the footfalls of someone, it had to be from the party, racing up and down the hall. New Years having passed here, the commentators turned their attention to the potential threats to Las Vegas and LA.

I turned off the tube. If we got through the night, we would start worrying about the Rose Bowl at Pasadena tomorrow.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra