Meakin Armstrong

Of course, while watching the debate, I thought of things that Biden needed to say. When Trump talked about Russia, I wanted Biden to ask about the $400 million mystery loan that was probably filtered to him through Deutsche Bank via Putin.

When Trump talked about Biden’s son, I wanted Biden to mention Cult 45’s kids feeding at the trough—and making millions while doing it.

But today, while writing an article, I listened to myself in an interview with one of my subjects: During the call, I didn’t get even the most basic points my subject was saying. I didn’t ask the right follow-ups, either. My subject repeated himself and interrupted me, obviously thinking he was talking to an idiot. We got what we needed, but it was no thanks to me. So while writing the article, I yelled at my computer screen. Which… I know. Can you backseat drive yourself?

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people—literally hundreds. And every time I listen to the recordings, I think: Who is that idiot asking those stupid questions? With that in mind, I now think Biden did fine. He missed some jabs. But I don’t think he needed to jab.

He needed to appear sane.

That’s all. Just sane.

Had he jabbed at Cult 45, he may have outraged that middling, on-the-fence voter who is starved for a candidate with politesse. So, maybe what we saw was the best performance possible. These debates aren’t aimed at any of us who have already made a decision. They are rallying cries, sure. But mostly they are aimed at the wobbly voter—our goal is to encourage that wobbly voter to either vote for Biden or if they are lean-Republican to be so repulsed by Trump to not bother to vote for him—by simply not showing up. I think Biden succeeded there.

He was the kindly bland old man who asks us what we learned in school today and then gives us old candy from another era—maybe Mary Jane or Heath Bar. We sniff at the candy, try it, and wonder how people got by in that earlier era. Then we decide that old man is a whole lot better than that addled, drunk uncle raging in the backyard. Why is our drunk uncle yelling at the swing set? Who knows. Let’s lock the back door and pretend we’re not home.

The first time I saw the smoke was from the 21st floor of the Conde Nast building in Times Square—a dot of black and gray, far down the island.

We evacuated our building because it was the tallest one in Times Square. I saw the collapse on the screens outside ABC News Broadcast Plaza: Peter Jennings said, Oh my god.
And that was that.

Walking home, I remember a teenage girl posing for a camera. She was smiling while behind her was panic. A man with a shower radio stood on the street as the news played. Around him was a crowd, listening.

I saw a suburban-style minivan stuffed with firefighters—it was so cramped, its sliding door was open and firefighters were hanging onto the side of it while that baby-blue minivan headed into the smoke and ash.

I remember the fire truck from Massapequa—for hours, it must have barreled its way through Long Island’s always-choked roads to Ground Zero.

Later, I saw a firefighter, exhausted, standing in front of the firehouse down the block from me. His face was covered in white ash and he was crying, his tears combining with the ash in rivulets. That station lost six men.

I remember the ironworkers who cleaned up the twisted, smoking mess for weeks afterward, only to get damaged lungs (My former live-in GF’s brother-in-law was in that stinking hellhole. He knows his life was stolen from him. His health never recovered).

That day doesn’t make me think of the highly paid, so-called knowledge workers like me. We were useless. I also don’t think of our leaders who wore suits and waved the American flag while standing on an emblematic — but safe and telegenic — part of the so-called Pile.
Normally we ignore the service personnel, but when that shit went down, those people headed into the fire while the rest of us got out.

We stood around and cried. We called our exes and long-lost friends and everyone we could think of and it really mattered who called and who didn’t. We mourned the ones who died. I ended up hugging a woman I barely knew in an office hallway because someone close to her had died. We all greeted each other, “Is everyone ok?”

There were flyers everywhere that headlined, MISSING. Beneath the MISSING headline, there was usually a photo, a name. Sometimes there was a prayer or a statement of love. That missing person went into the World Trade Center that morning and hadn’t been found. I recognized a woman on one of those MISSING flyers. I’d met her at a birthday party. She had been in the final rounds of becoming a doctor.

I saw many other people hugging and crying. In the subway. At work. On the sidewalks. I watched street cleaners wash down Wall Street in the most loving way possible the night before they opened the area to those who didn’t live downtown, the rest of America.
Cabbies weren’t rude. We were all acting our best like kids in school on the first day of class. We were trying to behave because we were useless: The people who mattered were the ones we had previously ignored: the firefighters, the ironworkers.

A few years ago while on a century ride, I was in a serious bike accident. An FDNY EMT showed up within minutes and held my head in place to keep me from damaging myself further. Others strapped me into the gurney and made jokes to keep me calm. I forget what the jokes were, but I remember compassion. They sopped up the blood as I bled over a bike path on Rockaway Beach (a kid cut me off, I swerved on the sand and fell on my face and wrist and shoulders. I got a concussion from hitting the sidewalk with my forehead, despite the helmet). At the major trauma center at Brookdale Hospital, the PA, the physician’s assistant, pulled the many, many grains of sand, bit by bit from my face and body. Another worked on my broken wrist.

To keep me calm, the PA told me she did something called West Coast Swing dancing. She told me this while picking out each grain of sand, one by one. She said, yes, her people don’t like the East Coast swing dancers. They don’t shoot each other, though; they just say impolite things. Because they’re nerds.

An hour later while I was still on the gurney, my face shredded and swollen, the PA sighed. An eight-month-old boy was being admitted, his face chewed by a Doberman that someone had allowed to roam the streets.

The scene was intense: the baby screamed. The parents screamed. The baby bled. I heard the distraught cop who helped bring in the baby ask someone if the baby was blinded for life.

They rolled me out of the room to give the baby and her family privacy. The nurse said, That poor baby. I asked her if she hated her job, but she said no, of course not: I get to help that baby.

The wrong people are praised in our society.

You’ll always run into someone who will tell you it was better just before you got here. Since you got here, it’s just not as good—it’s now a mall. It’s now a ghost town. You should have seen it a year or two before you got here, though.

Saying that is ridiculous. Like New York needs anyone’s approval. New York City doesn’t care about any of us. It’s just there like the Grand Canyon is there. You can visit. You can live here. You can leave. As far as New York City is concerned, it doesn’t matter what you choose to do—this city isn’t yours and it never was.

Before my time here, while the Bronx burned, the Yankees were also in the Bronx, winning the World Series. Woody Allen was in Manhattan making movies that never mentioned baseball or the Bronx. New York carried on. It just didn’t care. And new people still kept coming.

New York City has a waiting list. Those who are on the waiting list need the city to get cheap enough for them to come here. That was me, decades ago.

The city was repairing itself by the time I arrived, but it was still a mess. The dark streets were terrifying. I was in a subway car once: As the doors shut, I saw blood splattered all over subway car walls from a gunshot wound. A homeless guy once set fire to his feet in the doorway of my apartment building. I was mugged at knifepoint. None of these things was particularly unusual then. I loved living here, though: Everywhere else was just a suburb.

If the city continues to falter it’ll attract the waiting list. Those people will come, eventually replacing both you and me. The city will move on—and not to bruise your ego, it won’t remember us.

New York City is hurting, but so is America. New York City is always the tip of the spear—when there’s money to be made, we make more of it here. When the country is a dumpster fire, this city burns. Leaving New York doesn’t make you a failure. Staying doesn’t make you a success. Find your own reasons to live where you want—it’s not a problem for New York City to solve. It just doesn’t care.

On the face of it, the name of my Brooklyn Book Festival panel was a bit grim: Aftershock: Putting Pieces Together Following Family Disaster, but the session ended up being fun, packed, and fascinating. Description, below. The room was packed.

I’m speaking at the Slice Literary Writers’ Conference in a panel on magazines: How they’re managed and run, and how they will likely be managed in the future.

Personally, I think digital sites will make stories more visual. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but I still think that’s the way it will go. At Guernica, where I’m a senior editor, I think it’s important for the magazine to stay at the edge of modernity. But as a nonprofit, it’s also our responsibility to make sure there is a space for long-form text.

But more of that at the conference.

To promote the second season of Westworld, 360i re-created a choose-your-own-adventure experience for Alexa. Of course, Westworld being about the creepy side of tech made this a natural fit.

“Don’t let tactics interfere with strategy.”

Mark Ritson on Brand Management is how I think when I’m doing my job. I learned how to do it through trial and error. Glad I’m doing it the way it’s taught.

I interviewed Donald Trump—not about his fortune or his various ambitions, but about his relationship with Tiger Woods. This was when I was (sigh) managing editor of his magazine, Trump Style.

More on that on Literary Hub.

When I was about 12, I went to an artist talk given by Robert Indiana (RIP) in Charleston, SC. Like everyone at the talk, I was there to see the man who’d created the LOVE sculpture that was so famous, posters of it were on sale in Woolworth’s, just down the street.

For many of us in Charleston, Robert Indiana was the first artist any of us had ever seen. It was like visiting the zoo and looking at a giraffe. But he was normal and not at all glistening and exotic. He shambled about on the stage and his manner was familiar, like one of my grade school teachers—the ones who taught English or history. He showed us slides. They were pictures of his studio in the SoHo neighborhood of New York. Other slides were of his latest works. He tried to explain them—what art was, and what it meant to be an artist.

He didn’t want to talk about LOVE, though. But the crowd wanted to talk about LOVE. So he talked about LOVE, and how it had become too famous for its own good. Artists shouldn’t seek fame, he said. Just do good work. That, and don’t move to New York—he’d been lucky enough to move to New York when it was cheap, in the 1950s. It had become too expensive, he said. Instead, do this: Create new spaces and communities that allow you to create new art.

He didn’t want to talk about LOVE, though. But the crowd wanted to talk about LOVE. So he talked about LOVE, and how it had become too famous for its own good. Artists shouldn’t seek fame, he said. Just do good work. That, and don’t move to New York—he’d been lucky enough to move to New York when it was cheap, in the 1950s. It had become too expensive, he said. Instead, do this: Create new spaces and communities that allow you to create new art.

A Guernica story by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson was just selected for Best American Short Stories, edited by Roxane Gay. So pleased. Read it here:

Fresh from getting my Columbia MFA, I was broke and in need of quick cash. I accepted a gig as a proofreader and editor of funeral brochures in Brooklyn. The company, located in a rambling warehouse off Gowanus Canal, was a death-industry behemoth: It sold religious cards, gravestone markers, custom funeral tents, a magazine called Jewish Funeral Director, and some kind of special “no-smell” embalming fluid.

I was there for the funeral brochures, those pamphlets with the Order of Service. I sat in a warehouse room and looked at copy all day. Others photoshopped photos of the recently deceased—sometimes, those photos were taken from employee ID cards, because that old man who died had no recent pictures. We were considered the high-end for these kinds of brochures. The brochures were usually for those who had died outside of the church—their families wanted a religious funeral but didn’t have any religion they could claim. So they rented a preacher, often the same preacher, a man with the last name of Ford, who seemed to preside over 4-5 funerals a day. The orders of service were almost always the same: Rev Ford read the same Bible verses and the group sang the same songs, 4-5 times a day, every day.

Many of the services were for African Americans who had been shot, only a night or two before. Sometimes, I’d read the police accounts of the crime before I’d read the copy for the funeral brochure: this kid sold crack, the police said. This other one was a gangbanger. That kid who ended up separated into three trash bags? He was a blight to the community. Then I read the copy for the cards: It was never written well; it was never evocative of the life just lost, “He is among the stars,” some grandmother wrote. “He was the light of my life,” wrote another. I was told to just run the copy as the person wrote it; don’t interview the grandmother and write something better, just clean up her words and use AP Style in my edits.

But there’s this: Words are what we use to understand the pain of others. Without that, we see the weeping on TV of these kids shot by the latest mad gunman. We are left with the spectacle of inchoate pain. And then we move on, because that pain is too big for any of us to understand. And then we simplify the stories: That was a good kid who was accepted to college. She liked music. When she entered a room, that room lit up. Or in my case, that kid? That kid was a gangbanger who was still “among the stars” for some grandmother, somewhere.

I quit the job after a couple of weeks—I guess I was just a tourist. But something stayed with me: We’re in this together, and we all so much more than what we can say. Those kids who died in the shooting: They were more than we can say and they were murdered by a society that refuses to see that. If they’d understood, this would not have happened.

Instead of their safety, we thought only of ourselves and our “right” to have a gun. So we watch parents as they cry. And Florida’s version of Rev. Ford is still showing up for work.