I stopped wearing a watch when I was seven years old. And for some strange reason, I remember that moment quite clearly. I was standing outside of our apartment in the "alto manhattan" part of the city. The hallways were newly painted. The walls were a glossy Yellow ochre. The sheen on everything made me dizzy. The smell of fresh enamel added to the colors of the hallucinations. Funhouse mirrors if you stood in the right spot. Up and down, the staircase a solid glossy black. I am serious when i say solid. I once saw a girl run up the stairs and bang her head against one of the railings. At first, nothing, then her head swelled up. A purple black balloon. Where her perfect forehead once dwelled. A dark thought now extended out above her fragile stare. I never forgot that moment. Her mother coming up behind her, half screaming, half yelling at her. This was the way parents handled situations with their children in this time period. Even when a child was hurt from playing outside, with the exception of death, the parents were always trapped between a scream of dispair and a yell of disappointment at the child's obvious stupidity. Oh boy, those were the times. A savage land for those growing up, especially in that part of the city. A self realized nightmare for those who came from afar with other intentions for their family and futures.
The building was built during the art deco period of the 20's, so, everything was wonderfully ornate. The railings, although still present, were buried beneath the remains of the aftermath of a vesuvian accidental flow. A thick skin of shiny lava covered them. The moldings, also covered in the same black frost, followed along those long glossy yellow ochre walls. Wrapping around all of the ceilings on every floor. The doors, Rolling Stone black. The floors covered in one inch tiles, a classic black and white, checkered, masonic floor pattern.
I couldn't remember much else about the building. The exception being the window where my sister and i would hang out from and dangle our feet, 7 stories up. A thin.half attached, so-called child proof gate protected from the impeding doom that awaited us below. One day my mother, caught us in the act and almost caught her death, showed us a better way to spend our time with two swift chancletasos. Come to think of it, I also remember the window where a thief came in and stole our very first cable box. Just a few years before, my grandmother's television still had those rabbit antennas that constantly had to be moved around to catch just the right spot in the "frequency" to get canal 47. On some occasions, aluminum foil was added as an extra layer to get those in-between channels that no one watched, but us young ones knew were there. In those days, everything was a mystery, an adventure, a question. The eighties, were the crux, the zero point, the transition for humanity, dictators, and cyborgs. Apparently.
Atari, 2600 for us, was that moment. When television and human played together. We were new to all of this alien machinery, but, fascinated at the same time. Mind you, it was not enough to get us to stop playing outside. But, for myself, enough to keep me interested as to its developments. We had 2 games, pac-man and pitfall. Both basically repeating screens of gameplay that never ended. The forever loop. If you died, you didnt go back to the beginning of the level. Levels didnt exist back then. Imagine the mind of a kid with ADD, playing the same screen of pac-man. Over and over for hours. The novelty wore off quickly with that system.
Outside was were it was at. Skelzee, skateboards, and 25 cent sugar waters. We had it all. As a kid, you didn’t have your own currency. That little which your parents could pass on, became valuable with what you purchased. Comic books and candy in the courtyard can get you further into the circle than all the ill spent money in the world. Purchasing power at its finest. Things were simpler. Things were also very cheap. A dollar in those days can get you a weeks worth of goods. Owning the right issue of spiderman, or having that newest of transformers toys, granted you entrance into the inner circle. It didn’t take much cause most of us were broke. But, not in the same sense as today. Back then, people who were "broke" still took vacations. Not to some fancy place like Disneyland. But, somehow, everyone's family had enough to take those yearly trips to the caribbean, or florida (not Miami, not disney). I dont know what happened to this world where the conspiracy theorist (such as myself) were finding themselves to be right at every turn. When did it all change? Was it 1984? Oh Orwell.
We had just gotten MTV( i think it had actually just come out), and I saw that astronaut and those crazy neon colors for one day, and Madonna's face in a video. The next day, the box was gone. The window which was loft large and stretched from floor to ceiling, and was painted white like the rest of the room, led out to a fire escape. Which in those days was a poor man's balcony. The other channel was HBO. Which at the time was fascinating, not only because of the content, but because there weren't any commercials. They weren't trying to sell you something every other five minutes.
The door, which I assume was made of medieval times steel, had a chain up top and a metal rod that sloped down and fit into a little metal hole in the floor. For protection. I guess the person who took the box knew about it cause he took the old window route. The bar let us know that no one had come through the door while we were gone, but maybe someone left the window open. I still don't understand what happened to this day. But, growing up in alto manhattan was quite an experience which I must have not enjoyed very much considering how much i can't remember from that time. Even my memories of kindergarten. I can only remember going to school 2 days. Well I remember 2 days out of the other hundred days. Is this life? you live an entire year of your life and only remember 2 days? I can only assume that it was one of those leap years, with the difference being the year only had 2 days. What about the first 3 years of life?
Today, everyone is Truman on that show. Whether we like it or not, we or someone else is documenting everything we do. Every single moment that we are awake, eating, walking, running, shopping, watching others, and looking at our phones at what other people are doing with their cameras.
Before any of these contraptions, there was only a wristwatch. Everyone had one, and everyone looked at it from time to time. But now our phones have everything possible to capture every moment. The watch, on the other hand, had only one purpose. To tell you or anyone you asked what time it was. What was strange, was that people had large watches in their houses called clocks. On their walls or inside ornate wood and glass covers. To let everyone in the house or mansion or flat know what time it was. Before all that, there was the sun and the moon. There was actually a time where people were only concerned with, "well the sun us up", and the sun is down". People don't say, "oh look, the moon is up". They say, "it's getting dark outside". or "Look the moon is out". Where does it go into? isn't it usually dark in space? Our sun isn't a very good model. It only seemingly shines on us. The rest of space? Dark. Even with billions of stars and suns, a dark mess.
Reminds me of a time I was out with some friends, and we had taken some hallucinogenic vegetation. I was near this one guy, a buddy of mine,K. We were laying on the grass looking up. The sky was filled with so many stars. I remember looking over to him and saying, “maybe it was just bullet holes left by gunslingers of the past shooting up at the sky during celebrations”. They always celebrated with shooting up. Yes I thought for a moment that it was just a dark sheet covering the earth. And Cowboys shot it the fuck up. I was 20?
So here's the logic of a seven year old. I'm standing outside of our apartment and looking at my friend's casio watch. With the little gummy buttons, that no human could touch without touching them all at the same time. It was part calculator, and part watch. you could add and tell time. This was huge at the time. All the rave. I think the eighties were a turning point in history. A quiet, slow moving shift from the old ways of the world to the digital age we live in today. I had one of those antique watches that only told time, and ticked. It was always ticking. When it wasn't, a little shake, a little wind of the knob and it was ticking again. In that moment, I distinctly remember looking down at my watch and hearing that ticking. Underneath I could hear and feel my tiny heartbeat in my wrist. And it just got louder and louder, until it was all I could hear in the hallway. The ovvertaking of everything with the ticking of that watch. It was then that it dawned on me that the watching was regulating my heartbeat and this was why people got old. The watch. The ticking was mimicking the heartbeat and changing it. Manipulating it. I would not have it. I took it off and told myself I wouldn't wear a watch again. When I was a little older I had forgotten that moment and wore a watch for a minute, but such a memory always crept back in and I quickly disposed of it.