CITY OF STRANGERS

Whenever I am irritated by people talking loudly on their cellphones in public places – and anybody who knows me knows how much I hate people on cell phones – I only have to think back fifteen years to that very 90′s form of aural torture: the car alarm.

We have car alarms now of course. And part of the reason we notice them so little is because they’ve been around so long. But in the early to mid-90′s, they were a plague. New York seemed particularly stricken, and after a time, I began to think of them as part of the city’s fabric, just the WAY IT WAS.

How bad were they? For a few months, when I lived not far from the still-active Daily News plant in Brooklyn, a van would park in the area. Sometimes on my street, sometimes on an adjoining corner. No matter. The alarm went off every other night, set off by fire trucks from the nearby fire station, by kids, by passing vehicles. Sometimes, I’m sure, by an actual car thief. It had one of those old Viper alarms, the ones with the piercing four tones that ran in a loop. Unlike today, the alarm had no time limit. Or rather it was set in a loop, so that it would run through two cycles, wait a few minutes, run through another two cycles, wait a slightly longer period, run through another . . . you get the picture. By the end of the night the gap was just long enough to fall asleep through before the alarm went off again.

If the van’s battery held out – and it usually did – the alarm would go on right into the morning. Basically, for most of the night, you couldn’t sleep and even when you did have time to sleep, when the alarm went off, it was like an electrical shock through the nervous system. I’d get up the next day, traumatized, head buzzing, wondering how long it would be before I had a nervous breakdown. I often thought of Dr. Benway in Naked Lunch:

I don’t know why we put up with it. I lived with many other people in a rooming house and most of them were kept awake as well. We didn’t have a lot of contact, even in the house, and virtually no contact with our neighbors, who presumably were as disturbed by it as we were. Perhaps it was fear, perhaps we were just too isolated to take action. Perhaps too, this was so ubiquitous that we began to think of it as ‘normal’

How numb did it make people?

One fine summer’s day, roughly 1995, on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, a car was parked not far from the walkway. Both Viper alarm and horn alarm were blaring at once. The noise was unbelievable, like an air raid siren going off right in front of you, and the lunchtime office crowd streamed around the vehicle, studiously ignoring it with the benumbed, yet slightly wild-eyed long suffering look which was common to so many in that period. Like, collectively, they were about to explode.

But people did fight back. An article in the NY Times told how people threw eggs, tomatoes at cars and car owners, they smashed windshields, smeared dogshit on door handles, spray-painted obscenities on the hood. Sometimes, they even attacked the owners. Of course, as everyone knows, the alarms did almost nothing to deter theft. Eventually, the problem got so bad you could call the police and, in Manhattan at least, a special squad would come along and neutralize the alarm.

By the end of the decade, the worst of the alarms had disappeared. New York became that much more liveable. And I wouldn’t bring back that aspect of the bad old good old days for anything.

People’s stories about car alarms

The battle continues: car alarms in the 00′s

Just in case you wanted to hear it again: a reasonable fascimile of the Viper multi-tone car alarm

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