Joystick Boys, Vulvos, E-pocrites, Cauldron Holes, Deutschebankers, and the Unpickupped: The State of Our Streets
Volume 1, Issue 25
We appreciate The Gazette to the point of jealousy. It publishes the Croton-on-Hudson police blotter (last week’s had the CroPo responding to report of a suspicious individual wandering around “scanning” parked cars near the Tapsmith . . . it ended up being the Village parking officer) and they have a music critic who almost every week dances a full architectural page about local musicians (we hope we’re about to get the blow-by-blow on last week’s Tarrytown Music Hall performance by Chappaqua’s deep country legend Dar Williams) and audience-pleasing road acts passing through the area—coming this summer are The Billy Joel Band (without Billy Joel) Tusk (the Fleetwood Mac Tribute Band), and Big Eyed Phish (the Dave Matthews tribute band). But, most of all, we love them for their having defied the pundits and remained an independently owned and operated print, and an only print, periodical. They do not even have an Insta.
In our eyes, the paper’s only shortcoming[1] is that it does not enforce a maximum wordcount on its letters section. It is not uncommon for the sixteen-page broadsheet to have four pages of subscriber screeds. As far as we know, the record was set late last year when a Croton resident wrote a stunning 5,000-worder (approximately ten percent longer than our nation’s constitution[2]) about The Hudson National Golf Club’s plan to chop down several football fields’ worth of currently protected forest so that it can put up a solar panel array to reduce the electric bill for its twelve hundred sprinkler heads, fleet of golf carts, driveway-gate motor, patio floodlights, etc. No matter the subject matter’s sanctity, Logorrhea is an unfortunate condition.
We raise all this because we have received a subscriber letter that is past our own word-count maximum[3], but whose verbiage is too tightly knit for our editorial shears.
Publishing rules are not to be broken, but they can—through process—evolve, and we would have brought it to the standards board and then the plenary executive session (and also begged an exemption from the Pixel Preservation Society) but by the time that happened, the timeliness of the piece would be diminished if not altogether stultified.
And so we are hereby publishing the missive, with the pseudonymous author’s permission, not as a letter to the editor but as a contribution to our Morale and Mental Health section. Where it ticks several boxes, and is afforded some cover.
Dear Editor,
I see that the Briarcliff-Peekskill Parkway—9A to tyros—is going to be built back better to the tune of what we know will end up being at least a billion dollars.
We do not need an initial three-million-dollar study to tell us it is a thundering death flume. This is a cynical formality, an appetizer for consultants and engineering firms that have shouldered their way to the taxpayer trough, knowing the full slurry-load is on its way.
Designed for passenger cars before pickups and SUVs had become larger than D-Day landing craft, the road is twisty, narrow, steep, poorly drained, and traversed by arched stone bridges that force trucks and buses to ply the center lanes because clearance can be lower than eleven feet in the outer lanes.
And the median is inhabited by the Snagglepede, the road’s notorious 1970s-era metal barrier whose stanchions are periodically hit (there’s an accident every three days on the Briarcliff portion alone) and protrude like wicked fangs into the passing lanes.
Look. I am not against saving lives. I find Darwin jokes to be in poor taste. But it is not bad roads that kill. It is bad drivers that kill.
If we have spare tax dollars, we should be throwing them at driver’s education and re-education courses, and also at encouraging the police to go after—as they did in bygone years, and not just when they were looking for an excuse to pull somebody over—speeding, tailgating, rolling stops, failing to signal, and all the other actually dangerous behaviors that we have allowed to be considered nothing more than roadway niceties.
It’s true 9A is not an Atlanta- or Phoenix-style mega-highway with gently curving exits, HOV lanes, cat’s-eye lane reflectors, high-definition video signs and breakdown shoulders wide enough for trucks pulling trailer homes. But, if some of us drove even close to the posted 40 miles-per-hour speed limit, if we used signals as we changed lanes, if we checked our mirrors, if even one in three of us paid attention to our (and to others’) blind spots—if we all showed an ounce of good citizenship out there and gave the smallest piece of a rat’s ass about our fellow drivers—we would not be in this situation. And we would not be straightening and widening and generally uglifying (hello Jersey barrier, hello extruded overpass; goodbye tree, goodbye pretty stone bridge!) a road that ultimately is going to have just as many accidents because you know what happens when you make a faster, more efficient road just outside a city of more than eight million people?
It Gets More Traffic.
Google Maps and Waze and every other app is going to divert drivers to the new 9A from the Taconic or 684 and will discourage them going across the Hudson down at the Tappan Zee and up at Bear Mountain as they formerly did.
Fixing this road is tantamount to laying down a red carpet for the rolling rogues’ gallery of our nation’s near-lawless driver gangs.
Let’s begin with the biggest of the bunch—the Un-pickupped. You ever notice how when you go less than fifteen over the speed limit your rearview will often grow chrome stripes, generally with a Ford, GMC or Ram logo centered at the top?
Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, the pickup truck went from being a utility vehicle to a fashion statement for one of the least fashionable segments of our population. And one of its least rational, too. Look, we all know a very small percentage of these rural and suburban incels have actual need for their behemoths. (I’m sorry—pulling jet skis, four-wheelers, snow mobiles, and campers is not something you need to do. This is why it is called recreational equipment.)
If you don’t know the derivation of the pickup in pickup truck, it was forged by advertisers working for Detroit automobile manufacturers in the middle of the 20th century. In focus groups with likely automobile purchasers, they discovered the term pick-up had great emotional resonance with a large segment of the population. You might think this was because it conveyed the notion of picking up a hopeful sex partner. But, no, the reason pick-up has power with drivers of personal-use open-bed trucks is that their parents did not pick them up as babies.
Seriously—left on their backs to cry it out, gravity flattening the soft backs of their skulls into their crib mattress like refrigerated lumps of cookie dough on baking sheets—they are most all brain-damaged. Take a careful glance the next time an F-150 blows past you—the driver’s head will be flat as a board at the back. Sometimes, on the bald ones who aren’t wearing baseball caps, you can see a blanket pattern.
Neglect and a pancake-thin occipital lobe have left them with a craving to be noticed and so they buy these hulking aircraft carriers and roleplay being farmers and loggers and contractors and moose-hunters and tough luck if you happen to be driving a vehicle that weighs one quarter what theirs does and have to slam on your brakes for a deer or a red light or something.
Though at least it will be quick. Which can’t be said about a death at the hands of the Joystick Boys.
You ever sit in your yard on a summer day and suddenly you’re having a Pynchon moment—a brapping comes across the sky?
These days, loud pipes not only save lives, they mask the permanent whine in the ears of young people who have been wearing overpowered headphones and inhabiting Playstation and XBox games for more than a decade. Congratulations, America—you have raised a generation of half-deaf adrenaline junkies whose sense of physics, geography, civility, and mortality has been primarily shaped by Grand Theft Auto.
It used to just be the occasional Yamaha or Kawasaki crotch rocket that would come up behind and around you faster than a mirror-glance, announcing its presence with the banshee scream of unmuffled tailpipes. These days souped-up sports-model Subarus, Mitsubishis, Hondas and even Volkswagens with hacksawed tailpipes travel in Mad Max gangs, filling our valleys with their dopplering cacophonies and infesting our parkways like swarms of ground-running wasps.
We do not need to delve so much into the Hogs—the other significant segment of look-at-me males. They haven’t changed much in fifty years, other than for their numbers. There are so many fat men in black leather out there these days one wonders how any cows are left. I was on Route 202—the two-lane car-commercial road that runs along the side of Anthony’s Nose high above the Hudson—and was overtaken by a pack them that must have numbered at least eighty. Riding a Harley used to be about not belonging to the conformist herd, didn’t it?
But those are not the only hazard groups that will be coming up our velvet-smooth new superhighway—let’s turn to the E-pocrites and Deutschebankers.
The latter are those ultra-aggressive Teutonophilic hedgefund bros and bro-ettes who go screaming up the Taconic on their way to golf or tennis or elite underclass-oppressing thinktank symposia in their BMWs, Audis, Porsches, and Mercedes. They’ve always been part of the driving ecosystem up here but, like the hogs, there are so very, very many more of them these days.
The ranks of the E-pocrites—Tesla drivers—are of course swelling, too. In endless loops they silently cruise from Starbucks to gym to pedicure to Panera, so pleased with their greener-than-thou chariots, their giant rare-element batteries putting off no exhaust past the faint odor of strip-mined Congo rainforests, that they drive like conceited people walk. They expect you—to the extent they are even aware of your presence—to get out of their way.
And then there is the formerly Swedish, now Chinese-owned, car company that used to make perfectly reliable sedans and wagons—Volvo. The brand has, over the past decade, pivoted its attention from mildly eccentric northern-staters who appreciated a Scandinavian-designed vehicle whose windshield would quickly defrost on a single-digit morning to, now, high-end soccer moms who wish you to know they have $80k to drop on the family wagon. And, if you tease them about it—for instance by pronouncing the brand name Vulvo—they will spew a Facebook-post’s worth of safety statistics back at you and insinuate that nobody loves their kids like they do.
Gone are the old boxy lines that gave the make its quirky appeal. The new S.U.V.-scaled wagons are contoured like high-end sneakers, even trending towards those suppository silhouettes so beloved by Acura, Infinity and Lexus. Alone, or when there are other luxury cars around, they are relatively well behaved. But let a sub-$50k family transport vehicle like an Outback, Rav-4, Odyssey, or—heaven forbid—a Forester try to pass them and you’ll find yourself in the middle of an estrogen-fueled drag race.
I leave you with a Briarcliff-Peekskill story from late February. The spring heaves were upon us—the ground thawing, freezing and re-thawing, every 24 hours. A good friend, a teacher on her way to work, hit a brand new pothole—it would have been more accurate to call it a cauldron hole—on that horrible hill coming up out of Crotonville and (because she was no doubt going 60) not only blew out her right front tire but bent the rim. She pulled over at the right-angle exit for Stormytown Road and called me of all people to come help. I suppose I was some assistance—at least for holding lugnuts—and we managed to get the blown wheel off and to install the undersized spare.
But just as my friend cranked the jack back down, a thump-thump-thump came up the turnoff. A silver Mercedes C-series with a flat right front tire was headed towards our impromptu service pit.
“Oh my God,” said the sharp-dressed woman who emerged. “I have a meeting on fifty-fourth street in 55 minutes! What is it with the roads up here!?”
My friend attempted to commiserate, explaining she expected she had just hit the same pothole, but the woman held up a hand, finished doing something on her iPhone, and then looked down the lane. “It’s safe to leave a car here, isn’t it?”
“Do you need a ride to the train?” I offered.
“Train?” she said like it was a foreign word. “My Uber should be here in 3 minutes.”
Listen up, Northern Westchester. Go right ahead and fix up 9A. Straighten it. Widen it. Regrade it. Put foam safety bumpers and water-filled impact stanchions all over it. Bring that speed limit up from 40 to 65.
If you build it, they will come. And it won't take three million dollars to determine if we liked things better beforehand.
—A. Driver, Ossining
[1] ed.—is longcoming a word?
[2] 4,543 words, according to our intern, including the signatures
[3] 914, natch
An epic rant of staggering genius! Plus, the following explains my miscreant brother and nephews to a tee: "Neglect and a pancake-thin occipital lobe have left them with a craving to be noticed and so they buy these hulking aircraft carriers and role-play being farmers and loggers and contractors and moose-hunters."