Andrew Weiner, courier. - By Andrew Weiner

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Entry 4

Posted Thursday, Nov. 29, 2001, at 12:12 PM ET

Andrew Weiner is a courier in Boston.

All week the city's not felt right. Part of it is that the week started off dead, and too much downtime makes everyone testy. It's the first thing on everyone's mind, only no one wants to jinx it by mentioning it. There's also the weather. All fall it's been clear and mild, but each day this week it has threatened to pour. The fortune cookie of courier wisdom reads: The longer rain hold off, the stronger it fall.

Still, none of this entirely explains this uneasy lull that's set in. As automatic as it's become to blame the bombings, that still feels like the right place to turn. I mentioned yesterday how much private security has tightened, and that has definitely had an impact. Since most of the large buildings downtown now require couriers to sign in and/or use service elevators, it's hard to go more than an hour without being reminded of how much the job has changed. Details make the difference. For instance, I keep a copy of Elvis' license as a souvenir from a Graceland trip, and every once in a while I'd pass it to building security when signing in. Lots of guys do this kind of thing—I've seen riders signed in as Ernest Borgnine, Judge Reinhold, Ron Jeremy, Koko B. Ware—as a way to amuse themselves or see if anyone's really paying attention. It's a good way to tweak the paramilitary pretensions of the rent-a-cops who make some buildings feel like Fort Knox. Sometimes it even wins you special friends. This Cape Verdean guard at 100 Federal busted my Elvis gag, and now every time I walk in there he sings a few bars from "All Shook Up." Cute, right? Only I could never pull that off now, not that I'd even think about doing it.

All these little tensions speak to Boston's uncomfortably intimate role in the catastrophe. The fact that both planes that leveled the towers left Logan has left the city feeling shaken. It's not that people feel complicit, but for a while everyone was asking how that kind of thing could have happened here. Plus the proximity between Boston and New York has brought all the shock, grief, and confusion much closer to home. This holds true even for couriers, who get most of their business from corporate law firms, insurers, and brokerage houses, all of which have New York offices. The flags are back at full mast, but every firehouse in town still has a shrine set up in front of its garage, more cars than not have flag decals, and it's hard not to believe that the body of the city hasn't been tattooed into a massive mnemonic device commemorating all the losses of recent months.

Yesterday I rode through Downtown Crossing, a pedestrian mall in the center of town. Usually this time of year it's a dizzy blitzkrieg of fa-la-la-la-la-lagniappes and battery-operated Nutcracker ballets. The department stores were busy, but nowhere near frenzied. And the displays were conspicuously dialed down. Windows that last year had Barbie-proportioned mannequins enacting elfin lingerie fantasias this year are all PEACE and JOY and GOODWILL TOWARD MEN. None of the people walking out looked to have the glazed shopper's high that attends most displays of gleeful consumerism. The whole scene seemed too playacted for its own good, and I started to strain against the undertow generated by that whole cluster of nihilistic-solipsistic anxieties that the college kids call "the thoughts." So I turned to the imaginary kindly old, white-haired man who always allays such fears for me—Santa. He, like some stuttering bourgeois pimp, was standing in front of the travel bookstore dispatching Ho-Ho-Hos. His take was that business is slow because Thanksgiving fell so early this year. Occam 2, Weiner 0.

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