JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

Hypodermic Hijacking and the MIT Building the Cabbie Won’t Stand Under: Having an Unsafe and Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, or Thankstaking, as it more accurately would be called—well, there’s the problem, eh? Accuracy has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, or any other holiday, from the co-opted pagan solstice of Christmas to a Martin Luther King Jr. Day that is all about the man who made everybody feel like a white liberal and nothing about the man who proposed that in a just society, the government would pay everyone a $10,000 minimum salary.

I’m sure even the most Hallmarked among us would concur that Thanksgiving is as packaged as thin-sliced Mr. “Cannibalistic Species-Traitor” Turkey. Indeed, I and a friend commenced Thanksgiving morn by drinking our meal in the form of artificially (I hope) flavored soda, a clever kit picked up in an Ohio gas station that included Turkey and Gravy soda, Pea soda, Sweet Potato soda, Buttered Roll soda, something else I was too soft-wasted to remember, and a chaser of Pepto-Bismol soda complete with the little pharmacy dram cup. Now that you’re wondering, it was all way milder than it sounds, though when inevitably mixed into a cocktail (or rather turkeytail), it was as bad as a scurvy-twisted Puritan sneak-thieving a Cape Cod maize store-pit.

So as I acknowledge that no one actually told me to “have a safe and happy Thanksgiving,” as the saying often goes, I trust you will permit the elision of the usual rule that a titular conceit must be at least partly quoting reality. Such is the nature of a holiday.

Besides, (un)safety really was a theme of my Thanksgiving holiday in retrospect. In some ways, it was extremely metaphorical: for example, I was unsafe from enforced, Ludovico Technique-style exposure to advertising on my US Airways connecting flight. Required to remain strapped in a chair, I was forcibly exposed to drop-down video screens blaring more than five minutes of unavoidable advertising for various US Airways affiliates—i.e., the worst of all commercial evils: an ad for a product you’ve already bought. Then came the flight attendants handing out crappy dollar coupons for an ice-cream shop. It could only be more rinky-dink, and possibly slightly less annoying, if they next opt for stewardesses in Hooters uniforms. On US Airways, you may not be allowed to pray to Mecca, but you must pay obsequy to some casino they’re really, really sure you will like, or at least have stuck in your nightmares for a week.

Still, as our Department of (There’s No Way I Can Afford a) Home(Or)land (In This Utterly Screwed Country And Thus Have No) Security reminds me daily, there is such a thing as way too much safety. A welcome part of the trip—same leg, different airline—was drifting outside my usual safe zone of privacy and shyness by talking to the person sitting next to me for the entire trip. Granted, this was only after an awkward misunderstanding regarding the book of Yiddish folklore I was reading, a problem I had foreseen except for the part that it was actually not a problem at all, but rather great fun. Being unsafe can mean being real, or at least more human. In this age of obsession against physical vulnerability, emotional vulnerability is often lost as well, and it takes our selves inexorably with it.

But physical vulnerability is what I really want to talk about, and the natural philosophical musing for any air traveler—particularly one in an Embraer “regional” (aka tiny and weak-ass) jet piercing a major storm system over Boston, where the violent bounces are not so much bad in themselves but rather for somehow activating that sixth sense organ in the gut that tells you, “Damn, I’m going, like, 400 miles an hour in a tube about eight inches thick!”

It’s not every day that you have an entire men’s room to yourself, so I savored the choice of stalls when I found myself in just that situation on Thanksgiving night in the Columbus, Ohio airport. Perhaps the solitude and resultant freedom to let my eyes wander are why I noticed the weird, translucent-red box affixed to the wall under the paper towel dispenser. They’re certainly why I took the opportunity to examine said fixture, and discovered it to be a biohazard waste disposal box.

“Biohazard?!” I thought. Then it occurred to me—perhaps for insulin needles and the like? And indeed, a closer look through the red plastic revealed a nice hypodermic needle, canted up like a pre-launch missile and displayed like Macy’s merchandise.

I was already past security. Indeed, this was the first men’s room after the little benches where you can put your shoes and belts and dignity back on. The natural thought occurred to me—I could take the hypo, board the plane, put it to somebody’s neck, announce it was loaded with HIV or Drano or what have you, and order my little Embraer to land right on my street to save on cab fare, or whatever else I damn well pleased.

Now, I didn’t check to see if the box was locked or otherwise secured against prying fingers. I presume the whole point is to stop needles from being freely available in the regular trash (though janitor safety is likely the primary reason). But in fact, the see-through red box actually advertised the dangerous merchandise. And in any case, in a bathroom I’d already had all to myself for more than 15 minutes, I could’ve whaled away on it like ye olde Samsonite gorilla to my heart’s content until it was smashed as fine as Green Zone sand. With only a modicum of planning or effort, anybody could’ve walked out of there with a Wolverine-esque fistful of biohazard needles.

Here’s the life-imitates-the-second-joke-at-the-end-of-the-har-har-funny-TV-commercial part: Still mulling this over, I got about 80 feet down the hallway from the bathroom when this guy passed me yapping away on his cell phone. My ears perked up as he said: “I had to go through secondary screening because I’m diabetic”; by which he meant he was a bit late because he got extra security review for carrying needles.

So to review: A man with a disease shared by about 7 percent of his countrymen, according to the American Diabetes Association Web site, and familiar to us all, is pulled aside for extra scrutiny for his prescription needles. Meanwhile, the airport itself offers lil’ ol’ non-diabetic me a shiny free insulin needle in a bright red break-in-case-of-hijacking-urge box—and all once I’m completely past security.

That Homeland Security is a joke and we’re all doomed if someone wants us to be is obvious. But this is a fine example of exactly why: cops are by nature unimaginative squares. They think literally, authoritatively: “But, but, but—it’s a biohazard waste box, not a needle-providing box!” And if my hideous imaginings have any result beyond totally skewing my Automated Targeting System risk score (note to feds: it should spike by 1,000 points during force-fed US Airways commercials), it would likely be that the cops simply rip out all the red boxes and let people throw the needles in the normal trash again.

I had an earlier example of this in Boston, where, thinking that this whole silly panic over liquids on board was passed, I brought a tube of hair gel along in my carry-on. Suddenly faced with an incredibly unintelligible notice/diagram/flow-chart that I had about two seconds to read on a fast-moving security line, I took what appeared to be the advice and threw my hair gel away. Then I realized that what they were actually saying was that stuff like my hair gel was OK—if it was placed in a quart-sized plastic bag, which they were providing. I briefly wondered what sort of kindergarten project planner had decreed that somehow terrorists would be thwarted by Ziploc. But what really consumed me was that the hair gel I had just thrown away was already, like every leakable item I have packed my entire adult life, encased in a quart-sized Ziploc bag. And yet, there was a whole line of doofuses with their leaky bottles of Old Spice or whatever, obediently accepting counterterroristically pointless but thank-you-Mommy useful baggies from Transportation Security agents. And thus we see that Homeland Security will ensure that government of idiots, by idiots, for idiots, shall not perish from the Earth.

If you think I’m paranoid and cynical about safety, you should ride with a Russian cabbie on a monsoon of a Boston night. I sure did.

The rain was hammering down everywhere, creeping its through the brown concrete of the airport garage/carport in the form of dark, dripping stains like blood from some nightmarish crime in the hotel room above yours.

“Which tunnel do you want to take?” the cabbie asked, referring to the choices available in the Big Dig, Boston’s underground highway system. I hate directing cabbies, even though it’s necessary in this insane city, and said I didn’t care. The cabbie selected the Ted Williams Tunnel—particularly as, he said, “The other two are flooded.”

“That’s a pretty good reason,” I said with a laugh, sensing that this was about to get interesting.

For one thing, I’ve had excellent luck with Boston cabbies. You can’t make a living driving a cab anywhere, all the moreso in Boston, and yet I’ve found true hack paladins aplenty, like the guy I accidentally flagged down pulling up to his own front door at the end of a long day, but who insisted on driving me to my destination after leaving a chicken dinner with his wife. And the conversation has been outstanding, from the tales of armed robbery to the harangue against pot legalization to the declamation against Ozzy Osbourne to the crash course in Afropop. My favorite story is the shortest: The cabbie who drove me past the Suffolk County House of Correction and deadpanned, “Yeah, that was my home for six months.”

Also, the Big Dig as a disaster zone is old hat, yet an endlessly fruitful topic of discussion, much like the Red Sox except that in this case I actually know and care about what I’m saying. A brilliant aesthetic idea and a terrifying, deadly boondoggle in every other respect, the tunnel system has been so disaster-prone that major flooding is a given. We didn’t even really remark on it.

Still, safety was on my mind as we drove through part of the Big Dig that had only recently reopened months after enormous concrete ceiling panels came loose and fell without warning on a car headed to Logan, crushing a woman to death. I asked the cabbie, who must drive through the tunnels scores of times a day, if he worries about some similar fate.

“I try not to think about it,” he said, with an air of Muscovite fatalism. “Something goes wrong on every construction project. You just hope it isn’t something bad.”

That sounded astute enough to me, I said. But he was plunging ahead anyhow.

“I hope my child goes to MIT, but there is a building there I would never let him stand under,” the cabbie suddenly opined.

He directed me mentally across the Charles to Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And then to a particular site: the Ray and Maria Stata Center, a fascinating postmodern building that, in the words of Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell, “looks as if it’s about to collapse.”¹ My cabbie said that ain’t just looks.

Any day now, he said, it will shed the stainless steel panels that cover large portions of its crazy, angular exterior. The cabbie explained that he had been a sheet metal worker on the project, and that the panels—which he estimated at around 150 pounds each, on average—were not affixed strongly enough.

Also, he said, some parts of the building ended up out of their intended alignment by as much as several inches. This left some steel panels mounted over uneven bits of the exterior, making them even more vulnerable to wind and vibrations, he said. Slowly, he drew a picture something like Boston’s infamous Hancock Tower design disaster, when that building started popping its massive glass windows out onto the street.

I suddenly realized that I have stood under the Stata Center—well, under a little carport in a building across the street, close enough to be hit by fluttering steel panels, I would expect. The cabbie agreed that I shouldn’t do that anymore.

Since then, I asked MIT about the cabbie’s claims. Spokesperson Patti Richards said most people involved in the construction aren’t around anymore to ask. “However, the few people I asked who might know had not heard anything about these problems,” Richards said. “There seems to be a general consensus that these panels were installed according to the design, and the design and method of installation was independently reviewed by our consultants.”

Richards did allow that, “It’s totally possible that there are problems I’m not aware of.”

For what it’s worth, Globe columnist Alex Beam, in an early-bird tour of the still-under-construction Stata Center in 2004, described it as “a complete mess,” including “cracks in the flooring and in the poured concrete columns.”²

And interestingly enough, two other buildings by the same renowned architect, Frank Gehry, have had safety problems involving stainless steel panels—though they didn’t involve the panels peeling off.

His Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles has a curved steel-paneled exterior that originally, and unintentionally, acted like the mythical mirror of Archimedes, focusing sunlight enough to cause blinding glare and highly hot spots in surrounding areas, reportedly enough to cook hot dogs on the sidewalk and melt traffic cones.³ The panels had to be altered to cut the glare.

And Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western Reserve University became infamous when its curvy, steel-paneled roof dumped snow and ice onto students trying to get in and out, so badly that some doors had to be blocked off. Perhaps fittingly, the building houses a management school named Weatherhead. The building also had glare problems similar to the Disney Concert Hall.⁴

Back in the taxi, the cabbie was being cynical about things. He reminded me of a bitter Bulgarian metalhead I once knew. I wished he was taking thoughtful drags on an unfiltered cigarette.

He explained that you can only complain so much on a job site. There are too many layers, no one to answer to. I asked him if he’d ever thought about talking to a newspaper about the steel panels. “Ha ha,” he un-laughed. “You lose your job.” He brushed his hands together like Big Brother drying off after washing with a bar of Anti-Scandal.

I overtipped and got out into the rain and the dark. I may have told him to be safe.

Safety. It had dominated the conversation; it had dominated my night, this musing on physical security. And why not? I probably really never will stand under the Stata Center now, if only because I like the idea of honoring truly weird advice.⁵

That makes me think that it was a different kind of safety that really made that encounter meaningful. It was less akin to the airport bathroom box—physical vulnerability—and more like talking to the person on the airplane—emotional vulnerability. I actually hate talking to cabbies, too, because it disrupts my shell of shyness—and yet, as I gushed about before, I usually love it when it comes. Maybe I need less security all the time. Maybe we all do.

It was Thanksgiving. I was unsafe. I was happy.

¹ “Dizzying heights: In Frank Gehry’s remarkable new Stata Center at MIT, crazy angles have a serious purpose” by Robert Campbell, Boston Globe, April 25, 2004 (via www.boston.com).

² “After buildup, MIT center is a letdown” by Alex Beam, Boston Globe, May 4, 2004 (via www.boston.com).

Update: On Oct. 31, 2007 (about 11 months after the publication of this column), MIT filed suit against the Stata Center’s architect and construction company, alleging design and construction flaws that caused rampant leaks throughout the building; snow and ice to cascade off the facade; mold-covered exterior bricks; and disintegration of a small amphitheater that is part of the grounds. (“MIT sues Gehry, citing leaks in $300m complex: Blames famed architect for flaws at Stata Center” by Shelley Murphy, Boston Globe, Nov. 6, 2007, via www.boston.com.)

³ “Microclimatic Impact: Glare Around the Walt Disney Concert Hall” by Prof. Mark Schiler and Elizabeth Valmont, University of Southern California School of Architecture, via Society of Building Science Educators site at http://www.sbse.org/awards/docs/2005/1187.pdf.

⁴ “Ice, $62M building imperil sidewalks,” Associated Press, March 1, 2003, via CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Midwest/03/01/offbeat.school.building.ap).

⁵ Since the publication of this column, I actually did stand under the Stata Center again and examined the panels on the back side where they meet a sidewalk. They were a bit uneven, though collapse did not appear imminent.

Posted Dec. 5, 2006. Updated Nov. 4 and 15, 2007.

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