Aaron Naparstek - Honku

 

Thank you. Okay. It was December 2001, and I was living in this one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an old brownstone on Clinton Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. And it was a nice place, very affordable, had three big windows facing the street, got lots of great light. There was just one problem with this spot, and it was the honking. Endless, nonstop car horns directly beneath my three big windows. 

 

At the time, I was working as a web producer. I was what you called back then a community producer. That was the person who set up and ran chat rooms and message boards and did a lot of the stuff that today you would just call social media. 

 

I was living and working by myself most of the time in this apartment. I really got to know the honkers [audience laughter] in this situation. I could tell from just the sound of a honk without even seeing it what kind of vehicle it was. So, the bright major chord with a bit of a dual note, that was the Ford Crown Victoria, the yellow cab. Real blood pressure spiker. The deeper, more bone jarring, discordant honk, that's the Lincoln Town Car, one of the worst sounds in the world. 

 

I got to the point where I felt like I could understand the honks. Like, I could translate this awful monosyllabic language into actual thoughts and feelings and meaning. And so, the sort of the quick honk-honk over there by my living room window, that's somebody saying, “Hey, buddy, the light turned green.” The deeper honk over there by my bedroom window, that's somebody who's eight cars back and can't really see anything and is telling the guy in front, “Yeah, you should run over the pedestrians, because we got places to go.” [audience laughter] So, I thought I'd heard pretty much all of the honks that you could hear on Clinton Street. I had cataloged them, knew them. 

 

Then one day, I was sitting down to work on a mindfulness and meditation website that I happened to be producing at the time. [audience laughter] I hear this kind of honk that I've never heard before. It was essentially just a honk, you get the idea. Whereas most honks have a clear start and end point, this honk was just infinite. It didn't stop. And so, eventually, as the honk passes the three-minute mark, I come up to the window to see what's going on. I look outside and I can tell it's coming from this blue sedan directly beneath my window. But then, I notice that this honker is actually honking at a red light. This just seems unacceptable. I decide in that moment, I'm going to my refrigerator and I'm getting a carton of eggs and I'm returning to my window. And if this honk is still continuing, by the time I get back to the window, he's getting an egg on his windshield. 

 

So, I return to my window and I start pelting, because the honk is still going. And my first egg misses, but I was a pitcher in high school. I feel like I've got this. My second egg explodes across the roof of the blue sedan in this very satisfying thud, and it stops the honk. I probably could have left it there. That could have been it. [audience laughter] But I kept throwing. I kept throwing the eggs. And now, the honker is out of his car. By the time the egg is actually splattering across his windshield, he's standing in the middle of Clinton Street, he's staring up at my third-floor window and he is going completely ballistic. 

 

He's a middle-aged guy, balding, 40-ish, indeterminate ethnicity. And his general message to me, which I will have to paraphrase, is “I am coming back tonight, I am going to kill you and I know where you live.” [audience laughter] So, clearly, a flaw in my plan that I had not thought about ahead of time. [audience laughter] The guy drives off, but I am just shaken. I'm so agitated and I can't focus for the rest of the day. I can't focus for a couple days and I find myself milling about my apartment looking for household items that would make for good self-defense weapons. I actually went to sleep with a large plumbing wrench next to my pillow. I realized I need a different way of handling the honking. 

 

And so, the next time it really starts to bother me, I decided to take some advice from my meditation and mindfulness website that I'm working on. I decide to sit down, take a deep breath and just observe the honking on Clinton Street. And then, I take those observations and I start boiling them down into three-line 12 syllable, 575 haiku poems. [audience laughter] And I call them Honku. [audience laughter] It feels good to do this. It feels good to write them. And my first Honku was this, “You from New Jersey honking in front of my house in your SUV.” Just simply a snapshot, [audience laughter] the essence of Clinton Street. And this really pleases me. 

 

So, I print up that poem. I print up 50 copies of that poem and I go out very late at night, because I'm embarrassed about this and I tape the Honku up and down Clinton Street on the lamp posts, many blocks in either direction. This becomes my regular honking therapy regimen. So, whenever the honking really starts to bother me, I sit myself down, I write some Honku, and toward the end of the week I pick my favorite one from the latest batch, I print 50 copies, I go out very late at night, I tape them up. It feels like I'm honking back now in my own quiet way [audience laughter] and I have some like power over the honkers. 

 

So, one night, I'm out there taping up my Honku. I've been doing this for about a month. I'm still very surreptitious and a little embarrassed about it. I turn around and I see that a woman is standing right there. She'd been out late walking her dog. She sees me standing there, caught red handed with my heavy-duty tape dispenser. I brace myself and she comes up to me and she says, “Excuse me, but are you the bard of Clinton Street?” [audience laughter] I'm like, “Yeah. Okay, I guess so.” She gets very excited. She's like, “Well, we just love your work. It's fantastic. We're so sick of the honking. My daughters, they're now writing Honku too. [audience laughter] Would you sign one? Could I get your autograph? My husband would love that.” 

 

So, as I make my way down Clinton Street that night, I notice that a few other Honku written by strangers have popped up on the lampposts. [audience laughter] I'm like, “Okay, this is interesting.” And over the next few days and weekends, many Honku blossom on the lampposts of Clinton Street. I realized suddenly, like, okay, I'm not alone here. There are other people. 

 

And the next time I go out posting Honku, I decide to put a website address on my poem, honku.org. And at honku.org, I create a message board. I do my online community producer thing. I created a message where I call it the Lamppost. Within days of putting this thing online, there are dozens of neighborhood people and they're hanging out on the online lamppost. They're chatting with each other about problems in the neighborhood, trading Honku, talking about solutions. And I say, “Guys, why don't we--? Let's get together in person. Let's meet in person. Why not? Saturday, 11:00 AM on my front stoop, come on out.” 

 

About a dozen people actually show up. It turns out to be this great, diverse, funny, smart group of people who we've all been living next to each other in some cases for years and had never actually met. We're having a good time, and someone notices on the lamppost on my own corner, there is a sign very high up that says, “No honking, $125 penalty.” I've seen this thing here before and I never really thought much about it. But everybody gets excited about it, like, “Hey, the law is on our side. Let's make this city live up to its no honking ideals.” 

 

And so, that afternoon, I go home and I type up some letterhead for something called the Honku Organization. I start firing off letters to my local elected representatives and community organizations. I start attending community meetings too. I show up at the monthly community meeting of the 76th Precinct, the police station. It's probably the least dotcom place you can imagine. It's got the puke green subway tile on the walls, the fluorescent lighting, the burly mustachioed cops. I'm easily the youngest person in the room by a good 20 years. They seem like regulars. I'm really nervous. I'm like, “What the hell am I doing here?”

 

But the first guy stands up and he's like, “Look, this new bar that moved next door to me, he’s making too much noise. Got to do something about it.” Woman stands up, and she's complaining about the speeding and the double parking on Court Street. Next guy stands up, he's angry about his neighbor's dogs barking all the time. It slowly starts to dawn on me, these are my people, like, I have found the place that possibly where I most belong, like in this meeting. I'm getting up the nerve to raise my hand and speak, when in walks this 6-foot 5 inch tall, smiling, bearded guy very late into the meeting. The commanding officer of the precinct is like, “Hey, everybody, welcome our brand-new city council member. He's just been on the job for a few weeks now. Bill de Blasio. Come on in, Bill.” 

 

If you recognize the name, he is now the mayor of the city of New York. Bill sits right next to me. I notice on the stack of papers on his lap, at the very top of the stack is a piece of letterhead from the Honku Organization. [audience laughter] And I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to wait and see what Bill does.” He takes the floor immediately, as they do. It's almost like Bill is my downstairs neighbor on Clinton Street. He goes into the most perfect description of the honking crisis. It's not just a minor quality of life issue. This is a serious public health and maybe even a safety issue. He firmly but politely asks the police to get out there and enforce that no honking sign. Police say, “How's a three week no honking blitz on Clinton Street sound to you?” And I'm like, “That sounds incredible.” [audience laughter] 

 

The next Monday morning, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I oversleep. I do not wake up to the sound of horn honking on Clinton Street. When I do finally wake up, I jump over to my window to see what's not going on. I see guys from the 76th Precinct are standing there and they're talking to every single driver coming up Clinton Street. You know, the Honku Organization, I'll just be honest with you, we did not accomplish our ultimate mission of ending horn honking in New York City. [audience laughter] That battle is still there to be fought for someone else. But we did actually start to make a bunch of different changes and fixes on Clinton Street and the streets around it. This actually became my work and my career doing advocacy, and community organizing and media to make cities better for pedestrians and cyclists and transit riders. 

 

The real success though of Honku, the thing that I think was most significant was just that when I was walking down Clinton Street and when my neighbors were walking down Clinton Street, instead of being in our little bubbles of honk anger, we started talking to each other. We were really trying to fix something. Clinton Street wasn't just a street anymore. It was a neighborhood, and we were really producing community. Thank you.