Home (In)Security

For the first few weeks after my home alarm was activated, I could not bring myself to turn it on. Instead, I eyed the keypad warily, treading softly through the foyer, as if an errant step might set the siren screaming, might mark me as a trespasser in my own home. Before going out--either alone, or with my family--I’d stand at the doorway, weighing options, trying to decide. It wasn’t the leaving that had me worried, but the returning: What if I forgot the code or somehow couldn’t shut the system down? I had visions of the police arriving, of my neighbors peering out from behind half-closed curtains, wondering what the commotion was.

Even with the alarm off, there was no avoiding the spectral clicking of the motion detector in the living room or the electronic bleating by which every open door or window announced itself, three sharp hiccups that meant no one could get in or out unannounced. “I like this feature because it helps me keep track of the kids,” said the man who came to connect us, as he knelt in the front hall, touching wires to other wires. It was a telling comment, although hardly reassuring, with its implication that the system was designed as much to keep us inside as to keep intruders out.

This is why I hadn’t wanted an alarm, why I’d resisted, even after moving into a place that came wired. “We’re capitulating,” I grumbled to my wife, Rae, as the technician explained security codes and passwords. Then I spent the rest of the day muttering about all that we were losing, the price of our illusory security.

Security has always been a loaded issue in my universe, a source of both reassurance and discontent. I grew up in Manhattan during the 1970s, when fiscal meltdown rendered New York a three-dimensional symbol of urban blight. This was the era of “Death Wish,” of “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Serpico,” movies that still evoke how the city felt at that moment, a desolate streetscape of crumbling buildings and peculiar rape-lit darkness, beneath which you could literally sense the heat, the frustration, barely contained and boiling over, a volcano about to blow. My parents, raised in what John Cheever called “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat,” found this to be uncertain territory, and they approached it with a disconcerting ambivalence. On the one hand, they routinely handed over “mug money” so that if anyone tried to rob me, I’d have a few dollars to give up. (Since I went to school in the borough’s busiest police precinct, this was no abstract concern.) On the other, they let me roam the city from an early age--I was soloing the subway at the age of 9--and to this day, they live in a doorman building and do not lock their front door even when they’re at work.

For me, it was the first of these two points-of-view that lingered. When, after college, Rae (at the time my girlfriend) and I moved to a one-bedroom apartment in SoHo, we bought an armor-plated Medeco lock and iron window gates and sealed up every port of entry. I have never felt as safe as I did tucked into the third floor of our building, behind a steel door with triple locks.

In Los Angeles, of course--where Rae and I moved in 1991--security was more elusive: vague, intangible, amorphous, an article of faith. When we landed, two months after the beating of Rodney King, L.A. still clung to the fantasy of itself as a place outside history, where the customary rules of engagement might not apply. Every apartment we saw seemed wide open, including the one we eventually rented, the upper of a duplex in the Fairfax district, which had slat windows and a security gate a child could breach, as well as a single deadbolt in a wooden door. It’s not exactly fair to say I felt insecure in that apartment. Rae and I had two children there, made lasting friends and became part of a community, marking out, on some essential level, a sense of Southern California as our home.

I even began to think of Los Angeles as a city, and of living here as an authentic urban experience, ideas unimaginable to me when I’d arrived. The turning point was the second night of the 1992 riots, when I realized Rae and I were on our own in a chaotic landscape, the darkness thick with ash and the sound of choppers, and no one on whom we could rely. We hunkered down, drew the shades and watched TV until the live footage grew too overwhelming. Then we went to bed. In the morning, it felt as if we’d been through an initiation, like the scant security of our apartment might be enough.

All the same, when we moved seven years later to a one-story house in Pico-Robertson, I noted with relief the thick black bars that girded every window frame. The house was old, decrepit, with cracks latticing the corners like seismic spider webs; eventually we would have to vacate when it was scheduled to be torn down. Still, as long as it was standing, the place seemed nothing if not secure.

In our current home, though, we were dealing with a whole new strata of security. An alarm? It seemed an intrusion of the most fundamental sort. I did not feel safe; no, I felt angry, exposed, spied upon. Partly this had to do with my sense of these electronic monitors as emblematic of our worst impulses, reflections of our fears, our xenophobia, our terror of the outside world.

Even more, I hated the idea that once the alarm was on, I could not open a door, crack a window, without being ratted out by machinery. The reaction was personal, visceral, something that went to the very heart of what, to me, being an urban dweller meant. It reached all the way back to my upbringing, which had left me with a sense of the city--not just New York, but any city--as an outpost, elemental and stripped down. You had to be tough, to fend for yourself; you had to stand on your own. That was how I’d felt during the riots, and it was how I’d feel, I was sure, when the inevitable earthquake struck.

To survive in a city, you had to have the right equipment, equipment you could count on. Window grates, deadbolts--you could see them working; there was nothing abstract in their presence at all. An alarm, though, presumed that someone out there would care for you, which seemed a naive assumption at best. Who were these watchers? And who would watch them? In my vision of the city, this was about the most important question you could ask.

And yet, and yet, and yet. And yet Rae and I now found ourselves in a living situation so open that, in comparison, our old upper duplex appeared fortified. This was the nicest place we’d ever occupied, another duplex--lower this time--east of Fairfax, a sprawling cavern of an apartment with enormous rooms, 10-foot ceilings and a ziggurat motif in all the doorways, which unfolded above us like inverted steps. In the front, there was a small garden, and the entire building was painted white, with black edging the many casement windows, upon which there were no bars. It was lovely, Mediterranean, on a street that still had all its original architecture, unchanged since the 1920s. If you squinted, and ignored the SUVs and Subarus and PT Cruisers, you could almost imagine you were in the old L.A., where the West Coast equivalent of John Cheever’s river light filled the air at sunset, flat and white and full of promise, Southern California before the corruption had set in. This, of course, was a chimera, as we were reminded every time we received the community association e-mail update, which among other things, catalogued local burglaries. Did we need to worry? We didn’t know.

Then, one afternoon, a friend who had worked as a contractor noticed the alarm keypad and mentioned that at some point there must have been a break-in, since the system was so good. “You should really think about activating it,” he said as he was leaving. I mouthed a long string of platitudes about the risks of living in a city, but in that instant I understood where this would go. “I know you hate them,” Rae told me later, “but we have two kids.”

The irony is that the children were as unnerved by the alarm as I was. At least they were at first. During those initial few weeks, we’d look at it, together, as if we had been invaded, occupied. When Rae, who had no such issues, would use it, we’d all wait, outside, for her to turn it on or off. There was something about the beeping, something about its implacability. It didn’t know or care who we were, just that the threshold had been crossed. After a while, though, the unexpected happened: I began to find this calming, in an oddly familiar way. The change came slowly, unconsciously, as if I’d fallen in love with my invader. Or no, not love--love is far too strong a sentiment--but rather consolation, comfort, even ease. In the evenings, I began to feel safer after Rae had switched on the system, as if it represented not just an electronic barrier but a symbolic one, a metaphorical set of bars.

I’ve always been an obsessive, especially in regard to security. Any time I go out for an extended period, I check the locks once, twice, three times, as if were I to let my guard down, they might unlock themselves. Now the alarm began to take on that kind of focus, to fulfill that type of need. When I left the house, I’d stand on the front steps and wait out the beeping, which sped up precipitously as a warning before it came to an ominous, fully activated stop. At night I’d key in the code and listen with satisfaction for the three tones that confirmed the system was on. Before I went to bed, I would pace our long hall, looking in on the kids, making sure . . . of what I didn’t know. Then I’d pass the alarm console one last time, checking for the red light that told me it was armed.

In the 1981 film “My Dinner With Andre,” Andre Gregory recalls an encounter with an English tree expert who says New York has become a “model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards.” It’s an idea I’ve always found compelling, not so much for what it says about New York, but about all of us. Take me. I’ve spent my life in cities--indeed, in almost every way that matters, they have determined who I am. I love the rush of them, the electricity; I love standing at the center of a critical mass, with all the chaos and excitement (even danger) this implies. It’s a mental construct, and yes, I suppose it is a kind of prison. But it’s a prison in which, perversely, I’ve found my own sort of liberty, and often in unlikely situations, as with the alarm.

I don’t mean to claim that an alarm has freed me, but it has allowed me some measure of what, for want of a better phrase, I’ll call peace of mind. I would be lying if I denied it: I sleep better when the alarm is active, just as in my SoHo apartment I took solace in my triple-locked door. And yet, in the end, such consolations cannot protect us, for in any prison, there are inmates who prey on other inmates, which means, no matter what, we must look after ourselves. The prison is an illusion. The window bars and locks? An illusion. Indeed, security itself is an illusion, because what happens when the alarm goes off?

As it happens, our alarm finally did, one Sunday while we were at a carnival. We had left the house early, and when we got back in the car around 4 o’clock, Rae had a message from the security company. “It’s the alarm,” she said a few minutes later. “Something happened. They couldn’t reach us. The police had to come.” Although we tried to stay calm--and to calm the kids--a pallor fell over the car. For the rest of the drive, I imagined the house wide open, the television gone, the computers gone, the checkbook, the secret stash of cash. More than anything, I thought about a stranger walking through my home, touching my bed, my books, my children’s toys. When we pulled into the driveway and saw the doors and windows closed and locked, it felt as if we had gotten away with something, as if we had dodged the chaos outside our walls.

Of course, chaos often yields to other chaos--or at least that’s how it seems to me. Our alarm, we learned, had been triggered by a motion sensor that detected a subtle trace of movement: an insect, perhaps, or a mote of dust. Because the police had responded, we were liable for a $115 fee. To have it waived, Rae attended a two-hour seminar at Parker Center, where she was told that alarms were useless because they so often went off for no reason at all. For her, that was a catalyst; she now wants the system disconnected, seeing it as a marker for the lies we tell ourselves. I understand the argument--I have always understood the argument--but I’m not sure it matters anymore. No, what’s at issue is a far more nuanced mechanism, a psychological routine. I check the locks, I check the windows. I turn on the alarm and feel a barrier descend. It’s not about keeping the world out so much as it is about keeping it contained. And if that sounds like a prison, it’s one, I’ve come to feel, I can defend.