A Body’s Propensity to Overheat

Alone with my son and our pajamas and at the mercy of this city

Time stops when you think your child is dead. 

Leo, our three-year-old, was lifeless in my arms. Just moments before, I lay with him in our bed. Then came the convulsing and the eyes rolling back, and he just lay limp and unresponsive. My yells and shaking moved nothing inside of him. 

“Leo!” I screamed repeatedly. “Leo! Please don’t die!”

In shock, I picked up my sweet boy and sprinted out of the apartment yelling for help. A neighbor down the hall ran out, seeing me carrying a lifeless child and called 911. I waited for the ambulance, but after a seemingly infinitely set of minutes, I decided to take matters into my own hands and raced him to the ER myself. Holding my lifeless child, I ran barefoot onto the avenue screaming and trying to get any passing car to take me to the hospital.

A stranger hailed a taxi for us, and I jumped in yelling for the driver to book it to the nearest ER. The cabbie, a kind, older man with a thick accent and decades of driving under his belt, had clearly not experienced this one before. Probably pregnancies, robberies, throwing up, and sex, but never an accomplice to life saving. 

His eyes were heartbroken when he saw me holding my son as I prayed and shrieked and coddled him in my arms. 

“Leo, stay with me!” I repeated over and over. 

And, no matter how fast the driver went, or with every turn he tried to make to win an inch in gridlocked traffic, I screamed at him. 

“Faster!” 

“Run the red!”

“Drive on the other side of the road!” 

“Hurry up!”

“He’s dying! Please, you have to help me!”

The cabbie simply looked back to me and pointed up to the sky. I thought he was going to impart some wisdom about how God or Jesus or Allah was watching over. To remind me to come back to a faith in a higher power that I had long ago discarded. To make a prayer to the almighty and beg for the protection of my son.

“But, they are watching!” he said. 

“What! Who is watching?” I replied, annoyed by his Talmudic puzzle.

“They. The cameras!” he said in a resigned tone, “If they catch me, I could pay a big fine.”

What the cabbie could never know is that few people have been more responsible for the widening set of seeing eyes watching drivers across New York City than me. Just months before, I helped lead a fight across the state to expand our city’s speed safety cameras, an automated tool to issue traffic tickets regardless of rationale for breaking the law. I had spent hundreds of hours meeting with scores of people to describe their benefits for safety, equity, and fairness - a proven means to help save lives across our city and change the behaviors of our city’s reckless drivers. 

And today, my son’s life was in the hands of a taxi driver needing to decide between saving the life of a stranger’s kid or threatening his livelihood. 

“Please, sir.” I begged. “Whatever the ticket is, I will pay it and more.”

The cabbie paused for a moment, and then caught my crazed and desperate eyes in the rearview mirror. 

“Please! He’s going to die!” I screamed. 

He nodded to me, turned his eyes back to the road and floored it - breaking the sound barrier down the avenue. The Nissan van raced across streets and avenues, through red lights, and into bikes lanes - passing cars and buses with honks that screamed urgency, not a mere impatience. Meanwhile, Leo remained lifeless in my arms, wearing his favorite Avengers pajamas. I rocked him back and forth, willing life back into his tiny body. 

As the ER entrance appeared, I reached for my wallet only to realize that I had left it back home, along with my shoes and socks, house keys, and any sense of safety and calm. 

I was alone with my son and our pajamas and at the mercy of this city. 

“I’m so sorry, I don’t have a wallet.” I said, “Give me your phone number or address and I’ll send you whatever I owe.”

As he pulled up to the entrance, he looked back at me with kind and calm eyes, as the rest of his body was pulsing on pure adrenaline, “Go! I’m a father, too. You take care of your son, my friend. May God be with you, and let’s just hope those cameras never saw us.” He said with a wink.

I thanked the man profusely, and raced into the ER and threw Leo into the hands of the closest doctor. While near death is a subjective term for a crazed parent with no medical training, the seasoned medical team rushed Leo through some tests and monitors to realize that he had a febrile seizure, another genetic gift from his wonderful father. The doctors gave him some medicine and time, and I held him in my arms as he eventually woke up, drowsy and demanding ice cream. 

When I called my family to share the news, my parents reminded me of the day when I had a febrile seizure as a baby in our apartment in Rego Park. My similarly crazed parents jumped into a neighbor’s car and asked him to race them across Queens to the ER. However, their neighbor, a doctor, refused to break any traffic laws and stopped at every red light as I lay lifeless in my father’s arms in the back seat. My parents yelled, but the doctor refused to break even one law to get me to the hospital any faster.

Now, Leo and I bond about our body’s propensity to overheat and its implications for New York City’s motorists. 

The doctor who drove me as an infant to the hospital and rigidly obeyed every single law turned into a criminal. In 2006, he blew up his beloved Upper East Side townhouse, killing himself and injuring others, to avoid selling it and paying his divorce settlement. The explosion was so massive, the White House had to issue a statement saying it was not terrorism. 

As for Leo’s driver, he broke every law to save my son, and then vanished into the mosaic of streets. I pray his flexibility with the rules invites a better end.

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I Can Make It There is a collection of stories about the things and people, including me, that move through New York City. A celebration of the characters who crawl through endless traffic, slog through the subways, and stroll under the shade of scaffolding.

Like our fragmented and broken transportation system, some stories race with enthusiasm to a red light and others remain hopelessly stuck behind a double-parked Mercedes with New Jersey plates and blinkers on as the driver screams over the honking, “Just hold on for a minute! I’m only stopping in for a quick dinner at Sardis.” 

And, all of these stories could occur nowhere else but the greatest city on Earth - New York Fucking City.