The buzzer was the voice of a building that could not speak. The building wanted to say come in or go away and the building could not say either so the building buzzed. The buzz was a vibration that traveled through a wire from the apartment to the front door and the wire was the building's nervous system and the buzz was the building's one word. The building had a vocabulary of one. Buzz. That was it. Come in. Go away. I am here. I am not here. All the same sound. The visitor had to decide which meaning the buzz carried and the visitor usually guessed wrong.

The buzzer panel was next to the front door and the panel had names next to buttons and the names were written on tape and the tape was yellow and the names were faded and some of the names were not the names of the people who lived there now. The names were the names of the people who had lived there before and nobody had changed the tape because nobody had tape and nobody had a pen and nobody cared enough to fix something that worked well enough. The buzzer did not care whose name was on the tape. The buzzer buzzed for whoever pushed the button.

You pushed the buzzer and you waited. The wait was the longest three seconds on the Lower East Side. Three seconds between pushing the button and hearing the buzz that meant the door was open. In those three seconds you did not know if anybody was home. You did not know if the buzzer worked. You did not know if the person in the apartment wanted to see you. Three seconds of not knowing. Three seconds of standing on a stoop with your finger on a button hoping that a wire inside a wall would carry a vibration to a speaker inside an apartment where a person would hear it and decide that you were worth the effort of pressing a button in return.

I never had a buzzer that worked properly. My buzzer made a sound like a wasp trapped in a jar. The sound was not inviting. The sound said somebody is at the door and I am angry about it. My friends learned to ignore the buzzer and throw pebbles at my window instead. The pebble on the window was the buzzer before buzzers existed. The pebble was the original technology. The buzzer was the upgrade and the upgrade was worse. The pebble said I am here and the window said I hear you and the conversation was between a hand and a pane of glass and neither one needed electricity.