The car alarm was the loneliest sound on the Lower East Side. It went off at three in the morning and nobody came. The car screamed into the dark and the dark did not answer. The owner was asleep or drunk or in New Jersey. The car did not know. The car only knew that something had touched it and it was afraid.

The car alarm had six voices. It cycled through them like a singer trying to find the right key. The wail. The chirp. The honk. The siren imitation. The European two-tone. The one that sounded like a robot having a panic attack. Six voices and not one of them communicated anything except that the car was alone and did not want to be touched.

The whole block listened to the car alarm and nobody moved. This was the social contract of the Lower East Side. The car alarm was everybody's problem and therefore nobody's problem. You lay in bed and you listened to the car cycling through its six voices and you waited. You waited for the battery to die or the owner to appear or God to intervene. Usually the battery died first. God had stopped answering car alarms in the 1990s.

The car alarm lasted between four minutes and forever. The short ones were the new cars. The batteries were strong and the alarm had a timer. The long ones were the old cars. The batteries were weak but the alarm had no timer. The alarm ran until the battery died and the battery died when it died and the block waited.

I played guitar on the corner and the car alarm was the one sound I could not play over. The siren came and went. The ice cream truck came and went. The car alarm stayed. It parked itself on top of my set and it would not move. I stopped playing and I waited like everybody else on the block waited. The car alarm was the only musician on the Lower East Side who could clear the stage without playing a single recognizable note.

Nobody ever said thank you when the car alarm stopped. The silence after the car alarm was not relief. It was resentment. The car had stolen twenty minutes of the night and it was not giving them back. The block went quiet and everybody lay in bed resenting the car and the owner and the manufacturer and the concept of private property and the year the car alarm was invented which was 1913 if you care which nobody on the Lower East Side at three in the morning did.