The Overabundant

Hard to imagine Harlem as my home without a measure of self-deception. Really, Harlem as home to anyone strikes me as a dubious proposition. Spending time here, one can't help but suspect that the place has been imagined — designed — as a way to kill people.

The triumph, in any case, would be for me to become — to be — my own home.

~

4:00 AM. The music is so loud it sounds like it's coming from my kitchen.

I roll out of bed and make my way through the dark to the living room window. It's from a car parked below. Three girls have climbed onto the car and are twerking. Their dresses ride up their dark thighs, onto their asses. All three of them wear white panties. Boys film with phones. And dance shouting encouragement, I’m guessing — although I can't make out what they're saying over the music.

From my window, above the fluorescent streetlight, with the boys below I watch the girls twerk. Maybe for them Harlem is home.

What would have summoned the Belmont police in a matter of minutes apparently here only after a very long time, if ever. I know I'm not calling. I've retired from — am in flight from — calling or being police.

~ 

It was after midnight; I was alone and feeling peaceful and — unusual, for me — wanted to smoke.

I came outside to the sound of a young woman shouting. Screaming.

I walked the other direction, to the closest bodega, and bought American Spirits and a bottle of Stella.

On my way back, the woman and I passed each other. Now she was muttering. She might have been crying.

Sitting on the stairs of the brownstone I smoked and wondered what it would take for me to scream in the street after midnight.

She came along — I saw her bleached white, closely cut hair and tight pink top, jeans and high heels. She passed me, or almost passed me, and stopped. “Do you happen to have an extra cigarette?” I handed one to her and lit it and she sat down next to me. “I'm not having a good night right now.”

I stayed silent, letting the cigarettes do their work.

“I just can't let her do it. She’s fifteen. She's my sister. Out here blowing guys for what? A pair of Jordans? I can't watch it happen. The fucking guys. A bunch of weirdos. Just using her, I know, I know men. I'm a model. I know how they think, it's not like I don't know. I just can't watch it.”

She didn’t need me to say anything; I said, “That's heartbreaking.” And wondered — or later wondered — at the fact that listening to her I was more curious than sad and that her story seemed like life and mine an impoverished dictatorship of fear and feigned — or, worse yet, real — indignation.

But she was heartbroken, panic-stricken.

I was able to contemplate her not-yet desolated beauty and listen to her and say as little as possible, because anything — everything — I might have said, given my imagination, would have been patronizing — supremacist, maybe, and dishonest, as there is little about me more dishonest than my supremacy, which is really insecurity, because how else does cowardice feel when confronted with real pain, horror? Maybe guilty — I suspect guilty, inevitably.

Before my cigarette burned out I offered her the pack. She declined: “I don't smoke packs. Just one when I need it."

"Me, too," I said.

Soon, she asked, “You live here?” She nodded at the brownstone.

“I do.”

“It's nice. But I don't want her to come here.”

"No."

Two nights later, I heard her screaming again. “You all fucking weirdos!” For a while, from my couch, I listened, but it was a cold night and eventually I closed the window.

~

 

To the man filling the bodega’s beer coolers the cop said, “I deal with mental health issues all day. I put my life on the line every day. So I don't need to hear this right now.”

The man, agitated, said, “You kill people. You kill people.”

The cop said, “I don't kill people. But if you're having some kind of crisis, you need to go in the back and calm down. You need to calm down.”

The man — very pale, paler than me, his brown hair a mess — pushed boxes of beer into a storage cooler and disappeared into it himself.

The cop said to the young man behind the counter, “You need to control this. This is your store. If you know one of your guys has a problem, you need to keep them in the back. This is on you.”

The bodega is across the street from the 28th Precinct; I see cops in there all the time, ordering sandwiches and buying bags of chips. I've learned to speak to them without deference, which seems somehow more respectful of their humanity and will I hope eventually reflect how I feel about them, around them.

~

I'm on my way to a BBQ in Anna's backyard garden in West Harlem. Spring is here: the trees are in bloom; the breeze drifts with the fallen petals of cherry blossoms.

Descending the stairs at the 125th Street subway station I come upon a man terribly disfigured by what must have been third degree burns. His face, his arms — the fingers of the hand he holds out for coins have been burnt away; his hand is nothing but a scarred palm. I have no coins, no cash — just a debit card and my phone.

The BBQ is wine, steaks, fresh fruit, cupcakes. Aperol spritzes and cold beer. Sunlight and the company of a breathtaking tree — an eastern redbud, I think — covered in clusters of pink flowers. Laughter, friendship, cigarettes.

Seven hours later, returning home, ascending the subway station's stairs, I see that the man is still there, holding out his palm.

~

There will be a reckoning. This overabundant life — a world that feels sometimes like Mad Max and sometimes like Moonlight — will either be survived or not survived, a journey to madness or freedom. Those are, from what I can tell, the only possibilities. Harlem won't let me kid myself — play myself. At least not as I did, for so long.

The Plague Year

It ended at a Walgreens in the Upper West Side, a Saturday afternoon, the nicest day to date of New York City's 2021, 63 degrees, the sidewalks something like what they'd once been: teeming.

In front of me in line were a young Asian woman, a middle-aged white woman, and a young Black woman. Behind me was an Asian man with a baby in a stroller.

We handed our paperwork through plexiglass shields to the pharmacist's assistant and took a seat and waited.

A Russian woman came out and called us one-by-one into a make-shift room constructed next to the pharmacy. The Black woman went in first. When she came out, I said, "Congratulations," and she smiled with relief and said, "Thank you." That's when I started to cry.

Next, the Asian woman went in. Her little daughter — five years old?— stood next to her and watched her get the injection and asked if it hurt. Her husband took a picture just as she said, "Not at all."

Then me:

It was one of those rare moments in my life when my body aligned with my feelings. Humble, disbelieving gratitude. I see now that I gripped the arm getting the shot as if it were some kind of lifeline.

The Russian woman told me go sit down where I'd been and wait for fifteen minutes to be sure I had no reaction.

Well, I had a reaction. I cried like a baby. I thought of the hundreds of scientists — more — who had raced to develop these vaccines, and I thought of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who had allowed their bodies to test them, and I thought of the hundreds of thousands of dead — in this country alone —for whom they came to late. I thought of the tens of millions who had been hospitalized, and the millions yet to die or be hospitalized, because, unlike me, they didn't get to sit on this Saturday afternoon in a drugstore in the Upper West Side to be saved.

And I thought about the long, terrible year we'd been through. And how it was over, for me. Yet not close to over for so many millions, most of them poorer than me, darker than me, and, frankly, more deserving than me, because they or the people they loved had given and lost so much more than I had, a year in which I'd lost practically nothing but for the convenience of in-person work and the luxury of walking through the world without wearing a life-saving mask.

Nevertheless, I was right to get the shot when I could. Like those in line both before me and after me, we were doing our part to end the reign of the virus and return our lives to ourselves. Yes, inevitably, some new plague will "rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.” But getting up from my chair and walking out of Walgreens, into New York City's early spring sunlight, I recognized without effort the strange, timeless joy that brought an end to my weeping. The Greeks, from what I understand, called it hope.

The Best Books I Read in 2020

It's not enough to say that I read these books: I survived them. Survival was, even while reading, the year's ambition.

In no particular order:

• Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor
• Die, My Love, by Ariana Harwicz
• Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell
• Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, by Elaine Pagels
• Strength to Love, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Trump, by Alain Badiou
• Freud and Man's Soul, by Bruno Bettelheim
• The Stoic Challenge, by William B. Irvine
• The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, as translated by Michael Nylan
• Beowulf, as translated by Maria Dahvana Headley
• Self-Portrait in Black and White, by Thomas Chatterton Williams
• The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
• They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears, by Johannes Anyuru
• Ghost Image, by Hervé Guibert
• Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears, by László F. Földényi
• Like Flies from Afar, by K. Ferrari
• Everything Flows, by Vassily Grossman
• Fracture, by Andrés Neuman

Of those I re-read, The Plague, by Albert Camus, was the most felicitous.

Of those I added to my library, Dirt Road Epiphanies, by David Treanor, was the most sacred.

Finally: How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley, terrified me with its unnerving urgency. Please, everyone: if you haven't read it, immediately, yes, do. The hour is upon us. Read this book.