Covid Body
East Harlem, Spring 2020
*This was written real-time in spring, 2020 while living in East Harlem. If you want to read more of my NYC/Covid experience, CLICK HERE.
** Consider going paid for only $35/year (less than $3/month)
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It was late April, David remembered, when he saw the body.
He was still living in Harlem, on West 130th at the corner of 5th Avenue. Ever since he’d been followed, and had run, he’d tried to avoid going out in his neighborhood at night. But this time he’d been sleeping on and off all day—still slogging through his depression—and when he woke up around 8:15 PM, he decided to slap some cold water on his face, drink a half a mug of Irish Breakfast tea, and go on a walk.
This time, though, he made sure to stick very close to his apartment. He was especially weary of the east side now, anything east of 5th Ave. Too many shady characters. Too many loiterers. Too many young men angry and out of work, looking for victims. He understood why this happened structurally, but David had learned something valuable while living in East Harlem: There was structural racism, and then there was the Reality of his day-to-day existence. He couldn’t forgive two giant men who’d followed him one night, seemingly with the intention of murdering him, simply because of “systemic racism.” No one forced them to chase him; no one put a gun to their heads and said, Follow that white boy. He didn’t buy this. David wished more white Woke people would have the experience he’d had so they’d understand. He felt the same about the police: Before you criticize the cops, you should understand what it’s truly like to be one. Direct experience, David knew, was the biggest teacher in life.
He walked west down his street—130th—a light jacket on, half zipped up (it was fairly warm out), seeing the dozens of high brown steps leading up to red and green imposing doors. The standard Harlem brownstone. His building, though, was a six-story red-brick building. No outside stairs. Just a gray heavy steel building door.
No one was around. But then as he approached Lenox Ave—Malcom X—a large man came around the corner approaching him. David felt his arm muscles tense. His heart thudded. Stay calm, stay calm, he counseled himself. This was one of the most sinister, pernicious effects of having been followed, of living as a white man in Pandemic-era Harlem: He had started to feel more and more rage towards black people generally, had started to distrust them to a staggering degree. His peripherals were always on. He glanced behind him as he walked obsessively now.
For the first time he felt as if, at least to some minor degree, he grasped what it might be like for women walking alone at night, always worried that some asshole creep might pounce. That was the word he’d use for the young men’s eyes in Harlem, feasting upon his bright white skin: Creepy. It never felt like simple intimidation: It felt like psychic rape: They wanted to lynch him, like racist whites had done to black people in the 19th century. They wanted to burn him alive. They wanted to crush his skull. He could feel it the way, he assumed, women could sense The Male Gaze.
He waited at Lenox at the red light as several cars and an eighteen-wheeler rumbled by, the white side of the truck saying, FRESH DIRECT in red and green. The food delivery company was now in vogue during Corona. He himself had been using it since late March. Forget waiting in line six feet apart and going physically into the grocery stores. Just order and wait. Safer. Easier. Not cheaper, however. But that didn’t matter. Safety was first. He laughed out loud at the irony of this thought: Safety first, as he walked around at night in rough East Harlem during a global Pandemic.
He crossed Lenox, then started walking south across the road. At 128th he rounded the corner and started walking west again. Jamming his hands into his pockets, feeling a very light drizzle, with mild humidity, he sighed. He thought of how many books he’d been devouring since the lockdown started. He tried to avoid the news. He’d caught a few Andrew Cuomo YouTube clips, telling the American people about the spreading Virus, about Trump’s negligence, about reports from the CDC, about needing to expand extra space for new impromptu hospitals since max capacity was being reached, about not having enough ventilators, etc. Cuomo, he felt, was well-spoken and had a calming effect. People in New York seemed to like him. And yet they absolutely loathed Bill deBlasio, New York City’s mayor. New Yorkers seemed to hate DeBlasio with a passion so great that, if any of them could, they might assassinate the man.
He scanned round him once more, seeing the empty, slick streets. The sound of a rushing car behind him, slick rubber tires screeching, startled him; lights rose up, came from behind, then passed him. He was on edge. He shouldn’t be out. He should go back home. No, he thought, fighting an internal battle: I’ve been inside all fucking day. I need this. Books, damn-it. Think about books.
He’d read East of Eden, the 750-page Goliath by John Steinbeck. The lush, lovely settings; the physical descriptions; the Arthurian Legend; the complex, Biblical characters; the overarching, interweaving plot; the retelling of Cain and Abel. He’d loved the book. He’d been meaning to read it for years. And then a 1,032-page tome that was a biography on Steinbeck, which had been fascinating. He’d really only been surprised by how hated Steinbeck had been by “serious literary critics,” and how many thought he’d not deserved the Nobel Prize, and how, as an older man he’d grown conservative and had become a journalist during the Vietnam War, arguing on the side of the American invasion of a fallow, horrific, unnecessary conflict.
But then again: People changed. David himself was changing, had been changing since Trump rose to power in 2016. As the Radical Left Woke people had gained more and more cultural and political power, David had felt himself slowly drifting more and more to the center.
He’d read a memoir about love and pancreatic cancer which had been heartbreaking. He’d read Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, about a bohemian artist during World War I, the prose so real and raw and direct, the language so intense and unselfconscious that it put even Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski to shame. He’d meandered into the swamp of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, getting halfway through before abandoning ship. Too long, too detailed, too slow. He’d read Zadie Smith’s stories. (Brilliant.) Saul Bellow. Flannery O’Connor. The Underground Railroad by Coleson Whitehead. Short introductions on Jung, Hegel, etc. He’d simply been devouring literature. Like a drug addict, a fiend. During the Pandemic he had writing, reading and masturbation. He used them all well.
David passed Adam Clayton Powell. Several men stood around a monstrous cluster of bicycles, tangled together, on the sidewalk, near a 24-hour liquor store, the neon bulbs flashing, one letter cracked out, drinking bagged forties. As he passed the men—who didn’t seem to notice him—he heard one of them say, “I’m tellinya, Nigga, Darla got HIV n shit. Serious, dawg. Bitch is a dope fiend…” The man’s voice was low and bass-deep. The man pulled hard on a cigarette and David saw the bright orange dot in the night, and the man’s right dark eye under the light of a street lamp.
He crossed over Adam Clayton Powell and bumped into St. Nicholas Playground. This was the direction he walked when he went to his men’s AA meeting up in Washington Heights, before the Pandemic. He knew this area was not good. Most of Harlem in his area was not good. Sometimes the resentment bubbled up in those moments: At himself, for moving here; at The Universe, for the Pandemic; at Harlem and its people for doing what they did. To feel unsafe was a terrible burden. Many in this hood not feeling safe for years, for decades, for generations, they should know. Perhaps that was it: They wanted to make Whitey feel what it was like to be unsafe. To feel that sensation in the pit of his gut. Revenge. Projection. Animus. Well, if that was the goal they’d succeeded. Of course he knew it wasn’t personal, it was on some level systemic. But he couldn’t help but feel it personally.
David walked north along Adam Clayton Powell to 128th Street. He waited for some cars to pass and then moved across the road, moving back east. He glanced to his right, south, and saw the huddled men and the forties in brown scrunched lunch bags once more, and the liquor store with that bright pink cracked neon sign.
Then he was on the silent, residential-feeling 128th. Immediately he felt better, no longer on Adam Clayton. The major streets were generally scarier. He hadn’t walked this part of 128th before, he realized. He was surprised. He’d been living in Harlem for eight months and he’d seemed to have walked everywhere. But not here.
All his adult life, in all the towns and cities he’d lived in, he’d consistently taken walks around neighborhoods and gazed longingly at the homes and thought to himself, One day I’ll own a house of my own. Even when he was twenty, twenty-one, he secretly felt this way. Even then, when externally he proclaimed to be Mighty Punk Rock, King of Angry Rebellion and Savagery; even then his middleclass yearnings were in his DNA. He’d always been in combat between convention and the opposite; between poverty and wealth; between rage and acceptance; between rebellion and tradition. And even now. He still was. He still waged that war, fought those battles. He was masculine and feminine. Angry and tough and sensitive and soft. Hard and not. Unconventional and an artist and yet traditional. In short: A total human freak-show.
David was surprised that, as he approached Lenox from half a block away, there was a hospital. He knew there was a hospital up on 137th and Lenox. He walked by that one all the time, with the gigantic mural addressing African American themes on its side. He told himself at night that if anything terrible happened he’d run to that hospital. But here was another one, much closer to his apartment, on 128th, a mere three blocks from home. Good to know.
Just then, as if the Universe were contradicting his thought, the gray doors at the top of three brick steps of the hospital flew open.
At first all he saw were two men wearing all-white uniforms complete with thick padded white gloves, white full helmets with plastic screens covering their faces, and thick, billowy white one-piece outfits. The white pants were tucked into white boots. They looked like NASA astronauts, or like something from out of a 1990s Grunge MTV video. Surreal.
Next David saw what the two men wheeled out of the door and slowly down the brick steps. It was unmistakable. A human body, lumpy in a black zipped-up body bag. Three more men in all-white with the same gear and getup were holding the other end and they all five of them concentrated and wheeled the body down the steps—he heard the small wheels crunching and scratching and rolling unevenly along the brick—and onto the sidewalk.
David froze, watching. His heart slammed in his chest. His throat suddenly felt impossibly dry and tight. He needed water. Swallowing, he wanted to look away or cross the road but he couldn’t. He felt paralyzed. He couldn’t move.
As the men trekked across the sidewalk David saw that a giant black SUV sat in the middle of 128th. Its red rear lights flashed lazily. That must be what they’re loading the body into, he thought. Just before they pushed the gurney off the sidewalk and onto the street, one of the men in all-white suddenly glanced up and saw David, standing there in shock. David felt incredibly self-conscious. He was stunned.
The man in white stood there a few seconds, eyeing David, as if David were not supposed to be walking around. This was before curfew. Before the political protests. Before George Floyd’s murder. It was like being met by an Alien being who wasn’t supposed to be seen by humans. It was as if they were on the moon, or another planet. That almost sounded nice; ideal even. Why stay on Earth? It was being riddled by a nasty, brutal virus which no one could stop.
The man—David caught his eyes behind the plastic screen, and he was reminded of an insect—simply nodded at David, ever so slightly. Without really intending to, David found himself nodding back. The man returned the nod again and this time nodded more deeply and it hit David like a bullet, what the man was saying: Yes, young man, this was a Covid death.
Then it was over. The man turned and, with the four others, they wheeled the gurney onto 128th and opened the back of the SUV and began loading the body into the back of the car.
David bent over, for an instant dry-heaving. He hadn’t done that since getting sober in 2010. It felt awful. Jesus H. Christ. He wiped his mouth and, feeling his jolting heart, he walked, passing the gurney and the SUV and the men and the brick steps and the hospital.
He crossed on 130th. He raced, half running, down his block to his apartment building.
He opened the door, closed it, remembering being chased by the two men that night, and, shivering with fear, he walked up the two flights of stairs to his apartment. His mind flexed with muscular thoughts of ventilators, struggles to breathe, bright white hospital rooms, beeping noises, his heart pounding, panic panic panic.
The dark wide open abyss of Death.
Thank you for this writing, but I am far away from East Harlem, Spring 2020; and, even if I was there/then once, I was not.