My memoir, TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK now available on ebook/Kindle!!! (prologue [free] and chapter 1 [paid] in this post)

Michael Mohr's fictional memoir

Buy my book HERE via ebook/Kindle for $3.99!

• Two Years in New York: Before, During and After Covid is the “fictional memoir” of a young man—Michael Mohr—from California (an ambitious writer in his mid-thirties) who, after a breakup, flees the Bay Area for Manhattan to chase the elusive authorial ghost, as it were, of Kerouac, Updike, Mailer, Sontag, Didion and all the other famous 20th century writers who lived in Manhattan, the mecca of the writers’ world. In 2019 he makes the move. But what he cannot foresee—what no one can—is the explosion of Covid-19, the BLM riots, the political polarization of the country, the madness of Trump and the questioning of institutions. Living in a rough part of East Harlem, Michael was lucky to get out alive. Told in stellar first-person prose, hewing to the autobiographical memoir style of authors such as Nabokov and Henry Miller, Two Years in New York covers 2.3 years of a pandemic, a dazzling, complex relationship between Michael and a talented painter, the clash between Michael’s imaginative expectations of The Big Apple and the way it actually is, and the romantic reality of finally being in New York.

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Prologue

Early May, 2020

Hospitals were overflowing all over the five boroughs. Queens got it the worst, then the Bronx, then Brooklyn. Manhattan not as bad but still terrible, of course. Ventilators were yanked from intubated Baby Boomers in hospitals and handed over to younger COVID patients who needed to breathe to survive. We read the stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker; we heard the tales online and from DeBlasio’s and Cuomo’s mouths. Fear whirled in the air in Harlem like helicopter blades at riots in the 1960s. There was an anxiety which glowed around the neighborhood.

I was, it was obvious, seriously depressed. I barely talked to anyone. Days went by without my even texting a single friend. I started eating and drinking horribly—tons of soda day and night leading to a bad sleep/caffeine cycle; pizza and gigantic pasta plates to suck the carbs from them like manna from heaven in a desperate attempt to feel “better.”

Most white residents seemed to have left. I wanted out of Harlem so bad but my will to take action was very low. Plus I had another three months left on my lease.

I hadn’t told my parents about the two times being chased, or about the gun holdup in the building. They’d just worry. And there was nothing they could do anyway. I felt so alone, so isolated, 3,000 miles away from everyone and everything I truly knew. It was as if I were actually in outer space, floating by myself in the vast dark emptiness, inside of this small, cramped two-bedroom apartment in East Harlem. No one knew where I was. No one would help me. The energy from young men outside had become hostile. I stared at the middle-distance when I passed them; I averted my eyes, looked away, looked down.

Every day was a struggle.

It happened one night when I least expected it. The night before I’d read an article in the Washington Post about how NYC hospitals were seeing a small but growing number of patients in their twenties and thirties who’d come in for asymptomatic COVID-related stroke. Some small percentage of them were dying. Turned out most of them had had COVID without knowing it. That was the thing about COVID—it was often, especially in younger, healthier people, asymptomatic.

This particular day was a bad one. My usual routine now was this: Get up around seven, eight AM, read, drink caffeine, try to hit at least part of an AA meeting on Zoom, eat something, feel the strong urge to write but skip it out of emotional COVID fatigue and depression, and then, around eleven or noon, take a “nap.” I was 37 years old and I’d never in my life needed to take naps during the middle of a Wednesday, say. But now I napped every day.

I passed out that day around 2pm. It was sunny and blue outside, but with a crispness which tickled me through my open dirt-stained window overlooking 5th Avenue. Everything was silent now except for sirens and police and paramedics; even the basketball courts across 130th were silent; the city had finally removed the nets and locked up the courts.

I woke up later that day confused, groggy, out of it, as if from a profoundly deep REM sleep. My phone, which I reached for on my bedside desk, proclaimed it was 5:30pm. Glancing outside I saw it was bending slowly towards dusk. COVID days were like Before Times weeks. They passed sluggishly and slowly like honey globulating down a tree. Like dripping molasses.

I decided I’d take a shower.

After ten minutes of scalding water I turned it off, got out, stood there a minute, steam rising off my naked body. I closed my eyes. I breathed deep and slow again. My heart, probably because of the heat, I thought, seemed to be beating rather fast. I toweled off.

I walked back into the kitchen. My hot heel and toes cooled against the cold black kitchen tile. I poured another glass of water and drank half of it. I walked into the second room—my writing office—and looked out the window onto 130th, north, and at the empty, desolate basketball court. A black SUV drove by pumping gangster rap.

Back in the kitchen—thinking I’d put fresh pants on—standing right in the center of the space, I suddenly stopped. My heart out of the blue started pounding. I mean really pounding, as if an angry child were inside my body and was punching as hard as he could. I’d never experienced anything like it, not even when I hopped freight trains, got in scary fist-fights, or hitchhiked across America in my twenties. This was something new and foreign to me.

Next, before I had even processed the pounding heart, a wave of frenetic heat washed through my entire body from my head down to my toes. I imagined being electrocuted might be like this. After that, my left arm started going numb. I mean completely numb, as in useless limb. Then the rest of the left side of my body started numbing. By now I was absolutely terrified. I remember thinking, I’m having a COVID-related stroke.

Still naked, frantic, the left side of my body mostly useless now, my whole body vibrating with heat and a pumping heart like a fist, the final blow was the worst: I started, for the first time in my life, truly struggling to breathe.

I couldn’t get enough air, no matter how much I tried. The oxygen to my brain dropped. A vast, hyper-intense headache was descending. I panicked. I started trying to gather my clothes so I could…do what? My impulse was to run. But where? Why? Then I thought: Hospital. I need a hospital. But the next thought was: Hospitals are dangerous right now. What if you get put on a ventilator? What about COVID? But isn’t THIS COVID? I didn’t know. I was lost. Scared. Alone. I ran to the window again in the office, looking outside. Empty streets, shiny from a light spring drizzle. Street lamps. Desolation. Nothing.

Police, I thought. Call 911. Or my downstairs Texan neighbor, Latisha. Someone! I sensed in that moment that I was going to die. It was inevitable. I was going to die at 37, 3,000 miles away from friends and family, totally isolated and alone, scared and depressed, in East Harlem of all places. I felt my eyes widen in fear. I was too young to die. Too young to leave this planet, this life. Help!

At last I looked for my cellphone; it took me ten seconds to realize it was already in my right hand. I’d been going on autopilot. Had I been talking out loud? Had I already called anyone? The breathing got much harder again. I struggled. I needed air.

I dialed my mother. She picked up. She knew something was wrong. I never called randomly, unplanned. I said, my breath locked and rugged, “Mom. I need help. Struggling to breathe. Beating heart. Left side of body is numb.”

“Jesus Michael,” she said, the fear hot in her voice. “Ok. Ok. Look. Honey. What happened. Nevermind. Can you sit down?”

“I need a hospital mom,” I said. I realized then there was a hospital up on Lenox and 137th. Eight blocks away. I could throw clothes on and sprint up there. But with my struggle to breathe?

“No!” My mom yelled into the receiver. “Hospitals are dangerous right now! Let’s see…let’s see…shit…honey, can you call your neighbor? Can you sit down?”

I heard the panic in her voice. I heard my father asking her what was going on. She briefly answered him. I heard my dad say “shit” in the background. I had my mom on speaker phone. I was still in the office. I’d managed to get an old raggedy pair of shorts on. I sat down on the little thrift-store gray couch in the corner. My heart was still beating hard; the left side of my body was still numb; my breathing was shallow and weak.

“Ok, I’m sitting,” I said.

“Good. Good. Ok. Honey. Can you just take real slow, deep breaths for me?”

I wanted to weep. “I don’t want to die mom.” Fear was paralyzing me. My brain seemed half frozen. I was groggy and confused. Time seemed to move in LSD-like waves almost. It was like crawling through psychic mud.

“You’re not going to die, Michael. Keep breathing. Slow. Deep. In…out. In…out. In…out. Okay??”

“Ok,” I said, and it sounded slow and syrupy…

~

Chapter 1

New York City lived in my body. It’s a place I felt more than anything else. Especially as an outsider, and especially especially as a native Californian. I only lived in Manhattan for a little over two years, and yet it happened to be a moment which had never been seen before and may never be seen again—namely, the global pandemic known as COVID-19. Add on to this the murder of George Floyd and the mass protests which ensued, and the invidious political resentment roiling the nation on both sides of the spectrum—not to mention the chaotic turbulence of the Trump era—and you have one bumpy ride.

I was born and raised in Southern California—Ventura and Ojai, north of Los Angeles. I bounced around for many years and ended up living in the San Francisco Bay Area for a decade, from 2008 to 2019. As a semi-wannbe-semi-legitimate-very-angry rich-kid punker growing up in the late nineties and early two-thousands, I fastidiously read all the books I could find about the first-wave of punk which started in the 1970s. And this, of course, led me to Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, which led me to The Ramones, who grew up in Queens and played at CBGBs. Later, when I had transcended—if that’s the appropriate word—punk rock and discovered writing, I read Jack Kerouac’s roman-a-clef On the Road, the 1957 classic which nailed a generation and changed young men in search of spiritual ecstasy ever since. On the Road, again, led me to New York.

So in 2006—when I was twenty-three—I sold my few possessions, ended my one-year lease at a small one-bedroom apartment in Pacific Beach in San Diego, and, following Kerouac’s lead, took an Amtrak train 3,000 miles east across America to the emerald jewel that was Manhattan.

Back then I was almost halfway through my “drinking career,” and needless to say it was a wild two weeks, complete with drunken tomfoolery; blackouts; never-ending explorations by subway and foot; crazed, frantic sex with strange women I barely recall anymore; and continually craning my neck upwards gazing at those impossibly high, shiny, metallic buildings, like steel dinosaurs which still ruled the land.