Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 16)

My NYC-Covid "fictional memoir"

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Chapter 16

Two weeks later—mid-May—Sophia and I finally did our planned “urban hike” which we’d discussed doing for the past month. There was no specific goal other than walking around the city together for the day and seeing what happened. We’d heard stories, of course, about the ghost town that had become Times Square, about desolate Battery Park and Wall Street, about all the closed restaurants and cafes in the west Village, etc. We’d seen the images on TV. But we hadn’t seen it ourselves. Mostly we’d each kept to our own neighborhoods, like most people, avoiding the subways and Uber, trying to stay isolated, safe and sane as best we could.

            By this time I’d at last made a decision about Harlem: I was going to break my lease. Fuck it, I thought. After everything. After being viciously chased by lurid, terrifying locals twice; after two men held up a tenant inside of our building at gunpoint; after being spat at and cursed; after seeing likely rape in Marcus Garvey Park; not to mention the murderous ogling by young men nearly every day I walked outside: It was time. Beyond time, actually.

I called Emir and told him. He did what he did best: Tried to downplay the chaos and gaslight me, attempting to make me sound like I was crazy and making half of it up, that it really wasn’t “that bad,” and that I had an obligation to stay at least the final two months of my lease, which didn’t end until mid-August. I said I didn’t care, I was leaving, there was nothing he could do about it and, if I had to, I’d pay the final months’ rent even after I left. Reluctantly, he agreed. I started looking for apartments immediately. It was slow-going.

First I couldn’t decide where I’d even want to live. Fleetingly, I considered moving back to California. By this time flights were slowly, sketchily opening up again, though it was still a risk. I’d only lived in Manhattan for fourteen months though. The El Cerrito house was rented out, so I wouldn’t be able to live there. My parents were still living in Ojai, in the mansion. There was no way I’d live with them. Besides, they were in a slow-burning escrow on a new house they’d found in Santa Barbara. Ever since the Thomas Fire in Ojai in 2017, they’d been convinced Ojai was a Fire Death Trap. For the first time since we’d moved there from Ventura in 1991, they wanted out.

I couldn’t stay with my sister and brother-in-law, not long-term. I’d spent so much time, energy and emotional fuel preparing for and executing my move to New York City. After Adinah and I’d broken up. After all that work saving up money. It had been (and still was) my biggest romantic literary dream. Life was short. Was I really going to give it all up, after only a year and two months? Thinking this was like a hard kick to the groin. It felt—and sounded—like giving up; like failure. I just wasn’t ready for that. Not even now. Not yet. The problem, I told myself, wasn’t Manhattan but Harlem. Specifically this rough part of East Harlem. And specifically specifically during COVID-19. During the brutal lockdowns. The city was psychologically locked down, too. All of us were.

Soon I found a broker and looked at a few places on the Upper West Side. Three-hundred-thousand New Yorkers had fled the city by this time. The city was largely deserted; abandoned. Therefore rental prices were low. Despite this, there was still some competition. I found a new broker. I messaged with some rental companies directly. Had some phone chats. Kept looking.

The absolute final straw that had—at least psychologically—broken the camel’s symbolic back, as far as fleeing Harlem, came a few days after I’d last been chased. I’d gone on an unusual night walk around eight pm, antsy to get outside for even just twenty minutes. I’d been inside all day, depressed and too tired to go out. Finally, after dark had descended I’d decided to go, despite my rule against doing so. I was desperate. I stayed hyper vigilant and didn’t roam far. There were very few people on the street. It was a nice, cool May evening. Spring had begun blooming in the air, you could feel it. Everyone knew warmer days and nights would lower the COVID numbers because more people would be outside. By summer, people anticipated travel, some sort of return to normal.

It was somewhere around 128th Street, I think, between Lenox and Adam Clayton Powell, a few blocks west of my apartment, that I saw it. As I approached a building—which I soon realized was a hospital—I saw two large white electronic doors slowly open. From inside the building, four men wheeled a big lump on a stretcher with thin metal legs and little wheels along a polished linoleum floor. The men looked absurd, like NASA astronauts. They each had on massive bright white body suits, with full helmets and face shields. My first thought was: Star Wars. Their whole bodies were covered. It seemed as if, once again, I were on the moon, the bald, rocky white landscape, alone, in an alien space.

The men burst through open doors—I heard the scraping of the metal wheels along the top of the stairs—and then began their slow, careful descent. I wasn’t sure if they noticed me; by now I had fully stopped and was observing this theatrical farce from twenty feet or so away. My brain momentarily became foggy again, just like after the panic attack. And then, as if a toddler for the very first time grasping how to stand up, I realized the lump on the stretcher was a dead body. A dead COVID body. As if one of the men had telekinesis, when they landed with a lurch and a screech of metal on the sidewalk, down from the stairs, they briefly paused, and one man in the huge white NASA suit stared at me. I could barely make out his blue serious eyes behind his helmet face shield. He held my gaze for what seemed like a whole minute but was probably a few hard seconds. Then he nodded. I knew what that nod signified. COVID death.

This was occurring everywhere in the city, and in fact almost everywhere in the world, it wasn’t unique to Harlem, to my little neighborhood. I knew that but something about seeing it with my own two eyes, after dark, and after everything I’d already experienced since March, I felt that nod like a rough gut-punch, doubling me over. I had to get out of here, ‘here’ meaning Harlem, not New York City.