Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 7)

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Chapter 7

I turned the A/C on full-blast, across my bed, and then sat down in the chair facing my desk. My Acer laptop sat facing me, my gmail account open. I stared at the email from a small literary journal which told me that they were “delighted” to publish my short story, The Heart of the Emerald Green. I was profoundly satisfied. As an unknown, un-agented writer it was a thrill when I finally got a story accepted. Nine out of ten magazines rejected my work. This was fairly standard, until you became known and had a reliable audience. Maybe I got a story published twice a year, if I was lucky. This piece was yet another autobiographical story about my golden, shadowy youth in Ojai, being young and confused and drunk, unsure of what the future would bring.

It was about 1pm. I gazed across my bed seeing the red brick wall out the window. I was lazy and tinged with excitement and fear. Sophia, shocking me, had emailed. I’d been scrolling my emails after writing, around eleven in the morning, expecting the usual brew of bullshit—spam; advertisements; my New York Times daily update; my New Yorker daily update; a couple sarcastic messages from California writer friends; etc. This particular morning, however, fourth down from six bolded new emails, was one from Sophia Motte. It said: “Just saying hi.” I’d walked into the kitchen—thank God no Makena—poured myself a third giant mug of Irish Breakfast tea (I was already far too caffeinated), returned to my room, scratched Lucius behind his black, velvety ears, and responded, Hey. Glad you emailed. Didn’t think I’d hear from you. Want to get coffee?

I’d then responded to an email from a friend, and after began scanning the New York Times updates. Swiftly, ten minutes later, she had responded. Sure. Yeah. Coffee sounds nice J. The smiley face was a good sign, I thought. (Though I wasn’t sure why.) We did a little back and forth. We decided to meet the next day, at Shakespeare & Company, in the little café. She lived three blocks south of there, across the street from Lincoln Center, in a tall high-rise complex on West 66th. I asked for her number and, surprising me yet again, she gave it to me. I saved it in my contacts on my iPhone. I sent her a brief text so she had mine, too.

But, the next day, about an hour before we were to meet—fifteen minutes before I was going to head out the door—she texted me and canceled. She had some excuse about being really tired after a late night out. She apologized and I said it was fine. It stung a little, and I didn’t honestly know what to think. There was that vague shame again, doing what I knew to be questionable. And yet how that same feeling ignited a secret eagerness in me! How did she feel about it? I couldn’t be sure. But it felt like she was having a similar experience, that simultaneous push-pull internally. I want, I shouldn’t; I can, I can’t; I will, I won’t. I understood and respected that, though still, selfishly I felt needy and impatient.

Now, back to the present moment—July 7th. I responded to the literary journal telling them in exaggerated hype how “honored” I was that they were accepting my story. And it was true, I did feel honored. But also, deep down inside, I was resentful at the literary world for not somehow magically recognizing my merit as a writer. Ever since I stopped drinking, I’d been creatively driven to an incredible degree, writing constantly, submitting work (often before it was ready) to literary agents, submitting stories for publication, entering literary contests. In the past nine years I’d written eight novels (all of them unpublished; several of them read multiple times by dozens of agents), and probably hundreds of short stories, not to mention likely 100,000 words-worth, I’d guess, of journaling. I’d yelled my name at the top of my lungs, out into The Literary Abyss, and nothing had come back. Nothing big, anyway. Nothing concrete. I had, however, had dozens of stories published. One had been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. But no one knew who the fuck I was. Such was the nature of the narcissistic, desperate, self-absorbed, needy young question-mark American writer.

After this, I got off email and started the process of staying in New York City. I called Regional Rentals, Corp, the new, cheap Bay Area property management company. I told them my situation. They said the first order of business would be to get everything in my El Cerrito house cleared out. That hit me like a fist to the solar plexus. I hadn’t even thought of that. They said it might be possible to get someone in—maybe a U.C. Berkeley professor or a student—who didn’t mind it furnished, but, they advised, it would be much easier if it were empty. They told me about their prices, how they operated, I took notes, listened, checked with a few people I trusted, and signed a contract to work with them.

I called some good friends in the Bay Area—Brian, a writer I’d gone to S.F. State studying Creative Writing with when I returned for my B.A. in 2012; Jacob, from The Program; Terry, who I’d met through Jacob several years before; my neighbors across the street, Zader and his thoughtful Japanese wife, Sakura; my next-door neighbor, Gregory—and asked each in kind if they’d possibly be willing to do the absurd for me: Go to my house and clear it out, boxing stuff up and stowing it in the little detached garage in the backyard, in one room of the huge, house-sized basement, and taking or hauling out whatever was left. Incredibly, they all agreed to help. I didn’t want to have to fly back to California to do this myself. I hated flying, and I didn’t want to fissure the energy I had going here in Manhattan. I’d been here almost three-and-a-half months now. I was getting used to the noise and the chaos and the rudeness and the insanity. In a weird way it drew me to its madness like a moth to a flame. I was so totally out of my element, but I liked that. I wanted that. I’d become so sick of the Bay Area, with its same dull people and culture, its same streets, the same bridges, the same AA meetings , the same kind of women, the same politics, etc. I needed change.

I found out that the city of El Cerrito would require me to register my house as a “business” if I rented it out. I had to get a business license. I started the ball rolling on that. I found out I needed to have some minor repairs done to the house and that I’d have to do some light landscaping due to Fire Code regulations. So I called my program friend Elijah who was a longtime handyman and asked him how much he’d charge me to do the work. He told me and it was reasonable and so I hired him. Regional Rentals, Corp, meanwhile, told me they would send over a professional photographer when the house was cleared out and had the landscaping complete. Things were moving.

Around 4pm I refreshed my gmail account and there was one email. Sophia. Before even reading it I stood up, as if seeing a friend score a touchdown in a football game, unable to contain my glee. She emailed again! Then I thought, Why hadn’t she texted or called?

I opened the email.

Hey. I hope you’re well. I know this is last second but…I was wondering if you wanted to go see a movie with me tonight? I was thinking Midsommar?

Sophia

I reread the brief email several times. I started to write a response and then realized I should text. My hands were nearly trembling I was so joyful. A rush of anticipation pulsed through me. And on a day I’d made the decision to stay in New York! My mind then did a thing it often does with women: It jutted out way, way into some farcical, unreal, imagined future. Sophia and I would date. We’d fall in love. We’d travel the world. We’d decide to get married. We’d become famous artists in Manhattan. Finally, we’d buy a house along the coast in California, her being some sort of twenty-first century Diebenkorn, me a contemporary Paul Auster. I shook my head, knowing this was how resentments occurred; unrealistic (in this case diabolically absurd) expectations and hopes. We hardly knew each other.

Was this real or was it some sort of rebound thing from Adinah?

I texted her. She responded right away. We agreed to meet at 7pm for the Midsommar showing at the AMC Lincoln Square 13 theatre at Broadway and West 68th. Near her. Maybe, I told myself, my face flushing, we’d end up back at her apartment after the movie. Maybe we’d hold hands at the movie. Even kiss. I envisioned her that first time in the basement of that church, the meeting, her wet blond hair, her sparkling eyes, her kindness, that laugh.

I left the apartment an hour early so I could walk around Central Park a little. The massive-seeming park—stretching from 5th Ave to Central Park West across, and 59th to 110th vertically—still appeared powerfully urban and exciting to me. It seemed to represent the core of Manhattan, somehow. There were trails you could hike. (Short but sweet.) People walked and ran. In the low 100s along CPW there were high, twisting stone staircases. Huge boulders burst out above the cobblestone sidewalks. I enjoyed wandering around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, between 86th and 96th. Hanging around 59th near Columbus Circle. Passing by the Great Lawn or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or sitting quietly watching the tourists at Bethesda Fountain. Central Park was where anxious, gritty, busy New Yorkers went to exercise, let some steam off, relax. It pulled me to it like an old friend.

At 72nd I got off of the 1 train. I walked east a couple blocks to the corner of 72nd and CPW. I stared for a moment at The Dakota, and then started walking lazily north on the cobblestone sidewalk paralleling the park. I was introspective. I didn’t want to walk. I wanted to sit. I found one of the many faded green, scratched-up benches and sat down. It was scintillating and confusing, this actually moving to New York City thing. There was still that little blot of sadness, about renting out the house Adinah and I had bought and lived in for two-plus years. Our house.

I’d really convinced myself, for a minute there, that I’d been “ready to settle down,” create roots, be anchored to one place. We’d had our time together, me and Adinah. I thought of her parents’ Victorian house in San Francisco, how her father never liked me (German, not Jewish, alcoholic, tattooed), how he always shook my hand limply and averted his eyes when I came, as if embarrassed that I was his daughter’s choice. All the drives six hours south along Highway 101 to Ojai. My folks had loved Adinah—unlike me, she was easy to like. Kind, warm, compassionate, thoughtful, unselfish. The opposites of my personality in not all but many ways. I leaned on anger and control and fear and domination. Of course that was only one side of me. I could also be profoundly loving.

I could push Adinah in a good way. I’d pushed her to quit her job as a waitress and to focus more on the graphic design world, which was her true passion. She was very talented. She did focus more, successfully. I pushed her to apply for an MFA in design. I promoted and encouraged her print-art.

My reverie was jarred when my iPhone buzzed obnoxiously in my tight jeans pocket. I snapped back into the real world. For a moment I forgot where I was. Then I saw the cars rushing along CPW, the steam rising from sewers, the yellow taxis, heard the wail of a distant siren, smelled the freshly mowed grass of the park behind me, saw the cobblestones, and remembered. Manhattan. Some strange dream I was living in.

I pulled my phone out. A text from Sophia. That Pavlovian response again, internally; we’d take over the world. Maybe we’d even have a kid together. A kid? Well. Maybe not a kid. We’d stay young and spiritually free.

Hey. So. I’m really sorry to do this but: I have to cancel. I called two girlfriends in the program and they talked me out of it. They said it was a bad idea. I realized they’re right. I have a boyfriend. We don’t know each other. I don’t know. I feel like a jerk. But I think it’s the right thing to do.

An electric surge raced down my spine. My face flushed again, this time with shock, frustration, and the poison-wrapped arrowhead of grave disappointment. I’d been meditating for years—I cherished Buddhism—and I’d always tried to “let go,” to understand there “was no self.” But I was a middleclass American kid from the west coast growing up in the nineties and two-thousands. I had expectations. Growing up, though there’d been some instability, I’d also been privileged: We lived in a big house with a pool and jacuzzi; we always had the fridge stocked with food; I had my own room; I got expensive gifts at Christmas (I recall a brand-new silver Mongoose BMX bike in 1994); and I never wanted for anything, at least not financially. I’d been born into expectation.

I hated when people canceled last second. And this was her second time. I sat back, my spine warm in the humidity against the green bench back. Beads of sweat slithered down my forehead and slinked down my ass crack. I thought, Well, maybe this is for the best. See it from her point of view. How would YOU respond if you were in her shoes? These were annoyingly fair self-critical questions. If I stepped out of my own little self-centered desires, I grasped that she was in a perilous position.

I didn’t respond.

*

It took the better part of a month to make it all happen in NYC. My friends had successfully cleared out the El Cerrito house, leaving only the two huge bookshelves (empty of my books, which they boxed up and placed in the basement), and one couch. Everything else was taken, hauled, moved into the garage or basement. I’d been in constant communication with a few of them, especially Brian and Jacob, as they’d done the work. I paid them a little but they refused more. They were good friends. Elijah did the landscaping. I paid a cleaner to come clean the house. I repaired the washer and dryer. Regional Rentals, Corp sent the photographer over who snapped photos of the house. They immediately put it up online for rent. Within a week I had tenants. They moved in late July. The rent I received from them would cover my rent and then some in New York.

Between the clearing of the house; the property management company; getting tenants; landscaping; repairs; I’d also somehow managed to look at apartments for rent in Manhattan. Not to mention I saw two Broadway plays, Dear Evan Hansen and Slave Play. I also saw the opera, Turandot, at the Metropolitan Opera, at Lincoln Center, for free, with the all-black-wearing, Tom-Waits-loving, classically-trained-opera-singing 27-year-old sexy sober woman who I’d met at Sober Authors months prior.

I remember, in the thick of all of this, walking into the bathroom one afternoon. I closed the door and stood there, beyond stressed, exhausted. It would have been so much easier for me to just fly back to the Bay Area and take care of this in person. But, like almost everything in my life—and as my mom had always reminded me—I did things the hard way. I think deep down I had a penchant for masochism. Maybe I believed I deserved to struggle. To suffer. Who knows. I learned only one way: From experience by doing things my way. But, looking up I caught my hard green eyes in the medicine cabinet mirror. My pulse started racing, my head pounded, I became light-headed, and my eyes rolled back into my head. I staggered, partially fell, then gripped the edge of the blue porcelain sink. I stayed there, waiting. Finally, after a minute or so, as I breathed slowly, my racing heart calmed. The lightheaded feeling dissolved. It’d been stress-related high blood pressure.

In the end I went with the first place I looked at, which later turned out to be a near-fatal mistake. A two-bedroom apartment in upper East Harlem, on 130th and 5th Avenue. I hadn’t planned on moving back to Harlem, but it was comparatively cheap and I figured I’d have my bedroom and then use the other room as a work/writing office. Everyone had told me how hard it was to snag a place in the city. I didn’t want to lose the opportunity. There was a basketball court across 130th. A trendy coffee shop sat down on 129th and Lenox. I realized the HIV/homeless building on 129th near the coffee shop was where, in 2009, I’d stayed when it was a hostel, during one of my wild cross-country hitchhiking adventures which filled my mid-late twenties. I remembered hard-drinking, making some friends, Greenwich Village bars, women, stumbling home drunk at 2am back to rough, dark Harlem. If it was a sign, I didn’t know what it meant.

It was early August, 2019, when I moved in. My first real apartment in Manhattan. I was thrilled. I didn’t mind being uptown.

This started in many ways the “real” beginning of my New York experience. I was truly here now. I had arrived. It was like a movie—young man, brokenhearted after being left by his woman, flees California for Manhattan, tries to make it as a writer. It was fresh. Original. New. I was out of the Bay Area. Out of that suburban dull Hell that was El Cerrito.

A week after I moved in to 2 West 130th Street apartment D., Sophia texted me, out of the blue. This time she said she really wanted to meet. We’d texted a bit on and off over the past month, mostly just about AA stuff, recovery, sobriety, my writing, her painting, Art in general, 19th century literature, our pasts, etc. She occasionally complained about Chad and her relationship. I didn’t pry, which was challenging for me.

Where? I texted back.

A café I like in Brooklyn. Park Slope. This weekend. Saturday? I’ll be there working at Chad’s anyway. He lives close by.

I hesitated for a moment. Alright. What time?

I saw the three dots bubbling, indicating a text being clicked out.

6?

Deal.

This Saturday. Brooklyn. Why now?

Little did any of us know that in seven short months we’d be going through the first COVID lockdowns. We’d be facing a global pandemic of proportions not seen since the Influenza Epidemic after World War I. And we’d be doing it under the administration of Donald. J. Trump.