TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK (Michael Mohr's fictional memoir)

Prologue and Chapter 1 (FREE)

Photo by Zach Miles on Unsplash

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 off 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 5^th Avenue. Everything was silent now except for sirens and police and paramedics; even the basketball courts across 130^th 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 130^th, 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 electrified 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 137^th. 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.

That trip set off a pattern: Once every year, I’d go to the city for two weeks. I’d have my inane, insipid run of debauchery, and then come back to the warm, soft, kind arms of California, hungover, hungry, and hopelessly in love. New York, to me then—as now—was a very romantic idea. Not so much a concrete city, per se, but an idea; a mental rabbit-hole which, if I took the ride, pulled me into all the literature I’d ever read, or nearly. The more books I read over the years, the more I started to realize that New York was The Place for writers. So many famous writers lived there. It wasn’t just that the core of Big Publishing was located in The Big Apple. It wasn’t even just that you could potentially make gargantuan literary connections if you were lucky. Or even that intellectuals and writers had flocked and still did flock to Manhattan to get energized off its electric buzzing heart (which never stopped).

It was, really, the simple fact that it was tough to live there. It gave the term “starving artist” more depth, shape, dimension and meaning. Everyone lived on top of each other; everyone was in everyone else’s way all the time. People had harsh, myopic tunnel-vision; it was A City of Solipsism. You thought that rancid smell coming from the culture was narcissism but really it was the intense fury of ambition, burning like a flaming river of bubbling lava. Everything that lava touched got consumed. You even consumed yourself. You forgot who you were. What you were. None of that mattered in New York City. What mattered was making it; success.

In September of 2010 I hit an emotional rock-bottom from alcoholism and got sober. It changed my life overnight. Immediately, all my drinking energy transmogrified into literary urgency. I had the need to finish the autobiographical novel I’d started in 2008 and had chipped away at for over two years. In a fever of hallucinatory vigor, I finished the draft in a matter of months, completing it in early 2011.

From that point on I called myself a writer. My mom was an author. My uncle was a writer. It was familial. As young as eight I’d written poetry. As a child Mom read the classics out loud to me. I scanned my mother’s prestigious library when I was little, picking up classics like The Last Tycoon, Sophie’s Choice, and Doctor Zhivago. I read the sentences with glee, pretending I knew what they meant. It didn’t matter. It was the words, the language that I craved. And the style, personal to each different author. Even then I knew I was destined to put words on the page.

Alcohol stopped me dead in my tracks. But then I stopped. And everything changed.

I continued my routine, after I “put the plug in the jug,” as they say in AA jargon, to visit New York yearly. Now when I went I’d explore in a more pedestrian, mature, rational way. I’d go to literary readings at places like McNally-Jackson Books in SoHo, or The Strand on East 12^th Street. Over time, I grew more and more covetous of New York City, more and more desirous, more and more convinced that, at some point, I’d simply have to live there. The seed had started out small but it continued to grow and spread, metastasizing like some lurid cancer which could not be stopped.

Many things got in the way, as they tend to do in contemporary American life. I was living in North Oakland. I went back to college to finally land by bachelor’s degree in creative writing. I was interning for a literary agent and slowly building my book editing business. At last, just before I turned thirty, I had my first short story published in a literary magazine. I was beyond thrilled. In 2013, I got into a relationship. After two years we left our respective apartments and, with my parents’ help, we bought a small house in El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley. We were in our early thirties, in love, and I was under the naïve delusion that I was, for the most part, ready to “settle down.” We’d both had that decadent decade of our twenties, wherein we’d tirelessly traveled; ran away from adulthood and responsibility; threw sand in our parents’ faces, and chased our fractious dreams.

We lasted for four-and-a-half years. Not bad, considering. But I discovered, in the end, that I was not, in fact, done with the adventurous life. Nor was I finished chasing my dream of becoming a successful writer. In fact, given the ten years of active alcoholism, it was more like I was just getting started. I tried to convince my girlfriend to rent the house out for a year, for us to move to New York together. But she wasn’t interested in that. She legitimately wanted to settle down. Get married at some point. Likely have kids.

It was then that I realized the axiom I’d grasped all my life intuitively: I was a harsh triangle living in the ridiculous square that was American society. I didn’t fit in. I was uniquely, hopelessly who I was. Michael Mohr. Unknown, driven California writer.

We broke up on the first day of 2018. January 1^st. The day after my 35^th birthday. We’d just returned from a Christmas/birthday week in snowy Chicago with friends. It would be our final trip together. We both knew we were traveling down different paths. We’d moved apart at the fork in the road a year before. We knew it, but knowing and acting are two very different things, especially when it comes to romantic relationships.

Over the next year I lived half like a zombie, working extra hard on editing to make money so I could do something riveting, and so I wouldn’t have to feel the profoundly painful reality I was enduring. And yet I did feel it: I wept every day; I talked to close friends for hours and hours on the phone; I went to AA meetings religiously; I wrote; I edited; I survived. The house had been in my name, and had been bought with my parents’ money. My ex had merely helped pick the place out. We’d lived there together for two-and-a-half years. So there I was, thirty-five, living alone in a quiet, safe suburban town where my neighbors were older than me by decades.

That’s when I understood. I had to go. New York. It beckoned to me, calling across the continent like some long lost lusty lover. It wasn’t just about fun or chaos or the question-mark of what might happen; it was the ambitious drive deep inside of me. To do it; to make it as a serious writer. To be encapsulated by all that buzzing, frenetic energy. To stroll around Greenwich Village and Chelsea. To take the subways everywhere. To smell that trash-on-the-sidewalk, feel the warm-rush-of-subway-air-through-the-grate on 42^nd; to hear the constant bleating taxis and unruly pedestrians flipping off undiligent drivers; to hear the unceasing sirens and paramedics and NYFD trucks at all hours of the day and night; to be where Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion and Kerouac and everyone else I’d read had done it.

Now it was my time to do it. After working my ass off for a year—and recovering, glacially, from the breakup—I finally felt ready for the move. I didn’t have much of a plan. I didn’t know how long I’d go for, or even if I’d stay long-term. Like almost all of my romantic geographic trysts in my life, I leapt off the cliff without a parachute. I’ll figure it out, was one of my common neologisms. (Still is.) So I didn’t rent the house out. Not at first. I didn’t get an apartment in New York. I didn’t know what I was doing, and that excited me.

This was the beginning of my New York City journey. My Manhattan adventure. My romantic dream come to real-life fruition. I was scared and thrilled and ecstatic, full of pumping adrenaline. The future was wide, wide open. I loved that feeling. Anything could happen.

Little did I know that in one short year—twelve incendiary months—the whole city would shut down as a result of a global health crisis. No one could have seen that coming.

My time in New York—and particularly my time there during the pandemic—changed my life irrevocably. It changed all our lives, of course. I am but one man with one story. A speck of sand on the beach that is humanity. But this seems to be the story, somehow, that I have meant to tell my whole life.

But before the pandemic, before we even knew the words “shelter in place,” I had 2019. It was in this year that I became—in my mind—a “New Yorker.”