Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 10, Part 1)

NYC Covid "memoir"

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Chapter 10 is longer so I broke it into two parts.

Photo by Fabien Bazanegue on Unsplash

Chapter 10

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus wrote: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” I had great amounts of human need when it came to New York—a wild need for external literary and aesthetic validation—and Manhattan was silent in the face of this frailty. Ironically, it seemed that this silence was manifested in the form of intense, consistent noise. New York was a loud city. Everywhere you went the noise of Manhattan found you. The city stood stoic, unsmiling, arms crossed, looking into the middle-distance. It did not see you. It did not care.

In some ways this was exactly what had drawn me here: I wanted to experience the True American Melting Pot, the cultural diversity, the stoicism of an urban chaos of this magnitude. Central and South Americans packed in with Puerto Ricans and white hipsters and Orthodox Hassidic Jews. Blacks mixed with Mexicans and various Asian cultures—Vietnamese; Chinese; Japanese; etc. It seemed like everything was everywhere and it was all mixed together. There was a sense of social segregation, though, in other ways (either intentional and/or organic and self-fulfilling), with Harlem being mostly blacks, say, or midtown being majority whites. Salvadorans were in Hamilton Heights. Etc. But still: There were few hard, fast edges or boundaries here. And people freely roamed amongst the neighborhoods. (And yet, as I said before, 96th Street did in its way seem to be such an invisible boundary, as if passing from one U.S. state into another.)

It was late September; fall had arrived. The weather had cooled significantly. The humidity was all but gone, sucked back into the stratosphere, to everyone’s glee. The leaves were changing colors in Central Park, morphing into orange and red. A crispness in the air bit at your skin delightfully. That new season feeling was in the air—Thanksgiving and Christmas and my folks’ mutual birthday (October 8), my sister’s birthday (December 23) as well as mine (December 31st, New Year’s Eve). I both cherished this time of year, and was revolted by it. I hated the whole gift-giving culture in America. I’d always sarcastically called Christmas Corporation Day, because it was simply that—a boon for the corporations of America. To me it symbolized mass, sheeplike, herd-based consumerism. Besides, I’d always prefer love and affection and real, honest togetherness and conversation instead of possessions which helped mega-companies’ bottom lines. I didn’t like giving gifts, and in many ways I didn’t like receiving them, either. It just seemed superficial to me. And I had a natural allergy to superficiality.

But, this was the season we were in nonetheless. I loved the weather. I enjoyed wandering around the park and watching the changing, bright colors, seeing New Yorkers wearing multiple layers. Coming from California having actual seasons was tremendously satisfying. It was like life—beginning; middle; and end. Summer; fall; winter; spring. Renewal and rebirth; hibernation; joy and freedom. Almost all of my former trips to New York in the past had been in June and July.

I was meeting Sophia at the corner of 83rd and Central Park West after Sober Authors. It was Wednesday again. The meeting was from 6-7:15. It’d be dark by the time she and I met. The plan was just to stroll around CPW a bit. Then I’d walk her home. She left for Europe in two weeks for her artist’s grant. Two months in Western Europe. She was initially flying into Berlin.

Since our last coffee date—and that amazing, profound kiss—we’d texted quite a bit, sending not only written messages but audio/voice recordings to each other, sometimes three, four minutes long. She told me she wanted to date me exclusively, but she was still attached to Chad. However, even though she liked me, she was also clearly insecure about the idea of our dating. It wasn’t just Chad. She was concerned about the age difference, her being twelve years my senior. She worried I’d one day want kids, and she was too old for that. (Something she wished she’d done when she had the opportunity, she said.) In addition, as we’d learned more about each other, she was concerned about the behavior I’d told her I’d displayed with Adinah.

Sophia worried about this not only because of the level of obvious toxicity, but also because she in many ways lucidly saw herself as being in some crucial ways a lot like Adinah…and me being in many ways a lot like Chad. (Her submissive, me controlling.) I admitted she was right. Adinah and I’d broken up a year and eight months prior. Had I changed? Probably. To some degree. But would I actually behave differently in a relationship now? Likely not. Perhaps a little. How much had I actually learned? Regarding Sophia: Really she was still in it with Chad, still in many ways letting him “run the show” when it came to their uneven, unhealthy, challenging relationship. She was unhappy, clearly, but she hadn’t fully, entirely left him. She still used his art studio in Park Slope. She often cleaned his house because he was too lazy to do it. They sometimes went out to art galleries as a couple, but often they fought about the way in which Chad always seemed to subtly cut her in social situations by being cold and unaffectionate, domineering behind the veiled curtains of their love life.

Each time Sophia told me these stories I felt excited, envious and resentful. I was selfish. I wanted her all to myself. It wasn’t fair. He didn’t love her. He didn’t have sex with her. He controlled her. He didn’t respect her. She had even admitted that there was something deep and unconscious about Chad inside of her that drew her inevitably to him like a moth to flame. He reminded her, somehow, of her father. Cold and distant, controlling and angry, dismissive and powerful. She was attracted to that. She sought that out. Adinah had found that in me. It filled me with regret and despair when I thought about the way I’d often treated Adinah. Emotional abuse. Control. Narcissism. All the things I’d accused my mother of my whole life. But here I was, with this woman, and I wanted another chance. I could do better than Chad. Anyone could.

Sophia and I discussed all of this openly through texts and audio messages and phone calls (which sometimes lasted two, three hours) and several in-person coffee shop meetups.

We now comfortably held hands and kissed. We had not had sex. I was happy to wait, though certainly eager. At times we appeared more like good friends. Other times we flirted and kissed like a couple. She told me repeatedly how much she wanted to leave Chad but she just couldn’t, and how much she liked me but wasn’t certain we should really date. It was a bumpy ride, up and down, on and off, mixed and confusing. Either way, we were definitely two adults mutually playing the same game with more or less the same set of rules. I didn’t blame her for anything. After all it had been me who’d aggressively pursued her, a taken woman. It wasn’t as if I’d stepped into something I hadn’t understood. We’d both signed an emotional contract.

There was also this strange, creeping communication issue between us. Over the weeks, more and more we’d do this thing where one of us would text and the other one wouldn’t respond, sometimes for days. An obvious yet unspoken hesitation floated between us.

I remembered how frustrated I’d gotten at Adinah, when she didn’t inquire about my day or my life; when she didn’t know what to say in a conversation; when she sort of just stood or sat there, doing nothing, frozen in her social anxiety. I remembered going to friends’ house gatherings with Adinah and how, within ten minutes, I’d see her sitting across the room, alone at a table, looking irritated and bored. She didn’t know how to mingle and meet people, start conversations. I had (I thought) to help her all the time, protect her, stand up for her. I saw some of the same strands in Sophia’s behavior. In her soft, plaintive voice. In her following my lead. In her willingness to do (within reason) whatever I wanted. Sophia was different. No question about that. And yet, those similarities were also undeniable. I felt both afraid of and inspired by this older woman, this artist, this scarred sober angel. She represented what I thought I wanted, symbolically (the New York Artist), and yet she seemed to fulfill an old toxic pattern.

I saw the abyss, the sheer cliff ahead which we sprinted towards.

But do we ever really choose who we fall for?

I got off the 2 train at 96th and Broadway. It was almost dusk. I walked above-ground and crossed the busy, car-rushing Broadway and went up the sidewalk along 96th to the church. Standing at the top of the stairs which led down into the basement where Sober Authors was—if you ever need to find an AA meeting simply walk into a church’s basement—I saw my screenwriter LA friend Matthew. He was about an inch taller than me and had that suave brown handsome wavy hair of local Los Angelinos. He wore a button-up  white collared long-sleeved shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The top two buttons of his shirt were open, exposing creamy, smooth skin. His lips were tight, semi-smiling, compressed around a Marlboro. He’d worked in LA helping to develop screenplays and novels. Nearly having a nervous breakdown from pot, drinking, and working 16-hour days, he’d broken down, quit his job, taken out his savings, loaded up his few possessions and fled to Manhattan. We were similar—both 36-year-old sober men from the West Coast feeling a bit lost, trying our luck and testing our pluck in New York City.

“Hey man,” I said, smiling, extending my hand. “Aren’t you cold in just that shirt?”

I was wearing my signature—and very California—tight blue jeans and bright red puffy Columbia down jacket with silver internal lining. It kept me warm in anything. With my brown Keen hiking boots you’d never truly register me as a New Yorker. My mom and brother-in-law always called me a mountain man. That’s how I looked.

“Yeah,” he shrugged. “I guess so. How’re you, Michael?”

He shivered, as if by my saying it was cold he instantaneously  became aware of the reality.

“Not bad,” I said, crossing my arms, facing him. I heard voices down in the basement; the door down there was open a few inches. Heat radiated out. Cars pumped along 96th to our right. A car’s tire clinked hard along a manhole cover. A few people nodded at us as they descended the stairs to the meeting. We had ten minutes before it started. “Working on revisions of my autobiographical novel, the first in a trilogy, the one I told you about.” I’d written a novel about my early twenties called Running Solo. It was supposed to be the first in a three-part series which would cover my anarchic drunken punk-rock/hitchhiking days from 17-27, ending when I hit bottom and got sober. The first draft had been a mammoth 160,000 words. I’d waited six weeks and then cut it in half, to 82,000. Now I was revising and cutting and moving things around, tightening. My auto-fic punk-rock YA novel, The Cannonball Complex, had gotten closest to nailing an agent, had had the most agent full-reads. But, so far, no literary dice. I’d had to look at it from The Long View. It often took writers decades to get an agent, to get a publisher, to find commercial success. For as long as I could recall I’d wanted to be a writer. I’d known I was a writer. But you had to read everything you could. Mimic. Write some more. Find your voice. Understand the mechanics of narrative. Fail over and over again. It took time.

“Awesome man,” Matthew said, sucking on his Marlboro. He shivered again. I smelled the sweet, nasty, cloying tobacco as it wafted around us. “That’s great. I still need to read that Emerald Green story you sent me. Congrats again on publication.”

“Thanks. How’s Netflix?”

He’d gotten a job with a Netflix series as Production Assistant, which was, he said, more or less a terrible job which consisted more or less of sitting in a small office all day and running production numbers and taking notes.

“The job is boring. Doesn’t pay well, either.”

A few more people appeared and said a brief hello before descending the stairs into the basement. Then a man behind us said, “Hey fellas.”

Matthew and I turned. It was the other Matthew. He was in his early sixties with a tangled head of white hair. He had light blue eyes, a cheery smile, a great, hearty laugh, and positive energy. He had one in and one foot out of traditional AA. Just like me. He was a freethinker. When he wasn’t watching the Yankees he wrote plays for the theatre. He’d had a few produced on off-Broadway. He had a fairly large rolodex. He had personal connections with some famous people. But he was a very humble, very kind man.

We said hello. We shook older Matthew’s hand. He glanced at his watch. “Three minutes till showtime, gentleman.” He chuckled widely, exposing gleaming white teeth. With his square Irish face and jaw he almost looked like a short lumberjack. Age lines folded in his cheeks from his deep smile.

“I was just telling Michael about this movie I’m about to work on,” Matthew said.

“Oh yeah?” older Matthew said, his curiosity peaked. He crossed his arms, swaying slightly back and forth on his boots. I still wanted to see him play. Maybe this weekend, I thought.

“Yeah,” Matthew said. He took a hard drag of his Marlboro then dropped it onto the sidewalk and stamped it out with the heel of his shoe. He proceeded to tell us about the famous director and famous actors he’d be working for.

“Wow,” I burst out, sounding to my ears too eager, like an excited little boy on Christmas eve.

“Incredible,” older Man said, his voice deep and soft and even, woven with decades of experience dealing with successful New York creative people.

Matthew looked at me. He shrugged. “It’s a two week trip. A lot of drinking I’m sure. And a ton of work.”

“Careful around that booze,” older Man said. “Call anytime. If you get cell service?”

“Probably not,” Matthew said.

“Bring a Big Book,” older Matthew said.

“Yeah,” Matthew said. “I’m both excited and worried.”

“You’ll be fine,” older Matthew said, in his soothing wise voice.

There was a silence and then I said, “Will you at least be able to explore London for a few days?”

“Naw. We get flown back the next day. That’s fine. I’ll be exhausted. And we’ll have to start editing right away when we get back to New York. I’ve been to London a few times before anyway so it’s all good.”

We heard the gonging of a bell downstairs and then the secretary started the meeting.

“Shall we, gentleman?” older Matthew said.

We nodded, filing down the stairs one behind the other.

Matthew planted his palm on my shoulder, gently. “Good to see you, man.”

After the meeting The Matthews and I walked back as a trio up the stairs and chatted again for another ten minutes. Then I told them I had to split. I was meeting Sophia at 7:30. I had five minutes to get from 96/Broadway to 83rd/CPW. About fifteen blocks. I’d have to jog.

“Take it easy, guys,” I waved as I took off.

“Where’s he in such a hurry to?” I heard older Matthew say as I left.

“He’s meeting his Mysterious Blond Artist Beauty,” Matthew responded.

I arrived eight minutes later, out of breath, at the corner spot. Sophia was not there. Oh, yeah, I reminded myself, She’s always late. I laughed. I caught my breath. I could have talked to the guys for another five, ten minutes I bet. Oh well.

Leaning against the wall separating CPW from the park, at 83rd, about five minutes later I spotted Sophia coming along 84th. I walked towards her. It was dark now. There were still people out and about, cars moving along Central Park West.

“Hey,” she said. “Sorry about being late again.”

She wore tight jeans, a fur-lined black coat, and Chuck Taylors. She looked cold nevertheless.

“Don’t worry about it.”