Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 15)

Photo by Nirmal Rajendharkumar on Unsplash

Chapter 15

Three weeks later—in early May, just weeks before George Floyd’s death, prior to Sophia and I doing a “social-distance urban hike” around Manhattan—I had one of the scariest experiences of my entire life.

Let me give some context and backstory of the three-week gap. Those three weeks turned out to be probably the nastiest for me personally, in terms of my mental and emotional and spiritual state. I’d finished writing my “practice” novel, the rough draft of my second in the literary autobiographical trilogy. I’d pumped a draft out in just one month. It had kept me distracted, busy, with a task to do every day which usually lasted from four to six hours.

After I completed the draft I was exhausted. It was like cumming after hours of sex and then realizing that you didn’t know who the woman beside you even was. I was drained. I just wanted “her” to leave. Aka the pandemic; this sick, trapped feeling. I wanted out of Harlem. Out of Manhattan. Out of New York City. New York State. I wanted to go home. But I couldn’t go home; most flights were still cancelled, and flying was dangerous anyway. What if I gave COVID to my parents? Where would I stay or live? I had no money.

I kept going to AA Zoom meetings but they all started sounding the same, boring, lazy, preachy, obnoxious. I heard the shares as if from the bottom of a deep pool of murky water. I seemed to care less and less about much of anything. In the past month I’d chatted briefly with my folks on Zoom, feeling disinterested; detached. I couldn’t explain my feelings to them: Dad didn’t “do” feelings and Mom always seemed to want me to be “happy.” But I didn’t know exactly what “happiness” was. I never had known. I’d always been fairly unhappy. A naturally depressed, bottled-up person. I had been so alive as a young person, burning with the flames of rabid passion and organic drive for existence. I believed in no god. No religion. No cult. I accepted death completely, as I’d accepted pre-birth. (The end of consciousness.) While here on this Earth I wanted to strive towards my goals—I wanted to fall in love and have good sex and write powerful novels and hike tall mountains and have friends and read illustrious books. But in addition to all this I wanted to be alone, away from people, safe. People couldn’t be fully trusted. They hurt you. They were reliable in that way. Nothing changed and yet everything changed constantly.

Things were different and yet they were the same as always. The Earth spun round the sun; the moon round the Earth. “God” remained silent. COVID ravaged everything.

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 on the news 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.” I started going to fewer and fewer AA Zoom meetings. I wasn’t writing. I walked most days outside, but only during daylight hours of course and often for no more than half an hour or forty-five minutes. It was beginning to feel warmer out but the streets remained mostly empty. 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 was 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 palpably hostile. It seemed as if you could reach out and literally scoop the rage from the air. That’s how thick and menacing it was. I stared at the middle-distance when I passed them; I averted my eyes, looked away, looked down.

Once, I’d made the mistake of walking through a cluster of early twenties men. They glared at me and in their eyes was true hatred. Murder, even. It scared me down to the bone. I wondered if they’d attack me. They didn’t. Another time, walking during the day along Marcus Garvey Park again, the sidewalk paralleling the park, I happened to momentarily glance up and briefly catch eyes with a tall, tough-looking tattooed man with hair braids and an NY YANKEES hat on. He stopped, muscles bristling out of his wife beater, spat at me, and said, “What, faggot?” I did not respond; I simply kept moving. Thankfully he did not follow.

Every day was a struggle. Was this, I wondered, a tiny taste of what it might be like to be black in America? Or, more to the point, low-income and black? If it was I had deep, deep empathy for these people. And yet, I also couldn’t help feeling hunted. Hated. Why did they hate me so much? Because I was white? Because I was a symbol, representing for them the racial and monetary privilege they did not and probably never would possess? Their rage made a part me—I admit—hate them back. Was I racist for this feeling? Or only human? I didn’t honestly know at this point. All I knew was that every day I feared for my life, and that every day I wanted to cry, and that I hated, if anything, this goddamned pandemic, and what it was doing to us all.

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 article had scared the Christ out of me. I was already experiencing this phenomenon which happened to me once every eight or ten months or so, wherein I struggled to get totally full, even breaths for a few days or a week. I’d had it for many, many years. I’d seen multiple doctors about it in the past. They did tests and all said the same thing: It was just stress manifesting in slight difficulty breathing. When I had it I could still walk and run and do whatever I wanted…but I had to take frequent breaks to get my full breath.