Love in the Time of Coronavirus

A quarantine is not an opportune time for a break-up.  While we hear news reports (and occasional courtyard noise) that warn of spikes in domestic violence, the operative word of shelter-in-place would be 'shelter'.  For some couples, even a honeymoon is claustrophobic... but we have ventured beyond even a long holiday confinement into what feels for some like a prison sentence.

By the Harlem Meer today, I met a young man with a suitcase, desperately phoning everyone he knew. His girlfriend, he told me, kicked him out.  That is cruel punishment at this time when it is not charitable but dangerous to offer your sofa to a stranger.  What did you do, I asked him... and he muttered, through his mask... You mean what DIDN'T I do?  Which I understood to mean not his transgressions but the simple boyish failure to meet his partner's standards.

It's harder to deceive in the unstaged world of home confinement.  We are each other's mirrors; we can't hide behind excuses of 'I'm working' or 'at the gym' when we're having a drink at a bar, flirting a little too long at the office... hanging out... having a cigarette--- enjoying a little personal solitude.  Personally I cringed when one of my guests posted a Thanksgiving dinner photo; my home is my private domain?  But this month alone I have received so many home-broadcast videos, films, demos... if I looked at them all I'd be screen-blind.

At first it was a little novel seeing the usual TV newscasters sitting at their desk... their bookshelves revealing years of research and reading choices.  Most all of them, I've noticed, have the Robert Caro biographies-- the Winston Churchill World War II set (often unread-- mint condition).  I have a place in my heart for the dog-eared spine of Judy Woodruff's Oxford History of the American People; it looks just like mine-- a well-used souvenir of student days.

But the jokes have worn thin... the celebrity cameos seem callow and annoying.  Happy people in their well-stocked places with clean children-- housekeepers, toys, amusement, music-studios, ping-pong tables... showing how homespun they are-- mixing facials out of refrigerator ingredients, trying on costumes... looking 'casual', showing just enough of their personal environment to seem privileged.  Many of them are not aware of how this fuels domestic discontent for viewers.

A few blocks north of me is a woman with 9 large children... and a small 2-bedroom apartment.  Her husband is out of work but trying to drive a rented Uber car to make ends meet.  I have seen her in the grocery store where she stretches out her enormous shopping task into an afternoon activity for the kids who are literally bouncing off walls and turning over carts.  At least there are distractions-- label-reading opportunities.  She has aged five years since the pandemic began.  They have no wifi, she told me-- the kids received BOE tablets but they are useless unless they are 'somewhere'.  The youngest one was sitting in the front of the cart with a box of Confetti Cupcake Poptarts showing me how she knew her colors (well... a couple of them).  At any given moment, at least one child was crying, one stomping his foot.  Her tab was impressive; food stamp allowance for eleven people edges well into 4-figures.  Eating is the narcotic of the poor and under-stimulated.  Her boys have hoop-dreamy eyes and seem to grow by the hour.  She gives me a look-- shakes her head.

I would like to take one or two off her hands... to shelter that poor boy on the bench by the Meer... to even reach out and host a friend.  But we cannot.  I remember a time when I broke up with someone-- and you just wanted the world to end-- you wanted that person to have no life and no friends and no future without you.  We are not supposed to complain in the face of the litany of names listed every day of the pandemic victims... we are supposed to wait on lines and gladly pay twice the value for second-choice staples we need to survive.  Today I waited 35 minutes  just to find the price of chicken was more than I could manage.

But I am alone; I am old.  My son, I know, has violated the quarantine-- has 'dated' against social distancing recommendations.  I really can't blame him... I remember the early days of the AIDS epidemic, standing in a crowded bar weighing disease against passion-- and the latter always won.  There's a risk, yes... but I can't imagine being so young and independent-- having worked hard to make himself a home--  to watch his future being wrung out like wet laundry.  He is restless and ambitious.  I cannot answer his questions.

Personally I have no regular means of support... but I do recognize that I have a place to live in which I have collected things of importance to me-- books, instruments-- things that offer me a window in this solitude.  My rich neighbors with the renovated new space-- they have nothing... I hear their children, too-- trying to learn an instrument, being scolded, in the end sitting in their large bookless rooms with phones and tablets like social pacifiers.  They order food deliveries-- that is an event, an adventure.  Yes, occasionally I see the restaurant bags and sigh. They have no idea.

On the street outside the tent hospital Ubers line up at 9 PM to transport the medical staff home.  We applaud the workers every night, and they seem a little happier these days... less stressed.  At least they are not confined to a hostile apartment. The shiny black Billy Graham truck announces they are 'Sharing in the name of Jesus Christ.'  I'm not sure about that...  I don't like to speak for Him.

Shout out today to the white egret at the Meer today who almost let me touch him...to the fruit-vendor who stuffed a finger of fresh ginger in my bag and would not take my money... to the market that sold me a giant honeydew melon for $3 that is the best thing I've had in weeks...  And to all those who have met disappointment in love-- better sooner than later, I suppose.  The pandemic at its best will be like a sieve that filters truth from illusion.  And may that boy find a mother or grandmother who will take him in... the night is cold and bench-sleeping is not for the weak of heart.

Losing my Religion

When I was small and sick with one of those textbook childhood illnesses, the prospect of days in bed was a true delight.  There would be toast and jam and meal trays in bed... an opportunity to study my Robert Louis Stevenson and copy out my A. A. Milne into a book where I could draw my own pictures.  I could lift the quilts into a sort of tent and pretend I was an Inuit princess trapped for the winter in my house of ice while the arctic winds raged outside.

The novelty of this quarantine is wearing off.  My reading is piled up-- yes, and my projects sit before me... but I am less productive and a little more restless.  My body is telling me it's spring and just outside my window the dogwoods and cherry blossoms are doing their teasing best to tempt us before that magic moment when the soft pink carpet of petals covers the sidewalks and gutters for the briefest anti-urban blessing, and then turns to paleberry slush.  The crocuses and daffodils are blooming and the Park Avenue malls will be decked out... and we are stuck here in our cubicles, noses in our technology, binging on television, taking occasional breaks for a walk in the park or a trip to the supermarket.

Over the last few days I've had plenty of those mass-messaged Facebook posts suggesting 'tips' on defeating the Coronavirus.  Bad jokes, cartoons, sillinesses and distractions... personally, I am losing my urban religion.  I've had enough of film-watching and listening to the silence in my building hallways.  I have had a welcome few voicemails from old friends-- relatives-- people who worry about solitary people like me, checking in... making sure I am still here.

One of these was the beautifully resonant message from an older poet who lives in my neighborhood--  one of those old-fashioned voices made for reading aloud on vinyl recordings... for recitation and declamation...   wondering if I'm alright, this man, who once introduced Pablo Neruda to New York and appeared alongside John Ashbery on panels.  He has supported and read my work in the past.   We met on the crosstown bus, late-- he keeps his old Columbia University studio apartment on the west side where he writes overnight for the last 60 years, simply because he doesn't want to disturb his sleeping wife.  He and I would often meet on my way home from work; occasionally he would share with me... he wrote in longhand.

His wife passed away from cancer several years ago, but he continues his crosstown habit as though she were alive... so it touched me especially that he thought of checking in on me because I have not recently been bussing back and forth.  I watched him the other day; he rarely wears a coat, like an old Englishman... but is always impeccably dressed with a jacket and trousers, a button-down shirt and his hair combed gracefully in an old-style pompadour. He walks with hands clasped behind him like a distracted professor, looking down at the sidewalk.  He is always alone.  His fierce allegiance to this habit-- inspiration or none, rain or snow-- somehow touched me in this crisis... the loneliness and the solitary duality of two empty spaces suddenly seemed so poignant.

When I began this post I was sad and distracted-- less-than-inspired... but now in the past day I have suffered the terrific loss of my best friend and bandmate of years.  I am beyond devastated-- violated..
as though the cruelest wind came through and removed my favorite things from the city.  How do we go on from deaths, from loss?  My poet friend is teaching me something, I know.  Where is God, I want to ask him?  I am looking.

My friend was the kindest, most generous, most fun-loving, stage-gracing human.  He performed with exquisite musicality and dignity even in the worst venues, with the worst equipment.  His very presence was a poem for me... our stage and personal intimacy was like an award.  One whole day has finished without his gracious persona on this earth and I am waiting for some kind of choral requiem from the heavens-- a bucket of seawater on every street, a falling star exploding rooftops... Tonight I don't how to honor his memory nor celebrate his accomplishments.  I just want him to come back, to pick me up for the next gig and stand beside me while he sings like the godamn soul angel he always was until the old pre-Coronavirus sun rises over the east river.

I have cried a thousand tears and have nothing to show, nothing to trade, nothing to bargain.  Death is the tie that binds us all; it waves its hideous flag of warning over my lovely city and has banished so many of us to our lonely quarters like prisoners.  I feel like a solitary wooden ship left behind with no sail, an old poet traveling back and forth between lonely rooms with his blank notepad, reciting old verses memorized in another century.   Where is God, each one finishes, like a refrain:  we are looking.