Does it make sense to post installments that jump ten years into the future from my most recent chapter? Is it a productive use of my writing energy, when I could be pushing the story toward the finish line instead? Who knows. Probably not! But I'm not beholden to a publisher, editor, agent, or schedule, and my only remuneration is e-mails and comments.
I don't think of my story as capable of having spoilers in the traditional sense. If you want to be surprised in real time by how it unfolds, you can wait and read this later, in the normal order. At most, you could infer my general intentions of who will be in the picture and what they'll be up to later in the story. I'm not filling in background or providing exposition, beyond what people experience this spring.
I'll keep adding to this post. My thinking is that this section will run from New York's shutdown order of March 20 through the end of the curfew imposed on the City's protestors a few weeks ago. I'd like to claim that I'm writing this solely for myself, as a way of making sense of what just happened, through the idealized and somewhat more comfortable world I've created for the characters. Writing it feels cathartic. But if I were doing it solely for my mental health, I wouldn't feel compelled to share it as a work in progress.
Second installment; June 30, 2020
Third installment: July 13, 2020
1.
My parents spent four nights in Paris just the week before -- a last-minute, early-spring getaway they gave to themselves. I hit like on my mom’s Instagram posts of my dad at the d’Orsay and her badly-lit photos of the Pantheon and the Arc.
I read about Bergamo and Milan in articles posted by the British papers, puzzled why the American press wasn’t catching on, but also largely unconcerned. There was a photo of the empty plaza in front of the big duomo in Milan, a few masked locals in the foreground. I felt fear and superiority. Italy had been ungovernable for decades. New York would never shutter.
Since late January, there’d been talk about it at work -- “contingencies.” Not just for remote work but where and when to move the money. The timing of it. Volatility indexes, hedging, the risk to commercial real-estate holdings, the ADRs of Chinese companies. Selling shares of casinos and airlines and where to park the proceeds. Supply-chain implications. Some at work sounded confident that it was coming even as it felt theoretical and distant.
The first cases felt like small public spectacles, how a few years earlier that doctor returned from Africa with Ebola and went bowling in Brooklyn. There was the woman who carried it home to New York from Iran: everyone knew that it hadn’t even spread to her husband, that she was safe in her apartment. The lawyer who worked in Midtown: his case spread. New Rochelle went on lockdown. I’d never stepped foot in New Rochelle, knew it only as a stop on the Metro North. New Rochelle might as well have been Bergamo. He hadn’t even worked at a fancy firm.
People tensed on the subways. They eyed each other like threats. Some wore masks, even though officials admonished us not to buy them. They carried hand sanitizer. I perceived them as hysterics, perhaps mentally ill to begin with.
There were reports of half-full Broadway theaters. I looked at my spreadsheet of upcoming concert tickets and wondered if music venues would start to get cold feet, simply for insurance reasons.
Upon my parents’ return from France, their employers instructed them to self-quarantine for 14 days as a precaution. My parents sounded scared. I’d never known them to seem scared.
“We’re thinking about heading to Vermont for two or three weeks, just while it blows over,” my mom said. “They’re encouraging dad to work remotely and we got the DSL hook-up last summer. We’d love you to come up with us if you’re not scared we’re contagious.”
“No, I’m not worried about that, and Vermont is still cold as hell,” I said. “How are your temperatures? No cough?”
“No, no, we’re both fine, but they say it can take up to 14 days, right?”
“It’s not like Paris is a hotbed. You want to be in Vermont right now? In March?”
“It’s more space, and of course your dad loves it there, so we’re thinking of this as extending the vacation.”
“Yeah, that’s a nice way to think about it,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to make that trip.”
My mom paused. “Well, there’s lot of room at the house, obviously. You can take the whole upstairs and no one will bother you.”
“I know,” I said, now seeing this as a plea more than an invitation, “but Martin relies on me and if worse comes to worst, I’m not in an at-risk age range. I’m not going to do anything stupid but, like, if I get it, I get it. I’ll be fine.”
“It upsets me to hear you be so cavalier,” she said.
The next day, Trader Joe’s had a 20-minute line to enter and an hour to check out. Barren shelves of rice and pasta. I took pride in buying my standard assortment of perishables and not hoarding dry goods. Customers looked sweaty and tight. I tried to sound lighthearted when I unloaded my fruits, vegetables and yogurt at check-out. I wished there were an option to tip the cashier.
There was a day of grassroots fearmongering. It reached everyone in my demographic and went something like this:
City officials had convened a meeting attended by officers of Goldman, JP Morgan, Citi and other major employers to warn that all entry and exit from Manhattan would be blocked at midnight. It was unclear whether this was intended to keep the virus from reaching Manhattan or to contain an unreported outbreak. A common variation attributed the same meeting to a friend of a friend in federal law enforcement. Those who spread word vouched for the credibility of their source.
“This is bullshit,” I replied the first several times.
Then I began to worry, because I kept getting texts and e-mails, including from friends and coworkers who I knew to be calm and sober. The particulars didn’t make sense but they might reflect some version of truth. I thought of the empty plaza in Milan and the prospect of lockdown didn’t seem so silly. Local news reported that the mayor was weighing a shelter-in-place order -- a phrase I’d heard only in relation to major terrorism or a nuclear attack.
The rice-buying public at Trader Joe’s now looked prescient. I withdrew several hundred dollars from an ATM and secreted the currency in my copy of the Iliad, then bought a stash of Dinty Moore, Progresso and corned-beef hash at Duane Reade.
Just to be safe.
Like, I still doubted the rumors of a Manhattan-only quarantine zone, but a person never knows.
I envisioned food shortages and the breakdown of the financial system, thought back to articles about hedge funders who purchased homes in New Zealand as a precaution against American Armageddon. Sam sent a group text asking whether any of us owned a firearm -- ha ha ha.
I was taking my temperature every few hours. I worried every time I felt a sniffle coming on or perceived dryness in my throat.
* * *
“Are you okay? What are you seeing?” I said when I picked up Evan’s call.
“Yes, I’m okay.” He was walking in the streets. “I’m going home to pack stuff and then stay at Mom and Dad’s place.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Because they might not let us go out in public and if I have to be alone in a studio apartment for weeks, I’ll lose my mind. I’m scared we’ll be trapped.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. We all knew about the Italian towns that had gone full lockdown, with the viral videos of mayors shouting at constituents and Italians holding pop-music singalongs from their balconies. “I see why it makes sense to go there.”
“Do you want to come?”
“To Mom and Dad’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a lot more space, right?” Evan said. “And the balcony?”
“Do you think they’ll actually ban people from going outside? In Europe, you can still buy groceries.”
“My phone’s been blowing up all day and now the mayor is going to order shelter in place.”
“Is that official?”
“It might as well be,” Evan said. “I can’t believe you’re not on top of this, I thought that you of all people would be following like crazy.”
“Dude, I *am* following, but new stuff is happening every five minutes. We easily could have been ordered home since this call started.” I looked out my apartment window. The streets weren’t this empty even during the Sandy blackout. “I’m thinking about what would happen to my plants if I’m not here to water them.”
“That’s insane,” Evan said. “Bring your plants and water them at Mom and Dad’s if they’re what you care about most.”
“I know. Right. I’m thinking out loud. I hadn’t thought about leaving. I’m playing it out.”
“I’ll be direct,” Evan said. “I want you to stay at Mom and Dad’s. Everybody is freaking, hardcore. Spencer is going to his parents in Connecticut and Lorena is taking an Amtrak to Maryland at eleven.” Spencer was Evan’s good friend. Lorena was the woman Evan had been seeing for a few months. “Nobody knows what’s happening and I don’t want to be alone.”
“Have you talked to Rob and Sara? What are they doing?”
His voice pitched to a mix of exasperation and whining. “They’re obviously staying in Brooklyn. They have a better set-up and need to think about the baby. The worst thing would be if I gave rona to our niece.”
“Wait, you think you have it?”
“No, but it’s always possible,” he said. “Please come. Just until we know it’s safe. If it blows over and everything stays normal, we can go home in a couple days, easy peasy, but if it’s as serious as people are saying, you’ll thank me for it later.”
* * *
“Look,” I said shortly thereafter, “if it blows over and everything stays normal, we’ll all go home in a few days. If it’s as serious as people think, you can thank me later.”
“Sounds right,” Jamie said.
I was panic-packing. I took my temperature just before I called him -- 97.8.
“You might have to sleep on the fold-out in my dad’s study. Maybe the air mattress.”
“No problem,” Jamie said. “I assume you already called first dibs on floor.”
“I’m taking my parents’ room because I need space for work, but if you want the good bed I’m happy to sleep floor.”
“I’m kidding, weirdo,” Jamie said. “We don’t know where this is headed, but at least it’s interesting. I’m psyched to hang with you and Evan for a few days instead of sitting here jerking off and playing Fortnite.”
“We’ll take it a day at a time and see,” I said.
* * *
Emergency packing items:
-Toiletries travel kit
-Thermometer
-Toilet paper
-Don Quixote (Edith Grossman translation)
-The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner
-Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy
-Running gear
-Macbook Pro
-Apple TV
-iPad
-Beats by Dre
-Two pair jeans, one pair blue khakis, one pair sweats, one pair flannel pants, one pair basketball shorts
-Eight pair underpants (five boxers, three boxer-briefs, all clean)
-Eight t-shirts (college and concerts)
-Three pair socks
-One collared button-down
-One hoodie
-Three houseplants, carefully arranged in paper grocery bags
* * *
“I didn’t know you cared so much about your plants,” Evan said, when I walked into the apartment and gave him a tight hug.
“I don’t but it would be cruel to let them die. They’re like pets but more helpless.”
“I agree.”
“Jamie’s coming to stay with us too.”
“Okay, that’s good.”
“He’s in the same position. I should have checked with you first. It’s all happening so fast.”
“No, it’s great. I want people here. You could invite your most annoying friend and I’d be so happy.”
“You mean Sam.”
“No, that one guy from New Year’s who I didn’t like. But even he’d be fine now.”
“Are you okay?” I didn’t know him to be jittery.
“No, dude, I’m freaked. These rumors all day, and then Spence and Lorena texted me within minutes of each other to say they were leaving, like, immediately. No good-bye, no nothing, just gone.”
Evan liked Lorena so much. She was the first woman he liked since a sad break-up three years ago. He was sensitive in ways alien to me. “I’m sure she’s scared too.”
“I imagined myself dying alone in my sad little apartment.”
“Oh, dude,” I said, and gave him another hug. “You won’t die.”
“I know it’s dramatic.”
“We’re all stressed. Don’t apologize for how you feel.”
“Thanks for coming here. I know you like things your way.”
“This was a good idea. I don’t want to spend weeks by myself, either. I’d rather be with you and Jamie.”
“Mom wanted us to go to Vermont with them so much, and now it’s like, what if something happens? What if we never see them again?”
“Don’t get like that. They don’t have symptoms. They’re healthy.”
“But what if? Something could happen to us, too. Nobody knows how any of this works. And you should wash your hands. We shouldn’t have hugged in street clothes. When Jamie comes, we can’t hug him. We need to change clothes and wash them, right away.”
He was acting crazy but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I agreed that these were good points and washed my hands.
* * *
People were panic-buying. Sites published lists of foods with long shelf lives. We bought things just for the sake of abundance. The more we had, the safer we’d be, like animals in a den or Muscovites preparing for the invaders’ siege. Evan said that we shouldn’t hog essentials because others were more vulnerable than us.
From a bodega near Seventh Ave., we bought a gallon of bleach, dish soap, Comet bathroom scrub, some steel wool, two jumbo packages of napkins (leaving paper towels for those who needed them more), two cans of Chock Full O Nuts coffee, Chobani, Fage, eggs, American cheese, beef jerky, corn nuts, Pringles cans, Oreos, ice cream, CBD gummies, Frosted Flakes, Special K, Muscle Milk, oat milk, almond milk, soy milk, cow milk, half-and-half, White Claw, beer, and a pack of Marlboro Reds -- reasoning that we weren’t going to smoke, but if we wanted to, let’s go for the harshest variety.
To placate Evan, when we returned to the apartment, we took showers and ran our contaminated clothes through the laundry. None of us had owned laundry machines as adults. In-house clothes-washing would soon become a joy and indulgence.
We took an awkward three-man selfie and sent it to our mom to tell her that we were together and okay. My mom replied with a heart-eyes emoji. Jamie called his parents to check in and give them the latest. I FaceTimed with Sam and sent a short text to Heroin Mike.
A little before eleven, we started the first episode of Love Is Blind on Netflix.
We waited.
And then we waited.
For months.
2.
I made them reshuffle our room selections after a couple of nights.
“I can’t sleep in Mom and Dad’s room,” I said. “I’m only getting four hours a night and I wake up confused.”
“Because of the room? Not because you were dicking around until four in the morning?”
“Dude, I hate their sheets and mattress. I *really* hate being so close to their clothes and personal stuff. I have no problem sleeping on the couch or a floor.”
“So you’re calling dibs on floor after all,” Jamie said, swapping eye contact with my brother, like they had an inside joke.
“I’ll trade you for office or Evan for guestroom.”
“I don’t understand the clothes issue. Are you trying them on?”
“Dude, it’s their clothes, it’s fucking creepy. I wouldn’t feel that way about your guys’ clothes. It feels like Mom and Dad are hovering while I sleep.”
I couldn’t tell them that part of the problem -- though not the biggest one -- was the mental impossibility of jerking off in that room.
* * *
It was a surprise and relief that we were still permitted to walk the streets. The subways still ran. Grocery stores and bodegas stayed open. Some restaurants did takeout and delivery. When the three of us decided to consolidate, none of that seemed certain. If I’d known that I could still get sushi deliveries at home and wander the streets at will, I probably would have ignored Evan’s plea and stuck it out alone. At least for awhile. I’m grateful that I didn’t.
Because even if our food wasn’t rationed and we were free from home confinement, the City was taking a punch. Movement, culture and recreation had stopped. Friends who lived alone, like Matt Cannetti and Kevin Berger, were adrift in their social isolation. Friends with kids were overwhelmed. Half of my coworkers had fled the City by the end of March. Affluent, childless couples were the only ones who thrived.
People don’t live in New York for the real estate or natural beauty. We were here for the opportunities, the socializing, the bars, the theater, the concerts. Losing them was blinding, even as a person fully onboard with the lockdown’s necessity. The coming months’ itineraries -- weddings, bachelor parties, rock shows and plays -- were gone. I don’t savor simple pleasures. I live for loud punctuations.
I even get angry when people on social media mock risky behavior and claim that the lockdown is easy because we have Netflix. Forcing people apart is like depriving us of sunlight. We have to do it; I’m not one of the crazies who demands reopening. But every day still feels brutal. It doesn’t get easier. The people who hate masks and want to party are rawly, recklessly human. I don’t share their practices but I understand their denial.
Had I been alone, I would have struggled even more than Matt and Kevin. I’m not a gentle soul who would’ve learned to bake banana bread while Friends played in the background. I would’ve been a trapped fox that gnawed off its paw. It’s plausible that I would have dabbled with drugs and developed a problem; equally plausible that I would have taken up meditation and completed this entire story.
I walked home to my apartment about a week into the shutdown. I wanted my heavy, familiar comforter and my down pillows. Walking in, my body went through the same collapse that it does when I return off a transatlantic flight. I felt exhausted and at peace. My muscles hurt even though I’d been asking little of them. I sat on my couch and closed my eyes, alone for the first time in days. I inhaled the familiar scents, at ease in the light through my window shades, my stacks of books, sitting silently for about a half-hour.
Then I threw my bedding into garbage bags and took the walk back to my parents’ apartment.
* * *
By May, statistics showed that Covid was slamming poor neighborhoods in Queens and the Bronx, that black and brown people were the ones hardest hit. The virus started out more democratic. It was slaughtering the most elderly in my parents’ work and social lives, the ones a decade or two older. Each week, one or two of their former colleagues or mentors died -- “passed,” as my parents euphemistically called it, as if speaking bluntly of death were a profanity.
“We got sad news,” my dad began a Facetime chat. “Rodge passed last night.”
Roger Goldberg had been my dad’s great friend and mentor at the start of his career. He died at age 86. When the virus struck, he hadn’t been uniquely infirm, though I knew he’d had a bout of pneumonia the fall before and a heart procedure a couple of years ago. The times that I met him, he knew of my interests and activities, and talked to me warmly.
“The awful thing was he spent his last 72 hours alone. Nobody could be with him. And now we can’t even do a memorial because it would be risky.”
“I’m so sorry, Dad.”
“When I started reading about the virus back in January, Rodge was the first person I worried about. Older guy, some pulmonary struggles.”
“I know. I thought about him too.”
“And you want to be with other people, share memories and tell stories about him. But now we can’t.”
A handful of our conversations began that way. Martin, too, was losing longtime friends and clients.
No one in my friend group was hospitalized, but a small handful got walloped. One of the bros in Kevin’s crew posted about it on Instagram. Three or fours days of the worst flu he ever experienced, followed by what he thought was recovery. Later, he rose from the couch and nearly fainted. His breathing didn’t feel strained, but he held the wall to reach the bathroom because it felt like he’d collapse. His walking and movement were labored in the days following.
Heroin Mike’s girlfriend was a nurse. She wrote posts pleading to be careful: to stay home, to wash our hands, to appreciate people while we have them. “Pray for the sick, pray for their loved ones and caretakers,” she wrote.
My AP biology teacher from high school died. Mr. and Mrs. Trafford caught it: they self-quarantined, their symptoms not advancing past sniffles and dry throats.
We all recalled recent quirks in our health. One night in early March, I went to bed wildly early for me -- 10 p.m. -- because I felt so exhausted; I had a headache and my muscles hurt, like the first day of a flu. I woke with nightsweats that soaked through my T-shirt. In the morning, I was fine. A couple of days later, I was out of breath from an easy, three-mile jog. By then we’d become vigilant about Covid, but had been warned that cough and fever were the key symptoms, and I’d experienced neither.
As the list of symptoms grew, everyone believed that they’d had a bout in February or March. Dry throats, headaches, fatigue. Even housed safely with Jamie and Evan, we worried over a stray sneeze or sniff, were worried even if a nap felt uncomfortably urgent. Any irregularity felt like a portent of illness.
At the start of the shutdown, people were careful and tense, but there was an underlying camaraderie. You shared eye contact in the subway and the grocery store with the understanding that we endured this together. Maybe we’d exchange a nod and a smile through pursed lips.
By April, strangers avoided eye contact. People crossed the street if someone approached from a half-block away. Each transaction felt potentially lethal.
* * *
It had taken only a few days for schedules and routines to collapse. Jamie and I stayed awake until three or four most nights, despite our nominal work days. We’d start a movie at midnight or even one. We wound down with another hour of scrolling our phones or streaming episodes of Rick and Morty or Community. Some nights we fell asleep perpendicular on the sectional couches. We woke around nine -- earlier when there was a call or video meeting -- and took naps throughout the day.
We had the obvious protocols. No work calls or video meetings in common space, ever. Work hours were to be respected: no stupid conversations, antics or interruptions. If we took lunch breaks together, we couldn’t talk gross or rile each other up. During work hours, observe the conversational etiquette you’d deploy in the office.
My work was easier than Jamie’s. I rarely had to concentrate. I muted my mic on calls and Webex meetings and passed the time on Twitter. I only participated because Martin would want to spend five minutes decompressing with me after. I dutifully perfected the wording of his e-mails and correspondence, which was more plentiful than normal. I supposedly worked for eight or nine hours each day, only two of which required even light concentration. The absurdity of my job had never felt more apparent.
Evan, by contrast, no longer had a job, but he kept the tightest schedule. He was asleep by one most nights. Awake by eight. He’d go for a short run, first thing. Three miles along the Hudson. He made coffee for us. He cooked breakfast for a few days, until I told him, with gratitude, that yogurt was all I liked in the morning. Evan then spent his day doing the Times crossword, reading newspapers and magazines, re-reading Harry Potter, and playing Fortnite on our dad’s desktop monitor.
By April, daylight hours and the designations of days became hypothetical. The City turned quieter, emptier, witchier. You could walk across major avenues at will. Silence replaced traffic. My parents’ building emptied out. We asked our favorite doorman, Rodrigo, how many people were left in the building. He paused and said it was about 20, 25 percent. That seemed generous.
If we went to the balcony, we heard sirens in the distance, any hour. On the street, there were no horns, car stereos, ambience from the bars, shouts from NYU throngs or finance bros. I once considered humans inherently noisy. No one had known such a silent version of the City, not even the Dutch. People quietly walked their dogs or carried grocery sacks. All of us were ghosts.
I slept in the pre-dawn hours of the morning and in the hours around dusk. We each had our own rooms, but even that broke down. I found the sounds and the air circulation of the living room more amenable than the stillness of my dad’s home office. One night I went into Evan’s room to read and fell asleep in the bed; he and Jamie split the king-sized bed in my parents’ room. Some nights I took my heavy comforter and slept on the floor next to Evan’s bed, just because.
Evan often dreamed that Dad was in the hospital and he was trying to locate him, but he couldn’t even figure out which floor he was on and all of the stairwells were chained. Jamie had work nightmares. On social media, people vaguely referenced manic, hallucinatory sleep.
Me, I often dreamed about deplaning at Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle, and feeling overjoyed that the lockdown was over. Sometimes I dreamed that I was about to go on stage, bass guitar in hand, and felt fearless and strong. I only knew good dreams. I sometimes woke feeling exhausted but I never woke feeling disturbed.
* * *
If this had happened five years earlier, Sam would have been with us, and the experience would have been entirely different. The kitchen table would have been for beer pong and flip cup. People would have passed out or vomited at least once a week. We would have had bruises. Good, necessary, healthy bruises, but bruises nonetheless. An item of furniture would already have broken.
It wasn’t a thing Sam could acknowledge, but he was jealous not to be with us. After we all discovered Zoom, we set our laptops on our coffee tables, muted our mics, and left them on throughout the evening, like we were each other’s security cameras. We could see each other lying on the couch and periodically unmute to trade quips and observations. Sometimes Caroline joined him on camera; sometimes Maggie toddled into view.
“How’s your diet?” Sam said. “Are you getting enough fiber?”
“Sure.”
“How are your bowel movements? Solid and consistent?”
“Yes.”
“Ewww!” Evan yelled from across the room.
“Is that Evan?” Sam barked through my laptop. “Evan! I hope your bowel movements are healthy, too.”
“Stop! Disgusting!”
“Sam, we need to be sweet around Evan. He doesn’t like coarse things.”
“We have the best little brother in the world,” Sam said.
“We sure do. I love him like crazy. Easily the nicest person I know.”
“Easily,” Sam said. “Give him a kiss on the cheek for me.”
“Evan, come here. Sam needs to give you a kiss on the cheek through me.”
“No, I’m not indulging this,” Evan said.
“He loves it. I hear it in his voice, even though I can’t see him.”
“He does,” I said. “He’s pink and he’s laughing. It’s a quiet laughter.” I walked my laptop to the kitchen island, where Evan stood, quietly laughing. He waved to Sam.
“There he is!” Sam said. “Evan, stop looking so happy. There’s a pandemic.”
“I know. It makes me really sad.”
“You don’t look sad. Shouldn’t you be carrying groceries for the elderly?”
“I want to so bad, but we have to stay distant from vulnerable populations in case we have the virus and don’t know it.”
“Joe, that’s so great. He’s always thinking about other people.”
“I know he is. Did I tell you he made us vegetarian lasagna and a cheesecake on Sunday night?”
“You did. I bet it was good.”
“So good.”
“Look at how happy he is!” Sam said. “He’s like a puppy getting its ears scratched.”
“He’s the best puppy,” I said, rubbing his head. Evan ducked and slapped my ribs but stayed within view of camera, awaiting Sam’s reaction.
“He’s so sweet, he shits cotton candy,” Sam said. “He doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s why he avoided my question about BM.”
“No,” Evan said.
“No? Evan, you don’t defecate finely-spun sugar threads from your sucrose glands?”
“No, ugh.”
“No, Sam, I hate to break it to you, but-”
“Yes?”
“Stop!”
“-we did a big order from Brick Lane Curry last night-”
“Heavens, I know where this is going.”
“Gross, stop it.”
“-and, like, my parents’ place is big for Manhattan, but not for the world in general, and today, you couldn’t inhale within ten feet of the bathroom if this person had been in there.”
“Oh no! Evan!”
Evan laughed so hard that his words slurred. “It’s the truth,” he said.
“That’s regrettable,” Sam said.
“Super-nice guy, excellent chef, nightmare dumps.”
“No, no,” Evan said, gurgling through laughter. “That’s unfair to share. This is how people get complexes.”
“Sammy and I lick each other’s hair when we’re drunk. This isn’t that bad.”
“I know you do. I want no part of that dynamic.”
“When this is over, I’ll damn well lick his sugary hair,” Sam said. “My God, look at how hard he’s laughing.”
“This is the hardest he’s laughed during quarantine.”
“We’re not even trying to be funny.”
“I know. I don’t get it.”
* * *
“When I started reading about the virus back in January, Rodge was the first person I worried about. Older guy, some pulmonary struggles.”
“I know. I thought about him too.”
“And you want to be with other people, share memories and tell stories about him. But now we can’t.”
A handful of our conversations began that way. Martin, too, was losing longtime friends and clients.
No one in my friend group was hospitalized, but a small handful got walloped. One of the bros in Kevin’s crew posted about it on Instagram. Three or fours days of the worst flu he ever experienced, followed by what he thought was recovery. Later, he rose from the couch and nearly fainted. His breathing didn’t feel strained, but he held the wall to reach the bathroom because it felt like he’d collapse. His walking and movement were labored in the days following.
Heroin Mike’s girlfriend was a nurse. She wrote posts pleading to be careful: to stay home, to wash our hands, to appreciate people while we have them. “Pray for the sick, pray for their loved ones and caretakers,” she wrote.
My AP biology teacher from high school died. Mr. and Mrs. Trafford caught it: they self-quarantined, their symptoms not advancing past sniffles and dry throats.
We all recalled recent quirks in our health. One night in early March, I went to bed wildly early for me -- 10 p.m. -- because I felt so exhausted; I had a headache and my muscles hurt, like the first day of a flu. I woke with nightsweats that soaked through my T-shirt. In the morning, I was fine. A couple of days later, I was out of breath from an easy, three-mile jog. By then we’d become vigilant about Covid, but had been warned that cough and fever were the key symptoms, and I’d experienced neither.
As the list of symptoms grew, everyone believed that they’d had a bout in February or March. Dry throats, headaches, fatigue. Even housed safely with Jamie and Evan, we worried over a stray sneeze or sniff, were worried even if a nap felt uncomfortably urgent. Any irregularity felt like a portent of illness.
At the start of the shutdown, people were careful and tense, but there was an underlying camaraderie. You shared eye contact in the subway and the grocery store with the understanding that we endured this together. Maybe we’d exchange a nod and a smile through pursed lips.
By April, strangers avoided eye contact. People crossed the street if someone approached from a half-block away. Each transaction felt potentially lethal.
* * *
It had taken only a few days for schedules and routines to collapse. Jamie and I stayed awake until three or four most nights, despite our nominal work days. We’d start a movie at midnight or even one. We wound down with another hour of scrolling our phones or streaming episodes of Rick and Morty or Community. Some nights we fell asleep perpendicular on the sectional couches. We woke around nine -- earlier when there was a call or video meeting -- and took naps throughout the day.
We had the obvious protocols. No work calls or video meetings in common space, ever. Work hours were to be respected: no stupid conversations, antics or interruptions. If we took lunch breaks together, we couldn’t talk gross or rile each other up. During work hours, observe the conversational etiquette you’d deploy in the office.
My work was easier than Jamie’s. I rarely had to concentrate. I muted my mic on calls and Webex meetings and passed the time on Twitter. I only participated because Martin would want to spend five minutes decompressing with me after. I dutifully perfected the wording of his e-mails and correspondence, which was more plentiful than normal. I supposedly worked for eight or nine hours each day, only two of which required even light concentration. The absurdity of my job had never felt more apparent.
Evan, by contrast, no longer had a job, but he kept the tightest schedule. He was asleep by one most nights. Awake by eight. He’d go for a short run, first thing. Three miles along the Hudson. He made coffee for us. He cooked breakfast for a few days, until I told him, with gratitude, that yogurt was all I liked in the morning. Evan then spent his day doing the Times crossword, reading newspapers and magazines, re-reading Harry Potter, and playing Fortnite on our dad’s desktop monitor.
By April, daylight hours and the designations of days became hypothetical. The City turned quieter, emptier, witchier. You could walk across major avenues at will. Silence replaced traffic. My parents’ building emptied out. We asked our favorite doorman, Rodrigo, how many people were left in the building. He paused and said it was about 20, 25 percent. That seemed generous.
If we went to the balcony, we heard sirens in the distance, any hour. On the street, there were no horns, car stereos, ambience from the bars, shouts from NYU throngs or finance bros. I once considered humans inherently noisy. No one had known such a silent version of the City, not even the Dutch. People quietly walked their dogs or carried grocery sacks. All of us were ghosts.
I slept in the pre-dawn hours of the morning and in the hours around dusk. We each had our own rooms, but even that broke down. I found the sounds and the air circulation of the living room more amenable than the stillness of my dad’s home office. One night I went into Evan’s room to read and fell asleep in the bed; he and Jamie split the king-sized bed in my parents’ room. Some nights I took my heavy comforter and slept on the floor next to Evan’s bed, just because.
Evan often dreamed that Dad was in the hospital and he was trying to locate him, but he couldn’t even figure out which floor he was on and all of the stairwells were chained. Jamie had work nightmares. On social media, people vaguely referenced manic, hallucinatory sleep.
Me, I often dreamed about deplaning at Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle, and feeling overjoyed that the lockdown was over. Sometimes I dreamed that I was about to go on stage, bass guitar in hand, and felt fearless and strong. I only knew good dreams. I sometimes woke feeling exhausted but I never woke feeling disturbed.
* * *
If this had happened five years earlier, Sam would have been with us, and the experience would have been entirely different. The kitchen table would have been for beer pong and flip cup. People would have passed out or vomited at least once a week. We would have had bruises. Good, necessary, healthy bruises, but bruises nonetheless. An item of furniture would already have broken.
It wasn’t a thing Sam could acknowledge, but he was jealous not to be with us. After we all discovered Zoom, we set our laptops on our coffee tables, muted our mics, and left them on throughout the evening, like we were each other’s security cameras. We could see each other lying on the couch and periodically unmute to trade quips and observations. Sometimes Caroline joined him on camera; sometimes Maggie toddled into view.
“How’s your diet?” Sam said. “Are you getting enough fiber?”
“Sure.”
“How are your bowel movements? Solid and consistent?”
“Yes.”
“Ewww!” Evan yelled from across the room.
“Is that Evan?” Sam barked through my laptop. “Evan! I hope your bowel movements are healthy, too.”
“Stop! Disgusting!”
“Sam, we need to be sweet around Evan. He doesn’t like coarse things.”
“We have the best little brother in the world,” Sam said.
“We sure do. I love him like crazy. Easily the nicest person I know.”
“Easily,” Sam said. “Give him a kiss on the cheek for me.”
“Evan, come here. Sam needs to give you a kiss on the cheek through me.”
“No, I’m not indulging this,” Evan said.
“He loves it. I hear it in his voice, even though I can’t see him.”
“He does,” I said. “He’s pink and he’s laughing. It’s a quiet laughter.” I walked my laptop to the kitchen island, where Evan stood, quietly laughing. He waved to Sam.
“There he is!” Sam said. “Evan, stop looking so happy. There’s a pandemic.”
“I know. It makes me really sad.”
“You don’t look sad. Shouldn’t you be carrying groceries for the elderly?”
“I want to so bad, but we have to stay distant from vulnerable populations in case we have the virus and don’t know it.”
“Joe, that’s so great. He’s always thinking about other people.”
“I know he is. Did I tell you he made us vegetarian lasagna and a cheesecake on Sunday night?”
“You did. I bet it was good.”
“So good.”
“Look at how happy he is!” Sam said. “He’s like a puppy getting its ears scratched.”
“He’s the best puppy,” I said, rubbing his head. Evan ducked and slapped my ribs but stayed within view of camera, awaiting Sam’s reaction.
“He’s so sweet, he shits cotton candy,” Sam said. “He doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s why he avoided my question about BM.”
“No,” Evan said.
“No? Evan, you don’t defecate finely-spun sugar threads from your sucrose glands?”
“No, ugh.”
“No, Sam, I hate to break it to you, but-”
“Yes?”
“Stop!”
“-we did a big order from Brick Lane Curry last night-”
“Heavens, I know where this is going.”
“Gross, stop it.”
“-and, like, my parents’ place is big for Manhattan, but not for the world in general, and today, you couldn’t inhale within ten feet of the bathroom if this person had been in there.”
“Oh no! Evan!”
Evan laughed so hard that his words slurred. “It’s the truth,” he said.
“That’s regrettable,” Sam said.
“Super-nice guy, excellent chef, nightmare dumps.”
“No, no,” Evan said, gurgling through laughter. “That’s unfair to share. This is how people get complexes.”
“Sammy and I lick each other’s hair when we’re drunk. This isn’t that bad.”
“I know you do. I want no part of that dynamic.”
“When this is over, I’ll damn well lick his sugary hair,” Sam said. “My God, look at how hard he’s laughing.”
“This is the hardest he’s laughed during quarantine.”
“We’re not even trying to be funny.”
“I know. I don’t get it.”
* * *
It helped that Evan and Jamie were the two most easygoing people in my life.
Throughout the ordeal, I marveled at how Evan could be a product of the same household that produced me and Rob. It was as if a bunny had been raised in a nest with two cobras.
Cooking seemed to be his favorite hobby. I hadn’t been aware. Jamie and I ordered a decadent volume of takeout and gave enormous tips, partly out of laziness but also because we wanted to throw money at the restaurants. Once or twice a week, Evan cooked dinner. In the afternoon, he walked alone to the grocery store (one customer admitted per household) and bought fresh ingredients. Throughout the day, he asked if his menu sounded good and if we wanted any modifications.
“Sounds great, Ev!” Jamie always answered. “Whatever you make is awesome.”
He chopped vegetables with precision and concentration. He made sauces and dough from scratch. One day he said that he wished our parents owned a pasta-maker because he’d never made pasta. I bought him one at the Target on East 14th.
In my mind, he acted younger than his age. I suspect it was because we all regressed during lockdown. That only partly explained. I never saw the cynical harshness I knew in myself and my friends. He didn’t think with practicality. He had a surplus of heart.
We all burrowed into nostalgia and obsessions. I rediscovered Bob Dylan, Ninja Turtle cartoons and David Lynch. Jamie plucked at his guitar, watched Muppet movies and got half of his nutrition from Reese’s Pieces. Evan’s focus was Harry Potter. He cycled through the books and movies, over and over. Jamie bought him the 6,000-piece Hogwarts Lego set, which was expensive as fuck and occupied half the kitchen table. Evan said that he was Hufflepuff and Jamie was Gryffindor. “You have Ravenclaw days and Slytherin days,” he said of me. “Rob is Slytherin. Dad is absolutely Ravenclaw. Mom is part Gryffindor, part Slytherin, but I think mostly Gryffindor.”
“Solid, dude,” I said. It was like talking to a fourth grader. “What’s Sammy?”
“Might be a Hufflepuff, oddly. He scrambles Selection Hat categories.”
“Wow. I can see it.”
There were easy put downs -- “I can’t imagine why Lorena didn’t want to quarantine with you” -- but that would’ve devastated him. Secretly, I was repulsed by his dweebish Harry Potter interest, and then it clicked that I did the exact same thing, constantly. How many pretentious literary analogies have I forced on you? Evan’s behavior was *more* socially normal than my habit of comparing people to figures from the Purgatorio. If fiction is supposed to help you contextualize your place in the world, it’s shitty of me to judge him for doing that, just because I happen not to love his books of choice..
I became aware of our specific, shared quirks, like our strong tenderness toward animals. We refused to watch Tiger King because we couldn’t bear to see animals suffer; we got overemotional re-watching Babe and The Lion King. Jamie said we cooed the same when our mom described seeing baby foxes in Vermont, that we both tapped our forks when we put them down, that we made identical expressions when we thought we’d said something funny, that we pinched our right earlobes when we were thinking.
I hadn’t previously recognized that Evan and Jamie had long been legit friends. Evan had hung out with us once a month for sports-watching and the occasional arena show at MSG or Barclays. Once a month didn’t seem so frequent, but by the decrepit standard of adult American friendships, it was devotion. When I look at Evan’s Instagram, we have 73 friends in common, the considerable majority being my own friends in the City. Jamie and Evan traded looks if I got too heated or too weird, like they’d discussed this before and decided it was best to let me run out of leash. They had a rapport and chemistry independent of me.
Jamie displayed less visible stress than me or Evan. He stopped shaving when the lockdown began. His beard grew patchy and sloppy, with stray silver glints. He wore the same Uniqlo fleece sweatpants for days in a row. I asked him in earnest if he was on a prescription because his bearing could be so placid, bordering on stoned.
“It’s a privilege to be bored right now,” he answered, in what became a catchphrase. “People suffering, people dying, people financially ruined. They’re correct to be terrified, bro. Maybe you and Ev are in a somewhat different category from me because you’ve lost folks close to the family. I honor that. Us, we’re strong, we’re healthy, we don’t have to worry about covering mortgage payments or buying food for our family. Ev might be out of work for awhile -- he’s got your parents, he’s got you. His whole dream’s on hold. Sucks harder for him, but he’s got support and a future to feel good about. Not everybody’s got that. Like, yeah, I loathe Zoom meetings, I miss meeting new people, I miss going out with you and tearing shit up, I’m sick that so much of my world is being lived through screens. I hate it. But I’m privileged that those are my hardships. The other thing that’s a privilege -- I fucking mean this, don’t roll your eyes, dickhead -- is that I get to spend this time with two individuals who I fucking love, and love to be around, and that you invited me to share this space and this time with you. Stop rolling your eyes, dick. All praise to your parents for letting us have the run of this place, all praise to Ev for coming up with the idea, and even praise to you for calling me in. It easily could’ve played out differently. So yeah, even if I’m not doing amazing, even if we’re not living our best life, I feel pretty all right.”
After a brief pause, Evan said with emotion, “I already thought of you like family.”
“Yeah, look,” I said, “same, but let’s stop getting carried away.”
“Ignore him, Ev. Love you too.”
“Joe didn’t want to stay with me at first because he was more concerned about his plants.”
“Not true,” I said. “You called me and I was looking at my plants. I was thinking out loud, not prioritizing the plants over you. If my plants called me while I was looking at you, I would’ve been, ‘Yeah, but what about Evan?’”
“So you think your plants can speak to you.”
“Not verbally, no.”
One night, Jamie and Evan sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch, hunched over a laptop, scrolling through expensive hipster shirts. High-end stores were selling at steep discount. Jamie was buying for both of them. He was exorbitant throughout the lockdown. Might as well. Our discretionary income couldn’t go to normal expenses. We subscribed to every streaming service in existence, including Acorn TV, Crunchyroll, the Boomerang app and Criterion Channel. Now he was buying clothes. He said that new outfits might change the mental routine.
I took stealth video of them leaning together, talking about a shirt they both liked, and whether just one of them would get it. They speculated that maybe they both could get it, but the shirt was so distinct that not only could they not wear it on the same night but would have to wear it in separate social groups entirely. It was a blue tie-dyed button-down with an embroidered lion. Evan insisted that Jamie should get it since he was paying for it, then Jamie was insisting that he’d get it for Evan because Evan liked it more.
My intention was to forward the video to Sam and include a derisive comment. What I came up with sounded too mean. Sam might’ve screenshot my snark and forwarded it to J Cal in order to cause light drama. I deleted the draft text and saved the video on my phone. I believe that it will age well.
3.
The City was hysterically silent for weeks.
Walking in outside air. The first day it was warm enough to sit in Washington Square Park and look at strangers and their dogs. Two women stood next to the empty fountain and played violins. People had been too frightened to leave their dwellings.
I had been sedentary since mid-March. In normal life, I ran about 25 miles a week and was in the gym most days. I gained seven pounds in quarantine. Evan was not athletic by nature but he did short, easy runs most mornings. My body resisted exertion, like it was time to wake up but I wanted to remain under the covers. It was a mockery of the gods to do threshold runs while others’ lungs drowned in their own fluids. A couple of friends posted ostensibly sympathetic, mid-run selfies in front of the City’s big hospitals, with tacky messages of support below, as if the ailing might feel warmed by their miles. Asclepius will smote them.
One gray afternoon, I ran with Evan up Seventh Avenue and Broadway, until we reached Columbus Circle. It was my first physical effort in weeks. We passed only one or two people each block. We didn’t need to pause for crosstown traffic or red lights. Some friends thought that it was cool to explore the empty city and feel like you had it to yourself. To me, it was caressing a corpse. I was disturbed by an unpeopled Times Square. The billboards and lights were an enormous show playing to an empty theater. Evan allowed me to take a photo of him standing somber in the crossroads, like an image from a horror movie where the protagonists were too stupid to flee.
All bodies were frail and would eventually fail. Hopefully not ours today.
* * *
I believed that victory was two weeks away, in perpetuity. If you asked me on April 3, I would have guessed that we’d be back in bars on April 17; if you asked me on April 4, I would have said the 18th. And so on. It was always just two more weeks.
* * *
We didn’t have the tensions that flared in roommate situations across the City. It mattered that we were together by choice. Any of us could have returned to our own apartment. A bad dynamic would nullify the project, so there was an incentive to stay cool. I got mildly frustrated over sins like loud typing, lingering food scents in the kitchen -- stuff that didn’t warrant even a side-eye.
The first time Evan mopped the bathroom, I thought he was being passive aggressive. He wasn’t -- he was just being a good dude.
* * *
I acclimated to their voices and movements. Their conversations didn’t register when I read at the dining table. I didn’t notice the TV. They could address me and I wouldn’t hear it unless my name was shouted.
Bromance would be the accepted term for the Evan-Jamie dynamic -- the double-underscore platonic rapport that two dudes share when their friendship takes off. Periodically, a publication like The Atlantic or the Times does a story about the struggles of adult male friendships, the difficulty men face when making new friends and the toll that isolation takes on their mental health. Then, when dudes make an effort, popular language and expectations are designed to belittle them.
When I review what I’ve learned from my attractions, it’s not so much about sexuality, but the rituals and restraints all guys confront when they connect, even modestly.
Jamie and I became friends through intensely social settings. We were Pippen and Jordan, always aware of the other’s place on the court and how we’d move the ball. The instant we started hanging out properly, we shared a camaraderie and style. We sized up people and situations in complementary ways. We amused and pushed each other, looking for the next epiphany or experience.
The energy with Evan and Jamie was lower-key, more intimate -- again, no homo, double-underscore on platonic. It maybe started because Evan was so bummed about Lorena. He was struggling to accept that his interest in her hadn’t extended back.
In the first day or two, he badly wanted to Facetime with her. He was worried. She gave him a timeslot for later in the day. It seemed like their conversation was brief, relatively perfunctory. I don’t view it as unkindness on her part. Everyone was reeling. She was allowed her own hierarchy of priorities and relationships.
“If she actually liked me, she’d want to be together now,” Evan said to me. “If it had been my decision, I wouldn’t have made plans without including her.”
“I know. You put more thought into things than most people.”
“That’s not it. It’s not thought. If you like someone, you want them around. You don’t want to do stuff without them.”
“Right.”
“You’re not like, ‘I gotta bounce, peace out,’ when a pandemic hits. Even if you just met. Even if it was only two weeks ago. If you really like each other.”
“I know, dude,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I think he wanted me to say more, but I’m not the best consoler. Practical thinking and context, yes, but if someone feels low, my instinct is to draw a plan for what’s next, which is not always welcome if a person principally wants to feel understood.
In his mid-twenties, Evan had been in a serious relationship with a woman named Eleanor. I once assumed they’d get married. Evan was a doting boyfriend and seemed likelier to settle down than me or Rob. After their tearful mutual break-up, I thought they’d reconcile after a few weeks or months. I’d seen it before. But they didn’t, and Evan’s lovelife fizzled through his late twenties, for reasons that weren’t apparent. I didn’t know if he was too clingy, targeting the wrong demographic, a casualty of the online dating economy, or had a flaw as a boyfriend that I wouldn’t know as an outsider.
Jamie counseled Evan through the Lorena heartache, as he once had done for the pre-marriage Sam. Jamie himself was imperfect boyfriend material, but he was a patient listener and talker. Nobody had planned for the pandemic, Jamie said; New York was home for Evan in a way that it wasn’t for her. We were in one of the most crisis-intense places in the world. She only left in order to help her parents and to have more physical space.
“Maybe she didn’t know how you felt, Ev,” Jamie said. “She might not have wanted to put too much pressure on you.”
“No, she knew,” he said. “Things like this happen to me, like, constantly.”
“One thing about being in the City, you understand that you’re surrounded by awesome and smart people, but their agendas don’t always align. I have my struggles, too.”
“Yeah, but your struggles are, like, opposite.”
“How so?”
“You struggle with girls liking you too much and you not feeling the same way. I’m the reverse.”
“Somewhat true. But you’ve still got to be yourself, let yourself feel those things. Like, I don’t know how you communicate, if sometimes it’s too much, too soon.”
“Probably.”
“You should sound it out with a female friend. That might help.”
“Katie would talk to you about it,” I said.
“Are you crazy?” Evan said.
Jamie then opined on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and OkCupid, and his philosophy of selecting profile pics (tread lightly on vacation shots, no animals, don’t be wacky) and assessing those of others (beware contouring and profiles that only showed photos of nights out with friends).
When Evan said he wasn’t ready -- that he wasn’t even clear on his status with Lorena -- Jamie backed off, but his comments prepped Evan for the letdown without expressly declaring it.
Jamie himself was chronically swiping Tinder. Despite his gentle handling of Evan, I thought that he was unwittingly callous with his own online dating practices.
“Dude, it’s just chatting,” he said. “Everybody’s bored, man. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere or I’m not attracted, it’s good to banter with new people.”
“Girls are more sensitive though.”
“Dude, I’m not telling anyone that I love them.”
“Dude, even so! They’re going to think you’re a catch, they’re going to like the attention, everybody is understimulated. You think you’re chatting about going to Duane Reade or watching Pixar movies, and they’re probably whispering dear future husband to themselves.”
“Nah.”
“Dude! Think of all the women we know and how stressful dating is for them. It’s not the same once they hit their mid-30s.”
“Dude, I’m mostly chatting with younger ones anyway.” He took out his phone and showed me the profile pic of a hot 27 year old.
“Weird flex, dude. The last person I hooked up with was 27 too, so we’re tied. My statement still stands. Even if you put a disclaimer on every message, they’re still going to feel played for attention.”
At the allusion to my own practices, Jamie and Evan perked like startled meerkats. It was a truth universally acknowledged that I would not share such things, and would repel even vague, sympathetic comments. I wondered which of them would text my remark to Sam (it was Jamie) but chose not to care. Not to be crass, but once people permit silent farts to pass without comment or reaction, the rules change.
* * *
It made me happy that they were getting closer. I was secure in my status with both. Their bonding wouldn’t exclude me. If anything, it made us all tighter.
When I observed their mild physical interactions -- once again, double-underscore on the platonic -- I realized how uncomfortable I was in my own body, how averse I was to inoffensive touching from other guys.
For instance, if we watched TV at night, it wasn’t unusual for them to lie on opposite ends of one wing of the sectional while I sat perpendicular with my feet propped on the coffee table. The couch was huge and wide, so their bodies might intersect only below the knees. When we watched Midsommar, they knocked tibias and calves, non-aggressively kicking and locking against each other while exclaiming during the tense scenes. They touched without deeper meaning..
I never had that ease of contact with Jamie. It felt excessive. With my brother, I would’ve felt obligated to play a role, I would have kicked him if our legs brushed, told him to mind his space, he would have said ow! and kicked back, so instead of being chill and watching a movie, we would have play-acted at sibling rivalry.
I’m averse to friendly touches by other dudes. I flinch or shove back. I perceive incursion or erotic implication. Sam and I jump on each other constantly, but that’s slapstick; as recently as last winter, he bit my earlobe while I sat on his lap at the end of a booth in a bar. But we’d never think to recline on opposite ends of a couch. If his leg crossed mine while he napped, I would have knocked his ass awake.
* * *
I have never been less amorous than under Covid lockdown. Twitter abounded with confessions of quarantine horniness. Nothing was less erotic than virus-suppressing confinement with a sibling and a close friend, while strangers outside shrank in terror at every exhalation. It stayed cold through April; it seemed to rain on alternate days; the forms of others were shrouded in dark, spring-protective gear. I barely mustered the interest for stray acts of masturbation and indulged them mostly for biological necessity.
A couple of times, I opened Grindr out of muscle memory, then closed it immediately.
One night, while Evan and Jamie watched a film about hobbits, I texted the aforementioned 27-year-old, who I had seen a few times in January in enthusiastic but unremarkable circumstances. I thought it would be considerate to check in, but also, to a degree, I wondered whether we might want to swap a few new boner pics in the interest of social distancing. Behind the locked door of my dad’s home office, we had the following exchange:
JOE: Yo! It’s been a minute.
JOE: How you holding up? Everything good with you?
ERIC: lol heyy dude
ERIC: yah, I’m good, been chilling
JOE: Nice. Staying with my little brother and a friend at my parents’ place in the Village.
ERIC: rough life lol
ERIC: you horny?
I dislike non-ironic use of the word horny. I was, on some level, horny, but he would have rated higher if he’d just said that it would be cool to hang out right now, and followed up with a suggestive pic. The sentiment wasn’t a problem; it was the inartfulness.
I was trying to compose a witty reply when he texted me three question marks in a row: “???”, a punctuational aggression that softened my interest.
JOE: Nahhhh. Ha.
JOE: We’re watching a thing about hobbits
ERIC: lol
JOE: Just wanted to say hey and make sure you’re thriving
ERIC: thanks, yah, all good here
I put my phone in my pocket and immersed myself in the splendor of Middle Earth.
* * *
I didn’t even watch porn. I channeled my lust through movies with big party sequences: Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some, Animal House, Metropolitan, Shampoo, Booksmart. Even movies where the party goes wrong: The Exterminating Angel, The Rules of the Game and Boogie Nights. I once watched the Playboy Mansion party sequence from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on a half-hour loop -- the part where Mama Cass dances and Steve McQueen explains his busted crush on Sharon.
People tried to simulate parties on Zoom. They were dispiriting. I mainly wanted to Zoom with Sam only, because we could leave our cameras on without forcing a structured conversation. Sometimes we added Katie, but she worked on weeknights, when our banter was most likely to flourish. As usual, she was less charmed by us than we were with each other.
Jamie and I were on Zoom sessions with the big New York crew, but those felt informational -- we swapped stories about the minutiae of our neighborhoods and survival tips, debated the ethics of food delivery and ordering from Prime. I was interested in the different sociologies of Bushwick, Dumbo and the Upper West Side -- how people carried themselves on the streets and in the grocery stores, the perceptions of ambulance sirens, our expectations of how the future might look.
Trevor organized a Zoom party consisting of college people. At first I thought it would just be those of us from the house, but it maxed out at sixteen people, at least half of whom had kids that they wanted to show off to the assembled. People weren’t muting appropriately so it was a cacophony of cross-talk and background noise. Eventually we gave brief updates of our lives in general. It was apparent that those outside of New York were living a dramatically different experience. Their crisis was primarily about working at home and awkward logistics at the grocery store. Even the two doctors seemed relaxed. I especially envied the Californians and Texans, with their square footage, backyards and sunny weather.
By New York standards, Sam, Katie and I weren’t among the more scared or strident civilians, but on that gathering, we preached. I told them that my parents had five friends die; Katie talked about the eeriness of commuting home late at night in a ghost town; Sam described people wiping down items in grocery stores and losing their cool if someone stood too close. I don’t think our intention was to proselytize about precautions. It was more to explain that New York felt radioactive in ways that other places did not, like we were close to the front lines of battle while others reclined by their pools far away.
Chris didn’t join. He claimed that he didn’t want to figure out how to use Zoom, which was so ridiculous that it may have been true.
He was on group texts and occasionally contributed. He once used the famous Faulkner quote when trying to make a point about human nature: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. -Requiem for a Nun”
After a month of Zooming, I was done. When I saw my face in a square, I wanted to punch myself. I didn’t need to hear what people were drinking, didn’t like having to wait turns for everyone to speak. These were panel discussions, not conversation. There was no substitute for being together in person. I wanted noise, crowdedness, surprises, gossip.
Even our parents eventually cut back our Facetime sessions from once a day to a couple times a week.
“Are you keeping the apartment clean? Are you all showering every day?” my mom asked, trolling.
“Yes! Gross!” I said. “We’re high-functioning adults. I know you struggle to accept that.”
Our pastimes included Harry Potter, Ninja Turtle cartoons and WWE broadcasts.
“We’ve also turned vegetarian,” Evan said, not taking her bait.
“That’s a surprise move.”
“Mostly vegetarian,” I said. “I eat pork and fish when we order Mexican, but otherwise, vegetarian.”
“What prompted this?”
“It’s a good time to experiment with new things. Meat is mean to animals, fake meat is good now, and it’s easier to control what we eat,” Evan said. “I’ve been meditating a half-hour every day. Learning German on Duolingo. Just to keep well-rounded.”
“He has,” I said. “I’m worthless.”
“He reads Ovid and watches Louis Bunuel movies for fun,” Evan said. “Huge slacker.”
“Have you thought about going to see your brother yet?”
“You mean Jamie?” I said. “He’s right here.” I flipped the lens. He looked up from his phone and waved.
“Hi Jamie,” she said, “I enjoy seeing you, too. I meant your biological brother. I think you’ve answered the question.”
“People aren’t moving around yet,” I said. “Brooklyn Heights is a little far to walk and I’m not sure if there’s a risk with the baby -- you know.” All reasonable and convenient excuses.
“We talked to them this morning. Isabel is so cute.”
“She’s too young to recognize faces,” I said. “When they’re that little, they only see shapes and colors. So she’s, like, not going to remember or know whether we see her or not. She can’t understand Facetime.”
“I realize that, Joe,” she said. “That wasn’t my point.”
“If I hear you correctly, you want us to give Covid to Rob, but spare the baby.”
“That’s not funny,” she said.
“I think it’s kind of funny.”
“Mock me because I’d like to see my sons and be able to spend more time with our first grandchild. You twist those feelings into something dark and nasty because you want to play smartass.”
I sighed dramatically. “I obviously don’t want Rob to get Covid, okay? We don’t have Covid, I don’t want Rob to get Covid, I want everybody healthy, okay? I’m sure Isabel is cute even though she’s Rob’s. She has your genes and everyone knows you’re hot. Maybe Evan and I can Facetime with Sara when we finish and look at the baby.”
“Your casualness and lack of concern-”
“Dude, when Evan called me at the start, one of the first things we said is that we don’t want to give Covid to Isabel!”
“It’s the truth,” Evan said.
“I’m not a dude, and I don’t think this is the right time for flip attitudes and snide remarks,” she said. “It’s not helpful.”
“I respectfully disagree. You are a dude. It’s always the right time. It’s always helpful.”
“You’re such an ass,” Jamie said, laughing off camera.
“I agree with Jamie,” my mom said. “One hundred percent.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll go give Rob Covid, since that’s what you want.”
“Enough. Let me give you to your goddamn father.”
“Don’t swear about Dad because you’re annoyed with me!”
My dad’s face peered out from my phone. He blinked. “I don’t suppose any of you has started Chernow’s book about Grant yet?”
* * *
Growing up, Rob and I were mostly interested in fighting one another, which left Evan unscathed. I viewed Evan as a pet and mascot, one I treated with fondness but occasionally poked. Our age difference was big enough that I didn’t see him as a peer. He was eager to impress me and feel included -- noble goals.
One exception was that, when he was a tiny guy, Rob and I could make him burst into tears by saying the phrase, “Evan is Welsh for John.”
He knew that it was a comment on his name and construed it as unkindness. I understood Welsh to be a kind of minor England and therefore it seemed fine. I must have known about his name based on the remark of an adult. I only said it for his reaction.
At age three or four, he could be toddling around, behaving inoffensively, and if I said, “Evan is Welsh for John,” he would pause to take a breath before his nose and eyes tightened. He let out a wail of grief. One of our parents would walk into the room wanting to know what happened.
“He said Evan is Welsh for John,” he bawled, his heart broken.
“Joseph, don’t.”
“It’s not mean. Isn’t it true?”
“He’s too little to understand. You say it to make him cry.”
Evan mourned, his face buried in my mom’s shoulder.
As he grew older, the reaction to the comment remained out of proportion. In kindergarten and elementary school, he’d turn red and tell me to stop. In late single-digits, it elicited a frustrated, “Shut up.” In his tweens and early teens, maybe a “You suck,” or a frowning middle finger.
“Hey, Ev,” I said one day during lockdown.
“What’s up?”
“Evan is Welsh for John.”
He laughed. “Jerk,” he said.
“Dude,” I said to Jamie, “when he was tiny, he’d melt down when we said that to him.”
“It’s the truth,” Evan said.
“It wrecked you.”
“I didn’t know Evan is Welsh for John,” Jamie said. “Are you guys part Welsh?”
“Not that I know of, but our background isn’t always clear.”
“Our parents just liked the name,” Evan said. “They love bland, white-guy names.”
“They didn’t name us in a Bengali or Latinx tradition, true,” I said. “Do you remember why you flipped out?”
“Obviously, at first I thought you were being mean about my name, and later it seemed like a thing you said to try to put me in my place, like you wanted to remind me that you could control how I felt. So after, like, seven or eight, I wasn’t mad that Evan was Welsh for John.”
“But, like, I wasn’t a bully or anything. I didn’t scar you.”
“You weren’t a bully, no,” Evan said. “But you could be, like, sharp, and it was unpredictable.”
“Same as it ever was,” Jamie said.
“I looked up to you but couldn’t figure out your boundaries. Overall, you were reasonably nice and cool, especially when you had friends around.”
“I’m here to protect you from him, Ev,” Jamie said.
“And now that we’re adults and I can imagine what you were going through, I get why you might have had good reason to be randomly abrasive from time to time.”
“Wait, what do you think I was going through?”
“Come on,” Evan said.
“Bro, I guarantee that wasn’t it!” I said. Evan looked skeptical but was reluctant to say more. “Not remotely! I was running around with Rick and Sanjay all the time, and we’d be dicks to each other. Plus Rob and I were madmen. It was generic teenage obnoxiousness. There was no, like, inner turmoil causing me to say Evan is Welsh for John.”
“Not when you said that particular phrase, no,” Evan said, “but some of the edge, in general, maybe, it contributed.”
His perceptions sometimes frustrated me. His most exasperating moment in adulthood was the morning when the Supreme Court issued its gay-marriage decision, and he texted me, “Congratulations! So proud that you’re my brother!” Like he thought I was Andy Trafford or whoever. If only he’d heard my bitterly cynical conversations with Kevin and Matt about the cause of gay marriage. Congratulations?
Instead of a rant, I replied, “Thanks. Proud of you, too.”
Evan had excesses of empathy and compassion, which was part of why I grew to love the dude so much. Like, he imagined what it would be like for him to be gay, and imputed his needs to my situation, in ways I considered amiss. I guess you might describe it as liberal projection and condescension, which I don’t view as a flaw on his part -- like, we should all be so lucky to complain over people who misdirect their empathy surplus in our direction.
Throughout the lockdown, I felt surges of affection for him. He was braver and kinder than I was. He tried to write plays and screenplays -- talented enough to get an agent but not talented enough to get anything produced. He sometimes auditioned for acting roles, with minor speaking parts in limited-run productions at small theaters. He supported himself by waiting tables at a fancy restaurant in Midtown. He did the things I felt like I should have tried, except that I became too frustrated when I arrived to the City, lulled by a paycheck and overstimulated by the fun of other people.
Beyond that, I felt a deeper warmth for him as my little brother. One of my jobs on lockdown was to keep him boosted, even if all I had to do was sit quietly or pretend at interest in Harry Potter.
I wanted to say how much I loved him and enjoyed his company. It would have made his year, particularly given how measly it was shaping up. I wasn’t embarrassed by the sentiment, exactly. It just seemed like a needless dash of drama. We were getting along just great without dabbling in wild rhetoric.
As his observation about me lingered, I said, “Cool way to avoid the fact that Evan is Welsh for John.”
* * *
In early May, a neighborhood bar in the Village served out of its front window. It may not have been legal -- only groceries, bodegas, drug stores and Targets were open. Now we could get beers and cocktails in plastic to-go cups. People openly drank on the sidewalks. Glasnost and perestroika for all.
I paid cash for a drink and sat in Washington Square Park. Teens skateboarded. A dad kicked a soccer ball with his kids. Old people in masks sat alone or in pairs on the benches. Trace scents of weed. Green shoots of normalcy out of the ashes.
Just two more weeks and we’d be back.
* * *
The weekend before Memorial Day, we decided that it was time to meet. The curve was flat and low. All of us but Katie had been locked down at home.
Sam would bike in from Fort Greene. Katie and Alex would take a car from the Upper East Side. We could buy drinks nearby and catch up in Washington Square.
Jamie and Evan wore new outfits: Evan in ripped skinny jeans and the blue tie-dyed button-down with embroidered lions; Jamie in mustard-yellow denim, a pink paisley button-down and aviator glasses. We’d gone months without haircuts. Evan and I looked like products of early-90s culture -- not quite mullets, our hair was thick and poofy up top, shaggy over the ears and sprung out in cowlicks behind our necks. Jamie’s hair was shapeless and generically shaggy, more hippie than trashy. His beard was fully grown. With the grooming and outfits, Jamie looked like Don Henley’s coke dealer circa 1975; Evan looked like his rent boy.
“Shithead with a bike,” Jamie said, pointing to the east, as Sam walked his bike across the park.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, and jumped up, waving.
It was possibly the longest we’d been away from each other since the post-college Europe trip of 2005.
“Yo!” he shouted, beginning to trot.
I walked toward him, leaving Jamie and Evan on our bench.
We were both masked, but I believed that we should stay six feet apart. Sam dropped his bike and ran toward me with arms out.
“No!” I yelled. “Social distance!”
“Fuck you!” he said, running to hug me.
“No!” I said, running toward the empty fountain in the center.
“I biked all the way from Brooklyn!”
“I don’t want your touch!”
“You’re being childish. And rude,” Sam said, chasing after me. “Stop resisting.”
The park hadn’t been so crowded in months, though it was sparse by pre-pandemic standards. People watched us. As I fled, two women quickly walked out of my range, like they thought we were dangers.
“You’re creating a spectacle with the public,” I said. “You’ll get arrested.”
I had to let him catch me. Chasing throughout the park was too much. It was one thing for us to menace each other; worse if we disturbed fatigued strangers on a nice day. I held my breath and let him hug me. He loosened his grip. I pushed him away.
“Dirty virus motherfucker,” I said.
“What’s your problem?” he said. “We’ve been quarantined for months. Neither of us can have it.”
“Six feet back,” I said, “and pull your mask over your fucking nose.”
“Nice hairdo, dick,” he said, pulling his mask up.
“Has Caroline been trimming yours? It doesn’t look too bad.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “She said that if I come home too soon, she’s going to kill me, skin me and make it a jacket.”
“She wants a jacket with acne scars? Weak.”
“No Evan? No J Cal?”
I pointed toward the bench where they sat.
“I genuinely did not recognize Charles Manson and his wood elf.”
“They’ll like those comparisons.”
“I want to kiss them.”
One exception was that, when he was a tiny guy, Rob and I could make him burst into tears by saying the phrase, “Evan is Welsh for John.”
He knew that it was a comment on his name and construed it as unkindness. I understood Welsh to be a kind of minor England and therefore it seemed fine. I must have known about his name based on the remark of an adult. I only said it for his reaction.
At age three or four, he could be toddling around, behaving inoffensively, and if I said, “Evan is Welsh for John,” he would pause to take a breath before his nose and eyes tightened. He let out a wail of grief. One of our parents would walk into the room wanting to know what happened.
“He said Evan is Welsh for John,” he bawled, his heart broken.
“Joseph, don’t.”
“It’s not mean. Isn’t it true?”
“He’s too little to understand. You say it to make him cry.”
Evan mourned, his face buried in my mom’s shoulder.
As he grew older, the reaction to the comment remained out of proportion. In kindergarten and elementary school, he’d turn red and tell me to stop. In late single-digits, it elicited a frustrated, “Shut up.” In his tweens and early teens, maybe a “You suck,” or a frowning middle finger.
“Hey, Ev,” I said one day during lockdown.
“What’s up?”
“Evan is Welsh for John.”
He laughed. “Jerk,” he said.
“Dude,” I said to Jamie, “when he was tiny, he’d melt down when we said that to him.”
“It’s the truth,” Evan said.
“It wrecked you.”
“I didn’t know Evan is Welsh for John,” Jamie said. “Are you guys part Welsh?”
“Not that I know of, but our background isn’t always clear.”
“Our parents just liked the name,” Evan said. “They love bland, white-guy names.”
“They didn’t name us in a Bengali or Latinx tradition, true,” I said. “Do you remember why you flipped out?”
“Obviously, at first I thought you were being mean about my name, and later it seemed like a thing you said to try to put me in my place, like you wanted to remind me that you could control how I felt. So after, like, seven or eight, I wasn’t mad that Evan was Welsh for John.”
“But, like, I wasn’t a bully or anything. I didn’t scar you.”
“You weren’t a bully, no,” Evan said. “But you could be, like, sharp, and it was unpredictable.”
“Same as it ever was,” Jamie said.
“I looked up to you but couldn’t figure out your boundaries. Overall, you were reasonably nice and cool, especially when you had friends around.”
“I’m here to protect you from him, Ev,” Jamie said.
“And now that we’re adults and I can imagine what you were going through, I get why you might have had good reason to be randomly abrasive from time to time.”
“Wait, what do you think I was going through?”
“Come on,” Evan said.
“Bro, I guarantee that wasn’t it!” I said. Evan looked skeptical but was reluctant to say more. “Not remotely! I was running around with Rick and Sanjay all the time, and we’d be dicks to each other. Plus Rob and I were madmen. It was generic teenage obnoxiousness. There was no, like, inner turmoil causing me to say Evan is Welsh for John.”
“Not when you said that particular phrase, no,” Evan said, “but some of the edge, in general, maybe, it contributed.”
His perceptions sometimes frustrated me. His most exasperating moment in adulthood was the morning when the Supreme Court issued its gay-marriage decision, and he texted me, “Congratulations! So proud that you’re my brother!” Like he thought I was Andy Trafford or whoever. If only he’d heard my bitterly cynical conversations with Kevin and Matt about the cause of gay marriage. Congratulations?
Instead of a rant, I replied, “Thanks. Proud of you, too.”
Evan had excesses of empathy and compassion, which was part of why I grew to love the dude so much. Like, he imagined what it would be like for him to be gay, and imputed his needs to my situation, in ways I considered amiss. I guess you might describe it as liberal projection and condescension, which I don’t view as a flaw on his part -- like, we should all be so lucky to complain over people who misdirect their empathy surplus in our direction.
Throughout the lockdown, I felt surges of affection for him. He was braver and kinder than I was. He tried to write plays and screenplays -- talented enough to get an agent but not talented enough to get anything produced. He sometimes auditioned for acting roles, with minor speaking parts in limited-run productions at small theaters. He supported himself by waiting tables at a fancy restaurant in Midtown. He did the things I felt like I should have tried, except that I became too frustrated when I arrived to the City, lulled by a paycheck and overstimulated by the fun of other people.
Beyond that, I felt a deeper warmth for him as my little brother. One of my jobs on lockdown was to keep him boosted, even if all I had to do was sit quietly or pretend at interest in Harry Potter.
I wanted to say how much I loved him and enjoyed his company. It would have made his year, particularly given how measly it was shaping up. I wasn’t embarrassed by the sentiment, exactly. It just seemed like a needless dash of drama. We were getting along just great without dabbling in wild rhetoric.
As his observation about me lingered, I said, “Cool way to avoid the fact that Evan is Welsh for John.”
* * *
In early May, a neighborhood bar in the Village served out of its front window. It may not have been legal -- only groceries, bodegas, drug stores and Targets were open. Now we could get beers and cocktails in plastic to-go cups. People openly drank on the sidewalks. Glasnost and perestroika for all.
I paid cash for a drink and sat in Washington Square Park. Teens skateboarded. A dad kicked a soccer ball with his kids. Old people in masks sat alone or in pairs on the benches. Trace scents of weed. Green shoots of normalcy out of the ashes.
Just two more weeks and we’d be back.
* * *
The weekend before Memorial Day, we decided that it was time to meet. The curve was flat and low. All of us but Katie had been locked down at home.
Sam would bike in from Fort Greene. Katie and Alex would take a car from the Upper East Side. We could buy drinks nearby and catch up in Washington Square.
Jamie and Evan wore new outfits: Evan in ripped skinny jeans and the blue tie-dyed button-down with embroidered lions; Jamie in mustard-yellow denim, a pink paisley button-down and aviator glasses. We’d gone months without haircuts. Evan and I looked like products of early-90s culture -- not quite mullets, our hair was thick and poofy up top, shaggy over the ears and sprung out in cowlicks behind our necks. Jamie’s hair was shapeless and generically shaggy, more hippie than trashy. His beard was fully grown. With the grooming and outfits, Jamie looked like Don Henley’s coke dealer circa 1975; Evan looked like his rent boy.
“Shithead with a bike,” Jamie said, pointing to the east, as Sam walked his bike across the park.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, and jumped up, waving.
It was possibly the longest we’d been away from each other since the post-college Europe trip of 2005.
“Yo!” he shouted, beginning to trot.
I walked toward him, leaving Jamie and Evan on our bench.
We were both masked, but I believed that we should stay six feet apart. Sam dropped his bike and ran toward me with arms out.
“No!” I yelled. “Social distance!”
“Fuck you!” he said, running to hug me.
“No!” I said, running toward the empty fountain in the center.
“I biked all the way from Brooklyn!”
“I don’t want your touch!”
“You’re being childish. And rude,” Sam said, chasing after me. “Stop resisting.”
The park hadn’t been so crowded in months, though it was sparse by pre-pandemic standards. People watched us. As I fled, two women quickly walked out of my range, like they thought we were dangers.
“You’re creating a spectacle with the public,” I said. “You’ll get arrested.”
I had to let him catch me. Chasing throughout the park was too much. It was one thing for us to menace each other; worse if we disturbed fatigued strangers on a nice day. I held my breath and let him hug me. He loosened his grip. I pushed him away.
“Dirty virus motherfucker,” I said.
“What’s your problem?” he said. “We’ve been quarantined for months. Neither of us can have it.”
“Six feet back,” I said, “and pull your mask over your fucking nose.”
“Nice hairdo, dick,” he said, pulling his mask up.
“Has Caroline been trimming yours? It doesn’t look too bad.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “She said that if I come home too soon, she’s going to kill me, skin me and make it a jacket.”
“She wants a jacket with acne scars? Weak.”
“No Evan? No J Cal?”
I pointed toward the bench where they sat.
“I genuinely did not recognize Charles Manson and his wood elf.”
“They’ll like those comparisons.”
“I want to kiss them.”
“Fetch your fucking bike. This isn’t your mom’s driveway, you can’t drop your bike wherever. Someone will take it.”
“You have more demands than Caroline.”
“She’s a fucking saint.”
“I’m more than aware.”
“I should send a dozen roses to thank her for not killing you.”
“She’d love it. You should.”
(I would.)
Evan waved. Sam ran to them. I retrieved his bike.
* * *
“My second through fifth favorite boys,” Katie said, when she arrived with Alex.
“Liar,” Sam said. “I’m your favorite *man.* Alex number two. Followed by your third-to-fifth favorite boys.”
“Your lithium prescription run out?” she said.
“Sup, fellas,” said Alex.
“Your body is the only drug I need,” Sam said.
“Cool it,” I said. “Not in front of Alex.”
“You’ve spent months broing out. I’ve seen only my charming wife and my delightful daughter. And I can fucking love the shit out of them, but it’s not nearly enough.”
“Oh boy,” said Katie.
“I’ve been fantasizing about this since mid-March. I didn’t know if I could make it.”
“During the Siege of Fort Greene, Sam Frost suffered through daily viewings of Blues Clues and two months without bro time,” Jamie said. “He received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2022.”
“You and your fucking Charles Manson beard have never had it so good,” Sam said. “Shacked up with these two fine pieces of ass,” gesturing to me and Evan, “probably getting veal parmesan delivered from Carbone.”
“Nope. We’re vegetarians now. I agree with you on their asses.”
“Thank you,” said Evan.
“I love my wife. I love my daughter. But quarantine wasn’t in the wedding vows.”
“In sickness and in health, dickhead.”
“I am neither sick nor healthy.”
“Nobody told me it was a costume party,” Katie said. “Is that a Joe Exotic tribute, Ev?”
“Dude, no, they’re lions. Plus we boycotted Tiger King. It glamorizes animal abuse.”
“I wouldn’t say glamorize.”
“Trivializes.”
“Fair enough.”
“You’ve been thriving,” I said to Katie.
“Sort of. I go in from four to midnight. [Name redacted] has the home studio. We hired up thinking it would be all elections and primaries this year. Biden runs away with it and now we have a staff of politics junkies trying to become Covid experts.”
“Are you a Covid expert?”
“There are no Covid experts,” she said. “Even the actual experts don’t fully understand it.”
“So you’re telling me that in two more weeks, everything will be normal.”
“More or less.”
“Alex?”
“You know,” he said. “Probably not that different from you guys. We keep each other entertained.”
“That means lots of porking,” Sam said.
“Bro, listen to me,” I said. “Settle. The fuck. Down.”
“I can’t, I can’t. I’m trying, but I can’t.”
“Then shut your fucking mouth.”
“This is how they show they love each other,” Jamie said to Alex.
“No worries,” Alex said. “I know what to expect by now.”
“Any of you thinking about packing up and going back to your apartments yet?” Katie asked.
We shifted our postures.
“It sounds like our parents are staying in Vermont through the summer,” Evan said, “although they might come down to see Rob and the baby.”
“They want Rob and Sara to stay with them in Vermont,” I said. “Mom’s obsessed with the baby.”
“I’m staying until there are things to do or the C______s throw me out,” Jamie said. “I’d rather not be alone all the time.”
“Is it adorbs or is it a cult?” Sam said.
“Time will tell.”
“I was promised booze,” Katie said. “Who’s buying my drinks?”
“There are some spots on Barrow or Bleecker. Let’s do it.”
It was the best day since the lockdown started. I’d barely consumed alcohol and thus felt heavily buzzed after only three beers. We drank in a tiny park around the corner from my parents’ apartment. People walked happily in shorts, T-shirts and designer masks. In the Village, masks had a fashion component, many of them in colorful prints, some with a sports logo. Masked and in the sun, strangers were calmer toward each other than we’d been a few weeks earlier. We didn’t act like the virus could be transmitted through accidental eye contact.
It seemed like the post-Covid New York might be a more placid but ultimately livable version of its former self.
Instead, we were two weeks from being consumed by public beatings, mass marches, a curfew, and the origins of terms like “fuck twelve.”
I love that you've been thinking about this. (I'm the guy who commented on the last chapter wondering how Joe is dealing with Covid.) Really enjoyed this snapshot of Joe's life in the present day. Makes me wonder what happened to Joe during Hurricane Sandy (which I know he's alluded to a couple times), or his reaction to 9/11, which he kind of skated over in freshman year.
ReplyDeleteAlso I enjoy that Rob is married with a baby now and that Joe is close to Evan who seems to have a more normal emotional reaction to life events. And that it seems Joe's closest friend is Jamie rather than one of the Hamilton gang - or is that a symptom of the phenomenon where in their 30s people end up focussing on their kids and only people who never got married end up hanging out with each other a lot?
Don't read too much into it -- I just need to work through the last few months. At different points, I thought I would write long sections about the night of the '08 election and the financial crisis. This might all be boiled down to two paragraphs in the "official" version of the story. I'm playing in my sandbox and inviting people to hang out with me.
DeleteTHANK YOU for doing this! I haven't read the entry yet . . .I'm saving it to read soon as a treat. I have no doubt it'll be great. sharing it is very much appreciated. I will read anything and everything you write. Nothing else out there is measuring up.
ReplyDeleteThanks. As I do this side-project, I'm realizing how badly I need to process through the last few months.
DeleteWow, I loved this! I've yet to read any piece of fiction that grapples with the pandemic so I very much appreciate that you decided to tackle this with characters that I've grown attached to over the years. Seeing Joe handle 2020 also helps to make the story feel even more tangible and authentic. Can't wait to read more!
ReplyDeleteWell that was surprisingly wholesome. Also liked that Beats by Dre is listed alongside other books
ReplyDeleteThis effort would be rated PG-13 if it weren't for a few effwords.
DeleteSo I think a film can be classed as PG-13 in the US with one fuck, but no more than one fuck.
DeleteBecause that's the average amount of fucks the American child can handle.
I'm liking this and wondering since joe college anyway is such an unorthodox method of publishing, why should joe college have a finite end point? To some degree it is already a sort of wonderful snapshot of early 2000s college life. Without an end, it could become the cultural diary of the cusp generation. Though I'm suspecting you'd use it to delay the installments :).
ReplyDeleteI think the structure would collapse. Plus I want to think about other settings, types of people, play with more extreme voices, etc.
DeleteMaybe everything else in general being shrill is pushing you to extreme voices but that would be terrible. Joe's charm is that it is within the realm of the everyday and yet the interactions are wonderful and addictive. It has and will continue to age well. Although, your tastes so far suggest that even with extremes it wouldn't end up being shrill.
DeleteThanks! I don't mean politically extreme voices -- I mean more eccentric, less linear ways of speaking and telling a story.
DeleteFavorite line: "No one had known such a silent version of the City, not even the Dutch" Keep it coming! Not surprisingly, the characters seem very much themselves and yet not frozen in time. The 2020 version of who they were decades before. This unexpected writing is an awesome distraction and something to look forward to during the pandemic. Thanks for letting us in the sandbox with you.
ReplyDeleteNot only relevant but totally Joe! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteLove that you wrote this. Just found the series and read all of the chapters over the course of a week. Was sad when I got to the end, knowing that I had to wait for the next installment, so this was a nice find.
ReplyDelete"The last person I hooked up with was 27 too"
ReplyDeleteOh man, Joe still can't bring himself to say "the last guy I hooked up with"?
That's a good catch. :(
DeleteThat wasn't even intended as a nod! I thought the dysfunctional thing was Joe bragging about his hook-up's age to try to impress Jamie. And the more dysfunctional thing happened later, when he intentionally withheld kind words to Evan.
DeleteMe: It's better to examine the complexity of characters and recognize their flaws.
ReplyDeleteAlso me: Evan is a perfect being of light and love who must be protected at all costs.
In all seriousness though. I'm glad Joe has such a good support system in these crazy times. I've always liked Jamie a lot.
It does feel strange that my life at 25 resembles more Joe's in his mid 30s than in his mid 20s. It makes me feel old
Hey Joe, I picked up Joe College about 2 weeks ago and have been obsessed with you and your writing since. What a fantastic story which immediately shot up into my top 10 of all time Stories I’ve read on Nifty. I wish I’d been with you from the start but honestly I would have been hunting you down during some of those long stretches between chapters. The 33 month stretch might have caused a man-hunt for a deranged murderer on the loose. I digress! I do want to blow smoke up your skirt with all kinds flattering comments and what not but I not a writer and flowery words aren’t my thing, I’m the complete opposite of Joe when it comes to command of the English language or English literature. So instead I’ll simply say Kudos for the excellent work and perseverance to bring this story to this point. Now I’m trapped with the rest of your fan club and anxiously await the next chapters of Joe college. I won’t say the completion because I don’t want it to end. I would say though if you could churn out about a chapter a month going forward I could call off the search for your whereabouts. I hope to learn more of your bio, hopefully you can share that with us once this project is complete. Thank you, John
ReplyDeleteMy man Chris is nowhere to be seen :/ His own distancing from the crowd to obscurity still feels like as a unsatisfying resolution. All that remains is a nod to him here and there...
ReplyDeleteThere will be a lot more of Chris Riis. The story has not had a resolution yet.
DeleteOh man! Knowing there is 'a lot more of Chris Riis' makes the waiting even harder. I can't wait. This is still one of the very best stories and characters out there. Anywhere.
DeleteSo, uhhhh... it’s been a while. Everything okay? Is 35 expected before 45 leaves?
ReplyDeleteWho knows! I can't control my muse.
DeleteAny chance of a Christmas surprise? Christmas 🎄
ReplyDeleteThe third act hit a roadblock when covid didn't go away.
DeleteJPM770, Hoping you and your family are healthy. Did Joe get vaccinated yet? ;)
ReplyDeleteOn my commute home tonight I thought up three scenarios for Joe. Listing them in order from easiest to write to most difficult.
Delete1.) Joe and his circle are properly vaccinated, all back to living in their apartments, transitioning back to normal with leisurely ennui. Evan earnestly identifies with the Yang Gang; Joe often mocks this, which wounds Evan. Broadly, the characters' relationships grew somewhat closer during the Covid year but their personalities aren't fundamentally changed.
2.) In January or February, some combination of Joe, Jamie, Katie, Matt and Evan, along with one or two new characters, burned out and decamped to Tulum or Oaxaca to wait out the pandemic. They "work remotely" but descend into sloth and non-menacing decadence, as they stay in a VRBO of fashionable but cheap construction. They persuade themselves that they're not like their white, affluent peers taking refuge in the region because they're reading Bolano novels and learning Spanish on Duolingo. They hook up with skanky strangers, drink too much and have sunburns. Joe and another character start taking boxing lessons from a local instructor and inure each other when they have a fake fight while drunk. At some point, they all contract Covid -- ranging from asymptomatic to moderate. One character is later convinced that s/he is suffering from Long Covid, but it turns out to be allergies and a mild STD. This would be lightly inspired by The Sun Also Rises and probably run 30,000 words.
3.) As vaccination becomes widespread and normalcy creeps back, a non-Joe character feels deeply moved by the last year and doesn't want to resume a careerist/material lifestyle. It's more like the end of Groundhog Day or It's a Wonderful Life than depression or spiritual conversion. This person's changed perspective challenges the others to varying degrees, but particularly Joe. Extremely challenging to write without cliches or being too tidy. Would take me forever to write 10,000 words, I'd hate it when I finished it, but probably like it two years later.
You're commuting. Life is returning to normal.
ReplyDeleteNot that my opinion means anything, but I can envision scenarios 1 and 3, but not 2. This is despite the fact that you once wrote here in your blog that you wanted to write/read about people partying. But Joe and the gang seem too responsible and too grounded to just chuck it all. On the other hand, it would be great to read about Matt again, and, well, the partying would go over nicely on Nifty. It just seems a little out of character.
Honestly, just looking forward to anything you decide to write.
Yeah, that's a good point. On the one hand, I feel like a lot of people cracked over the winter and specifically decamped to Mexico/the Mayan Riviera. On the other, my people are fundamentally responsible and risk-averse despite their flirtations with hedonism. And I've discarded dozens of scenarios in this story because they seemed to contrived or cute. But then again, this might play out more like Andy Trafford studying abroad in Italy and partying in Berlin. The extended Joe College universe is full of possibilities.
DeleteI like that the extended Joe College universe is full of possibilities.
ReplyDeleteSo then, maybe the "kidney" the Joe once said that he owed Andy Trafford to atone for being such a jerk to him in high school might be named Chris Riis?
My comment was not posted :(
ReplyDeletePossibly a fourth-dimensional glitch?
DeleteIn f***ing 72hs. I read all the chapters of "Joe College", love the story!! Where is the next chapter coming up??
ReplyDeleteI just binge read the whole story too. I grew up in Long Island, went to Michigan and while I didn’t deal with my sexuality, I can relate to so much in this story. I miss Joe already. Thank you for giving this to me.
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