Panpocalypse Week Four: Hacks
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman takes to biking through a shutdown New York City in search for the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart.
Click here for Week Three.
He’s Called Beemer Because
He picks me up in a BMW. Later he will correct me on the brand of his car. We have agreed to make a bubble together and checked with our exes that it’s okay with them to expand our bubbles. We agree no pressure for a relationship, just two older queers who need touch and companionship.
His house is really nice—a renovated brownstone with built-ins. Two floors belong to him and his eight-year-old daughter, and the top two belong to his ex. He makes me dinner and a negroni. We go for a walk and talk a lot about academia, probably too much, because I am so lonely and desperate for touch I am not listening to the panic inside me, or I don’t hear it.
Or I am so desperate for care that I don’t recognize how I really feel, that maybe something is off, that this is all moving very quickly.
“Should we just kiss to get it over with so I can calm down?” I ask, thinking this is funny and also true.
He says, “I’m a slow burn,” so I think that means no, and I feel my usual shame attack for asking for something and not getting it.
Still, I’m game. I tell myself not to panic. We’d decided earlier over text that we wouldn’t have sex, just talk and cuddle. So we talk on the couch about my books, about his kid’s toys, many of which are the same as my kid’s and set up in little configurations around the living room.
“Do you want to lie on the bed?” he asks, and I say yes.
We’re both good kissers, that part is a match, and some of my clothes are coming off. My shirt and my bra. His shirt. My pants.
“I want to check in because I thought you didn’t want to have sex,” I say.
“I think I changed my mind,” he says.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
And then he’s licking my pussy and he’s very good at that and then I am licking his pussy, and I’ve really missed pussies.
He says he wants me to stay overnight and I don’t think I want to, but I do anyway, because he will have to drive me home and that makes me feel bad.
I don’t sleep very well, and I feel him awake in the night, anxious. I like him a lot, but I am also thinking about Gina, who I’d rather be next to but can’t because she won’t or can’t make a germ bubble with me.
In the morning he is awkward, and I don’t understand. He insists on making me breakfast, and I get stressed because something has shifted and I don’t know why or what. It feels like the aftermath of a bad college hookup: like, get out, you have to go, but stay, no, really, I like you, you’re special. He’s nervous about his daughter coming down the stairs and seeing me.
“It’s a bit intense for me,” I say. “I haven’t dated anyone whose kid lives just upstairs.”
“It’s not ideal for dating.”
I’m ready to go. His dog chews on my bike helmet while we eat, but I wear it anyway and leave with my uneasy feelings.
The ride home is long and I make a wrong turn and for one terrifying minute I am almost on the BQE. I wheel my bike through some weeds and then back onto the highway to access the bike path. I think of Dionne and Cher in Clueless and the hilarious scene when they get on the Los Angeles freeway and scream for a full minute until they can exit. I wish I had someone to scream and laugh with me, to witness my accidents and mistakes. Being a ham and making people laugh is one of my great joys. I don’t get to do that much anymore, except for with my kid.
On the Manhattan Bridge, the sky opens up and rains on me. The bridge is slick so I go extra slow. People pass me, which is fine, but I still get rattled. Sometimes I have a little spasm and do a jerky handlebar thing.
A woman cruises by and shouts, “Are you okay?”
“Yes!” I say back.
The rain stops and I’m off the bridge. The city is quiet. It’s only eight a.m. When I get to the corner of Houston and Allen, I pull up next to a middle-aged white guy in a beat-up, dusty-rose convertible Cadillac. He beams at me. No mask.
“Nice car,” I say.
“Thanks, my wife says I shouldn’t be out here. I have asthma, but there’s no pollution! The air is so clean!”
I look away and wait for the light to change so I can escape. He seems a little unhinged and I don’t want him to breathe on me.
He points to a rooftop kitty-corner to where we wait. “Did you ever see that lighthouse up there?”
I look up and he’s right. There’s a cute little painted lighthouse, almost like a treehouse fort, on top of the building.
“No, I haven’t seen that!” I’m delighted with him now.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to live up there?” he says, and before I can reply, the light changes and he speeds off.
I Fall and I Can’t Get Up
This winter I fall on the street so spectacularly that I break my arm. My mom is in town, and we fight in the sometimes vicious ways of my family. Duress I am not allowing myself to write about.
“Am I mentally ill? Yes. I have breakdowns. Episodes. Bodily manifestations of psychological trauma. Also perimenopause is for real and there’s very little research on how to help perimenopausal women—because guess what, nobody cares.”
Am I mentally ill? Yes. I have breakdowns. Episodes. Bodily manifestations of psychological trauma. Also perimenopause is for real and there’s very little research on how to help perimenopausal women—because guess what, nobody cares.
My kid and I rush down University Place. I haven’t slept well and as my therapist will later point out, my boundaries have been obliterated. One wrong step and my foot catches on the seam in the sidewalk or maybe some mottled part or maybe nothing and then I’m down, collapsed, Lana Turner has collapsed. I hear a bone break, a rattle, a fissure, slippage, wrongness.
“Mama, are you okay?”
“No, no. I think my arm is broken.”
“Mama.”
A construction worker pulls me up with my good arm. Street murmurs and a woman behind me cooing softly. Remember when we could touch each other, when strangers could help you on the street? I cradle my arm and realize I need to console my kid, reassure her that I’m all right.
“You run ahead. Meet your friend. Mama will go to the doctor. I’m okay, don’t worry.” I watch her go.
I do a bizarre amount of chores for someone with a broken arm, get my medicine, pack a bag, call Guapo and Pauline to find out the best emergency room to go to, get in a cab, and feel lucky for the millionth time that I have insurance.
At the hospital, I beg for Percocet and weep. I am always afraid of getting stuck somewhere without my medicine. The nurses are so nice. I get a second Percocet.
Hacks
It’s hard to fix the mistakes that the robot makes while I talk. Going back in and editing hurts my muscles too. I am trying to hack the novel. This serialization, this robot, this way of writing this book—it’s all a trick to make something I find excruciating easier. Writing my last novel gave me a nervous breakdown.
I see most of my friends working, working, working, working; Zooming to keep businesses going, clients happy, bosses satisfied; the capitalist machine running, running, running. Humming. I am typing now because I don’t feel like fixing all the mistakes on the robot dictator. This software really isn’t that great. Just so you know, I couldn’t get Dragon so am using Microsoft Word. I shouldn’t complain, but I’m a complainer, so I will do that here.
I start reading Heavy by Kiese Laymon, and it’s already the best thing ever and there’s something in the beginning about not giving the reader what she wants or not giving the publisher the lie that they want or not giving the audience the triumphant narrative. What it means though is that I have to expose myself in all my wretchedness, or it feels that way.
If I were to describe depression to you, I mean, could I? Could I describe mental illness with a side of neurological disorder? Or maybe it’s the other way around. No one’s brain is going to be right when there’s not enough dopamine and when the serotonin doesn’t jump the synapses the way it’s supposed to. I’m a very smart woman, but even when my neurologist draws me pictures of my brain, it makes no sense to me. It’s quite baffling to her at times too, and she’s an expert in movement disorders.
I have the wrong code to get reimbursed for therapy. Or I have left off a number and now I have to resubmit the claims.
Depression for me is not being able to stop crying for a whole day. It’s acute sensitivity, a blowing up of slights others might consider minor. It’s fighting when you don’t want to, it’s escalating when you should stand down, it’s not seeing anything up ahead that looks good or fun or interesting or hopeful, it’s no end in sight, it’s a pandemic for sure—but what’s mental illness housed inside of a pandemic? Suicide, I fear.
For all my life, I have received or helped shape or believed a message that I am not lovable or worthy of the kinds of love I need. It’s humiliating to type this. It makes me cry even more and I am currently very medicated. So medicated that I am thirty pounds overweight even though I have no appetite.
My friend Picasso messages me on Insta that I’m too hung up on coming out late. “There’s no such thing as a good queer. Being queer is failure.”
“Yes, I’ve read my Halberstam,” I write back.
“Don’t try to be such a good girl and a good queer,” he writes, and I feel momentarily liberated from myself, which is nice when you are mentally ill.
Memorial Day
Last night, rereading Inferno by Eileen Myles and thinking about jokes, how jokes were the protagonist’s first good thing, a way to make the mothers sitting on the stoop in her neighborhood laugh. Rereading Later by Paul Lisicky and admiring it for its honest sadness around sex and love. Please imagine these books as inspiration for this book. This semester I teach adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy.
Panpocalypse is an attempt to craft some emergent strategy, a fractal approach to art making in the face of totalitarianism, plague, the carceral state, and white supremacy’s capitalist death cult.
I dedicate this book to adrienne maree brown, Paul Lisicky, Kiese Laymon, and Eileen Myles. I dedicate it to the protesters, George Floyd and his family, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Monika Diamond, Sandra Bland, and everyone who has died from police brutality, murder, and COVID.
Please remember that joy is an act of resistance. I used to make people laugh, when I could see them. I miss making you laugh. I will try harder for joy.
On Memorial Day, I take Lana for a long ride. We navigate a giant square, up First Avenue to Fifty-Second Street, all the way west down Eleventh Avenue, and back into the Village. The city is especially empty except for, as always, the delivery people, the grocery store workers, and the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff. On First Avenue I pass Bellevue, pause, and take a picture of a place I might have wound up in if it weren’t for my doctors and medication.
A sweet Black man smiles at me and says, “You’re taking my picture right? Because I’m so handsome.”
I laugh through my mask and say, “I am. Yes, you are.”
I ride past the hospital and see people in scrubs. They look tired of course. One woman leans into the open window of a car. I imagine this is her husband she is visiting and I pedal on.
The UN is amazing! Why don’t I know this already. Lana is teaching me the architecture of New York City, about buildings I’ve ignored or have never really looked at.
I cross Fifty-Second Street slowly. There’s a white middle-aged woman on a foldable bike. She and I alternate passing each other—it’s not competitive, just that we both take our time.
Lana, cover your ears, but for my next bike I’d like a foldable one. My bike guy says they are wonderful, well designed, and worth the extra money.
On Fifty-Second and Park or Madison I see a long food line, mostly men and a few women waiting to be fed. I slow down for the light and make sure to take them into my brain and heart. How hard it is to be hungry and wait in line for food. Don’t glide easily or bumpily past. See who is there and what they need.
When I get to Forty-Second Street, Times Square, it’s empty except for me, a photographer with a tripod set up, and the Jesus sign guy, who has arranged all of his signs around the Winter Garden theater.
Jesus is the way.
Jesus loves you.
Christ died for our sins.
Whosoever shall call upon the Lord shall be saved.
Jesus sayeth, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
By grace are you saved through faith, not of works.
“I want to take this emptiness in and hold it still.”
I sweat and pant into my mask. I want to take this emptiness in and hold it still. The Jesus guy, is this his panpocalypse, the rapture?
I keep heading west past an old apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and down Eleventh Avenue. The Javits Center appears on my right, and then the gleaming silver subway cars idling in the sun, like loaves of bread waiting to rise.
I pedal down and over into Chelsea. I stare through the window of a bookstore. I miss book browsing, touching the beautiful objects that I read and write.
In Chelsea I start to smell hot dogs and it’s only then that I feel sad. I love a hot dog with mustard on a grill. The only things I really like about holidays are the food and my people. I haven’t eaten enough.
Near Stonewall, which is closed, a bar is doing curbside service. I order a negroni and french fries, and wheel my bike to the park across from Stonewall. I sit six feet from the other loners. My negroni seems to be 100 percent gin. I haven’t had a drink in three months. Gin makes me stupid and angry. I only have three sips and then scroll through Eurydice’s Twitter and Instagram. She looks good, skinnier than when I last saw her, but totally fine, like she’s handling lockdown with the swagger of someone who doesn’t need anyone, who is keeping it all together. What do I know? I text her something stupid about hot dogs and being friends again maybe.
No response.
Black Lives Matter
Riding back from Brooklyn, I intersect with protesters and join them. Several of us are on bikes, and people carry signs that read Black Lives Matter and Justice for George Floyd. We all know what’s happening because there’s no justice for Black and Brown people in America. I teach a course called Youth in Revolt and have no illusions about the police because I know the history of social movements in this country and abroad. What’s happening now is connected to COINTELPRO and the state-sanctioned murder of Fred Hampton and the attempted framing of Angela Davis. The list goes on. If you’ve been paying attention at all, you know what the police do.
The cops run alongside us until we get to Houston, and then police vans pull up and try to get us out of the street. We are all masked and most of the protesters are young. They run and ride quickly. I have been learning to slow down and speed up.
We chant:
“Fuck the police!”
“No justice, no peace!”
“George Floyd!”
There are maybe two hundred protesters, and the cops keep running next to us, trying to cut us off with scooters, and swarming to arrest people who step into the street. It’s easy for me to use my white body as a buffer. The police ignore me, and aside from chanting I am silent behind my mask.
We make it to Zuccotti Park. Two more arrests, cops swarming with their plastic handcuffs. I protest a lot, but I’ve never been arrested because I am afraid I won’t be given my medicine in jail and also because of my childhood. I am afraid of violence. These are choices I’ve made, though I recognize my comfort and privilege.
At Zuccotti Park I feel a surge of pride. A couple of protesters shout “Occupy Wall Street!” and I’m taken back to that radical time and to my novel, a protest novel. But we keep moving.
I’m slow and some of us get disconnected from the larger group. I forget about the pandemic because this is more important. I pedal hard to catch up. At the base of the Freedom Tower there are hundreds of cops chasing the protesters. The irony doesn’t elude me.
I speed ahead and join up at again Battery Park City. More clashing. Swatting. A cop rips a bicycle away from a Black woman who fights to get it back. She does and we cheer. More dispersal and jogging. I rest with my bike. I notice a little subgroup of queer teens and feel tender toward them.
Eventually I cycle onto the West Side Highway to meet up with the protesters again. There are more of us on bikes now, and the cyclists stay in the street both behind and ahead of the protesters while sirens flash, cops run, and scooters keep trying to intersect us. They arrest a Latinx teenage girl who starts crying, and we record them and say, “Shout your name! Shout your name so we can find you!” and they do.
Another group of young protesters link arms across the highway and try to block a wall of cops who keep repeating their drone robot bullhorn recording, “If you don’t get out of the street we’re going to arrest you. If you don’t get out of the street we’re going to arrest you. You are blocking traffic. You are blocking traffic.”
Some of these protesters are not much older than my kid. The cops try to surround them, but the bikes, our bikes, are in the way. Filming. Filming.
It’s a chase. It’s been a long chase and my knees are burning.
The protesters get smart and throw garbage bags into the street to block the scooters and vans. We bike maneuver around the garbage onto Chambers Street and then onto Church. A stupid white man yells at us about the garbage, and the protesters tell him to fuck off and care about the right things.
For a couple of glorious minutes, it’s just twenty people on bikes hooting with joy. The only women I see are myself and the woman who fought to get her bike back. I feel a kind of rare boy butch anonymity. A white twentysomething manboy asks me, “Yo, how do I get to the Williamsburg Bridge?” and I tell him.
The police scooter swarm catches up and cuts us off. I almost fall off my bike. I cut my ankle but keep pedaling and manage to get around the cops. Up ahead is another trap. My hands start shaking and I feel like I might fall again if I keep riding, so I leave.
When I get home I post all my videos and describe what I saw. I’m on social media for a long time. It keeps me up and makes my solitude more palpable to me. Tonight felt extra brutal. Cops chasing kids of color for hours.
So the last image I see this night is a Minneapolis police precinct on fire. From my posts a couple of friends check in. How to tell them that I was not afraid because I was fine. I’m white. I am fine mostly. It’s just that I started to get tremors and ticks so I had to go home.
My colleague asks if she can have the footage for her website Ark Republic, a radical Black creative media outlet. Absolutely.
Do you know what a tic is or a tremor? Do you know how many people of color suffer from chronic health problems like fibromyalgia, lupus, asthma, and diabetes? They are no stranger to muscle pain. The whole country is in massive pain, both medicated and unmedicated. Collectively we are traumatized by the legacies of genocide and slavery, and since so many white people are in denial about this trauma, the grief and pain of it, we have an increasingly unwell country.
I protest for two more days until I hurt my knees and can’t walk for a day.
What I love most about neurology is the connection between the “it” and the “I,” the body and the soul, the brain and the psyche, which is also about what people call the body politic.
