Panpocalypse Week Two: I Rode the Loop
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.
Gray Ride
“I ride because I have nothing else to do, and I want to push the city’s loneliness up against my own.”
I ride because I have nothing else to do, and I want to push the city’s loneliness up against my own.
It’s late when I get on my bike. Windy. The streets are empty except for delivery workers and the occasional Citi Bike rider. I notice that the Citi Bike riders are often tall white men who ride next to each other while talking. So casual. Sometimes they let go of their handlebars and cruise. The confidence of it is a little galling, but I aspire to have that level of balance, to not be such a spaz.
I circle the park, and then I head west. Mostly I follow the bike lanes because I feel safest there. I want to go up Hudson, the wide expanse of it. I stop at lights and think about my ex-girlfriend Eurydice, who I dated for six months, the first woman I fell in love with. She is a bike messenger, a former volleyball player, a poet, and mother of three children her ex will not let her see. Often broke. Gorgeous. Angry and sweet. She said her favorite thing about riding in the city was whizzing past construction workers as they whistled at her.
Her name is Eurydice because I am that little bitch Orpheus who can’t stop herself from looking backward and ruining everything. I am not above seduction via the lute. Poets, you know.
At a light on Christopher and Hudson, pulled up against the curb and resting my ass on my seat more comfortably than I thought possible, I text her, “I got a bike!”
“Bikes are cool. Be careful,” she texts back.
“Are you delivering? I thought maybe we could meet up.”
“No. Working at home.” She told me a couple weeks ago that she got a job processing bankruptcy claims.
“I miss you. I wonder if we can be friends?” I ask.
“Stay safe,” she sends back. She doesn’t give me much; she did for a little bit and then it all blew up.
I’m off again, trying to ride through the shame I feel at reaching out, the futility of it. The bike lane on Hudson is painted light green like a faded tennis court. The pink leaves of the magnolia trees have collected in the gutter. My face, especially around my mouth, sweats into my mask. My heart beats faster than it ever does in yoga.
I continue up Hudson and over toward the Whitney. The wind picks up and I pedal harder to keep going. For a moment, the wind is so strong that I pedal and don’t move. I tip over and panic for a second, but I’m okay. I get up.
“Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)” by Frank O’Hara, from Lunch Poems, 1965.
In this moment, I name my bike Lana, after my favorite Frank O’Hara poem: “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” I write about this poem often, how it’s become a kind of disability theme song for me. I like imagining myself as Lana Turner, collapsing on the sidewalk in epic Hollywood style, instead of my usual graceless catastrophes. In January I fell on the street and broke my arm. From research, I know that Lana Turner collapsed from exhaustion, but she did eventually get back up, after some rest at the hospital. The studios pushed her too hard.
I pass the old awnings of what used to be the meat-packing plants and then queer clubs in the eighties and nineties. I never went to those clubs, but I wish I had. I still want to go to a dungeon. I want to tie someone up and fuck them and get dragged around on a leash.
I stop again to take pictures of a potted tree that’s fallen over. A man in a flannel jacket with a little dog walks past the fallen tree. The dog sniffs and pulls at its leash to stay. I push off.
I’m getting used to my bike’s stopping and starting, the way I can land my foot on the curb and sit on the seat like I’m riding a horse with a saddle. Sometimes I hop off the seat and sometimes I stay on it. Later when I get home, I feel the inside of my right knee bruising from where I hit the bar when I hop off. I make a note to myself to work on that, to ease off my bike more gently. I turn south along a brick street that’s been sanded smooth by construction and traffic. There are no cars anywhere. Underneath the High Line, I pause to take a video of a clutch of vines hanging off the steel railroad tracks. The vines undulate like waves in the wind. A man on the stairs looks down at me and away.
I remember Eurydice, when we first started dating. We are in Red Hook at a bar full of dykes who don’t know what to make of us. We kiss against the wall. She presses hard into me. We have to go home so we can fuck. But she has her bike, and in a moment of panic outside the bar, I get on the bus without her. I think she’s behind me, but the door closes before she can get her bike on, and the bus takes off.
I want to cry. The bus passengers stare at me. Have they never seen a couple like us? I am at times ashamed of our age difference. I know I am too old for her, but she’s also been through so much. She’s more jaded than me. I am the hopeful, stupid one, who doesn’t understand how the world works, according to her.
I sit down defeated and space out. And then I see her out the window, pedaling alongside the bus, stopping when we stop, moving when we move, keeping her eye on me. My heart beats in my pussy. The passengers soften to us, an old lady smiles at me and nods. We’re in a rom-com for a minute and the city decides to play along. I blush.
I have never seen a rom-com about a middle-aged, bisexual, disabled cis woman and her trans girlfriend.
Pink Bridge
Once when my mom comes to visit, we walk across the Williamsburg Bridge. Often when she visits, I am torn between caring for her and caring for my kid. But this is a good day. My mother has agreed to walk to Brooklyn. She’s not afraid of the city like she sometimes is. She walks next to me instead of scurrying ahead or behind and saying “Where to?” on every corner, which annoys me and makes me feel like a tour leader.
The women in my family are prone to darting and hiding, like mice, like we’re not safe, like we’re in a maze and about to get caught. It’s May, we’ve survived Mother’s Day without a fight, and it’s warm but not hot, and sunny with a full blue sky. We link arms, the subway cars rattle and roll beneath us. We laugh and talk about books. I can tease her, and she doesn’t mind because I’m not being a bitch this weekend. I am nice.
“Why did they paint it pink?” she asks.
“I don’t know, but it’s such a good color.” For most of my adult life, I confuse the bridges and don’t know their descending order from Harlem to the Statue of Liberty.
I might even say, We’re on the Manhattan Bridge, and think I’m right and she’ll agree, because we are two country mice, one who ran away to the city and one who ran away but returned to the country.
I allow her to complain about my stepfather, to tell me things I don’t want to know. Newly divorced, I am not yet tired of dating. I still like men as lovers. I am in love with a new man, and he’s opened me up sexually and taught me that I like to tie him up and punish him. Hurting him in this dom way makes me cackle with delight. My boots land on the bridge’s walkway and my dress blows in the wind.
When we get off the bridge, I take her to a taco place I love, La Superior. We get margaritas and tacos and guacamole. The alcohol loosens my tongue, and I tell her about my new boyfriend and that am happy. I don’t tell her about domming and subbing.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Mommy, I really am,” I say.
I don’t tell her about the last time I was here: two years ago with my friend Guitar, right before my marriage ended. I was talking about a forbidden crush, Pony, and I burst into tears because I felt such shame about my longing.
In the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror. What did I see? A woman with the wrong haircut. A trapped woman. A woman with animal hungers. A crying woman who was in love with her therapist and Pony and a student who lingered during office hours and reminded her of JFK.
You are married, I told myself. You must make this work, even if you are unhappy. I can’t remember what Guitar said, but I know it was something good and scary. She helped me leave my marriage. She was hard and pushed me. I didn’t like it, but she was a prophet that way. She took me out, showed me around, and let me see that at night I could do things. There were parties and men who wanted me, even if only for a night.
“Are you really okay?” my mom pushes.
“Mommy, I promise, yes.”
I only call her Mommy when I am very happy or very sad.
Tiny Tim Is My Avatar
The best version of A Christmas Carol is the Disney one with Mickey Mouse as Bob Cratchit and Scrooge McDuck as Ebenezer Scrooge. The cutest disabled cartoon character ever is Tiny Tim, drawn as a small Mickey Mouse, with a stick for a crutch. What will happen to Tiny Tim? He’s so gracious and good and says, “God bless us, every one,” and then he pulls off a little cartoon turkey leg to dig in.
I watch Mickey’s Christmas Carol on the gold shag carpet of the split-level ranch house we move to when I am ten. I’m twelve when the movie airs on NBC during prime time. This is the era of thirteen channels. My brother and I are wearing footie pajamas and sip glasses of pop. We are deep into all the Christmas shows of that era, but especially Mickey’s Christmas Carol, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’m drawn to Tiny Tim with turned-in legs and cane (likely rickets and TB, though Dickens never says), Rudolph with his strange glowing nose and island of misfit toys, and Charlie Brown with his “blockheaded” ideas and sad excuse for a Christmas tree. If I am twelve, that means I have been diagnosed and “cured.” I take a magic pill several times a day, synthetic dopamine, pure and uncut then, pink, round, and chalky. Most days, it makes me queasy. Sometimes I throw it up, until I learn to eat something with my pills.
It’s December 10, the snow in western New York is deep and heavy. My father builds a fire in the fireplace, which is special, because the exertion makes him testy. Like Bob Cratchit, my dad has been trying to make partner at his firm for years. It’s the backdrop of much of my parents’ conversation: money and how to have more of it. My brother and I are especially close at Christmas. We ask for a lot of presents, and we usually get them. We still believe in Santa and the transformational power of a holiday, even though our parents have awful fights around Christmas, usually about the tree. This year we have plans to catch Santa in the middle of the night. We have flashlights and plans for a booby trap.
My mom is laid off this year from her secretary job and does needlepoint on the couch covered in an afghan. We want her to be a stay-at-home mom, but my dad is against that. We’re not sure what my mom wants, and we probably don’t care because we are kids, I mean, dicks like that, lol.
I wonder what my parents think when we watch Tiny Tim in Mickey’s Christmas Carol. They are glad I did not die, though I won’t know that until years later when they tell me that for a while they thought I had a fatal disease called Friedreich’s Ataxia, which often leads to death in the early twenties.
Like Tiny Tim, I am the sweetest cripple. A good girl. I submit to all the tests and the touching and poking and prodding. I learn early on to be the best patient, the cutest and most obedient. The one with highest cartoon pitch voice, because then the doctors will take care of me. It’s not until much later in my life that I stop being good. It turns out, I am not afraid of much because I’ve been in so much pain for so long. I don’t care. I can walk now, and later I will walk into so much trouble, simply because I can. Disabled people have a right to be bad too. I joke with only my closest people that I am that little Tiny Tim, so cute, so twee, and so irresistible as to take over the whole story. Once Dickens—he is such a master at ripping our hearts out—stages Tiny Tim’s funeral, we will do anything for that little sickie. He transforms the evil Scrooge because he’s so gracious and good. “God bless us, every one,” he says, and then he snuggles with Scrooge in a rocking chair. He’s not a whiner. He’s an inspiration.
“I learn early on to be a good patient, the cutest and most obedient. The one with the highest cartoon pitch voice.”
I’d like to snuggle with that little Mickey Mouse Tiny Tim. I’d like to throw him up in the air and catch him. It matters that he doesn’t have a little wheelchair, because that would render him culturally not cute, not curable, too disabled, and too distant for grabbing and touching. People love to touch the disabled and pregnant without consent. Tiny Tim is a disability doll. Floppy and compliant.
I call Gina, one of my casual lovers. I’m not allowed to see her during the pandemic. She’s immunosuppressed and lives in New Jersey. I can’t get to her and it’s potentially dangerous that I see her. Though this gets old. I think we should pod up somehow. I do a lot of research on various germ pods and configurations. This article in the Times says, “Bubble size should not matter, researchers say, so long as the boundaries are firm. But, of course, with more people come more opportunities for leaks.”
“Can you ask your doctor?” I ask. “Can you talk to your ex-wife?”
She’s been saying no to me for a long time, but she’s getting lonely too. We want to touch each other. I want to sit on her lap. She bought a new sex toy that is shaped like an L and looks like two dicks.
“Don’t dig in. Don’t be stubborn.” I haven’t seen anyone in two months except my kid and her dad.
“Okay, I will talk to them.” Her ex is afraid too, doesn’t want the kids to get sick. There’s some New Jersey–commuter, New York City–phobia going on too, like if you escape from New York City every day, you are not obliged to take care of your city, to be with it.
“I want to be able to visit you and take care of you after your surgery. I don’t want everyone to think I’m a stranger,” I say.
“I want that too.” We have talked about her pussy and the things we will be able to do with it. I am agnostic about genitals. I want you to have what’s right for your gender. I work with everything. Sex toys to me are extensions of body parts if we want them to be. They are robots too or just useful and increasingly well-designed, cute tools. I like dicks and pussies just the same though I have moods and preferences depending on the day. Sex for me just has to be queer, negotiated, playful, and intimate if we are ready. An asshole can be a pussy as easily as a dick. But sometimes a woman doesn’t want to have her dick anymore and so it’s time.
Tonight I go out on my bike at six o’clock. I have heartburn, gas, a stomachache. I can’t bear it anymore. “I can’t do it,” I text her. “I can’t do it. I can’t not touch another adult for this long. I can’t.”
I pedal up University Place, down Thirteenth, and up Sixth Avenue. Good bike lanes. No Citi Bikers at this hour, just me and the delivery men, who give me a lot of space, who are so much faster than I am.
I pass Trader Joe’s. I miss their food, but I haven’t been. I shop the small, shitty grocery stores during this time. Gristedes. Morton Williams. Outside Trader Joe’s, they’ve set up tables for people to pack their bags. It’s not busy, but I can’t figure out the system, so I don’t stop. I hate food now anyways. All it does is hurt me and all I do is prepare it. I don’t really deal with my IBS except to cut out gluten, sugar, and cow’s milk, but even that’s not working lately.
I fart my way up Sixth Avenue. Streaming farts, I consider riding up to Macy’s but decide that’s too depressing. I cut over to Seventh Avenue. I practice not hopping off my bike but stopping and leaning a little on my toes while keeping my ass on the seat. I’m doing a good job.
The clapping starts when I am on Hudson. Outside a bar that has takeout is a big crowd drinking beer out of plastic cups, kinda keeping away from each other, but not really. Chefs come out and bang pans. I stop and clap and clap and clap. People really love the clapping and I know it’s important for essential workers, but I am not able to get caught up in it. I don’t want to clap. I want doctors and nurses, some of whom are my former students, to have proper PPE. I want a president who isn’t a racist rapist, and I want a cure. I want to touch people instead of clapping alone on my bike.
In the rabbit warren parts of the West Village, like Jane, Charles, and West Tenth, there are families on stoops playing cards. I’m jealous and I keep going, wondering why I don’t have a family like this, a house like this, a stoop, a charming group of witty West Village neighbors.
Money probably. Self-isolation maybe. Class rage.
When I get home, I see a message on Lex. “Do you want to make a germ bubble with me?”
“Maybe,” I write back.
I Rode the Loop
“I will miss your selfhood still transmitting on screens,” I tell my students. It’s our last day and I manage to shower before class. My eyes are tired and squinty in the Zoom square that forces me to stare at my face for several hours on certain days. It’s a mirror I guess, but a live one, and so more evil, like the queer mirror in Sleeping Beauty. That mirror is a bitter queen. The Zoom mirror is too.
During my last class, Gina texts me what her ex-wife said. “No, it’s too risky to see you,” she writes. “She’s worried I’ll get sick and then she’ll have to take care of the kids on her own.” It’s all valid, except I hate them both for controlling me, deciding my fate. I don’t matter, I pout, and try not to cry through my last class.
My students and I listen to Rosa Alcalá’s poem “You Rode a Loop.” Listen to it here now and then come back.
What do you think? Do some freewriting for five minutes about the loops in your life. Mental, physical, in your past, your present. Make sure to include one object like Rosa does. This is my prompt for my students, but you can do it now too if you like. This morning on Twitter, an essayist I like said prompts are dangerous. Well, no. There are good prompts and bad prompts. I craft prompts very carefully. They need both constraints and openness.
In these moments of listening, you feel psychically linked to Rosa, who has become in recent years a dear friend to one of your best friends in graduate school, Jonna. In November, Rosa and Jonna hosted you at UTEP in celebration of your novel.
Wonder why you are writing in second person and switch back to first.
In November, in El Paso, I am very happy. The events are well-attended and the community comes out for me, a stranger. Bill, who runs the bookstore there, is one of the sweetest booksellers I’ve ever met, and booksellers are already the sweetest. I travel with my kid, and she and Jonna’s kids adore each other, like in a deep nerd, weird, loving way. We tell them they are like cousins and they go for it. Jonna and I hang out like we did in graduate school, but with better food and in the desert, which is one of my favorite landscapes, the wide blue sky, the heat and chill, the artistic pull of expanse and vista. We stay in a little adobe Craftsman, and every morning I walk down the street to eat at an amazing café with several gluten-free treats.
I read with Andrea Cote Botero, a Colombian poet who teaches in UTEP’s bilingual MFA program. She reads in Spanish and then there’s a translation. I miss reading with poets. My Spanish is rusty. I don’t tell anyone about how happy I am in Spanish-speaking places. My grandma is Cuban and I was a Spanish minor and studied abroad in Spain, but this information feels irrelevant. I associate Spanish with my liberation, travel, understanding certain things about my family that have to do with mood, smells, jokes, and rumors.
After the reading, I drink mezcal with Andrea’s husband. Rosa is next to me and we talk about a poet we both love. Jonna is on the other side, and I feel my worlds coming together, my graduate-school life and my novelist life. My straight life and my queer life. Mostly I am happy to sit between two dear women writers and friends, drink mezcal, and listen in on both Spanish and English. Andrea’s husband has been visiting the migration camps in Juárez and talking to people who are waiting. He tells us about the Cuban sandwich vendors, how quickly they have made businesses to feed people. I am so grateful for this knowledge, firsthand and real, not filtered through white journalists. The border is not imaginary in El Paso, the border and the wall are there every day.
“Pandemic time is loop time. Slack return and recurrence of very little. Tiny Tim with his little crutch hobbling along, trying to stay alive.”
I cannot imagine at this moment how far I will be from them all in six months.
In Rosa’s poem, she remembers the loop her mother allowed her to ride and the first time the men in the factory called out to her, a first catcall from strangers, and her mother’s silence when the speaker asks, “Does this mean I am beautiful?” The poem centers on a “pinprick” of a memory, shade and light and then also a meta layer about how memory works, how little we get of it, that pinprick of light, like the shutter of a camera. There’s real danger in the speaker’s childhood, Drac the Dropout who bites girls’ necks, the boys on the playground who grab asses and teachers who look away, and then the grown men who catcall a girl on a bike with a banana seat. The speaker considers her own daughter’s journey on her bike, on safe, quiet streets, and she waits for her too.
The poem comes to me at a critical moment of writing for you.
I think of the loops in my life, how I never liked to ride the loop in Prospect Park. I prefer to wander on my bike, take whatever turn feels right. Pandemic time is loop time. Slack return and recurrence of very little. Tiny Tim with his little crutch hobbling along, trying to stay alive.
