The Outside World

I still take walks with my baby daughter every afternoon, even though people seem to think you’re not supposed to leave your house anymore. Even under the shelter in place Cuomo swears isn’t a shelter in place, you can still go outside. “Who can leave their house now?!” I saw someone tweet incredulously to a children’s book author I once did cocaine with. I took it as a question about the rules, but could also be about volition.

Well, I like to leave the house. I’m careful, I wash my hands. I want to say I avoid crowded places, but there aren’t any crowded places left. It’s just me, my daughter snuggled in her stroller, and about 30 feet of empty concrete between closed up shops.

In a certain sense everything is normal. The weather’s been great. It’s quiet. If you just relax and let your mind wander, it’s pretty nice.

It’s deserted, sure, but you can trick yourself into thinking that’s not too weird. If you’re going by a closed bar you can think somewhere in your lizard brain “oh it’s the afternoon, they probably open at 5.” And if it’s a closed café you can think, “oh is that place only open for the mornings, I never noticed.”

Really it’s the places that are open that give it away. A bar selling cans of beer out of the fridge while the bartender and his boyfriend sit around checking their phones nervously, before kind of uncomfortably sincerely thanking you for coming in. The café (again, empty) with signs everywhere about being ‘takeout only’ while you and the baristas talk in a whisper – it can’t really be that bad, can it? Are they going to fire you? Are you going to reopen? What’s your venmo?

Though really that was a few days ago. The café I went to today had a rope strung across the big entryway’s reclaimed wood shutters with a little piece of cardboard pinned to it saying that you had to order takeout from the sidewalk. When I asked if I could get my coldbrew in my thermos (saving the planet, etc), the barista looked away and mumbled “… I’m kind of trying not to touch anything.”

After about 15 minutes on the sidewalk, you’ll notice basically everyone you’ve passed has been pushing a stroller or pulling a dog. I’m one of the stroller people – I try to give the other ones a friendly nod but they mostly look like they don’t want anything to do with me. There are a few other major groups of people you see out. People who like to get loudly drunk outside and don’t seem to spend a lot of time reading the news. People who look like they’re taking a spacewalk in a low-budget movie, with rubber kitchen gloves and masks you’re supposed to wear when you spray paint something. They look very nervous and they walk fast.

Also of course it’s very quiet, which makes the odd thing that’s still going on even louder and more jarring. They were jackhammering up the sidewalk next to my apartment today and I had to turn the volume way, way up on the various apocalypse movies I was watching. I was walking in Crown Heights at exactly 2 PM, down Dean or Bergen, and some church’s recording of bells went off and nothing has ever seemed louder to me in my life. It was like the air was empty, there were no other sounds to stop it. So it filled all the space.

People who’ve come outside to yell are filling up the quiet, too. There’s a tension starting to creep around the edges. You can hear them for blocks.

Guy, early 30s, white shirt black jacket, heavy new york/Dominican accent. On his phone. “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I LOVE YOU! I TREAT YOUR KIDS LIKE THEY’RE MY OWN. AND YOU DON’T WANT ME TO BE UPSET???”

Teenage girl, on my block, screaming at a closed up apartment building:
“COME DOWN HERE AND SAY IT TO MY FACE! YOU’LL SAY IT ON FUCKING FACEBOOK, BUT YOU WON’T SAY IT TO MY FACE? YOU DON’T KNOW ME! I’LL MURDER YOU!”

Saw some guys get into a fender bender and jump out of their cars to yell at each other. Saw some old guys sitting on beat-up chairs outside a bodega, screaming while white kids edged around them to panic-buy pop chips.

I’d like to say I’m going out every day because it seems important to support businesses or pretend life is normal for my daughter, but really it’s a part of me I’m not very proud of. It’s the same thing that made me not see any of the movies my friends loved when I was 12 – I’ve still never watched Ace Ventura: Pet Detective or Batman Forever or Dumb and Dumber. Even at the lunch table in middle school, I was sure everyone was losing their minds over something for no reason, that I knew better somehow. I’ve basically never stopped feeling this way (haven’t seen Fleabag or Succession which I think is actively harming my career). So I keep going out. When Cuomo announced this morning that the city was going to shut down on Sunday, the first thing I did was grab my daughter and the stroller and ran out to the sidewalk. I might not be able to leave tomorrow.