I might have understated it, just a little. The city is in its third week of near-total lockdown, CUNY went online (following my lead heh heh) a few days after that entry, and thousands of New Yorkers have died of COVID-19. It is a global pandemic, a crisis; the sort of emergency that changes everything. 

(Everything, maybe except the habits of the guys who congregate outside the window of our apartment). 

April 7, 2020

Maybe it’s easy to read this and laugh (if grimly), from a fifth floor elevator building a short walk north and west of where that entry was written. But we lived in that ground floor apartment through seven more months of those habits: the drinking that ran from 8am to past midnight, the groups of men cycling in and out of the northeast corner of 207th and Cooper, a block from the shut-down “A” train, a block from a park where they could have done this without bothering a family.

I remember the boombox blasting Sinatra some times and salsa at others, and one particular group who played from around the corner a recognizable playlist of the most terrible music from my own lifetime. It included the canonically bad–Vanilla Ice, House of Pain–and the forgettably mediocre–I mean, B*U*S*H, really. I remember the car that stopped on 207th playing an incredibly speaker in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, mercifully stopping its music and driving away just as I was due to help eulogize my aunt over Zoom.

I remember the guys on cellphones leaning against the wall under the window where I wrote those very lines. There was once a long conversation with a lawyer or about a judge; in any event, it was in the middle of the night, the speaker was drunk. Once a man rolled a joint on the other side of the thin pane of glass, looking into my bedroom, my wife asleep on the other side of the room, as he fiddled the paper closed on my windowsill.

Yeah: I don’t miss any of that.

But I wonder whether it was fair to exclude them from the ‘everything’ that was changed by the pandemic. It’s hard to know what their living situations were. Some may have lived in what NYC Test and Trace has been calling “congregate settings” the catch-all term for assisted living facilities, group homes and homeless shelters. And sure, if I were living through a pandemic in a group home or a shelter (or an assisted living facility like the Isabella Center–where I’d done a year or more of creative writing workshops pre-pandemic, and where more than 100 people died of COVID), I’d want to get out of there and be outside for as much of it as possible. (They were, almost all of the time, and almost to a man, maskless.)

So, conclusion: they were annoying to live on the other side of, not least because we paid rent and they didn’t, or because they were loud and we were quiet, or because they had another place to go and we didn’t. But to say nothing had changed for them, to say they weren’t in danger and suffering and reacting to it by doing what they did? No, they were probably just doing that.

And, months later, in front of a still-vacant apartment, they still are.

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