To be an endangered pedestrian in the bullshit planned community called “Westchester” requires little more than playing chicken with the wife pushing a baby carriage, the jogger with headphones, the husband and wife huffing and puffing. For the sake of my health — for the sake of courtesy — I’ll step out of the way, often into the street. This courtesy, in twelve weeks of this nonsense, they’ve not extended to me.
This is minor shit. Petty shit. I have not been stopped for walking next to the house razed for the sake of re-construction on Sixteenth Street and Eighty-Ninth Avenue, although three days a week it is unoccupied. I have not been stopped for miming to Moses Sumney, for drumming to Echo & the Bunnymen. But I have been whisked out of a karaoke bar in the same area for daring to sing Boy George’s version of “The Crying Game” (“We gotta get outta here,” a friend said in 2000, car pulled up to the front door, like Michael J. Pollard in Bonnie and Clyde). Even in the Miami of the late Clinton era it could be dangerous to hook up with a trick in a car.
What I mean to say is that the COVID menace has reminded millions of Americans of what many other millions already knew: a plague will destroy us if we don’t follow the simplest of precautions; the right to work quashes the right to ensure the health of our clients; our most vulnerable don’t feel the fury of our self-righteousness about wearing the mask that quashes our liberties; George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery remind us of the consequences of treating the Fourteenth Amendment as a meaningless buzzword during a time when the most privileged will hashtag #liberty from the freshly painted homes they’ve lived in since they were twelve.
In other words, cops are more dangerous than COVID-19. At least we — many of us — can take precautions against the latter.
I think of the Lou Reed quote, paraphrased, about poor doomed Delmore Schwartz: what a pity to be this attractive and gay, which is to say, what a pity to meet the standards of a sodden, doomed, repulsive society yet not meet its standards anyway.
Humanizing The Vacuum 