Going Out
by Zachary Lipez
I was feeling pretty smug about my lockdown sobriety, and honestly forgot that I was eating non-prescription adderall like they were Milk Duds on Free Milk Dud Day. I congratulated myself on my psychic fortitude, conveniently ignoring a newfound propensity to tear up at daily listens of Steely Dan’s lyrically problematic masterpiece The Royal Scam, whenever Donald Fagen sang “I never knew you/ you were a roller skater.” I thought I was keeping my facial hair reasonably tight until a homeless outreach guy on the E train offered me a sandwich and rubber gloves. I declined the food but took the gloves.
Realizing that I was no more immune to cabin fever than anyone, I signed up to volunteer twice a week for eight-to-ten hour shifts delivering food for God’s Love We Deliver. I used to volunteer all the time for New York Cares but, at some point, the “I’ll sign up next week”s had become a two-year intermission. Zohra had been studying the concept of Zakat (the Islamic call to charity) in her Koran classes and that was on my mind. Indulging my tendency towards cynicism, I told myself I was volunteering mainly so that I’d have something in my back pocket to win arguments online and that was partially true as well. But eventually, setting both cynicism and incipient sainthood aside, I was doing it mainly for the long van rides on empty New York expressways, listening to the Steve Harvey Morning Show. The driver I was assigned to assist shouting out “Uncle Charlie!” through his mask every time Charlie Wilson’s “There Goes My Baby” came on the radio.
There were so few cars on the road, those first few weeks, that drivers nodded to each other at red lights. I’ve been a bartender for twenty years but that’s a job whose solidarity is largely only shared by other nightlife workers (and cabbies who generally love having a sober fare at 4AM). So, I won’t lie, I reveled in all the head nods that came with being the only people on the streets in the early morning. If the solidarity extended to me was based on the misapprehension that I had to be there, well, I didn’t see any need to correct it.
While God’s Love has routes all over the city, I was mainly assigned to assist drivers going to Harlem and The Bronx. I come from a hipster tradition that has maintained its reverence to the idea of the LES, even after the neighborhood’s transformation (that we helped cause) into an open-air frat house. And a tradition that refers, with only a dash of irony, to 14th street as “Uptown.” This provincial background, combined with the long days of quarantine, made speeding towards Gun Hill Road or navigating the repeating architecture of Co-Op City feel like coming out of a dark tunnel to see the ocean at daybreak. The one time we made a delivery to City Island, I felt just like Freddy Bensen, the Steve Martin role in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, seeing the French Riviera for the first time.
When the Black Lives Matter protests began again, I joined them like I did in 2014. As with volunteering, my motivations were a mix of humanism and selfishness. I strive to love my fellow humans, engage in necessary calls for justice, and hate the police. I also missed walking everywhere. Seeing all the punks on the street was as close to going to shows as one could expect for the foreseeable future. Even the throwing of water bottles at riot cops wasn’t so different from how audiences treat the bands at the concerts I’d used to attend.
I had to stop volunteering and attending protests two weeks before I was going to go see my mother in Massachusetts. She’s in good health besides the cancer but she’s also eighty. This was at the end of June. My sister, aside from working ten-hour days teaching fifth grade, had been helping with all the gardening and groceries since April. So, as other non-essential New Yorkers were transitioning from self-quarantine to angrily filming each other outside, I pulled down the shades, fired up the DC Universe channel on the ROKU, and committed to reading the Gail Simone runs of Birds of Prey, Secret Six, Wonder Woman, and Batgirl in their entirety. After that, I tried to read all the Geoff Johns comics but, to be honest, his propensity for superhero/villain dismemberment bummed me out. I’ve done enough reading on depression that I was careful to take a shower and put pants on every day. I even exercised for a bit until it started to make a visible difference and, one day, I looked at my weights and thought “I could just not pick those up.” And that was that for that.
I’m not going to get into my search history during lockdown except to say that much of it was occasionally deeply, deeply uncool.
Zohra and I have a shared slogan. It’s “No Lessons Learned.” I don’t like stories with morals, and people who give advice online are the enemies of my heart. There is the world and there is God. We have responsibilities to both, but knowing what those exact responsibilities are is a lot like fumbling for your eyeglasses after a too-long, unintentional nap where it’s close to daybreak and all the apartment lights are still on. And turning them off and brushing your teeth feels like a lot of work. Not knowing what day it is during lockdown is the privilege of those who can survive without working, but I don’t think it’s controversial to say that time got weird for everyone. I mean time itself, its measurement. Not the “strange/dark times” that brands and their salespeople have been referring to in their press release opening statements. I mean time like a calendar with pages stuck together from water damage. And maybe not for everyone. I can only go by humanity’s online posts. Solitude with flashes of communal action hasn’t given me any more trust in the universal than before.
Zachary Lipez is a writer and musician in New York City. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, VICE, The Fader, Hazlitt, and Penthouse. His most recent book with regular co-authors Stacy Wakefield and Nick Zinner is 131 Different Things (Akashic Books). His most recent album with Publicist UK is Forgive Yourself (Relapse Records). His newsletter can be found at https://zacharylipez.substack.com/ and all other strongly held opinions can be found at @zacharylipez on twitter dot com.
