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As Liam drove south along U.S. Highway 101, just past Gaviota, finally seeing the calm, peaceful blue sea—that everlasting Christlike image of his youth—he felt the now-familiar sensation of spiritual exhaustion, drugged confusion, almost clinical detachment from reality, the amorphous interior blob of lostness he’d been feeling for the past almost-two years.
It was his terminally ill father, yes. Of course it was that. But it was more. It was having left Manhattan. Covid in the midst of it all. The loneliness and depraved fear. The sordid attachment to isolation, like being the core of an apple that didn’t exist.
It was the waiting. For what? For his father to perish. For his fiancée and he to move up north from Lompoc to the Bay Area. For his life, somehow, to “start,” though it’d been “going” for over 40 years at this point. It’d never officially “stopped.”
Liam drove his father’s 2018 black electric Nissan Leaf. It was beautifully, sensationally silent. And fast. He could beat anybody in terms of speed off the line. Forget his mother’s pearl-white brand-new Porsche; this baby could arrow like a pebble hurled by the cosmic hand of God. No comparison. But he didn’t drive fast. He drove slow. Sixty-five in the right-hand lane. He was heading to his folks’ house, on Hedgehog Lane, the small two-story house with spectacular views up on the hill in the Riviera, just below Alamo Padre Serra.
As always, he felt both excited and nervous to see his parents. His dying, bed-bound father and his kind, stubborn mother. He’d been frustrated with his parents all his life, which was another way of saying he’d been frustrated with himself all his life; he was their only son; he carried their problematic genes, the alcoholism and depression, and the further deterioration of his familial “nurture” of narcissism and isolation. He and his father clashed because they didn’t understand each other. He and his mother clashed because they were far too similar. Inevitably he’d have to sit while his father was in bed, the oxygen mask on at 3% assistance, his dad’s nearly-transparent blue eyes looking awkwardly away, unable to fully rest on his son’s. And he’d have to endure his mother, with her complaints and her struggles.
He was deeply familiar with it all. He’d left New York City in 2021 to care for his father. He’d been living in the Bay Area before that. In Late March, 2019 he’d flown across the country and ended up in Manhattan. East Harlem for a year and then Lenox Hill for another year-plus, and then his father’s diagnosis. He pictured the industrial ghost-town that was East Harlem. The young black men who’d threatened him with their violent, murderous eyes in 2020 during the lockdowns, an upper-middleclass white boy from California wandering erratically around their hood. It seemed back then the whites had all fled.
He had nowhere to go, not at first. Flights were cancelled. So he broke his lease and moved to Lenox Hill. He saw in his mind’s eye his little second-floor walkup there, on East 70th, the small, long, narrow shotgun apartment, typical of the city. He remembered the walks up and down 1st Avenue, along York, along the East End Ave, north along the East River paralleling the FDR highway, cars rushing and rattling his insides. He’d wander through Carl Schurz Park up along East End Ave between 84th and 90th. His sacred spot. Always alone. Running. Walking. Sitting on a bird-shit-spattered green bench facing the dark East River. The dogs yapped in two separate fenced-in animal pens. He could see Randall Island, Wards Island Park, Astoria Park, the RFK Bridge, Astoria, Queens, Roosevelt Island, the cable-run tram cars rolling over from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island, and Brooklyn far to the south.
This made him remember first arriving in Manhattan, on March 26th, 2019. It was still cold out, remnants of slushy snow. Windy that day. He remembered leaving his house in Berkeley, with his cat, that morning, jumping into an Escalade Uber, getting dropped off at SFO, then the flight, landing at JFK, getting another Uber northwest through Queens and over the RFK Bridge into Harlem. His tuxedo cat sat terrified in his tiny green flexible crate next to him on the back seat. The driver had the radio playing, some 90s pop band he vaguely recognized but couldn’t name. The car reeked of pot. He was 36, one year out of a 4.5 year relationship, and less than a week out of a more recent one. He felt so profoundly wounded and alone and yet: Thrillingly, throbbingly excited. New York. Manhattan. Finally. After all these years, he was here. The promised land. Ever since he first started listening to The Ramones, from Queens, at age 14, circa 1997, he’d been obsessed with Manhattan. And here he was.
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