Containing multitudes, Tyler C. Gore’s debut, My Life of Crime: Essays and Other Entertainments (Sagging Meniscus Press), is testimony to the weirdness of growing up Generation X, an homage to New York City, a cry against conformity, and a droll appraisal of the institutions and mores underpinning American society. Laugh out loud funny as well as poignant and thought-provoking, this unconventional collection includes a book-length essay, “Appendix,” from which the following excerpt has been taken.
The Plague Year
COME CELEBRATE WITH ME
THAT EVERYDAY SOMETHING HAS
TRIED TO KILL ME AND HAS FAILED
—Words displayed across the Prospect Park Bandshell in the early spring of 2021, an art installation by Mildred Beltré and Oasa DuVerney with lines excerpted from Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me”
Actually, 2016—the year which had just begun to unfold—wasn’t going to be such a great one.
Oh, in many ways it would be like other years, a lot of same-olds and rather-nots punctuated by irreproducible moments of joy and grief. We’d see friends, take trips. Natasha made pottery and I went on long runs through parks and beaches. After a few months, my post-appendectomy bowels would return to normal, by which I mean that I no longer spent much time thinking about them. I would, however, develop a revolting and humiliating rash on my scrotum, which turned out to be caused by an allergy to sunblock, oddly on the one place I had never applied it. The world moved on, as it always does. Prince died, Muhammad Ali died. Umberto Eco, Harper Lee, Richard Adams, Carrie Fisher. Emerson died in March; Lake died in December. Milestones, marking the passage of one era into the next. Natasha’s grandmother, Nanny, the much-loved matriarch of my wife’s sprawling Trinidadian clan, died that year too.
That was to be expected, the changing of the seasons. But all that year, beyond the foreground of daily life, a creeping dread marched through the headlines. Mass shootings, terrorist attacks, climate change, the rise of nationalist nutjobbery in nearly every corner of the world. Brexit happened, like watching a friend drink Drano on a dare. The passionate intensities of social media, 140 nasty characters at a time. Lines of force coalesced, the center couldn’t hold, you were going to have to choose sides. All this had been happening for quite some time and yet something felt different. A shifting in the tectonic plates had awakened something foul from its stony sleep. It was hard to avoid apocalyptic feelings that year, with the Lord of the Flies slouching towards the White House. And then in November, the nightmare became real. The election of 2016. A festering turd in the punchbowl if there ever was one.
It wasn’t just the United States. Shitbags were running the show across the globe. Haters hated with a new, gleeful ferocity. Some sickness had entered the world. In the beginning, galvanized by loathing, Natasha and I did the things a lot of people did. The Women’s March, angry postcards to elected officials, that sort of thing. Attended some activist meetings and quickly realized (much as we had during the Bush years) that activism wasn’t really our cup of tea, so we raged and stewed, made modest donations to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, and signed a few petitions.
Life went on. People died, babies were born, leaks sprouted and ceilings were patched. The next year, we learned that our building superintendent, Godot, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and this made us very sad because at some point during all those maddening years of missed appointments and paperclipped faucets, Godot had become our friend. With alarming speed, Godot grew sallow and wasted, but between surgeries and chemotherapy he summoned up the old maniacal energy, slapping paint on doors, building a bench out of discarded scrap. Even when he became too weak to do those things, I’d still encounter him in the halls laboriously heaving groceries—one bag at a time—up three flights of stairs to his ex-wife’s apartment, where he now resided. He sure as fuck wasn’t going gently into that good night.
In the fourth year of the Turd Emperor, the metaphorical sickness that had entered the world became literal. The Plague Year hit New York like a tsunami. The panicked scramble for face masks and sanitizer, the shuttered restaurants and bars, the confused armies of homeless people wandering the abandoned streets and subways, the morgue trucks. We all experienced it together and yet we were all alone. At night, Natasha and I stood at the window, staring out at the darkened plain of our wounded city. Across the East River, the Empire State Building convulsed in red, blinking like the Eye of Sauron. A melancholy wind from across the sea had blasted away all the certitudes of ordinary life. We had only each other now. No, that’s not quite right; we had a third companion in our pod. Thank God for Luna, our cat. She still puked with stubborn perversity but she’d never spiraled back into anorexia. Our friend Valerie was not so lucky. In the early days of the pandemic, one of her two beloved cats died. She was devastated. She lived alone and was terrified that if she got sick, there would be nobody to take care of her remaining cat. For many months, she saw no one. She had her groceries delivered and spent her days alone, birdwatching in the nearby cemetery. That would soon become something of a trend.
The numbers rose. Every morning, I put on my N95 and escorted Natasha to the subway, waiting on the deserted platform until the train came to take her to the hospital. I didn’t know what else to do. Some days, against her protests, I’d ride the train to work with her and walk back through the lunar landscape of early-pandemic Brooklyn. During that three-mile trek, I’d sometimes stop to piss against the side of a building—there was nowhere else to go—and sense all around me the disapproving eyes of sequestered families peering through the blinds.
We learned to live with fear. Every hour Natasha spent at the hospital felt like a round of Russian roulette. I was certain she’d be exposed, that she’d become one of the hundreds on ventilators, dropping dead within days of diagnosis, and all day and night, the incessant wail of ambulances racing towards her hospital kept that terror fresh. Natasha feared for her colleagues on the clinical frontlines, pulling eighteen-hour days plowing through an avalanche of the dying and the dead. Huge numbers of staff had contracted the disease. She despaired that she’d never again see her mother or sister in Trinidad, which had closed its borders. She cried when she told me that a cafeteria worker at the hospital—a fellow Trini—had died of Covid-19. Whenever the cafeteria had offered some Trinidadian specialty, he’d save a plate just for her. They spoke daily, but she’d never known his name until he was gone.
It felt like an asteroid had slammed into the planet: an extinction level event. But life seeks out the empty places. As the last dinosaurs shuddered into the dying swamps, small furry creatures crawled out into the half-light and blinked, keen to inherit the earth. For a time in the silenced city, birdsong filled the air. By summer, a new dispensation had taken root. The pandemic transformed the Long Meadow of Prospect Park into a Seurat painting, a grassy archipelago dotted with picnicking families, solitary readers, socially distanced yoga classes, and, nestled near the periphery, secretive clusters of young people huddled under clouds of marijuana smoke. A new city regulation allowed restaurants and bars to open outdoor street cafes, and—despite all the masks and precautions—humdrum Park Slope became as lovely and festive as an Italian piazza. All summer long, like mushrooms after a heavy rain, jazz bands popped up on random street corners.
After the murder of George Floyd, the city erupted into months of Black Lives Matter protests, but even in that great outpouring of grief and rage, there was a strange joy. Helicopters roared overhead, but in the streets below, colorful murals exploded across the plywood fencing of vacant lots, children taped crayoned expressions of solidarity to their windows, and young people of all ethnicities tore themselves away from their screens to gather at the barricades and forge alliances seeded with newfound purpose and meaning. In that barren year of social isolation, the flowering of a new civil rights movement offered the possibility of hope.
That was also the year of the bicycle—and not just bicycles. Cheaper lithium batteries and the rise of certain evolutionary conditions (the reluctance to use public transportation, the increased reliance on deliveries, the urgent need to get the fuck out of cramped apartments) led to a Cambrian explosion of newfangled wheeled contraptions barreling through the streets. Every conceivable configuration of bicycle—electric, cargo, tandem, fat-tired, reclined—jostled for space in the narrow bike lanes with a Dr. Seuss parade of unicycles, tricycles, skateboards, scooters, go carts and rickshaws. Citi Bike offered free annual memberships to hospital workers and Natasha decided to try it. I purchased a membership so I could join her. We bought helmets and practiced in parking lots, and after a week or so, Natasha started biking to and from work. We soon acquired bicycles of our own. This would have been inconceivable a year earlier; we’d always thought our bicycle friends were nuts to risk their limbs in the meatgrinder of city traffic. Times had changed. I surprised myself by signing up for Revel, an electric moped sharing app. They looked like futuristic Vespas. I only used them for short rides, but what a rush! Even strapping on the helmet was a thrill. Whizzing through Brooklyn in my sunglasses and scarf, I’d pretend I was a handsome Italian professor in Rome, late for an important lecture.
Skiing was out of the question that winter. But we did go sledding. On the evening of the first heavy snowfall, we dug out the old blue plastic sheets from the back of the closet, exactly where we’d stashed them a decade earlier, and trudged through the snowdrifts to Sunset Park. In Central Park, they’d had bales of hay at the bottom of the sledding hill. In Sunset Park, there was an iron fence. Just as we arrived, a little kid on a sled slammed right into it. For a moment he lay still, and his distraught mother came scrambling down the hill after him. He stood up, shook it off; he was okay. Jesus. We took careful note of the distance between the bottom of the hill and the fence.
At the top, we decided we’d go one at a time so we could take turns recording the adventure on our phones. I went first. Fighting the wind, I unfurled the plastic sheet and flopped onto it headfirst, gripping the slots in front. With a little kick I was off. Woo-hoo! I’m sledding! I shot down over the snow, reached bottom, and immediately rolled off to avoid crashing into the fence. I jumped up, brushed the snow off my coat, waved to Natasha. This was fun! Why had we waited so long to do this?
I clambered back up and got out my phone. Natasha’s turn. She opted to sit upright on the sheet, facing forward. I gave her a push, and down she went. Go Natasha! Halfway down the hill, she lost control, spinning like a top. As I noted earlier, you can’t steer those plastic sheets; all you can do to avoid collision is bail. But she didn’t bail. Now facing backwards, she reached the flat stretch at the bottom—and just kept going. What the hell, Natasha?
Three yards, two yards, Oh God—
Her head smacked against the iron bars and she crumpled to the ground.
I stood frozen at the top of the hill, mouth agape. Had I just witnessed my wife die in the most ridiculous manner possible? I couldn’t move. And then she lifted her head out of the snow and cried Tyler! I need you! and now it was me scrambling down the hill. She was, thank God, alive. She had a nasty bump on the back of her head, but her winter hat had cushioned the impact. No broken bones, no blood, no lifelong paralysis. I helped her to her feet, and she told me that she didn’t want to go sledding anymore.
I laughed, relieved that she was okay.
“But we can come back another time,” she insisted. “I want to do it again.”
Because that was just how we rolled during the Plague Year, when death raged all around us. By then we understood: every day was a day stolen, every endeavor edged with risk. You could never win the war against entropy—the house always wins—so there was no sense in putting things off for idealized conditions that might never come. I don’t mean to imply that I would spend the Plague Year learning to play the violin and firming my buttocks. Au contraire. I would watch every terrible sitcom ever made and gain fifteen pounds. But I knew at last what I really wanted out of life. I wanted to live.
Tyler C. Gore is the author of My Life of Crime: Essays and Other
Entertainments, which the Washington Independent Review of Books called
“immensely readable…full of the people and peculiarities of New York and told
with an almost wide-eyed wonder of someone in love with the place — even the
worst of it.” My Life of Crime was also a First Horizon Award Finalist, shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize, and appeared in the Independent Book
Review’s list of “Impressive Indie Books of 2022.” Tyler has been cited five times as a Notable Essayist by The Best American Essays, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Exacting Clam and StatORec.
His essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in many of the fine, high-quality
journals preferred by discerning readers like you. He lives, as he dreams, in Brooklyn. Visit him at http://tylergore.com
Author photo by Leigh Gore
Bloom 