Before the beginning of the pandemicI found myself living outside the norms of regular society. Partly by choice and partly from a feeling of being overwhelmed by bullshit -- my own and that of others.
To many of my friends, and what was left of my family I had disappeared.
When I did finally reemerge nearly 2 years later people were most curious about 2 things: where had I been, and where was I when the pandemic hit. Where were you when the pandemic hit was quickly overtaking ‘where were you on 9/11? as peoples’ favorite stupid question to ask.
What the fuck difference would it make? Crazy shit happens all the time, every day, but we don’t bother memorializing every incident of crazy. If we did the calendar would be full of nothing else.
So I believe I devised a way to answer both questions at once, You tell me.
In 2021, I was living in a hotel in Crown Heights named aptly. or ironically, The Oasis. The hotel had recently been converted into a homeless shelter while at the same time, large swaths of downtown Brooklyn were being reinvented as luxury living spaces for a new generation of gentry venturing out of Manhattan into the Outer Burroughs, wherever that was and whatever that means. Reminded me eerily of the vintage creepy TV show The Outer Limits.
The Oasis hotel rooms did not come with TVs, thank God. None of us read the daily news periodical, nor did any of us care about what was going on in the world outside of us any more than it cared about what was going on with us.
Nevertheless, we sensed that something was going on that was even more fucked up than usual.
The fifteen or so people who were staff were acting noticeably more antsy than usual. Many of them had stopped coming in at all, and those who did let us know that they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t need to be. It was as if it was our fault that they had spent years in college and were likely now in debt for tens of thousands of dollars. For what? So they could hang out here all day in cubicles staring at computer screens to administer ‘services’ to people like us who they were disinterested in at best.
One of the brightest among us called them Anti Social workers. Cynical, accurate? It was hard to discern.
There were around 40 of us living in The Oasis at this time and one day the staff reluctantly herded as many of us as they could find into the community room for an important announcement.
The person they selected to make this ominous-sounding pronouncement was round. Her head was round. Her chest was round and her butt was round. And she had somehow managed to stuff all that roundness into a sleek salmon-colored Hillary Clinton pant-suit, Jeri curls.
I closed my eyes and prayed God whatever this is please make it quick.’
She then cleared her throat several times.
'Take the goddamned diaper off your face. This is Brooklyn not I-Raq!-"
"Gentleman, she went on smoothly, making a point to not look at any of us directly. “I am so sorry to have to inform you that right now there is something going on in the world that is ravaging economies and killing people."
We each looked around at one another, rolled our eyes, shrugged our shoulders and said: “No shit!'