THE FRAY IS BACK

REFLECTING ON 20 YEARS AT THE FOX

Read the digital article here.

First on the Scene

During the second week of quarantine, I woke up to a request to book my AirBNB for the week. Before even opening the message, I joked with my boyfriend Iouri about Chinese divorce rates skyrocketing and how, with all this extra time together, the guest had probably been kicked out of the house.

We didn’t want to be right, but we were dead on. He “needed a few days to figure things out” after he and his girlfriend broke up , so later that day, he came to stay for around a week.

The AirBNB is completely separate and has its own entrance on the first floor, so it’s not much of an intrusion. Sometimes I’d hear him taking a bath or fighting on the phone or cracking a cold one — really not that different from any other guest.

But then on Friday, we heard banging on our front door and went downstairs to find two cops by the welcome mat. When we opened the door, they asked if Patrick* was staying with us. And, just like that, the intrusion was over — that wasn’t the name of our AirBNB guest. We sent them next door since our neighbor also has an AirBNB unit and went back upstairs, relieved.

After not speaking to anyone other than your significant other in person for weeks, cops are a lot. I’ve really only interacted with them as a result of basic traffic violations, but there they were asking to enter my home. My first thought when I spotted them was that I’d somehow broken our stay-at-home order in a catastrophic way. Even in quarantine — or I guess especially in quarantine — I can be a real rule follower and seeing ‘the law’ immediately made me run through almost three weeks of mundanity, looking for possible infringements.

After a few minutes, the pair came back, still looking for Patrick. Apparently, our guest had used his middle name on AirBNB—easy misunderstanding. The cops went on to explain that his brother was so worried about him that he’d called in a wellness check. We immediately let them enter and knocked on the door separating our home from the AirBNB unit. After a couple beats with no response, we unlocked the deadbolt and let the cops go in.

The space was dark, except for the bathroom light, but even from the hallway, I could see it was well stocked with tall boys, prescription bottles and a half-eaten, microwaved gas station meal.

The partners were male and female, so the male agent took the lead going into the bathroom where he found our guests passed out naked on the floor, seemingly after a bath. At that point, we went back upstairs to give them privacy and told the female cop, who was similarly giving the guest space, to call up if she needed anything.

As we waited, I paced. I’d heard a can crack open on the early side of noon and had chalked it up to quarantine and heartbreak. Just the day before, I’d contemplated baking brownies and bringing some down to him, knowing he was grieving, but instead I’d done nothing other than send friendly messages and hope to be free of his burden sooner than later.

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The cops called up the stairs to tell us an ambulance was on the way. When they’d asked our guest if he was going to hurt himself, he said, “Maybe,” and that was enough to warrant a hospital trip (in a pandemic) so that he couldn’t harm himself further. They told us he’d be gone for a minimum of 72 hours and then they went back downstairs to dress him and greet the EMTs.

As he left, I felt no relief. Instead, I felt anger — that he would do that in my home. In my safe space.

And in that anger, I found fear that I’d had such a close brush with darkness. That it was so easy to imagine his loneliness and desperation. Just two weeks into quarantine, and I realized the kind of demons this was likely bringing out for people. All the stillness and the waiting. The lack of human connection. The scarcity of resources. Financial loss. Physical loss.

The hospital released our guest after less than one day, not three, and upon getting back to our place, he went right back to 7-Eleven to get two tall boys. I know this because his brother, the same one who’d been concerned enough to call the cops, came to pick him up, and that’s where we found him, double-fisting in line.

With the help of his family, that guest went to rehab, and I’m so glad he’s getting help. But I can’t help but think about those two cops smiling beneath their masks. How, until they came into my home, I didn’t realize the huge scope of their job.

Those cops were kind and seemingly competent, but should they be the first on the scene for a potential suicide attempt? For addiction and a whole slew of mental health cases? I tend to think not.

As our country has shifted from the collective pause of quarantine to the collective action of protests and legislation, I’ve realized how much better this could have been handled if a mental health professional—with the appropriate funding and infrastructure—took the lead instead.

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If you’ve made it this far are still bothered by the call to #defundthepolice, I implore you to contemplate a world where we invest in our communities, instead of a militant police force. Where we go after the cause—education, mental health, housing, etc.—and not the crime. Above all, I ask you to be open to change, especially your own change of heart.

*Name changed for anonymity

A Case for Dance

From age five to age 17, I took dance classes after school at least two days a week. Even as homework and sports and going to the beach with my friends started vying for more of my time, I continued to wiggle into tights and a leotard every Monday and Wednesday with just enough time to make it to Virginia Dell for 6:15pm ballet, tap and/or jazz, depending on the year.

Admittedly, the older I got, the more likely it was that I’d go straight from the beach to the studio with salt in my hair and do a quick change in the closet just before class started, but the point is I always made it. For those of you who’ve only known me as an adult, this probably comes as a huge surprise. Not the fact that I over-scheduled myself from a young age but that I was, for several years, a ballerina.

If you’ve seen me simply attempt to walk, you know I’m a distinctly uncoordinated individual. I trip over myself and any inanimate object, real or imaginary, in my path. My legs have semi-permanent bruises, and my most recent major injury came from sleeping on a plane. All of that to say, no, I was not a very good or graceful ballerina.

Even from a young age, I wasn’t prepared for the part. For starters, I didn’t like wearing pink or being girly. I enjoyed the stage and performing, but after my first recital, I remember standing in the dressing room with my mom trying to scrub the makeup off my face. As I looked at myself in the bulb-framed vanity mirror, resembling a raccoon now more than one of the children in The King & I, I asked my mom why women do this every day. But I kept doing it for years, well past the time that I realized I’d never be a prima ballerina or a Rockette.

When I was in middle school, I remember getting in a fight because a classmate said dance wasn’t a sport. That made no sense to me. Sure, it’s artful, but how could something that causes me to sweat and blister and develop muscular tone not be a sport? How could women who hide their broken toes behind tape and a stiff smile not be athletes?

It takes a very specific kind of strength to keep moving and smiling through injuries, which every dancer I know has done. And unlike other athletic endeavors, you don’t get to swear or sit on the bench when things go wrong. How could you when the show must go on? Looking at it now, I realize it’s probably the best training a young woman can get for society and its expectations for women—no matter what happens, we’re first and foremost expected to smile.

I was reminded of my dance days recently at The Class. If you’ve never been, it’s a workout class by Taryn Toomey that takes a typical bootcamp setup and extends every activity beyond what you reasonably thought you could do prior. So you’ll do a round of burpees or some other sort of cardio and then hold a bridge pose well past the point of exhaustion. But through the pain, you don’t have to smile. You get to scream. In fact, you’re encouraged to. So it’s no surprise that these female-dominated classes tend to feel like training for Xena Warrior Princess.

One of my favorite parts of The Class, other than it’s the best place in New York to scream right after the top of the Williamsburg Bridge, is the dance respite you get between sequences where you can just groove around on your mat. It’s like that Twitter thread about what women would do if men were given a curfew. We’d do ludicrous things like walk in the park at night alone or enter parking garages without keys between our fingers. And we’d go out just to sweat and dance with each other and with the rhythm of the music. Personally, I’d run almost exclusively at night, and I’d dance very very badly.

If you’ve never tried it before, there’s something incredibly freeing in dancing badly. When I went to Bonnaroo this past summer, I flailed about during one of the (three) Phish sets. Sure, I was moving with the beat of the music, but the ways my arms and body shimmied and shook could barely be described as dancing. Innocent (i.e. sober) onlookers might have used “seizure” or “possessed” had they been paying attention.

When the song was over —again, it was Phish, so I’m not exactly sure the song was over — I turned to a friend and said, “Wow that felt good. I’ve been suppressing that for a really long time.” He laughed, but I was for once very serious. I don’t often let myself dance badly, especially not in front of people. And I’d needed that set to let something go and take myself a bit less seriously.

I think everyone should learn how to dance. There’s few more lessons more important than learning to control your core and limbs and few things more joyous than to love music and feel it flow through you.

But I also think everyone should learn to give themselves permission to dance badly. To realize that, in dance and in life, the best part of learning proper technique is that once you learn the rules, you get to break them. Then, and only then, can new, interesting things emerge, even if it’s just an immediate acceptance of your klutzy self.

(And maybe a newfound love of Phish. Shh…don’t tell anyone.)

I’m not even a cat person.

But when one jumped into my path, I knew I had to help it — him. I knew I had to help him.

It all started on New Year’s Day. I was walking home from a late dinner with friends in Williamsburg, so the streets were empty except for us when a white furball launched himself at me from a side street, making me shriek.

Somehow, that did not scare him off. Instead, he started circling my legs and purring, and as he got closer, I realized he was incredibly clean, especially given his stark white coloring. This cat couldn’t be a stray. No, this friendly little fellow was someone’s cat and he got loose and I could get him home. And for some reason, in that moment, I knew I had to get him home.

So I scooped him up and started carrying him towards my apartment, but I didn’t even manage to get him home before I naming him. After a few blocks, he started wiggling and turned to water in my arms, like only cats can, and between that and his queso blanco coloring, I had no choice but to call him Fondue. The sheer fact that he had a name was worrisome to my roommates as I spilled into our apartment with him in my arms, but I think they could sense the state I was in and therefore agreed to let me keep him in my room—temporarily.

The second I set Fondue down, I started nesting. My pizza Tupperware set became his food and water bowls, and an Amazon box I’d meant to break down became his temporary litter box. While I went about this, he largely ignored me other than to occasionally brush by for a head scratch. That is until I opened a can of wet food. The way he bolted over and got in the way before I could even pour out the can confirmed it — this was a house cat and a spoiled one at that.

Once Fondue finished his tin and settled down again, I took some pictures of him. Because even as I was forming attachments to Fondue, I was formulating a plan to get him home. In the morning, I’d take him to a vet to see if he was chipped, and if not I’d post online and hang fliers around the area. I was confident I could give this cat a happy ending, even if I wasn’t going to have one.

My happy ending derailed two weeks prior when I broke things off with the boy I’d been dating on and off for nine years. And after the adrenaline of making a huge, life-altering decision faded, intense dread set in. Had I just made the biggest mistake of my life? Would I actually be any happier? How does sleep work again? Throughout the course of our relationship, no matter how stressed I was, I could curl up on his chest and hibernate for eight or so hours. Now, every time I got in bed it was a toss up — either sleep would come easily or I’d lie awake for hours contemplating not just this decision but every decision that led me to be a single 26-year-old copywriter living in New York.

I hope it isn’t this way for everyone, but 26 has been a very hard age for me. When I talk to people in their 30s and beyond, they seem to think I’m still so young and have my whole life ahead of me. And while I guess that’s true, I’ve been feeling pretty lost lately. I had no real plan for after New York. It was just a decision I made in college that felt right. And now, instead of listening to my gut like I used to back then, I’m struck with indecision and fear at the prospect of making a wrong decision. So as my friends from Florida settle down and do all the things you’re supposed to do, like buy houses and start families, I’m left feeling frozen and alone (And incredibly confused by all the emails I get from Bank of America regarding mortgages).

The only thing I’ve been certain about lately is that the relationship needed to end, and it took me months to get there. We were kids when we started dating, and after breaking down into hysterics every time I got too drunk for months, I finally accepted that we weren’t the people who first fell for each other back in Florida anymore. We’d changed too much to be together, and who we were now far outweighed the comfort and the love and the respect of our relationship. So while leaving was hard, staying was wearing me down more than I’d realized.

But losing my first love, even though I knew it was the right thing to do, left me feeling empty. And Fondue filled that void, at least temporarily. Instead of thinking about myself, I had a cat to take care of.

My only extended experience with cats pre-Fondue was when my family briefly adopted one before realizing both my father and I were allergic, so all of Fondue’s habits, specifically his nocturnal ones, were a complete mystery to me and therefore an excellent distraction. Every night I had Fondue, he would curl up next to me contentedly until around 1am when he would jump out of bed and alternate between (1) throwing around the contents of his litter box, (2) staring at me demonically from any and all elevated surfaces in my room, and (3) screaming like he was about to die.

So by the early morning, I’d get to a breaking point with him and would contemplate putting him back on the sidewalk where I’d initially found him. In fact, one night in a moment of either total clarity or lunacy, it’s hard to be sure, I locked a screaming Fondue in the bathroom around 6am so I could take a quick nap before work.

Even as I was doing it, I thought back to a week before when I’d curled up on our bath mat and cried so as to not bother my roommates. They’re pretty used to my emotions at this point, but this wave of missing my ex left me crying in the full-body, hysterical way that leaves your abs sore, and I didn’t want to wake or worry them.

Now my red eyes were from cat allergies that were slowly acting up as Fondue got more and more comfortable in my space. The vet confirmed that Fondue was snipped but not chipped, so I was left to wait for his parents to see my postings. And with each passing day, I was sleeping less and sneezing more.

Thankfully, the cat community is parallel to none and had responded to my posts with a number of leads. Was this Blanco from Bravo Supermarkets? No. Does he belong to someone in the co-op at 103 Havemeyer? Also no. But for each potential owner, I loaded Fondue into the cat carrier that the vet gave me and walked him around Williamsburg as he rolled around screaming and scaring passersby.

This is the most effective print piece I’ve ever worked on, and I expect a Gold Effie for my efforts

The madness finally ended one afternoon when a woman named Annette, texted me because the cat from the posters looked like Kenneth Cole, or Kenny as she calls him. She sent pictures that confirmed that Kenny and Fondue were in fact one in the same, and we made a plan to meet after work.

After handing him over, I felt immense relief — I could sleep through the night! But my joy over my newfound freedom was immediately replaced dread, knowing that I probably wouldn’t.

With the task of getting him home completed, I had to return to reassessing my relationship status (or lack thereof) in addition to countless other facets of my life that were making me restless. Even as I set about putting my room back in order and vacuuming up as many of the white hairs as I could find, I accepted that with or without Fondue, my eyes were going to be red for at least a couple more weeks.