Dispatches: New York Gravity

Pass the acaí bowl

Vision of New York from above, as photographed by Andrew Griffiths

I’ve had five different essays run through my head since I made it to this city, but the moment I sit down to write them, they vanish. I’m left with this strange, ever-changing present. This must be how Frijolito feels, finding herself in a strange-smelling place with too many people and too few dogs. We haven’t gotten her a dog bed yet so she curls up on our clothes. I imagine that they smell like old books with new stories. We’re teaching her how to walk with a leash. She’s okay with it, but what she really wants to do is run, launch her little body up and down invisible tracks, twist as she turns, bounce over grass. 

“Like a Loony Toons character,” I said to a friend of mine who was visiting our house on the cerro recently, “which one is that? That bounces with all four feet? Bugs Bunny? Daffy?”

“Pepe Le Pew,” she said, which was at once deeply surprising and obviously right.

Frijolito wants to bounce through the grass like Pepe Le Pew, who is at least as hilarious as he is problematic—this is to say, trop drôle. 

Unlike Pepe, unfortunately, Frijolito has not been getting much bounce to her 106 ounces. Isma and I have been taking her on long walks. A few days ago I jogged around the block with her. I thought, damn, am I out of shape. I felt heavier than I ought to be. As though I’d been on the moon and and recently returned to Earth gravity. My joints made noise. I thought, so I’m getting older. Happens to everyone. But it felt as though my age had caught up to me somewhere in the air between Mexico City and New York. When my heavy feet slapped to a stop, Frijolito looked up at me, mouth open, eyes bright: “More?”

Not now, Frijolito. Alaya needs sustenance after all that exercise. I bought an acaí bowl at a place on the corner. There are no acaí bowls in Oaxaca, and there weren’t in New York either when I left, but good things come to those who suffer under late-stage capitalism. Acaí bowls and legal weed gummies: two things the US got right in my decade away.

We went to the store to buy some beer. We were celebrating the US exhibit debut of one of Isma’s closest friends from Mexico, the Afro-Mexican photography artist Hugo Arellanes (whose powerful photographs are up at the Schomburg until December). I lasted until one am, but Isma and Hugo kept at it like they were still at their radical rural university together, sharing deep truths about their lives as though they were jokes, because maybe they are. They were many chelas deep. I was polishing off a bottle of cheap bodega wine. I love that phrase, “bodega wine” but I had to explain it to them because Mexican Spanish doesn’t use “bodega” the way New York English does. Anyway, we all grokked the concept: my dusty bottle of deliciously indifferent cab sauv snagged with some shame from the rack at the back of the store and presented to the cashier who then had to check the price (four dollars more than I expected, but then so is everything else here, and what was I going to do, walk to Trader Joe’s?). That was my poison of choice, since there is still no such thing as bodega weed gummies. When that ran out I went to sleep.

At four am, Isma came into the room and told me that they’d been talking to some people they’d met outside the bodega. Solid, three am kind of brothas. One of these was a beefy Latino guy, accent more New York than anywhere else, and a wild racist, a real Trump supporter, waxing rhapsodic to Isma and Hugo about how the US was going to invade Venezuela and murder Maduro. Hugo and Isma weren’t sure whether to find that shit hilarious or terrifyingly stupid. “Is he going to go through Mexico first, or is that after he takes out Maduro?” Then it turned out that their companion, their compatriot of late-night bodega-corner carousing, was a cop. 

“Shit,” Isma said. “I’m afraid of the cops here. I don’t want them to shoot me.”

“No one’s got any reason to shoot you,” the cop said. 

Isma wasn’t buying it. “But if there was some kind of assault around here, don’t you think the police would come straight for us, three latino guys?”

The cop didn’t say anything for a moment. “The one’s you really got to watch out for are the FBI,” he said, finally. “They shoot and don’t ask questions.”

Anyway, I was half asleep when he told me all of this, and he was way more than half drunk, so I got the whole story again in the morning, when we were shuffling around red-eyed and too hungry for the meager contents of our US pantry. We planned a trip to downtown Flushing. Isma is addicted to bao buns and wants to share them with everyone he meets. I wanted to visit the library, because I still haven’t managed to visit this sacred place which has been among my most anticipated activities during this year—“abroad” I was about to type, but I don’t know what this is, really: a sojourn on a planet that I used to know, a candid tour of reverse-double culture shock, a visit to my past, which is of course another country (and not even past!). 

I still haven’t visited the library. In fact, we didn’t even get to Flushing. In the hallway outside of our apartment just as we were about to head out, I stepped to the side. That’s all I can tell you. I stepped to the side and felt two colossi in my knee clash and struggle, stone against stone in such powerful rage that sparks showered down my calf and shinbone. I collapsed onto the carpet. The pain had me pretty blotto, so all I remember is Isma squatting beside me asking what he could do. I was in that liminal state where most of my brain was occupied with Holy shit, oh, shit and the other ten percent was attempting to understand where the danger had come from, because seriously, all I had done was take a step. 

I had an ACL repair eighteen years ago and I remember the bending pain of those collosi fighting in my knee right after the surgery. I don’t think that’s a good sign (especially in the same knee!)—nevertheless, the US health care system knows how to spin a good yarn and not let you get to the resolution too quickly.¹ Hugo and Isma never did get their bao buns, but they did get an interesting tour of the urgent care centers of Queens and an entire half-gallon of orange mango juice from Trader Joe’s which the three of us shared while waiting. 

Perhaps the moral of this story is that I had no business pounding New York City concrete with my extra-voluminous ass. Or that I should avoid sidestepping in awkward positions. Or that no one injures themselves in interesting ways after the age of 25 and I should take another ibuprofen and get on with it. 

It does seem funny, though, that when someone injures themself because they might be too heavy for New York gravity and have forgotten how to step to the side, the prevailing medical treatment is to hand them two pieces of metal with texturized plastic handles and encourage them to balance between these oversized toothpicks with mental grit and hand strength. Alaya hasn’t done enough yoga for this, Frijolito. I spent the energy of a 5k just shuffling two blocks between the Urgent Care and Walgreens. 

“How is everyone today?” the Uber driver asked after I had slid inside, panting, sweat running down my back, my splinted knee propped on Isma’s leg. 

“Fabulous,” I said.

* * *

I did suspect the move would derail my best intentions to post here, and it did. And now this! But I guess I can use this time on my butt to write (sorry, Frijolito). Thank you all for continuing to be here and for supporting my writing. It means so much to me. It seems appropriate to let you all know that, quite unexpectedly, I have been honored to be among the nine finalists for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin prize for my novel The Library of Broken Worlds. If you have read that novel, you can probably guess how much the nomination for an award in Le Guin’s name means to me. The sheer quality of the finalist list makes me deeply honored to count myself among them. And I’m grateful, because I hope that this gives Freida’s story a little more life (in that least forgiving of spaces: the late-capitalist marketplace).

More soon, friends.

Alaya

1. I’m doing better and can limp around, but I’m waiting on an MRI to see what exactly is going on with my much-abused soft tissues.