New York Shitty #1: New Amsterdam

what's 9+9x9?

The man across from me is holding a zip ‘loc and drop it’ bag of purple tortilla chips. He is the Pokémon finder. Old Navy wearer on the bottom, an unrecognizable dark jean and a rain jacket. He reminds me of the word ‘beard.’

I just spent an hour in 118th street pre-Harlem, getting myself drunk to the point of honesty, while the jazz band fucked up their 8 counts. Usually, I’m just the silliest goose when off the gray, but today I have a spark of residual rage. I call someone’s boyfriend ugly. I have an aperol spritz and keep my lips shut, smudged in beauty supply store brownness, so I don’t reveal that I’m probably battling with depression. Or her other three-syllable cousin. Something in the mental category is beating my ass up, I feel like I’m on Zeus Network. It’s always depressy, depressy o’clock, Joli!

I’m at The Door around 4pm the same day. My phone is on do not disturb, but do disturb so you can see I will not. I’m checking my Slack notifications though, waiting to answer messages if any of my coworkers sniff that instead of sending influencer emails, I’m solving the mysterious case of the panic attack shazam. Oh, brother—this girl’s sad! The staff at The Door are a bizarre kind of nice, a TV show domestic violence asylum kind of nice. James, the receptionist, big Unc in the red Nike tech makes sure I’m handled with care. Maybe they don’t get enough new members dressed down in LGB and Costume National. It’s an assumption that you can’t be both dripped and drowning. Well, unless you’re a rapper.  I tell him I’m there to sign up for counseling. I have the beauty of a teenage mother. 

They offer us dinner, the staff being a woman of ambiguous Asian descent, and a white lady in a green sweater that likes to fill staircase silence with some sort of dialogue. 

“These stairs get me everytime.” My turn: “Mmmm.” 

“One more flight.” Me again: “Mmmmm.”

 “It’s always a maze up here.” You guessed it, “Mmmmm.” 

I say no to dinner, but do eat the blueberry donut they offer me as I fill out paperwork that asks for my Medicaid ID. TTDepressionJDM. 

A beautiful woman, mid-forties, says my name in one go—Joliamour, no spaces, no room for question, just an entrancing tongue, and says she’ll call me on Monday. I’ll make an appointment. I’ll have an intake where I’ll discuss all of the things I’m too tired/embarrassed/nervous/confused/lazy/too me to tell everyone. Sometimes I think people believe I’m moving through life as if I’m waddling with all the lights off.  Why am I always the one willing to order the Adult Capri-Sun? Sometimes I struggle being the youngest in the room, and sometimes I feel like people are waiting for a button to turn on in me that soon makes me more extroverted, more flirtatious, a networker and room transcender—my sex appeal is locked in a jar that I can’t retrieve. 

“Well, I like Capri-Suns.” —No you don’t, you’re drinking something with 90 percent alcohol, you psycho. You think I’m a little kid with big boobs. I speak with the musicality of an eighth grader and it is partly to keep a fistful of childhood wonder so I do not succumb to all of the despair creating oatmeal inside of me. 

I wish to come across those Tumblr posts that reached a million views about what it meant for a bony bruised knee white girl to say, “I’m fine.” She was not fine. I am not fine. I am 5’3, I am constantly sniffing armpit air. 

*

Three weeks ago, I met a bald British guy, and his girlfriend who looked like Cher Lloyd’s cousin. They were not random people, they were friends of my [statement redacted]. I was very high on a 5mg edible. On that day, I did not know math. I thought grams and gigabytes were long lost relatives. My boyfriend’s friends looked at me with the lingering sensation to figure out if I was ambitiously stupid or just the regular kind. Stop licking your lips so much, it freaks people out. The thoughts in my mind flickered away like distant epiphanies in the night, I spoke slowly to make sure my sentences did not sound like questions. I chewed on a mint from the bottom of my oxidizing Juicy Couture bag. I thought about how stressed it makes me feel not to visit my mother often. I thought about how I still can’t drive, and how I grow self-conscious when my boyfriend takes a photo of all of us. The ANTM model-negro hymn that sings across the credits as one model in a beige bandeau disappears after being eliminated by judges no one cares about is very adamant in my head. Why am I so thirsty? 

We’re at a pizza shop. I order something that is not regular, the one that’s inspired by someone’s Italian grandmother, who apparently does not like her slice rectangular. There are pepperoni’s. Melted cheese stains the corners of my dry mouth and Nia Archives is crossing the street to meet us with her cap-toothed smile. Why is she so pretty? Her tall friend with the ponytail is also pretty, maybe if I were British, born on the backside of Dalston, I too could get called beautiful on the sidewalk and believe it. And I could also pronounce January as if all the vowels were sitting on the couch together. Jan-uar-y.

I think about my friend Mimi. She knows Nia. Maybe Nia knows Mimi. Maybe Nia knows Nia. Maybe life knows death, and lemons know lemonade. She doesn’t know who Mimi is but Island Records bumps, and whenever I’m nervous I become the brand-ambassador of all New York heights and locations. Oooh, yeah, Dinosaurs. Museum of Moving Image. High line. Queens, I’m originally from Queens. Go there, and get lost. 

Everyone scurries, recess is over. I am still high but keeping a secret. I will never take a gummy again. But I will contemplate on whether or not I am the villain of my own story. I will come back to the moments of whether or not I’m someone that has puzzle pieces that reflect the good parts, the parts that aren’t all broken and weirdly bent and bit. I want to be NASA, and space, and all the stars aligned, and pieces of spaghetti intertwined, I hate that I am sometimes a brigade of all the saddest curtains and I hate that I relish in frowns, and misery and I could sit there by myself in all of it’s booth space. Goodbye.

*

It’s showtime! Guy on the train is kicking his fitted into his elbow, kicking his fitted into his elbow, kicking his fitted into his elbow. We are all dead, and unhinged, and all drowning in Monday huddles. He stops dancing, sucking his house-shaped teeth, in refute of our inability to pay attention to his swagger jack. Sir, it is 10 AM. Do you know where your children are? School. Do you know where I have to be in twenty minutes? At 1123 Broadway—move. 

On Saturday, I get asked whether or not I am a good writer by my mentor. She reminds me of a cigarette, her eyes feel blue—not an ice that melts, but an ocean that hits. Hard. I’ve got tears in the compendium, I swallow them down in hamster rants with Berkeley boy, telling him that the biggest mistake I have made in life was not reading. That is true. I am afraid that there are people better than me. I grow intimidated about whether or not I begin to dull because a nebula is sitting across from me telling a funny story about volcanoes. Boyfriend’s brother and their friend whose name starts with the letter D(eez Nuts) hear stories from me about Amsterdam. And New Amsterdam. 

“Did you know New York used to be called New Amsterdam?” Boyfriend’s like whaaaaaa? 

Turns to big bro, who is literally him but with a more gingery beard and violet sunglasses that make him appeal to Lord Farquad. They are both gorgeous in a brooding Twilight way. If Edward was a werewolf instead of a pale white guy pretending to be American and sparkly. 

Boyfriend’s like whaaaa? And big bro goes, “oh, I knew that.” 

I don’t know why I’m still talking, but then I mention slavery. And then no one laughs. Why do I always think people might laugh at horrible things the way I do?

They go ahhhhh. Mm. Short hums. A strum of guitar, the vibrato was heard, but it wasn’t guttural. It came and left. 

Why do I have to ruin perfectly good convos with the slavery talk? What is with me trying to be the Sojourner Truth of the Oppenheimer crew? 

In one week, I am running away from the possibility that I am not as much of a clever egg as I think. James Clear, another bald guy, says sometimes you just have to suffer a little more. I don’t know if I agree with a man with a butt chin. I don’t know if I have any more suffering in me. I have suffered. I sleep in suffrage, I suffocate, and cradle my face in its orange anguish, I squish myself to the brinks of exhaustion, I stand on the street corners bellowing in suffrage, and thinking about how a Newport pack could maybe make the suffering disappear with a quick inhale. Hiss and a blow, then my heart puts a jacket on. I suffer with cowardice, I suffer in childhood brutality, I suffer in the fear of alcoholism and smelling it in other people’s pores, I couldn’t even try a cigarette because of the fear I might turn into one and never turn back. I suffer with not understanding how to push and spread boundaries, with being non-confrontational with the Instagram mutuals I see often but don’t like, I suffer at dinner hoping everyone’s having a good time, and making sure everyone feels apart of the conversation, I croak in the bathroom, pretending I’m an actor to turn back happy-faced so no one will ask what’s wrong with you and I go I don’t know. I have eye bags worth of suffrage, I see the space in the glass before the water splashes, and I hate that no one else sees it too. And I’m a hater, I talk shit, I’ve got a thing for making fun of people, I get it from my dad. And I get his nose, and his disappearing eyebrows, and his disappearing act. The DuBose-Morris family has experienced a Duane Reade receipt of suffering. I feel like an XXXtentacion song.

*

The election keeps me dizzy. I sit at Nook, trying to read my book about the abuse of Black women, while sipping on a drink replicant of my color foundation, trying to replace the creepy crawlies with caffeine jitters. The air of New York streets is jarringly calm. People are saying “sorry” more. Didn’t hold the door for me — sorry. Bumped into me when walking past — sorry.

Best friend comes to sit across from me with a box of pizza shaped like a geometric proof. I feel guilty that I stood in line to vote for a democratic silk press Black woman, because mom was sexually assaulted by a democratic silk press Black woman, and I’m betraying my faceless cousins fighting a war that is fighting them. Eliminating them. But I do care about being able to have a child who won't get sucked into my throat during birth, while the doctors turn to me and go, uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…I think you just might have to die. My baby comes out like scrambled eggs.

On Wednesdays, we all become social journalists. Threads, notes, stories, filled with different subjunctives based on the verdict, and I’m tired of people behaving as if James Baldwin would have broken sourdough bread and ginger tea with them. Audre Lorde wouldn’t have fucking liked you. She would’ve thought you were annoying, regardless of how many mutual aid links you reposted. We don’t really care about anything. We have never truly loved anything. I am mad that I exploit my trauma, but I feel worse that if I don’t write about it, it’ll just clog itself in the toilet. Can’t gag it, or shit it out, it’s stuck to the linings. They speak of core radicalism, and a thirst to demolish the broken bracelet of a system but mother I, mother I, mother I, mother I can’t repost your mother it doesn’t go with my Instagram feed. People do not pray, people do not share, people do not arrive at The Christmas Party show where I have to watch my mom reenact being assaulted. The furthest part in the darkness is red, and I approach it. I walk around Madison Square Park in lion anger.

Sometimes, I revisit the feeling of anger frequently. I sit in the waiting room, take a thermometer under my salmon tongue, choke my bicep in a blood pressure pumper, and reserve a subscription for more anger. God said he chose his people to be peculiar, and I feel that, but does it also come with isolation? A uniqueness so perverse, only I walk forward on the privilege test because in one lifetime I know PTSD, and when I blink I just become a little girl in a large white t-shirt struggling to understand why the doors of the bathroom are off the hinges again. Where are the screws to put everything back in its rightful place? Do I live in a dream where my dreams make sense or am I having one of those experiences again where I’m peeing but I haven’t woken up yet? Showtime’s over, it’s time to get to work, the bangs and clangs of Veteran’s Day produce a dislikable FOMO. Too many American Flags, and too many hands waving them. 

*

In the night, a Friday before social festivities—eating Thai food and holding up the menus so we don’t mispronounce the words—I let my legs take me to Spring Street. I’m not mad that Tyler, the Creator is playing, but I am mad that it is so easy to hate women. What did I do to you besides make you? You are my breath, and I am your lung. Yellow taxis, Artizia glass windows, and Camper’s closing soon. I slip into 2nd Street to try on capris. I buy them. They were $12. They didn’t make me feel ugly. Ugly is a disease and I’m going to go to therapy for it. I’ll blabber, and make a smoothie about all of the ingredients that brought me to the L train alone tonight. 

My head is a cloud that you draw and inside are all the apologies I owe myself, but I just can’t say them out loud. Did you know New York used to be called New Amsterdam? Land of the free, home of the 9-5 workers at Dotdash Meredith. The wind is gracious, and my feet are skinned of cruel bone. My boss sends me an email saying TGIFF! I agree. Thank you, Friday.

j.