Dark Times, Volume 1
Welcome to New York (It’s Been Waiting for You)
A fun little essay in which I tell you my life philosophy and how it served me as three (okay, it was actually four) very unpleasant things happened to me all at once. Blood (not mine), penises (also not mine), and vehicle damage (sadly, mine) are all involved; take this as your warning.
Some time ago, “dark times” became my catchphrase.
It’s best deployed deadpan. A friend tells a story about something less-than-ideal, or I do—a regular anecdote about a string of bad dates, or a more sobering one about a health scare—and it’s the perfect response, equal parts teasing and earnest, sassy and sympathetic: “Dark times.”
It got to be so ubiquitous that even in my last relationship, which was conducted 95% in Spanish, my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend was familiar enough with the phrase that when we were breaking up, he turned to me over the glass table to say, smiling, “Este califica como ‘dark times,’ no?”
“Yes,” I said, “this definitely does qualify as ‘dark times.’”
That was then
I say “some time ago” in that first paragraph, but I can probably be more precise; I can’t remember saying “dark times” more than three and a half years ago, and that feels right, since that’s when I left New York (and my job and my apartment and my friends) for a six-month sabbatical in Latin America. Six months turned into two and a half years, before the pandemic sent me back to the States for a nomad year spent between Washington and Michigan and Texas and now, and again, New York.
Being back now, three and a half years after I left, it’s clear that I am different.
I am more self-sufficient. I’m more likely to gush over something I love. And I’m better able to deal with something goes wrong.
I would’ve changed regardless—time does that—but I don’t know if I would’ve changed in this direction. The specificities of where that time was spent matter.
There are a lot of things to love about Latin America, but a personal favorite will always be the way it forced me to slow down. To adjust in real time when present circumstances don’t fit within my plan. To, if not go with the flow entirely, be a person who can recognize that going with the flow is an entirely valid way to go through life, and something that she can occasionally channel.
That happened when the Argentinian airline canceled my December flight hours before it was supposed to leave because the workers were on strike. (We love workers’ rights! Just slightly less when it means we might miss our holiday party.) It happened when I got sick eating street chicken at high altitude in Cusco and had to be taken to the hospital by the doctor who’d come by for a house visit and not liked what he saw on my pulse oximeter. It happened when I couldn’t find anything to eat at 2 p.m. in Cali because everything was closed for the afternoon, and when I spent an entire afternoon drinking Belkin beer at a Belizean beach shack waiting to see if the weather would be good enough to go out on the boat, and when I Ubered around to no less than three museums in Montevideo, only to find all of them closed, of course, because it was Good Friday.
All of those things happened and all of those things worked out fine. I got on another flight and made the party. I recovered from salmonella and got to a lower altitude, which meant I got to explore the salt mines I would’ve otherwise missed. I found someone selling empanadas, and I came to love the holiday version of the beer, and I hung out in my hostel instead of museum-hopping and ended up meeting the man from the third paragraph, the one I spent two great years with.
Dark times, yes.
But full of light, too.
That’s what the phrase really means, in the end: seeing enough brightness in the future that it’s appropriate—funny, even—to comment on the darkness of the present.
And this is now
I don’t know whether I could’ve gotten through my first week back in New York had I not been well acquainted with the idea of dark times. Had I not been familiar with its contours, the harsh planes of its reality and the angles it could be reevaluated from, a new perspective all that was required to turn failure funny or misfortune merry.
It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. It truly, truly was.
The best was easy: it was walking down the street and seeing the children playing with sticks on the sidewalk; the girls fingering the ends of their braids and giggling to each other; the women pushing carts of laundry; the men on their stoops, watching videos on their phones. It was smelling the barbeque from the hog-bellied steamer wafting smoke outside my building; the lavender reaching like rulers from the grey-brown earth next to the statue down the block; the curry from someone’s open kitchen window. It was hearing the sirens, yes, but also the bachata, and also the subway announcer voice, and also the girl in the apartment next to mine yell “bark, bark!” at every dog that walked by, her enthusiasm palpable four flights away.
I will cut myself off soon, because enough people have written enough things about New York. (And because I’m sure I’ll want to write more later.)
I spent my first few days in Brooklyn in a series of highs. Running down Nostrand, rubbernecking at the Trinidadian bakery and its long line of customers, sprinting faster to make the light, feeling—this sounds so trite to say, but it’s what I felt, so it must be said—the energy of the city in every step. Walking hours to visit a friend, staying up too late in her living room and queuing for bagels the next morning, eating them in the park next to a woman reading the paper and tsking at the headlines. Dragging home a tote bag of vegetables and fruit and eggs and bread with which to make humble, cheap, nutrient-rich meals in between going out for complicated breakfast sandwiches and expensive entrees and pizzas cluttered with pepperoni, each cup curved and glistening. Being wowed, earnestly and honestly, by the hotness of everyone around me, from the 60-something woman dragging her grandchildren down the block to the trio of young Black men in cutoffs debating with the bus driver the fastest way to get to DUMBO.
I felt young and alive and lucky. Lucky to be there, to have loved ones there, to have the time and the health and the money to walk around the city, to see it and smell it and hear it and taste it.
Honestly, I felt not unlike Amy Adams in that scene in Enchanted where she’s wandering around Central Park like an absolute buffoon, completely unaware of the ways of the world, thinking she’s in an elaborate fairytale land where things like traffic laws do not exist or at least do not apply to her, waltzing around in her puffy-sleeved turquoise dress and perching daintily on rocks that are sure to have been recently peed on.
R.I.P.
But the worst of times quickly made themselves known.
It started with a murder.
Probably.
My part of the story started with two nights of bad sleep. I was renting one room in a two-bedroom apartment from a woman named Elise who was moving out early; she took her original bed with her, but promised me she’d get me another one before I moved in. When I arrived, I saw she had, and I immediately put the blue-and-white gently-checkered sheets I’d bought from HomeGoods that morning onto the mattress, planning to strip them and wash them properly once I had a bit of time to do so. Two days later, I did; I washed all my bedclothes and then asked my roommate, a 26-year-old teacher named Carys with a stylish long bob and impeccable comedic timing, if she’d help me flip the mattress before I put them back on.
I wanted to flip the mattress because I’d noticed it was pillow-top-down. It was also encased in a scratchy semi-transparent sleeve—because Elise wanted to ensure me it was bedbug-free, I assumed—that I wanted to take off. I was convinced the hard mattress and the way my new sheets slid all over the plasticy cover were what was keeping me from sleeping through the night.
I was convinced of that until Carys and I flipped the mattress over and saw a huge bloodstain at the head of the bed.
She screamed, I screamed, we both backed away from the bedframe, then inched closer to check that the rust-brown stain, in roughly the shape of a wheel-less VW Beetle, was, in fact, dried blood, then jumped back upon confirmation.
I’d been sleeping on top of a ghost.
I had to be. The stain was way too wide and deep to be a period stain or a casual wound. Someone had bled out on this mattress.
I immediately texted Elise, informing her that I discovered the bloodstain on my mattress and asking that she replace it with a non-murder-adjacent offering before I went to bed that night.
I then started a questionable line of Googling: “do you have to call to the police if you find dried blood in your house?” “how to get rid of huge bloodstained mattress” “dumping biohazardous waste in new york city”
Between searches, I turned to Carys, who had been friends with Elise for four years, to gauge her reaction; she was, if anything, even more shocked and disgusted than I was, which was a great reaction to get from my only ally. We decided the only appropriate response was to go for pizza and wine while we talked shit about how and why Elise would’ve put a bloodstained mattress in my room—there’s no way she didn’t know; why else would it be flipped the wrong way and left in that sleeve?—while we waited for her to fix her mistake now that we’d caught her in it.
When we got back an hour and a half later, a new-to-me mattress was waiting in the hall outside of our apartment, this one marred only by a minuscule soy sauce stain (we triple-checked). Carys helped me drag it in, I wrestled the old one out, and after successfully scheduling a pickup with the New York Department of Sanitation for the next day, I made my new bed and starfished atop it.
Shady subleasers and massive bloodstains: dark times. Their light came quick: a truly comfortable mattress and an impossible-to-top origin story for me and my new roommate-slash-friend.
Tuesdays in the park with…someone?
I’ll tell you now to expect no such quick reversal of fortune for my second “dark times” moment in as many days.
The next afternoon, I had walked the 40 or so minutes from my apartment to Prospect Park, where I was watching the macaroni-shaped clouds scroll across a pasture filled with the sounds of musicians and children’s soccer drills and the acrid scent of weed.
I decided to head out from a different entrance and found myself walking along a quiet, tree-lined path. I called my sister and was listening to her job search updates when I saw a white man in a baseball cap and baggy shorts stop in the middle of a copse of oak trees just ahead of where I was walking.
When he started to lower his shorts, I looked away, figuring he had to pee and wanting to grant him privacy as I passed.
Then I noticed movement and glanced back up: his shorts were now around his knees, his erect penis was out, and his right hand was vigorously stroking it. Frigging it, I want to say, having recently read James Joyce’s incredibly NSFW erotic letters to his future spouse, Nora Barnacle, in which he uses that word over and over again to reference masturbation.
“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” I whispered into the microphone hanging between my headphones as I pivoted and started striding quickly back towards the bike lane.
Marta was asking me what had happened, but I couldn’t focus on answering her, not yet. I was too intent on listening for footsteps.
Was the man content with public masturbation? Did he have something more planned? Did he know I was coming up behind him? Had he heard my reaction? Would he follow me? What would I do if he did?
I wanted to be among people as quickly as possible. After stepping out from the smaller path and onto the wide bike lane, I told my sister what I’d seen.
She was disgusted; I was disgusted; we were disgusted together, and it was only after I’d exited the park and reoriented myself, heading north on Franklin Ave, that I wondered if I should have called the police.
What if it hadn’t been me who had wandered upon him? What if it had been one of those kids playing soccer? Was that man still there? Would he be back?
I was fine and unscarred, and so, with a few blocks of steady walking, I could put those qualms to rest and even see the humor in the situation, the “dark times” of it all: the irony of this happening the day after the Mattress Incident; the ignominy of his exposure, of the short, pale meat of him; the hilarity of New York and all the ways it shocks you.
But it really isn’t funny, and just because I can find levity in something terrible doesn’t mean that I should have to.
I think about a scene from the second season of Sex Education. In it, Aimee, a girl-next-door supporting character, is sexually assaulted by a man who masturbates onto her while they’re both riding a crowded, standing-room-only bus.
When she gets to school, she runs into main character Maeve and tells her in quick succession that, “I was on the bus, and a guy wanked on my leg, and I got a bit of a shock, and I smushed the cake—do you think it’ll stain? I love these jeans.”
Over the course of the next few episodes, Aimee’s assessment about the assault turns from minor inconvenience to majorly (and understandably) upsetting. She has to stop taking the bus, she doesn’t want her boyfriend to touch her, and she can’t stop seeing visions of her assaulter.
Aimee’s story alone is sad. Aimee’s story alone is too much. But Aimee’s story doesn’t get resolution in the show until several episodes later, when she finds herself in detention with five other girls (I don’t say that as a stand-in for “women”—they are all in high school, they are all under 18) and blurts out her story.
As it turns out, all half-dozen girls have experienced something similar: physical assault, verbal assault, stalkers, flashers. After sharing their stories, they all show up at Aimee’s bus stop together. Their comradery—built on universality of their terrible experiences—is what helps her heal enough to get on.
I am glad that women have each other to get through these types of dark times, and I’m furious that we have to get through them at all.
Streets: 2, Penny: 0
I had a brief respite from dark times, and filled those two days with a date (my first one in years!) and hiring someone to deep-clean my apartment (just in case there were more bloodstains somewhere—none were found) and elaborate avocado toast and long walks and helping an old friend pack.
And then I woke up the next morning and went out to my car to move it—alternate side parking street-sweeping rules, you will not best me—only to find that someone had torn off my passenger-side mirror, leaving red and black wires poking out drunkenly from the door.
They had nicely placed the mirror, chipped and missing its attachment, on my windshield; I snatched it, placed it gently on my passenger seat, and drove around for half an hour, looking for a new parking spot, chuckling the entire time.
Of course, this! Dark times happen in threes, after all! After the mattress and the masturbation I’d thought back to my first day in my new apartment, and how, when walking home from visiting a friend down side-streets packed with trash, not one, not two, not three, but four rats came within inches of my foot as they scurried across the sidewalk, carting their bounty. I’d been leaving an audio message for a friend, and squealed for a good 30 seconds to her before regaining my composure and trilling a few bars of Taylor Swift’s “Welcome To New York”—“It’s been waiting for you!!”—and continuing my message. That was my third bad thing, I’d thought, or, rather, my first; the mattress and the masturbation completed the trio.
But no. My beautiful, dependable, 13-years-old Toyota Prius, which I’d bought in Cleveland, Ohio at the end of last summer, when it finally dawned on me that I wasn’t going to be leaving the States anytime soon and that everywhere in this country aside from the city I now find myself living in, a car is a prerequisite for freedom, had been maimed. Penny had lost her mirror, her parking spot, and her dignity.
I circled around the block a few times before deciding to double-park and come down 45 minutes later to move Penny to a new spot.
It’s been six days and she hasn’t been fixed yet. Her other mirror is folded against her doorframe, the reflective surface protected by its own carapace. I’ve driven her only once since she’s been disfigured, out to a car repair shop in Queens to get a quote. Repairing her will cost $512, and it’s unclear whether my insurance will pay.
Dark times, indeed.
Onwards
Before I finished this essay, I reviewed my pop cultural references. I cited James Joyce’s horny letters, I got Aimee’s quote exactly right, and I double-checked Taylor’s lyrics.
In rewatching that scene from Enchanted, though, I realized I’d gotten it all wrong.
It’s not Amy Adams who comes off as a buffoon at all. Naïve, sure, but not idiotic.
As it turns out, she knows exactly how the world works. It’s her no-nonsense, business-suited companion, played by Patrick Dempsey, who is clearly the fool.
There she is, waltzing through Central Park, tapping into its magic effortlessly with every step. She comes across men with long dreads and fedoras playing a steel drum and a güiro and they immediately pick up her song. A Billie Ray Cyrus lookalike joins them as they stroll up towards Sheep’s Meadow, stopping to sing on rocks where I have definitely seen people pee, but having a great time nevertheless. While Patrick stands off to the side with a judgmental smirk, it’s Amy who engages two benches of octogenarians and introduces them to each other, who dances with a group of brides and grooms, who smiles at the mariachi band standing in a rowboat, strumming their wide-bellied instruments, as Patrick huffs and puffs his way across the lake.
It is her bringing people together, showing them the joy they couldn’t find on their own, laughing at the little moments, building a life.
Everyone in Amy’s New York is too white and too heterosexual, yes. But setting that aside for a moment, it’s clear that it’s her, and not Patrick, who really gets the city.
It is her optimism—her connection with other people—that unlocks New York’s potential.
“Dark times” lets me see things the same way.
Amy’s character is predisposed to fairytale lightness. I started off adulthood predisposed to the opposite. My family bonds over nothing more quickly than complaining about someone else, and growing up, it was easy for me to watch the moods of everyone around me sour in real time in response to minor inconveniences.
Both of us were forced into a world that wasn’t designed for us and left to sort our own way out. I didn’t start off with her optimism, but in recent years, I have recognized that bad things will always happen and that the only thing I can control is my response to them.
It’s like seeing that an empty cup flipped over becomes a prism to refract light.
Not quite enchanted—but still magical.