The summer of our discontent
Watching the film Stress Positions and looking back on summer 2020, my final season in New York City.
In Austin, we’ve been gifted with a long, rainy spring, something I was certain we wouldn’t get when it hit the 90s back in February. I’m about to spend my fourth summer here. But five summers ago I was in Brooklyn living out the collective strangest summer of our lives.
The gauzy feelings of summer 2020 came back into focus when I saw Stress Positions, a new movie starring John Early, one of my favorite comedians, and Theda Hammel, who also wrote and directed the film.
A decade ago I’d make my way to Ars Nova on Tenth Avenue to catch John Early’s comedy variety show, Showgasm. I remember him coming onstage on a hoverboard, spinning and cracking jokes, always singing a nasally Britney Spears cover song. Hammel was his sidekick and she’d perform original songs with her tiny keyboard. (Hammel wrote much of the music for Stress Positions.) They got drunk onstage, and so did we, and we laughed and laughed at Early’s strange brand of humor. I ache for the kind of art I enjoyed in my twenties, imbued with longing, daring, and possibility.
Stress Positions begins in Brooklyn around June of 2020, just after the first phase of the city’s collective trauma of endless sirens and chilled morgue vans, but while first responders were still getting their nightly applause outside of apartment windows at 7pm. I laughed out loud when John Early’s character, Terry, is on the phone in his grimy kitchen desperately trying to multitask as he thrusts his arms out the window to bang pots and pans together in a neurotic panic.
This was still the era of baking sourdough and whipping up affogatos. Still the era of fear and mass confusion.
Most of the movie takes place in Terry’s dilapidated brownstone in a neighborhood that’s probably Bed-Stuy. It’s called “The Party House” because it was the vacant home where Terry’s soon-to-be ex-husband threw drug-fueled ragers. Terry’s 19-year-old nephew, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), has moved in with Terry, his only nearby kin, to coalesce after being hit by an ambulance and breaking his leg. Everyone in Terry’s life is curious to meet this young Moroccan model — Bahlul has a Moroccan father and a white American mom, Terry’s estranged, homophobic sister — but Terry is extremely Covid-cautious, wearing war-style gas masks and spraying down bills with Lysol before handing them to delivery men.
Karla, Hammel’s character, is Terry’s close friend who’s quarantining with her longtime girlfriend. But she’s decidedly less Covid cautious and grasping for human connection, or maybe just sex; when Terry slips on raw chicken in his kitchen and hurts his leg, Karla, some kind of somatic worker, rushes over, ostensibly to help Terry but actually to finally glimpse Bahlul. Terry finds Karla working out a shirtless Bahlul in a tiny, charmless backyard that looks like one I’ve smoked cigarettes in dozens of times. They end up drinking Grappa into the night together and having conversations that feel familiar to me: sweeping truths about the world spoken in joking but biting tones, spat out on the cusp of a fourth drink.
Karla is a trans woman (as is Hammel) and playfully talks to Bahlul about transitioning, how easily he would pass, with a “Why not try it?” sort of air. (I cried laughing when Terry screams at her “Not everyone is trans!”) But her nudging felt more real when Karla says something like, “After I transitioned I wanted to kill myself less.”
In a podcast interview, Hammel said that these characters are living “the opposite of queer joy.” Terry is grappling with his undesirability as a 30-something gay man. Karla is guzzling vodka and cheating on her girlfriend. Bahlul is trapped and immobile in a house full of “losers.” All of them are miserable and twisted. But who wasn’t in June 2020?
I can’t recall much of how I spent those long, unemployed summer months of 2020 in Brooklyn, other than the dozens of hours I spent in Prospect Park. I gathered with the local swans every evening to wallow and worship. I had no desk at home, so I would spend hours typing on my laptop while lying in bed, sweating. I was not working any kind of paying job, though I did write and publish this newsletter twice a week religiously. (I cry a lot but I am so productive.) I biked all over Manhattan listening to “Folklore.” I spent a day in hammocks on Governors Island. I said my goodbyes to my beloved city in nonconcentric circles, clutching onto what I could when so many doors were closed to me.
I didn’t feel as trapped as others may have, probably because I knew I was leaving the city for good in August, and because I had the wide expanse of the park just a half block away. The three-mile loop around the lake that my feet daily shuffled is forever mapped onto my subconscious. Sometimes I walk it in my dreams; I end up at the Boathouse, Gatsby-esque lights shining above a sea of electric-green algae, crowded with an orgy of turtles.
Around this time I fostered a black Lab puppy named Gouda. I had a lot of time on my hands and already spent hours in Prospect Park every day, so why shouldn’t a dog join me? Though she was only four months old, she would sit calmly next to me in the park for hours while I read and journaled and did yoga and cried. When fireworks went off for weeks (more on that later), she slept through them like an angel. We wandered the packed trails together, reading, people watching, whiling away the sunny, solitary days.
I was almost always alone. But sometimes I would gather with my close friends for backyard and movie nights. We’d take advantage of the to-go drinks available at every otherwise-shuttered restaurant and bar; I never said no to a street Frosé. One day we took a car to Fort Tilden, all the windows open as a courtesy to the driver. My dopamine surged when I purchased a Nutcracker on the beach. The sun set in a rainbow of shrooms. The night ended with pizza at Rocco’s, which was having a moment.
Stress Positions comes to a climax at a Fourth of July celebration in that grungy backyard. Karla sets the American flag on fire and posts it online, telling Terry that everyone is marching in the streets “starting a revolution.” Terry’s ex brings a gaggle of young gay men and a plethora of drugs to what was supposed to be a small gathering. Terry’s upstairs neighbor crowns Bahlul with her long blond wig. Everyone ends up getting Covid.
I recalled my friend’s lush Bed-Stuy backyard, one he tended to with care, 20 of us gathered before Bushwig, a drag and music festival. Each of us was adorned with wigs, glitter, wings, scales, homemade purses, theatrical flourishes. Our veins coursed with alcohol and nicotine and probably something else.
2020 was a year of many (literal and metaphorical) deaths, rebirths, and revolutions. I marched with several massive Black Lives Matter protests, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with tens of thousands of people. I will never forget or forgive how the cops were the only ones not wearing masks, how it enraged me, how risking the health of themselves and their family members was somehow warped into a power move. I remember standing outside of the Brooklyn Museum for the March for Black Trans Lives. At least 15,000 people, all wearing white, stood in solidarity with our trans brothers and sisters. Though I was on my way out of New York City, I never felt more pride and faith in the unified New Yorkers surrounding me than during those days painted as unruly.
In the weeks leading up to the Fourth of July, fireworks exploded in every corner of Brooklyn, nonstop. Every night. For hours. It was exhausting. Online, people theorized it was a police psyop, that they purchased the fireworks and handed them out to kids. I never thought that was true; we’d been through four months of death and forced stillness, and now the city rebelled, refusing to sleep. We were all bound by unrest and suffering and solidarity; so much had been taken from us, and people took back what they could. I ended up on some Brooklyn rooftop to watch the fireworks. In my car home, boys set balls of fire and light off in the streets, whistles streaming through my ears.
On my last night in New York City, I drank some wine with my roommate. Later, I blew lazy rings of smoke out the window, something to help funnel me forward into the unknown. I fitfully slept on the couch, my former bedroom barren, listening to the angry, deafening sounds of traffic on the boulevard below.
I was ready to go. It still wasn’t easy to leave.