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I like New York a normal amount

An introduction that's at least as much about Ohio, if we're being honest

I moved to New York in August 2020, in a Dodge Grand Caravan rented in a panic after the 12’ truck I’d scheduled was “upgraded” to a 16’ truck I had no prayer of driving to, let alone around, my new city. Before that, I’d hauled all my stuff from Columbus, Ohio to my parents’ farm in east Tennessee, where it and I would stay in an outbuilding for the two weeks between the old lease and the new sublease — essentially driving a giant checkmark across the eastern US, as though to spite Pennsylvania. The OH-TN leg had taken two trips in an eggplant-purple Honda Fit I would sell shortly afterward, six hours each way, back to back to back to back. I slept on a floor mattress in there somewhere. I don’t really remember. The last act of my Ohioan life was competing in a remote egg eating contest, where I performed respectably after heaving furniture around all day. I ate a dozen eggs in ten minutes, did my best to sleep, and got up to start loading the car.

If none of that looks like an unambiguously good idea, it didn’t at the time, either. But it all worked out fine. Frankly, I think I could have gone harder in the egg eating contest, but it was my first, and 50 seconds per seemed like a good starter pace. There was also a fair amount of donation money pledged to each egg eaten, so you do want to collect but not totally overwhelm expectations. Excuses, I know. I could still come back and hit eighteen, I bet. The contest was held over Zoom that year in lieu of the annual live event at Poultry Days, a huge and sort of genially rowdy ultimate tournament attached, by accident of history, to a nice, normal, small-town-Ohio summer fair by the same name. Animal exhibits and fair rides, that kind of thing, and over in the town’s central park, hundreds on hundreds of recreational athletes from across the continent camping and partying. Earlier that summer, on what would have been the weekend, my buddy Jeff and I drove out to the site in Versailles (not said the French way) to walk around, reminisce, leave flowers (his) and a candle (mine). Twelve eggs on a livestream was the least I could do to complete my respects.

As for the drive, of course I missed my folks, and it’ll sound dramatic now but it was true to the conditions we were all living with then that I didn’t know when I'd see them again. On one level, I was selling my car. On another, my parents (are matter-of-fact people who got vaccinated early and are fine now, so I think they won’t mind me acknowledging that they) were in their fifties and working in a hospital and you just didn’t know, that year. It’s sort of a commonplace now that nobody acknowledges how much the pandemic fucked everybody up, but I think it’s like any other big traumatic happening in life: you can avoid acknowledging it and its effects will creep up on you anyway; you can also acknowledge it as honestly as you can and its effects will still creep up on you anyway, some you don’t expect, others you do but don’t necessarily handle any better for it. The farm’s a pretty place and I love my family and I was happy to be among them for a while. As for the van, it was pricier than the truck would have been, but I’ll hand it to Dodge: a Grand Caravan is a terrific moving vehicle, cargo space that compares respectably to a white utility van plus great visibility and poised, graceful handling. I think someone had smoked a lot in the one I got, but that’s not the car’s fault.

New York, I don’t know, I thought I would like it. I didn’t have a job lined up or anything and didn’t know many people in town, certainly nobody I was on come-help-me-move terms with. Also, I hadn’t been there since I was 13. The scholar-poet lifestyle of my twenties didn’t afford much travel to places I didn’t already know someone, but mostly, I just never got around to it. I'd seen other cities, though, and I knew what I liked. Public transportation and access to water, mainly, and obviously people. Money was thin, but it was never going to be cheaper to get a foothold, and in a world where no one else was doing much of anything but sitting in their apartment, I figured I wouldn’t feel too left out doing the same.

There’s an attitude I run into that I don’t have much use for, which is that, for any sufficiently cool or interesting person, New York’s the only place really worth living, and they’ll for sure appreciate it when you shit on wherever they grew up or also chose to live at another time. For one thing, I don’t think anyone who really believes that is paying enough personal, original attention to anything in their own life to much appreciate the things that actually are interesting or distinctive about living here. But I also think a lot of people say stuff like that without really believing it.

Ohio is a frequent punching bag here, and you can’t convince me at least some of that isn’t because people are always filling Ohio into the blank of this kind of vacant non-joke joke. They feel a space in the conversation, or an itch for the satisfaction of making a joke when they don’t really have a joke, and they make the joke we're all used to. That itch is a funny phenomenon. People say all kinds of stupid shit on account of it. I'm sure I have, too.

I like Ohio, but the fact of the place isn’t really the point. I guess you’re supposed to be thinking of bland suburbs, but New York has those, too. If you’re curious what else is out there, I invite you to read more about the cultural history and present of America’s urban midwest. And the country, well, the country’s the country everywhere, for better or worse. I’m from the country myself and I swear it's all more similar than not in Maine and Montana and Alberta and east Tennessee and north Georgia and Versailles. Anyway, they’re places people live. So is New York.

My last two months in Ohio, I took a job as a package handler at a FedEx facility because my job teaching poetry workshops to undergrads had ended and that’s who was hiring. Not unlike the college instructor gig, we were shown a grim video training on what to do in a mass shooting, then more or less thrown into the field to figure out the other stuff on our own. Covid protocols were a tent outside with some folding tables and handouts to self-report any symptoms. The main warehouse was an airy, hangar-like space, with forklifts blazing around and two elevated tracks of colorful package-sorting machinery that were fun to watch in a Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” kind of way. I often got sent to unload trucks, which were smaller and less well-ventilated, with metal walls as hot as an old playground slide if you forgot and leaned against them. Mask use was a B average at best. I never got sick as far as I know, but many of my coworkers were older, in big households, and I wondered how and whether I’d know if they were doing alright. I didn't have it in me to bring that kind of thing up with them at the time.

Instead, people talked a lot about their kids: whatever language or other barriers there are between us (signage around the floor was English, Spanish, and Somali), if you’re a parent and I’m a parent, we get something about each other. I worked with a woman named Brandy, who spoke ASL with one other person, I think, but mostly we’d all step back a polite distance and pull down the mask so she could lip-read. She asked me once, through a combination of lip-reading and gestures, if I had kids; I didn’t, though she had four. My mom has six, I told her, I’m the oldest, and she said how old are you? 28, I told her, and she laughed and said but you’re so small! It’s true, I am small. But I work hard and consistently, and I know how to lift safely, which is most of the battle. Though I also remember a couple of other women, who seemed to me quite old, who would sit on the floor of the trailer and kick piles of soft poly-mailer packages out toward the belt. It seemed to get the job done.

It was a distribution center, as far as I could tell, things being shipped from Ohio to the world over. We handled a lot of L Brands stuff, L Brands as in “L Brands shareholders filed a complaint […] stating that former chair Les Wexner, among others, created an ‘entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying and harassment’ and was aware of abuses being committed by accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein," and also L Brands as in Hollister, Victoria’s Secret, mall stores like that. (One of the big hospitals in Columbus has an “Abercrombie and Fitch Emergency Room,” which sounds like a CW drama but is a real place you might get taken after an accident.) At least one client must have been a swimwear or a sports company, though, because in early June, I noticed more and more swim goggles coming through the sorter. It was summer, but summer had been on the way for a while. It would have been around the time I found myself in the breakroom with a few coworkers while the George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis was on TV, maybe live. “Everybody came to see him,” a Somali woman said softly. “It’s beautiful,” a man said, with conviction. And said it again: “It’s beautiful.”

When I got to my new home in Queens, city guidance was to isolate for two weeks after arrival and I was sincere about it, though I did go on walks. I know the neighborhood well enough now that I can’t remember what impressed itself on me then except for a lot of bright sunlight (I was not getting out much) and a moving truck that said something like MOVING IN WITH YOUR LOVER? WE CAN MAKE IT EASY, which, I don’t know, sounded like they were already making it really uncomfortable. I haven’t seen it since, but let me know if you have. (I see ALWAYS MOVE WITH A HAPPY ENDING pretty often but I think that’s a different company.)

I joked with friends about my state-mandated quarantine, but it was a state suggestion at most, and in fact fairly reflective of what my next three years would be like: a lot of walking, a lot of reading, a lot of gazing into the East River and thinking nothing deep. Most of my tweets are lost to history but I once tweeted something like Don’t ask me where to go out in my neighborhood; I live in New York the way a house sparrow does, hanging out in parks and taking home things I find on the ground. I do pretty much live that way. I keep a circuit between the Roosevelt Island NYPL branch and Hunters Point QPL branch and the Greenpoint BPL branch, and I’m slowly working my way through all the museums on Culture Pass. I take pictures of funny signs. I write my poems. A lot of what’s in my room now was once someone else’s garbage. I like what I’ve done with the place.

It’s been a good phase of my life. Obviously, a lot of things along the way were completely horrible. I remember a moment early that first fall, when I wasn’t having any luck with jobs and had just learned I was going to have to move again. I needed to have a good cry about those things and everything; I was in Astoria Park at the time, so I sat down among those rocks between the WWI memorial and the Astoria Pool back wall and just had at it with my whole chest. At some point, I looked up between sobs, and a man had appeared by the wall. He had red track pants, very shiny, and pink hair that had grown out a lot since it was dyed. His dick wasn’t out, but he was clearly in an attitude of just-about-to-piss when our eyes met. He gave me a nod that seemed to say I see what you’re going through and moved along.

In my memory, I was also in the middle of a text conversation with a friend in another borough about trying to meet up soon, but maybe that was a different day. I know I told them about pink hair, because they had a pretty great story of their own about piss and camaraderie between New Yorkers, which I won’t relate here because you don’t just go around telling other people’s piss stories. We weren't super close, but we had a friendly texting volley, and they were maybe the one person in town I could reach out to for an open-air hang in what was otherwise a very isolated time. Fall got hectic and then we slid into the early stages of a falling out, and the open-air hang never happened. I can count on less than five and maybe less than two fingers the number of real fallings-out in my life; it can’t be true that that one was a singular event, but maybe it was. It was a singular period. I won’t litigate anything here, but I’m sure I wasn’t the easiest person to know at the time. If this gets back to them, I’m sorry about that time I asked if they would edit a nice memory out of an essay because I felt self-conscious about it. Their life is their life, and they should get to talk about it however they want.

I did find an apartment (a real gem, in fact, unless you’re thinking of buying the property off my landlord, in which case I saw nine sinkholes and a poltergeist downstairs), and a job, and then some other jobs. A web writing gig that seemed like the dream revealed itself to be otherwise, but ain’t that the way. Childcare, election work. I made a solid share of my rent one month selling poetry chapbooks I printed through Office Depot and hand-drew cover illustrations for, which was nice. I took another package-handling job at UPS, an evening shift this time, and got caught in Ida floods on my first night. It was only a couple of hours, most of it on the elevated Queensboro Plaza platform, but I truly did not know what would happen the entire time I was out. I remember looking out the window on the 7 (which wasn’t supposed to run from Hunters Point per every sign in the station, but did when I waited there anyway) and seeing garbage bags floating like dumplings in soup. I didn’t think it affected me much, but months later, some flooding imagery in The Batman spiked my adrenaline in a weird, unexpected way that took a while to settle. I haven't hit the override on a bad gut feeling about a bad forecast again. But they probably wouldn’t have let me reschedule, and boy did I need the money.

That was a decent job, though. Dusty and exhausting, but I knew what I signed up for, and my arms never looked better. I picked up a couple of weekend shifts as a driver’s helper, riding shotgun and running packages to stoops and entries and doorpeople all over north Brooklyn — good overtime pay, and a tremendous Saturday out if you’re nosy. Mostly, though, I split my time between unloading trucks and sorting smalls. Once, my smalls-sorting partner Sylvia got a mailer with a tambourine in it, still jangling through the poly wrapper. Another time, I whipped a plain manila envelope a little too quickly off the belt and an unwrapped dry sausage tore through and hit the ground. Sylvia was cool. Went to a Wendy Williams taping once and showed me some videos on her phone. (Phones on the floor was a difference from FedEx; for some reason, I assumed this was an industry-wide shift after the mass shooting in Indianapolis earlier that year, but I think companies just vary. We did have to watch another mass shooting training video, though.)

In non-hurricane conditions, it was an easy subway commute home. I could afford it sometimes, but not both ways every day, so unless the weather was bad or it had been an especially tiring night, I usually walked the two miles back to my building. I didn’t let anyone at work know I was doing this, because people get a certain way about me walking home alone at night, and I’d prefer not to deal with it. My usual line is, I feel better walking home alone in a city than I do driving home alone in the country, and it's usually true. In retrospect, I’m not sure how acceptable a risk that was. I had a membership at a 24-hour gym around the midpoint, and I told myself that was my way station if I ever needed it, but you had to get through a lot of dark warehouses to reach the populated streets of the last mile or so. Anyway, I walked that route many times that fall into early winter, and for what it’s worth, nothing terrible happened.

If I did have transit money, though, the walk to the Hunters Point station down 49th Ave happened to look out on an especially iconic slice of Manhattan skyline — Empire State and friends; you’d know it if you saw it. This will sound corny but it is the biographical truth that my heart swelled every time I saw those lights rise in the near distance. The most reliable thing I know about signs and portents is that you tend to see what you’re looking for, so if you see something that moves you, then you know something about what it is you’ve been looking for. I was looking for a reason to hang in there.

I have a desk job now, which — after manual labor, structureless freelancing, and miscellaneous scholar-poet activities — feels fake, but nice. I like the work and I like the people, and city budget stuff means I may not move to full-time as soon as I hoped but the benefits are solid. (I also had to watch a mass shooting training video for this one.) It’s in a big, shiny building, a “going to work in tall buildings” building. I might be able to see the old warehouse from the other side of my floor. I haven’t checked, but will soon.

I like it here, broadly. I like the food and the beaches and concerts in the parks. Politics are more than who your electeds are at the moment, but I have to say it’s cool as hell that all my reps are socialists. I like the feeling of being among so many ongoing lives when I go out in the world, and I also like how many good places there are to go to be alone. I like the sick stuff people leave for free on the curb. I like seeing sailboats on the water when I’m running errands on my lunch break. If the money ends up working, I could live here my whole life and be very happy, I think. I could also go somewhere else and be fine with that. There are lots of good lives out there. (To be clear, though, I definitely don’t have the money to move, so I would be sticking this out for a while still even if I'd felt completely done years ago. Luckily, the place suits me.)

I did make it back to Ohio last summer: direct to John Glenn International and straight into the carpool to Versailles, baby. I was hot off a pretty severe head injury at another tournament (a run-up to the more competitively serious summer club season, which I was effectively knocked out of), so no good to play, and only somewhat good to dance. But I contributed original stencils for spray-paint-and-beefy-tee jerseys, which seemed to go over well, and some quality heckling of the US national team, who were playing a few friendlies ahead of the World Games. You ever watch the World Games? Get into them. They're the Olympics of the possible future. Things like that happen all over for anyone who cares to notice. Also, a woman on my team ate a truly horrifying number of eggs, owing partly to technique and partly to a particular herb or spice she had someone bring to the field site. I never would have tried that, but I get it, actually. I won’t give away what it was.

Poem: "In the City of Light" by Larry Levis

The last thing my father did for me
Was map a way: he died, & so
Made death possible. If he could do it, I
Will also, someday, be so honored. Once,

At night, I walked through the lit streets
Of New York, from the Gramercy Park Hotel
Up Lexington & at that hour, alone,
I stopped hearing traffic, voices, the racket

Of spring wind lifting a newspaper high
Above the lights. The streets wet,
And shining. No sounds. Once, [...]

→ Continue reading at Blackbird

Other Things

• The last Poultry Days before the pandemic was also the last time I saw my friend Kelly Caldwell, a brilliant and deeply loved poet and athlete among many other things. Cass Donish has two recent poems for Kelly at Poem-a-Day and Bear Review.

• My buds Megan Praz and Meghan Kemp-Gee are launching their sports underdog graphic novel One More Year in a few days. You can sign up for news or connect on socials via their Linktree (which also includes an interview/profile I did a while back, if you're into that kind of thing).

• I'm rereading True Grit, which rules, on the silky bible-paper pages of the Library of America Charles Portis volume, which is so good-looking and fun to hold, but somehow also mainly an excuse for me to tell you about the audiobook read by Donna Tartt, which I will never, ever get out of my mind's ear, especially in that killer opening.

• Carly Rae Jepsen is godly in my life and I've been trying to see her live for years, but kept getting thwarted. A couple of weeks ago, I had tickets All Things Go in Maryland, had a rental car booked, everything all lined up, and then the floods came. On a last-second Amtrak to Baltimore, no sleep, and a prayer, I made it and can now die fulfilled. This was the soundtrack.

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I'm reading: Agents and Books | Anxiety Shark | Ask a Fuck Up | Bitches Gotta Eat | The Breakside | Bring Me Giants | Channel 6 | Craft Talk | Defector | The Ed’s Up | Garbage Day | Hell Gate | ¡Hola Papi! | Hung Up | Life Is a Sacred Text | The Lost Songs Project | Making It | The Melt | Ordinary Plots | Pome | Rax King | SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE | The Small Bow | Something New | Starting Out | To a Green Thought | Unsnackable | Walk It Off | Welcome to Hell World

Mags Colvett is a writer and editor mostly raised in east Tennessee and currently living in Queens. You can find them on Bluesky and Instagram. Subscribe free for more where this came from.