How To Destroy Loneliness

Last night I did something I don’t ever do much when visiting New York which is to go out in our neighborhood here in Hell’s Kitchen. I’d just left my friend Mira Jacob’s house, where our writing group had a beautiful and deep three hour discussion of her new novel draft, and then afterward, she and I were talking about how we were coping. What left with me was her description of the need to do the sort of things that get you off your phone, to get away from the feeling that your loneliness has created more loneliness, the sense that you and your algorithm are having a seemingly endless moment of teaching each other. I like this I do not like this I am obsessed with this I am friends with this person this upsets me this pleases me etc., looping and looping. Barefoot and handsome men smiling at me as they show me a hip opener or work out or watch television or get ready for their day, then cut to shattering news. The sharing of protests, the sharing protest safety also (how to safely toss a tear gas canister away from you or to otherwise deal with it, what goggles to wear, what masks), and then the fundraisers, a friend’s reading, a friend’s book launch. But the overwhelming feeling, too often, is of having been with nothing except the phone. Of being lonely and alone.

So I gave myself a night out and practiced being alive again with people in a different way than I usually do. After I got off the C train at West 50th, I remembered there was a new omekase restaurant I’ve wanted to try and made myself a reservation in person so I could check out the vibe. That left me 45 minutes or so until dinner, so I went to a bar near me here that I’ve meant to go to for some time, Pocket Bar, so called because it is small, seats maybe 15 people. I used to be more of a bar person when I lived in New York, and so I went old school, for me, and ordered a beer and started talking to my seat neighbors. They were a father and son who were having a night out together before the son moved the next day to Williamsburg. He was moving to my old street there, South 4th, where I lived back in 1991, in an apartment at South 4th and Berry that my roommate and I rented for 400.00 a month each. “How was the neighborhood,” the young man asked me. “Rough,” I said, and remembered how I’d find my car each morning with the hood raised and the battery jostled but never removed, the ground littered with the tiny bottles crack was sold in back then. A friend back then had explained that addicts might try to steal the battery but might also be too weak to get away with it, which did seem to explain why the battery was never stolen, just loosened.

“There’s lots of cute places on that corner now,” the young man in the bar said, and I nodded, assuming this was true—it was Brooklyn after all. And when I check the next morning, this morning, I see my old apartment is now flanked by a bar, Nicky’s Unisex, and a cafe called Butler.

Back in the bar, the young man’s dad got up and went to the bathroom, and the bartender set down a metal tray with a birthday candle on it, and what looked like Gumby and Pokey having a moment of, well, intimacy. Scrawled on the tray were the words FIRST TIME. It was the father’s first time in the bar, I learned, when he got back to his seat and laughed at the presentation. I admitted to her it was my first visit also, so this tray became mine next. They said goodbye and left and then the bartender admitted she had a crush on him. “Now what,” she said, like we were suddenly in a buddy movie about getting them together. I pointed out that the young man had said he was going to be coming back as a regular, and that he hoped to see me again, which later made me reflect was not the hopeful message she hoped for about their prospects. She’d even told a whole a story to us about someone who’d left their phone number for her that on reflection was perhaps a hint for him to do the same.

Two charming young men came and sat down next, and when we began talking they told me they were in New York as their brother was having surgery. They were from Dubai and it was their first time in the city. They’d come to keep their brother company as he recovered. I wished him a swift recovery and left for my dinner.

The meal was a simple, even revelatory and well-made omekase that I thoroughly enjoyed. This is an indulgence I give myself a few times a year. I read a beautiful short story as I ate, by Zak Salih, “Three Niles,” in the O. Henry Stories anthology edited by Edward P. Jones, and I chatted with my seat mates a little, but they seemed almost neurotically attuned to the menu details and I felt I was interrupting their obsession.

I heard from friends as I did this. One texted from an ICE Watch training session on the Upper West Side, 1000 folks in attendance. I texted a single photo from my meal to a group text of friends suggesting we come there together sometime later. I made a plan with another friend, for today, and a plan for my sold-out reading this Monday at Sarah Schulman’s First Mondays salon at Performance Space. I’m reading with Bobuq Sayed and Sa’ed Atshan. We’re all reading from new work. I will read two chapters from my new novel. I am sorry I didn’t post about it here earlier, but when I last wrote, the link wasn’t up.

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It has been hard to write but I cannot write another newsletter about that. What’s his newsletter about? About how it’s hard to write right now. I don’t want that. We get it, we’re all struggling. Anyway, here is some of what I’ve been reading on my phone.

Today is the day rent is due in Minneapolis-St. Paul and around the country. Mutual Aid organizers there have noted the city is effectively under occupation and many are unable to make rent. If you can, join me in making a donation to Stand With Minnesota. But check in in your own communities too. ICE is operating in many places, and chances are if you are in what has before now been a lively and liberal community, you are probably under attack in ways you may not have seen yet.

There was a fair amount of good news last night and this morning. Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old kidnapped by ICE and used by agents as bait to try and capture his family has been released and he and his father are flying home to Minnesota. And last night Dems won two seats in Texas, at the level of the State Senate and the House of Representatives, narrowing the national GOP majority further. Once he has been sworn in. As we know with Rep. Grijalva last year House Majority leader Mike Johnson delayed that swearing in a long time. But maybe, with him now one vote away from losing his majority, he’ll be better? I guess we’ll see.

I keep seeing what’s happening with ICE and the CBP referred to as an immigration crackdown and as they make clear, it is not that. M. Gessen took the time to break down what they are doing, offering a definition of State Terror, Trump’s chosen method to his lawless reign, and it is worth reading as the distinction depends on a random nature to the terror, established through this idea of “absolute immunity” from accountability, which, of course a career criminal would focus on. The quotas given to ICE mean the president is not trying remove illegal immigrants from the country, he is trying to install a dictatorship that kills a democracy that leaves him in its place. As the senate struggles with taking a vote ICE and CBP has been kidnapping citizens along with immigrants, then releasing them often without clothes or a phone in rural areas, in the woods, in the cold. Native Americans have noted these are called Starlight Tours, a tactic Native tribes in Canada know from their long history with the Canadian Mounties.

As a result, people of color in Minneapolis-St. Paul and communities around the country have gone into hiding to avoid being forcibly trafficked to meet private prison quotas here or in other countries the administration has contracted with, and this to my mind is what is really going on—the filling of quotas, bodies for the private prisons. Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker has some insights on the relationship this mission has to slave catcher patrols from the 19th century and how local resistance to those patrols and the anger those patrols provoked led to the Civil War.

Minneapolis-St. Paul continues to elude the president’s grasp in several ways, and the city’s strength was centered in the stories that came out over this last week, visible in the extraordinary organized community effort undertaken to protect the community and the news that 34,000 community members joined the community watch after the executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Calling it a protest seems strange to many, because it is so comprehensive, and it has had to be. But I do think a protest is a community’s way of asserting its values in the face of injustice and that is certainly what is happening. Due to the extraordinary amount and kinds of gas deployed against the citizens there, for example, the Minnesota Star Tribune offered this extraordinary guide to these different gases used on crowds there and their health consquences, and how to recognize the canisters left behind. Definitely read Kerry Howley’s coverage of the organizing in the Twin Cities responding to this. I keep thinking of this photo of Greg Ketter, the owner of Dream Haven Comics, who was just trying to get a look at the ICE agents when he was photographed by journalist Theia Chatelle, walking through a massive cloud of tear gas without a mask or goggles.

His store site has crashed from people ordering books to support him, which is great, and there is also this gofundme for his store, which had been struggling.

Other news that stayed with me: Palantir employees are in an uproar over the company’s role in ICE’s assault on the country. ICE agents and ICE watchers in Lewiston and Portland, Maine are using the same tactics their counterparts were in Minneapolis—ICE agents are calling their raids there “Catch of the Day.” ICE is still very active in Los Angeles, where organizers want to remind everyone they are still under occupation, and around the country. ICE agents have caused an uproar in Italy, as American officials try to use them in security there for the Olympic Games. Italian coverage of this awful new development here. Someone meanwhile wrote ICE OUT on the ice on Lake Nokomis, captured well in this photo by Jonathan C. Slaght.

Cartoonist Ryan Estrada, the husband of cartoonist Kim Hyun Sook and also a collaborator with her, notes Korean journalists are calling the Minneapolis-St. Paul ICE assault America’s Gwangju, an atrocity that inspired Han Kang’s Nobel Prize winning novel Human Acts. National Nurses United has called for the abolition of ICE after the murder of member Alex Pretti. They are the largest union of nurses in the United States and are calling on members and supporters to organize against the continuance of the agency. You can call your reps to ask they listen to the nurses. And I will say, I found it strangely calming when Jamelle Bouie took some time recently to explain that the Trump administration is entirely illegitimate.

Books And Book Love

I’m reading Happiness, As Such, by Natalia Ginzburg, and the new Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Disinheritance, story by story, and loving both of them. And I will say, reading a story a day, a practice Aaron Burch has suggested, has been a genuine sustaining pleasure to me.

And in purely escapist literary news, I tried to recall the website charting every London location for an Iris Murdoch novel that I’d found back in 2023 when I was in London, and the wonderful Joshua J. Friedman found it for me: irismurdoch.info. I have a fantasy of planning an entire trip around this site...

Thank you to all my new subscribers. You’re amazing. I have been dreaming up some stuff I want to offer to subscribers and while the country’s situation keeps pushing my dreams into a ditch, I keep climbing out.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee