Let's go to the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic just for fun
I was missing Lisa hard on Thursday night instead of going to bed and just then, when it was too late for customary phone calls, grandma called.
I flipped on Friday and said "do you wanna go to New York next Tuesday Paige" and she said yes and we left at 8:30AM. An embarrassing amount of CVS snacks in the wheel well. The Dunkin Donuts in the gas station on the corner and a boy with ruby red hair. All these people were going to their jobs and we were going to New York City. We took a bunch of rest stops to stretch and polaroid. I researched the Frustrated Maestros. Paige talked about her friend Al and Kettle Black and said "here I am to catch you." We didn't have a plan. But we laid out some goals. Mine were NY pizza, map of Manhattan, and Paige's were Green-Wood Cemetery and her old neighborhood.
Paige's old apartment is past the middle of a block of skinny, connected two-stories, and hers has dark brick and black iron over the windows. She lived there four years ago and "enough things have changed to make it uncanny," but not her laundromat on the previous corner or the blue nautical-themed bar up 5th Ave. We drove the hilly, curling roads of Green-Wood Cemetery, where all the trees had arms down. An entire one was uprooted sideways, the newly-exposed fingers of its roots curled and gnarly and now useless.
We parked on Sassafras Avenue, with the trees making a long archway, and Paige changed into shorts while I shimmied out the passenger window (she had parked too close to an embankment of dead people) and we went looking between Woodlawn and Mistletoe for Jean-Michel Basquiat's grave. We were lost a little while, tramping down grass (one grave had a plate that read "perpetual care") and had turned to head back for the map when I said "Oh," and Paige came back.
His was in a long row of low, nondescript, modern-looking plaques. There was a childish-looking painting resting on it, and two empty liquor bottles. Four lighters, a clementine, paintbrushes, markers, and messages. Paige put a joint on the top of the grave and she smoked one, too. Two groundskeepers rolled by and smiled and nodded at us. When Paige was done, she pulled out her bag of mini tarot. "I wasn't focusing on a question or intention, I was just reaching-" I said, right before I turned over the Death card. "You get to pull a clarifier," she said immediately, but I felt lucky and amazed. I knew it wasn't a bad thing. She had told me on the ride down all how it was the new moon in Leo, and because Leo is in...my seventh house?? that means new beginnings in work and daily habits. I know that's what the Death card really means. Besides, I was sitting on Basquiat's grave, ten minutes from bringing up Adam Yauch Park, having broken down last week missing Lisa.
We visited a convenience store Paige knew for their sandwiches, but she just got change for a hundred her mom had unhelpfully tossed her for house-sitting last week. This was the only place we were in enclosed quarters with people not wearing masks, but it was only a minute and I turned away.
I googled "best pizza in Manhattan" and Joe's came up multiple times. But on the way was Yauch's park. I knew it was probably small and nothing too special, so I was just like "we'll just drive by." Of course we didn't just drive by. I'll write about that next.