The Park and It’s Artifacts

As I labor over the crossword in Washington Square Park, a man beside me meditates, his hands are placed face up on his knees (a method to promote energy absorption), and he sits in rhythmic breath as I finish the last of the “across section.” Nearby, someone is selling psychedelic mushrooms and discounted weed, “2-pre rolls for 1!” he shouts while banging the side of a plastic merchandise container like a drum. My meditative neighbor keeps his breathing steady, eyes shut while a few finance bros in backward hats and collared shirts discuss a new property one has acquired. Inhale…Exhale.

I’m still stuck on a 5-letter word for “map box” when two women on a bike-drawn carriage disrupt my rumination. The sign on the back of this bizarre city-wagon reads, “Carriage rides $5 dollars a minute.” I briefly recall the days 5th Avenue and the park were the runways of the daily upper-class Promenade. Suddenly the sweaty chauffeur rings his bike bell, and my neighbor’s eyes are open, a deeper Inhale….Exhale, and his eyes are shut again. As my bewilderment runs its course, I linger on the crossword, desperate for an answer…

The park is best enjoyed for what it reveals in these brief present moments. At times, a park bench is the premier site to reach out for the camaraderie provided by the mere observation of others. Yet, these observations are tarnished in their unsettling brevity — the park steadily loses its enchantment in the memory. In fact, we forget to remember. Memories of passing faces blushed with glee or sullen gray are stored, and no explanation is provided. Despite its sunny disposition, the park beckons grim temporary attention to hauntingly disparate human lives.

For me, Washington Square Park holds sinister artifacts. I see the bench where I wrote to Naomi begging her to spare her life and am “disgorged in total recall.” The poet Allen Ginsberg was familiar with these uneasy sensations; the “rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dreams of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stones as heavy as the moon.” I remember five benches down on the park’s east side; I had my heart broken once. On the west side is where the ambulance arrived when Naomi got so high she wanted to die, she ran north away from the medics. There by the ravenous fountain, Naomi met “Moloch,” who Ginsberg spotted 64 years prior; we held her final intervention in the grass a few feet from there. I suppose these are “the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements” and the material of the holy “river of tears under the streets” Ginsberg espoused.

The atmosphere of pandemic-ridden 2021 New York City was polluted with the same “narcotic tobacco haze of capitalism,” which fumigated Manhattan in the days of Allen Ginsberg and the suffering souls of the beat poetry movement. Ginsberg wrote his poem Howl in 1956, an era of urban renewal where the erection of the Kennedy Bridge and massive architectural developments relegated the middle class and impoverished creatives to an unfettered underbelly of the city infused with artistic provocativeness and drug use.

Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, NYU students arrived on campus to find themselves in a deserted concrete playground that shut down at 8 pm. Washington Square Park became the “illegal” gathering spot for “the shepherds of rebellion” (students desperate for alliance but unable to breach their 6-foot boundary indoors). We stood shivering at midnight, longing for what Ginsberg calls “ancient heavenly connection,” while the city’s dark corners and hollow halls loomed in predation.

Moloch wasn’t hard to find for all of us fresh-faced-freshman hungry to feel alive and connected after months of forgetting the touch of even our own mothers’ embrace. Moloch, a Canaanite God of child sacrifice, was Ginsberg’s term to describe the insidious impact of living in the center of global enterprise while remaining in disaffected isolation from the community of New Yorkers around him. Marshall Berman details this seclusion born of urban cosmopolitanism: “modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all of mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction.”

In the park, looking for unity or an “angry fix,” Naomi met face-to-face with Moloch, a boy with kind eyes and a pack of Perc30s laced with fentanyl. The habit she developed was still easy to hide the night we met in a “fire paint hotel:’’ the Stewart near Madison Square Garden (at the time, a secret party spot for large and illegal gatherings). In the bathroom, among cigarette smoke and shots of tangy tequila, we bonded over tumultuous upbringings and our desire to, here for the first time, be free from it all. In that infinite moment, we were “New Loves! Mad generation! Down on the rocks of time!” She told me she’d one day take me home to the San Francisco bay area, and I told her it was wild she had never been south and promised to show her Atlanta.

Over that very first year, we were enchanted with the city’s vibrance and blissfully naive of what lurked in the ominous forgotten corners of the park. We established a little group of friends, more out of obligation than choice: myself, my roommate Ella, Naomi, and her roommate Kristen. We had each other, and we knew no one else. The year oscillated between week-day isolation, taking classes on a screen alone in our dorm rooms, to wondrous weekends in the “grandfather night.”

On Naomi’s 19th birthday, she told us she dreamt of being a teacher for prison inmates. She said she was desperate to connect with those from whom society would usually cower. Her endearing universalism was her best quality; she had an unsparing heart. This is also why she sometimes made friends in parks at night and spoke for hours in “humorless protest” about prison reform and gentrification, sometimes over cigarettes and cocaine. When we found out she had taken the L to Prospect Park past midnight once or twice to score heroin, we were ripped out of the haze of city lights and thrown into the brutal “Absolute Reality” of this cement city.

Ah, Naomi, ‘while you are not safe, I am not safe.’ Here we all were, four 18/19-year-olds in the “total animal soup of time — .” Kristen, Ella, and I began meeting separately to discuss what we were supposed to do. We had yet to meet so much as a teacher in person, we did not know our RA’s, and we had no trusted advisors. Blind leading blind. We began googling things like “how to have an intervention?” and the “odds of recovery from heroin addiction.”

We decided we would meet in the park, and attempt, in “poor human prose”, to convey the preciousness of her life. To convince her she would not be forgotten in the way so many other things were. We reminded her of the “cosmos vibrating at [her] feet,” how the universe had reserved a place for her at the front of a classroom, on a park bench somewhere in this godforsaken city, in our hearts. We trembled in the grass, unaware of the battle before us.

Finally, she agreed to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and to contact counseling at the university. We told her we couldn’t go out drinking anymore together and started to plan game nights and sleepovers. On that day Naomi promised to never return to Prospect Park; she said she would quit all of it:percocets, cocaine, heroine.

One Google search revealed headlines we were unprepared to understand: “Only 20% of heroin addicts recover” and “150 people die from fentanyl overdose every day.” Without the money to send her to rehab, we were banking on NA meetings and fellowship to save her life.

In a damp church basement in the Ukrainian Village, Krystin and I accompanied Naomi to her first NA meeting. Saddened and supportive eyes traced us as we grabbed pamphlets and folding chairs; we were the youngest in the room by far. The omnifarious group was as much a display of cosmopolitan diversity as the first spring day in the park. The room was surprisingly varied. Men and women. Black and white. Old and young (not quite as young as us). Optimistic and downtrodden. Those recovered, recovering, and those trying not to stop at a dealer on the way home. Our trouble was attempting to scale Naomi’s place in the ranks; she told us she had been clean all week, and we wanted to believe her.

This was the largest gathering of people I had seen in a year. NA was the only spot in the city that was genuinely standing-room only. In reality, we were in the epicenter of one the darkest periods for mental health and drug addiction in decades. Drug overdoses rapidly increased during the pandemic and New York City was a hot spot for cheap fentanyl and laced drugs. Over 100,000 drug related deaths occurred in the first 12-month quarantine period of 2020. In that moment, we had no idea we were an artifact of the time.

The meeting began with a speech from the group’s leader, “I fight the grip of my addiction every day,” he boomed triumphantly, “and I do it for me, I do it for you, and I do it for my family, which you are a part of too.” He told the story of how meth addiction had ruined his life. During the 2008 recession, he lost his job, then his home, then his wife, then custody of his children. He said the drugs just made this separateness bearable and gave him the luxury of numbness. After three stints in rehab and multiple arrests, he told us he had been clean for 11 years and flashed a medallion as proof.

At the end of his speech, he asked the group to raise their hands if they had been clean before coming here. The older man next to me sat up in his seat. I kept finding myself staring at his hands; they were torn and bleeding, in stark juxtaposition with his perfectly tailored suit and tie. I wondered if suffering always left clues like this. I wondered which of Naomi’s I might have missed that brought her there that day.

Suddenly the man’s hand shot up, and the slightest bit of blood dropped to the floor. I looked up and finally allowed myself to see — Naomi’s eyes were bloodshot. Slowly, she raised her hand to indicate she was clean too; slowly, I stopped trying to believe her. The rest of the meeting consisted of brief testimonies from the group; they discussed their constant battle, fighting off incessant thoughts of drugs while trying to hold jobs they desperately wanted to be steady. However, the quiet group members were limp-necked and disengaged — Naomi included. In the end, the leader reminded the group: “This all starts with you, your choice to stay clean, your choice to show up and keep showing up.” Naomi was already aiming for the door.

Afterward, she asked if we should celebrate with her favorite: bone-dry Martinis, and I started to tear up. I feared this was a battle I was wholly unprepared to fight, and I feared we would never save someone unprepared to save themselves. Ah Naomi, ‘While you are not safe, I am not safe.’

Upon the final intervention, we were alas aware of the cursed crossroads before us: rehab or death. When we arrived at the park, we sat in silence for too long and finally determined we needed to move locations to her apartment in the West Village. A lawn could not be both a site for Whipple-ball, chain-smoking and a life-saving intervention all at once. As we sat across from her on her bright yellow couch, my body began shaking and my armpits dripped cold sweat. At 18, I was preparing to tell someone what to do with their life, and I found myself on shaky ground. We knew now her grandmother had offered to pay for her treatment, and I told her plainly, “Rehab is the only option.” She protested, claiming her drug use was only casual, just for fun when she was with her boyfriend.

With a tinge of untraceable anger, I forced myself to say, “There is nothing casual about heroin use, Naomi.” We knew what we had to do. Everything we had read on interventions from Wi-ki How, to published research were clear: at some point all drug addicts must be issued a damning ultimatum. We followed suit. “Naomi, you have to go to rehab, and if you do, we promise we will help you pack, we will visit you, and we will count the days until your return. But if you do not go, we can’t see you anymore.” Everything in my body rejected the sensation of allowing this sentiment to pollute the apartment’s atmosphere. I wanted to say we’d never leave; I wanted her to know she was not alone. But more than that, I knew my discernment alone was insufficient; I was attempting to do what was morally required. She told us she appreciated what we were trying to do and promised to get back to us after she thought about her options.

This moment sits unsteadily in my mind, subject to spontaneous replay when I catch a glimpse of the spot in the lawn where the grass forgot to grow, where we once sat grasping for words capable of granting immortality.

If we had stayed, perhaps we may have witnessed her “howl on her knees in the subway.” Perhaps then, I would have been with her in San Francisco, where she was madder than I am; I would have been with her in San Francisco, where she must have felt awfully strange. I would have been with her in San Francisco, where she faced Moloch in an ungodly sphere.

We had yet to hear from her a year after that day. We never once passed each other on campus, and I watched her life from Instagram posts of martini glasses, pill bottles, and mirror selfies. In her last post, she was back in California, it was a picture of graffiti reading “Fentanyl be killing my friends” and she captioned it with three emojis: a heart, lungs, and a brain.

That summer, as I sat in oppressive July heat in my un-airconditioned apartment on a once insignificant afternoon, I found out. As I mindlessly scrolled Instagram, I came upon a post from Naomi’s childhood friend, Ava. When I first saw this reel of photos of the two of them, I was delighted to find some were recent. Briefly, I allowed it to confirm she was doing well. However, when I made my way to the caption, “Absolute Reality” sunk in again. “Naomi, I will never forget you…,” it began. I stopped reading. I texted Ava to confirm the news; she told me per Jewish custom, the funeral occurred 24 hours after her death, and she was already buried near her mother on a hilltop in California. “Molch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!” For hours I read everything I could about loss.

Then I went searching for the “incarnate gaps in Time & Space” that might have brought her back to me. I walked by her old apartment. I sat on the steps of the Ukrainian Church. I went to the park bench where we once sat together. I washed my palms in that vicious fountain. I laid in that part of the park where the grass remembers not to grow because somehow it knows what was lost from there.

These are the artifacts I once again unearth today as I scan the park, stuck on the crossword. I ponder that damned blank space on the park bench and all these things come rushing back. I try to scale how long I had been sunken into memory and am reassured, given my neighbor, still in meditation, has kept his rhythm. Inhale….Exhale. Suddenly, the mushroom man bangs his drum again, and I’m back. Inset! A five-letter word for “map box.” I’ve found my answer.