Plague Journal, Day 20: Grieving Fountains of Wayne

The Girlfriend has a Brooklyn filmmaker friend experiencing the third week of symptoms identical to hers: head and body aches, tight chest, tingling, waves of debilitating fatigue. A friend in our Brooklyn co-op is, like The Girlfriend, in week two of those symptoms. The filmmaker got a test before hell broke loose in New York City: positive for Covid-19. We’re going on the assumption that The Girlfriend and I (suffering milder but similar symptoms) are among the fortunately positive. 

Wednesday: after a down day yesterday, The Girlfriend and I feel good enough to extend our walk, south to Vanderbilt to a bagel store. We miss bagels. Our two nearer bagel sellers seem closed for the viral duration, but on my bike I’ve noticed this one open. We plan: she’ll stay outside, I’ll go in, maintain distance. Alas, a sign says it’s closed April 1, to reopen April 2. Unlike the previous two days, the walk fails to exhaust her; her twisting path to health, we hope, continues. 

Brooklyn feels battened down, wary. The few pedestrians give each other greater distance, pause to allow others to pass quickly. Exercisers seem focused, dutiful. The Girlfriend and I greet most everyone we pass; some seem grateful, others startled. Tomorrow we need to go to a park, hear children, evidence of joy. We also need masks. (Conventional wisdom on mask wearing, in the U.S., anyway, has flipped from two weeks ago.) 

I hop in her car, drive south to pick up laundry dropped yesterday at a spot I found on Washington. (My laundromat across the street is closed; avoiding our co-op’s crowded laundry room seems wise.) The laundry’s not ready: “This afternoon,” says a worker from 8 feet away. I go to the nearly empty market next store, buy paper towels and liquid drain cleaner for our barely evacuating bathroom sink. I use the aisle with the most substantial counter, where the shift manager sits: more distance. I thank the (gloved, masked) clerk for staying on the job. “You’re the first person to say that,” she says. 

We spend the afternoon preparing for simultaneous videoconferences, The Girlfriend for a class, I for a job interview. I’ve never participated in any professional videoconference, much less for an interview. We practice likely questions, find me a suitable (plain white) background, test what happens when we speak at the same time (fine if she’s behind the closed bedroom door). My interview is delayed when the hiring committee chair sends the wrong sign-in number. One of the four panelists spends four-fifths of the interview with her laptop camera showing only the top of her head until another panelist tells her, “We’re getting a great shot of your ceiling.” To the extent I can tell through the transom, the chat goes fine. 

A former work colleague posts an interview with David Kessler about anticipatory grief, our feeling when the future is uncertain and scary. “With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety…I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this…We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.”

Meanwhile, people are dying. In New York City (which to date has close to 1 in 3 of Covid-19 diagnoses and deaths in the U.S.), a New York Times summary concludes, most of the sick are in poor neighborhoods: South Bronx, Western Queens, Eastern Brooklyn. These are folks who have to keep going to work, riding the subways, congregating in apartments with no chance to isolate. Older relatives, mostly, are the ones who end in the E.R., the morgue. 

But it’s not just the poor. Playwright Terrence McNally. Actor Mark Blum. Jazz musician Ellis Marsalis. Heck, the jazz world alone has lost Bucky Pizzarelli, Manu Dibango, Wallace Roney, Marcelo Peralta. 

And it’s not just grandparents. Drag artist Mona Foot couldn’t have been in better shape: dead at 50. And, the public figure who’s struck closest to my heart so far: pop songwriter Adam Schlesinger, 52.  

Schlesinger wrote plenty of music for lots of projects. But the songs he co-wrote with fellow Williams College classmate and Fountains Of Wayne bandmate Chris Collingwood reached me in adulthood in ways seldom touched by other rock acts. They didn’t bare their souls or make political statements. They were pop craftsmen who paid homage to a wide range of musical styles. They could sound like a score of bands — Big Star, The Cars, The Meat Puppets, The Posies, Teenage Fanclub, They Might Be Giants, Pavement, The Lemonheads, Nada Surf — but with sharper hooks than most, defter lyrics than all. 

Their catalog's depth is demonstrated by the fact that a half-dozen tribute lists published in the last 24 hours picked about 40 songs as among their best 10. They wrote short stories in verse, songs of quotidian Tri-State middle-class life in the tradition of McCartney or Difford & Tilbrook: office workers needing to sober up or take a sick day; teens going to a laser-light show or ready to party while their parents vacation on Fire Island; a couple waiting at baggage claim; a dilatory coffee shop waitress; a guy with an instant crush on a DMV desk clerk; guys traveling to see their loves on I-95 or the Acela. They wrote funny. They wrote always with empathy for their sad-sack protagonists. And they wrote with a depth of specificity that, contrarily, gave their songs universality: a trick only artists can pull.

Adam Schlesinger's death doesn't incite ambiguous grief, or anticipatory grief. It’s just grief. 

(New York state numbers as of Wednesday: 83,712 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 10 percent — the smallest percentage increase since February; 1,941 dead, up 25 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 4,746, up 25 percent.)