By Andrea Georges Dolan
I moved to Weehawken on the evening of my 23rd birthday, celebrating in an unfurnished apartment with shitty boxed wine and a dozen stale donuts from Dunkin’. My roommate and I lived on the second floor of a triplex on 49th Street. The man who lived below us was a bassist who would play the same twangy seven notes on a bass that looked like it was fashioned out of plywood and scrap metal. Sometimes his girlfriend would be there, but they definitely hated each other. I once caught him kissing his girlfriend’s sister in the driveway and he glared at me as I quickly turned away from them and dashed to my car. It wasn’t my business, but at the same time I wasn’t going to plug my ears when I heard his girlfriend hiss you’re a FUCKING embarrassment before slamming the door behind her.
Above us lived a Tisch professor who would bring home his much younger female students. Most of them were obvious overperformers but all I could focus on was his silence while the bed squeaked loudly. I wondered if he really felt anything, but now I understand that it sometimes just feels nice to be next to a warm body, especially if she’s 21. On the nights during which he was alone, he would restlessly watch reruns of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on full blast in his living room. I can still hear his heavy footsteps pacing above me. I can still feel the loud DUNDUN rattling through my skull in the late hours of the night.
Weehawken is where I started running. I still can’t definitively say why, for I was cursed with flat feet and even walking has always been somewhat painful. I never quite got the runner’s high, but there was something profound in the struggle. A body can really push through anything. Perhaps it was boredom. Perhaps it was a way for me to outrun my thoughts.
There are two levels to Weehawken: the upper cliffside along JFK Boulevard East and the lower Waterfront along the Hudson River. To get from one end to the other, one must traverse what is locally called The Steps of Doom. Covered in chewed gum and graffiti, the rickety steps zigzag their way down from The Boulevard to the light-rail station at The Waterfront, where I would take the train to The City. Sometimes I would purposely torture myself and run up and down The Steps—not for any particular reason, just to say that I could do it. Just to say that I could run through anything, even pain. Especially pain.
The rusted steel squeaked and rattled with each step, and looking down gave me such intense vertigo that I vomited hard against the top railing, but descending was far better than its counter. The pointed heels that I often insisted on wearing on nights out got stuck in the janky slats of The Steps, so sometimes I would run up barefoot and pray I didn’t get tetanus. Sleazy men could get a good peek at my ass if they looked up. A slicked-back guido might menacingly wink at me as I breathlessly trudged my way up the twenty flights of Hell. Touch me, I dare you, I’d think. I’ll stomp your fucking brains in.
Sometimes when I’d run along The Boulevard, I’d think about how the luxury condominiums that lined The Waterfront would be the first to go in a climate catastrophe. I was thankful to live up top along the cliffside; I could see the entire expanse of Manhattan from there. If I looked close enough, I could see the hideous H&M advertisements flashing from Times Square. Sometimes I’d wonder if The City could agree on the irony, but I soon realized that Manhattan is far too self-absorbed for introspection. Narcissus beholds his dazzling reflection in the Hudson.
Upside: Weehawken has the best view of The City.
Downside: Weehawken has the best view of The City.
Every evening around seven or eight, two E-EXPRESS TOUR charter buses would pull up along The Boulevard and out would pour dozens of tourists, cameras in hand, all ready to snap away at the perfect view of The City. Didn’t they know this path was mine? Didn’t they know they were in my way? I’d grunt at them as I shoved my way between excited conversations in foreign languages. They stood tall with their arms outstretched to mimic the great and glowing island behind them. I wonder how many photographs of their smiling faces feature my blurry, heaving, and sweaty body running just out of the frame, like a ghost. I liked to think of myself that way anyway—invisible, fleeting, haunting.
On longer jogs I concentrated on the sound of my breath. When my thoughts would travel, I could bring myself back to focus by listening to my breath. Grad school got ya down? Just return to your breath. Heartbroken, again? Just return to your breath. About to jump off The Palisades Bluffs and hope the Hudson River swallows you whole? Just return to your breath. Sometimes I’d run until I couldn’t feel my limbs. My feet thumped hard on the concrete, a stubborn skeleton crumpling with every burdensome step. A nightly cold compress held close to swollen ankles felt more empowering than painful. Just breathe through it, I’d tell myself as I rubbed Tiger Balm on my splinted shins.
Sometimes on my jogs I’d think about all the bodies that have been scraped from the bottom of the Hudson. Sometimes I’d think about my friend’s older brother who jumped off the George Washington Bridge just a few years prior, and would wonder why he left his shoes behind. The police said that was common. He was a runner, too. A track star, really. I remember him running backwards with perfect form on our high school’s track, as if he had pressed rewind on himself. I’d stare in awe in my dirt-caked Converse as his knees drove higher into perfect 90 degree angles. We all thought he’d be an Olympian one day. Now he’s just a name on a banner hanging in the school’s gymnasium. Immortalized at 22.
I remember when he would walk his sister and me to Blockbuster when we were kids and buy us a bucket of Butter Lovers microwaveable popcorn. He was always so quiet and focused. Sometimes I’d think about how his mom didn’t initially believe he was dead and maintained that he was only missing, even though the last inquiries he searched on the internet were how tall is the George Washington Bridge and how many suicides on GWB. “Not my son,” I imagine her saying to the police knocking at her front door. “He wouldn’t do something like that.” I remember the look of denial in her eyes during his wake.
On one weekend morning jog, I saw a dead body washed ashore by the condos at The Waterfront. I remember the horrified screams of the wealthy middle-aged woman wrapped in a light gray robe, her phone in hand to call the police. She hovered over the pier where the feet of the body could be seen underneath her. It was a cold morning, too cold for spring. I listened for my breath.
“Don’t come over here!” she warned, but I was curious. This certainly was not the first dead person I’d seen, but I had never seen one quite like this. Bloated and blue, face down. The dead bodies I’ve seen lay peacefully in lacquered coffins, their arms posed gently over their chests, their faces caked with costume make-up. I wondered what had happened. Suicide? Murder? A drunken casualty from the ferry? I tried again to listen for my breath but all I could hear were her screams. I kept running until I got to Hoboken.
Once after a long night of drinking far too much free wine at an office party in The City, I opted to take a cab home. It was significantly quicker and more convenient than my usual MTA to NJ PATH to Steps of Doom running route. The cab driver was an older man, maybe mid-to-late fifties, with a thick gray mustache and even thicker bifocals. I had been particularly conversational this evening, asking him about his job, his life. He told me he had buried his granddaughter a week prior, and that life was unnecessarily cruel. I couldn’t muster anything to say other than a meek I’m sorry.
What I wanted to say was that grief is an unpredictable monster, and that sometimes its giant fist wraps itself around your body, constricting your blood flow. Grief takes your oxygen and replaces it with lead. Grief will demand that you punish yourself, for it should be the only thing you feel. Grief pulls at the loose ends and unravels you.
But I didn’t say any of that. I only looked at his eyes fixed to the road in the rearview mirror.
On the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel we took the first exit toward JFK Boulevard. Around the curve, The City skyline came into view. Bright, expansive, and silent.
“Do you mind if we stop for a minute?” the driver asked. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”
Andrea Georges Dolan is a writer from New Jersey, currently living in Los Angeles. You can read some of their other work at agdolan.com