How to do the wrong thing right
“Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves.”
This quote — attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the motto by which I’ve so blithely lived my entire life — is evermore pertinent now. The simple truth is that here in America, we are getting to experience first-hand what ordinary life was like for the average Soviet citizen living under Brezhnev. The entire world, in fact, now gets to enjoy this new Big Party Communism experience, wallowing utopic in the inconsistencies of our bourgeois essentials: toilet paper, hand tissues, sanitizing wipes, diapers, baby food, fresh meats, canned tuna, peanut butter, milk, and even pet food for Lucky and Snowball. Rumors and innuendo swirl like Putin’s hairline about which grocery will soon receive a shipment of paper towels on morrow’s dawn — “Pssst, just remember to haul granny along with you: Seniors are permitted to rifle the ransacked shelves a full hour ahead of those not flaunting turkey wattles and knee dimples!”
From CEOs to street hustlers, everyone is riddled with a skittish anxiety about entering what’s uncharted: The small gym in my building — as with all gathering-places involving too-close proximity of breathing humans — has shuttered. In the blink of a Trumpian eye, my previously much-sought-after personal trainer spiraled from having to turn down new clients on a Wednesday, to total abandonment by his slate of regulars on Friday—a securely self-employed, flesh-and-blood man gone human hologram — ineligibly undeserving of even a nickel from the new two-trillion-dollar “stimulus salvation” package. Inside my building’s elevator doors, a cautionary notice has been taped warningly: “Do not touch the elevator buttons directly, use a tissue.” (A box of Kleenex is courteously placed on a stand for just such a purpose.) Putinesque phrases I’d never heard of a mere two weeks ago — “shelter-in-place” and “social distancing” — are now suddenly part of our everyday lexicon. Next to my building, The Katy Trail sprouts advisory signage requesting everyone distance themselves six feet apart; previously, in line at my bank only two days earlier, it was three feet. Millennials I’ve spoken with say, universally, they’re (duh!) not paying April’s rent, no more than their unopened monthly credit card statements shall bother making it up from the mailroom’s trashcan.
Obviously, Millennials aren’t alone here. And no matter how cagily any media dunderheads spin it, there’s plainly no mathematical way that our long-ago-now globalized economy can simply halt on a dime for a solid month, or even for two weeks, without inviting a worldwide, financially mortal meltdown. My brother in Gulf Shores, Ala., speciously informs me the public beaches have all closed down, but the ammo shops sport lines out the door. Inertia can only keep the globe spinning (via gallows’ humor) for a short while; ultimately, everything simpers to just a heaving death rattle — the resultant new world order bearing no resemblance to how things previously existed only 30 days prior. As renowned investigative journalist Alfred Henry Lewis terrifyingly stated back in 1906, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”
Exactly where our lives as they currently stand — everything closed and the hospitality/airline industries annihilated — will ultimately lead is anybody’s stupefied guess; that everyone on Earth is now living through a 9/11-magnitude type of crisis seems clear. Meanwhile, jabberwocky empathy foams forth courtesy our own Oracle L’Orange’s lucidity-free public assuages on his paycheck-embalmed citizenry; yet, nothing stops Air Force One taking off, Mar-a-Lago bound: Time to hit the greens!
In paralleling sidebar down here in Dallas recently, I received “a special message from American Airlines” announcing they’ve temporarily changed a number of policies in response to COVID-19, including a “relaxed seating policy” to better enable customers to practice social distancing on board “whenever possible” as well as (what a shocker!) reduced food and beverage service; plus, naturally, the suspension of checked pets. In other words, at last the airlines, dead though they may be, have exhumed a legitimately watertight (albeit mortally contagious) scapegoat to finally quit doing what they’ve been seeking plausible alibis to do away with for years: meal service and animal husbandry: “For the safety of our customers, we’re temporarily suspending food and beverage service on flights typically less than four-and-a-half hours, and because schedule changes increase the risk of leaving a pet stranded, all checked pet service will be suspended.” Rest assuredly, though, they know you always have options when choosing to fly.
As T.S. Eliot warned, This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper. Thus, dear readers, we arrive to this following letter attributed, dubiously, to the Fitzgerald canon. Written precisely 100 years ago, the author’s anxiety-addled tone draws a prescient comparison between the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918–19, the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century, according to the CDC… and our own 21st century’s little springtime pestilence:
Dearest Rosemary, It was a limpid, dreary day hung as in a basket from a single gold star. I thank you for your letter. Outside, I perceive what I think may be a collection of fallen leaves tussling against a trash can. It rings like jazz to my ears.
The streets are that empty. It seems as though the bulk of the city has retreated to their quarters, rightfully so. At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid all public spaces. Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is much the denier, that one. Why, he considers the virus to be just influenza. I’m curious of his sources.
The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.
You should see the square, oh, it is terrible. I weep for the damned eventualities this future brings. The long afternoons rolling forward slowly on the ever-slick bottomless highball. Z. says it’s no excuse to drink, but I just can’t seem to steady my hand. In the distance, from my brooding perch, the shoreline is cloaked in a dull haze where I can discern an unremitting penance that has been heading this way for a long, long while. And yet, amongst the cracked cloudline of an evening’s cast, I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better morrow.
Faithfully Yours, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Though purportedly penned in 1920, “Fitzgerald’s Quarantine Letter” is actually a 2020 work of satire by American author Nick Farrietta: Even the most casual of Fitzgerald buffs well know F. Scott and Zelda didn’t become married until April 3, 1920, say nothing of visited jazzy France or palled around with Hemingway. Nonetheless, in a perfect example of what passes for World Wide Web truism, replete with the past clairvoyantly foretelling the future, arrives this letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald gone viral. And as for its unidentified recipient here named Rosemary? She’s a lady who never existed in reality, borrowed from Fitzgerald’s own fictional 18-year-old American actress, Rosemary Hoyt (from his 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night).
Although intended as a parody, “Fitzgerald’s Quarantine Letter” — with its theme of nothing terrible lasting forever, or even for long — conjures up the best of our angels; inexcusably, North American virus cases now top the world. The current presidencies of both the U.S. and Mexico won office by the very skin of their respective country’s working-class teeth… the very same socioeconomic group now most decimated from global quarantining. Even during boom times, for those treading just ’neath the middle class, ruination looms but one wrench-tossed-into-the-system away. Oh, and of course you’ve all heard by now that L’Orange has (to the surprise of exactly no one) extended his previous end for our social distancing. Grrrl, wha? You heard me. No longer shall everything be “back to normal” again by Easter Sunday: “Six feet apart” now lasts this entire month… or is it 10 feet apart, rather, after the 12th? Who knows? Who, in the end, cares? It’s just so damned hard to stay ahead of an aspirational beacon of light.
Alas, with grateful hearts, it’s now our front lines’ emergency rooms where the bravest examples of emerging heroes abound: In Mexico City’s esteemed top medical facility, The Hospital Espanol, Dr. Ronaldo Rodriguez sums up a spirit of hopeful entrenchment best: “It doesn’t matter if I get the virus. Emergency care was my path’s choice. Risk of contagion is part of my life as a doctor. We’ll see a light at the end of the tunnel very soon, and everything is going to be normal after this apocalypse.” Oh, but that we could all aspire to Dr. Rodriguez’s life philosophy with equal honor, grace and serenity.
Indeed, Eliot was correct: April is the cruelest month. For how long, and how severe will be the repercussions of this unfolding springtime bete noir? Well, if you ask Howard — which, after all, is why you’ve made it this far anyhow — I say try swallowing this: Think of the coronavirus as a hasty marriage made in Vegas to your just-released-from-prison callboy at 4 in the morning whilst partying with those twisted, fun-loving Tina and Molly twins, drunker than Cooter Brown. We’re now in the honeymoon.
Kisses, kisses, terribly, terribly… see you in the distance, boiz!
— Howard Lewis Russell
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