Le Chéile
Moves, façades, and fateful turns in pandemic biking
The barnyard duck had no notion that his little head was big enough to contain oceans, continents, skies; but of a sudden here he was beating his wings.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars1
I lived in Chicago for six years, and at the midpoint of that residency in my first post-college town, I got a brief taste of what it was like to commute to work by bike. I lived in a neighborhood called Old Town, close to the city center, and I had easy access to the Lakefront Trail that runs for 18 miles along the shore of Lake Michigan. At one point my office was temporarily at 303 East Wacker Drive, a building also very close to the water, so the shoreline commute was a breezy three-mile bike ride that required almost no interaction with car traffic.
The bike that I used came from a Bucktown street fair and cost me $25. Before that purchase, I had no experience with biking in a city. I grew up in suburban Texas, where the dependence on an automobile to move even small distances is nearly absolute. When I look back on the car culture of my youth, I associate cars with limitation and not freedom. You didn’t have freedom until you could drive, and when you could finally drive, adventures were hours and full gas tanks away.
I have very fond memories of that Chicago summer of biking to work. In fact, in retrospect, I can pinpoint the summer of 2011 as the most carefree I’ve ever felt in my life, before everything started to unravel. One of the best feelings I’ve ever had is just gliding through the air on a bike, and learning your city in a different way. There’s magic in being able to move yourself, to cover ground and traverse space on your own energy. It’s also beautiful when you bike in places you sort of know on foot, and your brain starts to fill in gaps in your patchwork understanding of neighborhoods. A route that was always there is newly traversed, linking disparate memories, and connections between islands of time light up.
The perpetual stress that came after that carefree summer was all my own making, when my partner and I decided (Her official position is that I decided) to leave Chicago and move to New York in search of better careers. There’s nothing new or revolutionary about our New York move: we moved here for the reasons everyone moves here. I was full of romantic notions of what an intellectually active life looked like. I wanted the opposite of what I grew up in. I wanted a better tech job.
Admittedly more to the point, we wanted to make films and consume more film. Reesa and I had started to spend all of our free time watching repertory programs at Music Box Theatre and the University of Chicago’s student-run film society, Doc Films. But the cinephilia had been in both of us independently from the beginning; it just never had the proper outlet or community around it until this town nurtured us.
In August 2012, on my most memorable Chicago night, the director of my all-time favorite movie brought a secret print of his latest feature film to Music Box. It was only the second time that the work had been shown to a public audience. That early pop-up screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master was the first time Reesa and I had ever seen 70 mm film projected.
Right after that momentous event, the two of us were able to find (stalk) PTA at the bar next door. I summoned the courage to grab a beer with him and bashfully fawn over Boogie Nights. We talked about his DVD commentaries, his plans to show The Master at the Venice Film Festival, and the silents that were then playing at Doc Films, like John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924)—the first time I had ever watched silent movies, let alone seen them projected in a theater on film.
My suburban mind was dazzled and starstruck. Our cinematic vistas were expanding rapidly. I wanted all of this, but on an even bigger scale now. Through my reading, I was becoming more aware of the film organizations and resources in New York. Disappointed by the Chicago tech options, I started seriously considering New York as the natural place to pursue both the tech job and the dream job together. But really, Chicago was an outstanding place to live. We left something very good for something infamously and intensely difficult. Even though we didn’t make that much money in Chicago, I thought we lived pretty comfortably for our age. But our Chicago savings dropped to zero after just a few years of New York living.
To jump from reasonable comfort to paycheck-to-paycheck precariousness in search of vaguely romantic ideals feels particularly foolhardy and Icarian. So often in my harried existence do I long to get back to that peaceful state of biking down the Lakefront Trail, coasting toward the Chicago Loop. My mind plays Don Henley’s lyric, ruefully musing on the strangeness of those impulses that “make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more.” What are all these voices? Looking back, I can’t avoid viewing my fateful decision to relocate us as the hubris that hurled us forever into survival mode.
Leaving Chicago was bittersweet even as I was realizing a long-held dream. I had only lived in two other cities before, and forging ties to a city as an adult is just a different experience. Your friends start to get married. You learn how to feed yourself three times a day and maybe actually enjoy the process. The living spaces are yours, in spirit if not in legal deed. For that final week before we loaded up the Hertz rental car and ventured east on I-90, I distinctly remember feeling quite sad, knowing there were so many neighborhoods that I had just never visited. I’d spent little if any time in Andersonville, Ukrainian Village, Humboldt Park, Pilsen—and it felt like a failure not to have embraced the wholeness of a city’s character in the good amount of time that I had lived there. You get so used to your daily patterns—those easy comforts of knowing what your next meal, your next event or hangout will be—and instead of exploring, you just forget how multitudinous it all is.
When the COVID lockdown first hit in March 2020, there was a blissful ignorance in those first days when we thought that the pandemic would last for a few weeks, and it was therefore time to tackle things like reading The Recognitions or starting a garden in the newfound leisure time that would soon enough revert to normal. I personally thought that I would have a lot of new ideas to write about in that free time of not seeing friends and not going to the office. Losing access to an office building, to the familiar rhythms of industry, was a troubling shift for me, and I wanted to document my reactions contemporaneously as the horror set in at this moment in world history. As early as May 2020, there was even a New York Times article on this topic, proposing that our quarantine journals could become valuable primary sources for the museum exhibits of the future.
I do write journal entries on occasion, thinking that this unstructured data could someday be useful to someone, but my lamentations never come close to forming an ordered timeline for posterity. I don’t know, for instance, when it became clear to me that the pandemic wasn’t going to be a weeks-long thing, but an indefinite thing. A month in? Two months in? I wish my memory were better, but sometimes I wonder if, on average, I forget things that I should be forgetting anyway. Does it matter that I started feeling some deep melancholy about my professional and social life four months in? That one year later, there was a brief period of catharsis between the initial wave of second-dose vaccines and the delta variant, when I got to attend an indoor concert and act like a maniac? Maybe the importance of any granular recounting of the COVID-19 timeline will vanish against the scale of unfathomably larger global problems. Maybe it’s narcissistic exceptionalism to believe that anything you record could be a primary source.
In my pandemic malaise, I didn’t bake sourdough loaves. I didn’t recite sonnets like Sir Patrick Stewart, or study TikTok to do the shuffle dance up a flight of stairs. (Well, that’s not accurate: I actually did study many videos, but I couldn’t pull it off.) I was victorious, however, in joining the well-documented New York bicycle boom. When lockdown started, I stopped buying a monthly subway pass; I stayed put in my home borough for two months, unwillingly; and I got scared of breathing any enclosed air, consciously inhaling a little more shallowly through the mask, lest those extra cubic centimeters of oxygen smite me a few weeks thence. I also left the best job I’ve ever had (long story) and started a new job during the pandemic. That turned out to be the worst job I’ve ever had—but one positive way that the new gig changed my life was by offering quarantine-friendly subscriptions to Citi Bike, New York’s bike sharing program, and to WeWork for coworking spaces in lieu of a headquarters.
Citi Bike was my subway alternative and my introduction to biking in a dense urban space. Burning to see the New York that I loved again, I ended up cross-breeding these dual forces of Citi Bike and WeWork as an excuse to explore the cosmopolis in its ghost-town state. It was the first time that I had biked since those halcyon Chicago days. I would take one of the tank-heavy bike rentals to a random coworking spot and greedily partake of the Wi-Fi, desks, printers, quiet booths, alcohol wipes, dishwashing, tea, coffee, flavored seltzer, vibes. The WeWork subscription is designed so that customers pick a sort of home-base location to patronize and then occasionally visit other satellite locations when it’s convenient, but I chose the opposite configuration and intentionally rotated through new buildings every week as my standard procedure. I needed to feel the pulse again, or more pointedly to exist in the lifeblood that used to course through the city.
At the final tally, I’d visited 17 different WeWorks in the brief time that I was employed at the Bad Job, across various neighborhoods: the West Village, Chelsea, NoMad, Midtown, Dumbo, Williamsburg. Biking to these offices was exhilarating but hard at first for someone who hadn’t vigorously exercised since it was required of him to graduate from high school. I had to google “how to shift gears” and learn how to follow the painted bike paths that sometimes instantaneously shift to the other side of the street. I also had to take breaks the first few times because I didn’t have enough wind for the interborough bridges. After one or two weeks, though, it became completely normal to bike everywhere.
When I visited a WeWork in the Financial District after biking across the Brooklyn Bridge, I was in awe of having so much space to myself—and pretty luxurious space by any standard. I guess I’m in the target audience to whom the bougie aura of WeWork’s cautiously fun interior design would appeal. There still weren’t any work friends, and I didn’t have any office snacks, but the sleek workspace was an oddly comforting phantom of perks that used to be.
At my old office at the Good Job, I’d had access to Greek yogurt, granola, fresh fruit—way better than any breakfast I could make at home daily. When I moved to New York, I didn’t think I’d be reduced to using office pantry snacks to defray food costs. But the city changed me a lot. On bad days, you can try subsisting on the office’s beef jerky and cheese sticks, almonds and black coffee. This is one way to pay for your New York rent and lifestyle.
That stratagem might sound extreme, but externalizing things that could otherwise happen in a normal-sized home (meals, drinks, parties) is what New York is all about! Sociologists coined the term “third place” to denote a venue, outside of the first place of home and the second place of work, where social connection can happen: cafés, libraries, barbershops, malls in the 1990s. The third place and the second place are essential to New York: you spend much more of your time in cafés, bars, parks, and the office than at home (pre-pandemic, at least). While I have enjoyed the improbable setting of a 20-person party in a microscopic apartment, a lot of that stuff has to happen elsewhere—there’s just no room for it. Fleets of double baby strollers and scooters perch on stairway landings; dogs have self-service wash locations; condo buildings have dentist-grade playrooms for toddlers. Even bare-minimum storage space gets externalized.
More important than providing subsidized food, though—the workplace was the primary way I socialized. I never considered myself a career man, but I guess I fell into the trap of making work become enough of my identity, to the point where losing the office’s trappings suddenly cast me adrift. The second and third places had actually started to blend for me, but in a positive, enriching way. Office interactions were crucial to how I was making and maintaining friendships at that stage in life. As a result, the afternoon coffee breaks and the five-o’clock Friday beers were so much more to me than white-collar rituals: I was finally connecting to other people in a way that I never had before, rejoicing, commiserating, dreaming. Formerly a deep introvert, I needed a pandemic and more than 30 years of life to understand how deeply I needed to connect to friends and to feel genuine camaraderie in order to live.
It is a very much a specific phase in your career, though, and it doesn’t last very long. In that way, the Good Job became a pivotal third place for me: I happened to be in that pre-childcare phase of life where you’ve formed a more mature idea of what you need out of life, but where you also still wield the energy and motivation to pour your heart into a company and forge meaningful friendships at the same time.
Biking to WeWork offices wasn’t going to bring any of this back—the collegiality, the two and a half place, the lifeblood. But at least I was exploring again. I wasn’t going to feel sad about the neighborhoods I’d never visited. I still lived here, and I was armed with new knowledge and new powers. Once again, I was using my own energy to fly through the air and traverse space and time.
The density of New York makes a simple walk through one neighborhood turn into a literal memory lane. Façades visited years before spark remembrances that long should have decayed by now; somehow, inconsequential wisps of memory have persisted beyond any usefulness. Tribeca always acts this way for me, because I used to work there, too: I’ll roam its blocks, and the innocent storefronts will remind me that I once interviewed someone at Edward’s, and got interviewed by someone else across the street at the Odeon; we said goodbye to a colleague at Puffy’s Tavern and then wrapped up at the fancy Brandy Library, a place I could never enter without venture capital to subsidize the alcohol; we bought just-married balloons for another colleague at Balloon Saloon; I had a glass of red wine at the Hideaway when everything was going to shit.
Things are often going to shit, and I wonder what forces keep me in New York. How much more financial pummeling can you take, really?
The tech giants continue to invest in New York real estate despite the countless cries that the nature of work has changed forever, effusing that “New York’s energy, creativity and world-class talent are what keep us rooted here.” It’s platitudinous PR speak, but it’s accurate. It’s at least as well thought out as my own justification if you had asked me why I wanted to leave Chicago for New York.
I finally got my own city bike after one year of a Citi Bike subscription. (It was free off the street. The density of New York is good for that, too.) If the gas tank in Texas constrained my adventures, and if Citi Bike’s coverage tethered me to populous areas, now it was all up to me to pedal. I wasn’t going to repeat the Pilsen or Humboldt Park regrets of Chicago. During the delta era of the pandemic, I’ve biked to Randall’s Island, the Bronx, Coney Island, the Rockaways, Ridgewood, Flushing—all places that were too hard for me to reach on a hefty rental bike. I’d also made a New Year’s resolution to push myself and bike outside the city limits, and New Jersey was a natural choice for venturing out of New York City by bike.
When I was biking back from that Jersey jaunt last month, another memory lane materialized—this time on the north extreme of Manhattan, opposite Tribeca. I rode by this Irish pub called Le Chéile in Washington Heights and immediately remembered it, despite having been there only once and having never gathered its name. I even had a presentiment of recognition as I approached its environs. (Spaces do that to you: they are imbued with your own memory and somehow keep an invisible record, perhaps never to be accessed again, or perhaps to be referenced just one more time.) The front of the pub overlooks a street that descends sharply toward the Hudson River, at a declivity quite unusual for Manhattan but more typical of the upper half of the island as it extends its long foam finger into Washington Heights. At a saddle point in this downsloping topography, Le Chéile (together in Gaelic) sits rather confidently, its vivacious façade radiating colors of sea green and cerulean and a pop of magenta outward.
The memory came hurtling back through time—“Nosebleeds from epiphanies I took full in the face,” Arctic Monkeys would say. As remote as this place was, I had been here before. Even choosing that particular street to bike down felt destined: returning from the George Washington Bridge that connects Jersey and the Heights, I had actually needed to head south, not north to the foreordained street. But I obediently followed the road signs directing me northward so that I could find the nearest access road and finally go back downtown along the Hudson River Greenway. Bearings set for Manhattan-grid north, I eventually made a decisive left onto West 181st, and as I descended a startling gradient and applied my brakes in many short bursts, I instinctively remembered that pub several years ago where I’d once found (stalked) a film hero of mine but ended up being too nervous to talk to him.
Yes, this was actually Paul Thomas Anderson again, but not with The Master in Chicago. In September 2014, an orchestra named Wordless Music had performed a live score for a screening of Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood. The film screening plus concert took place far uptown at the United Palace, one of the five ornate “Wonder Theaters” erected by Loew’s in the New York City area as the Roaring Twenties crashed to an end. (Still waiting on our post-COVID Roaring Twenties, incidentally.)
Wordless Music’s performance of There Will Be Blood became my favorite moviegoing experience ever. The film itself is the best film of the century, but the music alone is an extraordinary union of Jonny Greenwood’s discordant strings and percussive plucking, together with the brilliantly inspired use of the Brahms Violin Concerto. Wordless, as always, was so beautifully synced and mixed with the film’s soundtrack, and the concertmaster rocked the shit out of her third-movement solo over the end credits. Allegro giocoso, indeed—no such thing as troppo. Written for the Screen and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
It was a transcendent experience. Greenwood played in the actual orchestra, and there was talk that Anderson had been in attendance, though he’d opted out of a public appearance on stage—just as he had on my favorite Chicago night. When it was all over, Reesa and I lingered outside the wonder theater in rapture. We had no idea where we were, being new to Washington Heights—but suddenly she overheard that the orchestra players were headed to an after-party at some bar on 181st Street, no name, no cross street. Armed with only this single piece of leaked information, like Tom Cruise’s interloping “Fidelio” in Eyes Wide Shut, we sauntered down the eavesdropped street and stumbled upon this ridiculously San Franciscan hill. Le Chéile stood out brazenly at the bottom, and we thought, Oh, it’s gotta be this bar. There’s no other one.
This is all converging to an anticlimax, by the way. There’s no reprise of the drunken PTA chitchat to boast about this time. Inside the pub, the musicians hung out in a more private upstairs area where I dared not intrude (lest the sex cult unmask me), so we just loitered sheepishly on the ground floor until we finally spied Anderson and moptopped Greenwood exiting the pub Together and jumping into cabs. Keeping with the Irish theme, my epiphany communed with that of James Joyce’s narrator in “Araby”: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
Alone, together; alone, le chéile. I don’t know why I was brave enough to approach Anderson in Chicago but not here. Maybe New York was already starting to wear my spirit down in year two. Maybe online stan culture lures you too far into parasocial creeper territory. On the other hand, maybe the uninhibited zeal you possess when you’re young and ingenuous is worth something special, before the world has cruelly dismantled you and made you conscious of your boundaries and limitations. Whatever the case: smash-cutting to the present day, riding on my sidewalk-swiped bike, nose figuratively bleeding from Mnemosyne’s assault, I couldn’t believe that this foray was actually a thing we once did! It felt born of an entirely different life. For so long we had been earnestly searching for new experiences and new film connections, and in the intervening years I had completely forgotten why I’d killed myself to get here.
I’ve been fixated on this sly surge of memory ever since it happened. A wisp of a remembrance planted me face to face with some slowly creeping life changes that I never wanted to confront. A haunting passage from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn precisely expresses this long-dormant shock: “Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.” Sebald then qualifies:
And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere neverending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is!—so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory.2
A bike, a hill, a pub: simple objects disinterred my mistakes and my faded dreams. I’ve been utterly bewildered by my New York downslide, so often feeling bitter and ashamed—and I’ve been further stunned by the stark death and transformation of the pandemic in these last two years. I used to have good ideas about what I wanted to do, but they got thwarted by, I don’t know, life.
I’ve tried to muddle through by actively seeking joy in friends, in work, and in my city. And I suppose I do write to be a kind of primary source, penning an uncertain commemoration of epiphanies that I narcissistically want to pass on—however useful or trivial, archetypal or localized, universal or navel-gazing.
There are parts of my life that I very much want to forget now. Some memories aren’t valuable lessons, or interesting data, but dolorous burdens. (“I wanna be forgotten / And I don’t wanna be reminded.”) Sometimes I appreciate the permanent record that technology presumptuously collates for us; other times, I need the ephemeral story to just dissipate. I want an absolution for past mistakes, for making moves I had no foundations for.
What can I possibly say now about abandoning dreams? That I never should have done it? That we should’ve stayed put? Or maybe there’s something in the middle: it’s okay to dream, but you have to dream within reason? This is the part that I just can’t ever understand. The romantic in me doesn’t ever want to know my limitations. ■
Thank you to Stephen D. Miller for many conversations on memory and city neighborhoods, and to John Muniz for conversations on cars and bikes in Texas. I copped Sebald’s whole photography thing.
