The Ambulance Isn’t Coming

In the first piece in the essential new anthology, A Journal of the Plague Years: Words and Music from the Lost Years, co-editor Brian Cullman hits on a major lingering effect of the global COVID-19 pandemic: uncertainty. He describes the death of a friend in New York City, who needed an ordinary ambulance to take him to the hospital when his COVID got bad. But there wasn’t one available, and he died. His family then had to use an art delivery truck to get him to a funeral home. There was no vaccine and little medical information. No one knew where this breakdown of the ordinary would end.

“No one seems to know anything,” Cullman writes in “The Music of Shelter.” “All we know is the ambulance isn’t coming.”

We want to believe in the world we once knew — in municipal services, in our fellow citizens and in democracy. But somewhere along the line, our ability to trust was dislodged. We lost our footing and began to tread water. The Trump presidency had already left us with family members who most likely would never talk to us again and with talk of a coming “civil war.” Then the pandemic came, and this fractured polity set in like cement. The America in which people pull together (around public health, for instance) never resurfaced. Vaccines, relied-upon facts and even a red-hot economy don’t seem to matter. According to the CDC, about 300 Americans still die of COVID every week as of the last week of March of 2024. Fascist banners darken the shining city on the hill and young people still sing and laugh, but much of it is gallows humor. 

Journalist Susan Zakin, author of Coyotes and Town Dogs, did not know any more than anyone else did when the COVID death rate started to spike in March 2020, so she did what journalists do: started a magazine. Named after the Daniel Defoe book about the bubonic plague in 1665, A Journal of the Plague Year is a place for writers — and more importantly, readers — to share what is broken, name the fears, shine light into dark corners and celebrate upwellings of hope. It is a bid to find some solid ground, or at least, as poet Keith Donnell Jr. writes, “to capture a language of this moment.” 

Cullman, a writer and musician who formerly hosted a syndicated rare-music radio show called Bug Radio,  joined to share editing duties with Zakin and to add some entertainment in the form of pre-assembled music playlists that accompany many of the articles in the magazine and the book. After the pandemic stubbornly persisted into a second year, they had to change “Year” to “Years.”

The selected pieces in the anthology, which will release on May 1, 2024, go to the heart of a country, and a world, desperate to understand the nature of reality. Celebrated novelist Steve Erickson screams about the debilitating effects of living in constant fear. Mikal Gilmore drills deeper and deeper into what Trumpism and its frothing death-eaters say about our nation, and whether we can compare him to Hitler. A more straightforward report by Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi discovers Navajo elders badly neglected under COVID restrictions. In a piece that says so much about the lack of real financial help for anyone, Mike Medberry shares his house with another family when the money runs out. A Deep South explainer by Blanche McCrary Boyd is appropriately titled: “Who the Fuck are the Boogaloos?” Stephen Pain writes about being homeless during the pandemic and how one upside is a city-provided hotel room with a great shower.

Courtesy of D. Collins Graphic Design Co.

The essays in Plague Years are impressionistic and opinionated — not a scholarly accounting of the pandemic but rather a portrait of how it feels to live it. Amid a mounting array of intense crises from mental health issues to the vilification of immigrants to environmental catastrophe — all intensified when COVID hit — the notion of fixing things is left to some other book.  

Alberto Montero, a doctor, quotes Robert Sapolsky saying, “Our brains unravel and run amok in the empty moonscape of ambiguity.” 

Is that moonscape here to stay? 

One piece, “The Last Great Visitation” by Michael Brown, suggests that perhaps we are simply wrong to think things are ever normal. He discusses French historian Fernand Braudel’s idea that time is plural: we live in a world of surface events that seem to pass by in serial progression, but the striking similarities between the COVID pandemic and Daniel Defoe’s descriptions of the plague in England in the 1660s remind us that, underneath it all, there is a deeper historical time. Like magma under the Earth’s crust, it moves at its own pace, full of deadly viruses and other endings, always hot and bubbling, occasionally erupting through. 

Perhaps, then, the real disruption that led to this moment was the rise of climate disasters over the last couple of decades, and the existential threat that poses. Zakin noted in our interview, “I’m convinced that a lot of the anger that we are seeing is pure fear of death. Straight up. And as we know, American culture does not really have a place for death.”

In the spirit of the pandemic, we got on a Zoom call to discuss all this.

***

Susan, why was making a magazine your first response to a pandemic?

Susan Zakin: I had been a cop reporter in South Jersey, and this was a five-alarm fire. This was an absolute crisis… We did it because this is what we knew how to do. I am very squeamish, and I could not be on the front lines rolling bandages.

All these great writers were writing on Facebook, essentially on Mark Zuckerberg’s plantation. It made them feel better, but it wasn’t getting the kind of context that the writing really deserved. I’m talking about people like Steve Erickson — nine novels, Lannan Achievement Award, a distinguished professor at University of California Riverside. One of Steve’s pieces is a lyric essay on fear that was originally on Facebook. I had been feeling for a long, long time that the divide between creative writing, nonfiction writing, and journalism was sort of artificial. Without really thinking about it very much, because so much was happening so fast, that’s what we put into practice in the magazine.

Brian Cullman: For people who have been journalists, sometimes you can only understand what you actually think when you put it down in words. In my case, I felt a real lack of community and a real lack of the connection that I used to have with the weekly papers that I’d grown up with; whether it was the Village Voice, The Nation, Boston After Dark or the LA Weekly, where people were responding almost instinctively; you could feel the synapses, like, all shifting. And that wasn’t there. There was a lack of community outside of the friends we could call or email. And sometimes it felt like we were calling the same people and getting the same responses.

This was a way of expanding the voices that were there and being able to hear each other.

You named the magazine after Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Did you have some intuition that this was going to go on for a long, long time?

Susan: I called it a pop-up magazine when we started. I was in my denial phase. I thought, ‘In a few months, I’ll go back to my normal life.’ But eventually, we did add the “s” and make it A Journal of the Plague Years.

Brian: We basically set up a fruit stand. We didn’t know we were going to need a liquor license.

Brian, you kick off the book in just the right way with that lead piece because you hit upon the theme of the whole time: uncertainty.

Brian: Very much so. One of the things that we were able to process with the pandemic and with the shift in all of our consciousnesses was the reality that nobody was in charge. And the people who pretended to be in charge were not to be trusted.

Susan: And that goes to the core of your sense of self and your moorings in society.

Brian: We had to create a different way of talking to each other and of finding what passes for safety.

Susan: The poet Keith Donnell said, “I am trying to capture a language of this moment.” That gave us an enormous amount of leeway. We used every form that struck us as appropriate. One example: when they were talking about putting Trump on Mount Rushmore, we did a meme collection, calling it Mount Trumpmore. Memes are almost like Daumier; they’re satire, and when they’re good, they say something. 

Psychologically, reliving these last four years is a catharsis, and that’s why I think the book can help us move forward. 

One of my favorite pieces in the book is “Rounds” by Alberto Montero, where he says, off-hand, “Teleological living is exhausting.” If you try to assign a purpose to all this madness, your mind just gets worn out.

Susan: It is figuring the odds and also facing your mortality on a daily basis. You go to the supermarket – remember how scary it was when we didn’t have vaccines? Who’s wearing a mask, and who’s not wearing a mask? People were shot over this.

Right, the store cashier who was killed in Georgia by a guy angry that she was wearing a mask.

Susan: As I went over and over the anthology, I had actually forgotten how it felt on a daily basis to have that sense of danger and that feeling of not knowing what was coming at you next. I had also forgotten how close we really came, around January 6th, 2021, to not having a government. We included a few of those stories, just enough so you get the trajectory as we face the [2024] election.

I’m interested in what you said earlier, “We were trying to find a language that brought us to some place of understanding or maybe even safety.” Do you think that either the magazine or we, as a nation, have arrived at that?

Brian: No, I don’t. The mainstream media has acted as if all these problems are well in the past and are something sort of quaint and interesting to look at. Whereas, from my vantage point, it feels as if we’ve gone deeper into the quicksand. We’re not out of anything.

The piece by Thrity Umrigar points out that this isn’t just one epidemic: COVID just illuminated poverty, homelessness, income inequality, lack of healthcare and climate change. Did you start out thinking you were going to write about all of those things?

Brian: It expanded. We started in our own neighborhoods, and our neighborhoods got scarier. As we found voices from other neighborhoods, we began seeing cracks in the pavement in their towns, on their streets, and we started noticing those cracks went everywhere and went very deep.

If you had money, COVID seemed like just a shift: everybody was safely at home, doing Peloton and probably doing some day trading. But I loved that piece, “Stick Built,” by Mike Medberry, because that was the story I was hearing: blue-collar people quickly lost jobs. Everybody’s living in somebody else’s garage. A lot of people died either from getting sick, from ODing, or from suicide. I just kept saying, “Why aren’t people talking about this?”

Brian: I have a friend who runs a little cafe down the street, and he opened a window taqueria, just making sure that people in his employ could pay the rent and take care of their families. That’s what the conversation on the street was: how people would be able to stay in their homes, find food and figure out a way for their kids to get some sort of schooling.

Susan: We had a great intern, Haley, who was working her way through school, and she gave us a piece we love, “Frontline Diary.” Every time I would go to a restaurant, I apologized to the people behind the counter because, like Haley, they really had no choice, and those are the people who weren’t being heard.

It suddenly laid bare how many people in the country are so close to life-threatening poverty.

Susan: In Blanche McCrary Boyd’s piece, “Who the Fuck are the Boogaloos?,” her white parents both grew up poor in the South, and she talked about that. She talked about race and about her conversations with her mother about white supremacy and about politics. I thought it was a great piece because it was capacious, and that’s what we need, that kind of vision. It was precise, it was fair. Because that’s the issue: people don’t feel like they have enough. When people don’t feel they have enough, it gets ugly.

We didn’t have to pretend that what was real was not real or was somehow an opinion.

I am an environmental reporter at heart, and I keep thinking about climate change and how that had already introduced this high level of uncertainty before COVID hit. 

Susan: To me, it’s clear that [a fear of death] is connected to the desire for an authoritarian leader. The day after Trump got elected, I felt unsafe in this country as a Jew for the first time. And I’m like the most assimilated Jew that I can think of. And I felt, as a woman, that I had been put in my place. That’s why I think the E. Jean Carroll verdict was so important.

You ended up reporting a lot about Trump. Was that just because that’s what was going on in the country during the plague years? Or is he part of the plague?

Susan: I think of it as the twin plagues of COVID and Trump, and they were intertwined in some strange way. I think that’s why people trusted us: we didn’t pretend that Trump was an okay guy. Brian and I both grew up in New York, so we knew Trump. We were not learning about him on The Apprentice. My mother knew Roy Cohn, who was Trump’s lawyer. So, we didn’t have to pretend that what was real was not real or was somehow an opinion.

In the book, you included a long piece about Peter Beard, who died in 2020. Is that because it’s simply part of the COVID time? 

Susan: At the end [of the book], we talked about the environment. We wanted to go to the root of the problem. Virtually every new infectious disease is zoonotic, a result of our invasion of the wilderness, sudden contact between rare animals and people. And as we lose wilderness, we accelerate extinction. Beard was one of the first people to recognize the cataclysmic extinction crisis that we are moving toward at an astounding pace without paying attention to it.

Yeah, The End of the Game was one of the first books I saw that actually just said that.

Susan: And that book came out in the 1960s. Peter never stopped talking about this. That story was about a battle royal between Beard, who was the consummate artist, and Richard Leakey, a politician. The whole premise of Journal of the Plague Years is that you need both — especially now.

Did you feel like this anthology, or the magazine itself, found sources of hope and joy that made people feel okay?

Susan: I always feel that there is comfort in knowing that people see what you see and that validation. Psychologically, reliving these last four years is a catharsis, and that’s why I think the book can help us move forward.