THIS IS US

The Rollercoaster Cure for an Endless Pandemic

I needed to scream. Like a kid. It was glorious.

Wednesday, my boyfriend and I decided to have a day of play, so I re-arranged my Zoom life and cleared my schedule for a New York adventure. I put my auto-reply on, set my Slack to “out of office,” and stepped away from this very laptop. He likes to joke that “all you do is type anyway.” Anyone who works on a screen for a living knows that, in fact, we do a lot more than click our keys. But I like to let him have his little fun at my expense. It helps in those inspired moments when I come up with a gentle zinger and can turn the tables on him with a mischievous grin.

I have been learning — now in my first serious pairing in 11 years, at 43 — that a healthy relationship requires a bit of poking fun. That’s something I was never really that good at, frankly. I’m a bit of a sensitive flower. It also requires very structured roles and responsibilities for housekeeping (me), dinner prep (him), and bill paying (us). Apparently, as we have quickly learned, it also requires one person to love and cherish a menagerie of bed pillows…and the other to want to burn the bed down every time he has to remove them to get under the covers (him).

So Wednesday morning found us on the D train to Coney Island. I have to admit, I have not been there in 20 years. When the Italians and our Jewish neighbors all moved to Staten Island in the 80s, gone were the halcyon days of Brighton Beach Memoirs. The Jersey Shore became our new beach getaway, and our younger generation made halcyon days anew. The kid in me — a joyful young boy I have been working to get back to ever since the pandemic hit — was elated to sit on the beach, sand between his toes, and eat mango cut to look like a flower — on a stick! I asked the Mexican vendor for a fork, but she told me she had none. “Eat it like a lollipop!” The young boy did. And he loved it.

I have dated on-and-off since my ex and I ended our relationship in 2010. Spending your 30s in graduate film school doesn’t exactly afford many opportunities for love, unless of course you and your Assistant Director have a meet-cute around the monitor. No such romance sparked on the endless short-film sets I worked during those years. If I am being honest, I suppose part of me felt a certain sense of shame to be back in school in my 30s. Well, maybe it wasn’t shame, but a little voice inside always gnawed: I was being indulgent and “not a real adult.” So whenever I looked for love — whenever I found a spare second — I looked for the adult in everyone. If I was childish to be in school at 36, the other party needed to be very well employed and conquering the world like a good American male.

That’s one thing, among a million, that the pandemic has changed in me. My boyfriend and I met in November 2020, after eight months of more adulting than any of us should have to endure in this life. For most of the pandemic, I was alone in an apartment in New York City. All I could hear daily were the ambulance sirens bringing Covid patients to the hospital. At the height of the crisis here in New York, we lost 800 people a day. Until the day I myself die, I will never forget those sirens. And how they blared into empty but infected air, the only sounds New York could make for nearly three months. Other than, of course, the clang of pots-and-pans at 7pm.

After that, I looked for joy in the faces of those I — carefully — dated. Conquering the world like a good American male plummeted on my list of criteria for a partner. It plummeted on my list of how I should judge my own life. How I should choose my friends. How I should carry myself in a room. At a dinner party. How I should approach the very anxiety in me that’s so directly caused by it. Joy shot to the top. I didn’t know I was looking for it in a boyfriend, but when I saw it so clearly in his eyes it instantly turned me on. Because it turned on my own joy. I didn’t know I was looking for that either, until it made its resurgence out of the depths of 20 years trying to be “successful.” It has been ten months now, and our pandemic romance has grown into a true and deep love. It is no surprise that he is not an American male.

Back to me being a beach snob. I hadn’t been to Coney Island in two decades. So after I finished my citrus pop — and after a short conversation with a very drunk woman who sipped vodka from a brown-paper bag while admiring us as if only she knew we were a gay couple — we walked along the beach and boardwalk. I insisted on a Nathan’s hotdog, but we decided to eat after the rollercoasters at Luna Park. I proposed the classic Cyclone first, but Joyman didn’t think it looped enough. What is boyish in him is very boyish. He wanted a coaster with loops. Real, high, exciting loops. So we could scream.

And we got it. It is called the Thunderbolt. It goes 86 feet straight up in the air. At its pinnacle, you turn 90 degrees and can see all of Brooklyn and the towers of Manhattan in the distance. But only for a mere second…before you drop the same 86 feet. I should have known it would be death-defying, thrilling, exhilarating. After the heyday of rollercoasters — when the rickety Cyclone held you in place with one simple bar — an easy amusement-park rule of thumb prevailed: the more you are strapped in, bolted, buckled, and bear-hugged by pure steel casing, the more fucked-up the ride is going to be.

And that it was. The worried wailing started on the way up. Because we were, well…fully horizontal, on our backs, staring at a clear blue sky. I looked at Joyman. He looked back. And smiled. There was no going back. My desire to give him a day of pure Americana was about to turn on me. As the coaster hit its peak, I could feel my stomach bottom out. We glided over the curve. Brooklyn. Towers. Manhattan. Helicopter. Doves. Clouds. Jesus Fucking Chrissssssst!

Until the day I myself die, I will never forget those sirens. And how they blared into empty but infected air, the only sounds New York could make for nearly three months.

And we were off! If going up was 2019, going down was 2020, immediately. And I let out the scream of my life. To say I “let” it out gives me too much say in the matter. It burst out. It exploded out. It thundered out. And we thunderbolted down the orange rail. Suddenly, the last year-and-a-half erupted with it — through it. Every second spent alone. Every day of quarantine. Every moment wondering what would become of our city, of the country, of the world. All of it. Out. However the body captures those memories, those thoughts, those anxieties — however they become hidden inside our cells like mementoes in a locked trunk — the process reversed. The body opened the flood gates and out of every cell came every minute spent missing my mother and sisters, every week learning of the death of friends and family, every megabyte of Teams endured with a confused smile. And it all came screaming oooooooouuuuuuuutttttttt.

What followed were loops and sideways turns. We were upside-down. We were hanging by a thread. We were rushing, falling, plunging, hurling, spinning, speeding, and zooming (lower-case Z). Joyman let out a scream so guttural you could hear it in other time zones and in decades past. He was shouting to me, to Brooklyn, and to the ancestors. Out of him came the fears of life change, the anxiety of moving to a new country, amidst a pandemic, the mourning of friends of his own lost to Covid. What came through our lungs and mouths was monstrous, primal.

The ride was only 38 seconds. But in less than a minute, G-force — whatever that really is — managed to give us the chance that little else could in the day-to-day social mess we all find ourselves wading through right now. Nowhere else could I really scream. Like, scream. The very act I wanted inside, outside, with friends and without, since March 2020. Because any other scream is a fake scream. It’s an approximation. It’s a performance. It has too much social pressure attached — either to do it, or not to do it that loudly or in any deep and meaningful way. Even when I was alone, that pressure was there. Don’t scream for real. I know you want to get it all out. But someone somewhere will think you’re crazy.

Funny enough, no one thinks you’re crazy when you scream on a rollercoaster. You’d be crazy not to. And so Joyman and I found the perfect place to purge. When the ride came to a stop and the steel restraints lifted, we smiled at one another. We high-fived. We kissed. Two kids on a thrill ride. I got out first. I gave him my hand so he could steady his exit. We hugged. That was death-defying, thrilling, exhilarating — yeah, sure. But that was cathartic. And we both knew it. “See,” said Joyman, “That’s much better than typing all day, isn’t it?”

For Wednesday it was. For today, I’ll type about it.

Julio Vincent Gambuto is a writer/director, based in New York City. His debut feature film, Team Marco, is now available nationwide. Julio wrote that Medium essay about the pandemic that went around the world to 21M readers. Follow on Twitter for small thoughts, or here for Medium ones, or his website for large ones.