How We Live Now: Scenes from the Pandemic

By Bill Hayes

Winner of the New York City Book Award

From the beloved author of Insomniac City, a poignant and profound tribute in stories and images to a city amidst a pandemic.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States in March 2020 and New York went into total lockdown, writer and photographer Bill Hayes hit the largely deserted streets of Manhattan to try to document-through words and photographs-how the city was changing virtually overnight. How We Live Now records those first 100 days of the pandemic in real time-a time of both hopefulness and great fear, long before we had effective Covid testing and vaccines-up to and including the historic Blacks Lives Matter demonstrations following the tragic murder of George Floyd.

Featuring Hayes's inimitable street photographs, How We Live Now chronicles an unimaginable moment in time with his signature insight and grace, offering a glimpse at our shared humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781635576894

Bill Hayes

Bill Hayes is the author of Insomniac City and How New York Breaks Your Heart, a collection of his street photography, among other books. He is a recipient of the New York City Book Award for How We Live Now, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction. Hayes has completed the screenplay for a film adaptation of Insomniac City, currently in the works from Brouhaha Entertainment, and he is also a co-editor of Oliver Sacks's posthumous books. He lives in New York. Visit his website at billhayes.com

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

I started working on How We Live Now just when New York went into total lockdown, in mid-March 2020, and I wrote and photographed the whole book over the next three months. What I set out to do was to capture the first hundred days of the pandemic in real time, and to try to convey how one’s life can change virtually overnight.

Looking back, I’d say this was the most exhilarating creative challenge of my life. I would generally write every morning; go out and take photos on the street in the afternoon (often bringing home not just pictures but also stories of people I’d met); and then edit photos at night. Venturing out in those first months, I found the city eerily silent and empty—even Times Square and the subway stations—hardly a soul in sight. Refrigerated morgue trucks were parked outside the hospital just down the street from where I live. I wasn’t so much scared as stunned, awed by what I was witnessing. At the same time, I was always glad to get back home to the safety of my apartment. Especially since I live alone, it was a great gift to have this project to immerse myself in, with the goal of creating something meaningful, beautiful, and, I hoped, universal, from a horrific situation.

As I worked on the book, I found myself naturally weaving in recollections of life in New York before the pandemic—memorable subway rides and street characters, chance encounters and conversations—a New York that, at least for a time, had disappeared. I felt it was important to include such stories and photographs not simply to romanticize the past but to be reminded of aspects of life that we may take for granted. By considering what we value most deeply in our daily lives, we will be able to rebuild and recover more thoughtfully as time goes on.

So much has changed since I completed How We Live Now. I would never have expected that we’d have effective vaccines in the United States by early 2021, and that I would be fully vaccinated by that spring. Nor, for that matter, would I have imagined that the pandemic would continue to rage—with different variants of the virus evolving—more than a year later. As I note in one of the closing chapters here, I remember when just 40 people in the United States had died from Covid-19, and how, one week later, on March 19, 2020, that number had quintupled to 200. At the time, that seemed shocking. As I write this introduction, we have now lost more than 600,000 people in the United States alone.

I’ve often thought if I were to attempt to write now about those surreal first hundred days, I probably could not do it. It’s too easy to forget what it was really like back then. I’m grateful that I got it down when I did. Although it wasn’t my specific intention at the outset, How We Live Now has begun to seem more and more like a time capsule. And I hope that, just like opening a time capsule far into the future, if one were to open this book a century later, it would still feel as vivid and in the moment as when I wrote and photographed it at the start of the pandemic.

—Bill Hayes

September 2021

1

It is one year ago, and I am walking up Hudson Street near where I live:

I cross paths with a beautifully dressed young man with a long, pitch-black beard, and I ask if I can take his picture. He demurs immediately.

But we go on chatting. He tells me he’s a writer from Turkey, here to look for stories.

So, have you found any?

Yes, this is a story now, he replies, with a sideways glance.

I laugh. For me, too.

We shake hands and I tell him my name.

I’m Yevgeny, he says, and begins walking ahead of me at a faster clip. Good day now.

Good day, Yevgeny.

Tango Dancers at the Pier

July 10, 2019

2

Now, I think about:

The last time I shook hands with a stranger.

The last time I saw people dancing.

The last time I saw people smiling.

The last time I heard kids playing.

The last time I saw traffic on Eighth Avenue.

The last time I went to the gym.

The last time I went swimming.

The last time I took the subway.

The last time I took a plane.

The last time I went to a movie.

The last time I went to a play.

The last time I made someone laugh.

The last time I made someone dinner.

The last time I kissed someone.

The last time I slept with someone.

The last time I fucked someone.

The last time I let someone fuck me.

The last time I shared a joint.

The last time I took a taxi.

The last time I took an Uber.

The last time I took a bus.

The last time I went to a restaurant.

The last time I went to brunch.

The last time I went to a grocery store without fear.

The last time I got a haircut.

The last time I got a drink at a bar.

The last time I took a bath with someone.

The last time I saw food carts on Fourteenth Street.

The last time I saw a crowded sidewalk.

The last time I saw people sitting on their stoops.

The last time I saw Ali at the smoke shop.

The last time I saw anyone in my family.

The last time I saw friends in person.

The last time I saw Hailey.

The last time I saw my therapist at his office.

The last time I heard cars honking.

The last time I shared an elevator without worrying.

The last time I went outside without a mask or gloves.

The last time I wasn’t scared.

The last time I was as scared as this.