Newsletters From Manhattan

By Aimee Sitarz

Newsletters from Manhattan is a spellbinding memoir and collection of photographs of a young artist's two months stay in New York City. It’s shockingly honest, utterly revealing, and the more personal it gets, the more you feel it’s about you, moments you’ve hidden from yourself or pretended to forget. Her words capture the overwhelming, complex, sometimes confusing and altogether beautiful spirit that we all possess.

Invited by a disabled friend recovering from surgery to be his care-taker in Manhattan, the author feels her way through a world that is laugh-out-loud hilarious but punctuated by heartbreak, depression, and dazzlement. She experiments with her meds that are prescribed for ADHD and a mood disorder, but she’s wonderfully, tenderly sane, and truthful to a fault. She gets lost daily, fights with the subway pass system, meets a fortune teller, sits on the grass to watch a street performer, attracts a streetwise mentor named Sully and embarks on a never ending search for the perfect NY hot dog. The imagery woven throughout is fascinating; both her internal dialogue and her descriptions of the city and its inhabitants. She describes the newness of her experiences, familiar matters of the heart, and the suffocating dynamics of caregiving; all the while photographing everything she sees with her cell phone camera. It’s the journal we all wish we could write, but we’re not brave enough, feral enough, or honest enough.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aimee Sitarz
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005375690

Aimee Sitarz

Aimee Sitarz is a photographer and conceptual artist living in Portland, Oregon. She spends time hanging out with her cat, playing video games, and making art for social justice. Not necessarily in that order. Newsletters From Manhattan is the first book she has ever written.

Book preview

Prologue

His Instagram bio says Eliot Scott. SCI C1-C4 EDS, Chiari, Craniocervical Fusion & Tethered Cord. Release April 2021. Wheelchair user. Nuerodiverse. Queer Nerd.

He also has a connective tissue disorder and celiac disease. Plus sleep apnea and some kind of heart thing. I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting something. Oh, and he doesn’t eat sugar. Eliot is sick. He’s not someone with a disability, he is the disability. Being sick is literally part of who he’s become, it’s who he is.

We used to live across the hall from each other at Milepost 5. I used his wifi in exchange for walking his dog on Sundays. One summer when it was unbearably hot, we fashioned an air conditioner for him out of a styrofoam cooler, a fan, some regular ice and a chunk of dry ice. Well, I fashioned it, Eliot just gave suggestions from bed where he had been confined for the past almost 2 years. We felt very scientific. 

He had been waiting to see some special neurosurgeon who was the only person in the world who could fix his neck and now he was in New York healing from two major spine surgeries that would eventually allow him to walk again. His parents live in Connecticut but had basically abandoned him as he was about to get out of the hospital after a two month stay. He found an apartment in Manhattan just blocks from where he would be going to outpatient physical therapy, but he needed someone to live with and take care of him until he could get his insurance to cover a health care aid for 12 hours a day. I had known Eliot for over a year and had often answered his call for help when a care worker from some agency didn’t show up. Now he was texting me asking if I wanted to come live a block away from Central Park for a couple of months. Maybe longer. I would be there to take care of his basic needs. To dress and undress him. To help him bathe and shit and piss. To cook for him to clean up after him. To let his dog sleep with me and take her for walks and pick up her shit. I said I could commit to two months. 

I don’t even remember what I expected it to be like, it all happened so fast. All I knew was that Eliot had said he could pay more of the rent if I helped with his care when he was released from the hospital. I didn’t know if I would be getting paid and I had no idea how much rent was in New York City. The pandemic had turned everything upside down. I lost my job as a nanny to a little girl who was just turning four. I had known her since she was 7 months old. Her parents had stopped communicating with me and I had no idea if I would go back to work for them or if I would ever see Josie again. I had just fallen out of an odd relationship with an artist 25 years older than me. His name was Mike, and he was barely hanging on to being married for 20 years. He was the only person I interacted with in the same physical space at the beginning of Covid. We couldn’t touch or be too near one another, but we made banners and images to project and came up with brilliant ideas to change the world inside of a huge empty warehouse. At night we had sex with each other texting back and forth from our separate bedrooms across town. After part of a year of that he of course had to drop out and go figure out what he was doing with his life. I was still broken hearted.

The summer of the George Floyd protests had passed and I wasn’t really making any art anymore. I lived in an affordable housing shithole building for artists except it was more like living in a halfway house. I was collecting unemployment and had quit paying my rent.

I had been in the same place for so long it had become to seem like it was impossible to move beyond the borders of the space this town took up in my mind. So on May 27th 2021 I hopped on a jet plane with my black cat Pirate and flew to New York City. I was there for 72 days. Whenever someone asks me how it was, I can’t help but take a deep breath and say, It was a lot of things. 

Newsletters from Manhattan

I’ve never been good at journals. Off and on when I was younger, I would keep them a bit. It was always horribly depressing writing. I was horribly depressed. Manhattan urges me to write things down. Maybe because things will never be like this again. I will never feel the shock and surprise in my body in this space that I am new to. I am in New York City and no one else will ever have this particular constellation of experiences. And after a while I won’t see things like this anymore.

The following are short chapters from my time here, Newsletters from Manhattan. 

The Spanish Harlem

The very first thing I did when I got to the apartment was take off all of my clothes and walk around looking at everything in an excited awe. Pirate was still airplane sick and didn’t know what to think. Eliot's mom had somewhat furnished the place with necessary things like soap and toilet paper and dishes and some breakfast cereal for me. It felt like a hotel without the beds, just empty hardwood floors, shiny kitchen appliances and white towels folded on the back of the toilets. She had placed boxes of kleenex everywhere. On the kitchen counter, the bathroom counters, every single windowsill. I could build a kleenex castle. My bedroom is the biggest with a small bathroom and a twin-size air mattress on the floor that has since begun its slow decline. It was lonely at first. And it rained and I had no one to talk to inside the apartment.

Eliot's stay at the hospital kept being extended. First he had a rough couple of days and then his medical equipment and bed hadn't been delivered to the apartment so he couldn't leave. So for the first two weeks I mostly took walks in Central Park. It's like every park in Portland shuffled together in one. Parts remind me of Laurelhurst with its winding paths and lit up lanterns posted along the way. Other parts are like the secret woody trails through Mt Tabor. There’s a pond you can fish in and a big empty swimming pool in one section and little creeks with bridges across in others. The Park is much much bigger than this small northern corner I took two weeks to explore, and it comes with the voices of a million birds singing as a soundtrack. The birds are so loud they fill up the thoughts in my head when I listen quietly enough. 

There is a squall outside on the balcony. It started with a ferocious warm wind and then the rain. The rain turned into hail and then back again. Now I can hear sirens. 

I've taken a break from Eliot. From helping him take a shit while sitting on a shower chair into a bucket on the floor. Every time I have to put it underneath him in just the right place where I think his poop will land. The bowel routine. I must take a break from his ceaseless monologue regarding his very own self and everything that is especially wrong with him and no one else. Ever. How very soon it will be senior dinner time because it's almost five thirty and that's what time they eat every evening in the hospital. Even though he's not a senior. He's only 33. I think he wishes he was still in the hospital. I do enjoy his company mostly. I can be myself like we've known each other forever. And it doesn't matter what comes out of my mouth at all. I don't have to be careful or afraid he'll hate me, think I'm stupid or treat me any differently because sometimes I fuck up. We have fun and laugh. We talk things right out of the day and then find we must start over. It feels incredibly natural that I