Where's my Gorgon?

I would like to be able to exist in the world without constantly appearing in someone else's content.

Chinatown, New York City. Listen while you read: Control by Emmit Fenn on Spotify/YouTube.

There used to be a statue of Medusa in this park. I used to visit with her, ask her for advice. Her body and face were made conventionally beautiful, highlighting the innocence of her flesh to feed the fear of her affect. There was a reflecting pool too. Sour green algae crept in from the edges of the stone hole, inching toward the cigarette butts and fallen leaves that floated on the pool’s surface. The maze of courts and jails and municipal buildings whipped up the winds that carried debris in every direction.

I remember being aware of the pool, but it never drew me in. I was busy with the Gorgon.

Everywhere I go I’m in somebody’s content. Reading on the fire escape of my Chinatown apartment, crying in Columbus Circle, watching the East River rise and fall from a decrepit bench hidden behind the fence around a never-ending construction project. Auto-shutter, long arms, selfie sticks.

While crossing the Brooklyn Bridge last month, I emerged from the tourist horde to stumble immediately upon some guy filming a dance routine for TikTok. It’s a bridge. There’s nowhere to go. I’m in his video now.

I’m in the background of that couple’s golden hour selfie under the FDR, which is still painted a cheerful lilac that I find both perplexing and incongruous with this part of town. I’m in the background of that guy’s running commentary at the one-time screening of an independent kung fu documentary. In a movie theater. Seriously.

The Medusa statue is gone now. The pool is dry. The park is locked. I walk around to try the far entrance and find an all-black pigeon perched on the chains that hold the gates closed. Out of one eye, without turning his head, he watches me watching him. He’s waiting. I’m waiting. What are we waiting for?

I give up.

As I turn to leave, I trip over a thick rope of media cables and electrical cords snaking their away around the park’s perimeter. A row of police cars and prison transport buses face off against a whole block’s worth of cable news vans. Neat letters laid out in neon tape stake each TV station’s territory on the hot pavement. The metal gates enclosing the media pen bear the marks of both the NYPD and an equipment rental company. Everything is for sale.

It’s my fault for walking this way.

Just a few blocks over, there is another park with a lot more green and no gates to keep out the public. The tulips are overbloomed. The daffodils gray. A loaded swing set groans in the shaded playground. A long line for the public restroom spills out of the park and onto the sidewalk.

I try to take a picture of the droopy flowers but I can’t get around the people. There’s always someone in frame, someone who didn’t ask to be photographed, someone just existing in the world. I want to cut them out of my picture because I want to be cut out of theirs. While I’ve been trying so hard to remember we are each the hero of our own story, I forgot that we are also someone else’s supporting cast. It’s hard to avoid.

I leave the parks behind and turn onto my winding no-car street. I realize I am being followed by another surge of cables and wires, guided along their path by zip ties and electrical tape and heavy duty pedestrian cord protectors. I stomp on one or two, only sort of looking for their owners. It’s not the news machine this time, it’s a movie crew. The neighborhood is scenic, sure. Historic, even. I get it.

Equipment carts crowd the sidewalk in front of my door, wrapped in transparent plastic in case of rain. Every lamppost in sight is plastered with arrows pointing from set to lunch and back again. Around the corner, a fleet of ear-pieced assistants man their trucks and trailers, bored and tired but soon to be paid. They’re pacing. They’re yawning. They’re chain smoking. I crawl upstairs to my apartment and draw down the shades. I do what I can to block out their big hungry camera lens but it’s pointed at my window, waiting to turn me to stone.