“First, we start with gods that have sex.” Harry8 shouted.
“Like the Greek gods?” I asked.
“I was thinking about those, those… yoga gods with lots of arms and….”
“You mean Tantric yoga deities…” GloryZ, hung her head, so that her face disappeared beneath her rectangle on the screen.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant. But the Greek ones, too, March. Their gods were bouncing in and out of bed.”
“Leda and the swan,” Fred718 added.
“Sounds kinky!” Harry8 was gleeful.
And that’s how we decided to start our own religion.
I guess I should backtrack a bit. It was the end of March and the New York City metropolitan area was shut down. I was working from home, in my little apartment in Hoboken. It had only been a few weeks, but I was already feeling waves of despair, alternating with a peculiar restless lethargy. I paced a lot. Like a big cat in a small zoo cage. My actual cat watched me with an annoyed look on her face. Don’t tell me that cats don’t have facial expressions. After a few weeks in near complete isolation, they do!
I missed my imperfect job. I missed my imperfect Path train commute into New York City. I missed my imperfect boss and my imperfect colleagues and my imperfect work wardrobe and the imperfect coffee from the indie coffee bar next to the Starbucks… I even missed my extremely imperfect former boyfriend. He reached out to me, “Jo, maybe we can quarantine together? You know, rekindle the flame and… you know, not be alone and you know…”
I’m glad I said no, because, you know… Although there were moments when I wanted badly to not be alone. I also know that if I’d said yes, one of us would be making a virtual court appearance and the other would be in the hospital or the morgue. I’m not sure which I’d be? There must be some kind of justification defense when a normally rational person explodes into violence in response to all sentences punctuated with ‘you know.’
He still checks in with a periodic, “How are you doing Jo?”
Yes, my mom named me Jo after Jo March in Little Women. March is not my last name. But it’s turned out to be a good nickname and so my handle on social media is always a variation of March. It’s kind of a family joke, a literary family joke in a family if literary jokesters. It was Mom who directed me to the book club.
“What have you got to lose, Jo? You fill out a questionnaire about your taste in reading and sign up for a club that meets in a Zoom thing to talk about the book you’ve all read.”
I’d been in a couple of book clubs—real life book clubs. I thought I had an idea of what could go wrong. One book club that met once a month busted up after a huge argument when we read the original J. M. Barrie Peter Pan. It’s dark. And it’s not kind to parents. There’s even a line saying that every time you breathe, a grown-up, dies. Or something like that.
It’s incredible. I came down on the PRO original side of the argument against the Disney-delusions about childhood that split the book club into warring camps. It was especially sad as the meeting had begun with a roaring rendition of “I Won’t Grow Up” from the musical.
The other book club simply devolved into a regularly scheduled boozy brunch with a side order of contemporary books by women authors, when the all-girls group realized that the fun part of the monthly event was the drinking, eating and gossiping portion of the Sunday afternoon before we addressed the book. We simply ramped up the drinking, eating and gossiping and diminished the literary chatter until it was more of a forum for talking about books we’d read and warning friends off poorly written bestsellers and suggesting unexpected gems.
I missed those Sunday nominal book club brunches! We tried a Zoom version, but it just made me—and everyone else—feel lonely. The members with partners or husbands complained about their partners and husbands and the single women complained about being single and about the complaints of the coupled up. We don’t want to hear about it! Really, we don’t. You’ve got someone there with you. I’m talking to a cat!
The online book club wasn’t going to fill that space on the second Sunday of every month, but it was something to do inside that was outside of myself so, as my mom said—why not?
I filled out the questionnaire—noting that it was asking a great deal more than what I liked to read. I acknowledged that my answers were likely to be sold to advertisers who’d learn that I am 38 and single, that I have an elderly short-haired cat, that I work as a technical writer, that years ago I was certified as a yoga instructor, and that I’ve tried stand-up more than once, can’t carry a tune, won’t eat canned fish (it smells like cat food), plus my favorite brands of haircare products and spaghetti sauce (Yes, coupons followed…) The app was monetizing my profile. I took a deep breath and decided to get over it.
CVS pharmacy noticed that I always buy one of those oversized Lindt chocolate bars when I pick up my allergy med. They sent me a “personal coupon” to try to get me to shop in-between refills. In this brave new world, our information is valuable. We are a commodity and we are bought with free services that give us access to electronic platforms that provide us with electronic social connections. This is the way the world works now. Accept it. Or go off the grid. As a technical writer, I don’t really have a choice. To Grid or Not to Grid? Grid me, baby.
The pandemic book club app—that’s not its real name—pulled together a group of twelve people all willing to meet once a week during a particular time frame, to discuss books from the suggested list of what turned out to be classic Dystopian Lit. How or why the algorithm did this was a subject of debate at our first virtual meeting. Did we all present as “gloom-and-doomers” Harry8 suggested with a giant-sized belly laugh. “Or maybe this is the list they are giving everyone?” GloryZ revealed herself to be a skeptic from the start.
We soon discovered how much and how little the 12 of us had in common. Our ages ranged from 17 to 79. We came from seven distinct time zones and lived in a variety of places including: Berkeley, California; Washington, DC; Buenos Aires, Argentina, Melbourne, Australia, Liverpool, England, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Kyoto, Japan. The 9pm on Thursdays in New Jersey time worked for me. It was an odd time in some of the other places but there were some odd folks in the mix—insomniacs, vampires, shift workers and lonely souls. Except for the Argentine and one of the two original participants from Berkeley, we were all native English speakers. Charlie in Japan was a very lonely English-language tutor.
By the time we’d read, or reread as the case may be, George Orwell’s ‘1984’, Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, and P.D. James’ ‘Children of Men’ we were down to eight members. Charlie hung on through Suzanne Collins’ ‘The Hunger Games’ before he had a time-difference meltdown. They almost lost me at ‘Anthem’ because it’s by Ayn Rand, but I figured—what the hell, it’s short (only 50-something pages).
By the time we plowed through William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ we were down to seven. And somewhere in the middle of Steven King’s ‘Running Man’ we went down to five: Harry8, the belly-laughing, insomniac, 68-year-old widower from Melbourne, Australia; GloryZ, the skeptical, former high school English teacher from Santa Fe, forced into retirement at 50 due to a mysterious autoimmune disorder (or a severe case of vampirism depending on when you talked to her about this); Fred718, a 20-year-old whiz-kid programmer, stuck in his grandmother’s basement in Washington, DC while pining for his life in Brooklyn; J.P. (Juan Pablo) an erudite, and remarkably handsome, 40-year-old college professor, holed up in an apartment in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires; and me in Hoboken with Wendy.
I adopted Wendy right after that J.M. Barrie book club fiasco, so I named my cat after the character who grows up after her adventure in Neverland.
The five of us began to meet more often until it was nearly every day and ultimately more than once a day… And that’s when the pandemic book club discussions took on a life of their own.
He’ll probably deny it, but J.P. was the first one to float the idea that we should write our own dystopian novel. We rotated chapters and, let’s just say, it was a dystopian disaster! I was number five in the line-up and trying to sew Fred718’s futuristic cityscape filled with automated “service providers” of all kinds, with Harry’s idea of a female superhero fighting to save humanity in the face of the faceless “big brother” who GloryZ turned into a cabal that started out to save humanity and wound up “protecting us from our basest instincts” with J.P.’s convoluted attempt to move the story forward while wrapping it in a Jorge Borges inspired fantasy library setting was a Sisyphean task. My chapter five was a tortured fever dream blurring the already shaky lines between reality and fantasy.
This inspired a much-improved flow through chapters six to ten, but when we gathered to read the first ten chapters out loud, we determined that it was a “hot mess” and we could or should or would be better off finding another activity to pursue as a group.
As jigsaw puzzles don’t work on Zoom, we decided to invent a religion and, depending on which one of us was on board with which plan, we’d ultimately morph the religion into a multiplayer, interactive online game; turn the religion into the backdrop for a dystopian novel; or start stomping for cult followers and bilk them out of bitcoin.
Whatever the outcome. It was something to do. And Wendy signaled her approval by sitting in my lap whenever I chatted with J.P. Yup, a pandemic romance with a stranger I knew only through our electronic portal. I didn’t lie about myself—at least not about important things. Was he fully truthful? I doubt it. He was way too good-looking to have led a boring life. I suspected a wife and a string of exes, but none of that mattered as time went on. Our private chats were a lifeline that kept me alive and hopeful about the future. If that’s all a relationship accomplishes, I’ll mark that as a success.
The club was bound to implode or simply slowly disappear. I wasn’t sure which. Just as J. P. and I were bound to meander off into real life romances as soon as the opportunity presented itself. But the end came with neither a bang, nor a whimper. It came with a genuine cry of sadness.
Harry8’s daughter reached out to us. Her dad was hospitalized with Covid19 exacerbated by underlying conditions. The reality of the pandemic set in. We cried together—or as together as you can be via zoom. With only four boxes on the screen there was nowhere to hide. I felt exposed in my grief and fear.
When we got an email saying that he’d died, our pandemic book club died, too. Should I delete the files? I’m not sure. Maybe they are the best record of my experience of 2020? Maybe one day, years from now, I’ll want to revisit our attempt at a dystopian novel and the creation of a religion that was more fun than it should have been.
We held one final meeting. Fred718 wanted the time to create some kind of ritual to say farewell to our friend Harry8. We pondered this for a while and J. P. suggested that our invented religion that focused on gods having sex was key.
“Our gods are life affirming!”
“Yes, but…” Fred718 whined. “Our gods aren’t real.”
“They are as real as any other gods,” GloryZ answered. “And our ritual is as valid as anything else.”
“What should we do?” I asked. “Should we sing?”
“Like a hymn…” GloryZ shook her head. “No…”
“I won’t grow up…” I started to sing. I just couldn’t help myself. It was the silliest, most cheerful song I could think of and, in a very strange way, it reminded me of Harry8 and his riotous laugh and adolescent sense of humor.
At the end of the song, we bid farewell to Harry8 and to the Pandemic Book Club.
