The Last Night Out

The virus pulled back the curtain on our fraught relationships.

- By Calvin Baker

The last night I went out in the city was in late February. I met my friend Grant (whose name has been changed) at the Standard, on Bowery, and we walked over to Bohemian, on Great Jones, to celebrate the 50th birthday of a Broadway producer. After dinner we went down the street to Acme, where a tech entrepreneur was having a dance party to celebrate his 40th. Grant sipped his tequila and began to grow irate because there were so few people of color around. It felt like the 1950s. We were talking to a beautiful Ghanaian woman whom I’d met once before, and when she mentioned a house party in Harlem that a mutual acquaintance was throwing, Grant and I invited ourselves. But as we glided up the FDR we heard the party was a bust. We dropped her off at home and headed to Koreatown, as though we knew it would be one of the last nights we could go out. We ended up in a bar on 34th Street, giving each other the kind of questionable advice that pours out after midnight when Grant started to thumb at one of his phones.