42 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
Chinatown.a senior editor, joined the call. Nine
people on the line.
“I’ll get the party started,” Otis
said. She came to the Daily News in
2012, from the Post. “If we wanted to
do only a tangentially corona story, the
best one we’ve got going today is ‘BK
SHOT,’” she said, using the story’s slug.
Shamar Davis, a twenty-one-year-old
who lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn,
had been taking care of his quarantined
aunt when he noticed a fight going on
outside her apartment building. Davis
tried to break up the fight, which led
to his getting shot and killed. “We don’t
have a picture of the shooter,” Otis
said. “But we’ve got an interview with
the aunt. And it’s a very strong, emo-
tional story.
“On the political side, you’ve got
the big mask order from Governor
Cuomo. The enforcement of this is a
little bit up in the air.” She went on,
“It’s leading the Web site. And it’s the
big talker.”
“Have we talked to the police about
what they’re going to do to avoid ar-
bitrary enforcement?” York asked. “It
has the risk of being a little stop-and-
frisk-ish.”
“We have questions in to them,”
Otis replied. “I’ll make sure that’s on
the list.”
“I want to make sure that we under-
stand what it means whenever Cuomo
comes forward with an order like this,”
York said. “It starts to put some teeth
behind it—even if they’re little teeth.”
“So,” Eddie Glazarev, the director
of print operations, said. “Do we want
to do something like a ‘No Shoes, No
Mask, No Service’ kind of front page
tomorrow?” After the call, it would be
up to Glazarev’s team to create a
mockup of a front page—“the wood,”
in tabloid-speak.
“I think that’s the place to start,”
York said. “Or you can do something
with Cuomo, some masked-man Lone
Ranger thing.”
“Who would be Tonto?” Otis asked.
“De Blasio,” Glazarev said. “Actu-
ally, de Blasio could be Tonto’s horse.”
Laughter. “That horse was the worst.”
The temperature was dropping when,
in the late afternoon, N.Y.P.D. officers
approached a man on the corner of
Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.
He was sitting on the sidewalk, in a
patch of waning sun. The officers knew
the man as Michael, and his story
was always the same: he was waiting
there for a car, which would take him
home, to California. “I have it on order,”
Michael told the officers, Joseph
Musquez and Erik Bunze, who are
members of the Citywide Mobile Cri-
sis Outreach Team.
The officers were accompanied by
Courtney Cruise, a big guy with a faint
Jamaican accent, wearing cargo pants,
an N95 mask, and purple nitrile gloves.
Cruise is one of twelve nurses that the
N.Y.P.D. recently brought in to help
officers connect the thirty-five hun-
dred or so people who live on the city’s
streets to hospital care, shelter, and
other services. COVID-19 was com-
plicating these efforts. Homeless peo-
ple are particularly vulnerable to the
coronavirus: many have unaddressed
health problems, and self-isolating is
difficult to maintain on the streets. The
officers were handing out masks, but
the recipients usually refused to wear
them, saying that they were uncom-
fortable or looked weird. Cruise tried
hard to overcome this resistance. “The
homeless, they’re not stupid,” he said.
“They can talk.”
Michael sat beneath a blanket, with
an empty McDonald’s coffee cup and
a box of Goya crackers. Cruise re-
minded him that the coronavirus is
highly contagious and damages the
lungs, adding, “Everybody’s wearing a
mask now—you see?” Michael, who
has alert blue eyes and a full beard,
thought that it was 2005, and said that
he was fifty-two (he’s sixty-two), but
he wasn’t coughing. His breathing
seemed fine. Cruise checked his pulse.
Michael amiably followed Cruise’s in-
structions to remove his Nikes, expos-
ing his bare feet. Cruise, feeling the
skin, detected no sign of fever. Officer
Musquez handed him a ziplock bag
containing hand sanitizer and masks.
Michael tucked it away and said,
“Thanks for dropping by.”
In Union Square, the team met Kel-
vin and Eleanor, who had become
friends only the previous night. Elea-
nor was bare-legged; she wore a long
black skirt and a furry coat. When she
began singing a Rita Marley song,Cruise joined her: “I wanna get high,
so high.” Eleanor and Kelvin finally
agreed to sleep inside—the team found
them beds, in separate locations. El-
eanor refused a mask. “I don’t have the
AIDS virus,” she told them.
As Eleanor and Kelvin left, in
N.Y.P.D. vans, team members suddenly
sprinted across the street—a man’s coat
was on fire. He had stuck a lit pipe into
the pocket of his parka and now stood
in a swirl of feathers.- At around 5 p.m., two doctors, a nurse,
and a respiratory therapist met in a