valediction for a rental (2008-’09)
“[A] lovely little carriage house… enchanting and [...] a little bit lost in time. [S]o cute and so fairy tale-ish; everything was kind of crooked but beautiful and old-fashioned.”
- NEW YORK TIMES, 29 March 2009
Not everyone has a NYTimes shout-out for their apartment – and I feel lucky to have lived here. Like 15 million other people, I remember when I first moved to the city: being jobless and desperate to leave Boston, on deadline in NYC; walking 20 miles a day with Bat, back and forth between Prospect Park and Greenpoint. Realtors literally shut the door in our faces, and we’d get back to Becky’s — that’s where we were staying the first time — covered in dirt and feeling like we were doing something impossible with expected results. The second time we came up — regardless of geography, NYC is always “up” — I mainly remember taking naps in the Carol Garden park, in Tompkins Square Park, in one other that I can picture but not name; trying to get together the 3 or 4 months security deposit we needed to get to the one landlord who’d have us (we never got it back). Weird, right – why so hard? We had black snot rimming our noses – were we sick or just cartoons? – and thought it was cute to call the grime “stardust”.
And then there was that first NYC apartment, which I remember fondly and which most of you are most familiar with. The one with the gold-leafed murals and Bat’s bright yellow and glossy black boudoir. The chic-est neighborhood in Brooklyn and somehow we’re across the street from a chop-shop and there’s some sort of shady middle school drug ring in the foyer. And then the gourmet grocery down the block called Chop-Chop – was that the too-high pitched laugh (dry) of the self-aware? Bat loved stoop culture, or was good natured about it – I felt too much pressure to perform and never put in the time. And now this one, and then another one, which I’ll be moving into this Saturday.
I won’t lie, expectations make it a hard move: it’s cathected – the perfect historic bo-ho-let’s-make-a-go-of-it apartment left, lonesome, for a new construction a block away. A lot of friends have cringed, there were some knowing looks. And then the expectation of knowing looks and cringes. And then a quiet conflict over whether to say anything or have old friends knocking on the old door. And the thing is, at this point I could care less where I live – I just want to get rid of half of everything I own, feel less shackled by trappings (both physical and… social?). Important to note is that I’ve never affected bohemianism as an aesthetic. Rather: I’ve been poor with an aesthetic. This distinction is vital, overlooked.
I was thinking about this before we signed the new lease, months before, but then also immediately before… while reading the following passage from a soon-to-be published book of Will Self essays (courtesy of Mordicai – who’s been hooking me up with all things Self lately): “I recall the feel of hand-me-down parental linens – and sinking into the trough of a broken-backed bed dragged back from the furniture warehouse on the Liverpool Road. She turned away from my carefully crafted caresses and I saw peculiar spiral markings on her bare back and stubby neck. Ring worm. We both had it – the vermiculation of our short-let accommodation had bored through the plaster and into our flesh.”
To read something like that and empathize made my skin crawl. Not with ring worm, thankfully, but… I talked about this at a dinner party the other night – an apologist for the impending move – and completely confused everyone at the table: we’ve been having a problem with borders. The no-doors situation is livable, but less tenable is NYC seeping up through the floor and in through the cracks. Not physically, although: yes, that too. But spiritually, psychologically – we’ve been feeling fettered. Too close to the dirt, too tied to the ground. The undulations and ululations of Brooklyn surrounding and asphyxiating. Every cell phone conversation at the bus stop outside – and then the bus itself, shrieking and sighing – puncturing any interiority I thought I might like to find myself caught up in.
To be… up. To be up and looking outward. Able to effect psychic distance, to hole up and away and preferably above. I had this in my old bedroom in the half-glammed out tenement on Pacific Street – sixth floor walk up and a window looking out onto the upper boughs of an Ailanthas tree… that’s where I wrote the bulk of my poems about chakras realligning (in Triangulating Happiness). I’m looking forward to having that kind of calm and separation again, and I honestly don’t care whether that happens in a pre-war walk-up or some swank condo I lucked into. I will miss the Carriage House, though. Living here has made me feel more a part of the city than I would’ve thought possible – the reason I love it, the reason I have to leave. Some Bluesman said it first.
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Posted on 30 October 2009 at 2:37 pm
makes sense now… up up up. ok. i’m with you. good luck.
“some bluesman said it first” – you got that right. sigh. some blues man probably said THAT first too.
Posted on 31 October 2009 at 1:58 am
yoga, I think it might be time for you to start playing the blues.
Posted on 30 October 2009 at 2:07 pm
Oh, Nick. This really got me – and I get it. I remember when finding the snot in my tissue laced with black filth was romantic, almost charming. It isn’t cute to me anymore – but laughing about it like it never happened to me isn’t cute either. You’re moving on up, and that’s a-okay by me.