*a submission to local arts and culture magazine, which will be published in August? September? Maybe, if they like it! Fingers x’ed, yet what matters is that I do. 🙂
It was Halloween, the perfect day to move from the Catskills into the big city; what’s the worst that can happen? Revelers doing their raucous Halloween thing? Car horns and music blaring? Shouting? Screaming? The unmistakable sound of fights breaking out beyond the apartment windows? Gun shots?
All of that and more occurred that memorable night, my first in NYC. Why Halloween? What were you thinking? Who does that? I do. It was time to get my life going already, post-college. Halloween also, that year, fell on a Saturday. That meant pop was able – and willing, which was more astonishing – to close the store and take me into Manhattan, dropping me off at the apartment I’d rented two weeks earlier with money I’d saved up over the previous 18 weeks waiting tables on Nantucket Island.
It wasn’t a big deal. I’d be fine. I’d lived in London, after all, another sprawling, fast-paced metropolis, and managed well; loved every minute, in fact, making that city my own. I wasn’t a helpless child. I was 22! My father counseled me never to leave my apartment after sunset, which, that month, meant around 5p.m. This admonition from dear old dad was unsustainable, but I followed his advice for a few weeks, with one exception, mostly because, jobless and relatively friendless, I had nowhere to go.
The exception was the day after Halloween, November 1, All Souls’ Day. The locksmith I’d hired once the lease was signed, found at random in the Yellow Pages, arrived that morning to change the cylinder on the door handle lock, installing a deadbolt just below my eye level as well; he then asked me out. I said yes, partly because I was in my new life, which meant taking risks and embracing adventure, but I was also a little concerned about saying no when he was inside my apartment, with my new keys still in his hand. He had all the necessary equipment to get in again, at will, right? Why was it I could never lie about having a serious boyfriend? A fiancé? A jealous husband?
Still. What’s the worst that could happen? I said yeah, sure; we decided on a time he would pick me up later that night (my phone wouldn’t be installed for another week), and handed me my keys. I think he was surprised, actually, when – buzzing my apartment in the darkness – I came out the front door. He had a vintage Chevy, low-slung and green? Maybe? I’m not a car person.
He decided to take me, a squeaky fresh newbie to the Big Apple, up the west side highway to his old neighborhood in the Bronx, where we visited a surviving bar amidst the mostly empty, burned out blocks. We played pool; he drank a beer; I sipped a club soda. After introducing me to a couple of his old friends, we left to drive around the neighborhood; he wanted to show me where he and his pals had once lived, in buildings that no longer existed. It looked like a war zone, but for whatever reason – we never met again – I felt perfectly safe the entire time. It’s also possible everything was so new to me, that I was numb. I do that, go numb, turn into a witness, only, to my own life and everyone in it.
That winter was brutally cold; my landlords, 3 friends in their late 30s, all new to the business of multi-unit property ownership, were unable to pay the oil bills on the building they’d bought. My upstairs neighbor’s pipes froze and burst, bringing the ceiling down, flooding my kitchen. I kept warm-ish drinking innumerable cups of tea, and by turning the oven on; I read novels by flashlight under the covers fully dressed in layer upon layer of my clothing. My parents sent an electric blanket, but I couldn’t shower; I saw my breath every time I emerged from my wool and cotton cocoon. What an adventure!
I tried to help an upstairs neighbor learn to read after discovering that the notice on the front door – a building-wide meeting to be held that week (Rent Strike!) – was news to him, because it was indecipherable. How could you live, I thought, without being able to escape into books? Into other worlds? He was in his 40s and took my genuine desire to help the wrong way, sliding hand-decorated love notes under my front door almost daily, which put an end to our lessons. His loneliness was a monster he carried like Casper carried the burden of being a ghost; he was childlike, scary sad yet kind, just looking for friendship, and love. While I was not afraid of his monster, or him, I was also not the solution.
My immediate neighbor on the first floor disappeared for several months, which I knew, or surmised, by watching newspapers and flyers pile up in front of his door. Hearing his keys jingle, I opened my door to welcome him back, but was stopped short by the sight of him, hobbling on crutches. He was in rough shape, one arm in a sling, but said he was glad to be home, and lucky, he told me, to be alive. He’d been beaten by his boyfriend so badly he’d been in hospital all these weeks. I’d heard them fighting at times, through our shared wall, but said nothing. He left the building not long after.
I got a job that frigid January at a diner on 25th and 2nd Avenue, Big Nick’s Burger Joint 2, where I was the counter girl for several months; they put me there to test my skills, but also because that’s where other lonely men like my non-reading neighbor on East 1st St. would sit to bolt or nurse their breakfast, lunch or dinner, or maybe just a piece of pie and endless cups of coffee. Let’s give them the new girl to gawk at. Why not? At Nick’s, as on the street in general, the sexual harassment I endured was, like the weather that winter, brutal. Unlike winter, however, it never went away.
Nick’s manager made it clear the busboys and short order cooks with their tongues hanging out and constant, running chatter about my various body parts and what they’d do to them were much more essential to the running of the restaurant than I was; if I didn’t like it, I could be replaced in a hot minute. I still thought that if I reasoned with them, minds could be changed; I was that naive. Eventually, I learned how to deal with the men who insisted on sharing their thoughts and feelings at me, cat-calling, flashing, stalking me throughout the city. Don’t ask. Use your imaginations. Niceness is not a viable strategy when dealing with pig-persons.
One of the other waitresses at Big Nick’s, Lulu, gave me a tutorial on how to surreptitiously punish obnoxious busboys and customers (I’ll never tell, be nice to your servers!), as well as how to figure out the subway without getting turned around each time I resurfaced, including how to not get on a downtown train when I was headed uptown. She was a heroin addict, as were – I discovered – my building super and his wife; they were all only a few years older than I was at the time, 26 or 27.
Both Lulu and the super’s wife were pregnant that spring; the risks they were taking were terrifying, but what did I know? Who was I to say something, or to judge? They were, all of these humans, kind to me, and I was grateful, having landed myself in a soup of much murkier complexity than I was used to. A roommate I’d had, briefly, in London – a girl with the glorious name of Cinzia Splendori – had also been addicted to heroin, a drug that gave her the one thing she’d always wanted: skinniness. An older brother arrived to bring her back to Rome, and rehab; she wrote me several times, and I responded hoping – hoping what? That being a curvy girl would cease to upset her, making her feel less than? I doubt I wrote that, although I know I wished her well. I still do, all these years later. Don’t go out after 5p.m., Cinzia. Just say no, Cinzia. Just say no, Lulu.
It would be almost a decade before I met my actual tribe of NYC friends who were – whatever their issues, and we all have them – not on drugs, illiterate, cray-cray, or in relationships that were dangerously abusive. Water, and we’re all about 60% water, finds its level; they, my best friends for decades now, are of and on the same level, the same wavelength. My newish friend Frank would say we’re in a bubble, and he might be right, but please don’t tell him; he’s male and Italian. Compliments go right straight to his head.
Decades later, I returned to live in the Catskills on Christmas Eve. Who does that? I do.