april, 2008
I really miss New York. Carroll keeps sending me these essays about it, I guess because she’s leaving too. And they make me sad. They make me miss my first days, or weeks, living there. My first apartment was in Chelsea, with two gay boys and some rats. I’d scream when I saw the rats and jump onto my bed- an air mattress that would deflate everynight. I didn’t know, until Hunter told me one day, that rats could climb. I just assumed I was safe on that 6 inch thick air mattress. Sankil, one of my roomates, would kill them for us…and throw them out our window onto 23rd Street. That’s disgusting. But I hope they hit someone.
I was terrified my first night alone in New York. My mom left me, in Chelsea, with two strange boys I knew through a family friend. For some reason both of us remember Chelsea being way scarier than it was/is (in my mind I picture it like the New York in Taxi Driver). The week I moved in she had reservations to stay in the Chelsea Hotel since it was 2 doors down, and then she saw the place and quickly moved to the Plaza or the Carlyle or some other place uptown. Then she left me with my air mattress and plastic containers and I was alone, aside from the gay boys in the bunkbeds in our living room. And the cello. The first night was terrifying. But then I was never scared again. And it felt like home.
Keen was the first person to visit me. It was in June, but for some reason it was freezing. It was the week we were on the Today Show, the entire show it seemed, and the week that all the subways had ramps, rather than stairs. I’ve never once seen a ramped subway exit since that day. We discovered Coney Island that week, in the freezing cold. There wasn’t a single person there, except for the cotton candy seller (which is the only person in the world who really matters anyway). We saw Toni Collete, wasted, dancing at the AIDS benefit, the night her play closed. We went to Macys (the last time I ever went to Macys) and rode endless wooden elevators until we finally reached the top. I think it was Christmas themed. Some sort of arctic theme. Who knows why. It was June. Apparently a weird June. But a good June.
That summer and the following two were my favorite times of my life. The next summer Jason and I subletted some sketchy place in Kips Bay from some girl with 2 cats. For some reason we paid full rent AND babysat her cats. Gerard would, obviously, call us idjiots. I made masks out of my clothes because when I fed them, their food would make me vomit. I’d buy bags of ice and Jason would eat the entire bag in a day. The girl told us not to use the air conditioner because our electric bill would be huge. She failed to warn us that staying on the dial-up internet all day and night would lead to $700 phone bills, while the electric bill was $15. So we ran the air all day and went to the internet cafe in Times Square. Jason would pretend to go to auditions, but really he’s lie on the couch all day, sleeping, while I took pictures of cats on top of him. We saw Wet Hot American Summer 8 times in the theater. And the scene where they couselors all go into town is still one of the greatest scenes in movie history.We stayed at the Del Close Marathon at the UCB for 3 days straight. It’s where we saw “Dratch and Fey.” Homeless people lived on our stoop and had a tv plugged into the lamppost. I never asked them to move because I respected their dedication to the television. I locked myself out of my apartment one Sunday night and instead of calling a locksmith I flagged down a firetruck. They shut down my street and used their bucket to send a guy up, in through a window, to open my door. Four weeks later, that guy (who was barely older than me), and half of the others who helped me died in the World Trade Center.
And the next summer Carroll and I had our brief stint as roommates (until I kicked her out and she moved down the street and was banned from ordering Rays Pizza). It was the summer that you couldn’t buy a board game at 9pm anywhere in the city. We discovered Degrassi and Lizzy Maguire (and Gordo!). We ate things, in mass quantities, that should have killed us on the spot. Some days I’d order nothing but a glass of orange juice and have Lennys deliver it. We named our neighbors and filmed them doing things from everyday activities, to things the curtains should have been closed for. We discovered Hunan Satin Pants and Tom Cavanaugh became Carroll’s stalker. A boy moved in with us and would leave the oven on so often that we had to leave notes telling him how to turn it off. He slept on a piece of foam, while we had our bunk beds. I called the top, because I’m an idiot. He made us ganache whenever we wanted it, which is the only reason we didn’t murder him in his sleep. But he never locked the doors. Thank god Big Man and Big Dog, other inhabitants of our building, weren’t murderers. We watched Jason on Big Brother and I had to suffer through Zach Braff’s horrific taste in music (avril lavigne and some other awful girl singer who was big at the time) every night at Shakespeare in the Park. Carroll would drink until all hours of the morning with Pauley at Malachys. And I had too many non-paying jobs to ever really do much of anything. But my butt did become a famous MTV star that summer. I miss my movie theater on Broadway and 68th Street. And the Barnes and Noble where Peter Jennings and I stalked each other one day, before he got sick and died. I miss that shitty grocery store that wasn’t open on Sundays, a fact I could never remember. This was around the time I developed my hatred of Oprah and her 8 inch waist. And my love of smearing Magnolia Bakery cupcake iccing all over Eddie, our Super. His wife always scared me a little. And he seemed far too old to have such young children. But he sure did look pretty covered in iccing.
I miss not caring about anything. Having no responsibilities other than not falling into the subway or spending too much money on shoes at Bergdorf Goodman. I miss getting drunk at Bendels at 10:00am and watching Carroll ask two sisters if they ever made out.. No one told me what to do and when to do it. I could miss work because I was an intern, so who really cared if the intern was missing? I miss all that freedom and all that possibility.
I miss that New York. And that life.
