Yello

We moved to the city in the middle of the summer, and an old classmate of ours agreed to let us crash on his floor for a couple of weeks while we got settled. His name was Bruce and, while I didn’t know him very well, he and Eric had apparently hit it off during my absence in Chicago. I was grateful to have a place to start, and, when the cab let us off in front of his West Village apartment, our New York adventure officially began.

Bruce was an interesting character. He had been in an awful accident when he was a child. Climbing a tree, he grabbed onto a electric wire that wasn’t supposed to be there and was almost killed. As it was, he endured many painful operations and his right hand was permanently fused together, which made him very self-conscious about it. I always surmised that that was the reason he had taken up the French horn, so he could hide his disfigured hand in the great brass bell of the instrument, and he was always very quick to be the first to offer his left hand for a handshake, to avoid the awkwardness of exposing his right hand and its inability to grasp. Because of the horrific accident, his family had sued the power company, which had apparently run the power lines through the trees illegally, and they ended up with a huge (and justified) settlement. The money was held in a trust until Bruce was older, but he got a very generous monthly allowance from it and was setting himself up in style in the Village. He was also gay, and was really enjoying the opportunity to explore that lifestyle in such a positive environment. Not that Interlochen wasn’t tolerant, but the Village in the early ‘80s, before the spectre of AIDS had really ripped its way through the community, must’ve been quite an exhilarating experience.

He took us in, showed us our spot on the floor, got us stoned, and walked us around the Village for a couple of hours. It was overwhelming. Eventually, I would acquire my NYC blinders, but, coming from the quiet woods of Michigan, the city blew my head wide open. Even my time in Chicago failed to prepare me for the intense urbanicity of New York. Sights and sounds and smells (it was summer, after all) came pouring in so quick and fast that I was nearly paralyzed, and had to keep looking down at my feet every now and then to make sure they were still moving, and then immediately look up again so I didn’t lose Eric and Bruce in the crowds. When we got back to the apartment, I was exhausted and overwhelmed, and we had dinner and went to sleep.

Eric and I dove in the next morning, leaping into the formidable task of establishing ourselves in the city. Bruce was very generous in letting us crash at his pad, but it was a small loft and it was clear that we had to get out of it as soon as possible, so we went to work trying to find an apartment before we really focused on getting jobs. But there was a catch-22 in effect. Employers like you to have an address before they give you a job and landlords like you to have a job before they give you an address, so we were caught in a vicious circle. I knew we were both responsible people, but nobody else in the city did, and New Yorkers, as I was learning, are a suspicious breed and tend to assume the worst about you and your intentions, so it was quite a difficult hurdle.

Finally, we found a guy who ran a big building on 23rd Street in Chelsea – just a few doors down from the infamous Chelsea Hotel – who agreed to rent us an apartment. He even offered to throw in some furniture that he had lying around in the basement, and we eagerly took him up on his offer of a convertible couch, thereby saving us an expense neither of us could afford. We were on our way!

The apartment was amazing. We were in no position to turn it down, but it was truly awful. It was on the 7th floor of a 22 floor building, and it was an internal apartment, which meant that the one window in the room looked out over the airshaft in the middle of the building. You had to open the window and stick your head out and twist it around to look straight up to see what kind of a day it was (oh, it’s sunny!) and the brightest it ever got in there was a sort of dingy grey-blue, as the sun never got anywhere near our window. There was a disgusting, heavily-stained green carpet on the floor, which we immediately ripped up and threw away, revealing the badly scratched-up hardwood floor underneath. Unfortunately, ripping up the carpet also revealed the rows of nailed boards that ran around the circumference of the room, with hundreds of carpet tacks sticking straight up that had held the carpet in place. The boards were rotting and impossible to remove, so you always had to be careful not to sit or step too close to the walls or you’d impale yourself on a bunch of rusty nails. This row of death also stretched across the thresholds, so you’d have to take special care in walking from room to room. Fortunately, there weren’t many rooms, so this wasn’t much of a problem. In fact, there was really only the one 12 x 12 room, with a small bathroom and an even smaller kitchen (in which you could stand in the center and touch all four walls at the same time). I cooked one and only one meal in that room, and was so hot and sweaty when it was over that I practically threw the food at Eric and said “here’s your goddamned dinner”. The only thing we ever really did in the kitchen was defrost the freezer, which had to be done every couple of weeks or the refrigerator door wouldn’t close.

Defrosting the freezer was an hours-long ordeal that involved hair dryers and pots of boiling water. You’d finally finish it and plug it back in and, in a matter of hours, the ice was already starting to cake up around the sides.

Being that it was summer in New York City in an apartment with one window that overlooked an airshaft, it was fucking hot all the time. As we were quickly discovering, New York City summers are not just hot, they are humid, and relentlessly so. There’s isn’t even any relief after the sun goes down, and each night became a hellish endurance test, and we’d wake up cranky and exhausted from tossing and turning and sweating all night. The room was so small that we could open up the couch into a bed only when we went to sleep and had to fold it back up in the daytime if we hoped to move around at all.

The only relief from the sweat was for about five minutes after you took a shower, and those were often the best five minutes of the day. The shower was freakishly strong, and was either off completely or on paint-removal strength with nothing in between, and you’d have to cower against the far wall having the top layers of skin blasted off while the shower curtain whipped around you in a frenzy. A quick rub with a perpetually damp and smelly towel and you were ready to face the day.

Now that we had a place to hang our hats (or bang our bats), it was time to get jobs. Again, being green in NYC with no history and no references (and no real skills) didn’t endear us to many prospective employers, who figured we’d just bolt when things got hard (like, what, they were going to get harder?), but Eric got a job almost immediately. And, what’s more, he got a job that he didn’t have to go to. He was hired by a small food stand in the newly opened South Street Seaport called Pasta and Cheese 1-2-3, which prepared a couple of quick pasta choices with some sauces for easy consumption by the business and tourist types that haunted the financial areas on the south end of Manhattan. Although he had been hired, they weren’t quite ready for business yet – construction delays and the like – so he had the security of a job without having to actually do anything for a couple of weeks.

Me, I was not so lucky.