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By Root 414 0

I needed to find somewhere affordable to live, so I opted for my sister Katharine and her new husband Henry’s couch. I fancy myself a darned good houseguest but after a season or two they got that pained look on their faces. Then they busted me having phone sex on said couch with an actor in Chicago I had done a play with and they asked me to leave. I said farewell to the newlyweds and headed off on my own. I needed to get writing and I couldn’t do it with all these leaseholders and apartment owners crowding me. I found something on their street two blocks down. It wasn’t exactly an apartment, but then, what was the strict definition of apartment anyway? Some people might insist on amenities like a bathroom, but isn’t the expression “Location, location, location”? I’ve never once heard “bathroom, bathroom, bathroom” when the cognoscenti discuss New York real estate.

Mike and Nicola, the owners, were theater people. I had met them in Austin, Texas, at RAT (Regional Alternative Theater, or Raggedy-Ass Theater) Fest, where theater-makers from all over the country convened to share info on hijacking billboards, how to sharpen stage pencils at your temp job, this kind of thing. When I talked to them about moving into two rooms on the third floor of their brownstone, they informed me that there was a Puerto Rican family who lived on the second floor and part of the third. The two sisters had lived there for forty years and as the new owners Mike and Nicola had no interest in displacing the elderly. As far as Mike and Nicola were concerned, the two sisters were more than welcome to die in their building. These two women shared their place with a fiftyish son and a stoner nineteen-year-old grandson (who, shortly after I moved out, accidentally shot himself in the face in his room, approximately ten feet from where I’d been living). Mike and Nicola were far too Brechtian to clear out the top floors of their home and make more than the two hundred bucks a month they were likely charging the two sisters.

I learned that before buying the brownstone they had spent their time in a tepee in a shantytown at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. The tepee was made of United States government mailbags sewed together by Nicola. They built a spit outside where they would roast lambs and things. They siphoned electricity off a lamppost on the bridge and refused to talk to journalists who came by, as that would put them back where they started, on the plane of franchised, connected artmakers. After about two years, Mike and Nicola felt close, very fucking close, to closing the gap between them and us, you and me, him and her, but then in 1993 the city put an end to the shantytown, razing all of the structures on “the hill.”

It was an exciting time for me. I was twenty-eight, and after a rigorous credit check (Mike: “Can you afford four hundred a month?” Me: “I’m sure going to try, Mike”), I got my first very nearly what you would call an apartment. On my own that is. No cosigners, no boyfriends, no sisters. I had two rooms and a sink in a closet. Virginia Woolf would have creamed in her pants. The main room was about twelve feet by twelve. It had two windows that were pretty well rotted through, and wood plank floors, which, with a single weekend of sandblasting, would have been irresistible. Against one wall there was an ancient white stove that looked like it belonged in some old rapist’s house in New Hampshire. And then a fridge next to that. This was the kitchen, just a fridge and a stove plunked into a room. There were no cabinets, no counters. If I had to do any fancy culinary moves like slice a tomato, I would put a plate on the stovetop and do it that way. I put a mirror over the sink in the closet. This is where I brushed my teeth, washed my face and peed in the middle of the night when I didn’t feel up to using the bathroom in the hall. This is also where I washed my dishes. Outside my door was a roof ladder on which the two old Puerto Rican sisters liked to dry their wigs on hangers after they washed them. I never knew why they chose