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By Root 391 0

this spot, right outside my front door, as the place to hang their drying wigs, but this was it and there was no way I could broach this conversation, en español or English. Jimmy’s door was about ten feet from mine, directly across from my bedroom door. Ignacio (or Nacho, as he was called) and the old aunts were really nice, but Jimmy I wasn’t so sure about. It wasn’t just the fact that he was in one of the most diabolical demographics known to man, the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old male, it wasn’t just the fact that he was a pothead, one of my least favorite addicts. (Potheads being generally lazier and less quick than other addicts. I preferred alcoholics. Alcoholics were charming, snappy dressers, good conversationalists, witty, cynical and a pretty ambitious crowd. Alcoholics were people . . . like me. Heroin addicts displayed tons of derring-do, venturing into abandoned buildings and finding the vein juste, and speed freaks seemed awfully likable, they liked to dance and stay up all night, they patronized the arts, liked to have tons and tons of sex.) It was that Jimmy seemed slightly untrustworthy, which is not a quality you want when sharing a toilet with someone. He was a little slow, like a pubescent Puerto Rican Stanley Kowalski, particularly the way he ordered women around. He had a habit of opening his door around eleven at night and yelling down the stairs, “Abuela, chocolatay.” A few minutes later his aged grandmother would make her way up the stairs to his door where she would say his name and he would open the door and take the hot chocolate from her and close the door abruptly, never saying thank you. This really got on my nerves, that a nineteen-year-old couldn’t make his own hot chocolate.

In the middle of the main room there was a long, light blue couch I had gotten at the Salvation Army. Alongside it was an old mahogany end table that looked like it might have been stolen off a Coachlight Dinner Theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace. The couch faced a TV atop a white cube between the two windows.

Next to the couch was my desk, where I sat Stegosaurus, my aged Mac, one of those models that had a huge rear and took up your whole desk.

There was a small bedroom that fit only a bed. It had dark gray office carpeting. There was nothing on the walls in either room, a little decorating trick I had picked up from my father, who, since leaving our house in Bronxville, had never hung a single thing on a wall of his apartment. For my dad, walls were the bulletin boards of his mind, where he would tack up thoughts, story ideas, funny things his daughters had said. It was awful to visit him and see some comment you had made about the meaninglessness of work when you were a mother’s helper on Nantucket in 1985 on his wall for all to see.

“Do you remember when you said that, Jeanne? Oh, that’s a terrific line.”

I leaned closer to the wall outside his bathroom door. “‘Work is a wonderful spectator sport.’ Yeah, I guess I remember that. Seems kinda dumb.”

“No, no, a great line! Particularly as it was uttered by a fifteen-year-old mother’s helper in a swanky summer WASP hive.”

I decided what might be nice for my bedroom was some shelving for my clothes instead of a bureau. As I was clearly walking a new path of an entirely self-made life, I decided to build the shelves myself. I bought a bunch of plywood and nailed the boards together. This did not make shelves. They were more like plywood sculptures that clothing was placed atop. There was no recognizable shelfness to them. If they were the last surviving example of shelving to bring into the future as a prototype, shelves would be extinct.

ONE MORNING I WOKE UP after another big night of drinking and realized that I needed to take an Academy Award–nominated poop. Immediately. I grabbed some sweatpants off my plywood shelf sculpture and pulled them up super-quick. I also spotted a stinky gray running shirt that Julia had given me that was starting to get all holey and thin and pulled that over my head. I dash-dash-dashed into the living room and