2/15/22: Dispatches from the Front

Many years ago, a friend posted an update on Facebook, stating grimly that she’d just had to wrestle her dog for the poop her toddler son had left in the yard. There were dozens of comments, some funny, some sympathetic, but the one I’ll never forget was a laconic one-liner: “You gotta want it.”

Here’s the thing about the gnats. They want it. And they want it way more than I do. I’m not giving up or giving in, and I keep up my endless rounds of soil-stirring, spraying, the routine of collecting up, emptying, and refilling my multitude of gnat traps. I’m making progress, that is certain: their numbers are dwindling, and they’ve taken to laying down to die in mass quantities on the floor just by the back door, but it’s still perfectly obvious, at least to me if not the gnats: despite the completely lopsided score, they still want it more.

One thing I really liked about living in New York City was that I felt like I could step out my door into a different life every single day, maybe even multiple times a day. It’s a cliché, of course, but one nice thing about jamming 9 million people into such a small space is that they create their little pockets and you can literally turn a corner and enter a new world. I only moved apartments a few times, but each time I did I started my life completely over. Once I moved just two blocks, going from 106 to 160 7th Ave, but even still it was a fresh start: new dry cleaner, new pizza place, new wine store, new nail salon. And when I eventually left those places behind, I went as a ghost: one day there, then, just…never there again.

I’m still trying to process how buying a house—a townhouse—has locked me up and into a certain space. I don’t feel locked up or in, at least not yet: the space seems quite large to me and I have lots of closets and even an entire room where I can put things and close the door, but that stuff isn’t going to magically go anywhere and one day I will have to open those doors and deal with whatever I’ve stuffed behind them. In my old life, I could just give my notice, call the junk man, and move away.

160 7^th Ave was in the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and I lived there for years before I realized I did not have children or a dog, much less children named Fairy or Osmund, the kind that wore what appeared to be Halloween costumes year-round and flew down the uneven sidewalk at a terrifying speed on those aptly-named Razor scooters and, by the time they were 8, had a signature drink they ordered from Starbucks. I once sat in a friend’s apartment while she sent her two daughters, maybe 7 and 11, out to buy themselves “coffees,” her credit card casually dangling from the older girl’s little hand. After a little while, the barista called, wanting confirmation that the children had permission for this junket and at first I thought that was a really sweet neighborhood-y gesture and then later I thought more about wealth and privilege and if maybe that same barista had been harangued before for selling drinks to the under-aged/under-permissioned and it wasn’t long after that incident that I sought out meaner streets.

Since I worked in Manhattan, it made sense to shelve my 45-minute commute in favor of something much shorter, and due to a bunch of other personal requirements including easy access to the West Side Highway, zero interest in living in a neighborhood with people, plus the lure of being walking distance to midtown, I ended up in a 300+ unit building that took up a whole block on 8^th Avenue, from 52^nd all the way to 53^rd. It was love at first sight for me: the apartment was tiny, of course, but dollhouse perfect with three big built-in closets at the front door, tons of cabinet space in the itsy kitchen, a walk-in closet outside of the bedroom, and—be still, my heart!—a dishwasher.

160 7^th Ave was, by contrast, an apartment that might best be described as having character. It was one of eight apartments in a four-story brownstone-esque building with an old-school white tablecloth Italian restaurant on the ground floor. My apartment was one of two on the second floor and took up the entire side of the building. It was enormous by many NYC standards, but so strangely laid out it was hard to maximize the space. There were essentially two very large rooms, one in the front, facing 7^th Avenue, which had a large closet, then another in the middle with light coming only from a small window in the back, then a “kitchen” that was essentially a hallway to the bathroom. The kitchen was so small it didn’t have any drawers, just a sink with cabinets underneath, a set of cabinets above, a range and a fridge. The other real estate of the kitchen was taken up by the hot water heater which I had been told would be “boxed in” but, of course, never was.

But the bathroom: oh, that bathroom. It was huge, easily one and half times the size of the kitchen. It had a pedestal sink (no cabinet underneath, naturally), an uncomfortably small and weirdly shaped stall shower: as if it was meant to be a square box but the bathroom door needed to open in and so one corner of the box was flattened off so the shower space was almost—but not quite—triangular. It had clear walls and gold trim and on the shower door some inspired madman had etched a very very large ghostly rose. Across from the shower was a jacuzzi tub, of all things, with three steps leading up to it like it was Cleopatra’s Brooklyn crib. Everything—including the walls—was tiled with something meant to evoke pink marble, and the whole effect was, in a word, breath-taking.

“You have to see my bathroom,” I would tell people, “you’re not going to believe this.” The rest of the apartment was nondescript: one wall was exposed brick, but it was the real kind of exposed brick, like I think there was a fire and some contractor took the drywall down and found the interior of the exterior wall of the building and tried to convince themselves it was chic so they painted it dark red and then hightailed-it out of town. The floors were sharply sloped, the carpet in the (one) closet was a visual representation of the word “threadbare,” and I could never get the apartment actually warm when it was cold, or cold when it was warm, but that bathroom: someone must have gotten a sweetheart of a deal on the demolition of a palace in Brighton Beach as there is no other plausible explanation for the décor: it was simply hideous.

The two rooms of the apartment, after the kitchen-hallway and bathroom-mausoleum, were comically large. I made the first one, the darker one, into a dining room/living room combo, with more than enough room to spare. The second one had to be my bedroom, and out of other ideas I ordered a rug and an over-sized chair to take up some of the rest of the space, but two living rooms was really a bit much so most of the floor space in that room went unused.

That is, of course, until Second Bed.

First Bed was an okay bed, but it had traces of a breakup attached to it and the frame wasn’t to my liking anyway, so one flush day I splurged at Ikea and bought a new mattress and frame. Getting a furniture delivery, or really a delivery of any kind, was a hassle: I had to stay home from work on the appointed day (which would turn out to be or not be the actual day) and then hover at the window, scanning 7^th Avenue for the truck. It was a busy street and there was no parking, so I’ve often wondered if delivery drivers would ever “make attempts” then drive away, knowing that after three tries the customer had to come pick up. That customer would not be me, so I hovered at the window until the van appeared and then ran down to wave frantically at the driver, simultaneously patting my pocket for my keys as I’d locked myself out once before and swore I would never again.

The length of this story probably signals my reluctance to tell it, so here are some facts: Second Bed arrived in a flat pack, because Ikea, and there was plenty of room to stand Second Mattress up against a wall until such time as I could put Second Bed together, which turned out to be a little while because Ikea and also lack of urgency due to the proximity and availability of First Bed, which was only being replaced for emotional reasons, not because its expensive, plush mattress was a hardship on which to sleep. Thus by the time Second Bed had been assembled—at the foot of First Bed, naturally, as there was plenty of space and Second Bed could be put together in stages—First Bed had no particular place to go and no particular time it had to be there.

The era of Second Bed lasted an uncomfortably long time, so long my memory refuses to admit it, but let’s just say the word “years” would be appropriate. The two beds were displayed in a T-shape, a few feet separating the foot of First Bed from the side of Second Bed. I only remember one house guest staying over during that time, and it was exactly as I’d imagined life in the orphanage would be: “Goodnight, Danners,” I whispered from Second Bed, close enough to reach out and shake Danny’s foot goodnight.

“Jesus Christ, Casers, I can’t fucking believe you live like this,” Danny responded from First Bed, then we drifted off to dreamland until 5 am when the garbage trucks came grinding down 7^th Avenue, the tremendous roaring of their machinery echoing off the buildings and tunneling directly into my window. I lived there for like 7 years, I think, and I still couldn’t tell you why.

When the time came to move, it happened to coincide with the closing of the restaurant downstairs. I ate there frequently—once or twice a week—and the owners and staff were very kind to me. They made my special off-menu dinner and waited until I’d finished a glass of wine before bringing my first course. Marcello and his nameless wife were the owners: he was tall, with a humble, gentle demeanor, straight from Italy. She was short, with the accent, blond hair-helmet, and collection of animal-print denim wear that could source her directly from Long Island. They argued all the time, and there was always soccer on the TVs over the bar. Marcello would greet me sweetly, in his quite murmur, and then she would sweep by my table, all 5’2” of her, even in her platform espadrilles, and say, “How you doing, sweetie, okay?” I would agree, and she would go back to the bar where she sat with her Shirley Temple and shouted at her husband. I loved that place. When they told me they were closing (reasons unclear), I was truly bereft, so much so that I earnestly promised to attend the some-future-date opening of their vaguely described new location.

The restaurant was gone in just a couple of days—all the equipment packed up and moved out and the great aluminum shutters brought down and padlocked over tall windows that, in the nice weather, had once opened to the street, so smokers could stand up from their table, leave the restaurant, and simply rejoin the conversation from “outside,” the smell of cigarettes and sound of voices and laughter drifting up to my window, flowing in to find me no matter which bed I was in.

A day or so after that final shuttering, I smelled gas. Feeling myself quite the hero, I called 911 and was promised someone would be there immediately. Much to my shock it wasn’t more than 20 minutes before a man arrived: he had a wand which he would point into a space and see if that was where the gas smell was coming from. We made quite a scene tramping around in the building, banging on doors, the man poking his wand into corners, but nothing coming up, when finally El Morono me mentioned the restaurant on the ground floor had just closed. The man took off down the stairs and by the time I caught up—for what was it at this point except for my journey, too?—he was on hands and knees, angling his wand into the gap between the aluminum shutters and the (filthy) sidewalk. Whatever his wand told him, he popped up from the ground and turned to me, his face suddenly urgent: “We need to get these doors open—the leak is coming from inside.”

And that is how a man from National Grid and I mobilized to cordon off the sidewalk in front of the restaurant while he called important people and I called the landlord and then the landlord’s agent, who had her office in the area. He had the south end of the street while I took the north, each of us working the phones and shouting at people to get away, put out that cigarette. Sadly, it wasn’t until I heard the National Grid man shout the cigarette warning that I came to wonder how wise my own presence was, flameless or not, standing a few feet away from what was apparently a major gas leak.

I was saved from further self-examination by the landlord’s agent, who arrived per usual on her cruiser bicycle, complete with a whimsical basket on the front decorated with flowers. There was much ado about getting the shutters up, and then as a wave of sulfurous odor came out, the gas man—so bravely, in retrospect!—charged into the restaurant and the rest of us stood around slack-jawed, or at least I did, until he emerged, his face pale. Apparently, the gas burners of the restaurant had all been left cranked wide open, and once the doors were opened the stench was such that a bunch of idiotic passers-by started shouting, “I smell gas! Do you smell gas? I smell gas!” clearly not realizing that me and Mr. National Grid had the situation handled, or, at least, had managed to navigate a combination of wand and luck to avert what could have been, Mr. National Grid later told me seriously (and perhaps unwisely), a “complete and total disaster.” Boom, he mimed with his hands, my whole building gone up in a blast.

I never knew if charges were filed though in the aftermath Mr. National Grid had intimated darkly that they should be, as “this kind of thing” wasn’t unusual when a restaurant felt unfairly removed from a space, me trying to imagine kind Marcello cold-bloodedly planning to blow up the building then, stupidly, realizing, of course: the wife!

A day or two later my movers came, and when I said, “No, no, that bed stays here,” they shrugged and went about loading the rest of my belongings.  I followed them, via subway, to midtown and slept like a baby that night, Second Bed now First Bed, Only Bed, and just a few loose ends to tie up in Brooklyn before I was gone from there as if I had never been.

“Are you sure?”

The We-Haul-Junk guy was skeptical, but I was steadfast: “I want it gone.”

He could keep it, sell it, tote it over to Staten Island and leave it there for all I cared. I watched dispassionately as he and another guy made short work of removing the mattress and box spring and disassembling the frame, then within minutes that part of my old life was disappearing down the stairs out to a truck idling illegally on 7^th Ave. I took a last look around, clear-eyed in certainty that I didn’t want any of it anymore, and then I followed the men down the stairs and turned toward the subway for the last time and I never once looked back.

The gnats want it more than I do, but I’m living here, in this place, and it’s mine, at least for now, so I’m going to take this place back from them. Apologizing for Second Bed was one thing; explaining away a fug of gnats entirely another, and while it’s debatable as to whether I’ve ever learned a thing from anything I’ve done, I know this: I’d bet good money on someone having turned the knobs on each of those burners before they left.

My friend fought the dog for the poop not because she wanted it, but because she didn’t want the dog to eat it more. I might not know what I want from any one day to the next, but I know one thing: the goddamn gnats aren’t going to take it from me. Unless it’s whatever is behind the door to that one room upstairs—but then again, nah. I don’t have to get rid of all that just yet.