Address

August 26, 2005 was hot enough for me.  I arrived from LaGuardia and did little more than set my bags down when I got to that loft on 1st avenue at 20th; I had a friend in town and packing could take place later.  It was a good thing too because by then end of that weekend one of the Dartmouth Kids called to tell me they found someone for the room.  Not to worry, though, they had agreed I could stay there beforehand and I could avail myself to one of the two massive leather sofas facing the dark dinousaur-silhouette of the big screen tv.   I could keep my bags in that perch above.  I need not worry about rent.  It was all well and good until a different Dartmouth Kid had made enough suggestions about Brooklyn and Chinatown to get the writing on the wall.  I didn't quite take his advice, at least not yet.  But I got going and by the end of September, that year,

......I had a weekly sublet on 149th between Broadway and Riverside.  Just until I could find my proper spot in the East Village.  I already had a job, so at least I wasn't worried about that.  I could be selective in my choosing, which would have to take place evenings after my commute back from the Bronx.  Arrange to see an apartment each night of the week, knowing that one of them would choose me, had to choose me.  I could see a movie or visit a bar afterward.  And then get back to my place, being real quiet and modest with the light, what with my Dominican subletter and his wife asleep on the bed in the living room, and catch another good night's sleep before class in the morning.  Fortunately, the Dominicans arose at the same hour, so I didn't have to worry about needlessly waking them.  They would fold the bed back up, reassemble their living room, and go about whatever they were about to go about.  As long as I paid in cash by Sunday night, we need not say much more than pleasantries.  And then of course explain that I would now, and this must be about the end of November here, I would now explain that I had found a new place

.....in the East Village, on 5th between B and C, which was really more like D because 5th street does not go through at B, because there is a school there, so one must really walk to C and around the block to get back to my apartment building, which was right behind the school.  I love walking anyway, so no big deal.  To tell the truth, it was a challenge.  Initially.  I'm about as big a champion of every liberal cause to grace a website or a petition in the Real World, but was far removed from being able to deal with that in my own home.  Of course, it never turned out to be like that, and I think it's rare that it actually does.  So I played it cool and put on my headphones those weekend nights when Ben's boyfriend would be staying over.  The walls were thick enough, but I needed the precaution.  My virgin ears and sentiments didn't want to quite hear male penetration coming through the adjacent wall.  And they never did.  It was a really clean home and Ben was a pretty nice chap.  Still, that dog never did take a shining to me, and I took less to him, and $1000 was way too much to pay for a square not much bigger than my own bed.  I'd just as soon go away over the summer and find a place in

.....Prospect Heights, like the one I landed in on St. John's at Washington in October 2006.  My only real anchor to the neighborhood was the museum and The Islands, which is enough to keep a body in this city if you hear me tell it.  I could discover more, maybe track down those legendary nights of funk music and sultry marijuana inhalations from the year before.  That place where the colors collide under harmony and let that borough of beggars, braggers, and post-modern racial reincarnation move our feet for us, let are hips sway like they're bearing the weight of seven waves of immigrants.  I saw it, sure enough.  There was this great place called Prospect Park nearby with grass as suitable for reading a novel as any other under that sharp afternoon sky.  I could walk past stately architecture, past young families and fellow post-scattered contemporaries in the urban dream without any verbs like "hurried."  It was something all right.  And I was more than content to survey it with the one roommate with the leg tattoo always playing video games.  He was a good dude, really meant well, but I wasn't quite ready to cast myself into iron as a homebody.  Not in this place.  If the girl with the huge head and loud voice, loud walk, loud door opening and closing, loud being had been there more than ten minutes each night, it probably wouldn't have taken me so long to move in with my girlfriend

.....in Boerum Hill in August 2007.  Really nice place, home-y as home-y could possibly be for a one-bedroom in a five story with a window looking out on the back of some austere construction site.  This was a pre-war.   Fantastic molding.  Back when builders were craftsmen, when work was done with pride.  And the neighborhood?  Wow, the neighborhood.  I guess I liked it before, but maaaaaan, I loved me some brunch after living in that place.  The Israeli place killed it with the Mediterranean Crispy Dough and it felt so refreshing to be walking arm-in-arm down Smith Street with a hot cup of freshly roasted coffee.  That little lounge tucked between Atlantic & State on Hoyt had a drop-in bluegrass band on Sundays, perfect for a beer and a listen.  That Thai place was great on the wallet, if crowded on the weekends.  Seemed like we only splurged at that sushi spot when times were tight.  It was all worth it.  Of course, I moved in with her, so when I make the decision to stop being we, it is incumbent upon me to pack my bags, two of which would go with me

.....while I shuttled between one friend's couch in Washington Heights (on the weekend) and another in Carroll Gardens (weekday) in October of 2008.  One bag had clothes, seasonally appropriate, while the other had my necessary texts and notebooks for grad school.  So much is done online these days that I really did not have much of a weight burden with the school supplies.  Friends in the rooms around these couches were so good to me, didn't ever hold my feet to the fire.  I still had it underneath.  So much so that I refused their offers of more time to

.....relocate to another weekly sublet in Harlem, at 147 on the opposite side of Broadway less than one month later.  At least this time, the family members had their own bedrooms in the apartment.  They had wifi, so I could search for apartments, in Brooklyn this time, wherever, as long as it wasn't the Boerum Hill/Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill area.  That was verboten as per my ex one month prior.  I wasn't too particular about the particulars.  I really couldn't be.  Midterms were approaching, my student's budget not quite able to reach the top shelf if you know what I'm saying.  Just a roof over my head.  Close enough to the train.  Somewhere safe and cheap, and maybe, interesting?  What do you know if I didn't find just that

.....in Sunset Park in November of that year, right on 58th street, and right near the express N train.  The room was tiny, the twin-sized bed took up more than half.  But it was $400!  Incredible.  Goddamn I loved to get reactions out of that one.  In a brownstone.  I had huge bay windows and two guys sharing a room on the opposite side of me.  The Palestinian was a bit off his mark.  But the Japanese guy, fuck that Japanese guy was cool.  We could talk about the world, our travels, that feeling of being foreign in the dark kitchen as I made my tea.  For once, I had a roommate who was gone just as much as I was, but intersected at home in the same hours.  And he was interesting.  We would talk for ten or fifteen and then go back to our quiet rooms on that quiet street, sleep well even if there was a street light just outside our windows.  The girl from Washington was on the other side of the apartment and inclusive in party invitations.  She was (still is) pretty, but not my type.  We hit it along famously until she left and Maria took her place, that sweet Spanish girl.  She overlapped with my Japanese friend, and, soon, his pregnant girlfriend, who had taken the Palestinian's spot.  I remember we missed the Super Bowl that one year (Saints-Colts) for one last dinner before Maria had to go back home, to be replaced by that sweet Russian man.  Of course, by this point, our Japanese friends had found a spot to raise their son in Jersey City, so I had them find Nobuyuki.  Not that I asked them to find him, so much as a him that would turn out to be such a great friend.  He was

.....on the other side of my new room which is to say my old room, same address, and not so good with the Engris.  I taught him.  And introduced him to pot.  And got him really drunk with my friends where he would say some pretty funny shit.  At first it was funny, and it still is, but it eventually got to be so beautiful.  When a person speaks a second language and they don't speak it well, but know enough to carry across their meaning, there is absolute poetry there.  Forget the grammar and the syntax and the subject-predicate agreement; hearing them speak is to hear human expression in its purist form.  It was insight into the human spirit and all the more wonderful because it came from a friend.  And a great insight into language.  Or at least I reckon.  I likely have this association because he was on the other side of the wall on those nights, at least four per week, when I had one lamp going and my laptop in front of me, placing prose in my Great Life Venture.  I played soft, sad, rhythmic music, because of the three breakups of the previous two years and because it set the mood.  Against these solemn notes I could compose.  Pour out my fragile heart and delicate dreams into something that mattered, something that was me, something that could define me were I so fortunate.  A man at work on his life's work and I would do the bare minimum of part-time jobs to keep that going.  I just needed 500 words per night.  I got over 2000 one night, but give me 750 and I would go to bed content.  And I was ready.  The wine and marijuana catalyzed the somnolence, but all credit belongs to The Process.  Each night was a marathon and the only ribbon I could run through was the promise that I would do the same the following.  The downward motion I made to the bed each night, for fifteen months, could not be described as anything other than "collapse."  It was total.  And it was endless.  But night after night, over and over again, till the words were north of 100,000, then north by another 40g's, I pounded the letters.  And on my own laptop, the keys battered and bruised, now sits a work of fiction that represents the total exertion of one modern man.  That's something, even if that's all it is. 

It seems like my own date of departure got set the minute Nobuyuki told me he was moving out.  It didn't happen for almost another year.  But the seed was planted.  The novel was done and I needed a break.  From this.  From the disappointment of not being published and frowning away the daylight hours at tasks I not-so-justly deemed beneath me.  There would be an exit, but not without -plan or -strategy, and damned if my own wouldn't get Style Points.  I had to travel, so I did, including a stop to see my friend, and when I got back I decided that I'd had enough with a lot and resettled in

.....Bed-Stuy, where a friend had a small bedroom for me while his girlfriend was away in the summer of this past year.  It was difficult moving from such large quarters (my second room in Sunset was like a spacious studio) into another closet.  The double bed was a squid that ate half the face of that room.  All those bookshelves and chests of drawers accumulated, the nightstand and the glass coffee table, couldn't exactly be laid out.  So it was stacked.  At the foot of my bed.  Another few months and it could have been messy enough to cameo on Hoarders.  The understanding, which was that this was a sublet, kept me through.  I would move on after the summer so there was no need to worry about not settling in, or vice versa.  And who settles in during the summer?  That close to Fort Greene Park?  What with the Euro games on by day through June and the daily opportunities for beach, beers, a free concert in the park?  I didn't feel comfortable in that room and damn right I shouldn't have.  There was no sense in not taking advantage of finally living within a bike ride of going out, a drunk ride back to sleep in my own bed.  It was summer, I had goals and they needn't be reached now, so why not work hard and live well while I was at it.  And just so serendipitously, one of those nights, I learned

.....about the upcoming vacancy at this place, in Crown Heights, beginning in September.  I wrote about it then.  It has lived up to its promise.  It's arguably the most comfortable, aesthetically, of all the places I've lived in New York with soft lights overhead and smooth wooden floors throughout.  It's home-y in the living room, in the independent female sort of way, owing to my three independent, female roommates.  We get along just dandy grand and the whole logistics are copacetic since my arrival and departure are bookended to complement everyone else's.  I really have liked it here.  And I reckon

.....that I'll like it in the Bywater, at that place I'm renting on St. Claude starting in January.  I'll have the big room and Laura assures me it will be great.  She told me that it is an old Victorian, formerly a Catholic convent, that was converted sometime last century into a school for boys.  Or maybe the other way around, I'm not sure.  I just remember her saying that there is a theater in the backyard, with a backyard behind that, and then behind that another backyard with a grill set up.  She added that there's a front yard too.  It all sounds so well and good, and well, I guess I'll have to see it for myself.