Last Night in NYC: Residential History of My Adult Life, Early Grad School Years, Inspired by Friend's Niece's Phone Call

I forgot that you have to sign in to write a blog post! I'm back upstairs--not in the lower apartment tonight--and my friend's niece was nodding off to sleep, 11:35, when her Iphone went off and now we are 20 feet from one another, she in the bed I adore and me on the chair in the living room. It is interesting. I am not sure why, but some people are just easier to live with than others. In December, my friend had to stay in his apartment with me, rather than the lower place and I never had that feeling of constraint and disturbance.

Of course, no two girls share an apartment of this size after college. And I can share space with someone quite easily if s/he does not speak on the phone, but perhaps because I pulled a muscle a week ago which is worse at the moment than all week, and because I'm coughing like someone about to die, it's quite irritating and I very much hope she is not on the phone too much longer. Of course, it is not so bad that I wish to go down four flights for a bedtime smoke. I was about to take a long, hot shower and I will in a moment... (She's a very sweet girl and apparently leaving in a few days: I am very grateful that my friend allowed me to come while she is still in this place... I know this is temporary and that he wants to have it available for friends of his...)

It's just the oddest sensation. I have with J, and the person before him, listened to phone conversations, though not in a 550 sq foot apartment.  I live with J when I am in SB, which probably averages out--not counting trips back East--to five nights a week. I have spent exactly two nights in my own apartment in  two months and one over at a friend's after the Oscars. I have always lived alone, since I started college , at any rate. (Of course I lived with my parents, but it was not full-time, as they lived on their large ketch--54 feet--from Friday night to Sunday night from 9th grade to 12th grade, so I had the house to myself on weekends.)

I honestly cannot remember ever having female roommates. I did the first term freshman year, but the emotional drama of that semester (sans men, it is quite possible to have drama in life simply with family and school, no men involved!) makes it a bit difficult to remember. I had a single for two semesters after my time off for analysis and AIDS volunteer work in 1991, and then in 1993, I got a studio, quite large, in the Taft. I lived there from 1993 to 1996, 10-O, with a large kitchen, living room, normal bathroom, and no bedroom, before moving into the bane of my existence, that horrifying Lebanon shithole dump , a large one-bedroom on Hope Ave on a fucking truck route up to Foothill Ave (which the guy who gave me the place while he went off to work on second Ph.D in Oxford neglected to mention). I lived there for a decade, during unquestionably the most brutal and despair-filled years of my life, and while there were many reasons I did not finish the dissertation, that apartment was responsible for at least 25% of them.

Of course, nothing prevented me from moving. But at the time I was estranged from my parents, had no home in LA, and really nowhere I could escape from SB which I regarded as very close to hell. And I was afraid to move to a nicer place, whether at the same price or slightly higher one, which would have been fine, because I feared I would feel "homeless" in unfamiliar surroundings. This ended up being a central issue in the dissertation because Kant, in the Third Critique, talks some about beauty in relation to a sense of being at home in the world, at least according to Richard Eldridge, full professor at Swarthmore and former chair of philosophy, whose work influenced me very deeply. He was on my Orals Committee and they hooked up a phone in the conference room so he could be on speaker phone during the exam (the Ph.D. qualifying exam, or rather, its passage makes you "advance to candidacy," thus becoming ABD--all but dissertation--a limbo in which many people dwell till the day they die. I am a doctoral candidate or ABD.) .

I have gotten used to typing while listening to summer talk about Hamptons time share, and in fact, this is sort of interesting, thinking about how different this girl's life is from mine at the same year. She is precisely at the midpoint of her third decade in life (twenty-five), and works full-time. At her age, I was beginning my M.A., because I took a year off after college, and graduated at 23 not 22 because I took 18 months off during college. She is talking about many trips, out to CA where her father lives, then New Orleans over Memorial Day, which she wants to do instead of a prior commitment on which she hopes "to bail."

At 25, life was not so terrible. I was in my first year in SB and not yet estranged from parents and LA, and exiled to the hell as I called it, of SB on that miserable , busy, ugly street in the area known as Upper State. There are three banks on the corner of Hope Avenue--Wells Fargo, Montecito Bank and Trust, and B of A--and it's close to the big Vons mall which at the time had nothing cool to eat , really, just depressing.  But I was on fellowship that year, which means they give you money for nothing, and you just take courses and write seminar papers. I had a yoga studio and a bad gym and it wasn't so terrible. But this girl has been transferred from San Franciso area to Manhattan; she is very fashionable with coats, boots, shoes, Tom Ford perfume and Bobbi Brown makeup. She is living a life wholly removed from the one I lived, even at the best moments of graduate school.

Of course, the money she makes is for work I would find at once repellent and impossible: sales. I do not have anything like a salesman's temperament, and even if I did, I would rather live in a shithole in SB, probably, than do work in business, in NYC, though she has a really fun and happy social life.  She seems to like her job. And she doesn't seem to work over 40 hours a week. Still, I would hate to hate my job for 40 hours a week. It's not so much that she has more money than I did at the same age. It's more that she lives in NYC and I was in Southern California in a school I hated, an apartment I hated, and a town I hated, with almost no friends, and no prospects for dating. It is very easy to be alone , in the sense of single, in NYC. And if I had had the outgoing, ebullient air then which I have now, if I had been in anything like a decent urban center, I would have made lots of friends and probably met lots of guys. Even if I had been the picture of bliss and mental stability in those days, I was destined to shrivel up and die in SB, and quite honestly, I didn't have a choice. I didn't get into Yale, Harvard or Berkeley. Chicago gave me no money. And oddly, I did not apply to Stanford or University of Washington, which is in Seattle, a great but very rainy city. (No one in English at Yale undergrad gets into grad, something like two students in ten years.)

Moving on , the summer of 1997 was the summer I moved out of my parents' house in a dramatic manner, taking all my stuff and declaring that I would not be returning. (That was a lovely day by the way, Dad furious and Mom sobbing, but as I will write another day, it was the right decision and I felt a sense of exhilaration though I would pay for the brief bump in my emotional quality of life that summer for years and years.)  I moved into a beautiful guesthouse on 25th and Carlyle, about, in a very expensive part of SM and paid nothing. It was the home of an elementary school friend, Jewish, whose father was at one point my brother's shrink and whose mother was ABD in Renaissance (English) at UCLA. We went to elementary school together and he went to Columbia and then came to UCSB to study with the legendary religious studies professor at UCSB, Walter Capps, the late husband of our very liberal and fabulous Congresswoman, Lois Capps. She took over the seat when Walter died, and the two met at Yale Divinity School, before she went on to become a teacher, mother, and nurse. 

This was also the summer I lived all day at Yogaworks on Montana, a great studio where many famous people go to study with high- profile teachers (Rod Stryker, Meg Ryan's longtime teacher to name one). It was the summer that both Princess Di and Mother Teresa died. I didn't have a TV but the mother of my childhood friend let me watch in the main house and things were, all things considered, not so bad. I watched about three hours a day of NYPD Blue reruns on Fox. I was in Brentwood/Santa Monica, by some miracle, and not in the wasteland--my other word, when sick of hell , for Santa Barbara which felt to me oxygen-deprived.

This may sound odd , since people, multimillionaires dream of moving to SB. But let's face it: people don't dream of a shithole one-bedroom on a truck route in Hope Avenue, with walls of windows in the living room and bedroom facing West, which make the apartment about 90 degrees for four months, with no air conditioning, and no circulation. Sure, it's better than living in the middle of nowhere in a hot, humid, landlocked and unenlightened town. I realize that of course.  But for an LA girl, who lived in New Haven, spent time in NYC, that apartment was the wasteland. And I remember tears rolling down my cheeks around Malibu Canyon or Agoura, when the land by the freeway changes and you know you are no longer in LA, not even in the San Fernando Valley.

Of course oxygen is an element on the periodic table; it does not have emotional dimension. But it truly seemed to me as though the air got sadder, thinner, more suffocating with each mile I traversed from the Valley to SB, heading toward the halfway point, the Camarillo grade. That was the moment, in each drive up, I felt as if I had died emotionally. An hour later, or perhaps forty-five minutes, I would arrive back at my apartment with the yellow door and 132 on the front, with tear-stained cheeks, thinking to myself on Sunday night, "Fuck. I'm back. God I hate my life."

This may be one of a countless reasons why Rescue Me, and more broadly, the comedy of Denis Leary , touches me so. I love that scene in Season 2, Episode 9, when Tommy begins to take the anti-depressants he steals from Janet, after Lou tells him that there are no pills for every conceivable ailment. Tommy is incredulous and Lou tells him, "I'll bet she's on one of those, 'I hate my husband, I hate my life, my vagina hurts, please take it all away pills.'" "They got those?" "Sure, two a day and you might even bang [your husband's] lyin', cheatin', deceivin' little brains out--no offense, Tom."

On this theme, I also loved No Cure for Cancer, from about 1995 or 1996 on, when life was still reasonably tolerable. 1995 was wondrous: graduation, summer home doing yoga all the time, return to New Haven in the fall for my year of graduate applications and stress-free living. 1996, leaving Yale--which this hedge fund guy last night at Fishtail said "had to have felt like a step down" (quite true but you sound like a snob admitting it), and starting the M.A. was not great but not cause for jumping off a building either. Leary, during his rant about rehab and annoyance with "whining maggots," takes aim at those who say they abuse substances because they're "just not happy" and their lives did not turn out the way they thought they would. Leary: "Hey! Join the fucking club. I thought I was going to be starting center fielder for the Boston Red Sox. Life sucks, get a fucking helmet."

I think part of me knew, from the minute I arrived in this place that made me ill, literally ill, in my gut when I moved in the first weekend in September, that things were not going to end well for me with this academic career thing. I remember seeing Fly Away Home with a very sweet older boyfriend, probably 42 or 43 when I was only 24, a stock person living in Malibu, the Sunday before I finally drove up to sleep in the apartment the first time. I cried in his arms in the parking lot of the Mann 8 and said I wanted to sleep at his house and he said that he thought if I didn't go up then, it would be even harder the next morning. He was no doubt right. In 2000, when things shifted and in 2001 when I became a Ph.D. candidate I had hope for a brief period. Then 9/11 happened, and life began to spiral downward, which is obviously why I related to Rescue Me on this visceral level.       

The girl has long since gotten off the phone, and I think it's more the tone of her voice than the content of her speech which provoked this intense desire for her call to end. ("I really cannot think at the moment about anything but the persistence of this voice which I wish were persisting considerably less," I had written before I launched into the residential history of my life which focused my attention.) But it is amazing to think of her life, as a young professional woman with a college degree from a state school (not like University of X...but X State), who is making more money than I ever will, in sales, and planning time-shares in the Hamptons, trips to visit her father and stepmother--to whom she refers as her "parents"--and Memorial Day trips to New Orleans, when I was just beginning my spiral into a crippling depression which would end in the death of all my hopes and dreams from high school on: an academic career at a prestigious university.

Of course, my mother was 26-yr-old first-year lawyer when she married my father, fifteen years her senior, inheriting two children, 5 and 12, in the deal. When you set these three lives next to each other--one by one--there is no question who has the best deal here. This privileged, popular, social girl has by far the best life. But if I had to choose between being married to my father and inheriting two children, on the one hand, and living on the verge of a decade of depression in SB , single and with no responsibilities, I would absolutely choose my path, not that of my mother. I adore my father. I would under no circumstances want to be married to him, especially not in those years, where he was by his own admission, Denis Leary's favorite word, a word about which he wrote a megahit song.

Well, I did not plan to write such substantive note. I was going to take a shower and put on my Obagi anti-aging cleanser about which I have waxed poetic on FB, followed by the lightweight Murad I like very much, both Christmas presents from my sister, a stylist, who can buy this all at Cosmoprof, which requires a current cosmetology license.

And I was going to talk about my Fishtail lunch--I took pictures but of course they're on my phone and the FB friend who was supposed to help, never called me back--and the normalcy of living in NY for 10 days and feeling truly at home. God/the universe does have a sense of humor because the minute I thought I would write about that normalcy and peace, this girl takes a phone call which sends me up the wall! I am thrilled to meet one of my favorite FB friends tomorrow after the psychic and also breakfast with Sharon, a friend I met in NYC not on FB, at Mon Petit Cafe. The post-psychic friend (no Dionne Warwick images intended) will drive me to JFK, for which I am deeply grateful.

P.S. Halfway through the conversation about vacation spots, there was brief talk about apartments. It seems she has found a tolerable roommate and place into which she will soon move. Rents in Midtown are obscene. An average, not nice, big studio or small to medium one-bedroom here is  3500 and a very nice one-bedroom, with or without elevator and doorman, can be 4000. She also gasped at hearing about the end of a two-year marriage, prompting her suggestion that perhaps it is better not to be married. This reminded me of a comment of a FB friend of mine, which he heard from his mother or grandmother: "It is better to be single than to wish that you were." That , in turn, reminded me of a hilarious comment on the wall of a friend of Gregg's , in Southern California, obscenely wealthy and Republican (not obscenely Republican, just Republican, but really pretty far right I think), by a mother who adores her children but still says: "Kids make you old and tired and poor!" I confess this has always seemed intuitive to me, from a very young age!
Of course, Dad wholly approved this sentiment when I told him a few days ago. And ertainly, if I were not around, he would have a significantly greater estate after 39 years. Denis Leary did a hilarious thing about the tab that kids rack up by 18 yrs old in Lock and Load, very funny, though the figure seems inflated even for a kid who attended private school K to 12 and then Emerson College, but perhaps it's about right.)

So that's the last blog from NYC until June or July, where there is a two-week intensive jazz workshop at Luigi, where Francis will be one of the teachers. NYC sucks in the summer with the heat and humidity. But I am quite sure this apartment has a/c, as the unit below does, and it would be worth studying at the original Luigi studio. I know Mom would be thrilled as she thinks it is good for me to dance and sad that , another knock on SB, sorry, there is no decent jazz in all of SB County. There is hip hop: this is not jazz, it is hip hop. (We have ballet and yoga and some tap, even, but no jazz that doesn't look like a bad rock video with slithering, bumping, grinding, glistening bodies.) I would love to visit my friend on the Cape, which is beautiful of course, and where I have not ever been, just Martha's Vineyard the week after college graduation. I did not understood why stars like Carly Simon and John Belushi loved the Vineyard so much after my first day there. By the end of the second, I was hooked and it was a great sadness to leave that quaint little island, with the magical scrub oak, the long and relatively barren beaches of the nature preserve I stayed, and the charming boutiques and cafes. Even the dilapidated little gym in Vineyard Haven had a shabby, patrician appeal.