Look Alive Out There
Page 10
Instead of rolling the dice with another roommate, I decided it was finally time to live on my own. So I moved to a studio apartment on the first floor of an old brownstone, right above the garden unit. What used to be an Edith Wharton character’s yarn storage room was now my entire world. The cliché about New York starter apartments is that the shower is in the kitchen. The good news is this joke didn’t apply to me. The bad news is this is because there was no shower, only a bathtub.
Still, the place had whimsical touches. Like an outlet on the upper right-hand corner of one of the walls that suggested the building had once been upside down. Or the radiator that someone had taken the liberty of spray-painting gold. Or the defunct buzzer on the door frame that had once been used to ring for a maid. Now it was frozen beneath layers of white paint, its cords clipped. I didn’t need to ring for a maid, anyway. I was my own maid. I used to scrub down the whole place in ten minutes, using paper towels and Windex, cleaning the windows to get a better view of the greenery below.
Most people I knew who were lucky enough to have outdoor space used it for damp parties strung from above with Chinese lanterns or as a necropolis for broken patio furniture. The garden apartment was a thing to be trampled on or, when the situation called for it, puked near. Whatever weeds pushed themselves between seams in the concrete constituted “the garden.” But not this garden. Here I was, living above Don, a sixty-something man with a NO NUKES sticker on his door and a deeply green thumb. Don meticulously kept a wall-to-wall garden of flowers and topiaries, of vegetable trellises and canopies of vines. It was extraordinary. To this day, it is the only one of its kind I’ve seen.
I never knew Don’s last name. Or rather, I did on the day I moved in and he shook my hand with a calloused paw, but I have long since forgotten it. What I do know is that he was the thing rarer than a baby-pigeon sighting in New York—a neighbor with whom you enjoy interacting. After his name, the second piece of information Don offered pertained to his grapevines, which were at their peak. If the vines got too unruly, I should let him know. They were Champagne grapes, he explained, small, dark, and seedless. I didn’t think much of this warning at the time. My previous bedroom window had faced a brick wall—how unsightly could a bunch of grapevines be? And who was I to spit in Mother Nature’s bucolic face? I also figured he was overplaying his gardening skills. I lived a full floor above him. Those would have to be some pretty determined vines to climb so far and so fast.
Within a few weeks, they had completely obstructed the bathroom and living room windows. Which was all the windows. It was like living in an organic jail cell. The vines moved at a grape-specific speed, somewhere between stop-motion animation and full-blown horror movie. At first their tendrils cast playful shadows on my walls, but now they were like Michael Pollan’s wet dream run amok. When I lifted the windowpane to get some fresh air, branches flopped inward and onto my radiator, unbending as if they had eaten too much and had just now been permitted to unbutton their pants. And my apartment was but a pit stop for them as they made their way to the window above mine.
On the plus side? What an olden-timey way to discourage burglars! Cheaper than an alligator moat. On the minus side? Off-Seasonal Affective Disorder.
If I had been my old roommate, I would have said something. He lived and died by Occam’s razor, whereas I seemed to be in the midst of a multidecade phase of making everything more complicated than it needed to be. Here I was, unambiguously invited to say something if I saw something. Instead, I decided to resolve the situation myself. Not wanting to make Don get out his industrial ladder and climb up to my window in threadbare boxer shorts, I would reach out every few days with a pair of kitchen scissors. But no matter how deep into the V of the scissors I crammed the vines, they only slid back out. I barely nicked them. Come July, I had to use a cleaver. Which also meant I had to buy a cleaver. But every woman should own a cleaver.
And it worked. The mosses and flowers and a softly bubbling fountain came into view. There was a roughly cut stone path of the Zen persuasion. It was lovely. For a whole seventy-two hours. Until it wasn’t again.
One day Don stopped me as I was coming out of our local Laundromat. He was wearing a striped caftan and green rain boots with plastic amphibian eyes molded to the toes. He had taken notice of the attempted trimming. He told me that he would have done the pruning himself and seemed borderline offended that I had taken this task off his hands. I hadn’t realized it was a betrayal of our neighborly relations and, in fact, assumed that Don of all people would appreciate communal gardening. He blew a lock of white hair from his forehead and added that he hoped I at least ate the grapes because he didn’t know what else to do with them. He had only one family member in New York, a ninety-seven-year-old mother in a nursing home with “no appetite and no charisma,” and the rest of his friends were back in Portland, Oregon, having swapped opiates and Airstreams for lattes and refurbished Airstreams. He made me promise to eat some of the grapes. Then he insisted on carrying my laundry as we walked home.
At first, I was resistant. Eat the grapes? Eat them? Grapes that had come from city soil and rested on the same brick wall from which my air conditioner protruded? Oh, no, thank you. But both the grapes and the promise I had made dangled themselves before me. So one day I reached out the window and tore off a couple of ripe helixes. I soaked them in my sink. Then I put them in the refrigerator. If I couldn’t kill the germs, I could at least make them wish they were dead.
The highest compliment bestowed upon fruit is that it tastes “like candy.” Pineapple gets this a lot. Raspberries. Star fruit’s certainly sick of hearing it. What’s meant to be a compliment to fruit is actually an insult to candy. I don’t know what kind of Eastern-bloc chalk pellets people have been eating, but most grapes do not taste as awesome as candy. Except for these. These were like little clown cars of sugar and flavor. And they were accessible from my bathtub, where I could reach my arm out, snap off a cluster, and knock my head back like a Greek goddess.
To thank Don, I hung a bottle of red wine in a paper bag around his doorknob, along with a note that I’m sorry to report included the phrase “grapes of bath.” Before long, we became engaged in a game of Obvious Santa. Don really amped things up. In return for the wine, he left me a bag of freshly picked tomatoes tied with red ribbons. In return for the tomatoes, I left him a beer koozie with dancing rainbow bears printed on the side. He left me a flower vase. I left him flower food. He left me a bottle of organic laundry detergent. I left him hand balm. He left me a yoga mat. I left him the same yoga mat with a package of Hostess cupcakes tied to it.
After about a month of this, I returned home from work one day to find an actual present wrapped in paper and ribbon, waiting for me outside my door.
I’m guessing you could use this, read the attached note.
Inside was a glossy photo book called Designing with Books. I was still working in book publishing and Don had registered the rectangular packages I received. It was the first gift that didn’t seem spontaneous, that hadn’t impulsively occurred to either of us. He had tracked it down especially for me. So at the office the next day, I did some digging of my own. Turns out I worked for the same people who produced such sleeper hits as Gardening in Small Spaces. Presumably this series also includes Reading on Stools and Napping Under Partial Enclosures. I ordered a copy of Gardening in Small Spaces and left it outside Don’s door, along with a trowel. He was the only person I knew who could use it without hitting concrete.
*
The other thing that made Don so great is that he was considerate without being intrusive—unlike our super, who was a professional lunatic. This man terrorized our building, inventing minor crimes for which anyone could be tried. Offenses included: being too rough with the front door, tracking dirt into the basement, standing outside while talking on the phone, allowing vagrants (food delivery people) to enter the building, and hosting scumbags (friends) and degenerates (members of the opposite sex). All of
whom demonstrated reckless behavior. Like opening the front door.
If your toilet clogged, he gave you the side-eye. If your ceiling caved in, he yelled at you for having a ceiling. Once, he banged on my door at 7 a.m., and when I opened it, bathrobed and bleary-eyed, he accused me of letting my packages languish on the lobby radiator. I explained to him that not only was this false, but it could never be true. I was living on my own for the first time. I took no vacations. I wrote on weekends. A package was confirmation of my existence. The mailman himself didn’t monitor package delivery as I did. Also, lobby was an ambitious term for it.
“Then how do you explain this?!” he shouted.
At his feet was a box stained from the inside. It smelled of melted chocolate. On the side of the box was stamped: THE LAST STRAW(BERRIES)!™
Even if I had associated with the kind of people who might tar and feather berries and ship them to me, this seemed like more of a 3 p.m. issue. I crouched down and examined the box, which was addressed to 1F. Which was not my apartment number. It was Don’s.
“Oh,” our super said, storming off with the box under his arm.
Don, too, had the mayoral streak that comes with twenty years of living in the same building, but he smoked too much weed to get wound up about it. The notes Don taped to the front door were upbeat scribbles about what not to do with one’s plastic bottles and what to do when closing the front door. Be gentle! Leave this world better than you found it! Peace & love, Don. I overheard him doling out lectures to new tenants about newspaper stealing that were so heartfelt, I felt guilty. Even when it was my paper that was getting stolen. He left sandwiches for the crack addict who sometimes slept in our vestibule with her knees tucked into her T-shirt, the scent of her lack of other habits seeping into the hallway and under my apartment door. Rolling a towel beneath my door became part of my nightly ritual. I suspected it was part of Don’s, too, though for a different reason.
So inspired was I by Don’s hempish embrace of the world, I salvaged a wobbly end table from the street, drowned it in disinfectant, and put it in the hall outside my door. I also put a disposable glass vase on it, which Don took to filling with flowers. With a fluorescent hallway bulb as their only light source, the flowers were doomed to perish at an epidemic rate. And yet Don replaced them regularly and without fanfare. When he got wind that I’d be publishing a book of my own, he seemed legitimately concerned that I would be made uncomfortable by the flowers.
“In what way would flowers make me uncomfortable?”
“Well, now that you’re famous,” he explained, “you’ll probably get creepy things all the time.”
I tried to imagine the world, now gone, from which Don hailed—a pre-Internet world in which there was only one brand of fame and you either were or you weren’t.
“That’s not how book publishing works,” I told him.
In truth, I had already received a piece of fan mail. It was in the form of a VHS tape from a hoarder in Boise who had read an excerpt of my book. The tape featured an hour of this guy speaking to the camera in front of a backdrop of board games and piles of Tupperware containing foods in competing states of decay. He talked about his gig as an SAT tutor while some birds chirped in a cage off camera. He was sane and harmless in the way that people who have grown to expect little from the world are sane and harmless. To this day, I’m not sure how he got my address but I choose to remain unconcerned about it. For one thing, I don’t live there anymore. For another, who am I to hoarder-shame anyone when I’m the one with the VHS player?
*
One night, after a bad day at work, I returned home to find a single iris resting on the building’s stoop. It was big and floppy, plucked up by the root. I spotted it from down the block. I couldn’t understand why the flower was outside and alone instead of in the vase and in the company of other flowers. But I had a hunch as to who had put it there. I twirled the stem between my fingers, glancing down at the note that had been left underneath.
Written in unfamiliar ballpoint, it read: To our beloved neighbor Don of many years … you will be missed.
I dropped my bag and sat on my stoop, where I reread the note several times. I felt that shameful charge in the nerves that occurs when something big happens. Before your brain has a chance to parse if it’s good big or bad big, the information goes into a kind of processing center for all eventful things. I wanted to cry, but I had wanted to cry before the introduction of the flower. It felt cheap to cull the emotion from one less-than-ideal day in order to have the ideal response to Don’s death.
You will be missed.
Proportionally, I hadn’t known Don well enough to burst into tears—but I also hadn’t known him little enough to go inside like nothing had happened. I called my old roommate in LA. I was unsure of where to put this tragedy that was not entirely mine. I wanted to drag it up to the roof of emotionally miscellaneous occurrences and leave it there.
“Well, that’s the thing about New York,” he said.
“There are a lot of ‘things’ about New York,” I groaned.
“True,” he conceded. “Except for death. Death is New York–specific.”
I balked at this. Death is not a regionally specific experience. It comes for us all. Death and taxes. Actually, just death. The Cayman Islands don’t have taxes.
“I mean the way New Yorkers handle death,” he clarified. “They don’t know how to mourn for people they only sort of know. It’s too abstract for such an opinionated culture. That’s why 9/11 was such a mess.”
“Oh, is that why?”
“I gotta go,” he said. “I’m going to a party in Venice.”
“Fine,” I said. “I hope you get trapped in traffic forever.”
I picked up the flower and took a big sniff. Alas, as Don could have told me, irises don’t smell like anything.
*
By the next morning, more flowers had appeared on the stoop and someone had drawn a sad face on the original note. There was also a bag of almonds and a squeegee, signs of other friends in the building, of other private jokes that were now one-way. These objects provided me with a sense of comfort when I bumped into my super, his gruffness barely pruned by death. He told me that Don made a wrong turn on his motorcycle, drove headlong into a bus on Second Avenue, and was in a coma for six days before he died. My super seemed surprised by my upset.
“He sent those berries to himself, you know.”
I think part of me had known that. I never heard a single visitor in Don’s apartment. I never ran into him on the street accompanied by anyone but himself. I never saw him with more than one bag of groceries in his hand. To live alone can be a glorious thing. Between jags of crippling loneliness and wretched TV, it’s an education in self-sufficiency, self-actualization, and self-tanner. But it is possible to have too many rooms of one’s own.
There was a service for Don at an Italian restaurant in Jersey City. I didn’t know he had family in Jersey City. I also didn’t go. The invitation asked for charitable donations instead of flowers. I sent neither, though I knew Don would have liked both. But perhaps that’s tribute enough, having people around who knew that you were here, who can say what you would have liked. I tried to keep up Don’s habit of putting flowers in the vase. But my flowers were half as nice and twice as expensive. You really have to buy two bunches of the bodega kind unless you want your vase to look more wretched than it did before you put the flowers in. I also did not enjoy the face the bodega man made each time I told him that he didn’t have to bother wrapping my roses in paper.
The new tenants moved in quickly. These neighbors were also adults but a different brand of adult than Don. They wanted a place to sit outside and read the Sunday paper, a place for their toddler to play that wasn’t a coliseum of thorns and jagged rocks. They wanted patio furniture with cushions and they got it. They uprooted everything, including the vegetables and the moss, including the grapevines. I had to install curtains.
Right Aid
Relative Stranger
The most important thing you need to know about my uncle, the porn star, is that he’s not my actual uncle. He’s my mother’s cousin, which makes him my first cousin once removed. The oldest of three brothers, Johnny is now a seventy-four-year-old man partial to books-on-tape and cantaloupe, but between 1973 and 1987, he starred in 116 adult films. He was Man in Car, Man with Book, Man on Bus, Man in Hot Tub, Orgy Guy in Red Chair, Party Guy, Guy Wearing Glasses, Delivery Boy, and, perplexingly, Guy in Credits. He was the porn equivalent of Barbie, who can count astronaut, zookeeper, and aerobics instructor among her professional accomplishments. Except that Barbie, like Jesus before her and Prince after her, has no last name. Whereas Johnny’s last name, his actual last name, is Seeman. This is a fact too absurd to warrant further analysis.
I didn’t snoop around about Johnny until college, but this was not for lack of interest. My college years happened to coincide with the late nineties, when the Internet was fast becoming a tool for personal research. Before that, my generation mostly used it for chain letters and lightbulb jokes—How many Harvard students does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the lightbulb and the other to rotate the world around him. But suddenly I had a vehicle for my curiosity. So I looked up Johnny to see what I could find. I was neither brave nor willing enough to search for video footage for fear of noticing any genetic resemblance to my mother’s brothers. Even the Greeks don’t have a name for that specific a complex. Instead, I read. My favorite article to this day was one in which Johnny is referred to—revered by, really—as the most famous stunt cock ever. That was the headline—Johnny Seeman: The Most Famous Stunt Cock Ever.