While I was not posting on my blog, I delightfully prepared to move out of my slummy apartment in the South Slope and found a beautiful apartment in Kips Bay (Somewhere on the border of Murray Hill and Gramercy, aka Curry Hill). I would be living on my own for the first time...ever. I gathered my movers and my kids and we all lugged my stuff into my new home, a beautiful duplex apartment where I sit now. I fantasized about my life here and the hobbies that I would take up and the new life that I would begin.
I knew, after one night here, that I was in trouble. As one real estate agent said, "Some of those great deals are not really such great deals". This is a guy that I've called twice in order to inquire about listings who declined to show me anything. He practically hang up on me both times. Odd. Believe me, in this market, it's very odd. Maybe it's just his hobby.
On my first night in my gorgeous apartment, I was assaulted by a constant mechanical noise in the bathroom and in the bedroom! When my Mother came to visit my new home the next day, I was barely coherent with lack of sleep. We called the Super who came over and explained that the pipes were vibrating due to the electric water pump. My son came over later in the day, dismissing my concerns and suggested that I get a "large fan". I called the landlord the next day thinking, foolishly, that there was a problem and that we could fix it. He told me that the pump was supposed to be off at night, that he had a complaint about the noise at night before. 4 days later when I finally reached him again, he explained to me, hysterical woman on the other end of the phone, that it could not be fixed. Nobody, he said, had ever complained before! He had called the prior tenants and they had never noticed the sound that makes you think that you are inside of a vacuum cleaner. He offered me the opportunity to move out if we found another tenant. Meanwhile, my healthy life deteriorated - I started smoking again to cope with the stress. Valium might help, but I don't have any handy. I have been too exhausted to get to the gym. To sooth myself, I've started eating chocolate ice-cream for meals and I actually look forward to going to work! Mon deiu!
After fully documenting the condition of the apartment on videotape and going completely insane, I moved my cat to my brothers apartment. I then vacated the apartment on weeknights. I went to go stay with my Mother, who, while polite and not unwelcoming, clearly prefers to be on her own. On Saturday, I returned to my apartment where, due to some miracle, the noise that could not be fixed had somehow managed to cease to the point where it was barely tolerable along with some actual extended periods of silence. I even woke up at one point Saturday night while sleeping on my couch (When I am here, I do not sleep in the bedroom - I sleep in the quietest place in the apartment) because it was so quiet! Of course, this improvement came about just in time for an open house that was held today (Sunday). I (once again foolishly) thought that perhaps my landlord had realized that something could be done about the noise. Tonight, the noise, while a bit quieter, appears to be closer to it's usual constant 24 hour a day cycles between the loud creaky noise and then whining with no silence between them. I may be back at my Mothers apartment in no time.
Meantime, I have been wandering the neighborhood. I love the neighborhood but it doesn't feel like home yet. When I went to school here, this neighborhood was prostitute city in the evenings. Thankfully, they are long gone. The neighborhood is now dotted with hospitals, cute townhouses, College students, elderly people, the very poor, junkies, lots of Irish pubs that serve Irish breakfast, a strip of CLUBS, several Dunken Donuts, zillions of dry cleaners, the usual zillions of drug stores and banks and, surprisingly, quite a few grocery stores that have not yet been turned into drug stores. Most of them are called Gristides. These things are almost obsolete in Manhattan where large crowds tend to hit Whole Foods and Trader Joes. There are no bike lanes, but plenty of men delivering food weave in and out of the traffic and onto the sidewalks all day long.
In spite of Curry Hill, no one ethnic group has taken over the area. There are several charity shops here, many of which are on 23rd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue. I wandered through all of them although there is nothing at all that I need except to get rid of stuff right now. There is a badly organized and chaotic Salvation Army next door to a clean and efficient Goodwill and two doors down there is the Opera store. They all have sale signs in the window. I overheard a clerk in the Opera store telling a customer that they will have to close if the economy continues to go down (and it will).
A little perspective is always in order when I start to feel sorry for myself.
Compared to here, poor people are invisible in Park Slope as is the economic downturn. Yeah, you get those clean looking and well spoken guys on 7th Avenue who hold doors open for you and make a living off of your change. Yeah, there is the Armory for homeless women but they are largely invisible except for some who are mentally ill and haunt Windsor Terrace along with the alcoholics and junkies who litter the Windsor Terrace sidewalks but that's not Park Slope. Entire Mexican families come out at night and take away your recycling in Park Slope, quietly and neatly. Homeless people sleep in the parks near my old apartment on the southern edge of the slope, but they are always are gone by the time that you head off to work as if somehow, they might offend you. The minority non home-owning working poor who once populated Park Slope have mostly relocated to White Plains or somewhere in Long Island from whence they make their long and expensive commute into New York for their shitty minimum wage jobs. The remaining home-owners scoff and scowl at the people who have taken over their neighborhood.
Back to Kips Bay. Even on the Lower East Side, which was once the armpit of hell, poverty is not quite this visible and in your face.
Here, the mostly male and addicted poor can be found slouched all over the neighborhood. They can be seen carting their bags of belongings up and down the street at all hours of the day and going through the refuse outside of a Gristides on garbage night examining the discarded food. Over the past week I have seen, in both Chelsea and Kips Bay, bent over exhausted homeless people who own 2 or three large carts or strollers full of junk and recyclables. They push one up the block and go back and get another one. It amazes me that nobody tries to steal them - I've seen walking homeless guys try to roll (take money or shoes) sleeping/passed out homeless guys on 14th Street and 6th Avenue, but carts are sacred.
Here in Murray Hill & Kips Bay, the VERY poor and the VERY down and out are visible and in your face calling you "rich" which makes you laugh but it's not really very funny. When shops close down in Park Slope, they are immediately replaced by more shops, here stores sit empty. The rents in Park Slope have barely budged. Here, and this is bad news for me in my current situation, apartments are sitting empty and many, many people are unemployed or about to be.
I'm lucky to have a job and I'm lucky to have a roof over my head, even though it's a noisy roof. I'm lucky to have my family who have gone out of their way to help me out in my admittedly not so bad situation. All I have to do to remind myself that it's not so bad is to walk outside or to read the news. It could always be worse. I'm going to just eat my chocolate ice-cream and look forward to the future. This too shall pass.
Lyrics to Homeless Brother :
I was walking by the graveyard, late last Friday night
I heard somebody yelling, it sounded like a fight
It was just a drunken hobo dancing circles in the night
Pouring whiskey on the headstones in the blue moonlight
So often have I wondered where these homeless brothers go
Down in some hidden valley where their sorrows cannot show,
Where the police cannot find them, where the wanted man can go
There's freedom when your walking, even though you're walking slow
Smash your bottle on the gravestone and live while you can
That homeless brother is my friend.
It's hard to be a pack rat, it's hard to be a 'bo
But living's so much harder where the heartless people go
Somewhere the dogs are barking and the children seem to know
That Jesus on the highway was a lost hobo
And they hear the holy silence of the temples in the hill
And they see the ragged tatters as another kind of frill
And they envy him the sunshine and they pity him the chill
And they're sad to do their living for some other kind of thrill
Smash your bottle on the gravestone and live while you can
That homeless brother is my friend.
Somewhere there was a woman, somewhere there was a child
Somewhere there was a cottage where the marigolds grew wild
But somewhere's just like nowhere when you leave it for a while
You'll find the broken-hearted when you're travelling jungle-style
Down the bowels of a broken land where numbers live like men
Where those who keep their senses have them taken back again
Where the night stick cracks with crazy rage, where madmen don't
pretend
Where wealth has no beginning and poverty no end
Smash your bottle on the gravestone and live while you can
That homeless brother is my friend.
The ghosts of highway royalty have vanished in the night
The Whitman wanderer walking t'ward a glowing inner light
The children have grown older and the cops have gripped us tight
There's no spot round the melting pot for free men in their flight
And you who live on promises and prosper as you please
The victim of your riches often dies of your disease
He can't hear the factory whistle, just the lonesome freight train's
wheeze
He's living on good fortune, he ain't dying on his knees
Smash your bottle on the gravestone and live while you can
That homeless brother is my friend.
That homeless brother is my friend.
