About three months into the Ninth St. sublet, the boyfriend of a good friend was moving into a place on the Lower East Side on Stanton between Norfolk and Suffolk. It was the whole floor of a building and he was looking for a roommate. After seeing it and finding out I could afford the rent, I signed on. It was multi-roomed and with two entrances, which meant I could enter my bedroom, get to the bathroom, kitchen, etc. without tromping through my roommate, A’s, bedroom. There was also a fire escape off my bedroom window, which I sat on to read or just stare at the activity on the street. The neighborhood was still gnarly (to hear one instance of how gnarly, listen to the sound clip below). There was a bodega to the right of our building which maybe didn’t really sell bodega-like items. I discovered this when, soon after moving, I went inside to buy eggs and the guy behind the counter just shook his head at me when I asked where they were. Basically there was no dairy product section at all. There were loads of dusty paper goods: towels, toilet paper, diapers; although none of those products seemed like they’d been moved or even considered for a while. Those things felt more like window display installations. They did sell loosies (single cigarettes) and probably other smokables (and snortables) that were kept behind (under?) the counter and had to be asked for.

Although the crack epidemic of the eighties was really taking hold and our neighborhood in particular seemed to be in the grip of it, I still felt invincible in that way you do when you’re young and choose tunnel vision over a full-spectrum view of your surroundings. In my case, I knew that if I turned left as I left our building, I’d absolutely pass by an abandoned building that had been taken over as a location for crack dealing and doing. So I only turned right, pretending nothing else existed except the Delancey Street F train station or the slammin’ rice&beans&cafe con leche hole-in-the-wall joints on Essex and Ludlow streets or Cantor’s up on Houston or the bars and Sidewalk Cafe on First Avenue. Overall I was proud to feel tough enough to live both in my new neighborhood and in the city. I was also happy to have my own room, a small space with a loft bed, which in the summer was hot as hell. I had a tiny little fan that only managed to move the humidity around. This all seemed extremely romantic. Suffering. So La Boheme.

The suffering, as you’d imagine for a twenty-four-year-old, was filled with the melodrama of broken hearts and high drama that was painful in the most sentimental of ways. On some level, in between clutching my heart (or head if I had a hangover) and planning revenge (which was usually a very weak tea mixture of deciding what outfit would make him want me again and planning verbal zingers), I would think about storing up all the details for some fuzzy storybook. That was when I wasn’t crying or drinking or reading Paul Bowles out on the fire escape. That apartment was where I learned that the boy I’d first fallen for in NYC, the one mentioned in last week’s writing, was fooling around with someone else on the side. Another waitress at Dojo to whom he’d been teaching drums. Effin’ drummers. And I’d found out because friends from California had come out for a visit and were staying in his apartment when she left a pretty explicit message on his phone machine. Nothing can put a damper on your vacation like having to decide whether to tell a friend that her boyfriend is cheating on her. They did tell me and were thus treated to a very long night of drinking where they had to watch me morph into a heart-broken mood-swinging crazy person (anger, sadness, moroseness, then some time devoted to holding my hair back as I threw up between cars on some Alphabet City sidestreet. Tequila. ugh.)

This apartment held some very high-drama relationship moments. I had begun waitressing at Avenue A Sushi and during one night shift I got a call from A telling me not to come home for a few hours once my shift ended. In the background I could hear my friend/his girlfriend yelling at very high volume. After killing time at the bar, I came home in the early morning hours to a very quiet apartment. The next morning I discovered we didn’t have any plates or coffee cups left. Zero breakable items in the cabinet. It turned out that as A was being screamed at by his girlfriend, who according to him was challenging him in a physically menacing way, he opened up the window onto the courtyard out back, the area where about four buildings all butted up against each other with small yards, and began throwing out every plate and cup one by one so as not to engage in any other sort of violence. Giving new meaning to the term breaking up. Basically just breaking everything. The yard out back was a mess of shattered crockery, which A cleaned up after apologizing to the neighbor downstairs who claimed to have slept through the mayhem. Then we went to the restaurant supply stores over on the Bowery and replaced things.

So much of my life was hatched and furthered in this apartment and I remember feeling completely insulated from the rest of the world as if the city were it. But I also climbed on buses to Washington DC for marches on the U.S. out of El Salvador and the March For Women’s Lives – Reproductive Rights Rally. And although Reagan’s America flummoxed me, my sense of power in overcoming his awful destructiveness felt very strong. Was it my youth? The general sense of being invincible? Having time on my side? Whatever the thread running through it, I really wish I could take hold of that same invincible quality now.

That apartment was also the place I made a couple of ginormous mistakes of the heart, which I’ll cover in detail (fuzzy as it may be) next week.

(Hi, all. This clip ends after 4 minutes, even though there are some random bits at the end from a past recording. Please to ignore!)