I lived on Park Place for ten weeks in a spacious apartment. We had
no furniture other than two folding chairs and a card table that we
bought at Target. My brother slept in the first bedroom, next to the
front door and the bathroom. Tiles fell off the bathroom ceiling into
the tub, which didn’t drain until week nine when the plumber extracted a
plug of hair from the drain. The brown and black hair was compressed
and stretched into a vaguely phallic shape, like a voodoo charm or a
teratoma trapped under a young girl’s left lung, filled with baby teeth
and a little beating heart. The plumber left it under the sink. I almost
tripped over it.
The kitchen was no better. Two of the gas burners worked properly,
enough for French toast or a pot of chicken curry, but certainly not for
anything more elaborate. On the Fourth of July, I cooked pork chops,
spinach, and sweet potatoes, a meal that just about strained the
capacity of the stove to catastrophic failure. Early, perhaps the third
week into our lease, we detached the kitchen smoke alarm. I prefer cast
iron, and to cook properly in cast iron, one needs to heat the oiled
metal till it splutters and blows thin smoke. The sink filled with
flies, our milk went sour every Monday after Sunday shopping as though
cursed, and I could barely manage to maintain a baseline threshold of
cleanliness. No matter how much effort I put into scrubbing the
Tupperware we used instead of china, grime seemed to accumulate in the
corners with disturbing regularity. A minor tragedy. But in summation,
the many minor tragedies of 600 Park Place made normal life a near
impossibility. No air conditioning, broken windows, missing light
fixtures, crumbling plaster, water damage, and the occasional rodent
renter. Like with human cohabitants, the mouse demands a degree of
privacy. When encountered in the middle of the night, on the way to the
fridge for a sip of spoilt milk or a piss, the mouse darts for his lair
behind the plastic garbage can. The intruder, equally startled and
embarrassed, sidesteps towards his final destination with a nod of
recognition, eyes turned down to avoid obligatory conversation.
The Franklin Avenue Shuttle runs above ground past Park Place. Every
morning, I crossed the street, bounded up two flights of narrow stairs
and snagged the train on its brief bobble between Prospect Park and
Franklin. At night, however, the train still operated with the same
regularity, departing in seven-minute intervals, or thereabouts
depending on the style of the conductor on duty. Trains really do chug, I
learned this summer: they clatter and rattle rhythmically like a
predictable jazz drum kit warming up for a solo. Have you ever lived
under the train tracks? Eventually, you fall asleep in a hypnotic daze,
pounded into bewilderment by the continual crush of steel wheels on
steel tracks. It is not a restful sleep, the slumber of those living
under train tracks. But like Alvy, Woody Allen’s delicious nebechal who
lives under a rollercoaster in Annie Hall, the trauma of
mechanical motion becomes a part of ordinary life. I think I will miss
the sound of the subway. An empty space will open in my sleeping mind,
and something nasty will want to creep in, a hairy ball of waking
neuroses. Right now, the train protects me from unconsciously turning
daylight horrors about my palms; soon, I will need to face the plumber
or the broker banging at the door and demanding to show the apartment to
two clients who ‘came all the way from Texas.’ Continue reading →
