By Barbara Purcell

I moved to the Upper East Side a rent-stabilized redhead rather than a Bergdorf blonde. 10021 may have been the most exclusive zip code in Manhattan, but it also appealed to those who needed a cheap studio in a building which had yet to be knocked down, on some atavistic block with a dying shoe repair or hardware store. 

My place was on 61st Street and Second Avenue, above a 24-hour deli where cabbies bought coffee before going back to Queens. Traffic from the 59th Street Bridge never let up and Midtown East lapped against my block. The ever-present reminder of just having made the cut.

        In time, the 10021 zip code split in two and the neighborhood line was redrawn tightly at East 69th, prompting an Upper East existential crisis for those who had purchased units in co-op buildings near me in the lower East 60s. The zip code change made no difference in my life, since I had never made the social ascent myself. The urban illusion of five-digit perfection rapidly disintegrated into 10065, and we all became inhabitants of the Lower Upper East Side.

        My apartment had a door that locked and a toilet that flushed: the only two things that really mattered. My mattress took up one half of the space, while my desk took up the other. A mini-fridge, hot plate, and small sink were fused together as a single appliance. I spotted a microwave on the curb soon after moving in, lugged it upstairs, and plugged it in. It worked. My new home was complete.

        Trash day on the Upper East Side was a scavenger hunt for those looking to replace their ceiling light with a chandelier. Frolicking in the shards of carved wood and cracked glass piled on the sidewalk, finding unwanted treasure to reincarnate from someone else’s possession enhanced the strangely shared existence with my Upper East neighbors. The consignment shops in the East 70s were no different. Rummaging through vintage Chanel suits and Fendi bags from the mavens who had gone off to the big Bloomie’s in the sky made me feel like a voyeur more than a customer.

        There were little glimpses into the existences of these women who lived only a few blocks from my place on Second Avenue, but a world away, pushing their half-dead poodles in strollers, their own legs barely able to exert. I had never seen an anorexic grandmother until I moved to the Upper East Side, the done-up elegant type who preferred to eat like a bird and drink like a fish. Anorexic mothers, however, were all over New York, pushing their IVF-induced triplet strollers through the park, moving at the frenetic pace of lab rats. A minimum of 800 calories burned each day in the sole act of breastfeeding—a mother’s great sacrifice—to nourish her baby and ensure a bikini body by the time Memorial Day in Bridgehampton rolled around.

#

        “4F? As in, an honorable discharge?” Susie was poking fun at my new apartment number. “When you’re too crazy for the army, you get 4F’ed.”

        “Thanks for pointing that out,” I responded without taking my eyes off the list of wines by the glass.

        We were having dinner at Steak Frites near Union Square, where she and I met every Monday evening after her therapy appointment on the same block. Our friendship began after I was hired to pose for her art class on Staten Island. I stopped wearing my robe on breaks and instead sat naked and cross-legged with a coffee in hand as we pleasantly chatted about life. A space heater would unevenly blast my skin as her students rinsed out their sticky brushes in the stainless-steel sink.

        I can let you stay at my place for $750 a month, but you can’t let the landlord find out. Susie was nonchalant about this, as if everyone had a spare Manhattan apartment which cost almost nothing. A single room in that neighborhood (let alone an entire unit) would have been twice as much. But Susie had lucked out when signing a rent-stabilized lease for next to zilch in the late 1990s. According to the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, zilch could only go up 1-3% each year. Even at $750, she was still making a $200 profit off me—which went toward her art supplies and overpriced olives from Gourmet Garage.      

The only catch? I had to get naked for the professor whenever she pleased. She liked my fair coloring and slender frame, and I liked the attention.

        Professor Susan Harris, who still went by Susie at the age of 35, had made an offer I couldn’t refuse. I learned to non-exist in her West Village home, coming and going during off hours, arranging for my mail to be sent elsewhere, staging the place as unoccupied whenever the maintenance guy needed to come by. Other than food deliveries, I never answered a knock at the door.

        Susie was a strange woman, Yale-educated and snooty in that certain way females from the Northeast are—embarrassed by outward emotion—though her Minnesotan accent cut through this imperious demeanor. Her dishwater blonde hair and unplucked eyebrows didn’t make for a classically pretty face, but her easy laugh drew people in.

        Her artwork was a sexualized celebration of her love of animals and general distrust of men. I often posed nude with her taxidermy menagerie of small mammals while wearing a stuffed mascot bunny head, resembling the piñata version of some centaur—half human, half colorful beast.     

When Susie’s father purchased her a starter co-op in the East Village, she was determined to hold on to the rent-stabilized place across town; with its 1800s exposed brick and original molding. Windows which overlooked an ivy-covered courtyard connected to the Sixth Precinct, its holding cell, on occasion, occupied by men who would keep me up at night while crying out for their mothers.  

I moved my belongings out of Brooklyn and into Manhattan via the subway, one box at a time, and lived like Anne Frank in her illegal sublet on West 10th Street for a year and a half before the landlord found out. We kept this quiet arrangement past its expiration date, assuming that her nosey neighbor—a violent drunk who once shoved her girlfriend down the building’s stairs while I held my breath on the other side of my door—would report me to the super.

        But in the end, it was Susie’s EZ Pass records that gave it away; the landlord discovered her change of address after contacting their customer service number. I had 30 days to get out. 

#

        “Why don’t you try to find an apartment down near me before the holidays get here?” Susie asked in her naive, motherly way.

        We were each on our third glass of wine.

        “Because I’ve signed a year lease, and I can’t break it without screwing myself out of the $1,000 deposit.”

        I miserably picked at my Salade Nicoise.   

        “I just don’t think it is healthy for you to be living up there.”

I had been bouncing from one living situation to the next since moving to New York City in that post-Y2K, pre-9/11 sweet spot of dot-com bliss before shit hit the fan. Brooklyn had been my point of entry, though that initial phase didn’t last long. Long enough, however, to learn what it meant when someone devoured Domino Sugar straight out of the 5 lb bag with a bent, burnt spoon.

#

        My first roommate used to shoot up in the Boys Room before teaching biology to his ninth graders in Queens. We lived together the summer before 9/11 in Williamsburg, closer to the J than the L train. It was a long walk from Bedford Avenue, where proto-hipsters were beginning to rent from the old Polish widows who owned the neighborhood’s row houses. Our block was predominantly Hispanic and the landlords were primarily Hasidic.

The near decade between us posed no issue; most of the men I had dated until that point were at least 35. Adam was both skinny and paunchy, with thin arms that dangled on either side of a belly barely contained by his t-shirt. He would rub his sweaty knuckles on the front of his jeans over and over, as if his hands were leaky faucets.

        Our apartment was an unfinished basement: exposed drywall and dusty concrete floors, a drop ceiling missing most of its water-stained panels. A torn Japanese screen separated his space from mine. I slept in a half-finished kitchen with small, dead branches of electrical wiring jutting out of the wall.

        I know it looks a little rough, but the landlord said he’ll fix it up by the end of the summer. 

He asked for the rent money in cash the night I moved in, then disappeared over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan for three days. When the landlord came by to tinker with some wiring in the ceiling, he refused to look me in the eyes, only muttered Yiddish when I asked if he had seen my new roommate. 

Adam bumbled down our stairs a few nights later.

        “Where were you?” I asked, angry and relieved.

        “I got caught up.”

        He was much calmer than the first night. I had never met a heroin addict before. After finding thin streaks of blood in our tub, I decided to leave. Adam was furious; he demanded that I cover my portion of the following month’s rent.

        His elderly parents in Schenectady had no choice but to cancel his gas card again; its monthly charges had become exorbitant. He had been relying heavily on that card, buying cigarette cartons and selling them as loosies on the street at a 75% markup. Adam was panicked: his teaching salary couldn’t possibly sustain his addiction. Neither could a short-lived roommate from Craigslist.

        “You are incredibly unethical, remember that,” he wrote to me in an email days later.

        But I was already in a studio apartment in West Harlem. He didn’t have my new mailing address. I ignored the message.

#

        I was the only white girl on my new block, which made me more of an oddity than a liability—some cutesy “urban pioneer” who was about to make the rent go up. I introduced myself to everyone: the suspicious elderly neighbors, the woman next door with the endlessly crying infant, the bodega owner whose shelves were barren, except for canned beans covered in dust. They just looked at me like I was a ghost that would eventually go away.

        Joe, a quiet man who lived in my building and organized stoop chess tournaments most weekends, gave me his pager number in case I ever had trouble when leaving the subway. I never called, but there were nights I could feel the buildings on that dead-quiet avenue leaning in toward me as my little heels clicked in morse code: I AM ALL ALONE.

        I woke up to strange noises coming from the street below, like a cat being tortured; high-pitched cries that went on for too long. A white stretch limo with Jersey plates was idling next to the curb. A woman slightly older than myself was pushed against its trunk, her mini skirt pulled up around her waist like a belt. Four men in tuxedos were taking turns on her, each pinning her hips with his own body before letting the next one give it a try. I called 911. The apartment windows across the way remained pitch black. Was I the only one witnessing this? The dispatcher calmly explained that help was coming. We hung up and I continued to watch, unsure of what to do.

        One of the men yanked the woman from the trunk and shoved her into the back of the limo as the other three got in on the opposite side. The driver, who had remained in the vehicle the whole time, sped off. I stared at the empty street as if still watching what had just happened. After 15 minutes, a police cruiser went by without stopping, only slowing, before turning the corner. I broke my lease and moved back to Brooklyn.

#

        Brooklyn comes from the Dutch word Breukelen, meaning “broken land.” The Netherlands are to thank for my least favorite street name in all of Broken Land. Cortelyou Road rolled off the tongue like curdled milk. Its syllables were a violent sneeze, an overbearing mother. Cortelyou Road was a few stops from my new home, and every time the subway conductor announced the name, I winced. Cortelyou! Fuck you too, mother.

#

“Are you Jewish or Irish?”

        My new roommate watched me carefully as I unpacked and hung things in the smaller of our apartment’s two closets.

        “Squeamish,” I half-kidded while placing my passport on the highest shelf, just out of reach.

        Rose Shabir was a hyper-vigilant Palestinian Puerto Rican activist on the terrorist watch list. She had been detained after 9/11 for her possible knowledge of what brought those buildings down. After spending three days in The Tombs, the Manhattan detention complex not far from the World Trade Center site, she was released and her landline was tapped. Rose had two cats: Boadicea, a red tabby, and Mumia, a black Manx. Putting my allergies and national security concerns aside, I moved in with her for the long haul of winter. 

        “This is from the time an Israeli soldier pistol-whipped me. I was 7.”

        She pulled back her coarse grey hair and traced the thin scar along the left side of her jaw. Her bob fell perfectly at her chin, covering the mark quite well.

        I didn’t know what to say. Not so much out of shock, but feigned politeness. She would often tell me—in an almost bubbly tone—horrific tales of being detained in a Palestinian refugee camp. Rose described the Israeli Army bulldozing her aunt’s house while they were staying there, visiting from the States. Without adequate funds to rebook their tickets, her family remained in the camp for many months.       

        “We were lucky in a way. Back then kids under 10 could fly for free, so my family here only needed to save enough money for my mother and father’s airfare.”

        I listened as she told me about the young soldier with shimmering eyes who smacked his weapon across her jaw after she had refused to move out of his way. Her anecdotes seemed so far away from our Brooklyn share. I simply stored each one in my mental silo as explanation of her frequent eruptive rages, which scared the cats right under her bed.

        After sifting through our fridge late one night, she barged into my room and accused me of stealing her Oreos and the olive oil she smoothed over her forehead before going to bed. 

        “You’re going to get in trouble if you mess with the wrong person one of these days.”

        Her makeup-less face was electric with accusation. She was giving me fair warning about what she already knew to be true: I had eaten the Oreos. But I never touched her bottle of oil, the image of her liberally applying the briny liquid to her dull sun-cracked skin was enough to turn me off the Mediterranean diet for good.

        Trauma is the mind’s timeless trick. Her impulsivity was autonomic. She was powerless to the reflexive responses brought on by those experiences, years before in the camp. Rose told me how that first summer back in the States, they visited cousins for the Fourth on the Lower East Side. The neighborhood kids were playing with firecrackers, swirling figure eights in the air with sparklers while she hid under her father’s car. Waiting for hours for all those noises to go away, pressing the heels of her palms over her ears, as each orchid of light rocketed above the East River and bloomed in the black sky.    

# 

Susie and I settled the bill with her father’s credit card and my small offering of a cash tip. I got on the subway at Union Square and went up to 59th and Lex, where the Lower Upper East Side twinkled in silence all the way to my building, on an atavistic block which had yet to disappear. Old ladies and half-dead poodles, tucked in for the night. Cabbies getting coffee from the corner deli, on their way home to Queens.                 

Barbara Purcell is an Austin-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in the Austin Chronicle, Canadian Art, Glasstire, and Sightlines Magazine, among others. She is the author of Black Ice: Poems (Fly by Night Press, 2006) and has contributed to three anthologies including Word: An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes. She is a graduate of Skidmore College and a native of North Jersey. For more info, please visit www.barbarapurcell.com.