“I had lived my life before in accordance with the poverty and itinerancy of my childhood, sliding in and out of other people’s leases, never expecting to stay very long and tolerating circumstances that strike me now as completely absurd.”
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
Several years before we met, my boyfriend bought a shell of a building on a shady street in Brooklyn; after our first months glued to each other, he took me on a tour of the gutted brownstone, which was then several floors of skeletal plywood and no plumbing. We had decided to move in together once the renovation was complete. "Aren't you excited?" He asked. I had been too quiet throughout the tour, had not exclaimed at the possibilities of certain rooms or at the way the light came in. "I am," I said. And then: "I've never had stairs before." The admission put a wobble in my voice. As a child, I had written characters and dialogue for my sneakers and Mary Janes, the soles of which had come loose and begun to "talk." I remember the fraught negotiations in Payless Shoe Source and Ross Dress for Less, the plastic-framed Matisse print that was more sun-bleached every year, the intersections where our huffing 15 year old cars broke down.
When people learn that my new novel concerns a group of hapless renters who are disturbed and displaced by their landlord's dementia, they typically ask one question: Did that happen to you? The answer is no, but the book in question is undoubtedly a result of the years I spent in run-down apartments in California and New York, my life lived precariously against so many others. It goes back further, even, to a childhood spent in a string of rented houses, to a sense given to me early on that the physical address was something to be shed again and again, that our identities were carried in how we thought and spoke and never in the hastily taped cardboard boxes, which were never packed very carefully.
As the child of a single mother and a father who was something of a hologram the first 10 years of my life, I witnessed the rituals of renting with a spirit of adventure. I watched her paint when we moved in and repaint when we moved out, reinvent rooms in the creative ways that only penny-pinched renters can. For years we shared a large bedroom bifurcated by a Japanese screen onto which she had pasted tissue paper scraps of every color, and the effect of this on the light was a source of fascination and comfort as I woke and prepared for grade school. I was awed but not troubled by the checks she made out to landlords, those spectral figures who somehow had more right to our homes than we did. I accepted the trades inherent in each move: a seedier part of town for a real backyard, a smaller space for the charm of Victorian details. When my father, during a very bad spell, lived in a van until it was repossessed, and then in the loft of a rotting, long-abandoned barn, I thought him a great explorer; I remember the plank one had to cross to get to his mattress, the orange casserole dish that he pissed in, the light that poured in through the many rifts in the wood. At my mother's house, we often had roommates: an uncle who cooked elaborate goulashes and died slowly of AIDS in the drafty back room; a young woman with a string of bodybuilder boyfriends all named Jared; an Austrian friend of my mother's who took eccentric workshops and kept the mysterious, life-size porcelain figurine of a belly dancer she had crafted in the shared living room. I did not understand, until I was much older, that with the exception of her brother, these were compromises my mother had made, not proof of preference. I had assumed our home was filled with people because my mother liked to stay up smoking cigarettes and gossiping, because space was meant to be filled with the noise and clutter of all kinds of people. The guest rooms I occasionally saw at the houses of friends were as foreign to me as photos of life halfway around the world.
In the first year my boyfriend and I lived in our well-appointed home, I was also grieving my mother, who had lasted less than two months after the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. If this was a strange time to learn how to throw dinner parties, to squabble with flea market vendors about the provenance of 50-year-old lamps, it didn't occur to me then. I perfected my risotto and my roux, placed sprigs of rosemary in the slices of lemon that graced the water pitcher, schooled myself on the many ways one could fold a dinner napkin. Finding myself embedded in a different class than the one in which I'd been raised sometimes felt like a cheat that would soon be exposed. The panic attacks I managed in the bathroom during dinner parties, listening to the forks of friends move across the elaborate meals I'd prepared, did not correlate with the relief and awe I felt, most days, to come home to a place where I felt permanent.
I had lived my life before in accordance with the poverty and itinerancy of my childhood, sliding in and out of other people's leases, never expecting to stay very long and tolerating circumstances that strike me now as completely absurd. In college, I put on a black wig when my reprobate, pill-addled landlord came around and tried to collect rent I'd already paid, because it confused her enough that she would move on to the next tenant to make her false claims of nonpayment and whisper, in her thick, Iranian accent, "Evict, evict!" In San Francisco, I lived with a sex worker who claimed, in a bodiless voice, to be a nursing student — I never once saw a pair of scrubs or a textbook — and who had booming visits with clients on a regular basis. Sometimes my roommate Brandon and I would scurry to the other's room when this happened, so that we could gag and giggle and overhear the finale together. It was also in that house I was once locked into my room, and, learning the slumlord could not be bothered, had to find someone with a toolbox to come to my back-alley window. At another point I answered the roommate-wanted Craigslist ad of a woman nicknamed Steen, whose MySpace alias was "Suck It Steen" and who brought literal definition to that old idiom bringing home the bar. After one night of little sleep, listening to the many visitors crowing some hip-hop refrain about swallowing, I woke early in the morning to make a shift at a job I despised. Sitting on the toilet, I heard the sound no one ever wants to hear while in the bathroom: someone else, very close. A tattooed hand moved the tacky glass sliding door of the shower open; its owner, fetal and dreadlocked, saw me and groaned as though I were his mother confiscating his weed. I remember telling these stories to friends, but I don't remember ever protesting that these situations were impossible. It seemed only natural that my own life should be layered so closely on top of others.
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
At this time in my life I was very poor but didn't notice: perhaps because I could buy five avocados for a dollar from the smiling vendors on Mission Street, perhaps because the culture of San Francisco then was not to get ahead but to get content, perhaps because my childhood had prepared me for it. It didn't feel strange to live that way in that city, but it started to in New York, where I moved in the middle of the winter. I disposed of or gave away things I loved — a velvet clamshell chair with a gold-green fringe, records, a crooked dresser acquired by my great-grandfather after he arrived from Ireland in 1908 — without fanfare, as though they would come back to me later, meet me waving at some bus stop. I'd chased dangerous fun and its consequences in that city, opium tea on rooftops and burns on my feet from illegal fireworks and abortions I couldn't afford psychically or otherwise, and I must have felt that version of myself did not call for an ounce of preservation.
It felt different to live so scantily on the East Coast, to own very few things, to not feel a sense of home about the place I retreated to from blizzards and hurricanes. It did not seem safe to walk miles in a swarming wall of white, my shoulders clenched forward while the smug skiers whirred past, only to collapse in a bedroom that did little to remind me of myself. I remember subletting, from a lapsed poet-cum-bartender, a well-loved studio under the JMZ lines, tending to her jungle of houseplants. I watered the mess of green curls diligently and tried to imagine how I might become a person like this, who took pride in her small place in the world, who nurtured transformation in a modest row of clay pots. I couldn't. By then I was awaiting my first novel's publication and I began to acquire again, haphazardly, a collection of objects that no one would recognize as an attempt to build a home. I did not buy a set of hand and bath towels or a good chopping knife or cotton pajamas. I bought a Mork from Ork pull-string doll, a pair of damaged library ladders I used as bookshelves, 1940s fringed seafoam bathing culottes that buttoned up the back. My last housing arrangement included a largely unemployed actor who would not allow others' things in the kitchen cabinet and who spent hours on the couch playing first-person shooter games, his head never turning at anyone coming or going. Those sounds began to follow me out of the house, his low murmur into the headset and the carefully reproduced stutters and blasts of machine guns and bazookas. I could not foresee living in this way much longer and yet I could not imagine the alternative.
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