'New love and a cheap apartment on the Lower East Side'
Dec 4 2024 ☰ I was on the radio — a man who's just red flags in a trench coat — Balkan brass — leaving it to chance — fuck conventional wisdom, fuck optimism, just take aim — Dimes Square before Dimes
Transcribed below:
Wed, Dec 4, 2024 — I was just on the radio, KUOW in Seattle, talking on NPR about my old apartment. They didn’t keep the part about the Romaniote synagogue, the haunting brass music filtering in through the open windows with the snow, the sound of the weddings and funerals of people I don’t know marking my mostly isolated life with song.
They didn’t keep the fourth floor walkup with the roof above—the roof no one used so I used it to sun myself nude.
They didn’t keep the ostensible main point, the story the producer reached out to me about, of how the guy I subletted it from (where is he now?? I should reach out) only ended up giving me his apartment because he up and fell in love with a Swede and had a baby.
Nor the part of the story that was the main point for me, the reason I wrote it at all: that everyone said you have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding a cheap apartment in New York and I completely ignored all of it because—I only need one. The subtext being: fuck conventional wisdom, fuck the naysayers, fuck the fear mongering, fuck even optimism. Just accept the odds are wildly stacked against you and go for it anyway. Close your eyes and insist that when you open them, whatever’s in front of you is right. Close your eyes and ears and aim. If I have a pithy one-sentence message, it’s that. It’s the source of all my fortune, physical and metaphysical. And if time has shown me anything, it’s teachable and replicable, goddamn it.
I sent the audio of the radio segment to R. It was his apartment too, even if none of his side ended up in the story. No mention of the way he black-bagged his bedroom in Bushwick in ten minutes flat, or that we moved in with nothing more than a duffel bag each—the paucity of what our adult lives had amounted to thus far. No mention, our lack of paystubs. No mention, the 6 months beforehand we spent haphazardly having a fling, flinging, across countless Brooklyn Airbnbs.
The afternoon that I walked to the Lower East Side to look at sublets, I’d just come from New Work City. I’d been talking to Shuli. I told her I had no firm reason to stay in NYC other than this wtf fling. Maybe I’ll drop it and just move back to the West Coast, like today. I can’t date this guy, he’s a walking talking red flag. A stack of red flags in a trench coat. A piñata made of red flags papier-mâchéd together, with red flags stuffed inside. She said why not just stick around and see what happens? She said it plainly with a shrug and only the slightest twinkle—she hadn’t yet revealed herself as my sage. So I took a look at Craigslist. There were two sublets in the LES. I called both and they said come by now. So I walked over thinking you know what, yeah, why not?
It’s funny to think of it now: I walked that route over a thousand times, but I guess that day was the first. A twenty minute stroll from Canal and Broadway up through Little Italy and down Broome through Chinatown, just past Happy Ending. It seemed insane I could live on the Lower East Side. I’d visited a decade before, stayed at Beehive Migi’s squat by ABC No Rio. I mean I hated New York then but also fuck me Bluestockings is around the corner. Not that I’d ever bought a full priced book in my life, but maybe I’d start? Anything was possible. New love and the Lower East Side. R had already lived there, in the late 90s, a baller flophouse, the triangle apartment on Canal at Division where Ludlow starts. Dimes Square twenty years before Dimes. The very first white kids there, the patient zero gentrifiers—if they counted as gentry being mostly illegal and all immigrants, a gaunt and unlikely mix of Dublin and Belgrade. Tongs shot out their windows one night; the boys were blasting music not realizing a massive funeral going on across the street. The brothels and the mahjong parlors sometimes raided but otherwise safety and peace on the edge of the island, the edge of their known world, all-cash bartenders walking home off their tits drunk and high passing by Chinese moms and schoolchildren like ships in the night except it’s 7am, white ghost ships shrouded in fog or was it just cigarette smoke in the cold light of day.
Had I not found a sublet to rent that day, I’d never have ended up staying in New York. With love, I didn’t know what direction to take; I still don’t. I’m always playing should I stay or should I go, and my impulse is always go, especially when the windows get shot out. Leaving it to chance is the best chance I have of even having it. And it was all chance, a snowball’s chance.
Here’s the radio segment on NPR’s Marketplace, December 4, 2024 with transcript.
0:42: My name is Melissa Mesku. I’m a writer, among other things, and I lived in New York for 13 years.
0:52: Everyone I knew in New York had just nothing but sob stories about all the apartments that they couldn't get, having to butter up people you know to try to get a guarantor, brokers fees, et cetera.
1:07: But I was specifically looking for a sublet.
1:10: The first one that I checked out was inhabited by an artist. She had all of her beautiful paintings all over the house. So it was kind of hard to walk around in. And I was a smoker, I didn’t want to tarnish her canvases.
1:23: But then I went down the street and checked out a different sublet. And it ended up being the one that I stayed in. For 8 years! Didn’t see that coming.
1:34: The guy who lived there had lived there for 12 or 13 years. I was very happy to keep his place exactly as it was because his weird style was perfect for me. He loved textures; the walls were burlap, everything was linen, wood, and from the fifties, a found-on-the-street gracefully aging midcentury industrial.
1:45: There were very unusual furnishings. And the place was decked out with the most bizarre light fixtures, probably from dumpster diving on the Bowery.
1:53: Every single room had a different combination of, like, a dial, a switch... Turning the lights on in that place required full attention, full explanation.
2:09: The guy I rented it from didn't tell me that it was a rent stabilized place.
2:13: And probably the reason he didn't tell me it was rent stabilized is he fully intended to come back, so I would never actually get to see the lease myself.
2:21: But sometimes I would cross paths with other people in the building who were also paying rent. So I got to hear what their rent was and it was at least $1300 more than mine. So that was a real shocker.
2:42: I always planned to send a postcard to the place after I moved out as a hello to the people that moved in. I don't know its current status. I don't know if it's still a rent stabilized place or not. Maybe it got renovated, maybe the old parquet floor is gone. But, that apartment was pretty special as it was.
I think I’ll send that postcard now. I’ll use this photo I have, my hand holding a cigarette out the kitchen window, snow drifting in. You can’t hear it but from the synagogue there’s the distinct, plaintive sound of a brass band, slow and mournful, and a lone voice keening.