Occupy Me!
C.O. Moed
At least Linda Blair got to do acrobatics when she got pre-occupied. All I got was a crowded apartment filled with other people’s lives.
I was too busy commuting to my seven part-time jobs that spanned over three New York City boroughs. Not working full-time allowed me the freedom to think I was a writer. So, I didn’t notice a landscape of stuff rising around me, a very small - and I emphasize small - sampling that included:
(Personally, I never thought the definition of quaint included broke and desperate, even in 1978. Still, the lamps were better than the overhead bare light bulbs. I just hoped that who ever they used to belong to never ever visited me.)
Why didn’t I notice such an accumulation, one might ask? Because you need a lot of time and a lot of concentration to think about writing the Great American Novel. And, while I was trying to find the time before-during-after my part-time jobs and trying to concentrate in spite of being slightly hyperactive, I was also trying to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a boyfriend again because you also really need one of those while writing the Great American Novel – I mean, Hemingway had a couple and look how well he did. So, procuring that love-filled-couple-of-cats-and-a dog-rescued-from-the-pound-art salon-bohemian relationship was very important to me.
This goal was certainly helped by the invention of email and then online dating services and then Facebook and …
I just didn’t notice the time fly by.
There’s a joke about a man who asks his neighbor to pick up his mail, take any important messages, and watch his cat while he’s away on business. And the cat dies while he’s gone and then one day he returns and the neighbor rushes up to him and shouts, “Your cat died!” And the shocked man says, “Couldn’t you have broken the news to me gently? Like your cat was on the roof, your cat fell off the roof, your cat died?”
Then the man goes away again and asks his neighbor to pick up his mail and take any important messages while he’s gone. He comes back and the neighbor rushes up to him and says, “Your mother is on the roof!”
OK. So all I’m saying is, one day my apartment’s pre-occupation was told its mother was on the roof.
***
I went out on a date.
That, in and of itself, was not that unusual. In fact, I went out on lots of dates from the online dating service that supposedly catered to broke artists, but which, I found out later, was a booty call to people who had money posing as broke artists. That didn’t really affect me. That’s because while I wasn’t looking, I had gotten much older than the faux-art-sex-hook-up category. I was now in the “actually-broke-middle-aged-artist-looking-for-companionship” category, which also was a sham because everyone there was either a failed artist or a faux artist and, under the guise of wanting a serious relationship based on art, they just wanted to hook up so they could feel young again.
So, I went out on a date without much expectation, except for the wild hope it would be the relationship I needed in order to live my full life. I had this hope, even in the face of empirical evidence, demonstrated over and over and over again, the futility of lukewarm tea and strained conversation. Did you know that if you stare at a person’s nose they think you are hearing everything they say, while, in fact, you are completely someplace else? I was usually wondering if I had Hostess cupcakes in the freezer. You can freeze them up to six months.
But on this date something happened. Somehow, this date lasted five hours and we were still talking and I hadn’t even glanced at his nose once.
Imagine my surprise when I heard my mouth said, “Why don’t you come over? I could make us some dinner.”
I think surprise is an understatement. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t invited any of the other 54 lukewarm tea dates home. It was that I offered to make him dinner.
I don’t know how to cook. Neighbors took rotating shifts when I turned on the oven because I had no sense of when something was done or not and besides, the minute I turned anything on, I’d walk away and get pre-occupied with something else, like reorganizing all the travel-size notions left behind in the bathroom closet by roommates who traveled. So, I tried not to cook very often because the neighbors were really tired of the fire alarms going off.
But suddenly I had a person in my house, which was another surprising thing because I hadn’t had a visitor in years. Which was different than the roommates who lived with me – about four to six depending on the on-again off-again ménage a trois.
No, having a visitor was like being naked at a clothing-optional pool that had no beach chairs to recline in so that gravity could camouflage the body parts most affected by gravity. What I am trying to say is that there was no way to hide the fact the apartment could be considered a bit untidy.
It wasn’t a hoarder’s house. I knew this because a neighbor, unbeknownst to me, had submitted me to that show and the producers showed up unannounced one day and said I wasn’t bad enough but if I worked at it a bit harder they’d consider me again.
So, as a variety of roommates came and went, my five-hour date made polite conversation on the one chair in the kitchen, while I attempted to open a can of turkey chili from 1996 and cook spaghetti probably bought that year, too.
Things were going well, I thought, until the five-hour date went to use the bathroom. He must have accidently touched something because a stack of something came tumbling down in the hallway.
The combination of the avalanche and the roommates and the questionable smell of my cooking must have been the breaking point for him. Because, as he rushed to put on his coat, his eyes said, “Your mother is on the roof”.
***
Well, at least the fire alarms didn’t go off.
That’s what I told myself after he said good-bye and hurried off thanking me for such a lovely evening and the doggy bag of half-cooked spaghetti mushed into a paste with old turkey chili. And yes, he’d love to get together again, he said as the elevator door closed.
The Hostess cupcakes just didn’t obliterate the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Like when you realize that you had really bad breath after you talked to a ton of cute guys at a crowded cocktail party thinking you were the belle of the ball.
At 3 AM in the morning, I wandered through the apartment and I guess, for all intents and purposes, I wandered through my entire life, now several decades past nubile.
Wander in this case might be poetic. I stepped over or around what suddenly appeared to be a lot of stuff. None of which I had taken seriously until I saw the reflection in the eyes of my five-hour date.
Now, if this were a TV movie of the week or even that hoarder’s show, within an hour, with a montage sequence backed by inspiring Rocky-like theme music and a couple of professionals, I would have cleared the house, painted the walls (which hadn’t been painted since 1987), bought new furniture (a necessity in the millennium because of the city-wide bedbug infestation) and lost 30 pounds all at once.
That’s not what happened. What happened was...nothing. Nothing happened. Except that after decades of being otherwise engaged, I suddenly couldn’t breathe in my own apartment. Breathe? I couldn’t even move through my own apartment.
No matter where I looked, there were things I didn’t recognize or things I did recognize but didn’t know how they got there. And then there were things I knew the entire history of – when they arrived, who brought them, what happened on them.
I went into a deep and prolonged panic. I don’t know about you, but when I panic I eat and watch TV. Which is exactly what I did.
Until one night.
***
I was watching some gossip show or celebrity interview show on TV.
All of a sudden, this face filled the screen. This very familiar face. Annoying and smug and with really great make-up on, and the annoying smug face was describing something about the arduous journey it had been, not only to get published and produce a hit TV series, but to truly represent the spirit of New York City during those heady years of…
I didn’t know I was growling and barking until one of the trois rushed in and asked me if I was having a stroke.
I was not. What I was doing was watching years of my life spent supporting one of my first roommates through a writer’s block. Actually, now that I think of it, maybe it wasn’t a block she had in those days. Maybe it was offense writing, like offense driving or offense football playing. Because every single time I sat down to write after coming home from one of my part-time jobs, she’d come in all crying and upset and could I just talk to her about her work because I gave such good feedback and comments…
Including, by the way, the amazing original title on the amazing original book that the amazing original TV series was based on, all of which she based on her salad days when she was poor and living in a what? A cold water flat? Even when the boiler broke we had hot water. And she was never poor. Every time the boiler broke, she checked into the Plaza Hotel.
And that wasn’t just make-up, it had to be Botox. Because as she led the interviewer through her fabulously Malibu modern home decorated with billions of cubic feet of air and one piece of furniture per room, her face didn’t move.
How did this happen! I don’t mean, how did it happen that she could afford Botox. I mean, how did it happen I was still stuck in seven part-time jobs in three different New York City boroughs while being buried alive by furniture I didn’t even own. Including the little black and white TV I was watching, which was perched on a pile of magazines someone left behind in a move, which was stacked on the table the TV was perched on - the ugly floral shaped wooden table that looked like an end table only higher that she had left me as she flounced out to success and a fuck-load more space than me.
A younger husband? She also had a younger husband?
I don’t remember throwing my bowl of ramen or both my shoes at the TV.
My aim must have been good because the TV, the magazines, and then, after teetering for a few seconds, the ugly floral shaped table all toppled to the floor.
***
If I hadn’t been so afraid of pissing off the neighbors I would have tossed that table out the window. Instead, after finding out the elevator was broken, I quietly carried the table down four flights of stairs. My journey down may have been quiet, but suddenly inside my head every dream, every desire, every wish and want for myself and my life gathered together and became this huge mob, and this huge mob wasn’t going to take it any more and it began screaming “Out Out Out Out!!!”
So, I went back for the magazines. I didn’t even tie them up like you’re supposed to for recycling. I found a huge garbage bag I had snitched a couple of years ago from the super when he wasn’t looking, filled that bag to the top and then BOOM dumped them in that blue garbage can. This time the mob was screaming “Go Go Go Go!!!”
That stupid TV was next. Every roommate had a flat-screen TV in their respective rooms. Even the ones who shared a room had their own flat-screen TV. What was I doing with someone’s leftover black and white? It didn’t even rate kitsch/resell at the nostalgia over-priced thrift store down the street. It rated Salvation Army reject!
“Gross Gross Gross Gross!!!” screamed the mob as I carried the TV downstairs.
I was beginning to like this mob.
I was so busy throwing things out, I didn’t notice what was left behind until I began to sweep up the noodles and broken bowl. A beautiful corner and wall, not seen since President Reagan, was suddenly visible.
What had been behind other people’s crap was a molding—thrilling delicate waves of plaster caked with literally hundreds of years of paint. I hadn’t seen an empty corner in my apartment in decades. I felt dizzy, or like I had lost weight.
One of the public relations intern roommates (there were two) came into the living room. “Oh wow. My bookcase would look good here…”
But words that had always filled my life, like “sure, no problem, how can I help” never got to my mouth that day. Instead, I flung myself against the wall and shook my head “No.” The mob went wild. “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!”
Over the next couple of weeks, I was so distracted by that space I didn’t even check any of the online dating sites. Instead, every night I rushed home and with my take out whatever-dinner, sat and stared at the emptiness. It was the only part of the apartment that felt like me.
This disturbed the IT roommate and the PR intern roommate and they let me know they’d be leaving by the end of the month. I am not sure if I answered them. I was too busy falling in love with the beautiful molding. It felt like I was on a ship in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The seas were rough, but I was definitely going somewhere.
Those two roommates did indeed depart the following week and of course left behind furniture they had gotten at Ikea, which of course was broken. I circled those contemporary end tables and knick-knack wall units for days.
“Come on you can do it, you can throw it out,” the mob cooed at me. “Ikea stuff only looks like it can be fixed…”
It took a couple of weeks, but finally I agreed with the mob not to duct-tape anything. “You fucking rock!!” the mob chanted each night as I stomped downstairs to the garbage cans with yet another piece of former Scandinavian design.
Finally, late in the evening, with the last piece of Ikea chucked, I stepped into the dark bedroom and gasped. It wasn’t just that the room was so much bigger than mine. It was because it had all that beautiful molding, too. I wasn’t just a corner in a crowded living room. I was a bedroom. A big, airy, empty trilling wave of a bedroom. I dragged my bed in there lickity-split.
In the morning the sun woke me up. I sat up in bed and it was like I was floating in emptiness. It was almost as good as that fabulously Malibu modern home decorated with billions of cubic feet of air and one piece of furniture per room, except this was New York Motherfucking City and my face did move.
I couldn’t even remember when I had been this happy. Me, the bed, the sun, the molding and… How did that bureau get in here? I vaguely remembered it, but because the room had been rented for so long I hadn’t seen it in a while.
That was the bureau with all the extra linens in it. It weighed a ton and was godawful ugly - painted this gross wood color that made old snow look pretty. But I didn’t know who it belonged to so I never thought I could do anything with it, like paint it. You’re not supposed to paint other people's things. And besides, if I did throw it out, where would all the extra sheets and towels go, the ones left behind by decades of departing roommates and hand-me-downs by friends who could afford to buy new stuff?
Perhaps I shouldn’t have dumped all the linens on the floor. “Burn, baby, burn!!” screamed the mob in my head. I hoped they were speaking metaphorically, or that they really liked 1970’s music about burning the disco down. Still, surrounded by sheets and towels that didn’t match, I became so overwhelmed I almost didn’t hear the phone ring.
It was the five-hour date, wondering if I had gotten any of his email messages on our online dating site message board.
***
Now, if this was a romantic-comedy straight-to-dvd movie, by the time he came over again, curtains would have been put up and the largest thing in the apartment would be the space that flowed around carefully selected “pieces” that also happened to double as functional furniture.
Of course that’s not what happened. I just left the linens strewed about for the next week as I sorted out the fact he had asked me out on another date.
But I guess good conversation trumps poor housekeeping. I agreed to getting together but not before I promised myself I would not invite him up anywhere near my new-found walls and sunny bedroom. So we met in Queens. Dinner cooked by someone else allowed conversation that lasted, this time, eight hours.
I don’t know what it was but, just as there was more room in my apartment, there was more room inside me. He wasn’t just those five hours of words. Now there was eight hours of space. Almost like moving a piece of furniture and seeing how beautiful the wall was behind it.
I didn’t even wait until the next day to throw out all the linens. And then I painted that ugly bureau, and who knew it was as beautiful as the molding thrilling along the walls just with a simple coat of antique white gloss spray paint (two cans).
And then a couple of days later, the now eight-hour date asked me out again. This time we met in the Bronx. And right after that date, there was no mistaking my mob of dreams’ demands. They didn’t just shout in my head, they filled my entire body with disco “DANCE DANCE DANCE PRETTY BABY!!” as I dumped all seventeen milk-carton bookcases by the hydrant on the corner.
I was very lucky we had two Brooklyn dates because dealing with the books strewn about after I threw out all the milk cartons took longer than the rest of the house put together. I realized that if I tossed all the books that didn’t belong to me I’d have no books at all, and you need a few books here and there. Otherwise you look like a hotel.
So, in between one Sunday at the Botanical Gardens and a Saturday visit to the Museum, I went through all 6,337 books and kept any book that was either pretty, in English, made me look smart, or had an author’s name I could pronounce. And, after putting those 143 books in an empty bookcase, also repainted in antique white, I followed the time-honored tradition of my neighborhood and stacked the remaining 6,194 books out on the sidewalk, right next to the shopping bags of refundable cans and bottles. (Two weeks later they showed up at Strand’s $1 book bins.) My mob, now seriously into disco, threw a rave as I danced around the sidewalk, “DON’T STOP DON’T STOP THE CLEANING!!”
By the time my now-marathon date and I met in Staten Island at the all-you-could-eat-buffet, our visits were averaging twelve to fourteen non-horizontal hours and half my house was gone. Including almost all the roommates, except for the on-again, off-again ménage a trois.
***
Now, if this was a mini-series on PBS or something equally serious, the ending shot might be the curtains blowing gently in a spare room and then the camera pulling out to another room and a desk that has nothing on it but a typewriter or computer or whatever, and another room of more curtains and a dining table and molding trilling all over the place and wooden floors and me alone wearing crisp cotton and pearl drop earrings.
But of course, that’s not what happened. It takes more than a mini-series to push out four decades of other people’s lives that have taken over yours. And besides, PBS mini-series rarely have happy-ish endings.
For months I still felt like I was on a ship, rocking and rolling over high seas. But I loved finding that molding each time I went on those gloriously long dates and then came home and threw out another table or portable closet or a chair I never even got to sit in.
I did keep those two hideous lamps that the rich houseguests gave me in 1978. One of the roommates, I think it was the pre-med student, tried to pack them up when she was moving out, but I caught her just in time. She finally confessed to me they were considered very valuable now. Mid-century duplicates of an Eames-inspired homage done by a cooperative factory in the 1960s that influenced the modern streamline look of … I still thought they were hideous, but I kept them because everyone who ever saw them complimented me on my good taste in home decorating.
The Great American Novel still isn’t finished, but just the other week I got to Chapter Eight! Right after finding out on a TV gossip show watched from my six-inch flat screen TV that fits on my almost tidy desk that my old roommate with her Botox had to give back her Emmy because it seemed she not only took my good ideas; she took her ex-boyfriend’s good ideas and he sued and won. Her younger husband didn’t look too happy with her when they left the courthouse.
Oh, so what if it’s schadenfreude? That was my title and I still can’t afford Botox. Not that I’d want to.
And that multi-borough date of multiple hours? He’s still around. Remember the joke, “Your mother’s on the roof”? Remember the look I thought I saw in my date’s eye that fateful night of 1996 turkey chili and spaghetti?
Well, sometimes you want to put something on the roof, but you just don’t know how. Because I found out later he hadn’t noticed a thing. Not only does that man have no sense of housekeeping, his apartment is messier than mine ever was (and he doesn’t even have roommates) and the only reason he rushed out that night was that he forgot he had to speak at his AA meeting and was about to be late.
And yes, I finally let him come visit again. And again and again and again. And then one day I gave him his own little drawer to put his clothes in, in the now beautiful spray-painted bureau. But nothing else. When he misses his own furniture, we stay at his place.
Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, I wander throughout my now airy, open, OK, not-so-minimally-but-not-so-crowded decorated apartment. And sometimes, I even do the hustle in some of my own delicious cubic feet of air as my mob, bursting with every dream, every desire, every wish and want for myself and my life, gathers together and chants in my head, “Occupy Occupy Occupy Occupy!”
** *** **
At least Linda Blair got to do acrobatics when she got pre-occupied. All I got was a crowded apartment filled with other people’s lives.
I was too busy commuting to my seven part-time jobs that spanned over three New York City boroughs. Not working full-time allowed me the freedom to think I was a writer. So, I didn’t notice a landscape of stuff rising around me, a very small - and I emphasize small - sampling that included:
- Clothes in four different sizes handed down from friends and friends of friends or departing roommates or incoming roommates or put on stoops letting anyone know if it fit, it was yours;
- The mattress, the kitchen table, the cupboard, the three desks, the Matisse poster, the Miro poster, the Van Gogh poster, the Degas poster, the three-hole punch, the bookshelves, the bookcases, the milk cartons doubling as bookcases, the kindergarten cubby hole unit the church next door threw out which now doubled as a shoe rack, the bench, the other bench, the couch, the love seat, the decorative baskets – all found on the street and happily carted up to my apartment by various friends, family, lovers, most of whom I no longer spoke to;
- The six mismatched dining room chairs left by an ex who left me for another ex;
- Three coffee tables left by a roommate headed south to financial security, otherwise known as a trust fund;
- The full-length mirror salvaged by an enraged neighbor who, in a break from fury, left it at my door after I explained the reason I was so badly dressed was because I didn’t have a full-length mirror;
- And two hideous lamps, bought at the Astor Place flea market in 1978 by a rich houseguest who thought it was quaint that people sold their belongings (or more probably other people’s belongings) on the street.
(Personally, I never thought the definition of quaint included broke and desperate, even in 1978. Still, the lamps were better than the overhead bare light bulbs. I just hoped that who ever they used to belong to never ever visited me.)
Why didn’t I notice such an accumulation, one might ask? Because you need a lot of time and a lot of concentration to think about writing the Great American Novel. And, while I was trying to find the time before-during-after my part-time jobs and trying to concentrate in spite of being slightly hyperactive, I was also trying to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a boyfriend again because you also really need one of those while writing the Great American Novel – I mean, Hemingway had a couple and look how well he did. So, procuring that love-filled-couple-of-cats-and-a dog-rescued-from-the-pound-art salon-bohemian relationship was very important to me.
This goal was certainly helped by the invention of email and then online dating services and then Facebook and …
I just didn’t notice the time fly by.
There’s a joke about a man who asks his neighbor to pick up his mail, take any important messages, and watch his cat while he’s away on business. And the cat dies while he’s gone and then one day he returns and the neighbor rushes up to him and shouts, “Your cat died!” And the shocked man says, “Couldn’t you have broken the news to me gently? Like your cat was on the roof, your cat fell off the roof, your cat died?”
Then the man goes away again and asks his neighbor to pick up his mail and take any important messages while he’s gone. He comes back and the neighbor rushes up to him and says, “Your mother is on the roof!”
OK. So all I’m saying is, one day my apartment’s pre-occupation was told its mother was on the roof.
***
I went out on a date.
That, in and of itself, was not that unusual. In fact, I went out on lots of dates from the online dating service that supposedly catered to broke artists, but which, I found out later, was a booty call to people who had money posing as broke artists. That didn’t really affect me. That’s because while I wasn’t looking, I had gotten much older than the faux-art-sex-hook-up category. I was now in the “actually-broke-middle-aged-artist-looking-for-companionship” category, which also was a sham because everyone there was either a failed artist or a faux artist and, under the guise of wanting a serious relationship based on art, they just wanted to hook up so they could feel young again.
So, I went out on a date without much expectation, except for the wild hope it would be the relationship I needed in order to live my full life. I had this hope, even in the face of empirical evidence, demonstrated over and over and over again, the futility of lukewarm tea and strained conversation. Did you know that if you stare at a person’s nose they think you are hearing everything they say, while, in fact, you are completely someplace else? I was usually wondering if I had Hostess cupcakes in the freezer. You can freeze them up to six months.
But on this date something happened. Somehow, this date lasted five hours and we were still talking and I hadn’t even glanced at his nose once.
Imagine my surprise when I heard my mouth said, “Why don’t you come over? I could make us some dinner.”
I think surprise is an understatement. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t invited any of the other 54 lukewarm tea dates home. It was that I offered to make him dinner.
I don’t know how to cook. Neighbors took rotating shifts when I turned on the oven because I had no sense of when something was done or not and besides, the minute I turned anything on, I’d walk away and get pre-occupied with something else, like reorganizing all the travel-size notions left behind in the bathroom closet by roommates who traveled. So, I tried not to cook very often because the neighbors were really tired of the fire alarms going off.
But suddenly I had a person in my house, which was another surprising thing because I hadn’t had a visitor in years. Which was different than the roommates who lived with me – about four to six depending on the on-again off-again ménage a trois.
No, having a visitor was like being naked at a clothing-optional pool that had no beach chairs to recline in so that gravity could camouflage the body parts most affected by gravity. What I am trying to say is that there was no way to hide the fact the apartment could be considered a bit untidy.
It wasn’t a hoarder’s house. I knew this because a neighbor, unbeknownst to me, had submitted me to that show and the producers showed up unannounced one day and said I wasn’t bad enough but if I worked at it a bit harder they’d consider me again.
So, as a variety of roommates came and went, my five-hour date made polite conversation on the one chair in the kitchen, while I attempted to open a can of turkey chili from 1996 and cook spaghetti probably bought that year, too.
Things were going well, I thought, until the five-hour date went to use the bathroom. He must have accidently touched something because a stack of something came tumbling down in the hallway.
The combination of the avalanche and the roommates and the questionable smell of my cooking must have been the breaking point for him. Because, as he rushed to put on his coat, his eyes said, “Your mother is on the roof”.
***
Well, at least the fire alarms didn’t go off.
That’s what I told myself after he said good-bye and hurried off thanking me for such a lovely evening and the doggy bag of half-cooked spaghetti mushed into a paste with old turkey chili. And yes, he’d love to get together again, he said as the elevator door closed.
The Hostess cupcakes just didn’t obliterate the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Like when you realize that you had really bad breath after you talked to a ton of cute guys at a crowded cocktail party thinking you were the belle of the ball.
At 3 AM in the morning, I wandered through the apartment and I guess, for all intents and purposes, I wandered through my entire life, now several decades past nubile.
Wander in this case might be poetic. I stepped over or around what suddenly appeared to be a lot of stuff. None of which I had taken seriously until I saw the reflection in the eyes of my five-hour date.
Now, if this were a TV movie of the week or even that hoarder’s show, within an hour, with a montage sequence backed by inspiring Rocky-like theme music and a couple of professionals, I would have cleared the house, painted the walls (which hadn’t been painted since 1987), bought new furniture (a necessity in the millennium because of the city-wide bedbug infestation) and lost 30 pounds all at once.
That’s not what happened. What happened was...nothing. Nothing happened. Except that after decades of being otherwise engaged, I suddenly couldn’t breathe in my own apartment. Breathe? I couldn’t even move through my own apartment.
No matter where I looked, there were things I didn’t recognize or things I did recognize but didn’t know how they got there. And then there were things I knew the entire history of – when they arrived, who brought them, what happened on them.
I went into a deep and prolonged panic. I don’t know about you, but when I panic I eat and watch TV. Which is exactly what I did.
Until one night.
***
I was watching some gossip show or celebrity interview show on TV.
All of a sudden, this face filled the screen. This very familiar face. Annoying and smug and with really great make-up on, and the annoying smug face was describing something about the arduous journey it had been, not only to get published and produce a hit TV series, but to truly represent the spirit of New York City during those heady years of…
I didn’t know I was growling and barking until one of the trois rushed in and asked me if I was having a stroke.
I was not. What I was doing was watching years of my life spent supporting one of my first roommates through a writer’s block. Actually, now that I think of it, maybe it wasn’t a block she had in those days. Maybe it was offense writing, like offense driving or offense football playing. Because every single time I sat down to write after coming home from one of my part-time jobs, she’d come in all crying and upset and could I just talk to her about her work because I gave such good feedback and comments…
Including, by the way, the amazing original title on the amazing original book that the amazing original TV series was based on, all of which she based on her salad days when she was poor and living in a what? A cold water flat? Even when the boiler broke we had hot water. And she was never poor. Every time the boiler broke, she checked into the Plaza Hotel.
And that wasn’t just make-up, it had to be Botox. Because as she led the interviewer through her fabulously Malibu modern home decorated with billions of cubic feet of air and one piece of furniture per room, her face didn’t move.
How did this happen! I don’t mean, how did it happen that she could afford Botox. I mean, how did it happen I was still stuck in seven part-time jobs in three different New York City boroughs while being buried alive by furniture I didn’t even own. Including the little black and white TV I was watching, which was perched on a pile of magazines someone left behind in a move, which was stacked on the table the TV was perched on - the ugly floral shaped wooden table that looked like an end table only higher that she had left me as she flounced out to success and a fuck-load more space than me.
A younger husband? She also had a younger husband?
I don’t remember throwing my bowl of ramen or both my shoes at the TV.
My aim must have been good because the TV, the magazines, and then, after teetering for a few seconds, the ugly floral shaped table all toppled to the floor.
***
If I hadn’t been so afraid of pissing off the neighbors I would have tossed that table out the window. Instead, after finding out the elevator was broken, I quietly carried the table down four flights of stairs. My journey down may have been quiet, but suddenly inside my head every dream, every desire, every wish and want for myself and my life gathered together and became this huge mob, and this huge mob wasn’t going to take it any more and it began screaming “Out Out Out Out!!!”
So, I went back for the magazines. I didn’t even tie them up like you’re supposed to for recycling. I found a huge garbage bag I had snitched a couple of years ago from the super when he wasn’t looking, filled that bag to the top and then BOOM dumped them in that blue garbage can. This time the mob was screaming “Go Go Go Go!!!”
That stupid TV was next. Every roommate had a flat-screen TV in their respective rooms. Even the ones who shared a room had their own flat-screen TV. What was I doing with someone’s leftover black and white? It didn’t even rate kitsch/resell at the nostalgia over-priced thrift store down the street. It rated Salvation Army reject!
“Gross Gross Gross Gross!!!” screamed the mob as I carried the TV downstairs.
I was beginning to like this mob.
I was so busy throwing things out, I didn’t notice what was left behind until I began to sweep up the noodles and broken bowl. A beautiful corner and wall, not seen since President Reagan, was suddenly visible.
What had been behind other people’s crap was a molding—thrilling delicate waves of plaster caked with literally hundreds of years of paint. I hadn’t seen an empty corner in my apartment in decades. I felt dizzy, or like I had lost weight.
One of the public relations intern roommates (there were two) came into the living room. “Oh wow. My bookcase would look good here…”
But words that had always filled my life, like “sure, no problem, how can I help” never got to my mouth that day. Instead, I flung myself against the wall and shook my head “No.” The mob went wild. “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!”
Over the next couple of weeks, I was so distracted by that space I didn’t even check any of the online dating sites. Instead, every night I rushed home and with my take out whatever-dinner, sat and stared at the emptiness. It was the only part of the apartment that felt like me.
This disturbed the IT roommate and the PR intern roommate and they let me know they’d be leaving by the end of the month. I am not sure if I answered them. I was too busy falling in love with the beautiful molding. It felt like I was on a ship in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The seas were rough, but I was definitely going somewhere.
Those two roommates did indeed depart the following week and of course left behind furniture they had gotten at Ikea, which of course was broken. I circled those contemporary end tables and knick-knack wall units for days.
“Come on you can do it, you can throw it out,” the mob cooed at me. “Ikea stuff only looks like it can be fixed…”
It took a couple of weeks, but finally I agreed with the mob not to duct-tape anything. “You fucking rock!!” the mob chanted each night as I stomped downstairs to the garbage cans with yet another piece of former Scandinavian design.
Finally, late in the evening, with the last piece of Ikea chucked, I stepped into the dark bedroom and gasped. It wasn’t just that the room was so much bigger than mine. It was because it had all that beautiful molding, too. I wasn’t just a corner in a crowded living room. I was a bedroom. A big, airy, empty trilling wave of a bedroom. I dragged my bed in there lickity-split.
In the morning the sun woke me up. I sat up in bed and it was like I was floating in emptiness. It was almost as good as that fabulously Malibu modern home decorated with billions of cubic feet of air and one piece of furniture per room, except this was New York Motherfucking City and my face did move.
I couldn’t even remember when I had been this happy. Me, the bed, the sun, the molding and… How did that bureau get in here? I vaguely remembered it, but because the room had been rented for so long I hadn’t seen it in a while.
That was the bureau with all the extra linens in it. It weighed a ton and was godawful ugly - painted this gross wood color that made old snow look pretty. But I didn’t know who it belonged to so I never thought I could do anything with it, like paint it. You’re not supposed to paint other people's things. And besides, if I did throw it out, where would all the extra sheets and towels go, the ones left behind by decades of departing roommates and hand-me-downs by friends who could afford to buy new stuff?
Perhaps I shouldn’t have dumped all the linens on the floor. “Burn, baby, burn!!” screamed the mob in my head. I hoped they were speaking metaphorically, or that they really liked 1970’s music about burning the disco down. Still, surrounded by sheets and towels that didn’t match, I became so overwhelmed I almost didn’t hear the phone ring.
It was the five-hour date, wondering if I had gotten any of his email messages on our online dating site message board.
***
Now, if this was a romantic-comedy straight-to-dvd movie, by the time he came over again, curtains would have been put up and the largest thing in the apartment would be the space that flowed around carefully selected “pieces” that also happened to double as functional furniture.
Of course that’s not what happened. I just left the linens strewed about for the next week as I sorted out the fact he had asked me out on another date.
But I guess good conversation trumps poor housekeeping. I agreed to getting together but not before I promised myself I would not invite him up anywhere near my new-found walls and sunny bedroom. So we met in Queens. Dinner cooked by someone else allowed conversation that lasted, this time, eight hours.
I don’t know what it was but, just as there was more room in my apartment, there was more room inside me. He wasn’t just those five hours of words. Now there was eight hours of space. Almost like moving a piece of furniture and seeing how beautiful the wall was behind it.
I didn’t even wait until the next day to throw out all the linens. And then I painted that ugly bureau, and who knew it was as beautiful as the molding thrilling along the walls just with a simple coat of antique white gloss spray paint (two cans).
And then a couple of days later, the now eight-hour date asked me out again. This time we met in the Bronx. And right after that date, there was no mistaking my mob of dreams’ demands. They didn’t just shout in my head, they filled my entire body with disco “DANCE DANCE DANCE PRETTY BABY!!” as I dumped all seventeen milk-carton bookcases by the hydrant on the corner.
I was very lucky we had two Brooklyn dates because dealing with the books strewn about after I threw out all the milk cartons took longer than the rest of the house put together. I realized that if I tossed all the books that didn’t belong to me I’d have no books at all, and you need a few books here and there. Otherwise you look like a hotel.
So, in between one Sunday at the Botanical Gardens and a Saturday visit to the Museum, I went through all 6,337 books and kept any book that was either pretty, in English, made me look smart, or had an author’s name I could pronounce. And, after putting those 143 books in an empty bookcase, also repainted in antique white, I followed the time-honored tradition of my neighborhood and stacked the remaining 6,194 books out on the sidewalk, right next to the shopping bags of refundable cans and bottles. (Two weeks later they showed up at Strand’s $1 book bins.) My mob, now seriously into disco, threw a rave as I danced around the sidewalk, “DON’T STOP DON’T STOP THE CLEANING!!”
By the time my now-marathon date and I met in Staten Island at the all-you-could-eat-buffet, our visits were averaging twelve to fourteen non-horizontal hours and half my house was gone. Including almost all the roommates, except for the on-again, off-again ménage a trois.
***
Now, if this was a mini-series on PBS or something equally serious, the ending shot might be the curtains blowing gently in a spare room and then the camera pulling out to another room and a desk that has nothing on it but a typewriter or computer or whatever, and another room of more curtains and a dining table and molding trilling all over the place and wooden floors and me alone wearing crisp cotton and pearl drop earrings.
But of course, that’s not what happened. It takes more than a mini-series to push out four decades of other people’s lives that have taken over yours. And besides, PBS mini-series rarely have happy-ish endings.
For months I still felt like I was on a ship, rocking and rolling over high seas. But I loved finding that molding each time I went on those gloriously long dates and then came home and threw out another table or portable closet or a chair I never even got to sit in.
I did keep those two hideous lamps that the rich houseguests gave me in 1978. One of the roommates, I think it was the pre-med student, tried to pack them up when she was moving out, but I caught her just in time. She finally confessed to me they were considered very valuable now. Mid-century duplicates of an Eames-inspired homage done by a cooperative factory in the 1960s that influenced the modern streamline look of … I still thought they were hideous, but I kept them because everyone who ever saw them complimented me on my good taste in home decorating.
The Great American Novel still isn’t finished, but just the other week I got to Chapter Eight! Right after finding out on a TV gossip show watched from my six-inch flat screen TV that fits on my almost tidy desk that my old roommate with her Botox had to give back her Emmy because it seemed she not only took my good ideas; she took her ex-boyfriend’s good ideas and he sued and won. Her younger husband didn’t look too happy with her when they left the courthouse.
Oh, so what if it’s schadenfreude? That was my title and I still can’t afford Botox. Not that I’d want to.
And that multi-borough date of multiple hours? He’s still around. Remember the joke, “Your mother’s on the roof”? Remember the look I thought I saw in my date’s eye that fateful night of 1996 turkey chili and spaghetti?
Well, sometimes you want to put something on the roof, but you just don’t know how. Because I found out later he hadn’t noticed a thing. Not only does that man have no sense of housekeeping, his apartment is messier than mine ever was (and he doesn’t even have roommates) and the only reason he rushed out that night was that he forgot he had to speak at his AA meeting and was about to be late.
And yes, I finally let him come visit again. And again and again and again. And then one day I gave him his own little drawer to put his clothes in, in the now beautiful spray-painted bureau. But nothing else. When he misses his own furniture, we stay at his place.
Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, I wander throughout my now airy, open, OK, not-so-minimally-but-not-so-crowded decorated apartment. And sometimes, I even do the hustle in some of my own delicious cubic feet of air as my mob, bursting with every dream, every desire, every wish and want for myself and my life, gathers together and chants in my head, “Occupy Occupy Occupy Occupy!”
** *** **
About the author
C.O. Moed, a writer with a day job, grew up on the lower east side of New York City when it was still a tough neighborhood. With an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, and Directing from the City College, she was nominated in 2001 for a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. Her flash fiction has been published in Conduit, Mad Hatters, and the Istanbul Literary Review and her short story, “How Insomnia Saved My Life Until The Night It Tried To Kill Me” was published in Awake! Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull). In 2009, she received the Elizabeth George Grant for Fiction. Since 2008, she has presented picture stories of Her New York, commemorating the spirit of immigration, innovation, art, the streets, neighborhoods and family.
myprivateconey.blogspot.com
myprivateconey.blogspot.com