2006-11-25 - 7:26 p.m.
Second entry for Saturday:
Something about this Thanksgiving season is putting me in a "New York state of mind". I lived in New York when I was young, in fact, the very first apartment I ever had was in Manhattan, in 1972. I'm quite proud of that, actually. I considered it a very brave and adult thing to do, pack my car up with my clothes and belongings and drive my car across country to take up residence by myself in big, bad, Manhattan--this was kind of like a "modern-day hunting a lion" rite of manhood. Of course, countless others have done it, and from foreign countries, too, and when they didn't know a lick of English. But that's okay, I thought of myself as an immigrant, as well, and instead of entering Manhattan via one of the tunnels or bridges, I took a circuitous route that took me into Staten Island so that I could arrive by boat, which in my case, was the Staten Island Ferry, but it served my romantic purpose, sailing us past the Statue of Liberty, offering up to us that thrilling New York skyline, and landing on Manhattan at one of the docks.
Then when I got into my car and drove into the streets of Manhattan, boy did I get a shock, because where this was was in the bedlam of the narrow, compressed canyons of Wall Street, not one of the straight, long avenues that I had imagined! It was quite nerve-wracking to work my way all the way up to Times Square, where I had pre-paid for a room in the Hotel Holland for a week. I discovered immediately that in Manhattan the traffic lanes meant nothing and that travel in New York was akin to amusement park bumper cars (minus the bumps, it was hoped), where every car slithered into every available opening at every available moment. And the sound of horns honking was constant and unbelievable. I decided that New Yorkers were confused about the controls of their cars, that they thought that everything, whether it was pressing the brake or the accelerator or even lowering a window or adjusting the radio station required activation by honking the horn first. I realized that you didn't need to even watch the traffic lights, because when they were red, there was no way that you were ABLE to move forward, and when they turned green, every car across the width of the street would hold the buttons of their horns down, as if the noise was a cattle prod that would move all the other cars forward.
The hotel was, of course, meant to be a cheap and temporary expediency and while it was certainly cheap, it wasn't necessarily depressing (as it sure could have been); I was expecting much worse. I guess I'd say that the worst things about it were the color green that all the walls were painted, the faint odor of urine in the hallways, and the fact that the only appliance in my "kitchenette" unit that could possibly resemble anything "kitchen" was a hotplate. No tiny refrigerator, no sink, no cabinet, no utensils. Oh, and it was very noisy, because it was across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, so already I am sure you can figure out what kind of a neighborhood this was in. Still, it was NEW YORK, and so I was as excited as hell.
The first few days I was there, I treated myself to sightseeing and I went everywhere, Rockefeller Center, up the Empire State Building, out to and up the Statue of Liberty, went into the Stock Exchange, wandered around Central Park, up Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, Madison Avenue, into some of the museums, the Frick, the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Natural History, and the Museum of Modern Art, and some of the stores, Tiffany's, Bergdorf-Goodman, Bloomingdales (they had their own subway stop right inside the store!), and Macy's (ten floors high and filled up an entire city block), and so much more. Inbetween, I'd so some apartment-hunting, but in a very disorganized and depressing fashion. Depressing, because I'd walk around a neighborhood that looked like it was a place where I would like to live, I'd find a building that looked good advertising apartments for rent, and walk in and ask them what the rent was.
"I'd like to rent a one bedroom apartment," I'd say, "how much is the rent?"
They would look at me like, what, you made of money? and say, "I think what you want is a studio."
I'd say, no, I really want a one bedroom apartment, please, and they'd shrug their shoulders as if to say suit yourself, moneybags, and the rent would be something like $750, maybe $800 a month, at a time I considered $100, $150 a month to be a reasonable rent.
While I felt like fainting away over such astronomical sums, or letting my eyes bug out, instead I would just say, "Oh, yeah, right, that sounds good, let me think about it."
"Don't you want to see it?" they ask, but I'd respond, "Oh, no thank you, not yet," and quickly slink back out the door.
I pretty soon realized that this method of apartment hunting wasn't going to work, so I decided to be more organized and consult the want ads. But that proved no better. There absolutely was nothing listed that I could possibly afford except crappy hotel rooms like what I already had. But real apartments with kitchens and stuff, no, nothing.
I actually gave up on New York at that time and decided that living there was impossible. Well, Washington, D.C. had looked nice when I toured it on my way to New York, I had liked all those parks everywhere, so I thought maybe I'd go to Washington, instead. And rents there were more reasonable, I suppose, perhaps in the $400, $500 a month range. However, as I apartment hunted in Washington, I realized that No, I did not want to live in Washington, I wanted to live in New York! It was New York that had brought me out here, not Washington, D.C. So I decided to try New York again, thinking that somehow, just somehow, I was going to find a solution to the housing problem.
And what that solution was, was two things: (1) using an apartment rental agency that carried private party apartment listings, including sublets, and (2) getting a studio, as the advice had repeatedly been. Even the woman at the rental agency said that--"You will just have to get a studio apartment in New York, space is such a premium here, and cutting out that extra room will cut your rent down to something you can actually afford." And she was right.
The first listing I answered was the place I got, a sublease on a studio apartment on the top (fourth) floor front of a renovated brownstown in the upper west side (267 W. 71st Street, between Broadway and West End, just a block down from a subway stop). The rent was $200 a month. The reason it was so low was that it was a rent-controlled apartment, so it was low rent for the actual tenant, a young guy who had his own advertising agency (his one client was Ballantine Beer), and he could pass that on to me. He was trying to spread his business to Philadelphia, and so was going to live there in order to do that, and therefore wanted a temporary tenant in his Manhattan apartment. The apartment was furnished and the kitchen was completely stocked with everything a gourmet chef would want, including a ton of wonderful cookbooks. This guy was also a handy carpenter and had installed some clever space-saving features in the apartment, such as building in some clothing-storage cubby-holes in the closet so that you didn't need a bureau, and he had peg-board and hanging hooks all over the kitchen wall surface so knives, stirrers, thermometers, and pans could be hung instead of needing bulky drawers for storage.
But, best and most clever of all, he had divided the main room of the apartment (which you stepped down into from the central hallway that ran from the front door with the kitchen on the left side and the bathroom and closet on the right side) in half by building a false floor on the right side that was exactly the height of a mattress sitting on a boxspring sitting on the real floor. The bed was inside a cut-out in this false floor, as if the top of the mattress was the surface of water in a hot tub, and therefore there, but all but invisible to the eye. This made the room very modern-looking and sleek, and with no ugly visible bed in the living room. And then he also had his dining room table and chairs, which he also used as a desk, up on that false floor. This arrangement effectively divided the room up into three functional zones, "living", "dining", and "sleeping", and each one was on its own level, with the living room "sunken", the bed zone hidden at upper floor surface level, and the dining zone elevated. I really, really loved it.
Another feature of the room that I liked was the whole distant wall was one big curved bay window, with three-shelf bookshelves built in below the window level, and the window went from there all the way up to the ceiling. When sitting at the dining table/desk, it was possible to look out either up or down the street, as the window bulged out enough to afford you that view.
Instead of some crappy one-room let-down from what I had wanted, this place almost felt like a showplace to me. It really wasn't, but for my very first apartment, it was quite wonderful, and I have hardly done better ever since. For example, my current apartment is somewhat bigger, but definitely not better and in no way clever or stylish.
So I finally began my life in New York in earnest somewhere around Thanksgiving, and therefore Thanksgiving often makes me think of New York, as has happened now.
I am always amused when people tell me they are preparing a turkey for Thanksgiving for the first time and very nervous about it. As if cooking a turkey is at all hard.
The very first serious dinner I cooked for myself was a Thanksgiving dinner. I realized that my apartment in New York had all these great cooking accoutrements, and one of the cookbooks was a book of traditional American recipes, including recipes for a Thanksgiving dinner. I saw small turkeys (really about the size of chickens) for sale at the grocery store around the corner, so the idea began from that. I planned out all my dishes and the timing of each so that everything would come out together.
The morning of Thanksgiving Day, I woke up early and started my day off with home-made blueberry pancakes. Then I went to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (and nearly froze my toes off. I had always thought that cold weather wouldn't be such a problem, because you could just bundle up, which is true, but you can't easily bundle up your feet!)
When it was time to prepare my Thanksgiving dinner, I got to work and everything came out outstandingly! I pretty much remember my whole menu, 34 years later. Turkey with chestnut stuffing, brown and wild rice, peas, sweet potato souffle, blueberry muffins (using up the rest of the blueberries I had gotten for the pancakes), wine, and homemade pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream.
And I have enjoyed cooking ever since.
Even though even now I think of myself as yearning for a rural existence, I understand that I am primarily an urban creature, especially liking what I think of as "central" cities such as New York or San Francisco (which Los Angeles is not--it is spread out for miles in every direction and has no real center). New York was a marvelously exciting place to live, although it did take a lot of energy. And for winter, it was exceedingly cold. There was a lot of trouble with the heat in that apartment and a lot of the time it didn't work at all (it was a radiator, getting its heat from the building's central furnace). Many a night I'd go to sleep with a glass of ice water by my bed and when I'd wake up in the morning, all of the ice would still be there in the glass, unmelted. But other than these problems, my apartment in New York was like a wonderful private eagle's nest up in the sky over Manhattan (even though it was only four floors up over on the upper west side). I could stay there in my cocoon and get whatever work done I wanted (I wrote a novel there...an unpublished one, but I had written a novel nevertheless), and yet night and day, whenever I wanted some excitement or distraction, I could descend out of my aerie and via subway or ferry, the whole city lay at my feet.
So many decades later, I still remember it in my blood and I still can feel a yearning for it. I was there, I was a New Yorker. And I have to remember that because of that, I can really make it anywhere.
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