New York City living

My first apartment was probably the best apartment, all things considered. It was right around the corner from my parents’ house, the second floor of a two-story, two-family brick house. The apartment was described as a two-bedroom, but it really only had one usable bedroom, a tiny “sewing room,” and another room that could be used as a den or something. That last room opened out onto a nice patio which looked onto the roof of a pocket protector factory and the backyard of a local dive bar. It had a lot of windows; the front of the house was an almost solid wall of glass. The whole place was newly-carpeted, had a large living room and dining room, and a full bathroom.

I shared the place with a friend of mine from the neighborhood. We got along well with the landlord and his family instantly, and we were able to talk him down two-hundred bucks in rent. I don’t know why they liked us so much, since we treated the apartment like a frat house. The local dive bar became our second living room, and my roommate and I would spend four or five nights a week down there. Sometimes, we’d go in on a Saturday afternoon and stay until closing. My roommate was able to get us a glass top dining room table, which was mainly used to break up weed. The front of the house looked onto a corner that had a twenty-four hour deli and the local bus stop, and sometimes my roommate would shoot paintballs or throw eggs at people waiting for the bus. Even though the rent was incredibly low, we moved a third friend in about six months after we started living there. He took the den room. We were a bunch of guys in our early twenties living behind a bar, and it was a pretty good time altogether. Eventually, my first roommate started to get fucked up on drugs, and the guy living in the den and I decided to strike out and get another place after about a year and a half.

The second apartment I lived in was a real dump. We took on another roommate, a round, little man that looked a lot like the “time to make the doughnuts” guy from the old Dunkin Donuts commercials. This place was billed as a three-bedroom garden apartment, but it was really the basement of an apartment building in a Queens neighborhood called Sunnyside. The rooms were big, and there was a backyard strewn with garbage, but the living room was separated from the building’s boiler room by a thin door and the place had cockroaches. Not those little, innocuous cockroaches, either, but cockroaches you could strap to the bottom of your feet and skate around on. The hot water would sometimes come out completely scalding, and in fact an upstairs neighbor successfully sued the building manager when his handicapped son was severely burned. One night, the three of us went out to see a movie, and when we came back we discovered our place had been robbed. One weekend, the boiler died and it was so cold indoors that you could see your breath; I had two frogs and a fish in a twenty-gallon tank that died as a result. Also, the Dunkin Donuts guy was a real whiny bitch, which was actually the second most unpleasant thing about the situation.

The first most unpleasant thing about this apartment was that, about six or seven months into living there, the side and back yard would fill up with sewer water and create a kind of shit moat around the building. I remember that I didn’t want to believe that the sewer was backing up into my yard, and I pretended it was “laundry water,” which makes no sense at all. One couldn’t deny the turds and toilet paper and steam rising from this stinky pond, however, and once this happened, preparations to move began again. The Dunkin Donuts guy went his own way, and my original roommate and I went to a real estate agent, determined to live in a decent place. The best thing about the apartment in Sunnyside was that it was half a block from the subway, and, from that point on, proximity to the subway was a major consideration in getting an apartment.

We got a decent one-bedroom in Astoria, Queens, just on the southern side of the Grand Central Parkway. It was on the first floor of a decent four-story apartment building, which was part of a larger complex of four-story apartment buildings. My roommate took the living room, and outfitted it with a false wall for privacy. The apartment was okay, not great, but miles ahead of where we had lived in Sunnyside. To my memory, we never had any problems that weren’t taken care of in a reasonable amount of time. The kitchen was pretty large, and the bathroom was decent. I only lived there with my roommate for about four months, though, then he moved on for a variety of personal reasons. I moved my girlfriend in, and she helped to make it very cozy. We stayed there for two years, I believe, then we decided to move on to another, larger apartment.

We used craigslist this time, and to great effect. We were able to get a two-bedroom apartment about ten blocks away, the second floor of a small townhouse, with utilities included, and a driveway space and backyard. The landlady was taken with us immediately, being that we were a young white couple, and my girlfriend and I didn’t have to have credit checks or anything. It came with a brand-new air conditioner and a very large eat-in kitchen. The drawback here was that the landlady and her nephew seemed to feel that they could come into the apartment at any time for whatever reason, which perturbed me and drove my girlfriend berserk. I lived there for about a year and a half, then we split up and I looked to move back closer to where I had previously been in Astoria.

A friend of mine was doing real estate in the neighborhood, and after a few places, he eventually got me a very cheap basement apartment with a backyard, right off a major thoroughfare in the neighborhood. I was dead against taking another basement apartment, but as time went on, I was getting desperate for a place, and this one was pretty big and right where I wanted to live. Ultimately, it was a big mistake. I quickly learned that I had no desire or ability to take care of a backyard, and the place was always damp with periodic cockroach sightings. The bathroom was tiny—so tiny, in fact, that the sink was in the shower stall—and it had no ventilation to speak of. The windows were larger than casement windows, and so it got a lot of light, for a basement, but that only highlighted the fact that the place sucked. After a few floods caused by inordinately heavy rain, I determined it was time to move.

Which brings me to my new place, about five blocks away from where I live now: a clean, sunny one-bedroom on the first floor of a small, three-story apartment building. The rooms, including the kitchen, are very large, and the bathroom is reasonably updated. It has a bathtub, a sink outside of the shower, and, best of all, a window. I’d like to think that after five apartments, I’ve figured out where and how I like to live, but I know that I’ll eventually move from this new apartment to another one, maybe to a bigger and better place in another neighborhood. This is New York City, after all. You don’t take space, you only rent it.