Well, I’m still not there!
Long story short, the NYC Department of Buildings is a pretty foul
organization. The landlord had to get
three separate building permits, each of which took 2-3 months to be approved,
and during which time no work was allowed on the house. More than anything, the house laid dormant
for most of the past year, with weeks-long fits of construction activity,
followed by two months of waiting for the next permit to be finalized.
I haven’t been back there since late March, at which time I
was bagging up all my belongings as the decision was made to take down and
replace the walls and ceiling in my place.
I guess it was within the budget, and I can’t get mad at anyone for that
as it made sense. The last permit was
approved in early June, and I’m gathering this should all be wrapping up in the
next month or so.
I wish I had known it was going to take this long! I don’t think anyone did. I can still recall the landlord’s daughter
telling me, “We should have you and the upstairs tenant in by Christmas, and my
mother by Easter.” The original concept
being they’d first fix these much-less damaged apartments and then go in for
the big fix on the ground-floor apartment where the fire was. (Mostly the back extension where the kitchen
was … there was only smoke and water damage on the rest of that floor. Admittedly, every time I’d been in the house,
the stench from the completely-burned extension was hard to handle.)
But then it changed to refurbishing the whole house, floor
by floor, rewiring the electrical and moving the motherboard up to my
landlord’s apartment, re-doing the plumbing as they noticed it could use some
work. And that’s when it became a
multiple-permit, year-long endeavor as opposed to a project occurring in stages
with people moving back in as each floor became livable. I gather the entire extension was torn down
and rebuilt.
The house should be in top shape when it’s done. The wiring, especially, was a constant worry,
and what caused the fire to begin with.
Every time I plugged something into an outlet, I half-expected a popping
sound and burst of smoke. Not a good
feeling! But also new refrigerator, new
walls, ceiling, maybe even flooring, essentially a rebuilt house.
Life has surely gone on, albeit strangely. You learn a lot about yourself when you
reduce your possessions to clothing, a comfy lawn chair, a wire-frame, roll-out
bed, cooking utensils, a laptop with a broadband USB connection, an iPod and a
Kindle. I learned that air mattresses,
while comfortable, aren’t made to use for indefinite periods of time. The two I bought went pffft after about two
months, although that might have been my fault for routinely putting in too
much air. The roll-out bed that the
landlord’s daughter gave me shortly thereafter, while no frills, has worked out
fine, although it makes me feel like an inmate sleeping on it.
I’ve realized that so long as I can listen to music, watch
DVDs, get on the web at night, read books and exercise … life is fine. This is pretty much what I did in
Astoria! It’s pretty much what I’d do
anywhere. And go out to eat at local
eateries. Shop at local stores. Do a lot of walking. As I’ve mentioned previously, most people I
know in the NYC area are spread out, so it’s not a matter of being ripped from
my old neighborhood … as I had originally felt.
At first it was unsettling to realize my surroundings were this
inter-changeable. But it dawned on me
that this makes sense. My life as an
adult isn’t based so much on where I live as on how I choose to live it. Once that realization sunk in , probably
around Christmas, I started feeling like a normal human being again, just one
thrown into a strange circumstance that he had to roll with and see where it
went. That day, I got my ass out to Bed
Bath & Beyond, bought their over-priced cookware to make up some chili, and
got off that asshole “college kid in a dorm room” diet of Hot Pockets, Ramen
and canned soup.
Would I do it differently if I could go back? Hell, yes.
Get one of my recliners, my mattress and my TV/cable box. Life without TV? I’m not here to lecture you on how much
better it is. It’s really no better or
worse. When I’m around TV now, like when
I go back to PA for a routine visit, I don’t go insane watching everything for
hours. I’ve missed TV mainly for sports,
but have come to realize, most times I have it on, it’s just sort of on, and
I’m watching to pass the time. A force
of habit more than anything. I’ll need
to think about exactly how I want to have cable internet and TV in my life when
I get back, as the internet hook-up is essential, but I’m no longer so sure
about TV. The monthly bill for both was
creeping up to $120, which was grating on me something terrible before all this
happened.
About the only thing that makes me feel strange living out
where NYC fades into Long Island is walking … and how alien that simple
function is to the vast majority of people who live out there. Nobody walks out there. Anywhere.
Walking three miles back from the gym on a Sunday afternoon? Or a few miles home after getting off the bus
early on the Union Turnpike so I can get in a workout? You’d have to be a lunatic to do these things
to judge by how people react when I tell them this. Or a Sikh!
Those are the only people I see walking for exercise, old Sikh couples
who nod and say hello whenever we cross paths.
(For the uninitiated, Long Island and the far edges of Queens have seen
a tremendous influx of Indian immigrants over the past few decades.)
The suburbs of NYC are heavy car cultures, as everything is
more spread out. As a result, the concept
of pedestrians walking to the laundromat or supermarket – things that are
normal in any NYC neighborhood – are viewed as laughable anomalies by most
people with that suburban mindset. The
pain of it being their communities are perfectly geared to handle this. You’ll find mile after mile of sidewalks that
are wide, unbroken and immaculate. That
walk from the gym, between towns, is along a rural/suburban four-lane highway
with a paved walking path recessed about 10 yards from the road. My weekend five-mile run skirts a major
roadway, then a few huge hospital parking lots, then two industrial parks with
no traffic so that I’m essentially running without stopping the same way I
would in the country.
Yet people in cars gaze at me as if I’m in a Satan costume
when they see me walking by the side of the road. I’ve made that afternoon walk without seeing
another soul, a few dozen times, in perfect weather. There are more people riding bikes, but
seeing them is almost as rare as seeing pedestrians. You need a Texas-sized set of balls to ride a
bike in the suburbs of New York. So many
car drivers have no respect for anyone else on the road. Bikers?
The smart ones I’ve seen travel in small groups, so they’re less likely
to be hit-and-run. If I’m not mistaken,
most highways in that part of New York, be it the city or surrounding suburbs, have
speed limits of 35 mph, surely no more than 45.
Yet I’m constantly seeing cars doing well over 55 mph. And walking over glittering pools of broken car
window glass in so many intersections.
It’s a ramped-up way of life out there that extends beyond
how people drive. With no hope of ever
ramping back down. The odd thing is
people are ramped up so they can try to relax: a self-defeating way of life. You can’t relax when a good part of your day
is spent seeing other people as necessary evils you need to dominate in some
sense, whether we’re talking some guy in an SUV on the Northern Parkway, or
your neighbor turning his humble bungalow into a grotesque three-story fortress
that takes up every inch of his property.
Which is not my problem. I can’t
relax if I’m overly concerned with all this extraneous bullshit, so I’ve
learned to let it go as much as I can.
Can’t single out Long Island for that – it’s all over, not just New York
City, pretty much everywhere I go these days.
That’s the main thing I’ve learned living out there. My way of life is no better or worse … simply
geared towards less consumption, less material wealth, more mental and physical
well being. No sense of false
superiority … just an urge to simplify my life as much as possible. Which is wildly out of place with the general
consensus, but I’m sure everyone out there has something in their lives that’s
just as out of step with everyone else. I
do get a sense of the city falling away when I get on that Union Turnpike bus
and take it a few miles farther out to the edge of Queens. It’s much more quiet at night, a little
cooler. Less people along the road? Shit, NO people along the road! They’re all in their houses or driving like
lunatics to get from local retail establishments back to their houses. Where they bolt the door and fire up the
cable TV.
Neighbors don’t talk to each other as much I’d think they
would. Again, same story in
Astoria. Same story in rural
Pennsylvania. There are certain
neighbors you really get along with and make a point of saying hello to when
you see them. But it seem like the whole
point of living in a house is to separate yourself from everyone else, to have
this calm little oasis you can call your own, hell, even if you’re only
renting. I can’t bemoan any “loss of
community” because I haven’t really felt that since I was a kid in the
70s. When I go back to PA, I don’t talk
to most of the neighbors unless I see them on the street.
That sense of “stoop sitting because no one has air
conditioning” that so many older New Yorkers are fond of recollecting … man,
long before my time. About the only
situation I’ve had like this out there was the time the landlord inadvertently turned
off the sewage pump to the house, thus causing a minor shit-water flood in my
place, that surely provided for an angst-ridden few hours. But when I got home from work that night, she
had contacted a coworker who was also the super of his building in
Astoria. He had immediately diagnosed
the problem, helped with the minor clean-up, and we sat around the backyard
afterwards having a few Coronas while he regaled us with “building super”
stories of finding days-old corpses and being left with valuable antiques and
such because relative never came by to pick up possessions left behind by dead
and missing tenants. That was nice and
reminded me what it’s like to have a few beers in the backyard in the summer,
as opposed to scurrying home and closing the door on the world.
This is why people go to bars. This is why I go to bars! Or restaurants, to catch up with old friends
on occasion. It used to be my life was
filled with these sort of engagements, but I noticed this in my 30s, everyone gets
so spread out, and involved with their own lives, that these meetings spread
themselves out accordingly as opposed to happening all the time. I guess I could force these things, but they’d
feel just like that, forced.
Whatever I’ve learned the past year in that regard, I’ve
been learning all along, and the lessons really had little to do with the
fire. What I learned from the fire? Simply that the possibility of you being here
one moment and gone the next is ever present.
And this doesn’t compel you to jump from air planes or visit Tibet or
call up old flames and read them the riot act.
You just sort of quietly grasp this quality of life and go on living,
knowing that you could wake up one night to a wall of smoke and flames, and
that might be all she wrote. What can
you do in the face of that, but go on living, not with any sort of vengeance or
new-found knowledge, but with the understanding that we’re all living on
borrowed time.
I don’t think that should be depressing or have any more
depth than the same way you notice a bird outside your window, or how much
cooler the mornings are come late August.
The defining characteristic of adulthood is an understanding of
death. What we have now is too many
people who cling to their youths and that mind-set for decades into their
adulthood, rather than moving with the tide and knowing that every wave expires
on the shore. Horror movies are
effective because they play on a childlike/teenage fear of death, and it only
makes sense to be afraid when you’re that age, because it’s all laid out in
front of you, waiting to happen.
But halfway through? You
had better come to terms with this thing.
Because you will see it happening to your parents, your relatives, and
even a few friends as you go along.
Nearly happened to me one night this time last year! It makes you hard in ways that you were meant
to be hard. And it opens you up in a
strange way because you realize that ultimately you have no defense, you can
only fight so much, because in the end, everyone goes. That might be the only thing I learned from
the fire, and it’s an ongoing lesson that first truly registered with Dad’s
passing a few years ago. I’ve always
appreciated life, but sooner or later, you need to appreciate death. And see it clearly sometimes, like your
shadow.
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