Finding Apartment: 5
Jape led me to an apartment building down one of the umpteen narrow side streets in the West Village. I wished I’d left a trail of breadcrumbs for myself. How the two of us had arrived here, I hadn’t a clue.
The building itself wasn’t much to look at: beige and bunker-like. Very 1960’s-era utilitarian.
I hauled my nine thousand Duane Reade bags up the steps, trying to keep pace with Jape. No, he did not offer to assist, though he did stop every now and then to offer words of encouragement. “Almost there, old sport,” he said, his grand teeth flashing back at me over his shoulder.
The apartments I had viewed since arriving in New York were all a series of minor tragedies: deformed, rundown, always insanely overpriced. They were usually missing something significant, something essential, something that wasn’t necessarily evident at first glance. Case in point: there was the micro-studio in Murray Hill that I’d looked at the previous day. While I frantically filled out the application along with a dozen other people, all of us down on our hands and knees, writing out our names and addresses using stubby pencils like school children, all of us hoping to be the first to finish, someone asked the real estate agent where the apartment’s bathroom was.
The real estate agent matter-of-factly replied that there was no bathroom. “There’s no bathroom in the whole building?” someone asked. “Oh, there are bathrooms in some of the other apartments,” the cagey agent replied, “but this one doesn’t happen to have one.”
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He told us that if we got the apartment, we’d have to use the YMCA down the street to shower. In this moment I fully expected there to be a mass exodus. There wasn’t. Two people got up and left, leaving their paperwork behind. The rest of us — — including me — — continued to dutifully fill out the paperwork for this comically deficient apartment. Because that’s what New York does to you — — it makes you want things that are completely impractical, and only the luckiest of us, or perhaps the most doomed of us, ever get those things.
In comparison to the shoddy apartments I had been vying for, Jape’s apartment was basically the equivalent of the Taj Mahal. The space was a legit one-bedroom, complete with a full kitchen, small dining room (!), and, mercifully, its own private bathroom (!!). And then, to my surprise, I encountered what, at first glance, seemed to be another room. “What’s this back here…?” I asked.
Jape hit the switch on the wall. “I use this as an office,” he said. There was a paper-strewn desk, a desk chair draped with what appeared to be a dozen discarded Brooks Brothers jackets. “Though, as you can plainly see, I’m not getting all that much done at this point, old boy.”
I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. None of the apartments I had looked at since stepping off the bus at Port Authority offered any of these things, let alone all of these things, including a second bedroom/office. My hope was always to be a great writer in New York. Oh, I fully expected to suffer for a few years before I hit the big time. Seeing this desk, in its own separate room? It made me fantasize that maybe I could skip right over the suffering portion of my New York writerly life. I could write the great American novel here, I thought. I tried to catch my breath. “An apartment like this in the Village?” I said to Jape. “You must be paying a crazy rent.”
That’s when Jape made the most ridiculous claim of all: He told me that the price he was paying was around half (yes, half) of what the no-bathroom-micro-studio in Murray Hill was going for: Around $600 or so.
When he said this, I practically had to hold onto a nearby wall, to steady myself, to keep me and my nine thousand Duane Reade bags from keeling over.
“Look, old boy, I’m going to LA for a stretch of R & R,” Jape said. A nubile young actress, he explained, had invited him to join him on set of a major motion picture. “While I’m on the coast, why don’t you do a bit of house-sitting for me, old boy?” he said. Then he winked at me with one of his gray eyes. “Or, is that far too beneath your station in life?”
