Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut (11 page)

13

To the Namer in Chief, Essie Nail Colors

Hello!

As a longtime fan of your shades o’ polish and their funny names, I thought I’d propose a few others, free of charge!

Petite and Perky

Bathing Beauty

Hamptons Hot Tub

Asspen

Backseat Blow Job

South Padre Island Orgy

Duplexxx

Stiletto’d Slut

Janie’s Got a Gun

Cock Gobbler

Virgin Vamp

Booze Cruise

Hummer Holly

Twilight Temptress

Battered Wife

Seductive Sally

Gstaad Roadwhore

Gondola Fondle

Sincerely yours,

Jill Kargman

14

Living in a fourth-floor walk-up with a small child is no easy feat. Now add some rodents and fraternity-boy neighbors and you can start to see what my first two years of motherhood were like. When the movers put the boxes down and left, Harry and I looked at each other over my swollen belly.

“Our first apartment as a family,” I said, looking at the fresh coat of pale yellow paint in the nursery for the baby whose sex we didn’t know yet. I know, so annoying. I hate when people do that now. “One day we’ll leave here and miss it . . .”

Wrong.

First off, let me explain that while it was a very nice location—Seventieth between Lex and Park—it was also the rat capital of New York, after Chinatown. As any Upper East Side dog owner who does late-night strolls will attest, the block is teeming. The Mellons’ garden? Undulating with bodies. The summer months, especially, are a carnival of crawlies, feasting on the refuse from Corrado bakery on the corner and the former falafel joint downstairs. (By the way, the falafel smell wafted to my pregnant nostrils, causing much upchuckage. As my dad says, it’s called falafel cause it makes you feel-awful.)

But lemme go back. We found the apartment not through a Realtor or even online but from a serial-killer-scrawled ad taped onto a phone booth. That’s right, a phone booth posting, back when there were phone booths, complete
avec
those scissor-sliced tabs you can rip off and call. It seemed too good to be true, a spacious full floor of a town house for a ridiculously bargain-basement price.

As we climbed up the steep stairs for the first time with the owner, we noticed that the third-floor apartment had full-on crime scene police tape covering the door.

“Whoa,” I said. “Was there, like, a dead body in there?”

The owner laughed. “Hahahaha! No, no, just some bad tenants who didn’t pay the rent and they’ve been evicted.”

“Oh, sheesh!” I replied. “Glad they’re out!”

After three months of no
Law & Order
tape removal I started to get a bit suspicious. One morning on the landing, I met the woman on the top floor, a lawyer who worked all the time, and asked her about the derelicts in arrears on the third floor.

“Um, is that what they told you?” she asked with a raised brow.

“What, about the people not paying and getting evicted?” I asked, confused.

“Yeah, no, that’s . . . not the real story.”

I decided to walk with her to the subway.

As it turns out, the people downstairs were not what had been described. The apartment was, in fact, a brothel. A full-on Upper East Side whorehouse filled with Eastern European hookers who serviced local guys.

“
W-what?
” I stammered.

“Oh yeah, I had my buzzer going all night long with drunk guys coming for a blow job. All these Fifth Avenue Wall Street types with three sleeping kids and the wife at home would say they were walking the poodle. I swear, some nights I’d come home and there were seven dogs tied to the banister pissing themselves while Daddy got head upstairs.”

See, you can’t write this shit. I was obsessed. As it turns out, fiber-optic cables had been installed to observe the operation and after a while there was a full police raid complete with handcuffing of Svetlanas and their johns. My neighbor said she and her teenage kids looked aghast from their fifth-floor window as the drama went down and half-naked girls—literally wearing boas—were led into waiting cars.

Then she dropped the bomb: our landlord was also indicted. He was in on the whole thing. In the coming weeks a police document was taped on the front door. My neighbor and I took it down and read it, jaws on floor. The state seized the space (which is why there was the police tape) and served the owner with a packet of countless charges. The packet included the price list: $800 for sex, $600 for a beedge. We were giggling but I was horrified.

I gave birth to Sadie a few months later, and as if I wasn’t getting little enough sleep already, we got our first three
a.m.
horndog buzzer the one time she appeared to be sleeping.

“Hi, the password is four-one-one,” a male voice slurred.

“Excuse me?” I yelled into the intercom, heart pounding.

“The password. It’s four-one-one. I wanna see Josie.”

“Oh fuck,” I said to Harry. “It’s a john.” He ran to the window, where you could see whomever was on the stoop.

“Holy shit, he’s wearing a tuxedo,” Harry said. “The bow tie’s untied. And he’s wearing a wedding ring!”

I pressed the button to talk to our late-night ’truder.

“Let me tell you something,” I said. “I’ve got the four-one-one for you. Josie’s gone, so go back to your wife!”

We looked at each other, eyes wide, and I ran to the window. We watched him grumble disappointedly down the steps back toward Park Avenue.

Two weeks later, I heard some commotion downstairs. I took Sadie on my hip to scope the sitch. Two guys were cutting the bolts on the door to the brothel and opening it up. Somehow the landlords paid whatever fine had been levied and wriggled out of the charges. Now they were getting ready to redo the whole apartment and get some new tenants to cough up cash for them.

I looked in the doorway. It looked like some kind of Italian bordello: lavender paint, a velvet rococo settee, and a coffee table with
Jugs
magazines spread on it.

“Can I check this out?” I asked the contractor. “I’m obsessed.”

“Sure,” he said with a shrug.

I walked in and saw they’d set up each of the four bedrooms as a series of stalls with twin beds. On each headboard were scarves tied onto the posts and the bedspreads were cheesy pastel rumpled linens. I almost gagged thinking people were streaming in getting their rocks off next to other pairs on the other sides of the flimsy screens that separated the stalls.
So
gross. I mean, couldn’t they hear the other people’s moans and sighs? Vom.

I left within thirty seconds and needed to loofah my entire body. I felt so disgusting I couldn’t deal. But over the next few weeks the whole place was dismantled. The furniture was removed, an industrial cleaning crew came in, and the whole floor was given a gleaming-white fresh coat of paint. When brokers began showing it, I asked to take a peek. I was astonished to find it was gorgeous. The once purple moldings now looked beautiful and they had way higher ceilings than we did.
Maybe we should move in,
I thought.
It would be kind of fun to live in a place with such a storied past.

But it was too much of an effort—I mean, packing and unpacking is the world’s biggest hassle; whether you’re moving across town or downstairs, the headache is the same. So we opted to stay put.

Then the frat boys moved in. Four roommates, all analysts on Wall Street. They slaved during the week and then went fucking shithouse on the weekend. They rolled kegs up the stairs and threw ragers that went until dawn.

One afternoon, I knocked on the door and tried to make nice with the sweet Tom Hanks–y one who had a serious girlfriend in Texas and was the mensch of the gang. I explained we had a baby and if he could please keep it down we’d be so so grateful. On my way out, I smiled and said, “You know the story about this apartment, right?”

They hadn’t heard. I then regaled them with the whole history. There was a lot of high-fiving as if they could make a huge deposit into their spank banks if they were privy to what had gone on in there. If only their exposed brick walls could talk.

But our little bonding sesh didn’t help with the nice neighbor thing. They were so dickish, in particular the bitter schmuck named Matt who played guitar (badly) for his gal pals, whom I spied starting their walks of shame as I left for my morning coffee with the BabyBjörn.

The last straw was the Middle Eastern joint downstairs. When our landlord let them move in (after promising on our tour that the space would definitely not be rented to a food place) it was during the summer months when I was still pregnant. Now the next summer’s heat was upon us and ’twas the season for rats.

The first summer they were open they were relatively clean (though the stench sickened me), but as the months passed they became increasingly cavalier about chucking their waste on the street outside in poorly tied bags. Soon the critters came. Tons. And they made their way into our building. One day, I came downstairs with a bag of Code Brown diapers and opened the garbage room door. There, staring at me and my Björned baby, was a cat-sized rat. The tail alone must’ve been eight inches. I screamed so loud Sadie burst into tears and I ran outside hyperventilating. That night, I announced to Harry that we were out of there.

We packed up and headed for the place that’s now our home. But we know it was folly to think we’d miss our old haunt where we brought Sadie home from the hospital. I drive by now, wondering who lives there, wondering if, on occasion, a penguin-suited drunk buzzes for a BJ or if they spy the occasional rat despite the falafel store’s exodus (it now houses a fancy jewelry store). I’d love to meet them and tell them what went down, share with them the story of their nondescript New York apartment. Maybe one day they’ll get the 411.