Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut (8 page)

10

Dearest Apartment No. 5,

Some girls chart the chapters of their lives by jobs or guys or haircuts; I do it by real estate. You, no. 5, are inextricably linked to every memory I have from the mostly heinous fucking four years we spent together, but in the end, you were the one that built me back up from lonely twenty-four-year-old whimpering kvetch subsumed with worries about the Future. I arrived scarred and feeble and left you happy, relieved, and not roping up a noose. But we both know it wasn’t easy.

When we met, I was as maudlin as tattered Cosette in the
Les Miz
poster. I may as well’ve had a mop and actual shredded clothes, I was so down. Or, as Kit De Luca, the whore best friend in
Pretty Woman,
said, “Cinderfuckinrella.” I hoped in a new space I could turn my life around. You were way more charming than the other shitboxes I’d seen on my Tasmanian Devil whirlwind tour of way-too-expensive hovels that looked like Czech rat holes you’d crawl in to die. Your exposed brick and dreamy location near Central Park didn’t soothe my weary bones and battered emotions, though. That would take some time.

The hot Israeli movers came to pack me up from my downtown abode, which was a hipster gigantor luminous loft compared to you, my dark third-floor walk-up. Let’s admit it, my sweet, you were definitely a downgrade. The movers found me tearstained and sitting on a cardboard box, refugee-style.

“Breakup move?” one asked with a sympathetic look.

Whoa. ESP? “Mm-hmm,” I sniffled, wiping a hot errant tear.

“Don’t worry, honey, we do this all the time. You’re gonna be just fine.”

When I was fully moved in, my sitcom-style reverie of hot-neighbor sexual tension was dashed instantly: of the ten apartments, eight were occupied by single women. Grrrreat. Of the remaining two tenants, one was a family with three kids and the other lived behind a buzzer reading “Erlichman.” I held out hope for an NJB (Nice Jewish Boy), but he turned out to be an AARP-card carrier who told me his rent control had him paying $300 a month, compared to my nightmarish monthly ka-ching that was more than six times that.

“The landlord would love to see me go, but I got news for him,” he told me in the stairwell, which was adorned with horrifying pheasant-covered wallpaper. “They’ll be taking me outta here in my coffin.”

Good times!

Then the gal directly upstairs moved out (got married, migrated to the ’burbs) and in came cocaine-snorting, Moby-blaring Melanie, the town bicycle—and I mean every guy in New York had a ride. I didn’t know which was worse—the song “Bodyrock” playing on a loop, like seriously eleventy times in a row, or the bumping of her iron bed from the dick du jour pounding her.

Meanwhile, for normal non-druggie
moi,
there was
pas d’
action for a while. While I loved being out of a high-rise and into your intimate, cozier perch, the views of hand-holding couples squoze lemon juice on the wound of my singledom. The nights with you were very lonely sitting on an explosion of Pottery Barn, stuck with racing thoughts that stomped on top of each other, collage-like, inside my head. Would I die in this apartment alone? Like the dude upstairs, would they carry my lifeless bod down the walk-up steps?

If being alone with my thoughts got to be too unbearable, I would turn on my el cheapo crappy TV that was so small I might as well have been watching the rich yuppie across the street’s giant plasma flat-screen. That’s when I learned that four
a.m.
is the loneliest hour. Why do they show so many upsetting movies in the middle of the night? I remember watching
Jagged Edge
and
Single White
Female
alone, and somewhere around the time Jennifer Jason Leigh jams her stiletto through the guy’s eyeball socket into his brain and kills him, I thought to myself,
This might not be the best thing to watch all alone in the middle of the night.
I think deep down I wanted to take the plunge into my despair over my breakup and really feel the pain. And I did. I woke up with what Humbert Humbert called
pavor nocturnus
—complete and total, all-enveloping night panic. You know, heart pounding for no reason, cold sweats, racing brain, thoughts of spinsterhood.

There were two things that calmed me down: infomercials and my best friend, Vanessa. From midnight Chinese food Hoover-vac feasts to psycho long walks to endless phonefests into the wee hours, Vanessa was like the sister-slash-shrink I never had. I once saw a needlepoint pillow that said, “True friends are the ones you can call at 3:00
a.m.
,” and we all know needlepoint pillows don’t lie. During my loneliest, saddest hours of drop-the-toaster-oven-in-my-bubble-bath despair, I would dial her. I’d cry to her that I wished I could have a time machine, Michael J. Fox–style (minus the being-broken-and-needing-weapons-grade-plutonium part), so I could go back and be with my ex. I missed him, us, our life as a team.

Vanessa told me sternly that it was time to date—a guy wasn’t going to fly through my window while I was watching
Law & Order
marathons. I had to take control of my life and not whimper. And so began the dates from Hades.

There was one blind date who looked not unlike Danny DeVito. Buh-bye. Another had hands that were all palm—you know, huge palms the size of a slice of Wonder Bread, with short, stubby fingers like five pigs in blankets glued onto the Wonder Bread slice. Then there was a cute but way-too-snobby writer who snapped at me that my fidgeting with the Equal packets on the table was “really aggravating.” Another guy “would never set foot in Europe.”

Then, finally, a dream date with a sexy hipster rock critic—we laughed all night in a little café in the pre-chic Lower East Side and he said he’d had the best time and wanted to hang out the next evening. And then when I said I had tickets to a Billy Joel concert, he asked me if I was joking. And I said no, and then a mysterious headache came on and he said he had to go and I never heard from him again.

Then, about a year later, after a couple of failed mini-relationships, I really hit the nadir. For some reason all my best friends had boyfriends and I bitterly lamented the fact that I was utterly and completely alone. Except I wasn’t. I had roommates. Small, furry gray roommates.

The shrieks began when a
pavor nocturnus
fit woke me. Then I had that inner battle of do I deal with getting out of bed to pee or not? I tried go back to sleep but once I recognized my bladder, I had to eventually go. I was heading to the bathroom when I first saw a mouse. It darted across your two-by-two-foot kitchenette and I thought I was going to pass out. I tripped and fell, scraping my knee on the Pottery Barn sisal, not caring about the blood gushing out of my knee as much as the fact that I was living among Rodentia.

I called your owner and freaked. Her cold response? “Welcome to New York, kid.” I informed her I was from New York and never had four-legged squatters. She dispatched her exterminating company, Roachbusters, whose logo naturally was the Ghostbusters sign with a cockroach instead of Casper. Nice. Two weeks later, I could hear them still scampering. I called your owner again, saying perhaps if she had sent a company called Mousebusters, we wouldn’t have this problem. Eventually, thanks to mousetraps, which I had the pleasure of hearing snap in the night, the problem was solved.

But the mice forced me, more than anything else, to make plans for every single night. Gone were the dates with Orville Redenbacher and Time Warner cable—I had to leave to avoid other sightings. I literally made a voiced-out-loud pact with the mice that they could hang as long as I never saw or heard them and they shat under the sink.

So I started leaving you and going out. All the fucking time. If I didn’t have plans, I’d put on my earphones and just take crazy walks, I mean for miles and miles, à la Forrest Gump, minus the beard and retardation. And I started going to plays again, even by myself. One theatrical plunge was so therapeutic it began to take over my life. You must have wanted to shoot me for blaring
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
every second for a year. My friend Trip and I went to see the amazing musical in the West Village, and when we came out, I was singing the songs at the top of my lungs down Jane Street. He stopped and looked in my eyes.

“You’re back,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders. “We lost you there for a little while, but now you’re back.”

I burst into happy tears because deep down, I knew he was right. I hadn’t been fully myself in my previous relationship and I was finally returning to my kooky uncensored side, saying once-bleeped things like “cunt” or “cock gobbler.”

Then, as winter thawed, I continued to leave you; those long walks I was taking became longer walks—to Wall Street and back to Seventy-sixth, even round-trips to Brooklyn. So I thought I’d walk the New York City Marathon; why the hell not get a medal for this shit? So I did. Seeing as how I am the worst athlete ever to roam this earth (think JV volleyball benchwarmer), it was a true miracle that I finished it. I think it was some crazy challenge for myself and I knew I’d never do it again, but I had to do it once just to prove after nights and nights of lonely walks that I could actually leave you and go into the world. All five boroughs, to be exact.

My cute parents were freezing at the finish line, waiting for me complete with
go,
jill, go
!
signage, not realizing I’d finished way earlier than planned, so I staggered home alone in my silver cape thingy and, of course, my ribboned medal. I remember walking in and looking around your space. I was exhausted and could barely haul myself to the shower, but I felt so proud because, despite the fact that my body was near collapse, my head was strong.

A few months later, I was offered a blind date with a guy named Harry my grandma Ruth fixed me up with—he was the grandson of her friend Betty. My first thought was one word: Oy. And then: Not again. I had already been set up by my grandmother with another pal’s grandson, who showed up to our date with his boyfriend.

“I’m totally gay and my grandmother would drop dead if she knew,” he said apologetically, noticing I’d clearly spent all afternoon getting a mani-pedi and blowout. “But we’ll have a great dinner anyway.” And we did. But still. Another Nana fix-up?

After relaying this story to Betty, she assured me, “My Harry is straight!” Just what I needed, a dweeb who is such a power nerd he needs his nana for a fix-up with an NJG. But my life was so shtetl, because sure enough it was practically love at first sight for me. He was a beyond-adorable, scruffy nugget in his Harvard ski team pants (double whammy hotness factor of brains and balls), and after dinner we walked and talked and venue-hopped for hours. Finally at four
a.m.
he put me in a cab and gave me a kiss on the cheek, asking if we could have dinner again two nights later. Natch I said yes, beaming and giddy.

Unlike many nights coming home to you, I was elated. There had been so many evenings of dashed hopes after a supposedly fun party where I was in the back of the cab, hanging it up for the night, my only fun to be with
Saturday Night Live
upon my return.

But this time, as I put my key in your door, I heard the phone ringing. Huh? I ran up the stairs and saw the clock reading 4:17 as I picked up. “I just wanted to make sure you got home safe,” Harry said.