Moving Around Moving Around In 1985, I ...

In 1985, I moved to New York and stayed at International House on 125th and Claremont. I lived in an eight-by-ten room with a bathroom down the hall, just so I didn't have to deal with any crazy roommates. I was near Grant's Tomb and just a short walk to Columbia, where I was attending graduate school, but all too far away from downtown. The other students would drink beer in drab bars and host dinner parties I was usually not invited to, so I'd brave it and go to the old Palladium, which was near Union Square, or the Limelight.

One night I brought home a pretty stupid kid from the Limelight, reading more into his punk outfit than he was ever able to embody. He later tried to get into International House and find me, but the feisty door guy, Marshall, wouldn't let him in. I'd frequently try to engage Marshall in conversation because he was so obviously gay and I missed San Francisco so much, but the stalking incident didn't reflect well on me.

After a year in the boondocks I stayed in a friend's apartment for a couple of months right across from the building I live in now, 2nd St. between Avenues A and B. Back then, I slept under a blinking Schlitz sign, but was so scared of the block that I scuttled around rapidly and fearfully. Now, of course, that same block is littered with wine bars?no more guys mumbling "works, works" at the corner of 2nd and B?and I aspire to be the scary one. My friend Alexis, visiting from L.A., certainly rattled them by imperiously sending back a bottle of wine as I watched admiringly.

My British grandmother, Nanny, used to live on that block, but moved to fixed-income housing between C and D, where she ran around at all hours in crooked wigs and jarringly bright outfits from the St. Emerick's quonset hut thrift store. She liked to feed the stray cats in the then-abandoned lots of Avenue C, and collected a few for herself. I remember her even using cat food tins to cook muffins in. Nobody fucked with her. When she died, they hauled out hundreds of garbage bags of weird knickknacks, and I moved right on in.

I'd try to take three-dollar cab rides to avoid the dicey stretch from Avenue B to C, but they often wouldn't take me. "Why do you want to go there?" they'd ask suspiciously. Sometimes, on that danger block, you'd see guys getting dragged out of their cars, yelling for help that would never arrive, hear that awful thump of a beating. My visiting paramours, walking down to see me late at night, usually got pelted with eggs or held up at knifepoint.

My terrace on 10th St. faced the ConEd plant, and also looked over the basketball courts and pool on Avenue D, so I'd sit there, sleepless, watching sweaty midnight games or hearing rowdy splashers from the pool I only dared go into in the day. Still, it wasn't too loud late at night. At around 3 a.m. or so I'd hear a gunshot, a scream and sirens, and it was over. There wasn't a lot of room for any noisy bickering, no whoops from drunks suddenly feeling free in a neighborhood far from home?even the drunks weren't foolish enough to go down that far.

For a couple of months in the early 90s, I stayed in this masochist's apartment near Prospect Park, watching over his meticulously organized porn collection in a building that smelled like old people. The residents actually talked to me, which made me realize how alienating my other life was. When I returned to 10th St. I felt weighed down by the ConEd plant, the power lines, my black snot, the battered wife across the hall and the cheap crap I'd accumulated, so I moved to N. 4th St. in Williamsburg, back before there were five places to get lattes. I liked getting off the L train to that quieter place, but there was no heat or hot water; Brooklyn landlords get away with more, but in this case it was a moody widow who'd inherited a building with a rundown boiler and just didn't give a damn.

When I was on the verge of being homeless, in about 1996, a kind woman in a writing workshop at the Nuyorican got me a spot in a low-income co-op, back on old 2nd St. It's crooked and overheated and so cheap I can never move. For entertainment, I go to the Parkside Lounge at Houston and Attorney on Fridays for free jazz salsa; Collective Unconscious on Ludlow on Wednesdays and Sundays is three dollars. I loiter at the Bowery Poetry Club, bother the doorman at Sin-é, walk Key Food at 2 a.m., visit Chutney on Houston and A for a dollar cup of steaming hot chai at 4 a.m. I always make it a point to ignore the surly counterperson while I peruse the papers of the day.