Holland Tunnel (part 01)

part 01: can i live with you?

When I returned to New York City in 2003, only my skeleton arrived.

After a drawn-out breakup, two apartments, dwindling savings, and eighteen months of celibate monogamy, solo drug use and isolated art experimentation had burned away my nerves, city-life muscle, baby fat, and most of my ego. But somewhere in Florida's hot and angry rot, I found the thread of stories I wanted to tell, art I wanted to make… though neither path nor market existed for me down there.

So with the last of my savings, I copped a one-way ticket – always returning like a beaten dog – back to New York.

The cab driver who picked me up at JFK ignored my attempts to small-talk, silently farting at me with his windows up until I shut up and covered my face with my beanie. With my cat carrier in my lap, the grays and browns and blues of the Belt Parkway rushed past outside like an angry river. My fingers stroked Wedge’s chin inside his carrier. He purred and grumbled, needing a litter box and some fresh water.

The yellow cab stopped at the corner, right on Kings Highway in Midwood. This was deep Brooklyn. Real Brooklyn.

TAXI DRIVER: Here good?

ME: I dunno, boss... I gave you the address. I’ve never been here before.

He made eye contact with me in the rear-view mirror and farted again as he hunched over the steering wheel to squint at house numbers.

TAXI DRIVER: I don’t see… three… zero… one… okay. That one down there… three one seven.

He idled out front long enough for me to step out into the pouring rain with my cat and duffle bag before pumping the gas and splashing black mud across my pants. I took my Nokia out of my pocket, scrolled down to “Pickles” and thumbed in: IM HERE.

My brother came out: big smile, arms wide, eyes holding an unhidden tinge of pity. He threw his arms around me and we hugged for a long time.

PICKLES: Don’t worry about anything. You’re welcome to crash here as long as you need.

In his arms, I nodded, bruised and seasick. I had less than 30 bucks left.

++++

Pickles led me into the vestibule and closed it, sandwiching the three of us between rattling windows until he could fiddle his keys into the lock again. He beckoned me up carpeted stairs; apparently, he had the whole second floor of this house to himself. His landlady was a woman he’d met on a dating site; they didn’t vibe that way but remained friends, and she came through for him when he posted about needing a cheap place to live himself.

Inside, his place was messy but cozy. He led me through the living room – both of us stepping around stacks of plays and comics and tchotchkes spilling off every surface, an orange GameCube plugged into an ancient color TV, empty boxes of Pop-Tarts and Ritz crackers – to an open door next to the window.

PICKLES: This is you. It’s not big, but it has its own door for privacy and a window that opens. There’s an air mattress, sheets, towels in there already.

ME: Thank you, Pickles. Seriously.

I peeked inside; it was… really tiny. The sheets were folded on top of a tiny wooden bookshelf adorned with 1980s puffy unicorn stickers and faded Garbage Pail Kids.

PICKLES: It was originally a baby’s room. So, you know, it’s crib-sized.

Me and my 30 bucks couldn’t complain. I inflated the air mattress. It more than covered the entire floor, curling up the room’s walls and I was grateful. My cheeks burning from blowing up the goddamn thing, I stretched mismatched sheets over it and lied down with Wedge curled into me. Immediately it hurt my back: a quarter-sized circle of my single ass cheek bore my entire body weight on the linoleum tile. 

But we were grateful, and slept.

++++

I hadn't realized until I woke up that the next day was a Saturday. We had the late summer weekend together to goof around on Kings Highway. Pickles showed me his favorite spots in the neighborhood: the late-night pizza/boureka/shakshuka shop, the expansive Russian-Polish supermarket with a smoked fish counter you could smell a block away, the century-old bagel shop underneath the subway tracks, the sneaker shop filled day-and-night with shady Russian teenagers that was definitely not a front for something else.

Pickles and I had lived together as adults in Brooklyn before – we’d shared a house in Park Slope before I moved back to Miami – and we instantly locked right back into that groove again, like my eighteen months rotting in the sun had never happened. Except I had learned new skills, found a different voice… but in order to get there, I’d had to traverse the darkest places inside myself, and the queasy gut-churn of I AM STILL NOT OKAY was always watching from the shadows, sitting on its hands while I wobbled back into my old life like a baby deer, on new and uncertain legs.

But I knew this: I had to keep moving to get steady again. 

++++

Also, I needed money to live. I just couldn't leech off my brother’s kindness. I maintained connections at a few temp agencies that sent me out on occasional day-gigs, usually on the nine-to-five grind. I’d shave my face, wear a blazer and tie, pass myself off as human. Because I had corporate graphic design experience, a few weeks later I bagged a second shift “permalance” position at a Midtown Manhattan law office, designing PowerPoint decks and logos from 5 pm till 1 am. And just like that, I went back to “vampire temping” – working all night and sleeping during the daylight.

This job, however, didn’t offer a driver to take me home at the end of my shift. Riding the Q train back to Midwood already took an hour, but the MTA had long-term service interruptions forcing you to exit the subway, pile into a city bus above-ground with the other late-night zombies, and ride a mile or two to a different subway station before going back underground to get home.

On my way home around 4 am, I’d pass construction workers and police officers heading to work. I’d carefully unlock the front door of Pickles’ house, hold my breath in the vestibule, tip-toe past the landlady’s door and up the creaky stairs until I made it back into baby’s room, just to break my spine all over again on that air mattress. 

One August day, I’d picked up a daytime shift at the law office – I jumped at any chance for extra cash – when all the power went out. Not just in our section, not even the whole building, but all of Manhattan, New York City, the entire eastern seaboard. Everyone was afraid it was another terrorist attack. Work stopped and everyone waited, unable to take the elevator 38 flights downstairs and go home, relying solely on text messages from friends and family to learn what was going on. But I said FUCK THAT, packed up my bag, and stomped as fast as I could down dozens of flights, bursting out into what became a mass skyscraper exodus from Midtown.

Everyone on the street was ready for explosions, death; we’d all been primed for this two years earlier when the World Trade Center fell. When it was revealed as just a “massive multi-state electric grid failure,” everybody cut loose and it turned into the biggest block party in the country. We – all of us New Yorkers – walked home, en masse. Drinking, flirting, laughing, the summer sun slowly turning everything to honey. My own path from Midtown to Midwood took all day and well into a dark night where the city was lit only by cars’ headlights and candles. It was a magical blast: the complete inverse of 9-11’s mortal shock, still one of my favorite-ever days as a New Yorker. But by the time I hit Kings Highway, I was walking on squishing burst blisters and raw skin.

And I knew then: I didn’t want to live that far from the action anymore. I couldn’t keep imposing on my brother’s space. I’d had a couple months of rent saved up. It was time to move out of the baby’s room and find a proper place to live.

++++

Anyone who’s lived in the city knows that last sentence is a whole other full-time job. While working 40-hour weeks, I was doing apartment research and booking viewing appointments while on the clock, even taking extra-long lunches to see places near work. My morning began with afternoon viewings, and after-work for me was early morning for civilians, and so I wound up meeting potential roommates at weird hours every day of the week, all over the city.

These folks were consistently either creepy, or the room they offered was overpriced or sad, or my gender/orientation/cat ownership was the dealbreaker. As weeks of this dragged on, my search parameters got looser, the quality bar lower, the price I’d pay higher. Honestly, I blame the fucking air mattress.

Then one morning, I saw a Craigslist ad to share a two-bedroom all the way west on Canal Street, next to the Holland Tunnel. A great location, the right price, cat-friendly, a private room. The ad said “Call Shane.” A nice, gender-nonspecific name. I called Shane. No one answered. I texted the number and Shane wrote back immediately.

SHANE: yea cool come by whenever

ME: hmmm i work nights but really want to see your place

SHANE: what time u get off ??

ME: 3am 

SHANE: ill be up u can come see it then

ME: ok…

++++

Exiting the Canal Street 1/9 station at 3 am, I walked straight into wind whipping across the Hudson River. Summer was dying quickly; tonight was the first real crisp weather of the year. My eyes stung, tearing up as I crossed West Broadway, but I wondered if these tears were the wind or total emotional exhaustion.

I felt like I’d been floundering for a while, a few years at least. My spirit needed to sit still and breathe, with solid, consistent earth beneath my feet for a minute. My eighteen months in Florida left me disconnected from everyone and everything, even being back in my city. Life as a vampire temp didn’t exactly help.

I found the address and my feet stopped on their own in front of a crumbling red brick building, one in from the corner. It was taller than the corner building, which had a mega-watt electric billboard on its third-story roof that threw moving colored shadows across the street. I stood there underneath it, swimming in a sickly blue commercial for Manhattan Mini Storage. Shane’s building had a steel door, beaten-to-shit, covered in paint-marker tags and stickers. I was about to knock on it when it opened a crack.

A thin line of light beamed out onto the sidewalk. Within it: a slice of an exposed brick wall and a shadow with a top-lit blonde mop. One blue eye peeked out:

SHANE: You must be… “Daniel,” right? You’re right on time.

When I nodded, forcing a smile, he giggled, high-pitched but full-throated. Then he kicked the metal door open with his heel, sweeping it across the sidewalk like a medieval weapon. I jumped back; it just missed me. Shane then leaned against the door frame on a bare elbow like a Parisian hooker. From the skin folding in around his perma-stoned eyes, I guesstimated he was in his mid-fifties: stringy shoulder-length blond hair, pajama bottoms with dirty tube socks and flip-flops, a children’s Ninja Turtles tee that left his fluffy belly bare.

SHANE (with a wink): You coming up, or what? 

Now I’d seen dozens of apartments these last few weeks – I’d met a forgotten old Broadway singer, two firemen who’d left their wives to be together, a dominatrix whose landlady jacked up the rent to force her out, a hive of queer assistant book editors – but I’d never met a Shane. I wasn’t even sure what a Shane was: his energy threw me because he acted like we’d already agreed that I’d be his roommate, that this was just a formality.

He turned to walk up the stairs and I followed. The metal door banged shut behind me like a bomb. Inside the exposed brick stairwell was stifling hot, scented with a hint of Shane’s sour sweat. I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, wondering what the fuck was I doing, even stepping inside that building with this dude at three o’clock in the morning. Was this my last night on earth? But I knew: I couldn’t keep going like this. I needed a place – a tiny fucking room – to call my own. As he rounded the first set of stairs, the recessed light in the stairwell floor showed me shadow-puppets of bare balls beneath his pajama bottoms. To be fair, who wears underwear under their pajamas?

SHANE: You’re gonna love living here. So much.

ME [looking around]: It seems pretty cool. How long have you been here..?

SHANE: Hmmmm… I guess about seven years. Rents exploded out here a while ago, but at least it’s still interesting. Culturally, we’re at this downtown nexus – Tribeca, SoHo, West Village, a slash of Chinatown – but it’s also our own little pocket dimension, these few blocks to the river.

He stopped in front of the only door on the third floor. Actually, there was only one door per floor, meaning it was one of those legendary old SoHo walk-ups I always dreamt of living in. I swallowed, excited about what waited for me inside. This door had a chunky metal “3” nailed to it made of miniature construction girders that looked custom, hand-made. He saw me clock it and nodded with his chin:

SHANE: You like that, huh? [running his fingers through stringy hair] Yeah, I do metal work sometimes. Mostly I pay the rent with the film industry jobs: shop work, props, art department. My real passion is special effects though – practical ones, not that CGI shit. Do you like… movies, Daniel?

ME [my flex]: I actually, uh, graduated from film school a few years ago. In Miami.

SHANE [with a big grin]: Oh, did you now? I had a feeling about you…

His smile was missing four front teeth on his top and bottom jaws, leaving just the wet pink landscape of lips, gums, and tongue. My entire nervous system seized up just to hold the muscles of my face in place; I didn’t want to be rude, or stare, or hurt his feelings. But also: I really needed this.

SHANE: Okay, enough flirting… ready for the reveal?

The door opened on its own just then, and the world’s fattest calico cat squeezed its girth through, then started making figure-eights around Shane’s ankles. 

SHANE: And this here is our other roommate, Captain Galaxy! [Galaxy chirped hearing its own name] My sweet, sweet Gally-baby Gally-boy!

He reached down to pick him up, grunting as he heaved the neckless feline to his chest and rolled it onto its back, its pink asshole winking at me like a bad punchline. He nuzzled Galaxy’s wobbling belly with his face until he reared back and clamped his fangs down onto Shane’s shoulder. Not maliciously, but hard and drooling. Their bodies locked together like that, Shane and Gally-boy pushed open the front door with a backwards butt-bump and they led me inside together.

++++

As we entered the kitchen/living room space, it felt like going backstage at a theater: greasy gray linoleum rug, walls covered with pegboard-mounted homemade prop replicas. The kitchen sat on a raised platform, a yellow Formica counter that Shane sawed a hole into to install an industrial steel sink. No stove, but a microwave and an old wooden cabinet from someone else’s kitchen he spray-painted fluorescent orange. On top of the cabinet was a police dispatch radio that softly mumbled addresses, NYPD codes, and requests.

SHANE: Isn’t that nice? The ambiance of that helps me sleep. [clears his throat] Uh, full disclosure: we have a bit of a cockroach problem. They come up through the building pipes. I don’t spray poison because of Gally, so I just… smash a few and they stop coming for a week or two.

Scanning the room, Shane had hung dozens of models from the ceiling with clear fishing line – WWII airplanes, spaceships from sci-fi movies, kaiju from Japanese monster films – and wrapped a cat’s-cradle of Christmas lights around them. The whole thing hovered above us, in motion. If I was still in my teens, this would have been my dream room. He saw me looking up at them and beamed.

SHANE: I know. I love this room. Let me show you yours.

He took three steps to the left and slid open a Japanese-style door – one with frosted glass instead of washi paper – and gestured for me to step inside. The angles of the room were weird, almost triangular, but three out of four walls were exposed brick, one of which had a sealed-up brick fireplace. Instantly, I saw myself sitting there, writing and drawing. Like I’d already been there before. 

The same greasy gray linoleum rug continued in from the kitchen, except for vinyl tile beneath an uneven-looking black metal futon bed in the corner.

SHANE: That belonged to my last roommate. We can take it outside if you don’t want it, but–

ME: No, no, leave it, please! I’ve spent the last few months on an air mattress.

SHANE: Oh! You poor, dear boy.

He walked to the foot of the bed, to the window just above the oily radiator, and slid it open. Outside was a rusty, rickety metal fire escape, that iconic New York City kind that feels like it will collapse at any moment but has held for a century. The view looked uptown, over SoHo backyards and illuminated windows, tiny theatrical one-person shows stretching out for miles, the misty-peaked Empire State Building lording high above it all.

My cheeks flushed. I thought about lying in that broken futon, day and night, staring out at that view. That felt like peace. When I turned back to Shane, his glazed eyes squinched tight until they almost disappeared:

SHANE: You love it too, don’t you? [clapping] Ohhhh goody gumdrops! Can I show you my magic place?

As he jumped up and left the bedroom, my stomach filled with icky butterflies. I wondered if this was where the vibes get awful. Is this where he “shows me his bedroom” and I get raped and murdered? I swallowed hard, and willed the corners of my mouth not to stop smiling. 

SHANE [from outside]: Coming, Daniel...?

All I could do was follow. But Shane didn’t lead me to his bedroom. He’d stopped in the kitchen, to the window just outside the sliding door. He hiked it open with a grunt. Looking back at me, he threw one leg over the windowsill, then the next.

++++

On the other side of the third-floor window was the rooftop of the building next door, the one on the corner. We stood on its scratchy tar paper roof beneath the electronic billboard I saw from the street, blasting video ads out onto drivers trying to get into the Holland Tunnel.

I stood on the roof with Shane, bathed in colored lights and the pattering of raindrops, and exhaled a tiny cloud of relief and joy and possibility out over the city.

ME: Yes. Yes, I’ll take it.

Shane folded his arms, smiling big and gummy.

SHANE: Shall we consecrate this moment with a doobie?

I laughed. It was just after 4 am.

ME: Fuck it, yeah, why not?

Shane pranced back through the kitchen window and came back out with a joint and a butane torch. He pulled the trigger on it, incinerating its first half-inch. Then he stuck it in his mouth, took three deep yogic puffs, holding his breath as he passed it to me.

As I took it, he exhaled, a silhouette lost in a haze of billboard-lit smoke.

SHANE: Daniel… you and I are gonna have such a good time together.