One of the dangers of having a day job in New York is that if one is not careful, one can find one's expectations seriously skewed. Unless you are a completely healthy and self-actualized individual -- in which case, I don't want to know you -- it is difficult, if not impossible, to look around you and suddenly find your manner of living completely ridiculous. You might be the most nonconformist, struggling artist in your cubicle block, banging the ten-key punch on your keyboard as you input incomprehensible data into an unreadable spreadsheet as part of the wretched temp job you are working until your band signs a deal with Big Recording Behemoth Music, or you find an agent willing to shop your novel around, or you can finally afford to go to grad school, knowing that it's just a day job, food and rent, nothing more. Then you'll overhear a pair of bigs in the elevator chatting about their Lexuses (Lexi?), or about how they're getting killed on school taxes this year, and if this keeps up they'll have to sell one of their other three properties, or how their co-op board has finally started getting estimates for the jacuzzi being built on the roof. You know that you don't really want any of this shit, and you know that even if you did, you would have to spend ridiculous hours doing things you hated to get them; still, if you have never felt like a feckless, overaged college student in the presence of these folks, than you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din. It is obnoxious and unseemly behavior, and it's a surefire sign that it's time for me to stop fretting over frivolous trivia and get back to work on the book, or on the articles I am shopping around. Unfortunately, I am a champion at this unseemly and obnoxious behavior, and I am terrible at just stopping it by sheer force of will. I require, if you will, external forces. Nowhere am I more prone to this sort of nonsense than when I fall into a conversation about real estate. Lloyd and I have lived in our apartment for 11 years. Never mind that this is a way of life in New York, that I have known people who have rented for much longer than that, and I don't consider it a moral failing on their part, that my mom's cousin was lucky enough to sign the lease on a rent-stabilized apartment in the late 1960's, when I was a wee bairn, and I don't see this as a sign that he refuses to grow up. (My mom's cousin is a lawyer in the New York State Attorney General's office; he is one of the smartest, most interesting, most principled men I know. This has nothing to do with tonight's post. I just wanted to brag on my cousin a bit. Hi, Ken!) Somehow, though, I have managed to exempt myself -- and Lloyd, the poor angel who doesn't deserve this -- from similar grace and forbearance. I come to work and hear my friends and coworkers talk about the extensions they're putting on their houses, or the houses they've just bought with an eye to extending one day. I realize that people my age have school-age children (which is a whole other issue in and of itself -- we are still dreaming of little Pugsleys and Wednesdays to call our own, and we are stubborn in the pursuit of them Lloyd and I have a house's worth of stuff in three rooms. We should be looking for a bigger apartment like sane people, but we have a terrific landlord, the likes of which we'll never see in any other building in this city. "You don't know that," says my mom, reasonably. "You'll never know until you look." I am a genius at looking for houses outside of New York: Pittsburgh; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Snowballville, Colorado; even the Scottish Borders; but inside New York, I know better than that. Saying goodnight to me, Lloyd trips over the power cord to my laptop, which stretches all the way across the living room. I have to find a way to make things better for him, I think. It's not fair to make him live like this. The next morning we wake up, perform our regular squinty-eyed time-to-make-the-doughnuts ablutions as we do every morning, and get ready for another day of corporate day-job hilarity. Lloyd opens our apartment door, getting ready to leave. There is a white plastic grocery bag hanging from the doorknob. "I *thought* I heard someone up here last night," he says in a voice of happy surprise. Dear friends, this is why, as long as we are living in this city, we are not going anywhere. We do not have access to the backyard; only the landlord and landlady have that, and they use it for grilling, for sitting in the sun, and for planting a garden that kicks the smell of greenery into the air on stormy late-summer days. We can't go into the garden and pick a beefsteak tomato off the vine, but they can, and they can pick some extra, and they can put them into a grocery bag and leave them at our door. They can -- and do -- also pick peppers, both bell peppers and pepperoncini; they have picked stringbeans for us, and one year they gave us a cluster of Concord grapes straight from the trellis, for this is a neighborhood of winemakers, and my landlord is no exception. Maybe there is another landlord who would share his garden with us like this, but such landlords are few and far between. Besides, one of the prettiest sounds I know is that of our landlady, no slouch of a cook herself, gasping happily as I bring down a jar of cherry-almond jam, or string bean pickles, or a plum kuchen or a chocolate-cherry-marzipan torte, saying, "ohhh, did you make this?" as if I had brought it back from Peck in Milan. From this vantage point, or from the point I found myself tonight, as I seared a pair of New York strip steaks in the cast-iron ridged grill pan on the stove, boiled half a pound of spaghetti together with some baby peas, sliced the steaks and three of those bright red tomatoes, put everything into a bowl and dressed it with a buttermilk and herb dressing and stared at all that red and green in one big gorgeous bowl until I thought I would never stop smiling, from here, I know that we are not feckless, or stupid, or careless. We are lucky.
and portfolios outside of their 401(k)'s and equity. I am a worm, a wriggly worm, I think to myself, in the voice of Ed from Ed, Edd & Eddy.
August 02, 2005