Manhattan fish story: a conversation

photograph © Flora Roberts (click for bigger image)

Manhattan is an island, but most of its residents feel no connection with the maritime life. They see the water only when they are entering or leaving the city by way of a bridge. I mentioned this fact to my bartender, Michael, who never sees water. Not even to clean out the glasses. I also told Michael I was going to write an essay about Manhattan.

“What’ll ya have,” Michael asked me.

“Beer in a bottle,” I said.

Michael gave me a beer and went quiet for a minute. He does that sometimes. Like when he’s cleaning a glass with a dry, dirty rag. Or when he’s thinking about essay topics.

After a while he said, “Herman Melville was born here. Downtown somewhere. And that whale book of his was certainly a sea-faring story.”

“True enough,” I said.

“A few years back I tried moving up to Maine to improve my health”, Michael said. Michael is the kind of guy who likes to explain things with a story. “But once you live in this town you’re never really happy anyplace else. Whatever town you’re in, well you look at stuff - everything from the bars and the museums to the asphalt and the street lamps - and no matter what thing you happen to be looking at you think ‘the ones in New York are better.’ In the end you have to come back. This city haunts you. Just like Melville’s whale-haunted Ahab.”

“All wrong,” Pedro said.

Pedro is a bar-fly. I’ve never been in this particular bar when Pedro wasn’t there, which says a lot. Michael says he’s thinking about changing the name of the bar to Fly Paper to describe how badly Pedro is stuck.

“Manhattan is a fish all right,” Pedro said. “But not like Moby Dick.”

“How you figure,” Michael asked.

I could see Michael didn’t feel like talking to Pedro just then. But Pedro is what Michael calls the poetic type - which means he smokes mentholated cigarettes - and Michael probably thought a poetic type might be able to help out with my essay.

“Manhattan is alive,” Pedro said. “You can feel this city moving all of the time.”

Pedro put his hand in back of his ear as though listening for something. “If you try, you can hear its heart beat,” he said. “It’s a fish, all right. But we aren’t hunting it. We’re inside it. Just like Jonah. Stuck in the belly of the whale. We are stuck inside and unable to leave, particularly if we have rent controlled apartments.”

“I’ve never seen you try to leave this bar, much less the city,” Michael pointed out.

The entrance to Michael’s bar comprises a narrow hallway, with just enough room to squeeze past the drinkers and their stools to get to the back, where it widens to accommodate a few rickety tables. Hovering above the tables is a darkness so complete that it seems as though a chunk of midnight has chiseled out of the sky, dragged inside, and let loose to bounce against the tin ceiling. The tables are a good place for to sit if you’re hiding from your bookie or if you want to wallow in your sorrows. For either the first reason or the second, the tables in the back are generally full.

I usually take a stool at the front by the large window where, on a Sunday afternoon, light streams in to illuminate the first few spots, providing the suggestion that the divine is at work no matter where you choose to spend the Sabbath.

On this particular Sunday, the sun shone through the brown bottle of beer Michael had set in front of me and I watched the people who happened by on the street. I saw a skinny girl with a bare midriff and a pierced eyebrow leap from a yellow cab; a yuppie couple pushing a baby stroller; a homeboy decked out in comically baggy jeans smoking a Philly Blunt; a turbaned Sikh limping along with the help of a cane; a few East Village types in leather; and an ancient couple dressed in their Sunday best and leaning on each other for support.

Going to Michael’s bar is how I cheer myself up when I am feeling blue. And, taking the first sip of beer, I realized I was, in fact, feeling blue. I had just rented out the top floor of my house in Brooklyn. While I was delighted to have rented out the space, I was sorry that I had not been able to accommodate more than one of the hopefuls who had vied for the apartment.

My wife and I had listed the apartment on Craigs’ List, a free, online apartment service, thinking that we would get only a few responses. Within seconds of listing the apartment we had our first response, and from there the hits just kept on coming. We logged a total of 30 e-mails in two days, and as many phone calls.

photograph © Flora Roberts

The aspiring tenants were largely young urban professionals, just starting out their careers and they were all desperate to find an affordable space - some more desperate than others. The overall tone of the process approached that of a courtship, rather than a business transaction; prospective tenants were trying, in a very brief window, to woo us, first with coy e-mails and later in person.

Many of them arrived at our doorstep - or in our e-mail account - in a confessional mode. In the course of showing the place I heard numerous tales of woe about the horrible places people had seen recently, and about apartments that got away, and apartments they had heard about and had never gotten to see. I heard a few stories about failed love affairs and the need for a sudden move. I heard stories about house fires.

We received an e-mail from a young man had come to the city as an emergency worker just after the World Trade Center disaster. After arriving in the city, he wrote, he had quickly fallen in love. Her name was Dolores. He really loved her. He found a job teaching High School in Harlem. He and Dolores took an apartment on the Lower East Side. For a few months everything was great. But now, almost a year after arriving in the city, his girlfriend had decided to call it quits. He had to move out. Quickly. I really need this apartment, he wrote. I really do. The final line in his e-mail broke our hearts: Please, he wrote, accept me.

Over all, the desperate nature of the applicants reminded me of myself when I first came to the city in the late 1980s. After graduating college I had gone abroad for several years, supporting myself by teaching English as a second language. When I arrived in the city I had no real skills, no idea what I wanted to do, and very little money.

I can no longer recall just exactly why I wanted to live here in the first place. But I do remember feeling that there was an unusual energy in New York. A sense that anything could happen, to anyone, at any time. At the time I was little more than potential, and I suppose New York felt like a natural fit to me.

I instantly got a job at a fly-by-night business school teaching English to Russian immigrants. It was ideal in that it afforded me a good measure of freedom - more than once I parked my students at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while I went on a job interview, picking them up again just in time to march them back to the school. The Russian students became my first friends in town, and we exchanged information on the essentials, such as apartment and job searches. They were all in favor of me finding a better job. “Teacher,” they said to me. “This school is a shit hole. Get out while you can.”

My second day in the city I answered an ad to sublet an apartment. The regular tenant, I learned, made his living by dressing in clown face and blowing up balloons in Central Park. He operated under the name of Professor Bendability.

Professor Bendability’s apartment was a small one bedroom, fairly messy and a little off the beaten track. Details, however, mattered little at that point; the only thing that mattered was that it was within my rather limited price range.

The thing you quickly learn about New York is that there is always a hitch: Professor Bendability was, he told me, just finishing his plans for a tour of European capitals. This was his grand vision, he said. He would twist balloons in exchange for pence, pounds, Deutschmarks and francs. He would charm children in what he called ‘the international language of fun’. His plans for the tour were almost complete. There were just a few details to iron out. Would I be amenable, he asked, to sharing the apartment for the first few days of my summer-long tenancy? Just till his travel plans were complete? While I was loathe to agree to ‘sharing’ when I was paying for a sublet, I had no other prospects for a place to stay and I quickly said yes.

Day after day - and then week after week - I woke on Professor Bendability’s itchy, balloon-infested couch to hear that the date of departure was ‘just a balloon-twist away’. In preparation for his much-anticipated (on my part, at least) tour, the Professor continually asked me for appraisals of his handiwork, wanting to know, “Does it really look like an emu?” and, “What’s more believable, a camel with two humps or one?”

In the end there was, of course, no European tour in the works, only a pressing need to pay the rent. And with his rent paid, the good professor seemed to feel no need to ply his trade in the park. Instead he spent his time hanging around the apartment, endlessly experimenting with new balloon shapes and whistling what he called his theme song, 'Up, Up And Away (In My Beautiful Balloon)'.

After my bad experience with the Professor, I resolved to find a place on my own which, on my limited budget, was nearly impossible. I scoured the classified advertisements in the paper, and haunted bulletin boards in the West Village where, at that time, apartment listings were posted. During the course of my search I ran into an amazing variety of scams, including a newsstand in the West Village where for $40 you could buy ‘special listing’ of available apartments, all of which were unbelievably cheap. The listings were bogus, and the phone numbers were all either disconnected, or answered by people who had no idea what I was talking about. When I returned to the newsstand the operator could no longer speak English.

I answered an advertisement in one of the local papers for a studio apartment sublet - with an option to take over the lease - in the East Village. The ad claimed that the apartment went for the impossibly low price of $400 a month.

Once inside the $400 a month studio I found at least 40 hopefuls milling about. The permanent resident - who was disheveled and stank of gin - was seated on an orange crate. He handed on one out of a huge stack on applications. He explained that to be considered for the apartment I would have to pay $40 fee for a credit check. Cash only. I paid. The next day I called the number again, but the phone, indifferent to my plight, merely rang and rang. I never heard back on the status of my application. After a week or so, I forgot all about it.

Years later, I unwittingly answered the same ad. I reported to the same apartment only to find the same disheveled man, seated on the same orange crate collecting the same $40 from every schmuck in the place. Outraged, I confronted him. He shrugged, and muttered an unintelligible, gin-scented explanation. He never even bothered to rise from his crate.

I decided to make a scene. In a loud voice announced to all assembled that this was, in fact, a scam. I explained my experience of several years before. I pointed out that in all of that time the orange crate hadn’t moved one jot. The crowd moved away from me. They avoided my gaze, as though I were a nutcase in the subway. One man - a hippie type with a cowry shell necklace - seemed for a moment to share my outrage. “That’s just wrong, man,” he said. He put his hands on his hips. “Man,” he said. He glared at the man on the orange crate and then bowed his head, removed his hands from his hips and slunk off to inspect the bathroom. The rest of the crowd pushed past me to hand in their completed application and fork over the $40 fee.

Back to my original search: on the seventh day, miracle of miracles, I saw a sign on a bulletin board offering an apartment for $500 a month. I ripped the sign off its tacks and ran to the nearest pay phone.

The gentleman who showed me the apartment was a classic: of indeterminate age, he was clad in a stained wife-beater T-shirt and carried a can of Budweiser beer in his hand. “First month’s rent and security,” he said as we pushed into the apartment. “No problem,” I said, mentally counting my money and realizing that I would have just enough left over for one pack of cigarettes.

“Oh,” he added as I surveyed the mess inside. “The last tenants they were old timers. They kind of let things get out of hand before they died. I guess you gotta clean it, too.”

The apartment was chock-a-block with every description of detritus; stacks of old newspapers and books, clothing, paintings, and general bric-a-brac were piled against either wall and towered to the ceiling, leaving only a small pathway to enter. “I’ll take it,” I said.

Over the course of the next month I slowly cleaned the apartment finding in the process a number of semi-valuable items; a stamp collection, for example, yielded a few hundred dollars each for me and one of my Russian students, who in his capacity as an amateur philatelist, researched the collection; a rare coin from Scandinavia made me $500; some antique jewelry was worth a few hundred dollars and so on. As a result, I came to think of the former tenants - the dead people, as I called them - as my patrons in the city. Now, many years later, I still have a photograph of the two of them. They are dressed in their Sunday best and every time I happen across the picture I say, ‘Thank you’.

The posthumous beneficence of the dead people was the good part of my miraculous, $500 apartment. The bad part was the revelation of what lived underneath their accumulated junk.

From the first I realized that the apartment had an odd, musky damp order. Now that I am familiar with its cause I realize that the old expression ‘I smell a rat’ is far more than just an expression; rats really do stink. I saw the first one peeking out of the fire place and - tough guy though I fancied myself - I ineffectually threw one of the dead people’s books at him (a first edition of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which I still have), screamed like a little girl, and ran all the way to the hardware store.

artwork by Flora Roberts

I bought three steel traps, returned and set them here and there through the apartment. After baiting them with cheese I went out for a drink - to Michael’s bar, as this was the period when I first started going there - and drank a beer (paid for with the sale of the dead people’s stamp collection). Upon returning I found all three traps had been successful; three fat, gray rats had been crushed in their wires. Depositing these rats in a garbage bag, I quickly ran back to the hardware store and (after checking to make sure I had a full pack of cigarettes) spent the rest of my money on more traps and poison.

In the course of my campaign I learned a few things about strategy: a smart, old rat might be able to snatch the bait and run, without so much as touching the trap. The trick is to pour soy sauce on the wood base of a trap. Rats find it irresistible. And once a rat licks that soy with his evil, scratchy tongue, the trap is as good as sprung.

Besieged as I was by these malignant rodents, there was a brief moment in which I empathized with them: one night, a little drunk, I entered my apartment to find a very old, arthritic rat limping as fast as he could back toward his hole in the kitchen. A quadraplegic cat could have caught this old fellow. But I hesitated. I was suddenly infused with sympathy at the pathetic nature of his attempt at flight. Poor guy, I thought. Poor devil.

And then I smashed his brains out.

Over the course of several months I killed 30 rats. I killed them with poison. I killed them with traps. I killed one of them very quickly with a shovel while a young lady slept unaware in my bed. The girl was never the wiser and, after I had quietly disposed of the rat in a green hefty bag, I realized there was nothing that could not be dealt with. I realized that I had, in some small way, confronted The City and, while I had not necessarily won, I had at least been resourceful enough not to back down.

All of which is a long way of saying that I understood the neediness of the endless river of people who viewed - and who desperately wanted to rent - the apartment in my house in Brooklyn. I knew the angst that came with an apartment search in the world’s most glamorous city, and I knew how much depended on finding a cheap spot.

But, of course, there will always be an endless, desperate river of people flowing into New York to search for cheap apartments. I had been part of that river, and so had my Russian students. Even Professor Bendability and the rats had been drops in that endless surge.

The desperate nature of the rush can never really change, either. For those who stay here - and are lucky enough to pull themselves out of the rapids and onto dry land - it becomes imperative that we ignore the newcomers. Let them struggle on their own and, if they must, drown, die and be reincarnated into new lives in Cleveland or New Jersey. If we did not ignore them and continue to look after our own interests, their need would chip away at our foundations until we, too, would be rendered helpless and rejoin the endless flow.

“So what you’re saying,” Michael said, “Is that everyone in town is an island that can’t afford to acknowledge the stream.”

“I suppose,” I said. “Maybe so.”

artwork by Flora Roberts

“I am sticking with Jonah,” Pedro said. “Thank God for rent control.”

“Then when it comes to the water riddle, you answered your own question,” Michael said, ignoring Pedro, “and you’ve got your friggin’ essay. I don’t know why you even bother to ask me. Another beer?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m always up for another.”