Moving the House - Tourette's Style

A scratching on the door interrupts me just as I'm about to write (not strictly true, as I have no idea what I'm about to type - the past day was only mildly interesting: an eye appointment, a bunch of kava drunk, a strange dream about saving a mouse that turns into a small dog, TV watched and ignored, Indian food consumed - none of it seems worthy). I open the door to the bedroom where I've exiled myself while Katie tears apart the house in a process that is as much about mental health as it is about interior decoration, and explain the nature of my dilemma to her.

"If you need inspiration, I could use your help doing some little stuff before we have to move the big pieces," she says. When I demur, she picks up the rug and recommences dragging it down the hall, shouting, "Dicks!"

1/1/11 We ended up straightening up a little

"Pooks, I'm starting to feel like I'm wasting my life," I told Katie, as we sat watching "Sister Wives" while sitting around without pants on and trying to recover from the previous night.

"Well, do you want to try cleaning this place up a little?" She gestured to the piles of stuff, reminders of our guests from the past week, and of the blizzard that still clogs the streets.

When I demure at the immensity of the job, she says, "Well, it's not like we can really clean up, since Bloomberg won't let us throw out our garbage."

12/9/10 late nights in the slope

The sidewalks of Park Slope roll up at about 11:30, so I walk down to the subway station to pick up Katie after her shift ends. Normally we hold hands, but the cold has us both shoving our hands in our pockets and striding along, hurrying to escape the freezing cold, chatting and laughing even as we keep it moving.

Finally inside the warm apartment building, standing outside our apartment door, I can hear the cat inside yowling in displeasure at our continued insistence on leaving the house instead of sitting on the couch where she can ignore us properly. I'm pretty sure she's going to wake up the entire building.

11/10/10 Contrasts

I sit on the mat in the half-light before the sun comes up, and breathe deeply. My mat faces roughly east, as it has in almost every apartment I've ever lived that suited me at all, and I can see out the windows on the front of our building clouds lit from below by the rising sun shading from a vivid pink to a brilliant gold against a gray sky.

My wedding ring clicks on the wood floor as I shift to a new position in my routine. I never take it off.

6/25/09 - While you were out

"Scott, it's Warren, your super."

"Hey, Warren, what's going on?"

"I just wanted to let you know, there was a problem with the boiler and the fire department came, and while they were here they had to break down the door to your apartment to see if everything was OK."

I stood there in Katie's apartment, phone in hand, watching the news replay over and over again the stories of dead celebrities and New Jersey housewives, and said, "OK, man, I guess I'll be there in a few minutes."

6/2/09 - Seriously, it's freaking me out.

"Hey, Warren," I say to the short, round-faced, balding black man hanging out in front of my building. "Got a second?"

In my apartment, I show him the bulging boil of white paint hanging pendulously over my sink where the water from the apartment above has almost, but not quite, eaten through the ceiling of my bathroom.

"Yeah," he says, "those people upstairs moved about two weeks ago, but Mr. Zimmer won't even let me fix the hole in my ceiling that the leak made, and I'm the super!"

6-12-08 Why Do You Think I'm Living Here?

Mary greets me as I arrive home with her usual peculiar mix of friendliness and class hostility. "Exterminator ain't come yet. I thought you was powerful, get them to take care of it, but you just like me!"

"Yeah," I say, "don't let this pretty face fool you, they don't listen to me," all the while thinking, "Listen, just 'cause I'm white don't mean shit; I'm still poor!"

6-9-08 Kill, Chat, Kill

After work, while I'm playing video games, Stephanie stops by to drop off some power tools I let her and the Nosedive boys borrow. She hasn't seen the place since she helped me move in, and she is appropriately impressed with the work I've put in to make it livable.

The cat seems to remember her, and in contrast to the caterwauling that Her Furry-ness has been subjecting me (and the entire apartment building) to this week, she settles down and purrs at us while we sit and chat about our mutual friends.

Eventually she heads out, and I go back to playing Jedi Academy, wasting time killing artificial enemies.

5-25-08 Your Guide to Firefighting

Walking home from dinner (where we ate all breakfast foods) in Park Slope, Katie and I watch a firetruck roll up to a building. A handful of firemen, all suited up with the tanks on their backs and the jackets and the helmets and everything, jump off the truck and begin to make their way over to the door in a desultory fashion, looking up at the building as they go, as if looking for something.

After watching them mill about listlessly for a few minutes, I say, "Your guide to fire fighting, number 1: when you arrive at the site of the fire, check and see if there are flames coming out of the building anywhere, say, through the windows and doors."

Katie chimes in, "Number two: double-check the address, just to make sure you're at the right place."

5-22-08 What's Really the Matter

I've been distracted and a little depressed for the past few days.

I wake up most mornings recently at my place with a new, red, angry looking bug-bite on some part of my body, and sometimes many on many different parts of my body, which naturally led me to the hypothosis that I might have bed-bugs.

I washed all of my clothes and sheets and my futon cover in super-hot water, and then dried everything, and in the process I found one little fucking bed-bug (but we know that there's more than just one, right?), which I stabbed to death with a scissors before washing it down the bathroom sink.

He was dark brown and flat and roundish-shaped, with squirmy little legs, and even though I try to feel compassion for living things, bugs just tap right into that animal part of my brain that wants to kill, and I feel depressed because I know the kind of hassles that are going to go into fixing this, and the bites itch, which just bums me out even more

5-21-08 Picky, picky

Mary sits in front of our building in her usual spot, green jacket and brown hat. She greets me warmly as I come home from work.

"They finally kicked those nasty people out of the building," she says, "so if they rent them out on the second floor," (she means the apartments that have been newly vacated), "and fix this place up, it might get nicer, here."

When I begin to list some thoughts I have on things that might need fixing (a front door that locks, for example), she laughs and says, "oh, I don't think I want to be seen talking to you, you troublemaker, cuz they might evict me next!"

5-18-08 It's Not OK

The cat complains as I come through the door. She stands in my path on the tile floor, all twelve inches of her, stares me dead in the eye, and states, in her clearest, loudest voice, precisely why she is upset with me.

Her eyes are green and slitted, and she does not hiss, because she is not angry. She is upset, because I have been gone two days, and she would like to tell me why it's not OK.

5-14-08 Actually, That Was Me

I help one of my upstairs neighbors carry her (insane amount of) groceries upstairs, and as I'm about to go back into my apartment, I introduce myself. "I'm Reba," she says as we shake hands, "you live there all by yourself?"

Reba is short, dark skinned, heavy-set, with tidy, medium length dreads. I explain that my roommate and I keep opposite hours, since he's in a band, and she nods knowingly, saying, "I knew I heard somebody singing in there."

4-25-08 In which I find out that, in fact, it is not as dire as it seemed

Darnell, who calls himself the "assistant-super", is a skinny, older black man who lives across the hall from me. He wears glasses, a baseball cap, and most of his teeth are kind of a mess, but he's always ready with a smile and some sort of vaugely comprehensible greeting.

When I got home last night, I decided to ask him what went down yesterday morning, and he told me that the couple down on the second floor who always seem to be screaming at each other about something or other decided to really go at it, and the woman apparently went upside her man's head, and somebody went to jail, and somebody went to a shelter.

"It's just disrispecful," said Darnell, indignantly, "'cus they don' havta clean up the blood, I do!"

4-24-08 I May Be One of Those People

As I may have mentioned on these pages, I used to live in Queens, a few blocks from the spot where Kitty Genovese was killed, and I've long been fascinated by the story of thirty-eight people who sat in their apartments and did nothing while a young woman was stabbed to death.

This morning, I awoke to the usual pounding on doors and yelling in my apartment building, followed by running up and down stairs and more voices raised in anger. Annoyed, I turned up the radio until I couldn't hear the yelling anymore.

When I left my apartment building at about 7:45, there were drops of fresh blood in a trail down the stairs, leading to a puddle of blood about a foot wide in the entryway of the building.

4-16-08 Couches and Comics

Today I bought a couch, and the gradual transformation of my apartment from bear den to habitable abode proceeds apace. It was a little too awkward for Katie to carry as we shoved it up to the third floor, so mostly I ended up flipping it end-over-end up the stairs all the way to my apartment, where it now sits, comfortable and a little cramped until I get all the other crap put away and/or tossed out.

Also, as a side note, and probably totally unrelated, I just bought a ticket to go to the New York Comic Con on Saturday. I'm hoping that I'll get a chance to maybe even say hi to Grant Morrison, which would be awesome, since he's kinda one of my heroes (the other one, in comics, is of course Alan Moore), and since I've got an artist who's doing a couple of pages of the comic script I wrote back in 2006, I really would like to just get in the game, as it were.

4-10-08 Hanging Bike

I screwed a hook into my ceiling, and from said hook I hang my bike. My apartment now looks like a "...real New York apartment", says Katie, "like, 'yeah, my bike's hanging over my guitars and the vacuum cleaner next to the fridge, so what?'"

Last night, late, riding my bike home down Dean Street (where sketchy lives and the factories just don't stop!) was like riding through a cloud that lost its ambition and ended up wetly moping along the ground. The bike and I were covered in a fine mist that, when I hung my bike up, left wet, streaky black marks on the wall and ceiling.

1-30-08 "It just keeps getting worse!"

The panic rises higher and higher as the phone calls from numbers I know I don't want to talk to increases. The actions I take seem to make the problems more profound, and more intractable. I talk to Katie and know that I am dreadfully, horribly boring in my anxiety, and feel ashamed of how ineffectual I am being, and yet seem completely unable to stop it.

I once lived in utter squalor, in a run-down, disgusting apartment off-campus, doing drugs and getting poorer and poorer, and even though I'm clean, all I can think right now is, "it's coming for me again, and this time I won't escape."

1-29-08 Trying too Hard

I go to see another, different place in Brooklyn, all part of the campaign to move out of the place I've lived in for almost 10 years and to cut down on my commute, both to Manhattan and to Katie's place. I see a nice place, two bedrooms, uneven floors, typical New York apartment that would cost you 700-800 dollars anywhere else, but here runs you twice that. The pleasant, smiling man who shows me the apartment answers all my questions, rushes off to another appointment, and, after some consideration, I decide to take the place. As soon as I've called him and agreed to meet to put down money the first thought that runs through my mind is "Oh my God, what have I done."