today in my group text i started with demo and erin (i met demo, appropriately, on tumblr 10 years ago and i met erin at a media happy hour where we established that we were both from the same part of pennsylvania) we were talking about how none of us are good at remembering like, anything.Â
i can remember every stupid thing about my first year in new york but the years where iâm 23-27 all blend together in my head. but that first year was perfect: i was experiencing everything happening in new york for the first time, and it was that thing where none of it was new new, they were just new-to-me experiences that other people had all experienced dozens of times.Â
i moved into my bedroom in bushwick off of the wilson L labor day weekend 2014. i had been living with my momâs family in the rockaways that summer, and my momâs cousin ed dropped me and my stuff off in bushwick. âthis is where you live?â he asked incredulously. there was nothing wrong with the apartment, i just think he hadnât been to bushwick in years. the apartment itself was something of an artifact: it was a two-story, two-unit building. the 90-something-year-old landlord lived with her family on the ground floor, and our three bedroom apartment was on the second floor. it was a three-bedroom place; it hadnât been renovated in years. the paint in the unventilated bathroom peeled, the kitchen was enormous by new york city standards, and the living room was between the two other bedrooms, so i always had to walk through someoneâs room to watch tv.Â
the lease on the apartment belonged to emmy, who was a year older than me and went to newhouse before transferring to the new school. she was an unpaid intern at a photobooth startup whose offices were off the jefferson L, near cobra club (instead of waiting in line to pee at cobra club, weâd just walk across the street and use the bathrooms in the photobooth startupâs offices instead). her parents paid her rent. she smoked more weed than anyone iâd ever met in my life, and my college friends were comp sci majors who sold weed as an extracurricular activity. she had the biggest bedroom and a cat that routinely hissed at me. our other roommate brooke was once emmyâs best friend; brooke was in my year at syracuse. she worked at a boutique in carroll gardens owned by the real-life equivalent of jan levinson-gould on the office. brookeâs room was also big, and mine was small, but i had the only closet and my rent was $425 a month (the landlord clearly was unaware that the neighborhood was turning over; these days, the rent on my bedroom should be closer to $1000) so it was fine.Â
i was never much of a weed smoker in college. i just wasnât very good at it. and then i moved to 1337 bushwick avenue and i started smoking out of emmyâs bong whenever she and brooke would smoke. the railroad living room always stank like bongwater because there were no windows and the doors were always closed. brooke and i would get really high and walk over to the popeyes under the Halsey J, or order burgers from ridgewood eats. i am still not very good at smoking weed but brooke is still one of my favorite people to get high with.
here are some things i learned about and did when i lived in bushwick: doing all your grocery shopping after work at the trader joeâs on 6th avenue; getting off the L at bedford, grabbing falafel at oasis and walking all the way back to bushwick; the concept of a non-suburban target at atlantic terminal; parties in warehouses that had been converted to apartments; going to shows at shea stadium; standing on the balcony at shea stadium; going to union pool with emmy and expressing mild horror as she peed right on the outdoor patio by the taco truck; listening to cloud nothings on every commute into the city at 7:30 in the morning; riding the J train just to see what above-ground looked like in brooklyn; my college boyfriend coming down to visit and not having any idea what to do with him so we went to the comic book store in union square and got ramen and otherwise sat around counting down the hours until he left again; getting my full-time offer after working as a de facto reporter on a $13/hour rate for five months; getting coffee in bushwick at AP Cafe (now closed) on troutman with annie and asta to celebrate my new job; having pizza and champagne at my friend lizâs apartment to celebrate my new job; going to taco bell in union square with emmie (different emmie/emmy) to celebrate both of us getting our job offers on the same day; being extremely single in new york and dancing on an elevated surface at tandem (also RIP); uber rides home from fort greene to astoria on saturday mornings. it took so little to make me happy in new york that year. on a friday night if i came home after work, put on a bodycon dress from urban outfitters with my faux-leather jacket and got to sing at least a couple songs at karaoke at cobra club or slip into a party at house of yes without paying a cover i was content. our nights always ended the same way when i went our with brooke: we would go to bushwick pita palace, eat our falafel in the restaurant, and then take a car home. the idea of taking a car was also new: syracuse didnât have uber, and we didnât have the disposable income to make it habitual, so it always felt like a decadent treat when weâd have the car carry us a couple miles down bushwick avenue at 2 am.Â
i never signed a lease when i moved in. this would eventually work against me when emmy informed me the day before i went home for christmas that another friend of ours, ben, would be moving into my bedroom in five weeksâ time. i felt like emmy had been thoughtless with sharing this information with me, a person who clearly did not have any sort of upper hand in a situation where someone older than me whoâd lived in new york for years and who wasnât paying her own rent was dictating the rules.Â
will, my college boyfriend, was moving down to the city in about a monthâs time anyway and the plan was for him to stay with us for just a little while while we got our shit together and found a place; emmy sort of just expedited that process. still, we had an acrimonious end to our friendship. we didnât speak the entire last month i lived in her apartment, and the night before i left, she threw out all the food in the fridge that was mine. something else happened to the apartment around this same time in december 2014: it was invaded by houseflies. at first there were just a couple, and a flyswatter or some fly tape got rid of them. but then they multiplied. there were 20. then there was 100. then i had to eat all my meals in my bedroom with the door closed to make sure the flies wouldnât come in. something was rotting in the walls. i think it was the wood itself. we moved out on february 1, into our new apartment in ridgewood, and within a year, 1334 bushwick avenue had been knocked down. the apartment had become unlivable. i drove by it a few weeks ago on my way back from the rockaways with my friends, and in its place theyâd built a new apartment. if you hadnât known it before, you wouldnât know it changed at all.
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