Called Home
On leaving and coming back.
The psychic closed her eyes and swung the pendant back and forth over her outreached palm. “Hmmmm, Hoboken.”
“What?”
“You should move to Hoboken, maybe Jersey City. They’ve got nice apartments.”
I looked around at her dust covered living room which only contained a table and chairs, and a dead potted plant. I thought to myself that maybe she isn’t the one to defer to when it comes to matters of taste.
The question she was tasked with answering was whether I should move to New York City or not. At first her reply was a definitive “No.” Once I pushed back she settled on a compromise: Jersey. It was close to the city, still expensive, but not as bad as New York. She claimed some authority on the topic because she once lived in the city too. Like many New Yorkers, she had apartments in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. She preferred Brooklyn to the other two. But according to her there was nowhere you could go to escape the notorious New York landlords. She told stories of landlords who neglected their duties, refused to rid her apartment of pests: big and small, landlords that evicted her without proper notice, and sadly the one that sexually assaulted her. I took her personal experiences seriously, but I had my doubts about her psychic abilities. I mean she did tell my friend that his girlfriend had put a “love spell” on him.
He’s gay.
I fell in love with New York years before ever visiting. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and one of our favorite shared activities was watching Turner Classic Movies together. Weekend nights we would settle in and watch whatever was playing. Whether it was a shadow-filled noir or a romantic musical, all I saw was that New York was where the action was. One of my favorites back then was Rear Window.
The entire movie takes place in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment while he’s recovering from a broken leg. He’s visited regularly by his girlfriend, Grace Kelly, and his massage therapist, Thelma Ritter. He spends his days looking out of his window across the courtyard at his neighbors. It’s a heatwave so everyone has their windows open. People are playing music, dancing, fighting... and recklessly lowering their small dog in a basket to the ground so it can pee. Jimmy Stewart suspects one neighbor of murder, and I won’t ruin the rest of the plot. I was partially drawn to the movie because of the story, but mostly I just liked imagining myself in that life. A big apartment in Greenwich Village, an eclectic assortment of neighbors, a beautiful girlfriend, etc..
Against the psychic’s wishes, I did move - but not to Greenwich Village - to Astoria, Queens. Astoria is known for its’ Greek restaurants. Just between my apartment and the subway station there were five. Most of them were pretty good, but I tired of souvlaki and feta eventually. Most people move to Astoria because it’s cheaper than all of Manhattan and most of Brooklyn. I didn’t find $1,000 rent to be cheap, but by New York standards I guess it was. I lived on the first floor so my living room window gave me a view of the alley. It was no courtyard, but I could do some people watching. Old ladies with plastic bonnets, to keep their hair dry, shuffling to the grocery store. Moms with strollers walking their babies. Kids cussing each other out after school. As for the building itself, none of my neighbors seemed to be interested in becoming friends. My Southern training taught me to say hello when we passed each other, but I was almost always met with a side eye glance.
A few weeks into my relocation I was at home alone, while my two roommates were at work. It was hot so I briefly turned on the air conditioning while I reheated rice and beans for dinner. In order to conserve energy I turned all the lights off except for the one over the stove. As I was unplugging the microwave the intercom buzzed. I wasn’t expecting anyone, but I answered anyway.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Hello?”
All that I could hear was some muffled giggling. Disregarding my safety, I decided to buzz in my mystery guests anyway.
“We’re here to return your broom. Can we come in?” It was two girls and one of their boyfriends, about my age. Ignoring common sense and safety precautions, but doing as my mama taught me: I let them in. Come to find out they had just moved into the building across the street, also owned by my landlord. A few weeks ago they had been introduced to my roommates on the street by their broker, and they had asked to borrow our broom earlier that day. They seemed alarmed that I was in the dark, wearing an old t-shirt and boxers, but they hung out for a few minutes. High school friends, they had agreed to move to the city from their hometowns on Long Island. I promised I’d get drinks with them that week, and we became fast friends. It was great having friends that weren’t my roommates so close by. We would grab drinks at the biergarten, go for walks in Astoria Park, go to the comedy club only a few blocks away.
They moved away less than a year later. Now, one lives in L.A. and the other in Tampa. We kept in contact but Astoria never felt the same without them there. A lonely place was made less lonely by having them near. I could call up to their window from the sidewalk and make last minute plans. If I needed out of my cramped apartment I could crawl over to theirs. They invited me out with their home-friends, and did regular check-ins to make sure I was doing alright. I still miss having them across the street.
I moved to New York without a job, in spite of everyone’s warnings. I had spent the year after graduation working for a family friend at a law firm. It was great for my resume, but it was time for me to leave. One of my close friends from high-school and college had been in New York for a couple of years and his roommate was moving out. So, I took her room. I had saved up to make sure I could afford the rent on top of my other living expenses and student loans. I knew that I would go through a period of unemployment, but I was confident that as long as I was diligent I would get a job soon enough.
I grew up fantasizing about being part of the New York literati. In middle school I subscribed to GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. I absorbed writers’ ideas about fashion, books, politics, pop culture. I fantasized about my desk at Condé Nast, running into Anna Wintour, David Remnick, or Tina Brown in the elevator. I would head to Lincoln Center to listen to jazz with coworkers, go see intellectuals speak at the 92nd Street Y, form my own modern version of the Algonquin Round Table. Looking back, these fantasies were snobbish and unrealistic, but I’m glad I held onto them. My taste in music, books, and art benefited from my desire to be a writer in New York.
I spent over five months looking for a job. I woke up each morning and sat at my make-shift desk and cranked out cover letters and made alterations to my resume. I’d take a break in the early afternoon to walk around the park and then I would come back and get back to it. I networked with people in the city that couldn’t offer me a job, but would maybe connect me with “someone that could.” I did countless phone interviews. I sat in Bryant Park, trying not to sweat through my suit in between temp agency meetings. I interviewed at Bloomberg, twice. I was even offered a few jobs that were then taken back or left unfilled for various reasons.
Finally, I decided to take a seasonal job at a high end department store. I was promised that I would start out in an expensive section that would provide me with large commission checks. Upper East Side housewives were supposed to be easy marks that you could always upsell to. I was even told that once the Christmas season was over I could apply for an office job in the marketing department. I went out and spent some of my dwindling savings on black clothes, ready to play the part. My orientation class was about 40 people, and we were lead by a very thin woman, probably in her 60’s, wearing a Gucci belt and carrying a Goyard tote (a sort of uniform among certain New Yorkers). She gave us a history of the department store and made us feel as though we had landed the most exclusive jobs in all of Manhattan. During lunch, I was talking to one of my fellow new-hires and he revealed that this was his third season at this store.
“They never keep you on after January.”
“Well, I was told that I could stay on and maybe be transferred to another position.”
“Yeah, they say that to a lot of people.”
Whatever, I could just work through the season while continuing my job search. The orientation started back up and our leader told us not to expect to get Christmas Eve or the day after Christmas off. For locals, that meant that they could spend the day with their families, but for me that meant I couldn’t go home. The thought of sitting alone in my apartment on Christmas day was devastating. I quit.
After a defeating trip home for the holidays, “Yes, I still don’t have a job” “No, I don’t have plans to come back home yet,” I boarded the Chinatown bus. I had come to accept this bus ride as a part of my life now. Unemployed, I couldn’t afford the relatively inexpensive plane tickets, or the somehow more expensive train tickets, so I took the bus. It left from a 7-11 parking lot in Richmond and arrived near Herald Square. In between, we stopped in D.C., Baltimore and a rest stop in Delaware. The rest stop was meant for people to stretch their cramped legs and pee, but almost everyone except me it seemed, used the opportunity to run to the food court. Most rest stops, in my experience, had vending machines or a snack bar at most. Not this one. It has a food court to rival even the largest of malls. I wouldn’t have minded if people opted for a smoothie, bag of chips, maybe a soft pretzel. But it appeared that everyone had a secret meeting while I took my nap in Maryland, and decided to spring for an entire feast. As the aroma of fried chicken and Panda Express filled the bus, I wondered if it was worth it. Was living in New York really worth these horrible trips on the bus, eating oatmeal and pasta everyday to save money, the endless job search?
The bus got back around midnight and it was pouring rain. Now, one of the worst parts of living in the city is dealing with the rain. So I stood under an awning and called an uber. After waiting ten minutes, it cancelled. And so did the next one. After the fourth cancelled, I walked a few blocks with no umbrella to the train. I had to shake my head to dry my hair and I waited on the platform. A man, who looked to be in his late 30’s with salt and pepper hair, sat next to me. He was obviously buzzed, but not too drunk. As the train took off his leg hit up against mine and he left it there. With my suitcase between my legs and the railing on my other side, I couldn’t move. I sat looking straight ahead hoping his stop was soon. At one point he angled his phone towards me and scrolled over to Grindr. He got off at the stop before mine.
Astoria floods. Even light rain showers cause the streets to fill with water, and a mixture of trash, broken glass, and rat feces floats down towards Long Island City. So when I finally got to my stop I still had to wade through a cesspool to get home. Once back to my apartment, the deadbolt kept sticking and wouldn’t unlock. I called both of my roommates but neither would answer (the first time either of them had ever been asleep before 2 AM). After what felt like an eternity, the deadbolt gave and I got into the apartment. I removed the soaked clothes from my duffle bag and backpack, the ones that I had brought home to wash so I could save on laundry, and I wept.
I’ve never felt defeated like I did between New Years and the beginning of March that year. Even restaurants weren’t hiring me. I was faced with the decision of either stocking shelves part-time at the CVS down the street, or moving home. I’ve always been alright at accepting my circumstances and making realistic decisions, but for some reason I lost that ability. I didn’t want to make a choice between either option, so I didn’t. Fortunately for me, a temp agency reached out with an interview opportunity. It was at a “reciprocal risk retention group” working for attorneys. I had no idea what that was but I accepted the job before the recruiter could finish offering it to me.
From then on, New York completely changed. I could go out to eat. I could go see movies. I could buy a drink at the bar without checking my bank account first (ok, maybe I still did that). I wasn’t making any money, but I wasn’t losing it either. Now when friends visited, we weren’t restricted to $2 tickets to the Met and walks around Central Park. We could go out to dinners and buy too many drinks at the bar. Go thrift shopping in Brooklyn. Carry home stacks of books from the Strand.
That June, one of my friends from home was coming to visit. I sat at my desk and searched for something for us to do that weekend. I came across the perfect event: a booze cruise around Manhattan with a Madonna theme. Another reason I had glamorized New York for so long was because of the music I grew up on. Artists like Grace Jones, Blondie, The Velvet Underground, and Barbra Streisand, got their start in New York. Whether it was small dive bars in Greenwich Village, CBGB’s, Warhol’s Factory, or Studio 54, I knew that New York was essential to their success stories. Madonna’s mythology originates with her dropping out of college, getting on a bus, and arriving in New York with the cash in her pocket. After working in clubs around the Lower East Side and befriending artists like Basquiat and Keith Haring, she became the Queen of Pop. If she had stayed in Michigan, none of that would have happened. She had to get out. She had to get to New York.
The tickets for the boat were $50. I debated all day whether to spend the money. Although it’s not a lot, piled on top of rent, utilities, metro card, groceries, etc., it wasn’t responsible to spend it, but I did anyway. After my friend Dana’s connecting flight was cancelled, she decided to take the bus from D.C. to New York. My roommate Derek and I met her around 10 PM and she was exhausted and eating pizza. Once on the train, a man started making jokes out loud, and it wasn’t clear whether they were directed at anyone in particular. Dana laughed at his jokes while everyone else put their headphones in. She would respond with his glib comments with “True!” and egg him on to continue. Derek and I looked on in half amusement, half horror, until the man directed his attention to the girl across from him. “Hey honey, why don’t you smile.”
Every woman in New York is bound to hear this at some point. Walking to work, riding the subway, sitting in the park, I’ve heard countless older men bark that phrase at a woman. The girl rolled her eyes. “You should be more like her.” He pointed at Dana. “She’s nice.”
“Really? I should be more like her? She came to New York and is eating Sbarro.”
To this day, she’s one of my favorite people I came across in New York. The next day after work I came back to my apartment and we got ready for the boat ride. After throwing back some shots and throwing on some makeup, we hopped on the train and headed towards the pier. Once we were up on the deck we stood behind a dense wall of people and ordered
$16 drinks. I remember snippets of the rest of the night: meeting a Drag Race winner, a popular Instagram artist, and the host of one of my favorite podcasts/SNL cast member. Getting so close to the Statue of Liberty that we had to crane our necks back to look up at it. Dancing to some of my favorite songs while the city glided past.
One of my coworkers said that she was sitting on her balcony that night in Battery Park City and heard a Madonna song echoing off of the Hudson. She looked down and there we were sailing past. I wish I could watch that night back. I would see lots of men and women in underwear and mesh, some people in very elaborate pop star looks, drinking and dancing, and perhaps some embarrassing behavior on my part. The next day I woke up slightly hungover and the roof of my mouth burnt from impatiently shoving pizza down on the way home, wishing I could go back and do it again.
The rest of the Summer was great. Being able to leave work early on Fridays meant that when friends came to visit I could spend more time with them. The hard part about having friends visit during the Summer in New York is that it’s miserable to be outside. The piercing frigid winds of the Winter disappear around June, and you’re left with stagnant, oppressively hot air. The scent of the street is given new life in the heat and you walk around smelling garbage, urine, and body odor. My first full Summer it became clear why people set out to the Hamptons, Fire Island, Provincetown, etc., for days or weeks at a time. In August when my roommate and I were fatigued from a Summer in the city we were invited to go “out East.”
A guy that we went to college with asked us to come out to his parents’ house in Sag Harbor for his birthday weekend. I did not hesitate in saying yes. Visions of Ina Garten’s hydrangea bushes and Diane Keaton’s kitchen in Something’s Gotta Give played through my head. I packed my white linen shirt, gingham shorts, Birkentstocks and we set off.
Our first morning in Sag Harbor, we awoke at 6 AM, our host knocking down the door and shouting at us to get out of bed. He wanted to get the most out of the day, so we scarfed down some bran muffins and headed to the beach… at 7 in the morning. On the way to Southampton, we passed the typical cedar sided homes that I had expected, but interspersed were these huge new homes being built. Big glass and steel structures that looked more like Bond villain lairs than beach houses. They were sitting right on the water and all I could think of was how someone had spent all of that money to build these structures, and inevitably they will be lost to rising sea levels and superstorms.
We were the first to the parking lot and trudged our things to the beach. I wrapped myself in my towel because there was a chill with the breeze and the sun had not been up long enough to warm up the air. Our host went for a run and Derek and I read our books. When he got back, an hour later, we all got in the water. For the first time since I had been in New York, I got to swim. Growing up my family was always at the beach, or the river, or the lake. Since moving all I could do was sit in Astoria Park and watch the currents of the East River rush by. Sometimes I would see people with fishing poles, and I do not want to know what mutated creature they pulled out of that water. I dunked myself under and stayed there for a few seconds, taking a moment to myself. As I came up, a huge wave was coming down and it slammed me into the ocean floor. I did a few somersaults and thankfully did not break my neck. As I struggled to shore and tried to dislodge sand from every orifice, I was yelled at to come join a game.
We played a beach game for a few minutes and then our host said it was time to get back to the house to clean up. It wasn’t even noon yet. Usually at this time my family would be headed to the beach, not on the way back. It was his birthday, so we obliged. The rest of the day was spent wandering around Sag Harbor, eating ice cream, going into shops. A woman with a Goop tote bag gave me a dirty look, as if she could smell the lack of money on me.
That evening, his parents threw a backyard dinner party with some of their local friends. I floated around the party and marveled at how as the alcohol flowed the accents got thicker. Everything I said was replied to with a “shoooore” or “that’s awwwl.” Derek and I settled down next to an older lesbian couple that split their time between the Hamptons and Florida. As we got to know them, I realized they had the New York life I had always wanted. They had their city friends and their out East friends. Their West Village apartment had been used to shoot the block below for the opening credits of a cop show. They could name-drop impressively well.
One of the women was a child of immigrants that fled Hungary during World War II. My mother’s grandparents had fled the same country during the first World War. We discussed how even though our families came from the same place, their trajectories were so different. Both came through Ellis Island, her’s stayed in the city, mine came to rural Virginia. Her family Jewish, mine Christian. I imagined how if mine had chosen the same path, how different my life would have been. I would have been a real New Yorker. I would have grown up with trips to the Natural History Museum, a NY Public Library card, that self-assured mentality that all New York kids have.
She was a retired History teacher, so she grilled me about my dad’s side of the family, the ones that had been in Virginia for generations. I told her that I had traced our ancestors back to the man that came from England to Jamestown in 1616. The relative that was one of the first men elected to the House of Burgesses. The man that was arrested at Bacon’s Rebellion. And of course about the ancestors who were perpetrators of that great American sin, slavery. We talked about the complicated feelings I had about being a Virginian. Of course I hated the history of slavery in Virginia, and I was disturbed by the vestiges that remain. But I missed so much about home. At some point of being in New York, the most fleeting memory of home comforts would cause me to well up. My parents garden, full of fruits and vegetables. My mom canning spaghetti sauce, blueberry preserves, snaps, strawberry freezer jelly, etc.. The accent of family and friends that turned “berry, library and Mary,” to “burry, librury, and Murray.” Driving down familiar roads to clear my head.
I’m proud of the life I built in New York. I persevered and found a good job, made lasting friendships, and had a lot of fun. But for all of the moments filled with dancing, laughing, and exploring, there were moments of exhaustion, stressing about money, and homesickness. During that Winter, I decided to start applying for jobs in Richmond. I knew that I could live at home for a few months to build back some savings, and reset. I got a job offer and told my friends I was leaving the city. My new job was going to bring more money than the one I had in New York. No more anxiety over budgeting and falling asleep on the hour commute home. I would be surrounded by family and friends. I could take a moment to breathe.
There was a wonderful going away party where I drank and played games with my friends. I packed up my things and rented a van. And then I left. From the BQE until I entered my home county, I was constantly thinking. Reflecting on my time in New York and forecasting what the move home would bring.
As I drove South, I noticed how signs of Spring began to show themselves. Trees full of red buds, greening grass, pear trees turning fluffy white. Not long after I crossed the Virginia state line, I began to see bright yellow forsythia bushes along the road. Those sunny bushes cheered me up, not only because of their color, but because they were my grandmother’s favorite flower. In early Spring I would go in her backyard and snip some branches to fill her kitchen with (she believed all kitchens should be yellow.) Now I am prone to over-sentimentalizing, but it did feel like she had sent those flowers to me as well wishes. For the first time in a very long time, I was hopeful.
It turned out I wasn’t the only one called back home. Around two weeks after unloading the car, the country went into lockdown. From March until August I was back in my teenage bedroom, reestablishing a routine I had abandoned when I left for New York. Walking the dogs, helping my parents in the garden, reading on the front porch, napping on the patio, all became part of daily life. Although I’m thankful to be living alone now, I am glad I had that period in my parent's house. New York drained my emotional and physical energy, as well as my bank account. Now I was able to restore and remove those external pressures. I could spend time with the people I loved, and more importantly with myself. After a strange, exciting sojourn, I was home.
