Doing My Part For Global Warming

This afternoon I headed out to the store to get tonight's dinner, and while I was out I decided to sneak into Epilogue Books in Ballard on the way. So I pulled over, put 'er in Park, and hopped out. Epilogue Books was closed. Everything is closed; it's Easter Sunday.

On the way back to the car, cursing Christianity, I reached for my keys. Not there. When I got to the car, I saw them dangling from the ignition. I bent down; yes, the engine was still running. That's a photograph of them up there.

My spare key is in my wallet. I patted my ass; no wallet. No cell phone. The only thing in any of my pockets was a single dirty sock, red.

I know you think that the life of Fnarf must be one of unceasing glamor and fascination, but the reality is this: standing on the corner in the pouring rain, locked out of my running car, penniless and brainless; nothing but the suddenly inadequate jacket on my back.

No coathangers happened to be lying around, but I did spy a chunk of brick in the entry of a nearby building. I could break out my own window! But if someone saw me, how would I prove the car was mine without identification? How would I avoid an expensive ticket for driving without a license?

I walked home. It took me about half an hour, up and over the hill. When I got home, I had a brief meltdown when I couldn't find my wallet there either; could I have locked it in the car? My mental fog was so thick I couldn't rule it out. But no, there it was; but of course no key was inside. Do I even have a spare key? How would I know, I don't have enough brainpower to turn my goddamn car off when I park! I couldn't find my cell phone either (still haven't).

Nancy drove me back down there, and sat patiently with me while I phoned Triple-A with her phone, and we waited for over an hour for the guy in the truck to show up. He had it open in less than five seconds.

I'm Sorry, Jane

steve and jane c1963
Originally uploaded by Fnarf

I would like to publicly apologize for torturing my sweet younger sister Jane when we were children. You can see by the hangdog look on her face that I'm about to inflict some kind of unnecessary roughness on her, compounding the torture that our parents have already put her through with the cowgirl outfit. I don't think she liked it much -- the outfit, or the abuse.

I liked it very much indeed. I can still remember the feel of that tin star between my fingers, and mentally checking just how cheap and inauthentic it was -- cheapness and inauthenticity having no bearing on play value, of course. As for the chaps, well, let's just say it's a good thing it was a safe neighborhood, with no older boy bullies around. Because I would have been dead meat.

That's a phrase I remember hearing a lot as a child -- "you're dead meat", following by the pounding of feet and my heart. I was a dweeb. A dork. A geek.

This is about the time I had to be removed from my second-grade class for having pooed in my pants, out of a pathological sense of embarrassment that prevented me from raising my hand. Despite my best efforts I was unable to prevent a few pellets of shame from falling down my pants leg onto the floor. A teacher -- a woman! -- took me to the bathroom and gave me the most horrible thing in the world: a pair of school pants, with an elastic waist. I wanted to die.

I peed my pants all the time too.

Sweet Jane didn't think I was a dweeb, though; she worshiped me. I repaid this devotion by telling her, right about this time, that there was no Santa Claus. That may explain the face in this picture.

I used to do naughty things, like scatter my dad's tools around, or damage them, or damage furniture with them. My dad would attempt to teach us both a lesson about honesty and forthrightness, and ask us each in turn, "did you do this?" I would solemnly shake my head "no", and Jane would just as solemnly nod her head "yes". Our dad was not a fool, and would punish me, not her -- twice, in fact.

This photograph was taken by dad with a Kodak Retina IIa in 1963 or 64 in Magnolia, Seattle, Washington. I recently found it in a tray of my grandfather's slides.

Sergio! Sergio!

After my eviction from Jennifer's apartment, I was homeless. I went to work that day with a duffel bag and the newspaper, circling ads for rooms. The appearance of a duffel bag in an office always causes a commotion, and this office was pretty well geared for commotion anyways.

I was working on the Upper East Side, barely; we worked out of an apartment house on E. 62nd Street, just east of 3rd Avenue. Two apartments across the hall from each other, packed with telecommunications gear and eight or nine employees. We ran a calling card business; you know, the cards you buy at the corner store or the tacqueria that allow you to call long distance for cheaps. The business model was to buy minutes from AT&T and sell them on the cards. If we paid AT&T 6-and-a-quarter cents per minute, we made a fortune; if we paid six-and-a-half we lost our shirts. The company was run by two brothers, Victor and Raul, Venezuelans. Victor was the handsome, suave one, Raul the dark, funny, dangerous one. They were from one of Venezuela's richest families, and frequented places like "21", which seemed like something out of a dream.

The whole operation seemed shady; there was a closet full of binders of shell companies, maybe a hundred of them, and little stashes of serious cash in various drawers. I got the impression that the cash was there to tempt me, and if I took so much as a single bill I'd spend the rest of my life in a different time zone than my skin.

There was a third brother, Sergio, who was the black sheep of the family. I think that was his job title; all he did all day was sit with his feet up on his desk smoking furiously and reading the newspaper. We all smoked furiously; Victor the boss smoked cigars.

The office was a fire hazard in other ways too. Our primary lighting came from halogen torchieres with wobbly bases. They would fall over and burn the carpet. Once Victor stored a box of supplies on top of the stove in one of the kitchens (these were outfitted as ordinary apartments), only to fill the room with smoke shortly after as the gas pilot light in the burners ignited the box.

Despite the chaos of the office, Victor and Raul were fun to be around and fantastically loyal. The second they saw my duffel, they had their lawyer on speakerphone, who explained to me how stupid I was for vacating the apartment. Alas, it was done. But Victor said, "no, you can stay here until you find a place". So I moved into the apartment, sleeping on the sofa. The only drawback was that I had to be up and showered and dressed before anyone got there in the morning, about six AM.

The neighborhood was lovely; to the east, Madison, Lexington, Central Park and Midtown; to the west, the charming and leafy Upper East Side. I used the laundromat at the end of the block, and drank in the friendly bar on First. It was a lot closer to Brownies and the other clubs I was frequenting than my old place, too, seeing the Magnetic Fields, Holiday, and the Mad Scene play every other night. 125 blocks closer -- a feasible walk, even, from the East Village, which I did many times, either through the lonely wastelands of First Avenue past the United Nations, or the surprisingly varied neighborhoods up Second or Third, Lex or Park.

One day as the office was closing I was introduced to my new cross-hall roommate for the night: Miss Venezuela. She was the most beautiful creature I've ever seen to this day, achingly gorgeous, like a porcelain doll. She was going to be in one of the apartments, I was in the other. When I saw her in the morning I was suffering from a terrible hangover; she was still perfect. I wonder if I terrified her. She terrified me.

After a month of this kind of living the Alves brothers had a proposition: move in with Sergio. Sergio lived in the company apartment and his roommate was leaving. 14th Street between Second and First. My room was a shoebox -- eight feet wide, twelve feet long. Sergio's room was the living room, stood off from the tiny open kitchen and hall with rows of tall bookcases. His room was three times as big as mine.

Sergio lived there with his Japanese girlfriend Yuko, who came to the US for expensive dentistry and found a chainsmoking Venezuelan instead. Yuko was stereotypically Japanese, covering her mouth with her hand when she talked, laboring endlessly in the apartment, cringing before her master and now her master's new roommate. I was unnerved to come home to her scrubbing the floors and apologizing for not doing it well enough.

Sergio's main form of entertainment was watching war documentaries on his large-screen TV. The volume was always turned up. He also liked to engage in loud sex with Yuko, featuring lots of vigorous spanking and crying. I would cower in my room hearing the rumble and roar of thousands of B-17 bombers with the voiceover describing the destruction of Dresden down below, punctuated by loud slaps and Yuko screaming "Oh, Sergio, Oh, Oh, Sergio!" and Sergio himself demonstrating the kind of command and discipline that was denied him at his job. "You've been very BATT!" Whap. "Oh, Sergio! Sergio!" Whap. Grrrarr, boom, boom-boom, boom. WHAP!

New Yorkers spend most of their spare time going out. Now you know why.

Sergio also smoked pot continuously, and he had a little cocaine problem as well. When he and his friends were high, and after inviting me into his side of the apartment to enjoy the evening, he would get paranoid, and push me up against the wall, alternately threatening and cajoling me, don't tell Victor, don't tell Raul, you're not going to tell anyone are you, I swear to God I'll cut you, man, PLEASE don't tell them, here, you want some?

There was an Irish bar on the corner, an old-fashioned workingman's bar, not fancy at all, and cheap. Three dollars for a pint of Guinness, and in the grand New York tradition the barman buys you every third one. I have no idea if this bar or this tradition has survived the relentless gentrification of the city. I hope so. Where else are the telephone linesmen and delivery drivers going to drink? I sat in there for hours most nights, if nothing was going on, sipping the black stuff and reading at the bar, to avoid the seige of Sergio and his bellicose love life.

This was the apartment which Mrs. Fnarf came to visit again, in summer. We were engaged to be married by then. The discussion about where we would be living afterwards was very short. The 100 square foot room with no furniture except a bed and a bookcase, with Yuko and Sergio and his giant TV on the other side of the wall, did not make up for the excitement of having the East Village on my doorstep. On her first night, we walked down First and Avenue A as far as Houston, and when she realized she had to walk fourteen blocks back as well she threw water on me. New York was not to be.

Jennifer, Oh Jenny

I moved to New York in the fall of 1995, because I wanted excitement. My first taste of the city the previous year, helping to put on the first Tweefest, had really set my mind ablaze. So when the opportunity arose, I took it.

It turned out the opportunity wasn't there, and my friend Keith Testcard had already promised my room in his Hoboken flat to someone else. But things move fast in New York, and at a party in a restaurant for Sally, an old friend from punk-rock days in Seattle, I met a girl who needed a roommate. Her name was Jenny.

The fact that later that night she took a bunch of ketamine in a club in the East Village -- a club which I stumbled out of at four in the morning, still throbbing away inside, might have told me something about her, but I was desperate. A couple of days later I was on the A train to see the apartment.

It was in Washington Heights, on Fort Washington Avenue at 187th Street. There's a picture of the building on the Wikipedia page for the street; the tall dark six-story block to the right. I got off the subway at 181st, terrified at what slum horrors I might find above, only to come out in a tree-lined street in a lovely old Jewish neighborhood. One thing people who don't know New York don't realize is how close the neighborhoods are to each other, and how abruptly they change; just a block away, down a flight of stairs to upper Broadway, it was solidly and vibrantly Dominican.

The apartment was a shambles. Filthy, matted with dog hair, sloping floors, fifty layers of cheap paint on the doors, no cupboards in the kitchen, only slanting bare wood shelves. Two bedrooms, though, and my room was huge by New York standards, with high ceilings. I would have said yes no matter what it looked like, but it had promise.

Jennifer had promise too. Blonde, blue eyes, short but built like a tank, and brim-full of fire and light, she laughed constantly and deep, and never stopped moving. She was intelligent and well-read, with a case full of Peter Handke and other interesting books. This is not a romance I'm telling, but I'd be lying if I said she wasn't attractive. But there was something else there, too: a kind of recklessness that was also attractive, but dangerous.

I got my first taste of this side of her personality the day I moved my belongings in. I had been keeping them in a storage facility in Hoboken near Keith's apartment. Visiting the place to pay my bill was always interesting; I met an amazing fellow there once who got out of a big black Cadillac, wearing a black pinstripe suit, black shirt, mass of gold medallions in the open neck, and slicked-back hair -- straight out of The Sopranos. I didn't ask him what he was keeping in storage.

Anyways, the day of the move, my friend Keith helped me move the boxes from the sidewalk up to the new apartment. Jennifer didn't help much, but at one point she did spend a great deal of time fixing her hair, topless, with the door open. An opportunity that some little bell inside my brain said "don't take". Keith could hear the same bell. I had met her boyfriend, a six-foot-five black man who, while charming, could have broken me like a toothpick. I think she would have liked that, actually, just for the excitement.

Her old roommate had had to leave when her heroin addiction got out of control and she stopped paying rent. That's the story I was told, at any rate. That's apparently what happened to the cupboards; she'd ripped them from the wall in a violent rage sometime. She may have been dead. I don't know; I didn't want to know. More excitement I didn't want to come near.

Jennifer was a bicycle messenger. Every day she got on her bike and rode 187 blocks and then some down to her lower Manhattan messenger office, rode all day delivering packages, and then rode home. When she got home, she usually stripped off her clothes, put her favorite Madonna record on top volume, mounted her track bike on rollers in the hall, and pedalled furiously until the entire apartment filled with steam. This was not an erotic spectacle; it was explosive and insane. She rode for up to an hour this way, laughing and occasionally screaming out loud; then she'd stop, and jump in the shower. I would be cowering in my room.

Jennifer had a dog, a German Shepherd named Hojo. I never did find out if that was after Howard Johnson, the popular (at the time) New York Met, or Cujo, the Stephen King killer dog. I've never read the book, but Hojo did have some Satanic tendencies. The poor creature was mentally ill; imprisoned in a tiny New York flat all day, he was fiercely, insanely protective of Jennifer. One thing he liked to do was bite shoes; if you put on your shoes, he would bite them while making an unearthly high-pitched throat growl. Jennifer would calm him, but if you made a move toward the door, he'd be up and at your feet again, biting them hard enough to mark your shoes and hurt your feet inside.

Another thing he liked to do was bite people, especially children. He only got a piece of me once or twice, but many times lunged at my hands. Only when Jennifer was there. When she walked him, or when I was roped into doing it, he would lunge and snap at people if they were foolish enough to come close enough to try and pet him. Kids were the worst, because the most keen on petting him. One night Jennifer came racing back into the apartment, slamming and bolting the door. "Hojo bit someone" she said, but nothing more. Later that week, groups of kids would come to the door while Jennifer was out demanding money for the doctor that a young girl had needed to see.

Jennifer had a succession of boyfriends. There was her steady boyfriend, the tall black radical in his army coat; but also a series of fellows she met through cycling or work or wherever, ranging from a nebbishy ponytailed accountant to the city's premier graffiti artist, whose name I wish I could recall. Her dates with him would be across rooftops with backpacks full of paint. She would frequently have sex with these men with the door to her room ajar, Hojo the dog wandering in and out, me in my room trying to drown out their sighs and moans with my latest finds from Other Music or Kim's downtown. Sometimes afterwards we'd sit and drink coffee all together in the tiny kitchen.

Jennifer liked to sit around and talk about her plans for the future. This mostly involved the bicycle trip she wanted to take to Italy. With Hojo, trotting along beside her. Pointing out how disastrous an idea this was, that a dog's feet couldn't possibly stand up to a high-speed run down a thousand miles of paved highway, only made her angry.

Some of our visitors were interesting. Rose, from upstairs, had lived in the building since the 1930s, and had grown up in an orphanage. She was in her eighties by then, and would sit telling stories of working in the garment industry downtown.

For all the dramatic happenings at home, the neighborhood was endlessly interesting. In the Jewish part there was an old-fashioned candy store, which in New York means kind of a combination candy store, newstand, and stationers; an old-fashioned deli, the likes of which had even by then nearly disappeared from most parts of what most people mean when they say "Manhattan", which served the best egg salad sandwiches in the world; and the most decrepit supermarket I have ever seen: an ancient A&P, about a quarter the size of an ordinary Seattle supermarket, with cardboard on the floors all winter long (for the rain and snow), and the most random and meagre selection of goods you could imagine. The produce section was simply appalling, sparse and limp and decaying at the edges, and I don't think anyone ever bought produce from them -- you went to the Koreans for that. The selection of Jewish foods was excellent, though.

A block away, and down to 181st Street, the neighborhood was all Dominican, and had everything you could need -- tiny hardware stores, a grand old Woolworth's with a lunch counter, Seinfeld-style restaurants, and all kinds of shops selling Dominican goods. I loved going into Woolworth's, and outfitted most of my apartment from there. I ate a few grilled cheese sandwiches for $1.15 there too; it was in a time warp. Across the street from Woolworth's was another, similar, but even cheaper five-and-dime store. I can't remember the name of it, but it was huge, and I remember on the top floor the ceiling was caving in and the rain pouring onto the linen section, draped with plastic. It seems grotesque but it was a wonderful place to prowl around, like being transported back to the 1950s -- I swear some of the merchandise dated from then. I wonder if it's still there? The Woolworth's isn't, of course.

One day I decided I was sick of the cockroaches and the filth, so I cleaned the kitchen. I took everything off the shelves and sprayed and cleaned, cleaned and scrubbed, scrubbed and sprayed, until the last of ten thousand roaches had emerged from their last hiding places. The sink was a double sink with a metal lid over one side; when I asked Jennifer why it was always covered, she said only "don't look in there". I looked, and it was pretty nasty, but sparing no amount of Ajax and elbow grease I made it presentable again. It took two entire days, but that kitchen was clean, dammit, and those roaches were gone. I killed thousands of them, literally trash bags full of the bastards. I'm a clean person.

Jennifer's family came to visit once, from Erie, Pennsylvania. Her dad was a pleasant enough guy, and worked for the company that made a lot of the cables and connectors I use in my line of work, so we had something to chat about. Her mother was kind of mousey and worried-looking; and her brother was severely disabled with Down Syndrome -- a cheerful fellow but
obviously a great deal of work. It was apparent that the purpose of the visit was to encourage young Jennifer to abandon her bohemian lifestyle in the city and get back to the college she had abandoned.

One day in late spring, after I'd lived there for six or seven months Jennifer asked to borrow my portable cd player, as she was driving up to see her folks. This turned out to be goodbye, as she then announced that she was packing up and moving out. Everything was taken care of, a friend of her boyfriend's was going to take her place in the apartment. I never saw my cd player again.

A couple of days after she left, the landlord came banging on the door. He was demanding many months of back rent, nearly a year. I had been paying my rent directly to Jennifer, in cash, and it turns out none of it was making its way to the landlord. The nicest part of this was that my future wife was with me then, still in the early stages of deciding if I was reliable enough to be a proper boyfriend, and here I was frantically negotiating with a very angry man in a beard, a black fedora and a long black coat. I had never met him before, but I had seen him and a dozen men who looked just like him going in and out of a special room in the basement of the building.

After a bit of one-sided discussion, during which I discovered that not only had Jennifer not been paying the rent, but that the apartment wasn't in her name but in the name of the heroin addict who preceded me, and I heard a great deal of abuse of her as well. This man wanted me the hell out of there and he wanted me out now.

I learned a bit more about New York rental law in the next few weeks, and it turned out I did a very stupid thing: I moved out. If I'd stayed, as Jennifer had stayed, I couldn't have been evicted, especially if I'd started paying rent; he could come and bang on my door, but the sheriff would never come to put me out as long as I had possession. I also didn't understand at the time how valuable it would have been to have the super on my side. But alas, I knew none of this, and so back into storage all my stuff went, or as much of it as I could get packed up in a day or two. The one thing I left behind that I still miss is my Mussolini atlas -- a huge, beautifully drawn and printed world atlas made at the request of Il Duce in the late 30s, as a particular matter of Italian pride, and especially in the face of the world's best atlas, the Times Atlas of the World, printed in London. Mussolini demanded its equal or better, and he got it -- it was gorgeous, but it was too big to fit in any of my boxes. In a landfill somewhere, I suppose.

And that's the story of Jennifer, my crazy roommate in New York. I never saw her again. Several years later, she found me by email, and after breezily asking "I hope you're not still mad at me?" started sending me emails with pornographic pictures in them, or stories of weird sex with German Shepherds. I told her to stop.