Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  As terrible as things seemed to be going, I felt that being poor in New York City was preferable to being rich anywhere else, especially Corringham. I adopted the sentiment as my mantra when my stomach rumbled or I found myself walking miles home from Manhattan in near hundred-degree weather. I was becoming ill, looking drawn and beaten down. I thought I’d been doing a good job at concealing my run of bad luck but realized it permeated my being as homeless people gradually stopped asking me for change.

  I was now single and renting the open kitchen/living room of my friend Lizzy’s dilapidated Brooklyn apartment as a crash pad, answering phones and shrink-wrapping CDs at The Orchard in the hope of being paid and living off of bagels that sandwich franchise threw out at the end of the day. They were hardly stale, and if you froze them immediately a bag might last you ten days or more. Occasionally I could stop being angry at what had become of my existence long enough to revel in my penny-pinching ingenuity. I often felt a very real sense of pride as I marched cheerfully across the Williamsburg Bridge with yet another week’s starchy sustenance slung over my shoulder. Being incredibly thrifty was a game I was getting better at and even enjoyed at times. I began to amass a catalog of money-saving techniques that I’d either invent or adapt to suit my own situation. The leanest times gave me some surprising perspective on how I could make do with so little. I let this thinking inform my lifestyle further.

  I always carried an empty to-go cup. I’d spot friends brunching at a diner and siphon off a cup of their bottomless coffee. I’d bring a mason jar to house parties and pilfer a few fingers of gin, then dump in the remainder of an abandoned screwdriver or rusty nail. I’d go home and put the jar in the freezer, then take it out to the next night’s party and repeat the process. Some combinations were vile, but in general the resulting mixture was not unlike a Long Island Iced Tea and improved by the mouthful. I scaled back this practice after nearly choking to death on a rogue cigarette butt at a friend of a friend’s movie screening.

  If the universe was offering something, I’d gladly accept and decide whether or not I could use it later. One weekend’s bumper harvest included a copy of the previous week’s New Yorker, a shoe box full of well-thumbed paperbacks in Spanish, twenty-five square feet of plastic grass, a superficially damaged lawn chair, a cup of Baskin-Robbins’s Rum Raisin, a ratty-looking videotape of Moonstruck (with the last third taped over with music videos), over a dozen assorted gourmet olives, a three-foot-tall Frosty the Snowman lawn ornament, several bite-sized panini samples, a comped entry to a local band’s “showcase” gig, and a floor lamp.

  Luckily, the lean times coincided with the summer months. When the weather was nice I stayed outside as much as possible. The sunshine was a great leveler and made me feel human again. I borrowed one of Lizzy’s books and sat in McCarran Park or strolled around the East Village for hours on end. Three dollars would get me to the beach at Coney Island and back. On more unpleasant days, I trained myself in the art of appreciating vegetating under the covers. Many of my contemporaries had a reverence for sleep, but I had only known it as a necessity. I would while away hours listening to Lizzy’s Stereolab albums and drift in and out of consciousness, willing myself back into beautiful dreams.

  Lizzy and our other roommate, Albert, eventually confronted me with regards to my being habitually late with rent money and the cold cuts I’d taken from the fridge without asking. It took several minutes for me to realize they were actually asking me to leave. I was being evicted.

  “You’re chucking me out?” I said upon the realization.

  “Well, we can’t afford to cover your end anymore,” said Albert. “Plus, you’re sort of a thief.”

  Silently, Lizzy looked at the floor.

  “It was a few slices of cheese!” I pleaded.

  “Look, someone else has offered me a lot more for the space than you’re paying and things aren’t working out with us, so here’s your two weeks’ notice.”

  “Where am I going to go?” I said.

  “Sorry, dude,” said Albert.

  The phone call home had practically become assured in an instant. I ran out of the house in a vain attempt to get some sort of grip on the situation. Aside from the beautiful people languidly crisscrossing it, Bedford Avenue—Williamsburg’s main drag—is incredibly dull. When you’re hungry and your clothes are out of style, it’s downright depressing. I decided I would wander the Lower East Side until I had hashed out an action plan regarding somewhere to go.

  The L train wasn’t running so I walked over to the Marcy Avenue stop, a part of Williamsburg where gentrification hadn’t dared to encroach. From Grand Avenue southward, the neighborhood was strewn with crude graffiti slogans.

  “Gentrification = Death!” “Kill Borzois Oppressors!” and “Stop Gentrification Now!”

  By the late nineties it had become resoundingly obvious that a plea to stop gentrification was as ineffectual as a motion to stop plate tectonics or signing a petition opposing photosynthesis. It was a natural process beyond anyone’s control. Furthermore, I’m certain that the call to arms was sprayed not by the Dominicans, Poles, or Hasidic Jews but by distraught members of the first few waves of blue-eyed immigrants who had arrived over the previous decade, people desperately aware of how more affluent later waves would surely unseat them from their cheap and behemoth loft spaces.

  Before I got my first cell phone in late 2001, I had the mental agility to hold and recall fifteen of my friend’s phone numbers. I had about ten more written down in miniature on the back of a business card that I’d wrapped in Scotch tape. As I got off the train, I counted seven dimes in my pocket, meaning I was able to make two brief phone calls at best. Who I decided to call was often based more on the likelihood of them picking up the phone than on whether we had anything to say to each other, something I reckoned as I walked south down Essex in the muggy August air.

  Chris Apostolou could often be found at the Orchard during the weekend; I decided I would walk across Hester Street to see him and guiltlessly make my personal phone calls on the company’s tab. Aside from being the company’s de facto accountant, Chris was its handyman, using his weekends to build shelves to hold more CDs, painting the walls, squeezing in yet another workstation.

  “I have something for you,” he shouted over the dying din of his circular saw. Chris ran to his desk and returned with a check for three hundred dollars paid to cash. “I’d run to the bank now if I were you. I’ll keep chipping away at it for you,” he promised. “Things are looking a little better. I’ll have another five hundred dollars for you late next week.”

  My ego bolstered by the unexpected three-hundred-dollar windfall and the promise of more cash on the horizon, I walked tall up Orchard Street and up into the East Village. I picked up a copy of the Voice and commandeered a booth for myself at the Odessa diner on Avenue A, ordering pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, and sweet corn, despite the late August heat outside. With a full belly and wallet, I even felt good enough about myself to casually flirt with the strawberry-blonde, apple-bottomed waitress and let her talk me into a slice of pie and some coffee. I toyed with the idea of asking for her number but became deterred as she frowned, watching me fill my to-go cup to the brim. The practice had become deeply ingrained.

  I took my ratty-looking to-go cup across the street to Tompkins Square Park and had myself a think in the shade. I thought mostly about my imminent eviction and subsequent relegation to homeless-person status. My friend Mike had told me about a possible room opening up in his place in Washington Heights on October first. I’d not realistically considered it before, as I always wanted to live within a somewhat reasonable walking radius of the East Village, but these were desperate times and he told me the place was large, clean, cheap, a block from the A express train, and I would have my own door. I pulled out my laminated business card and squinted to make out Mike’s number.

  I eventually found a working pay phone that didn’t have blood and/ or fecal matter smear
ed all over the receiver and told Mike I would take the room sight unseen.

  With the sun setting and some semblance of an action plan coming together in my mind, I walked back to Williamsburg, across the bridge.

  The apartment was hot and stuffy. It had been for weeks. The iron bars encasing the windows of our street-level part of the house meant that it was impossible to install an air-conditioning unit. Hershel the landlord had promised the bars would be removed though warned that we would certainly be burgled. Lizzy and Albert had each brought two huge air conditioners to the house, but they sat hulking and redundant on the floor under the windows waiting for Rico the superintendent to remove the bars. It never ceases to amuse me that the apathetic alcoholics employed to keep a group of apartments in good working order are—without the merest trace of irony—typically referred to as “Super.” In the ten New York City addresses I’ve called home, these men have been anything but. We had a ninety-degree heat wave that lasted for two weeks in May 2000. Rico still had the central heating on full blast until June.

  Driven to distraction by the heat, I turned on one of the dormant air conditioners despite its just sitting on the floor. The unit noisily coughed out some blue smoke before blowing the house’s main fuse, which happened to be located in a closet only Rico had the key to. We were without electricity for twelve hours. Since then we had all been using cheap fans and misting bottles to abate the summer heat.

  I decided that even though I had two weeks in Williamsburg, I would spend as little time there as possible. I started immediately and took the now-running L train back over to First Avenue and treated myself to a late movie in the icy cool of Cinema Village East on Second Avenue. The first time I had ever been to the movies on my own. It made me melancholy but I felt that I had grown some in the process, though I can’t remember what film I saw. It was after two by the time it was over, too late to ask friends to crash. I decided to pull an all-nighter.

  I emerged and walked back to Odessa. A different waitress was on. She was older, harder, colder. Though it was largely unoccupied she said that I could only sit at the counter if I was just going to have coffee. I drank coffee to the point of itchiness and nausea. Five reluctantly refilled cups later, I twitched out of the diner. It had become chilly outside. It was after four and the only people around were heading to 7A, a twenty-four-hour diner, for food to soak up the booze. I did a lap of the twenty-four-hour Key Foods supermarket before I succumbed fully to fatigue. I had $270 on me—most of my first rent check at my new digs—and didn’t want to sleep in the open elements. I stumbled into the Citibank ATM vestibule next door, shoving the roll of cash into my underpants. I got two hours of restless sleep under the fluorescent lights before getting turfed out at around seven. A bright Sunday morning.

  In the relative safety of daylight, I laid in the park until I registered the sun burning into my face some twenty minutes later. I looked around. Crack whores sat expectantly by the chess boards, junky couples argued about ripping each other’s shit off. Old Ukrainian and Polish men sipped booze and mumbled to each other, their big red noses making them resemble proboscis monkeys. I was merely playing at being homeless. I thought about who would step in to save me if I let myself descend further.

  In actual fact there were plenty. But surely these poor pricks had friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, families. They’d gone to high school, some had attended college. I had been seeing these same bums in the two years since I’d moved to New York. They had been left to their own devices for so long that they had become living folk heroes and villains replete with colorful creation myths, nicknames, and accompanying lore.

  That morning I felt sure that I would never realistically be allowed to become feral. I had great friends and I wasn’t addicted to meth. I knew that if I recaptured some of the hope and optimism I had when I came to America to be with Becky, I was leaving myself open to something good. I lay back down and let the sunshine warm my face some more.

  LIVE FREE OR DIE

  FRIENDS OFTEN PUT TO ME that I hadn’t really taken full advantage of my time in America, but none more succinctly than my friend Mark.

  “Y’know, you’ve been here for two years and you’ve only fucked one girl.”

  His calculation was both smarting and accurate, but didn’t take into account that for eighteen months I was living with Becky, the girl I had come to America to win over.

  “So?” I said, feeling incredibly defensive.

  “I’m just sayin’ is all. You’re twenty-three years old, you play guitar, living in New York City. You ain’t that bad-lookin’, and you’ve got that stupid fuckin’ accent. Girls love that, don’t they?”

  “Well, some do…I suppose.”

  “Well, you should be livin’ the life, balls-deep in strange ass every fuckin’ night of the week.”

  While I’m sure that my accent has enabled me to make time with more pretty women than I’ve really deserved to over the years, its aphrodisiacal value—at least in my experience—is infinitely more subtle than one might think. In addition, there’s nothing like being penniless to negate the charm of a foreign accent. I couldn’t afford meeting a girl for drinks or a movie, let alone dinner. In theory, gallery openings could mean free wine, cheese-based snacks, and entertainment, but this was only worth attempting if they happened to take place within walking distance of my tumbledown part of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Even then, I doubt I’d have the gall to invite them into the space I called my own, just a ratty mattress on a scuffed linoleum floor in a common kitchen and living room area that inexplicably smelled strongly of gasoline. As is the case for many men, my ego inflates and deflates in concert with my cash flow, and consequently, this was a near all-time low. I craved to hold a naked female but I was in no state to court women in the time-honored tradition. I needed a sure thing; no drinks, dinner, or pretending to be interested in them or pretending to be anything more than a foreign drifter.

  That I was prepared to travel three hundred miles for sex I’d won in an online trivia contest surprised me.

  I stuffed a bottle of tap water and two frozen bagels in my backpack with some clean underwear and a toothbrush. The bus ride to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was a long one. I walked north from my squat behind the Domino Sugar factory. The area was largely untouched by gentrification and still pretty colorful: a biker’s hangout was stationed opposite the ramshackle building I was calling home, its denizens always revving their hogs and doing wheelies through the potholed streets. Hasids in giant hockey-puck-shaped fur hats poured through the streets at sundown on Fridays, followed by wave after wave of well-scrubbed Poles en route to the Warsaw Social Club an hour later. Dominicans made full recreational use of the sidewalks, with the sound of meringue music filling the air all day and the smell of burnt sugar hanging thick at night. The sugar factory workers were in a running dispute with their British parent company and had taken to defacing the Union Jack and images of the Queen in protest on Kent Avenue. It never failed to stoke the few dying embers of patriotism that I still had in me.

  It was 9:30 a.m., hours before the Saturday brunch rush on the more genteel and gentile stretch of Bedford Avenue. Trembling pretty people with preposterous cockatoo haircuts were still getting home. They had been drinking, drugging, and having sex and generally making the most of both their early twenties and the beautiful Indian summer. I had not. I was broke. In fact, I was quasi-homeless, hungry, ill, lonely, and a bad month away from going back to England a broken man, provided I could scare up the airfare. I took the L train from Bedford Avenue, changed to an uptown C train at Eighth Avenue and waited for the Greyhound to Boston at gate 71 of the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street. I had just over an hour to sit and think about what was waiting for me on the other end of my journey.

  Two weeks prior, with my reluctant repatriation seemingly inevitable, I decided that I would have a stab at doing something that took me out of my malaise, if only for a few hours. As I opened my mind beyond what I could
scrounge up to eat, an opportunity plopped neatly into my lap: a friend suggested that I enter a competition, a general knowledge quiz that took place in an Internet chat room. The prize was sexual intercourse with Lisa Carver, a former teen prostitute, performance artist, and writer at her home in Dover, New Hampshire. She lived up there with her husband and six-year-old son, who was sired by a prominent member of the Church of Satan.

  Up until this point my experience with women other than Becky was next to nil. By the age of twenty-three, the opportunity to engage in casual sex had not presented itself, and I remain clueless as to how to effectively go about it to this day. Free, transactional sex was the perfect sexual adventure for a socially awkward and downwardly mobile man. Lisa, bless her restless, reckless heart, was giving me that opportunity, and in doing so the opportunity to resurrect my American dream.

  Lisa wrote a biweekly column for Nerve.com in which she reported on the intimate details of her long, rich, and tumultuous sex life. She had recently gotten married and decided that she would keep things interesting for herself and her fanatical following by having sex with the winner of a random trivia contest. I hadn’t heard of Nerve.com or Lisa Carver before entering the competition; being preoccupied with my life’s downward spiral I had reverted to a hunter-gatherer existence, oblivious to popular culture. A coworker at The Orchard sat me down at the computer to answer trivia questions at work. It was only after the competition that she filled me in on who Lisa was, what Nerve was all about.

  By the time the decrepit bus willed itself past Hartford, Connecticut, I noticed that the reds and golds of autumn had arrived here weeks sooner than in Manhattan and that my bagels had thawed just enough to eat. I tore off bite-sized hunks of the cinnamon-raisin and popped them into my mouth despite being nauseated with fear. I found that the only way to abate the nausea was by telling myself that Lisa would understand if I backed out.