by Alina Simone
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“This apartment isn’t in Park Slope, it’s in Red Hook.”
“But the ad said Park Slope.”
“The ad lied. I’m looking at Google Maps right now.”
“It’s not in the Slope?” I struggled with this new piece of information. “Well, what’s in Red Hook, then? Isn’t Red Hook supposed to be, like, the next new place?”
“Maybe, but not where you’re living. Hang on … I just sent you the link. Check your email. You got it? Now put it in ‘satellite’ view. And zoom in all the way. Okay, so see all those big blocks over on the left? That’s the Red Hook Houses. And then see your place, just across the street over here? It looks the same, right? Dude, I think you just got yourself a place in the projects.”
I stared down at all the little rectangles of washed-out rose and gray and green and understood nothing at all. The only thing I understood was that I had to get out of North Carolina. Now. Even if what Ben was saying was true, I was still going. And who said the projects were even a bad place to live?
“Well, I guess I’ll have to make it an adventure,” I announced cheerfully.
“Did you already pay that lady? Because seriously—”
“Forget it,” I interrupted. “I’ll see you in a couple weeks. Dude.”
I arrived in New York a few days before my sublet began and crashed at Ben’s, who had exiled himself to his girlfriend’s apartment in Chelsea. With nothing better to do, I decided to drive out to Red Hook for a look at the new place. But as I approached the building, I experienced something I hadn’t felt for a long time in New York City: fear. Nearby fences were tipped with barbed wire and the check-cashing joint on the corner sported more armor than a Wells Fargo delivery truck. There was a dark, scary stretch of underpass that whispered, rape me. And the building itself did look suspiciously like public housing, which meant my sublet was totally illegal. Unless, of course, Mid-Twentieth-Century Institutional just happened to be this private builder’s architectural style of choice. I circled the block two times and then drove back to Ben’s apartment, thinking, Well, I’ll just have to make sure I’m always home by sundown and have enough food and water to last until morning; it will be good practice for World War III.
The next morning Priscilla called.
“I’m just calling to say that everything’s okay,” she said, and I knew right away something was wrong. “There’s just a … a situation that’s developed with the girl I have here now. She complained about the mail and I got a call from the super. So things are a little, you know, hot right now. I was thinking it would be better if you waited a few extra days before moving in.”
“Um, maybe. I don’t know. That might be okay.” It wasn’t such an unreasonable request, to wait a few more days.
“I mean, everything’s cool, it’s just so they can see I’m still living here,” she added. “But the other thing? After you move in? Is I’m going to have to be hanging around the place for a while …”
“What do you mean, ‘hanging around’?”
“In case the super comes by. I won’t get in your way. Figure I’ll just come by to watch some TV, make like I’m cooking something in the kitchen … we’ll tell him you’re my cousin, visiting from North Carolina.”
Cousins? I tried to absorb this, but whatever mental sponge I usually kept handy for bizarre pronouncements had long since become saturated. Setting aside that Priscilla was black and I was white, even if we turned out to be twins separated at birth, what about the fact that we had never met and knew nothing about each other? How was I supposed to prepare for my new role as Priscilla’s cousin? Should I head over there now for a marathon session of the Newlywed Board Game, to learn whether she preferred plastic to wooden coat hangers, and what her favorite sex-themed cocktail was?
I told her the deal was off, then sat alone in Ben’s apartment, a molelike railroad that came equipped, I swear, with a light/heat/ joy destroyer mounted to the living room’s only window, waiting for Priscilla to drive over and drop off my check. Somewhere behind the refrigerator, Otto, the feral cat Ben brought home from a Brooklyn alley, radiated anxiety, waiting for me to leave so he could dash out to his bowl for another mouthful of brown food balls. What should I do? I’d already told my boss I’d be in the office on Monday. But I couldn’t keep imposing on Ben. Or Otto. Nor could I bear the thought of turning around and driving back to North Carolina. There was really no option but to find another sublet, fast. So I hit Craigslist again, this time narrowing my search to AVAIL NOWs in any borough, and right away made an appointment with someone equally desperate, a girl named Sarah whose roommate had suddenly decided to ditch New York for California. The place was in Williamsburg, almost an hour-long trip from my friends in Park Slope. But the building was on Hope Street, which I could only take as a good omen.
It was nothing more than a giant plaster box, the playground for a landlord who worshipped a fickle god of interior design. There were no shelves in the kitchen, or pantry, just a bookcase filled with cereal boxes propped against a wall. The bathroom was an afterthought, a cube jutting awkwardly into the combined kitchen/living room, and the bedrooms also appeared to have been randomly dropped into the floor plan. It was as though a spatially challenged giant had abandoned his round of Tetris here mid-game. Clearly the place had never been meant for residential use. One could easily picture hundreds of dusty boxes full of indoor fitness apparel or stereo components lining its walls. But now Sarah and I were lining its walls, and paying an astonishing amount for the privilege.
When Sarah told me how much the room was renting for, I giggled. It was just that kind of number. You couldn’t say it without giggling. Later, when Ben and Eugene asked how much I was paying, I giggled when I told them and then they giggled in response. “Oh, God,” they giggled, repeating the number. “Wow. You’re paying that much? For … this? That doesn’t make any sense!” After a while, I realized that the number actually had a tonic effect on people and even considered adding it to my email signature: “My monthly rent is $—. Have a Happy Day!” In truth, the room cost only two hundred dollars per month more than the one-bedroom apartment in Red Hook, but now instead of a furnished apartment all to myself, I was getting a bare futon in a room without a closet whose only light came from a Virgin Mary statue with a lightbulb screwed into its head. And, of course, I had a new roommate. Or rather, as I would soon learn, roommates.
That first evening, after I’d deposited my meager pile of books and clothes in my new bedroom, I went over to the art gallery next door. It was having an opening and Sarah had suggested we meet up there after work. I got myself a plastic cup of white wine and loitered awkwardly against a back wall, waiting for her to appear. There was a painting of a dog fucking a pig with an American flag drawn on its belly and another painting of a girl giving a clown a blow job. But mostly, I was surrounded by dozens of sketches of badly drawn penises. I don’t know if it was the wine or just my frayed nerves, but as I looked around the room, the penises seemed to wobble threateningly toward me. They wagged their misshapen heads, ululating softly like some deranged Greek chorus, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing here? Here in Brooklyn? Here in Williamsburg? Here on Hope Street? Any idea at all?” And then Sarah appeared in the doorway.
“Hey, you!” she called, and then waved at the room, drawing a wreath through the cigarette smoke around the pigs, the clowns, and the penises. “Don’t you just love this?”
Sarah’s old roommate, Becca, hadn’t completely moved out yet, and she had invited another friend of hers to stay over too, so now there were two people staying in Sarah’s room and this other girl, whose name I didn’t know, sleeping on the couch. My friends giggled even more when they considered the amount I was paying to share a bathroom with three other people. But real hilarity ensued a few days later, when I began noticing swollen bites dotting my arms and legs each morning. My first thought was mosquitoes. But it was December and this was Wil
liamsburg, not Cambodia. There was also the fact that I was getting bitten only in bed, while sleeping. So after three nights of waking up itchy, I finally stripped back the sheets and found them there: an entire village of black fleas, pogoing merrily across the futon’s white surface.
After work that night, I gave Sarah the news that I had fleas.
“I guess it’s not that hard to believe,” she said. “You know those sheets of cardboard under the futon? Becca dragged those in from the dumpster.”
The futon officially still belonged to Becca, who was leaving for California in two days, but we decided it was better to throw it out right away, before the fleas spread. Together Sarah and I dragged the futon outside to the curb, and then I went down to the Atlantic Terminal Mall to find a cheap air mattress. When I returned later that night, Becca and Sarah were both in the living room and it was clear from the chill of silence that greeted my arrival that I’d just interrupted something. As soon as I’d slipped into the room, the yelling resumed.
“And what about Terrence? Is he, like, some kind of fucking carrier too? Is that what you think? Both of us are carriers?”
Terrence was Becca’s boyfriend; I had met him once. He was a typically scruffy hipster, and not a bad candidate for carrier, actually.
“I never said that you had fleas, I just said the bed—”
“What about her? Don’t you think maybe she’s the carrier?”
“Becca, I really don’t—”
“Well, I want to know why you don’t think it’s her. I’m supposed to be your friend. I’m the one who’s been living here for a year—who the fuck knows where she came from and what she brought with her?”
I stared out my lone window at the bricked-in alley and the sad, weed-filled lot beyond—a vista one might well describe as brownfieldy. I had been in Brooklyn for less than a week and now here I was, listening to two girls fighting over whether or not I had fleas and feeling nostalgic for the ghetto I never had. Still, I thought to myself, better a flea in Brooklyn than a tick in Carrboro.
“—only two days and you’re already throwing my private property out in the trash.”
“I know you’re upset about the futon but you know you owe me a lot more than that.”
“This isn’t about money, it’s about respect, Sarah, and trust.”
“Okay. You’re right. I was wrong to throw out the futon without asking. Sorry. But what’s that got to do with last month’s rent, or the gas—”
“This is unbefuckinglievable.”
Then there was a BOOM! The walls shuddered once and seemed to sigh in the sudden stillness. I waited for a minute before easing open my door to find Sarah there, sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead. For the first time since we’d met, her perpetual perkiness—a quality that made you either love her or want to lace her yogurt with arsenic, depending on your disposition—had been drained away.
“Hey,” she said, not looking at me. “I guess you heard all that.”
“I’m really sorry, Sarah—this is my fault.”
“No, it’s not your fault. She owes me money for a lot of other stuff. She’s just using this thing about the futon to get out of it.”
“Oh,” I said softly. “Well, I’m really sorry.”
“When she first moved in she was really, really cool.” Sarah made a limp motion with her hand. “We were friends. It’s only been lately … since the money …” Then she trailed off and when she looked up I noticed that her eyes, which were very big and very blue, were filled with tears.
I didn’t know what to say. We hadn’t known each other long enough for fleas and tears.
“Um. Well … if it helps any, I would like to offer you a nobility point.” This was something Josh thought up, the nobility point.
“Wh-what?”
“A nobility point. It’s like, you know, when something really shitty happened, but at least you did the right thing. Becca stole your money, but you never stooped to her level. If it were me? I would have told her to go jam it straight up her ass.”
Sarah blinked at me.
“So, uh, here,” I added awkwardly, patting her shoulder.
“Oh,” Sarah said. “Well, thanks.” And then Sarah smiled. And then she laughed.
And that, I realized, was the first truly good thing to have happened since I left North Carolina.
It was a total coincidence that Sarah happened to work as a music publicist for Lea. She hadn’t mentioned it in her apartment ad and I’d found out only after agreeing to rent the room. It had been two years since I’d met Lea, yet it was an encounter I still remembered vividly because it was, in every sense, a deflowering that marked the end of innocence and cleaved my life into “before” and “after” eras. This all happened back when Josh and I were still living in Hoboken, not long after I’d released my first EP, on a tiny label. At the time I was doing all I could to promote the release, playing every show that came my way, no matter how tiny or demoralizing, sending armloads of hand-addressed CD mailers to music journalists each week, usually without much response.
Around the same time I couldn’t help but notice that another local singer, Lisa Cane, who’d also just released an album on a similarly tiny label, seemed to be everywhere I wasn’t. Wherever my album got a blurb, she had a feature; wherever I managed a listing, she had an interview. The explanation was probably straightforward, I thought to myself. Her music must be a good deal better than mine. A freelancer for Spin puts her CD on the player and its sheer awesomeness blows a hole straight through the back of her head. Whereas mine? Meh. I didn’t give the matter a second thought until she started scoring opening slots for major acts, often playing two to three shows back to back in Manhattan, a practice that reliably pissed off bookers and got local bands banned from clubs for stretching their draw too thin. Something was up.
Lisa Cane did not have a manager, a booking agent, or a brand-name label. She didn’t dance on bar stools naked, dress up like a velociraptor, or traffic in the kinds of scatological stunts that generate instant acclaim. Nor did she have a hit song or a large, homegrown fanbase. And yet Lisa Cane was managing to take the New York City music scene by storm. Within a couple months, she’d landed a deal with one of the best indie labels in the country. A small ache opened in my chest whenever I saw her name. How was it that she’d managed to arrive on the scene so fully formed and primed for ascent, I wondered? I was jealous. But I was also curious. So I went to her website and started looking around, hoping for some clues. And after a while, I found this mysterious directive: “For more information, contact Shellac.”
Shellac, I learned, was a media relations and marketing company, but I still didn’t know exactly what that meant. I sent a vague note to the address listed, expressing interest in their “services,” and threw in a link to some of my MP3s for good measure. A reply came the next day from someone named Suzanne. She had listened to my songs and liked what she heard. Would I be interested in coming by the office for a visit to discuss my music, and what Shellac might do for me? I agreed and we set a date.
The following week, I showed up at the front desk of their cavernous space in the Flatiron District where the ceiling fans were whirring so far overhead they may as well have been helicopter blades spotted from the Brooklyn Bridge. I was overwhelmed by the sheer real-estate-ness of the place. A young woman who looked as though she’d just stepped out of a fashion spread in Vice magazine darted out from behind a workstation.
“Alina? Suzanne,” she said, motioning me into a nearby office. “You’re in luck. Lea said she can join us.”
“I’m sorry … who is Lea?”
“Lea founded Shellac. Let’s wait to talk until she gets here.”
A few minutes later, a formidable woman arrived in the doorway, announcing herself with a jangle of heavy jewelry.
“We listened to your music,” Lea said, without stepping into the room. “Tell me—did Pitchfork review your EP?”
“Y-yes,” I said.
> “And what was your number?”
My number? No one had ever asked me for my Pitchfork score before. It was like asking someone their IQ or their cup size or the balance of their savings account. There must be a rule somewhere saying that you can’t just come right out and ask someone for their number without exchanging bodily fluids first. I was scared. I didn’t really know whether mine was a good number or a bad number, objectively speaking. The review had been pretty good. But the number? It wasn’t a terrible number, for sure. Not an amazing number, perhaps, but still—
I gave Lea my number. She stood there thinking.
“Okay,” she said at last, coming unstuck from the door frame, “we can talk.” Then she sank into a chair and proceeded, over the course of the next hour, to explain how everything worked.
By the time Lea was done, I felt as though every song I’d ever loved, every band I’d ever worshipped, every bit of musical lore I’d ever stumbled upon and repeated was not a matter of personal taste or an act of free will, but the result of a successful campaign waged by beautifully coiffed people who moved purposefully from desk to desk in this spacious aerie with cell phones pressed to their ears.
“But I don’t understand why it matters whether I send a press kit or Shellac sends it …”
“Because then our name is on the envelope,” Lea replied briskly, “and it gets opened. People know we’re selective. We’re the gatekeepers—not the only ones, but one of them. Labels know we have influence, that’s why they hire us.”
“Is that how Lisa Cane got those great opening slots?”
“We have relationships with some of the better bookers around town. They know that if they include a band on our roster, their show will get a lot of press. When a slot opens up, they call.”
My head was spinning.
“And … so … how much does all that cost?”