by Tom Papa
Would I do it again? Hell, no. Because we don’t have to do everything. There are some things that you should be proud that you skipped, that you said no to. And if you’re confused about what those dumb things are, just remember to look for the form.
A LOT HAS CHANGED
When we were dating, my wife and I shared an apartment that had a bedroom in the back overlooking a tiny alleyway where pigeons would get stuck and peck each other to death. That’s where we fell in love.
It was in Chelsea, on West Twenty-first Street between Eighth and Ninth in New York City, just at the time when the gay community showed up, looked around, and decided things should be fixed up a bit. We wouldn’t have been able to afford it if she hadn’t lived there for years with an ever-rotating array of roommates under a questionable lease.
She had to pretend her name was Jen, keep a stranger’s last name on the mailbox, and if anything went wrong in the apartment, we would have to fix it ourselves rather than call the superintendent and have him snooping around for the landlord.
When I moved in we were able to share the rent, which made things a lot easier. A lot of relationships go the next step in New York simply because of housing. I used to say that I fell in love with her the minute I saw her place.
I loved the apartment and hated it at the same time. All New York apartments have their quirks. This one was extremely narrow, like a hallway with rooms, but when you’re young you don’t really care if it’s imperfect because you’re continually surprised and proud that you’re actually able to live in this monstrous metropolis.
The first thing I did when I moved in was to knock down the loft bed in the bedroom. A loft bed, for those of you who live in normal places, is like a bunk bed with only the top bunk. They’re popular in city apartments because they allow you to use the space underneath for a desk, a yoga studio, or more likely a bike that you hang your laundry on. The problem with this loft was that it was built too high and left only about six inches between the bed and the ceiling, so anytime I rolled over I would smash my face into it. Sex was out of the question, unless your idea of a good time was making love in an MRI machine.
I used the bumps on my head to plead my case that we had to knock it down. I was proud and relieved when I finally hauled all the wood out of the apartment and left it on the sidewalk. This is what you do with anything you need to get rid of in New York. Wood, bottles, bodies can all be placed on the sidewalk, where eventually someone else will take it away. I really enjoyed putting out books, old records, or clothes and watching from the window as strangers picked through and judged everything we owned.
No one would ever tell you that the shirt you were wearing was ugly, but when they’re holding it up on the street it’s a different thing entirely. I once watched as the local homeless guy who wore the same tattered clothes every day held up a jacket of mine, laughed, shook his head, and put it back.
The responses to books were great, too. I loved watching judgmental New Yorkers hold a Grisham book in their hand, stare up at the building as if they were trying to figure out what simpleton ever thought this was good, and then sneak it into their grocery bag and walk off.
Back in the apartment we swept out the room and put the bed down at floor level. The only problem with this was that we were now able to see out the window. It was a smaller than normal window, in a smaller than normal bedroom, in this smaller than normal apartment. I’m not sure why there was even a window there. It didn’t look out on anything but an alley about the size of a pizza box, between three other buildings.
It really served no purpose other than as a prison for pigeons that mistakenly got caught in there. They must have gotten caught in some kind of draft that pushed them down into it and prevented them from flying out. At times there could be as many as ten stuck down there in this bird purgatory.
Unable to fly, they stood around on the bottom, confused and teased by the sunlight shining in from up above. There was always a lot of noisy cooing, as if they were discussing their predicament. I imagined an older pigeon who had been down there for a while, spitting a piece of concrete out of his beak and telling the new arrivals how it worked down there. “There ain’t no use trying to fly. No one ever gets out of the hole.”
After a while they would all go mad and out of hunger or anger would pick out the weakest bird and peck it to death. I don’t know if they ate it, I never stuck around that long, but I did see them all join together in a circle and with their beaks destroy another pigeon like a biker gang at Altamont.
All we could do was close the curtain, crawl back onto the bed, and go to sleep.
During the winter months we’d keep the window closed and pretend nothing was out there, but during the hot and humid summers, when we actually put an air conditioner in that window, the pigeons and us became roommates.
We were just as desperate as those birds and risked breathing in whatever diseases their feathers carried past the filter and into our room. We didn’t care. Unlike a lot of people in that building, and many of our friends, we finally had cold air. We were Air-Conditioner People.
Looking back, I admit life in that apartment seems intolerable, but we were young, in love, and making it work. We were hardly inside anyway, which is why the streets of New York are always crowded: everyone wants out of their apartments.
The neighborhood was great. There was the great Bendix Diner on the corner of West Twenty-first and Eighth Avenue. It was a healthy but hearty twist on a regular diner, way before that was a thing. And unlike the “cool” places today, the Bendix didn’t make you endure the indignity of standing in line as if it were a bread line, ordering by yourself, and walking off with a number that you placed on a table you had to fight for. This was back in a time when restaurants had hostesses and waiters. It was quite a thing.
Across the street was a great Mexican place run by a creative woman who spent a lot of her time traveling throughout Mexico collecting recipes and ingredients that she would bring back and share with us. To this day I haven’t found a burrito as perfectly delicious as those.
On the other side of Twenty-first was a gay bar named Rawhide. The neighborhood was more gay than straight, with gay coffee shops, sex shops, and the Chinese restaurant that wasn’t gay but had the biggest rainbow flag in the city. At times it felt like we were the only hetero couple around, which I always enjoyed. It somehow made us more exotic.
My favorite place was the Gamin Café. It was a French bistro on West Twenty-first and Ninth and was the perfect place to write and drink great coffee. I loved it there. They never made you feel that you had to eat something or give up your table and move along. They were happy to have you, and while this may sound obnoxious, I think they liked us there because we were real writers, unlike those people setting up offices at Starbucks only to return emails. Whenever I see too many other people around with their laptops open I suspect there’s more shopping and Facebook than work.
But at Gamin, most of the time, there was only one other person working and there were no laptops, just quiet, respectful pen and paper. I wrote in, and still write in, Mead Cambridge 8½-by-11-inch college-ruled pads with the spiral on the top so the pages flip up and over rather than side to side like a book.
The great thing about writing in a notebook is that it’s just for writing. It doesn’t have the multifaceted utility that a laptop has. With the pad there will be no emails to read, no weather forecasts to check, and no quick looks at the internet to see what celebrity gossip you’re missing. The only important thing is what you’re writing. Or not.
I’d grab my notebook, kiss my wife, head down to Gamin, order their dark, rich coffee, and start. It was heaven. The waiters all spoke French or English with French accents. Everything was perfectly bistro, from the wicker chairs to the tin walls and unhurried pace. I’d laugh when new patrons would come in and complain about the slow service as if this were a problem and not the whole point.
If nothing was happening with my wr
iting, rather than fill that nothing space with technology I’d sit and watch the cook making breakfast or the waitress flirting at the opposite table. I could eavesdrop on the conversation between the two novelists going on about their weekend upstate or drink another cup of coffee, look out the window, and let New York handle the storytelling.
On really good days I could write in there for hours, just long enough to get hungry. Cynthia would come down, and I’d put the notebook away and make room for the perfect crepes, croque madame, and toasted baguette with the best butter in the world and somehow when it rained everything tasted even better.
As happens in New York, we stayed in that apartment longer than we probably should have, but we loved it and we loved each other, and even if we wanted to leave, our roots were growing deeper.
We made love and planned for our future there. We celebrated life and dealt with death there. We got engaged and married and returned there to spend the night of our wedding.
In the weeks and months after 9/11, we hosted friends and family as we tried to piece our world back together. We regained hope there and decided in the wake of that tragic event to make a family. And we brought our first baby home from the hospital by taxi and sat on the front steps of the apartment on Father’s Day, proud that we followed through on our promise to bring more good people into the world.
We converted the apartment for her and filled it with all the things that a baby needs: cribs, strollers, and mountains of plastic toys that eventually took over our lives and started to tell us that it was time to leave. But still we stayed.
Even when we had to move to Los Angeles for a while, we couldn’t let the apartment go, renting it out to friends and family who all had to adopt the secret identity of Jen to keep the place going.
When we became a family of four and moved back, we knew we couldn’t push the walls of that tiny hallway of a place any further. The kids only remember playing with their grandparents, dancing on the sidewalk, and jumping through the snow that turned the street into their magical playground. But we knew it was time to go.
The neighborhood has changed a lot. We go by when we can, and my wife is always shocked when a business has closed or a restaurant has become something new.
“Oh my God,” she’ll say, “look at that, Kelly’s is gone. Oh no.”
She sees every business closing as a small but significant death, and she’s not wrong. Bendix is gone, the gay coffee shop is gone, even Rawhide has been shuttered, which would be fine if they weren’t all replaced with banks and nail salons. We’re not alone in thinking that New York, especially Manhattan, has been taken over by big business and we’re quickly losing what made it a neighborhood worth living in.
But New York goes through cycles, and there are signs that small-city living will remain. The Laundromat is still there and the school across the street is still alive and filled with new students every year. And Gamin is still going strong, even though it’s changed its name.
Last fall we walked by our old apartment and the first-floor window, our window, was decorated for Halloween. We joked that they weren’t doing it right and criticized the window dressing as if the apartment still belonged to us, and in a very real way it still does.
We like to picture some young couple inside, loving it and hating it and starting off their life together just as we did. I hope they’re as hopeful and carefree as we were, despite having to sleep in that back room to the sounds of those spooky pigeons. Or better yet, I hope that all those birds figured a way to get out and finally flew away.
A SIMPLE CUP OF COFFEE
There was a time when I thought that the most important thing in life was sex. Then I thought the most important thing in life was money. Now I realize that the most important thing in life is coffee.
Java. Joe. Dirt. Mud. Cupped lightning. Whatever you call it, it’s damn good and without it I’m not sure that I would get through a day without killing someone.
I really do love it. I love it here, I love it there, even when I’m in my underwear. I love it at home or wherever I am. I even love it with green eggs and ham.
I go to sleep at night with a smile on my face because I know that the next time I open my eyes I’m getting another cup of coffee. The first cup of the day, which may be the greatest. Everything comes alive. As soon as that deep aromatic smell hits my brain, my entire being knows the day is about to improve. Whatever happened in that bed last night, no matter what evil monsters visited me in my dreams, despite how many times I got up to pee, coffee is the reset button and all that is wrong will once again be right.
When I’m home I have several methods that I’ve perfected for the creation of this mighty drink. Each of these options is designed for a single cup, which is all I need in my house, as I’m the only coffee drinker. The women I live with seem to be living a very different life under the same roof. They don’t like coffee, eat meat, smoke cigars, or listen to John Coltrane. Those are moments I enjoy on my own, unless I’m grilling a steak, in which case I’m joined by a very enthusiastic dog.
My first method is a small Nespresso machine that makes a solid espresso in as little as thirty seconds. It’s a reliable device that really does the trick, especially when I have only enough time for a single shot and a quick slice of sourdough toast. I also like that it has an Italian-sounding name. For a kid from New Jersey, it makes me feel like I’m doing something European, which must be right.
When I have more time, I prefer the slower but more satisfying single-cup pour-over method. It takes extra steps, but those steps are almost as enjoyable as drinking it. First you get to put a pot of water on the stove and boil it. There’s something about the timelessness of the fire, the pot, and the time that has a real primal effect on me. They didn’t use a Nepresso or Keurig pods in ancient Greece, but there has always been fire and a metal pot.
While that boils, I move on to grinding the coffee beans, which creates an aroma that’s so deep and rich, I’ve thought about putting a little behind my ears like a fine cologne.
When the beans have been ground, I pour them into a cone device with a metal filter that sits on the coffee cup, and the pour-over begins. It’s like filling a funnel, in that you can do only so much at a time as the water heads down over the beans and into the cup.
This takes probably four to five minutes in total, much longer than the instant coffee machines, but like all things in life that take a little more time, it is much sweeter. The flavor is fuller and echoes over the back of your tongue for minutes afterward, letting you savor the coffee and the wise choice you made to slow down and truly enjoy yourself.
I’m aware that I’m getting a little carried away here, but it’s the taking notice of these small, attainable things in life that cuts down on the malaise. It creates a memorable experience out of the mundane. Coffee is like wine for people playing it straight.
I also have a Keurig machine that brews larger American-size cups. I bought this one for when my father visits. The European size of the smaller machine doesn’t satisfy his American habit. He refers to the smaller cups as “Girl Scout size.”
The Keurig makes what he calls “a normal cup of coffee.” He buys the strongest stuff he can find, with names like Double Black Diamond, Hair Raiser, and Coal Mine Sludge. He’s not looking for anything fancy. He wants it hot. He wants it black. And he wants it fast.
My mother reported that recently he’s been waking up in the middle of the night, walking into the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee, and returning straight back to bed. It helps him sleep. For most people this would have the opposite effect, but he’s really not like the rest of us.
He doesn’t understand this fancy coffee craze either. He comes from the 1960s and 1970s, also known as the Great American Coffee Depression. They had some really bad coffee back there. I’m not sure how they survived. They had only two options: Thick & Black or Watery & Sad. Everything came in Styrofoam cups or, when they were entertaining, those paper cups with the card
board handles on the side.
There were no coffee shops back then. The closest they came to a coffee shop was a doughnut shop, but let’s be honest, that wasn’t about the coffee. You’re not thinking about coffee when you are scratching your tummy, trying to decide between a jelly doughnut and a bear claw.
They got their coffee in places like muffler shops, hardware stores, and police stations. People back then hoped to be called for jury duty because they knew there’d be coffee there with names like Sanka, Maxwell House, and Chock full o’Nuts. It came in big cans and was scooped into machines with names like Mr. Coffee that were sold by retired baseball players.
This was a time when coffee was made by the pot.
“I’m making a pot.”
“Will you stay awhile? I’m going to make us a pot.”
An uncle would walk into the house drunk, yelling about the government, and my mother would help him to a seat in the kitchen and say, “You sit right there, I’m going to put on a pot.”
To this day, my sister uses an old-fashioned percolator from this era. She inherited it from my grandmother. It’s a big metal pitcher with a closed top. It plugs into the wall and takes some time, but it brews great coffee, made better because it’s been with us for so long.
I remember running around on my childish adventures while the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents would sit together in the living room. This was the final stage of yet another family get-together. The holiday meal was over. Everyone was a little drowsy from the food and from the alcohol that they never drank much of, just enough to put a haze over the end of the afternoon. The dishes were done, the drying complete.
The conversation at this point was pleasant and subdued. Any political arguments or stinging gossip from earlier in the day had run its course. All the hustle, traffic, and familial anxiety, was over. Everyone had gotten through it and together realized it wasn’t all that bad.