by Rebecca Dana
As the recession drove away advertisers and the Internet slowly tortured and killed off print media, we floated along in our Gehry boat, far from making a profit but still, by the grace of our wealthy owner Barry Diller, blissfully unaffected. The building was loaded up with free goodies: all the candy, chips, yogurt, sodas, energy bars, carrot sticks, pudding and Jell-O you could eat. Each floor had Wii video game consoles, large flat-panel televisions, and cabinets filled with any kind of medication you might want for anything that ailed you. Chalkboard paint covered the walls, and we were encouraged to draw on them. A Wellness Room on the ninth floor, complete with massage chair and suede couch, was available any time you felt like dozing off. A restaurant-quality espresso machine made perfect soy lattes at the push of a button, and every Friday we had brunch. There were about thirty of us at the Beast when I got there, and my colleagues all struck me as impossibly hip and brainy. We spent a lot of time sitting around drinking lattes and eating bagels, talking about what was going on in the world and trying to make each other laugh.
A typical day at the office began around nine, with oatmeal and a scan through the morning’s papers and blogs. Then came an editorial meeting at eleven, where we talked about the big news stories of the day and how we should cover them, and after that, lunch. In the afternoon I exchanged a trickle of instant messages with journalist friends, made phone calls to sources and, most days, wrote or edited a story. It wasn’t heart surgery, but it was humane and periodically satisfying work. I covered media and fashion and a little bit of everything else. I mostly liked the people in these industries, so it hardly felt like work to call them up and chat. But after Chad kicked in the ground floor of my house of cards, this work felt not only unworklike but also soul-crushingly pointless and banal. The same person who had wanted him had wanted this. It was all born of the same fantasy, and that fantasy was stupid and wrong. My only recourse was to have some oatmeal and stare into space.
Work became impossible in the wake of my breakup, when the war between my body and brain still raged. My body wanted Chad, to hug him, to hide in his arms and disappear back into my old easy life. My brain was constantly performing an autocorrect on this impulse, putting those arms in their proper context: wrapped around other girls. This mechanism produced a kind of seasickness, a lolling back and forth between head and heart that caused me to stumble around the big glass building, struggling to hold my free Gatorade down.
Chad and I broke up on a Saturday, and I went to stay with Randi and Jacob in their stylish one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Jacob was a record producer at the label that had discovered Hasidic rapper Matisyahu. Randi was a pint-size prop stylist and a former editor at Martha Stewart Weddings. She had a lovely trilling laugh and walked around in hot pink neoprene sneakers with little slots for each of her toes. Jacob couldn’t take his eyes off her. They met one year on Halloween when he dressed up as a bathroom wall and she wrote her phone number on him. Their life since seemed like one perpetual Martha Stewart wedding. Their library was arranged in rainbow order and every morsel of food they ate was beautiful and cooked from scratch. I always half expected to find a photographer huddled in the bathroom, artfully shooting their stunning array of soaps. I shared their couch with Olive, their Boston terrier, who humped my leg before bed each night but who otherwise was a warm and welcome presence in the days immediately following the collapse of my entire life.
I was shocked that I could still walk and breathe those days, but discovered I was useless at most other things. On my way to work on Monday, I stopped off at the drugstore and, twenty minutes after entering, found myself in a Hamlet-like paralysis before a wall of deodorants. I read the ingredients lists, compared unit prices and still couldn’t decide. I imagined myself growing old in the aisle, gumming oatmeal, acquiring cats. Finally I settled on a stick of Degree that promised to be “Extra Responsive in Emotional Moments!*” I followed the asterisk to the fine print: “*releasing sweat.” I applied my extra-responsive deodorant in the bathroom of my doctor’s office, where I went for a quick STD test before lunch. (“Afraid of needles?” the nurse asked as I sobbed on the examining table. “Yes,” I lied.). A few days later the results came back—clean. So there was that to be thankful for.
In the mail that day—in a Federal Express envelope marked Urgent—came a galley for a book called Hunting Season: A Field Guide for Targeting and Capturing the Perfect Man, which arrived from the publisher’s publicity office. I flipped to the first chapter. “Open season on men begins on April 1 and ends on September 30,” it said, under a picture of a rifle and a pair of binoculars. I sank lower in my chair, pulled on my headphones and called up an old episode of Doogie Howser, M.D. on the computer at my desk. This was my favorite television show in middle school, before evil Carrie Bradshaw and her coven of witches stole my brain. The episode I watched was called “Breaking Up Is Hard to Doogie.” In it, the child-prodigy doctor and his high school girlfriend, Wanda, mutually decide to break up one night at a dance. Everything goes peacefully and amicably. No one ends up homeless, crashing temporarily on their gorgeous friends’ restored vintage couch while a female Boston terrier humps her leg at night. I wished then, as fervently as ever, that life were more like nineties sitcoms.
After Doogie typed his usual pat diary entry on the old Macintosh IIe, I turned back to Craigslist, determined to sally forth into single life in similarly calm fashion. I sallied for a good thirty seconds before the nausea returned, sending me staggering off to the candy-colored bathroom. I had moved six times in the previous five years. More of my earnings had gone to FlatRate Moving than to my 401(k)—in fact, I had contributed nothing to my 401(k)—and much of what was left went to clothes, shoes and other necessities I deemed necessary, like bimonthly trips to Kim, a petite Japanese stylist who spent three hours bleaching every last shred of pigment from my hair. I didn’t have a savings account or a credit card for my first five years in New York. Whatever money I earned flowed right through Citibank, without slowing to gather a penny of interest, and landed somewhere on my body. It was a glorious waterfall of consumption, the sort of thing you only see on-screen, when the characters don’t have to think about retirement or medical emergencies or anything beyond the final credits.
My lack of financial planning acumen, plus heartbreak, made for less than ideal apartment hunting conditions when the time came to start from scratch. But there I was, trolling a site better known for abetting serial murder than functional roommate couplings. The first place I found that I could afford was advertised under the headline “$650 KOSHER kitchen.” It was available immediately and required no commitment. The post mentioned a preference for a male roommate. “Would you consider a girl?” I wrote and then made a halfhearted boast about my cooking skills. The reply came back immediately. I got it on my BlackBerry, curled up on the floor of the handicapped stall.
hi!
sure, come on by.
cosmo
Cosmo gave me detailed directions to his apartment, which was in a part of Brooklyn that seemed so remote it might as well have been Vermont. I wonder if this person will murder me, I thought as I boarded the number 3 train, not caring terribly much one way or the other. Across the aisle was an advertisement for Dallas BBQ’s brand-new “sticky wings,” which were pictured steaming, on a plate, in grotesque, magnified detail. For the duration of the ride, I struggled to keep the meager contents of my stomach down.
I emerged from the subway and careened toward a public trash can. When I recovered my bearings, such as they were, I found myself staring up at 770 Eastern Parkway, the enormous Gothic red-brick building that is the international headquarters of the Lubavitch movement. This is where the great Menachem Mendel Schneerson, seventh and final Grand Rebbe of the Lubavitch sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews, had lived for more than half a century. The headquarters, known inside the community just as “770,” is dark and towering. Stiffly dressed men enter and exit at all times. I recognized the building instantly becaus
e although this was my first trip to Crown Heights, I’d seen it before: Lubavitchers have built exact replicas in Jerusalem and Sydney. The Jerusalem version is a red-brick anomaly in a city infrastructure made of sparkling, ivory-colored Jerusalem stone—an impossible waiver and one only a community as powerful as the Lubavitchers could obtain. I visited it with Chad; and someone told us the idea behind the replicas was to ensure that Schneerson wouldn’t feel lost if, in returning to earth to redeem humanity, he happened to land somewhere other than Brooklyn. We thought the whole thing was hilarious. If he’s the Messiah, how could he possibly get lost?
Brooklyn is to the south and east of Manhattan. To get there by subway, one travels down the center of the island, underneath tourist-clogged Soho, posh Tribeca, the tiny harried alleys of Wall Street and the East River. Yuppies, yoga teachers, food co-op volunteers and literary editors have colonized many acres of the northwest portion of Brooklyn, but at the time I moved there, they had not yet reached Crown Heights. Still, the distance separating that neighborhood from the heart of Manhattan was only a few miles. It had taken me thirty minutes, at rush hour, to get to Kingston Avenue, which by all outward signs was located somewhere in eighteenth-century Russia. En route to Cosmo, I passed through a gauntlet of quaint local businesses that cater to the ultra-Orthodox community: Mendy’s Delicatessen, Rebecca Wigs, Crown Hot Bagels, Boytique (with miniature tallit “for your lil’ rebbe”), Merkaz Stam Religious Articles, Weinstein’s Hardware and Houseware, the offices of Avroham Popack attorney at law, Judaica World, the offices of Alan Newark (“podiatrist and foot specialist”), Hamafitz Stam (“The source for Torah and tefillin”) and, of course House of Glatt (“We continue to serve the Chabad community with kashrut, quality, service and honesty”). There were also the school buildings on every corner: double, triple, quadruple endowed, their benefactors’ names emblazoned in giant type across their plain brick exteriors. On the way, I passed three Hasidic beggars standing open-palmed outside a synagogue, accepting change from the Lubavitcher ladies hurrying by. When I walked by, the homeless men put their hands in their pockets.
Bernice Court, at 621 Crown Street, was six long blocks from 770. The entrance to the apartment building was through a heavy double-locked metal gate, which opened into a vast arched foyer. The interior design was neo-everything, with immense Doric columns painted gray and mauve; elaborate ivory-colored crown molding; and nooks made to hold small marble statues, which had either been stolen or, more likely, never existed. It smelled strongly of Lemon Pledge and cigarettes, as if a local prison cleaning crew had just made the rounds.
Cosmo met me at the bottom of the stairs, said a curt hello and didn’t offer to shake my hand. He wore a T-shirt covered in Chinese characters with his tzitzit, the strings of his religious garment, hanging out beneath the hem. We walked up the three flights to the apartment in silence, and then as soon as he let me in, he went straight to the kitchen and began washing dishes. “Your room is in the back,” he said.
The first thing I noticed about the apartment was the smell, which hovered like a storm cloud over the front door. Part biological, part chemical, with base notes of dead animal and burned rubber, the message it sent was not “Welcome home!” but “Run.” But for whatever reason—exhaustion, and also not caring about anything anymore—I didn’t run. There were two old bicycles right in front of the door, along with a large table covered in upturned black top hats and unreturned Blockbuster VHS tapes. Holding my nose, I squeezed past.
“Do you need a bicycle?” Cosmo called from the kitchen.
His bedroom was on the left, the kitchen was on the right and before me was a vast living room, as large as any I’d ever seen in New York. The windows were wide open, and the chilly air only made it seem emptier and more cavernous. I made my way to “my room,” which was on the other side of the living room, directly across from the bathroom. I flipped on the lights. The room was bigger than my entire former apartment, with wood floors and ivory walls, high ceilings and ornate detailing. Once, many years ago, it must have been beautiful. By the time I got there, it was a repository for abandoned kitsch, as if a whole series of people had stopped by briefly, during a hectic period in their lives, and then ditched the place, leaving their strangest or most useless possession behind. By the time I arrived, the room boasted a half-destroyed armoire with a bobblehead statue of Princess Leia, a three-legged coffee table from the 1970s that held an old record player and two giant Aiwa speakers, a stack of jazz records that appeared to have been used as knife sharpeners, and a kooky blue-and-yellow-patterned knit yarmulke.
The walls were thin enough that I could hear the couple next door screaming at each other but thick enough that I couldn’t make out what they were shouting about. They screamed like that, almost without interruption, favoring the early morning and late night hours, for the next nine months—and I never knew why. I went to the window, over which someone had mounted a not-small American flag. I lifted up the glass and peered out. My room looked over a parking lot where the Lubavitchers kept some of their mitzvah tanks. Half a dozen sat in a neat row, God’s battalion at rest. “The view is the best part,” said Cosmo, hovering in the doorway.
We sat for a minute and talked. Mostly, he talked. “Sex, booze and cigarettes are cool with me,” he said. “I don’t care what you do in there.” I nodded. “Drugs are not allowed.” Okay. “All I really care about is that you can pay the rent on time—and by on time I mean, like, within ten days of the start of the month.” Okay. “The last guy was a real motherfucker about the rent, and I do not want to deal with that again.” It grew dark out, and Cosmo offered to walk me to the train. Jews make up about 10 percent of the residents of Crown Heights, according to the last census. The other 90 percent are West Indian immigrants. En route to the subway, we went a different way than I’d come, up Troy Avenue, through the West Indian neighborhood.
“Is this dangerous?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “You probably shouldn’t walk this way alone.”
Between Bernice Court and the subway, we passed three laundromats—one decorated like a circus—two Chinese takeout places and a restaurant called Fried Chicken and Pizza, which had a red plastic awning and, in a gesture of pluralism, also served “bagel/roll with butter.” There were several beauty salons, all evidently named during an era when putting a z in words made them look cooler: Appearancez was one, Hair Stylz another. On the corner of Troy and Eastern Parkway was a liquor store called Liquor Store. A few men hung around outside, drinking from bottles concealed in brown paper bags. During our walk, Cosmo told me about his love of psychedelic punk rock and then tried to explain to me what psychedelic punk rock was.
“Bye,” he said when we got to the subway, then turned on his heels and left.
I rode the subway back to Manhattan to meet friends for fajitas on the Upper West Side. The one thought in my head as the train chugged uptown was, “Thank God I’ll never see that guy again.”
THE NEXT DAY, in search of some fatherly advice, I went to visit one of the treasured adults in my life, a man who runs a television network, whom I’d met years earlier as a reporter for the Observer. As always, Richard was warm and kind. He gave me a hug and, in a tender show of concern, asked his secretary to hold his calls. We went into his vast corner office, full of pictures of his wife and daughter, and I trained my gaze on the ribbed fabric of his couch. This was one of the people in the city I’d always referred to as my “rabbis.” Wise and well connected, he tended to give good advice and seemed to take pleasure in doing so.
“All men under the age of forty are just walking boners,” he said after I told him what had happened with Chad. “Don’t take it personally.” He promised it would all work out.
The next day, I went to visit my old boss, the eccentric former editor of the New York Observer. Peter always wore the same frayed khaki trousers and crumpled blue shirts, with his tie tucked in, like Napoleon’s hand, between the third and fourth button. He al
ways seemed more made up than real to me, an impression enhanced by the virtual impossibility of seeing him. Wise, reclusive and perpetually harried, he is one of the very few people I’ve met who could make any young writer feel worthwhile.
“Rebecca, I have three things to tell you,” he said, sliding a chocolate chip cookie across the table and under my nose. “First, you need to gain fifteen pounds immediately. Don’t do the anorexia thing right now, will you? It’s boring.”
I broke off a tiny piece and took a bite. The cookie was soft, buttery and a little warm, and I felt a drop of chocolate melt in the middle of my tongue. On any other day, this would have been a positive experience, but on that day, it felt garish and obscene, as if my senses were under attack. I swallowed and smiled painfully.
He continued. “Second, what’s your natural hair color?” I gestured at my eyebrows, which were my natural plain brown, where the pixie-cut mop on my head was an otherworldly shade called platinum ice. “Go back to it,” he said.
Third was a recommendation to “throw yourself into your work.” I finished off the cookie even though it felt like battery acid on my throat.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-seven.”
“Good,” he said. “You have one year left.”
He didn’t say for what, and I was too afraid to ask.
“Do you have a good therapist?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Get her to cut you a special rate and go in twice or three times a week through New Year’s.”
“Okay,” I said, having no intention of bargaining with my therapist.
“Where are you living?” he said.
“On a friend’s couch.” He looked at me disapprovingly.
“I went yesterday to see this horrible apartment in the middle of Crown Heights. It was disgusting, and I think the guy who lives there is a Hasid,” I said. He pressed, and I told him a few more details: it was big and open, I’d have my own room, the neighborhood was horrible, like a scene out of A Stranger Among Us. It was cheap, and it was the last place I could ever imagine myself.