Little Earthquakes.
The year was 1995. I was two years out from graduating high school and one year out from dropping out of college. The only place I ever wanted to live was New York City. And there I was, in my first apartment as a young adult on the corner of Spring Street and Lafayette. My rent was something like $924.50 a month. Cray. I had a roommate I met during my 3-month stint at college (Emerson in Boston). She was a dropout as well.
Our apartment was right on the border of Soho and Little Italy, and we had a super named Gina who wore a terrible shoe polish black colored wig, dark sunglasses, a husband that never spoke, and made us baked Ziti once a week. She was everything you think an Italian super would be, or at least the ones you see in movies. She loved holiday decorations and used to sit on the stoop in front of the building all day with her sister, chain-smoking thin, long cigarettes, and gabbed to every one that passed by. There was a rumor in the neighborhood that she had ties with the famous mobster John Gotti. She had a framed newspaper clipping of the two of them hugging when he was released from prison in the entryway of the building. Regardless of the rumor, you wanted to remain on the good side of Gina.
We had a one-bedroom apartment, which, if you are familiar with Manhattan real estate, you know it doesn’t really mean that it’s a proper one-bedroom. I slept on the pull-out futon/couch in the living room, and my roommate took the dark tiny closet-sized room in the back that looked out into the middle of the building where the pigeons constantly shit and cooed. It was a sliver of a room; anywhere else in the world, the room would be considered a closet. But, in NYC, it was a bedroom cause it had a door that closed, I guess. The toilet room was next to hers, and the bathtub/shower was in the kitchen, which made for fun dinner conversations, especially if one of us was showering!
The apartment was directly across the street from the 6 train subway station and directly above an Italian bakery, so the apartment shook every time the train left the station, and we had a few cute mice that came up the fire escape from the bakery below, which meant we had to make sure the windows were closed. l loved to sit on the fire escape smoking cigarettes and looking down at the people bustling on the street below, pinching myself that I was actually living my dream in the city.
My roommate waitressed at the corner Italian restaurant and also worked concessions at the independent movie theatre Angelika’s. Which was great for me cause I was able to use her discount at both. She and I became instant friends at college. She was a vibrant, sweet young girl who was from New Jersey, completely obsessed with ballroom dancing and musical theatre. She was always creating and acting out different characters, which made it exhausting to live with as you never knew what character you were going to walk home to. I thought it was because she was an actress and she was merely expressing these characters inside her (which she totally was, too), but it was deeper than that. More psychological, like a split personality. She was also wildly sexual and masturbated all the time. She used to pleasure herself on her break at the movie theatre during a crowded Saturday night. She would take pride in locking herself in the bathroom and time how long it took her to climax - turning it into a game - challenging herself to break her record each time she tried. She got off even more when there was a line of people waiting, too. She loved the pressure.
The longer we lived together, the less we saw each other. We were two ships passing in the night or day or morning or whatever. I worked nights as a waitress in the West Village so I could keep my days free to take acting classes and audition. But with each audition I went on, I was too scared and too green to nail. I remember this one time I went to an Open Call at the famous Public Theatre, which was down the street from my apartment, and showed up carrying a bag of props (!!) When my number was called, I went on stage, unpacked my stuff, lit a candle (omg), and started to speak my Shakespeare monologue from Romeo and Juliet, trippingly off my tongue. I maybe got a few lines in when they cut me off and “Thanked me for coming, but they had seen enough.” I don’t doubt!
I studied acting at this old, rundown historic theatre, HB Studios. It was a place where the great actors, writers, and directors once were and the only place I wanted to be. The place was founded by members of the Group Theatre (Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, etc.) and was also where the infamous acting teacher Uta Hagan resided. She was in her 80s when I studied there, and you had to audition to get into her class. I remember at my audition, I did a scene from Anton Chekhov’s famous play, The Cherry Orchard. I walked into the pitch-dark room lit only by the solo streaming spotlight shining on the stage. The room was full of cigarette smoke coming from Uta chain-smoking, intensely sitting in the director's chair down at the edge of stage left, surrounded by young, gay, pretty boys who tended to her every wish. I did the scene with one of those boys, and, if I am honest, it was impossible to concentrate on anything other than her larger-than-life attitude, which made it impossible for anyone in her orbit to pull focus. She was the star, and that was the truth of it. I surprisingly was accepted into her class but decided not to take it and went with another teacher who was humble.
It was there I met my first friend in NYC, Alex. He looked like a young Lawrence Fishburne and was a fast-talking, intense Puerto Rican writer taking acting classes to become a better writer, not to become an actor, though he really was a fabulous one. We became fast friends, scene partners, inspirational creative cohorts, and blossoming artists. He lived in Queens with his snow white, very vanilla blond-headed (boring) girlfriend whom he didn’t seem to be in love with but stayed anyway. She worked all the time in the corporate office world as a temp, so we used to hang out after class in the West Village at coffee shops, jazz clubs, and occasionally bars where we would drink espresso, booze, eat, and pontificate about music, art, theatre, philosophy, movies and acting. We inspired each other and never seemed to run out of things to say. We decided to start a Theatre Company called In The Night Kitchen - inspired by one of our favorite children's books with the same title. We produced a play together that he wrote and directed called, Unfinished Moon on a shoestring of a budget in a rundown tiny ass theatre in midtown. It wasn’t a great production, but we had fun and learned, and that experience planted the seed for big plans to do art together.
Shortly after the play, in the throngs of our intense friendship, we lost touch. He wasn’t returning my phone calls and hadn’t shown up at his day job for a few weeks. I thought, as with most of my wasteful anxieties in my youth, that I did something wrong, or he was mad at me, or that it was all about me - my fault. Days later, I ended up receiving a very cryptic phone call from him, where I learned that he had checked himself into a mental hospital in Bellevue and suffered a manic episode. Now, I had experienced his highs and lows during our time together, and, if you remember my roommate, I kinda learned how to live with these whirlwinds of emotion. But he, unlike my roommate, had bouts of insomnia - staying up for days at a time writing, writing, writing. He spoke slowly and controlled on that phone call- something very out of character from his fast-paced cadence. I asked what happened, and he said he scared himself (and his girlfriend) from a long manic episode that lasted many sleepless nights, so he decided (really she did) to commit himself and finally agreed to get on the medication (Lithium) his doctor had prescribed months before.
I’ll never forget that phone call, the way he sounded, the way he slowly muttered his words and squeezed out his drug-induced observation that “if this is what I have to take to be normal, I’m not interested.” He hung up before I was able to respond. I called the hospital back in a panic but couldn’t get a response since I wasn’t family. I called his girlfriend, but she was too jealous of our friendship to take me seriously and said that my influence on him was not healthy. I represented creativity and inspiration, and she did not. She just wanted to get pregnant and trap him in their small apartment in Queens and make him do a 9 to 5 mind-numbing office job so he could responsibly pay the bills and brush his artistic desires under the carpet to only explore in retirement. After that particular incident, when the dust settled, we saw each other less frequently and eventually lost touch. I lost touch with many people I used to know.
So many of my past relationships began with an unwavering intensity that I never thought would end, as if we were the only two people on earth who could understand each other. But alas, most of them ended as fast and dramatically as they began. It was fitting that my first apartment was directly across the street from the subway station. It was there I started to learn how to embrace the rattling of youth and unsteady ground, like little earthquakes.
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