We All Live in a Noho Submarine

One of the biggest surprises that confronts an itinerant academic relocating to the Happy Valley is the area's distinct lack of suitable housing. By suitable I mean affordable, spacious, and reasonably grown-up - there are plenty of grim, '70s-era apartment complexes ringing the main university towns, with beer-stained wall-to-wall carpeting, relentless right angles, and parking lots strewn with discarded red plastic cups and the occasional pilfered traffic cone, but these aren't even worth talking about, much less putting down a deposit for. No, for the discerning 30-something accustomed to urban living and desiring something with a bit of character, something within walking distance of bars and coffee shops and drug stores, something in which one is unlikely to be awakened at 2am by hooting fraternity brothers, the options are few. Unless one happens to be in possession of a trust fund. And I'm not.

It took me four passes through the valley before I found a place to live. The first time I toured a few of the above-described apartment complexes, a few teensy-weensy studios, at least one isolated farmhouse that would almost certainly have driven me mad (like Jack-Nicholson-in-The-Shining mad) by the end of winter, and two decent but slightly expensive places that I put in applications for but failed to get. On the next three passes I dealt with a local rental agency whose agent, whom I'll call Debbie, was friendly and personable and wholly incompetent. My first really intense memory of the Valley is of standing in the rain outside a bar called Ye Ole Watering Hole while waiting for Debbie to come show me an apartment above the bar, her earlier phone call informing me that she would be about ten minutes late proving to be inaccurate by a factor of five. I probably saw six or seven different apartments with Debbie, some of them pretty nice but way above my means, the rest of them pretty crappy and still slightly above my means. I even went so far once as to put in a deposit for a place about a mile outside of town that I was pretty sure I couldn't afford, because it was large and was being renovated and had a balcony, but the owner ended up going AWOL for a week before resurfacing and informing the rental agency that he had rented the place all on his own, thank you very much. I should add that most of my transactions with Debbie's company were being conducted while I was staying with Anthony and Shelley out in North Adams, MA, an area of the world that has yet to be penetrated by T-Mobile - a circumstance that magnified the difficulties of my search considerably, forcing me to travel 45 minutes south to Pittsfield in order to get a cellphone signal (this inconvenience might have been alleviated had Debbie or her boss been capable of calling me at the alternative number I gave them, i.e. Anthony & Shelley's home number, but the introduction of a second phone number seemed only to confuse them further).

All this might have been much easier about a year ago, but the fact is, when it comes to apartments, I have recently become completely spoiled. Ever since birth I have lived with other people, mostly my family, but also scores of roommates in college and grad school whose foibles, smells, and eccentricities have provided endless anecdotes and character-building experiences. There was the Filipino transsexual whom I shared a salmon-colored apartment with in the Fenway whose voice exercises were capable of cracking crystal; the doped-out freshman year roommate who suffered from severe kleptomania, stealing everything from Mardi Gras beads to parental checks from the guys on our floor until a few of the fraternity brothers showed up one evening to set him straight; the perpetually happy 23-year-old cheerleader who lived with me and Josh in my last Boston apartment and owned so much clothing she had to put her bed on stilts in order to fit it all in her room. I have had wonderful roommates as well, of course (Josh, David, Declan, Lou, I'm looking at all of you simultaneously), but over the past year I got to where I really enjoyed living alone. Well, mostly alone. I was subletting a room in a Philadelphia condo owned by a professor at Penn who spent most of his time with his wife and baby out in State College, PA, only coming in to Philly two nights a week to teach. It was a large place with a glorious view of the 47th St dog park, washer and dryer in the unit, an old-fashioned elevator, a piano, a fireplace with a television in it, and even an indoor swimming pool in the building. I didn't use the pool much, but man did I enjoy hanging out in that place by myself, walking around naked if I felt like it, leaving the door open when I went to the bathroom, watching (or not watching) whatever I wanted to on the TV. And man did I get annoyed when the owner, in most respects a lovely and generous guy whom I have great affection for, showed up for his two nights a week and started stomping around the place, blasting the television, talking on the phone, turning on all the lights, and eating very strong-smelling Pakistani food, all while clad in nothing but his tighty whities.

This was how I decided that it was time for my own place. The trouble was, in Philly I was paying much less than I normally would have for a place that size, and it turns out what I can actually afford on my postdoc salary (which is nothing to sneeze at, given what I do for it, but not exactly luxurious either) is somewhat less than I'm accustomed to. And so: The Submarine. The Submarine is so called for four reasons: a) living in it forces one to be economical with space in a way that is usually only necessary in underwater naval vessels (and possibly in apartments in places like Manhattan and Tokyo); b) it is sinking slightly on its eastern side, making the floors tilt downward to the east and giving one the impression, if one stands up too quickly and starts walking from east to west across either the living room or the bedroom, of being on an ocean-going vessel that has just been rolled by a wave; c) even in one's private quarters, one becomes intimately familiar with the daily activities of one's fellow shipmates; and d) although it has many windows, for all the light it gets it might as well be at the bottom of the ocean. I first saw The Submarine on that same rainy afternoon that I waited 50 minutes for Debbie in the rain, and it was the last place she showed me - something, she said, that had just come open and in which there had already been much interest, but that I would be given priority on since I'd gotten screwed out of that other place. So I saw the apartment, it looked fine (though I did notice the sinking floors), and I was so exhausted and wet and frustrated that I took it more-or-less on the spot. This was early August, and the place wasn't available until early September, so I then drove home to Oklahoma and didn't see the place for a month.

What I discovered when I moved in will have to wait for another post. I had a very late night in Boston last night with some folks who are older than me and really ought to know better, and it's about time that I got myself to bed.