*
The man who’s looking at me circumspectly from under a black ‘Subway Q&A’ baseball cap has, it seems, lived in every single apartment in New York City. “I moved to the YMCA in 1989,” he remembers, touching the tips of his fingers together. “I lived there for a few weeks. Then I lived on—” and here he starts to enumerate, using his fingers to count—“15th Street, 16th Street, 2nd Avenue in a huuuge place, West Broadway, Avenue A, I was paying less than $500 a month then, and two different apartments on Mott Street. Every time I heard about a better apartment, I’d move. Then I found a place on Perry Street. I’ve been there for years now, it’s got two fireplaces and I look south across the city.” He smiles. “But I’m thinking about moving to Park Slope.”
I know how Todd feels. In the six months I’ve been here, my suitcases have worn themselves out migrating from Carroll Gardens to Chinatown and the Upper West Side to Red Hook. Because New York looks different from every angle, it actually feels like I’ve lived in four different cities. “No matter how big a city,” Todd corroborates, “you only live in a small part of it. You make your own small town.”
New York has been letting him down lately, though—according to Todd, the Big Apple ain’t as good as it used to be. “When young people can’t afford to move to an area…” he grumbles. I kind of agree. Pathetic as it makes me sound, I came here looking for la vie bohème, and unless it’s really hiding, its closest relations are Williamsburg hipsters, which are in fact not close relations at all.
When he first moved to New York from Chicago (to which he’d moved from a part of Louisville that’s “like a Jewish Westchester with a Southern drawl”), Todd worked as an outreach worker with the junkies on Bowery. “Bowery was the last stop,” he says. “By that time, they’d cut all ties, they lived in flop houses in beds separated only by chicken wire. My efforts mostly failed. Junkies are self-absorbed and selfish; that’s the nature of addiction.” The Bowery wore him out, so he studied international affairs at NYU and did archival research on architects, artists and designer furniture. He worked as a stockbroker for a while, then wrote for men’s magazines about cool things like free shit, survivors of tiger shark attacks, absinthe, Funkmaster Flex, and what happens when you go to New Jersey and put plastic explosives inside a pair of hiking boots. In short, he was a real New Yorker. “I like going to buffets,” he says. “Eating a little of this, a little of that.” But it was the advent of September 11th, the retelling of which still makes him tear up, that really turned him into a New Yorker. It galvanized him into becoming a paramedic.
Todd would rather I not write about that, so I won’t, except to say that I learned three things from our conversation: 1.) Starbucks locations in New York are tremendous junkie hotspots, due to the individual bathrooms; 2.) there actually is a drug out there that can turn you instantaneously sober if you’re extremely fucked up—where was that when I was in college?—and 3.) damn, I promised not to write about it. Oh yeah, here’s one: 3.) “skell” is another word for bum.
