The City/

Random Craigslisting

I woke up at eight in the morning. Got myself an espresso, orange juice and a white, Chinatown apple. I searched online for something extraordinary to do in this extraordinary city, and figured out that I wanted to do something ordinary: go on Craigslist.com, find three rooms where I could live, and go check them out. The criteria was that they had to be in the East Village, and that the apartments had to be shared with one person only; not two or three, just one single fellow resident of this bulging metropolis. The objective was not to find a new room to live in, but to see what the market had to offer me, and what kind of characters had the city to show me. I found the places, called, set up the meetings for the afternoon, and made the schedule for my day. 

St Marks Street is New York’s jazziest spot. It is the heart of the East Village, a neighborhood full of eccentric young people trying to deal with a nasty hang over, among other idiosyncrasies, and all kinds of bars, pubs, clubs, discotechs, you name it. St Marks is also the place where all the extravagancies of the Village clash together. From a very fancy bar decorated with small statutes of smart jockeys, to tattoo-and-piercing shops where you can see the AIDS virus climbing up the graphitized walls. In addition, St Marks is packed with hat, sunglasses and scarves shops, which all sell the same things and are owned by a Hindu or someone who looks like a Hindu. Anyway, in the midst of St Marks Street is where Monika lives. When I called her, she said that tomorrow at 7pm was okay for her, but, since it needed to be today, I insisted and got an appointment for 530pm. I got there half an hour before, loitered around the shops and rang up to her apartment on time. Monika is a chubby, cute, thirty-five-year-old woman. She lives in the last apartment of the first floor’s hall, which avoids all the noise from the street, and has a brown-and-orange carpet that welcomes you to her cozy, small joint: two bedrooms, one bathroom and a living room/kitchen/dining room. She has it clean and in shape, however, with orange and white decoration, new furniture, clean tables and a truly impeccable kitchen. Her bedroom is far better and bigger than the other one, since she makes it look like a living room, as she often invites people over, and is decked with different tones of purple. There is a TV, a laptop and an Iphone being charged. The other room is not bad, though: it’s closer to the red-and-silver bathroom and is big enough to fit a queen-size bed, a desk and a closet. It costs 1100 dollars, all utilities included, counting Internet. The first thing Monika wants to let me know –in a rather good, accent-free English– is both that she is a partygoer and that she works a lot as the assistant of a real-state monster. She wakes up at 9am everyday, gets to the office in the West Village at 10am, works until 6pm, and goes out almost every day to bars, friends’ houses, clubs, you name it. She is wearing a simple, aquamarine top, blue jeans, and has subtle, thin make-up on her eyes. She tells me she’s been living in New York for 10 years, a city she says she is in love with, and was born and raised in Poland, a country that she doesn’t show a lot of affection for. Monika is looking for a roommate who can replace her two-year-long, Moroccan one. She seems to like me, doesn’t ask many questions, and says goodbye with the same smile she has had the whole conversation we have had about, mostly, New York and its wild nightlife.

Esta means ‘this’ in Spanish. One can use it to point at a feminine object, like a table, or to point at a woman one doesn’t respect much, like a prostitute. In the States, however, Esta was a popular first name before the ‘30s. I had no idea that the person of the second place was a woman, until I met her. When I called, she didn’t pick up the phone, but returned the call right away. Her voice was like the voice of a fifty-year-old, asthmatic, neurotic man who complains to his neighbors all the time. She had been very picky about the time of the meeting, until we finally arranged that at 6. In addition, she strangely asked me several times if I was a student at NYU who was actually currently studying at NYU. As a matter of fact, from the start she seemed very picky and judgmental. From Monika’s I went there by foot, since Esta’s place was only 15 blocks away. She lives in one of those five-building residential complexes near the east river on Ave C and 18^th street, a very family-orientated neighborhood, calm and pleasant, with delis on every corner, healthy blooming trees, and kids playing with their nannies. Esta called me at 6:01 asking why hadn’t I gotten there, which I did 4 minutes after. I ring the bell of the 7^th apartment of the 7^th floor –the apartment 7g–, and an old, wrinkled woman called Esta opens immediately, as she was waiting behind the door. She seems pleased and appreciative of my appearance, and gives me her ill hand as a greeting. Her accent is very strong; she has short, black hair and wears sweatpants and a big, old t-shirt with a MoMA slogan. Behind her black-rimmed glasses there is a woman who seems to have suffered a lot, one who is waiting for death to come, one who tries to look happy but whose eyes betray her, one whose life is in between her apartment and the art studio where she works once a week, an artist whose outdated house is covered with her own paintings. She asks me again about my career status, about the classes I’m taking, and about the time I spend working everyday. Esta shows me the apartment in no more than 3 minutes. Her son occupies the living room and I wasn’t able to see it because of two dusty folding screens marking it off from the rest of the apartment. When I ask her about him –whether he lives there or not– she avoids the question saying, “he’s staying here, he’ll never bother you”, which doesn’t tell me if he is actually living there temporarily. The bathroom is very old-fashioned, dirty, and well organized, about which she remarks that the window-drawer will be all for me. In fact, throughout the tour, rather than using the hypothetical ‘would’, (i.e. ‘..It would be yours..’), she uses the future will (i.e., ‘..It will be yours..’), as if it were a fact the I was moving in. My prospective, nine-hundred-dollars room is big: it has a huge mattress and no bed, and is filled with rusty furniture. It has a TV that doesn’t have a control and there is no wireless Internet or air conditioning. When I ask about the latter, she replies that she hates air-con, and points out that there are two fans –one of which was once white but now looks brown–. After the apartment tour, Esta invites me to the dining room. “Lets talk about you”, she says, and asks me about authors, history, art and music, concluding the conversation with how special this quiet neighborhood is. Before saying goodbye and setting up when exactly –the hour– I’m going to call her to tell her whether or not I’m taking the room, she utters with her manly voice, “I have a feeling, Daniel, that you will love this beautiful neighborhood, and, don’t worry, no one is going to bother you”. She gives me her crippled hand and opens the door for me, since I wasn’t able to. Two blocks away, after I put on my headphones, my phone rings, I pick up, and I just listen, “Daniel, just to tell you that I actually have air conditioning, we (me and her) just have to install it, I’ll talk to you tomorrow at noon”.

Alexis calls himself Lex, and he makes me know that right away. Then, before asking me when I want to see the room, he asks me the period of time I plan to be living there, which I have no idea; the mere, basic question takes me by surprise. I say 6 months. He pauses for a moment, before giving me the address, sounding somewhat reluctant. The place is located on 2^nd Ave. and Ave C, which is far east in the East Village, close to Houston St and the East River Park. The atmosphere of the area is a mix between the two previous ones. Although one feels calm and the buzz of rock-and-roll life is smaller, one can still see skinny girls dressed in flashy colors donning huge sunglasses with yellow lens. I get to the bricked-building with black staircases. I buzz the apartment C, according to what Lex had told me, and, after I ask for him, a guy tells me that it is the wrong apartment. Next to the intercom there is a red-haired guy and a long-skirted girl having a cigarette. They both look at me, whisper something I can’t understand, and shamelessly laugh about me. Then, a new funky guy gets there –silver tie, black shirt, beret, old-fashioned suitcase–, and chats with the other two about the interview at MTV he just had, which apparently went great. I call Lex twice, without leaving a message, and he doesn’t pick up. I realize that the fact that the third potentially new roommate stood me up was part of the eventualities I could encounter in a day like this. After all, New Yorkers are not concerned about wasting strangers’ time, and the fact that I don’t have a third profile doesn’t mean that the third experience didn’t tell me something about someone: Lex was never interested in neither showing me the apartment nor meeting me.

To live with Monika would be very interesting, and it is obvious that that is the best option I found. She seems like a nice girl, who can introduce me to new people and some sort of a new nightlife. She knows the city, she is very easygoing, and she appears to be an organized, clean person. However, I would not like to see her with a hang over, wearing nothing but panda eyes, smudged lipstick, and a huge, repugnant baby doll, eating pepperoni pizza and drinking Pepsi from the bottle. Moreover, the room is a bit expensive and small, and living in the heart of St Marks St could be quite vexing. Esta, on the other hand, would be the worst mistake I could make in my life. She wouldn’t hesitate to judge me about getting barefacedly drunk every week. Likewise, she would question my girlfriend coming over regularly, and probably wouldn’t let her sleep in my room, making her sleep in the living room with her single, old son. Since she has an unlimited phone plan, as she pointed out more than one time, Esta would call me all the time to see at what time I would going to get home and what I would going to have for dinner; and whether or not it would be healthy for me. In addition, I can imagine her lazy, lousy son: a forty-year-old, fat, bald, bold, unemployed guy named Sherman or Sheldon, who lives off his mother’s back, leaves his dirty dishes in the sink, drops hairs all over the bathroom, and was known in high school as shittyface, or shabbit. Lastly, the third option seemed to be quite interesting, specially because of the people laughing at me, but there is not enough information to judge the situation, even though that I guy who doesn’t bother to call and just say ‘don’t come’, is not a very reliable insight.

On my way back home, I took down Clinton Street, a lively crowded place. This time, however, the police had closed it from tip to tale, since a shoot-out had taken place one hour ago. Today’s newspaper didn’t say anything about it, and I suppose that it will be one more unknown shoot-out that takes place in a room once posted on Craigslist.com.