Had a panic attack unlike anything in recent memory today. At Staples, of all places, I freaked out when there was one person ahead of me in line. I couldn’t wait. He was paying in some complicated way, a mix of cash and electronic coupons or payments using a smartphone, and there was additional discussion about some other aspect of the payment. The payment process looked endless. So I got out, thinking I might want to pop an anxiety pill but realizing I had no water to aid in swallowing it. You can buy water at Staples but I maintain that paying money for liquids (especially water) is stupid and symptomatic of something fundamentally wrong with our economy. I might still take a pill though, as I feel dizzy.
At the ghetto coffee shop, contemplating the manifold ways I found to waste time this day.. I left stuff at home, went back to get it, repeat, repeat, repeat. Then I decided to do a certain that I would rather not do in the rain, not even just a sprinkling like today’s. But as I was unaware that it would rain pretty much all day I wasted time getting ready to do that task — which was take out the DSLR and see if it records binaural audio. i think it does but did not play back the videos i took yet. I did end up doing this under the cover of the Astoria Blvd. subway station, which i thought would be a good surround-sound type of environment perfect for binaural sound, albeit not the most pleasing soundscape. Will see how it sounds later.
I’m amazed how quicklyi got used to walking and talking into the field recorder as I did yesterday for several hours. I guess the sound of my own voie has some mentally medicinal qualities at a time when I basically have no one else to talk to besides myself. And some of the stories I’m remembering are those I don’t think I’ve ever told to anybody. The task now is to go back and listen and write down the substance of it all. Can’t believe I walked 18 miles.
Thinking again about last night’s encounter with Lucy, and what I could or should have done differently. I should not have entered her apartment. She invited me and it was no pressure but it could have gone horribly wrong if it was some kind of crazy setup to lure unsuspecting dudes off the street into something dangerous. I mean, for it to have been a setup it was a pretty ham-handed trap, and the randomness of it makes the possibility that it could have been a trap that much less likely. And thus it never entered my mind until the next day that such a scenario even hypothetically existed. I did draw the line at getting into the cab with her. I mean even when it’s a yellow cab and even when the person trying to lure you is 90 years old and probably harmless I do not think it’s wise to get into a car with a stranger.
But I should not have raised her hopes of spending more time with her (if that is indeed what I did) by entering her apartment.
She was no Alice, that’s for sure. Alice was the elderly woman who lived 2 floors up from me on the upper east side, and who one day appeared at my door as I was leaving for work, scaring the crap out of me. She said something about her freezer being broken, and asked if I could fix it. Or something like that. Her voice was kind of a hissing grab bag of words that kinda made sense, and I think I got the gist of what she was saying. I went up there (it took many minutes as she moved up the steps at a glacial octogenarian pace). The apartment was just a carnival of cockroaches. The sunlight coming through the window cast long, moving shadows of cockroach bodies, and the roaches seemed to form a vortex-like circle around the drain of the kitchen sink. The bed was covered with bugs and roaches and God knows what else. I stepped into the kitchen to inspect the freezer and felt my shoes crushing multiple hapless critters. I had to kick them off of me as they earnestly and matter-of-factly tried crawling up both the inside and outside of my pants legs. She opened the freezer door. Roaches poured out. I don’t think the freezer itself worked, or else it was not plugged in, as I seem to remember no cool breeze belching from the compartment as one would expect. She said the ice tray was broken, and that it would not fit into the slot. Or something like. Once again with the hissingly obfuscated voice of near coherence. It was like she had an exotic foreign accent. In a way I guess she did. The accent of age.
I slid the ice tray into the slot with no trouble. She reacted in a certain reverance, as if a great but obvious truth had just been made clear to here. It was a “Very true, Plato” kind of reaction. I got the hell out of there, pausing at the stairwell to swat any remaining roaches off of me.
I wrote a story about it that night for sorabji.com. The next day my boss at work read the story. He said that if I had told him all this had happened that day he would have given me the day off, it was just that fucked up. Interestingly I just re-read that story and see I omitted some of the memories that are crystal clear in my mind now. Maybe I did not want to be too too disgusting with the crunching sound of the roaches under my shoes. Or else i just wrote it in a hurry and left out some details.
I remember feeling a certain satisfaction in seeing her apartment, though. I had lived there quite a while and could not figure out why I could not get rid of the fucking roaches. I didn’t expect complete pristinity but they just seemed to keep coming no matter what I did, even when the entire room was filled with bug spray.
The roaches were not really that bad in my apartment. 509 East 78th St., #2G. Still, if I tolerated it better at the time than I would today I think it’s because I was yet to shake the memory of the Parc Lincoln, where roaches routinely convened on my food the second I turned away from it, and where I would wake up in the middle of the night with roaches crawling into my mouth and pigeons standing on the window sill, clucking.
I later learned that the unfortunate folks one story up from me (and therefore directly downstairs from Alice) had it far worse, and they told me they might report her to the building management. Those guys owned and worked at the 24/7 convenience store around the corner, which I frequented almost every day. One day one of them asked “Have you seen Alice’s apartment?” I was like, hell yeah. We all shook our heads. I think those guys hesitated to report Alice because they had something like 7 people living in a tiny studio apartment, which is way in excess of occupancy laws.
I never thought of this until now but I wonder if those guys actually served as a buffer between the roaches and me. With so many people living in that tiny space the apartment must have been occupied 24/7, with somebody stomping out roaches all the live long day. What a strange scenario. I imagine a real estate broker selling my apartment with that “amenity”: “You got yourself a small army of people upstairs protecting you from being showered with roaches.”
Roaches aside I liked that apartment, and have often wished I never left that apartment complex. I gave it up for the guts and glory of moving to Atlanta and putting CNN on my resumé. What a difference that made in my life. Not.
Memories of Alice came to mind last night at Lucy’s place. She is no Alice but her place was just stinky and decrepit enough to be depressing, and to remind me that I do not want ever to get that old.
