Entry Level NYC 1981
Retracing my first steps and recalling a few stumbles
Upon arriving in Manhattan, I checked in at The Chemists Club in Midtown. Basically a hostel for businessmen and scientists, The Chemists Club’s members included my father. When I left Cincinnati for New York in February 1981, with a headful of writerly dreams, he generously fronted me a room there, though not indefinitely. My younger brother and sister were still in college at the time: finances were tight for our family of five. In ten days I needed to find gainful employment as well as a home of my own.
The Chemists Club stood out on a brusque and efficient block between Madison and Park Avenues. The building was about ten stories tall yet its effect was grander: columns in front, marble in the lobby. The modest wood-paneled rooms were handsome but small, while the spartan communal bathroom and showers on each floor turned out to be a harbinger of my immediate-future accomodations in that department.
Lurking in the vicinity of Grand Central Station, nestled between dirty grey skyscrapers, this particular stretch of 41st Street lingered in twilight all day long, even on the sunniest late winter afternoons. Businesses servicing the labor force from the surrounding towers occupied the storefronts: dusty shoe repair shops and dry cleaners, bustling diners and delis.
From the very first evening I noticed how the sidewalks emptied — same as in Peoria — not long after the workday ended. It makes perfect sense, upon reflection, but back then this sudden retreat into eerie near-silence threw me for a loop. In general, as I acclimated to the city, New York’s stark ambience distorted my senses like a drug; the effect was hallucinatory, like I’d been cast in a moody film noir. Coming off the train at Penn Station on that chilly long-ago Wednesday afternoon, I simultaneously stepped into my future and backed into the cinematic past. Flashes of Technicolor inspiration sometimes broke through the black-and-white city shadows. Right away the graphic reality of Manhattan stimulated my imagination. And in the urban dusk I glimpsed the potential for self-invention and high adventure that loitered amid the ruins of this troubled metropolis.
*
I’ve been fascinated by cults since the late Seventies. My college years coincided with the heyday of these new religious movements and their charismatic leaders. Campuses were fertile recruiting grounds for L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology and Reverend Moon’s Unification Church as well dozens of other lesser-known (but no less insidious) groups. One of my first impressions of Ann Arbor in 1976 was the outdoor Hare Krishna soup kitchen, where shaved-head devotees in flowing robes served macrobiotic gruel to Sixties leftovers and scraggly street people. While I was co-arts editor at The Michigan Daily during 1980, the student paper ran an expose about a new campus organization, a politically conservative outfit called CARP. The Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles turned out to be a semi-disguised arm of the Unification Church — the dark side of Reverend Moon.
Flash forward to February 1981. My third or fourth full day in Manhattan. In between exploratory visits to a couple of employment agencies, I stopped in a coffee shop. As I laid waste to a hamburger, the young woman next to me politely interrupted my noisy chewing.
“Excuse me but do I know you from somewhere? Haven’t We Met Before?”
Did I hear right? She uttered that old chestnut?
“Well, I doubt we’ve met before because I just moved here from the Midwest.”
“Oh! Where in the Midwest?”
“Uh, Ohio is where I grew up but I just got out of college in Michigan.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“The University of…Michigan, that is.”
“Oh! That’s where I went too.”
Of course her alleged Midwest connection should’ve sounded more convenient than convincing. Careless in my over-confidence, I let the conversation continue despite any half-realized qualms. In retrospect, I was already warming to my new role as wide-eyed rube in the big city.
“What Did You Major In?”
Oh My God I groaned inwardly. There’s no escaping this one.
“More or less, journalism. Actually I majored in psychology but I wrote for the school newspaper, and I was an editor my senior year, so I’d like to get a job of some kind in publishing.”
“Oh! I know some people who work for a newspaper right here in New York City. They’re always looking to hire new people, I could put you in touch with them.”
Since my weirdo early-warning system had yet to be activated, I supplied The Chemists Club’s phone number. She reciprocated the gesture with a business card. Kristine Morgan (let’s call her) held an untitled position at an unfamiliar and altruistic-sounding organization. Something along the lines of World Peace Foundation or Universal Brotherhood Institute, with an address on West 43rd Street. With her card in my possession and the hamburger platter demolished, I politely said thanks and goodbye.
Two days later, as I lumbered through the Chemists Club lobby toward the stairs, the man in a rumpled uniform behind the front desk made a beckoning gesture, gingerly lifting a piece of paper as though it excreted some dubious liquid. My first phone message! Upstairs, I retrieved an inky business card from my hand-me-down briefcase and warily took note of Kristine Morgan’s address. A consultation with the Manhattan phone directory in the lobby downstairs confirmed my better-late-than-never suspicion. It was the same address as the headquarters of the Unification Church. I never called her back.
*
A few days later, I landed an interview at a biweekly business magazine called Railway Age. Up until then I was unaware that specialized trade publications even existed, let alone that there were titles covering every imaginable field of endeavor, from Coin-Op Laundry World to Waste Collection Weekly. An artist friend, who briefly designed pages for a trade magazine, later tagged this under-the-radar media The Hidden Industry.
My interview at Railway Age, conducted by the somewhat curt and clearly preoccupied editor-in-chief Luther Miller, proceeded in a perfunctory blur. Despite my lack of experience, not to mention any prior knowledge of the railroad industry, Luther stunned me by offering the associate editor position, for $13,500 annually, at the abrupt end of our conversation. In a fever dream of disbelief or possibly a mild state of shock, I accepted the job on the spot. With only a few days left at the Chemist Club, I had obtained an actual job in journalism. Or something close enough. Now all I needed was a roof over my head.
*
Any apartment in my price range — $200 a month max — seemed to reside in the unfamiliar-to-me East Village or distant Brooklyn. Armed with a roll of dimes, and The Village Voice classifieds, I commandeered a booth in the Chemists Club lobby (no phones in the rooms), and began dialing. Dozens of calls yielded three possible spots: two roommate shares and an outright lease.
At this point, I really started to get nervous.
*
“Did you have any trouble getting here?” My potential roommate was polite, apparently not bothered by my late arrival. I was secretly frazzled.
“Nah I just took the subway, and then walked straight down Flatbush Avenue like you said. Sorry I’m late but there was a train delay.”
I was inordinately proud of this excuse, figuring it showed my familiarity with the day-to-day hassles of the city. What happened was I boarded the D express line at 42nd Street as instructed — headed in the wrong direction. Thoroughly frustrated, I disembarked at 125th Street and sprinted over to the downtown side of the tracks. By the time I arrived in Brooklyn, I figured not much else could go wrong.
My ultimate destination turned out to be a compact, well-kept corner brownstone. Inside, the building was divided into two long, narrow apartments per floor. The young man who admitted me into 2B said the other occupant was out so he would show me around. “Adam” looked to be roughly around my age and size, 23 and six feet tall, but thinner and bonier, with alarmingly pale skin and frizzy black hair just covering his ears. Immediately he identified himself as an actor and it was easy to imagine the guy onstage as a mime, coated in arty clown makeup. Once he’d shown me the cubicle-sized bedroom for rent, empty save for a sort of thick blanket or lumpy pillow laid across a long wooden frame, we settled into the living room. The décor was decidedly off-campus chic: potted plants, lumber-and-concrete-block shelves containing record albums and paperback books, uncomfortable couch that originally belonged to somebody’s grandmother.
After I ran through my resume, strongly implying that I led an ascetic existence away from the typewriter, the interview took a puzzling turn. Adam kept asking about my “social life” in audible quotation marks, phrasing and re-phrasing his queries. The answer was simple: “I don’t have one yet.” Adam continued undeterred for a spell, irritated by my clever reply. Eventually, he gave up and reclaimed his previous, placid demeanor. His parting promise, “I’ll call you after the vetting process is over, either way,” registered as an insincere formality.
I’m in the process of being vetted all right, I thought while descending the front steps twenty minutes after ascending them, vetted right out the fucking front door. Muttering to myself on the sidewalk, I nearly collided with a lamppost. Adam sounded like somebody talking in code. Ah, OK. The guy wanted to know if I was gay. But what the hell, why not just come out and ask? Maybe there was something I missed in The Voice ad, a tip-off or password that flew straight over my head. Feeling flushed in the cold, I got pissed off at myself for misreading the situation.
Nearing the subway station, I came upon a crew of teenagers, loafing around a massive boom box on the sidewalk. The radio blasted a disco song and its saucy chorus followed me down the reeking stairway, a woman’s silky voice haunting and taunting.
Can you handle it
Can you handle it
Cause you ain’t had nothing like it
Once I was back underground, hurtling toward Manhattan on the spray-painted subway train, I felt surprisingly relieved rather than disappointed or worried. A row of eye-catching underground murals flashed past the dirty windows as we approached the Manhattan Bridge. Abruptly, a blast of deafening static issued forth from invisible speakers, followed by the conductor’s metallic alto in mid-announcement. “…lastop Brooklyn…neckstop Grand Street Manhattan…THIS IS THE UPTOWN BOOGIE DOWN D TRAIN TO THE BRONX.” I laughed and said, “I love this place.”
Nobody sat me down and advised, Go East Young Man, while I continued my first apartment search. Frankly, I had no idea where I was going or what I was getting into, or I wouldn’t have gone. Not so soon, anyway. Negotiating the area around the alphabet avenues in Manhattan — A, B, C, D between 14th and Houston Streets — was no joke. I learned the hard way.
I read East Village in the apartment for rent ad and assumed it signaled a geographical and spiritual connection to Greenwich Village, the famed bohemian quarter I’d visited as a tourist during college breaks. My grasp of the terrain was tenuous enough that I didn’t realize how far east The Village extended, way past the historic McSorely’s Ale House and the baroque subway station at Astor Place. Geographically, and spiritually, the East Village was another neighborhood if not another universe.
Naturally, as a cultured young person, I’d already made the pilgrimage to CBGB on the eastern periphery. I can’t remember who played that night; it was the tail end of that music-packed spring break vacation during my senior year in college. Twelve months later, the environs surrounding CBGB had stayed the same. The grungy punk bar was a well-lit oasis on the Bowery amid sleazy hotels, storefront Jesus missions and restaurant supply stores where sturdy commercial stoves took up much of the sidewalk space. Inside CBGB itself, the squalor was contained. The Bowery bums of legend were still around, just not stumbling into the club too often.
Walking east of Bowery felt like wading into a deep-water drop off.
The listing for an apartment share in the East Village sounded promising, but I had no real idea where I was headed. Pitt Street, the youthful-sounding woman on the phone explained before I asked for directions, was the continuation of Avenue D south of Houston St. I felt relieved at this evidence of Pitt Street’s obscurity: apparently other people hadn’t heard of it either. “Eve” described both the apartment overall and the vacant bedroom in particular as small; she shared the larger bedroom with her husband. We arranged a meeting the next day. “Turn left on Houston Street when you get off the subway,” Eve said with a rehearsed chuckle, “and keep going till you hit Pitt.”
Feeling edgy, I also hedged my bets with a long shot at an actual lease, inquiring about a one-bedroom apartment for rent on 7th Street east of Avenue B. An unfamiliarly accented voice on the line gruffly scheduled a tour for the next afternoon, conveniently timed right after my Pitt Street interview at noon. “Yus’ buzz thee super,” he said before hanging up. Minutes later, I gathered he meant ring the superintendent’s doorbell.
Houston Street I knew as the east-west artery that bisected the Village and the downtown depths. To the south were Soho’s cast-iron corridors, the old country byways of Little Italy and Chinatown, and nearer the river, the Lower East Side proper, where narrow side streets stuffed with ancient tenements huddled beside institutional-looking housing project blocks.
My East Village initiation began as a stroll along the southern outskirts of Greenwich Village: an Italian neighborhood, with a huge Catholic church and multiple small restaurants, quaint old row houses alternating with newer mid-sized apartment buildings, clumps of medieval elderly people and shrieking kids herded in a concrete “park.” Despite the proximity of cross town traffic and its attendant exhaust fumes, olfactory evidence of pizza and bakeries in the vicinity was everywhere: more nauseating than appetizing, a sign of my general anxiety about the future. Heading due east, the dorms and lecture halls of New York University soon occupied the north side of my vision, almost campus-like. So far, so scenic.
Passing Broadway and that rarest of sights in Manhattan, a gas station, I was engulfed by a stunningly different vista to the east. Reaching Third Avenue a few minutes later felt like entering an alternate sphere, at least to my naïve imagination. I had crossed over into a dystopian landscape that could’ve been dreamed up by my recent literary discoveries Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. Everything — buildings, sidewalk, street, cars and trucks, even my fellow pedestrians — looked older and neglected, if not flat-out damaged by the passage of time, and definitely dirtier than the rest of the city, if that was even possible. Layers of indecipherable graffiti and grime covered every exposed surface. Tumbleweeds of windblown trash bounced on the streets. An alarming number of parked cars appeared to be abandoned. Every third or fourth building sported broken windows and barricaded doors.
The distance between avenues appeared to decrease as the numbers on the street signs turned into letters; the buildings got smaller, narrower, more residential than business. Here the ubiquitous corner grocery stores or delis all displayed the same yellow awnings with red-lettered bilingual signs. Bodega. Crossing over to the south side of Houston, my path traced the perimeter of a two block-long park. Ten yards away, a cluster of lost souls shivered on a pair of benches, despite the unseasonable warmth. A trio of burly young men in unzipped parkas and baggy sweat pants stood facing the benches. My sixth sense said “drug deal going down” and sure enough, before I could avert my eyes, the biggest and baddest-looking guy turned and fixed me in his pitiless gaze: “WHAT THE FUCK YOU LOOKING AT…”
When I turned around two breathless blocks later, the coast was clear. Nobody had followed me, but the sidewalk teemed with people — for the first time I really understood that hoary old expression. Hot and moist from speed-walking, I slowed down as much as possible without stopping. Another concrete park loomed up on the next block, and I glimpsed a vast empty swimming pool, complete with lifeguard chairs, lying behind the rusted fence. As Eve predicted, the street sign above read Pitt Street so I hung a right turn. In the middle of the block sat my destination: a decrepit brick building, shuffled into a deck of near-identical structures, each one hastily painted in muddy shades of reddish brown. I’d telephoned Eve from a pay phone on Houston and she met me at the front door. She looked even younger than I’d imagined, too young to have a husband.
Short and pixie-like, with streaks of blonde in her bottle-black hair, Eve confidently padded up the warped staircase like a mountain-climbing guide. The incline made me feel light-headed. Or maybe that was my nerves. When we got to the apartment on the fifth floor there wasn’t a whole lot to see. The long narrow living room opened into the kitchen area where a greasy white refrigerator and stove shared space with a bathtub. I inspected the windowless bedroom for rent — more like a storeroom or closet — in a manner of seconds.
We sat in the living room for a few semi-excruciating minutes, I stared at undecorated walls and dusty, half-full shelves while Eve bluntly apprised me of the dangers of the neighborhood. But I’d decided against the place before she told me there’d been two break-ins just in the year they’d lived here. The drug scene, she said, shaking her head. My share of $400 a month would’ve been $150, cheap for New York. And for all that you paid a price in terms of personal safety, and maybe in self-respect too. I’m not ready to live like this, I righteously decided. Not quite yet, as it happened.
Down on the street, I easily retraced my steps on Houston for two blocks and then proceeded due north on Avenue B. Every corner was occupied by an open bodega and/or a shuttered shop. Young men clustered in groups outside the stores, laughing and jostling each other. Glancing down the passing side streets, I saw children milling around the front stoops, and clumps of middle-aged men sitting on upended crates, drinking beer and playing dominoes in the 50-degree weather. I carefully avoided all eye contact and briskly made my way to East 7th Street. Rounding the corner on the home stretch, I was stopped in my path by one of the locals hanging out in front of the store. He looked to be my age or maybe younger despite an abundant, sculpted mustache. No time for salutations or small talk: he got right down to business.
“Works, works.”
“Uh what?”
“Works! Five, five bucks.”
Oh shit, I thought, he wants to sell me a syringe.
“Look no thanks man, I don’t do that stuff.”
“Then what THE FUCK you doing here…”
It wasn’t the way he said it that intimidated me as much as the accompanying look: cruel, cold, crazy. Walking down his block no longer seemed like a good idea — forget living on it — so I beat a retreat before our conversation went any further. As I continued up Avenue A, headed toward 8th Street and eventually the subway, a squad of beefy men in inky-black suits plowed past me on their way downtown. Now what? Stepping aside, I spotted a telegenic bald spot bobbing up and down amid these obvious bodyguards. It was Mayor Ed Koch, campaigning for re-election. Not yet an official constituent, I held my tongue as the incumbent passed. What I wanted to do was hurl his signature line back in his face. “How’m I doing?” It was a teachable moment. Ever day in New York City, the upper echelons and lowlifes traversed — or collided on — the same sidewalks.
