“I used to get by on $5 a day but New York City has gotten so expensive”
So said my first mentor in Manhattan — without irony — in 1981
Moving into 78 Washington Place in mid-March 1981 didn’t take long. All I brought: two suitcases stuffed with clothes, briefcase, clock radio, electric typewriter. Luckily Apartment 3C came furnished. More or less.
Fitted with a painfully thin mattress and itchy blanket, the barracks-style metal bed reminded me of bunks at sleepaway camp. The boxy college dorm mini-refrigerator appeared to be relatively clean and functioning. An unevenly applied coat of institutional-beige paint on the walls at least smelled fresh. Lodged against the corner wall were a rickety wooden table and mismatched kitchen chair. Dirt encrusted windows didn’t admit much sun during the day and at night, the lonely overhead bulb barely helped. An antique hotplate squatted on the table, its rusty twin burners propping up a dented kettle and warped frying pan. The shallow closet equalled the size of a cupboard; a chipped porcelain sink clung to the wall — precariously — beneath a mirror dotted with paint drips. As advertised, the communal toilet and shower facilities could be found near the stairway in the hall.
My first day began on an industrious note. I deposited the teapot and filthy frying pan in a garbage can on my way out to grab a cup of coffee. Later I took a ten-minute stroll up to West 14th Street and discovered a block of rock-bottom discount stores between Sixth and Fifth Avenues. There I purchased plates, a small pot and pan, a pair of place settings plus a serrated knife, two drinking glasses, a cereal/soup bowl and a large mug for coffee or tea. The whole deal set me back $15 with no mention of tax.
Back at home I attempted a grocery list, but it was hard to imagine what I could realistically accomplish on the hotplate besides frying an egg or heating a can of soup. Aromatic fumes from bacon or a burger would no doubt trigger the lunar-shaped smoke alarm on the wall. The severe limitations of this minuscule “studio apartment” sunk in fast. My first New York home was no more than a room. The panic switch in my stomach flipped on for a few swirling minutes, until I silently vowed to hang tight.
Just then I heard a knock on the door, rapid taps followed by a voice instantly familiar from my first visit to the building.
“Mark, hi Mark? It’s Jeff, Jeff The Super, you know…oh Hi.”
“What’s up?”
I must’ve looked distracted because he blanched and hesitated, waiting a few seconds before edging his way through the open door.
“Well I heard the radio so I knew you were in here. Where did you go earlier? When I came by before, there was no answer.”
“Yeah I wandered up to 14th Street and bought a couple things for the place, like some glasses and stuff. A new frying pan.”
“Wha-what was wrong with the ones here? You bought new…”
His eager green eyes opened wide in astonishment.
“Jeff, the glasses in the cupboard had spiders living in them.”
This seemed to placate him for a moment.
“You know, this apartment did sit vacant for awhile. Glen, the guy who lived here, he ah died a couple months ago.”
Here Jeff went silent for a moment, reflecting. I anticipated a memorial of sorts, some fact or anecdote about the late tenant.
“That’s why you got this nice new paint job.”
I noticed that Jeff had a plastic shopping bag in hand.
“Looks like you went to the store, too.” I nodded at his bag. This forced social encounter felt like making conversation with one of my widowed great aunts.
“Oh this,” he replied, hoisting it aloft. “That’s why I stopped by. Thought you’d need some toilet paper.”
Four individually wrapped jumbo rolls tumbled onto the table.
“How about some toothpaste? Do you have a toothbrush?”
Whatever illusion I had about Jeff’s visit as a magnanimous get-acquainted session went straight out the window. The toilet paper was no welcome-wagon gift. This old weirdo was trying to hustle me!
“Jeff I think I’m set on toothpaste and stuff. I never thought to ask about toilet paper, though, doesn’t the building provide it?”
“Oh no,” he said with an ashen look.
“Well I can pick some up when I go to the grocery. Thought I’d try Sloane’s over on West 4th Street.”
“B-but you’ll be needing toilet paper.” Suddenly Jeff was upset, almost shaking, plainly offended by my polite demurral. So I wound up paying him $4, undoubtedly an absurd markup, mostly because I felt sorry for him. But my blinders had been removed. Or so I thought at the time.
*
How old was Jeff The Super? Somewhere between 40 and 70 years old was my ballpark guess but at 23 my perception of aging was vague, unformed. Further confusing the issue was Jeff himself. He struck an elderly stance, carrying himself like a premature geezer. As time passed, I could spot him in a crowd because he walked at a crooked slant, unsteadily, swerving across the sidewalk like an imperfectly gripped pencil scribbling on the page. It wasn’t beneath Jeff to accept — or disingenuously solicit — a senior citizen’s discount at an unsuspecting restaurant. And his voice sounded old.
Evasive by nature, he routinely deflected any and all of my inquiries. He’d squint and furrow his brow in mild befuddlement for a few teasing minutes, and then flash an indulgent smile at my futile questions. He was careful not to date any of his meandering anecdotes or boring stories. Essentially he was timeless, or possibly misplaced in time. Rightly or wrongly, I viewed Jeff as some kind of human anachronism.
Arguably, he was my first friend in New York City. Well, next to Frankie Crocker on WBLS-FM. Jeff wouldn’t have argued with that characterization of our relationship. I would have. Still, despite my conflicted feelings about him, from the very start I was impressed by Jeff’s resourcefulness. His not-readily-apparent means of making a living was something he didn’t try to conceal. No, he was eager to share his acumen. The superintendent job provided free rent plus a meager salary. Considering that his duties seemed to solely consist of collecting the monthly rent and (less often) the trash, his $25 a week looked generous from where I slept.
His main gig and true calling, his métier, was scavenging. Jeff was a garbage broker, a speculator in recyclables, a trash tout. He picked investments out of the staggering array of flotsam and jetsam just left there to rot in the city streets. He combed the urban beaches, the New York equivalent of those borderline-derelict Florida retirees who used to patrol the oceanfront, wielding their metal detectors like divining rods.
Naturally, Jeff offered to share his finds with me, asking for a nominal fee only after he’d hauled the junk up to my apartment. None of this was desired nor encouraged. Jeff would show up, plunk down a tattered lamp or rusty toaster oven and start to admire it aloud, conducting a sort of hard-sell seduction until I’d finally fork over the suggested $5 or $10 just to get rid of him. Returning all this weather-beaten house ware to the street wasn’t an option, not after his wounded inquiry the one time I tried it.
“You’re not going to believe this but I found another table fan like yours…hey wait a minute…” Eventually, the unbidden furniture and appliance deliveries wound down. There just wasn’t much room left in my room.
When I wasn’t being judgmental, Jeff struck me as poignant. Not for what I came to see as his shabby, grasping method of survival but for what his existence suggested: the possibility of growing old in the city, what it might be like after twenty, or thirty years. Spending time with Jeff, I’d get swept up by an unfamiliar surge of melancholy. What troubled me, I understand now, was the prospect of growing old alone in New York City.
Jeff was also the budget gourmet supreme, a limitless resource on the culinary underside of downtown Manhattan. He became my guru in the matter of finding cheap, sustaining and delicious meals. Jeff was the first foodie I encountered.
“I used to get by on $5 total for three meals a day,” he’d say, with a sigh. “But New York City’s gotten so expensive.”
It was in Chinatown, on the streets as well as in the restaurants, where Jeff introduced me to another side of the city, a world within a world, at once alien and alluring, delectable and disgusting. Chinatown was a melee of sights and smells. Mott Street, the main drag, was lined with restaurants, souvenir shops and outdoor market stalls stocked with oddly shaped fruits and unfamiliar root vegetables that looked to me like unearthed tree stumps. Fishmongers stacked row after row of fragrant whole fish on ice in front of their storefronts, dozens of different species set out in the sun alongside barrels of edible shell creatures ranging from shrimp to snails to wriggling live crabs. Until then, I’d only shopped at suburban grocery stores, and crunchy-granola food co-ops in my college town.
Jeff certainly knew his way around Chinatown’s twisting streets. He favored one tiny basement restaurant that specialized in dense noodle soups: the fatty broth studded with floating islands of meat and bone. I never felt comfortable or especially welcome there; considering that we were always the only Caucasians in the joint, I understood why the service was non-existent. I preferred the row of Szechwan restaurants on East Broadway. The best was all the way down the block, practically underneath the Manhattan Bridge. This restaurant’s name is lost to me now — Shanghai something? The walls were papered with dozens of signs advising patrons on the specials of the day in Chinese characters, though the regular menu offered rudimentary translations: “lions head” was a giant globe-shaped pork meatball served on a bed of savory soft-cooked cabbage. Bony chicken nuggets in sauce had an addictive sweet spicy tang until you accidentally bit into one of the painfully hot red peppers dotting the dish like land mines and lost your sense of taste for the next hour or two.
As the summer wore on, I strictly avoided eating with Jeff anywhere east of Broadway. The World War II era décor and cafeteria service at Katz’s Deli suited his taste to a “t”, but at $5 plus their pastrami-mountain sandwiches were too steep for budget-conscious Jeff. And his enthusiasm for global cuisine evaporated before the Indian restaurant row on East 6th Street. On the other hand, the Ukrainian and Polish fare on offer throughout the East Village was right up Jeff’s alley: starchy, filling and cheap. Borscht, pierogis stuffed with meat or potato, kielbasa with sauerkraut. But for me, there was a catch. Unlike the Greek-American diners Jeff frequented in the West Village and Chelsea, east side coffee shops such as Kiev, Leshko’s, Veselka, and Odessa were full of people closer to my age not to mention appearance.
Honestly, I’ve never been much of a fashion maven, and at first acquaintance I found my style-conscious peers in New York to be deeply intimidating. Nevertheless, after a few months in the city I altered my look. Slim-cut black jeans (unknown in the Midwest) felt more comfortable than the traditional baggy blue Levis. Minutes after my first short-sides hair cut, I was humbled by a tardy realization: my long wavy locks looked ridiculous in a shaggy Seventies hairdo. As I began to fit into the East Village, or at least not stand out as much, I realized how incongruous Jeff and I appeared as dining companions. Even in New York City, we were one odd couple.
More and more, I dined out alone: another hallowed New York tradition.
Jeff was confused and hurt by my sudden reluctance to discuss the day’s New York Times over leisurely dinners. Looking back, I’m stunned by my callow behavior — bordering on cruelty — toward the unfailingly kind (and oddball) advisor who’d taken me under his wing: “showing me the ropes,” as he invariably put it. But as my raw hunger for human company abated, or became sated in other situations, socializing with Jeff started to cramp my style. To this day I feel pangs of guilt about my abruptly abandoned friendship with my first Manhattan mentor. Belatedly, I want to express gratitude for the nourishment he provided.
