Squalor

The toilet was lidless, its porcelain chipped and stained, squatting in the middle of what would become the kitchen of the place that somehow was going to be our family home. The year I first saw it was 1968, the Second Summer of Love, which really wasn’t about love, not in the New York of garbage strikes, the shooting of Andy Warhol, and the rioting in Morningside Park. But for me, poised between childhood and adolescent ennui, those days might have been about love, and how wide-eyed I was then, still hopeful about the future person I might become. That was the summer my family scraped together $10,000, a seemingly outrageous amount of money for thirty-six hundred square feet of raw space in a yet-to-be named wasteland of dying industrial buildings south of Houston Street in lower Manhattan. There were no rooms, no walls, no plumbing fixtures except for that single, chipped and permanently stained toilet which had been disconnected from the sewer line, leaving a jagged hole where the pipes had once been. Our new home would be the same square footage as a good size suburban split ranch stretched out into vertical vastness.

And it would have been completely empty except for the ten tons of garbage that filled the entire place from floor to ceiling: ripped-out particle board partitions, machine parts, gears, pulleys, assembly-line detritus and ball bearings from seed-like to the size of marbles, decades of crumbling invoices, receipts, old telephone books, moldering fabrics, rusting metal buttons and rivets, eviscerated sewing machines, and decapitated doll bodies. There wasn’t room for even one person to push through the mess and exclaim that one day all this would be our family home.

So I must have been wrong about seeing the toilet the first time my stepfather took me to see the incomprehensible wreck in a seven-story building of equally wrecked former factories where our five-person family plus dog would eventually live. I couldn’t possibly have seen it that day, its sad porcelain uselessness trapped behind a fourteen-foot wall of debris. For months the place would resemble an archeological dig while dust-covered workmen removed layers of garbage until they reached bare floor.

My stepfather, surveying the mess, had been proud of his real-estate deal. Where else could you get that much room in New York, even if it technically didn’t have any room or even rooms yet, just mountains of trash. Up until then we’d been living in a shoebox of an apartment, the five of us and our barely-housebroken puppy crammed together like commuters at rush hour. “It’ll be great to finally have enough space,” Mannie had said, his eyes shielded behind yellow-tinted aviator glasses clearly not taking in the same reality I saw. What he really meant was, so I can have enough space away from you and your sisters squabbling and your crazy mother. Maybe I said something in response. Likely I was stunned into silence. A commercial bakery across the street was churning out pies and cakes, and I could just make out the shapes of them sailing down the conveyor belt through the half-opened grimy loft windows. Everything smelled like burning rubber.

It must have been some time later when I actually saw that toilet, after the piles of old tin ceiling extricated from the hundred-year-old beams had been carted away, all that stuff flung out the fifth-floor windows into a dumpster parked at the sidewalk, the flimsy partitions that had once cordoned off the doll-clothing factory executives from the sweatshop laborers, entire working lives flattened into piles of dust. All the old factories in the building had also fled the city in the economic decline of postwar New York, when it became cheaper to move offshore to Vietnam or Malaysia and have workers do the work who didn’t need to be paid a living wage or perhaps any wage at all if they were children.

This collapse of a dying economy of small businesses left room for artists to move in, the toiling painters and sculptors whose work required massive amounts of square footage for their thirty-foot tall canvases, their house-size sculptures, years before art became conceptual and shrank to the size of an upside-down crucifix impaled in a plexiglass tank of urine (Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987). George Maciunas, friend of Yoko Ono and her collaborator in the avant-garde art collective called Fluxus, was also a part-time real-estate broker; he’d bought the empty building for next to nothing, then sold it off floor-by-floor, but only to other artists. My stepfather was an artist, sort of, an electronic music composer with a side gig as a psychiatrist. My mother, a classically-trained violist, was definitely an artist, though after her recent stint with psychosis, had been reduced to tranquillized muteness. How this monumentally empty space became a home for our family was going to be a magic trick, a leap of faith, an optical illusion, not just a renovation.

Later, after everything had been hauled to the landfill except for the toilet which was the last to go, it was the total emptiness of the loft that baffled me. All that square footage wasn’t really about the possibilities for what the place could become so much as a way to disappear into the immensity of it. I’d been reading Willa Cather’s My Antonia that summer, lost in Jim Burden’s Nebraska prairie and the immense flatness of the land, how between earth and sky Jim was blotted out, rendered insignificant. This was not a typical experience for someone like me, a city child used to living in shoebox apartments. But here it was, the magnificence of vacancy, stretching out in front of my eyes. Dust motes drifted downward in lazy spirals in the afternoon light. I was nothing compared to the fourteen-foot ceilings and massive timbered beams held up by columns the dimensions of old growth oak trees. All that mattered was not to fall down the hole where the sewer line for the toilet made a jagged opening in the floor. You could see straight through to the street five stories below.

A month later, we moved in. Much remained to be done and never got done. Shirtless young men, charter members of the antiwar group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which occupied half of the floor below us, made a little extra cash helping Mannie cart 2x12s from the freight elevator. For years, bare wall studs without plasterboard separated my sisters’ bedrooms, an airy lattice of lumber that let them giggle each other to sleep long after they’d been put into bed. A kitchen was installed with butcher block counters and maple cabinets, trendy for the late ‘60s, except that my mother hated to cook. In the bathroom, the tile guy laid the tiles upside down, the adhesive perpetually sticking to our feet.

We were let loose in a neighborhood that had slightly more diesel fumes than inhabitants. Twenty-four hours a day, delivery trucks roared up to the loading dock of the bakery across the street. Pies and cakes were loaded into white boxes and distributed all over the city. Technically, it was illegal for us to live in our building because the area hadn’t been rezoned from commercial to residential. Nor had the neighborhood yet been given the slyly referential name of “SoHo,” which some enterprising real estate agent looking to make a quick buck from the sudden availability of living space chose to evoke not just the location South of Houston Street, but really the chic shabbiness of London’s SoHo. Because city sanitation trucks refused to pick up our garbage, Mafia trucks picked it up instead. We lived in the squalor of colliding histories consigned to the overflowing dumpsters of social amnesia. These were the years we became urban pioneer outlaws, transforming the refuse of a dying industry into the art of making do.

When it was too cold to walk to the playground, my sisters and I rode our bicycles indoors, our convoy of three stir-crazy girls making wide, rackety circles in the emptiness around a solitary Con Ed cable spool pressed into service as a splintery coffee table, the only furniture in our immense living room. But there was no insulation between floors and ceilings, so when you heard the upstairs neighbor sneeze, you’d say, gesundheit, and he’d say, thank you. A spilled glass of water would seep almost instantaneously onto the downstairs neighbor’s pristine white sofa, though usually it wasn’t water but a glass of red wine our mother had carelessly placed on that Con Ed spool table, knocked over by an errant bicycle wheel. We were not the best neighbors. Our mother’s chamber orchestra rehearsals, Mannie’s synthesized bleeps and blats of the music he’d compose on the room-sized computers at Bell Labs in New Jersey, my own feeble violin playing, my sisters’ constant squabbling, even the clicking of the dog’s nails on the wooden floors, all this drove our neighbors into paroxysms of misery. Some artists, it turned out, really do need quiet.

Our loft was never going to be the kind that in a few years would be featured in Architectural Digest and sell for fifteen million dollars. Psychoanalysis had fallen out of favor in the new era of biological psychiatry, and Mannie wasn’t seeing as many patients as before. Computer music wasn’t even a thing then, still mostly his hobby that required the purchase of reel-to-reel tape recorders, multiple speakers, and a control board like the kind you’d see twenty years later in magazine photographs of modern recording studios. There had been enough money to put in plumbing, electricity, and some minimal walls, but just barely. The floors were scratched and scarred, and the fraying burlap curtains my mother made in a fit of therapeutic domesticity couldn’t hide the peeling paint and drafty windows that rattled from the vibrations of the delivery trucks backing out of the commercial bakery’s loading dock, horns honking, twenty-four hours a day. Sooty grit fell like hailstones from the beams onto the stacks of my mother’s violin and viola music scattered haphazardly over the piano lid.

Other artists and musicians had also moved in, some more well-known than others. Sometimes, I babysat for the Blackwells on the second floor, Tom, a Photorealist painter and his wife, Linda, a writer. It was an easy gig. I had no trouble tucking their six-year-old daughter into bed in her frilly bedroom and flipping through magazines on the Blackwell’s leather sofa while they went out in their hip, expensive clothes to gallery openings or book parties. But Tom’s massive photorealist paintings made me feel nauseous, the disorienting, larger-than-life- size images from the American war in Vietnam that took up every inch of space on the walls. I kept my eyes trained on the pages of New York Magazine or Rolling Stone because I couldn’t bear to look at the giant painting-collage of the napalmed girl running naked down a dusty road sharing the canvas with the execution of Nguyên Van Lém, a gun at his temple the instant before his head was blown off. All this mayhem was framed around the edges with images of motorcycles, convertibles, and surfboards. Art could appropriate suffering, like Picasso’s Guernica I’d just seen at the Museum of Modern Art, but I hated how uncomfortable it made me feel.

Many nights, the whole building shook when the jazz musician Ornette Coleman rehearsed with his band on the ground floor in a space he called Artists’ House, or in his third-floor loft, or sometimes both at the same time. Those were the years when the freight elevator was perpetually swaddled in moving blankets for the massive canvases and sculptures being transported in and out that our building really was an artists’ house, before real estate became more valuable than art and the galleries gave way to Benneton, J. Crew, Bloomingdale’s and the ultimate symbol of late-stage capitalism, a Coach store. But there wasn’t much solidarity among the artists. Not everybody in the building appreciated Ornette or his tenor sax, the high-decibel midnight intensity of his Harmolodic Manifesto jam sessions roaring through the gapped and splintery floorboards. And yet, something about the ferocity of his music thrilled me, the hot, angular, breathless phrases blasting a hole through the chromatic universe.

Slim and elegant in his nattily tailored suits, Ornette was always kind when I ran into him in the elevator on the way to my violin lessons. He’d ask about the pieces I was studying, remind me in a cool, detached way that there was more to music than the Seitz Concerto. The world was limitless as long as you took responsibility for yourself. “My parents gave me nothing,” he’d say, “but dig this, it means I don’t have to carry around their burdens,” his iridescent suit glittering in the dim light of the elevator clanking its way to the ground floor. When I dreamed up a gig delivering the Sunday New York Times to people in the building, trying to be responsible for myself as if I were a suburban newsgirl flinging papers across grassy lawns, only Ornette tipped me lavishly early Sunday mornings wrapped in a lustrous silk dressing gown embroidered with floating butterflies, his pet myna bird perched on his shoulder.

But art could quickly destabilize you, remind you of your nothingness. A corrective to Ornette’s generosity ambushed me when I delivered the next paper, the in-your-face shock value of a painting that slowly emerged like a motorized striptease as the elevator door opened on the fourth floor, a larger-than-life size painting of a naked man’s torso, penis proudly erect. I wasn’t a prude; I’d seen plenty of naked bodies because this was the ‘60s, but the feeling of this image wasn’t natural or groovy. What really mattered in the world was male genitalia, the painting said, the larger the better. It wasn’t just a celebration of post-Stonewall gay pride, but an image of domination. With no head and no limbs, it was the purest distillation of masculinity possible. The painting was gigantic, ever-present, and another massive reminder of my irrelevance.

Most weekends, even in the unfinished state of the loft, Mannie and my mother would have dinner parties for their social circle, their music friends or visiting academics, or the fellow shrinks who would show up in their out-of-the-office regalia, which meant bowties for the men and long peasant dresses and dangly earrings for the women. Their socializing was a steady part of Mannie’s attempts to keep my mother occupied with culinary therapy, the work of busy hands and the step-by-step organization that dinner parties called for which might just forestall another messy decline into the disorganization of mania. Somehow, music wasn’t enough; the real work of her hands tearing up and down the fingerboard could quickly become compulsion, the all-night sessions listening to the Mozart Requiem over and over, then another months-long hospitalization. This was before lithium was widely available in the U.S., before doctors knew to prescribe it off-label, before even Mannie understood the way psychiatry was cleaving into separate disciplines, fiercely politicized: psychoanalysis, which turned out to be useless in treating mental illness like my mother’s, and biological psychiatry, which had its own dangers of overmedication, troubling side effects, and lifelong obedience to chemicals.

My mother would start cooking in the afternoon, and I would drift into the kitchen to watch her. At first, she gave me small tasks, chopping green beans or mixing batter, and sometimes it was easy to see this as essential for making dinner, but other times the world intruded and called it busywork. Soon, I graduated to helping her stuff mushroom caps with crumbled blue cheese and scallions. Dousing them with red wine, she’d set the tray on the counter waiting until the right moment to put them in the oven just before the guests arrived. She was filled with important information like this, when to start things, when to finish up, and these were the times when it seemed impossible that she could be crazy. I didn’t think I would ever know how to do what she did. It seemed to be an adult skill that I’d learn sometime in the future, like the art of understanding who you were. To know that you didn’t have to be a Julia Child in the kitchen or even particularly sane in the rest of your life, but that you could make convenience dinners from packaged food the way she did then—beef stew with bouillon cubes, rice pilaf in a box, or sponge pastry shells with half a canned peach in the middle and a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top.

The guests came up the elevator, always late, bearing gifts, a bottle of Scotch or a box of chocolate, their latest book, or a silk scarf for my mother, a new book for me, or dolls for my sisters. One of their oldest friends, John Murra, an anthropologist at Cornell, always brought baklava from the Poseidon Bakery on Ninth Avenue, because he would come from visiting his elderly mother who lived in the building above the bakery. Something about the word, baklava, delighted me; it was mysterious, from far away, farther even than Ninth Avenue. The box he held out to my mother was golden, oozing at the corners with oil and honey. It was a sign I looked forward to that meant we wouldn’t have to eat the canned peaches.

Baklava was a trick of perception, a geography of green bits of pistachio hidden within paper-thin layers of filo that was a map to an alternate universe. Before even sitting down at the table, John Murra would unspool his stories of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, tales that astonished me especially at that time when talking about war was supposed to mean protest, not participation. This small, urbane man could never have been a revolutionary. But once, long ago, he’d been someone else, a young boy named Isaac Lipshitz in Russia before moving to Spain and then America where he changed his name to John Murra and became a professor. There was something magical in the transformation, like the way he’d always greet me by reaching behind my ear and pulling out a dime, the one he had in his hand all along.

At dinner, I distanced myself from the grown-ups as if I were an island hidden by the waves of conversations swirling around me. I watched intently the way the guests moved their bodies, their hands gesturing freely in the air. My mother would make a place for me next to her, and I’d fiddle with my napkin while the guests told bawdy stories and drank many bottles of wine and smoked until the air was thick and blue. I was fascinated with their lack of restraint, a familiarity with the give and take of discussion while the wine was being poured, forks scraping against the plates, my mother serving seconds of beef stew. Their talk was about Nixon resigning and who was Gerald Ford, still the threat of nuclear war, the NEA budget, Merce Cunningham’s new season. Arguments floated and were batted around and refuted and laughed at and agreed upon, and they spoke in a language that had words I understood and ideas I tried to latch onto even as I couldn’t pin down its interior logic. I watched the women’s dangly earrings shake back and forth when they laughed, noticing how they would still defer to the men and let them take over the flow of conversation, how they would step free from any debate, dab their lips with a napkin and fall silent. All except for my mother, who would always have a rejoinder, the precise landing of her comments putting her right back into the fray with the men. Contrarian, reluctant to concede, eager to escalate the rhetoric. I noticed the wine she drank, the dark red stain on her lips, a trace of lipstick on the glass.

But beyond the imaginary line separating me from the regular world, I wanted only to be the same as all my friends. At school, I pretended that my parents were just like my classmates’ parents—fathers who were suit-wearing Republican businessmen, mothers in aprons who held school bake sales they called The Pecan Festival—and I learned to pronounce the name of the nut the Waspish way, pi-CAHN. Homework kept me occupied, and routine made me forget that I came from the grubby streets of a strange, unknown neighborhood where garbage trucks would not venture and the bodega at the corner that held cockfights in the basement every Saturday night, where bleeding carcasses of eviscerated roosters would be lying on the bloody sidewalk Sunday mornings.

Sometimes, when my parents were fighting, which was most of the time, I’d flee to my friend Marianne’s brownstone on Sullivan Street. I envied the calm and order of her family where there was a place for everything, a kitchen gleaming with copper pots and pans dangling in size order from a rack over the stove, and a living room filled with squishy modular furniture. James, her father, was an architect who designed entire cities, and her stylish French-Egyptian mother, Colette, was a writer. I longed for my mother to dress like her and learn to tie a Hermès scarf around her neck just so.

But my mother was too busy losing her mind. She hated the lack of privacy in the loft—there was no place to go crazy without everybody knowing about it. “You can hear everything in this building,” she’d say. Then it became: “The neighbors are listening to all our conversations, and they’re writing them down for the F.B.I.” She was convinced that the black car always parked at the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets were the Feds listening in on her phone calls.

And yet she was right to be paranoid because that was just when the messy split happened between the moderate radicals of SDS, those shirtless young men who’d done carpentry for us, and the Weather Underground, when the 11^th Street townhouse bomb-making factory exploded killing three people, and the FBI descended on our building for real. For one entire afternoon, my mother’s paranoia was justified when men in dark suits crawled around the basement where the SDS printing press was. They were looking for anything incriminating—documents, filing cabinets, even receipts for lunch—but all the Feds found were reams of blank paper.

Revolutions could also be silent, occurring in places you could never imagine. Every year, the cracks in the ceiling beams widened. All those trucks rumbling down the rutted cobblestone streets had started to loosen the stability of the timbers. You could feel it, the vibrations transmitted through the wood, a steady endless echo that was a kind of tuneless music. A wrenching-apart was taking place, subliminal, well below the auditory threshold. Soon, my mother started taking lithium, a last-ditch effort to keep her marriage and our family from dissolving. But Mannie had already given up. That was the September John Murra arrived with smoked eel instead of baklava the evening of my fourteenth birthday. Eating eel seemed too daunting, too much to ask especially on a day that I’d still yearned for cake and candles, but I wanted to please him, this solicitous and elegant man so erudite and cultured, the anthropologist who studied the Incas, who was also studying me. My sisters weren’t home; they were the sacrificial victims of a visitation schedule based on equality of time and women that had them trundling over to Mannie’s in their pajamas every three and a half evenings exactly at six o’clock. That night, there was no beef stew or stuffed mushrooms, no other guests, just John Murra, my tipsy mother and me. The eel came in little flat rectangles like thick slices of whitefish wrapped in wax paper. John placed a slice on a plate my mother held out to him, bearing it in front of me like an offering.

“Now, on your birthday you have the chance to eat eel like the adult you are becoming,” he said in his melodious Russian-Spanish-English, his face creased open in a grin. I closed my eyes and let him put a slice of the eel on my tongue. I felt his fingers lingering in my mouth as the eel dissolved into the rich, smoky fullness of the knowledge that I was no longer a child. But I did not yet know the person I was becoming, the person I’d begun to dream about, or the ease of the way she would move through the world. I still had not realized she was someone I might never become, in her well-cut pants and silk blouses, how she would speak a language of acquisition and desire, how she would live in an apartment in a tall, modern building, with thick rugs that were never dirty, with crisp white sheets for sleeping. She would lead a life of order and purpose, and there would be someone always with her, his clothes hanging from a hook in the closet, his shoes neatly arranged by the bed. Her notebook and pen would sit by an open window that looked out beyond the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge to where the river bends and narrows, the land green and lush.

Some buildings in SoHo had small brooks meandering underneath their foundations, a legacy from when the entire section of Manhattan west of Washington Street had been the Hudson River. Spring Street was once a real spring with minnows and striped bass swimming along its shallows. Before landfill made a new grid of modern asphalt streets that paved over the old cobblestones rutted with carriage tracks, you could dig anywhere and hit water. Foundations, like families, were notoriously unstable.

People used to call SoHo a light-manufacturing district, and for a long time I imagined this was where light came from. Lightbulbs, neon tubes, flash lights—anything to shine into the dark corners where rats sometimes lurked. In less than a decade, the last remaining factory disappeared, and nobody would remember if it made doll clothes, cardboard boxes, or doormats. Nobody cared. The collective memory for the urban past vanished in the onrushing urgency of the present. The Second Summer of Love was long over.

Our home became a space of departures. Down the street, six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his way to school, transformed from a lost boy into a face on the cartons of milk we bought at the store. Men on the street began to ogle me, made crude noises at me with their mouths. I was lost in the squalor of it, the vertical vastness that blotted me out of existence. The constant dirt and noise, my mother’s mania, Mannie’s absence, the endless stream of industrial pies and cakes hurtling down the conveyor belt in the bakery. I was growing up faster than my sisters who seemed to stay little girls forever.

But there, in the distance, I could just make out an opening. A crack of light, a path beyond. An exit sign glowing in red. Every house has a door. Ask any child to draw one. All I needed to do was walk through it. This was my chance. Here was the way. Soon, I’d be leaving.

SUPPORT

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IN LITERATURE