Railroad Apartment
by
Matthue Roth
Ezra and his roommates lived in a three-bedroom apartment in Bushwick. That was a courteous way of saying, in the Brooklyn vernacular, that the apartment only had three rooms. There was no distinct living room, kitchen, closet, closets, hallway—just three rooms plopped next to each other like the droppings of a small animal on a walk, what they called railroad-car style. In another real-estate life, this might have belonged to one of the Hasidic families down the street, packing all their children together, but for now, it was their new home. And, for nownow, it was mine, too.
That first morning, they gave me a tour of the apartment, and when Ezra said those words, railroad-car style, someone made a Holocaust joke. I was the only one not to laugh. In San Francisco, where I was coming from, Holocaust jokes were like using the word nigger—you couldn’t say it unless you really owned it. I did a quick census of the room using my eyes. We were all Jews. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened to me.
I gave them my best Bambi-in-the-headlights look. I wanted them to fully realize just how naive and helpless I was. I wanted them to come to my rescue.
In reply, Ezra and Benji and Yirmi immediately launched into a crossfire of explanations—the kind delivered to recent imports to Brooklyn like people who have only slightly more experience themselves in dealing with Brooklyn:
It sounds totally lame to say—or, as the guys back then would have said it, drowning in unaware irony, totally gay—but I can always remember feeling that desire, a wish to meet a girl and then never have to meet another girl again. In general, it was not good for man to be alone, and in specific, for someone like me, who spent most of my life repelling girls like a human can of bug spray, getting beat up by guys simply because they didn’t know what else to do with me, finding someone who would want to stick with me forever—well, someone who wouldn’t run away—was the only real dream I had.
Ezra and his roommates lived in a haze of perpetual twilight. Their building was attached to other houses on both sides, and windows were rare. There was one large room that constituted a kitchen/dining room/living room/everything-else room, which had a mattress and a chest of drawers—that part was Benji’s bedroom, one more function of that room. This was New York rent math: you don’t have one roommate per bedroom, you have one roommate per room.[1] When I showed up, Ezra was finishing off spaghetti with ketchup, which was to become our staple food. He lifted the pot and offered me his seconds.
I was too embarrassed to accept charity, but too hungry not to. “That depends,” I said. “Are we drinking tonight? Do I need to line my stomach?”
“Only one way to find out, man,” he extended the pot to me. I grabbed a clean-looking fork from the counter and dug in.
His roommates materialized, Benji from the roof (he said), and Zachariah from the corridor of bedrooms, still in his pajamas. It was nearly sunset. Not that you could tell. The walls were painted bright red, and there were no windows—a phenomenon which dawned upon me at first only subliminally, then exploded into full realization—like a casino, you’d black it out of your head, and only slowly would it occur how you had absolutely no idea what was going on in the rest of the world, if it was day or night or nuclear war.
“Are we going out? Are you guys hungry?” Zachariah asked us, either ignoring my new presence in the apartment or already acclimated to it. He moved around the kitchen area, identifying and sniffing at, and then rejecting, Ezra’s pasta. Gradually, much in the same way, he focused on me. “Hey,” he said, “are you coming out with us?”
“I’m uh, I’m staying here for a few weeks,” I said. “If that’s alright with you?”
His face turned baffled, then amused. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Join the party. But, uh, where?”
I followed them down into the subway tunnel, and they waited for me to buy my farecard. I oscillated between a single-ride card and a weekly pass. How long would they let me stay. How long would my money last. At some point I would return to Philly, I’d have to, but the threat of more memories was potent enough to keep me away for a while. I gave a defiant stab at the button button over the word month.
Zachariah, the guy in white, led us to the Manhattan side of the platform. The train fired into tunnels, dumped us at a transfer point, and we slid along the progression of numbers to Thirty-fourth Street. Right where I’d come from. I’d gone all the way to go nowhere. I thought of San Francisco like that, the five years I’d spent there, and I breathed in the winter air. Frost and salt and traffic and burning. This is where I was now. This is who I am.
We exited through Madison Square Garden, where fifty-foot backlit famous people stared into the night, impervious to our adoration. White-Hat led us to the stairs of the main Post Office, a marble-carved building that should have been a museum or a palace of justice but instead it was where people went to mail letters. Through the dark glass doors it looked normal, some posters advertising stamps with old singers and TV shows on them, like the crappy mall post office in the Northeast.[2] But outside it was a Taj Mahal just for words that people sent to each other. It was about writing. It was meant for me to be there. It was a shrine.
We sat there, told jokes, waited. They digested my story with no questions—grew up on this coast, moved to California, came back to crash at my parents’ for a few months, Philly was stifling me. They didn’t need to know any more than that. For them, I was young, Orthodox, and single, and this meant that of course I should come to New York City. It was what Orthodox people did. I was part of our mating cycle. There were so few Orthodox people in the world, if you ever wanted to meet another one—for dating, for marriage and babies and reversing the effects of the Holocaust and prolonging the survival of our species—you had to come to New York and find one. What had I been thinking, living in San Francisco, trying to pay rent with poems performed in a bar full of goyim? If at any point you took a survey of the world’s Orthodox 22–28-year-olds, they’d be right here, split evenly between Manhattan and Jerusalem. I didn’t need to say what I was doing here. In their minds, that was what I was doing here.
“What are we doing here?” I said.
The night was cold—it was getting on winter; we were in hats, coats, numb and rubbery skins—but the rest of them didn’t seem to mind. They were used to it, the poor miserable non-Californians. Some people passed us by—a steady stream of people had been passing us by, all of them identical ghosts in murky-colored puffy winter clothes—but the people who passed now, these were the right people. Ezra leaped up at once; Benji grabbed hold of the arm of our new acquaintance, one of them, and swung himself around it.
Around her. They were girls; there were three of them; they’d been aiming for us. My new friends were their friends too—or their associates, anyway, since Orthodox Jewish guys weren’t supposed to be friends with girls. They weren’t supposed to touch girls, either; and yet here Benji was, eating French fries out of a girl’s hand; there was Zachariah, arm into arm with a figure in a green parka with bulging indications of female-ness.
The girls said hi to me. I must have said something funny in reply, since they giggled when I introduced myself, or maybe they weren’t sure what to make of me and they took it as a joke. But I’m serious, I didn’t say. I didn’t want them to take me seriously. I wanted them to like me.
There were seven of us, three of them and four guys, including me, if I counted. They paired up at once, but nobody seemed like couples. There was flirting, looks and giggles and words, but they rotated between themselves, shared each other, traded partners like a square dance.
“What’d you bring me for dinner?” Benji said to the girl in the green parka, grabbing for the takeout container in her hands.
“Jiji, it’s mine! The chef made it for me!” She turned away and tried to protect her dish, but Benji had already beat her to her own prize. He slid free the steak of its mashed potatoes and greens and was dangling the dripping fatty end between his lips. Like a performing shark, he aimed his mouth upward and brissed the end right off with a sudden clamp of teeth.
“Ewww,” came the disgusted verdict from the girls. But they liked it. They liked him. They were entertained.
I tried to interrupt them, to ask their names. Benji was the only one listening. One name tumbled out, maybe two—“This is Chani,” he said, “and she’s—” I tried not to miss it. Devoirie? Debbie? Chavi? Shalvi? Shani? Shira?
I smiled, I played along, I was cool. I could act like I understood this language. I could act like I’d spoken it my whole life.
We took a train back into Brooklyn, another subway line whose color I recognized, whose letter was unfamiliar to me, and got off in a neighborhood I didn’t recognize at all. In a bar with dark blocklike furniture and screaming primary-colored lights, we sat in a back booth, clustered around a horseshoe-shaped table. I was stabled in the direct middle. I couldn’t go anywhere. The breed of people around was totally different than what I was used to, than what made me comfortable—professional, tailored clothes that actually fit. We were like cats dressed up to look like people. People brought me drinks and I drank them, unquestioning.
I should have been glad for it, but I felt like an unwelcome gatecrasher, haunting their party, drinking their drinks until I was expected to buy a round. And then I’d probably find out each of these beers cost $27, or that the whole time I’d been drinking drinks meant for someone else, or that my ATM card wouldn’t work in any machine in New York.
The what-ifs built themselves up in my head, fiercer and fiercer. It didn’t matter how unlikely the scenarios were, or how disconnected from reality. In the pooling aether of my brain they were true, and they were horrible. Lightning rippled through my nerve endings. I felt like I was standing in midair, surrounded by nothing but these pointless conversations with pointless people. What was I doing here, why was I chasing their approval. We have so little time alive, why am I wasting it with these people I barely knew and don’t care about and will never love? When death shows up to claim me, I won’t think of this night or anything to do with it. I’m wasting myself. I need to leave here. I need to do something.
The anxiety was crushing me, so painful I wanted to cut away my skin. I needed to slow down, to stop thinking. There was a drink in front of me. I drank. If only I could regain the beatific calm, the all-is-rightness of a Saturday night with friends. I wasn’t an alcoholic. It wasn’t the drink I was craving. I was craving Mike, and any feeling I could hold onto of our lives together, I wanted to surround myself with that feeling, I needed to wrap myself inside it.
We headed home under a bright moon, the air cold and clear. Our breath looked like crystals glowing white as we climbed up from the final train of the night and turned down the block of Ezra’s building. There were seven of us. We felt like a teen TV show. We took up the whole sidewalk.
“You guys are so cool,” I gushed. I was lost, hopelessly lost. I hadn’t slept in days, I had no way to judge them or my own standard of coolness or what made any sense in the world. But I was happy to have Benji, happy to have someone to talk to. Maybe that was what I needed. Maybe that was all that mattered anymore. “I had no idea there were people like you. I feel so close to you.”
“Thanks, man,” said Benji, draped over my shoulder on one side and Shira-Shani-Shalvi-Devoirie on his other. “We like you too. You’re one of us now. But, what are people like me like?”
We dispersed to the rooms. They broke up two by two, in some secret pattern I did not know, was not supposed to know, a guy and a girl to each. They divided arbitrarily, or governed by some instinct too primal and sublime for me to fathom. Ezra in particular had affixed himself to the occupant of the green parka, a tiny red-haired girl who’d shed her outermost layers and plastered her bosom to him as if it belonged to him in the first place, as though it had fallen off his body and they were desperately hoping that, if they held it in place, it would become reattached and no one would notice.
And Benji, so desperately coy, holding his date’s hand as he guided her to sit upon his kitchen-bound bed. And Yerachmiel, disappearing into the middle room with his companion so matter-of-factly.
There was an extra air mattress in the apartment. Before leaving that night, we’d blown it up and installed it in a corner of Ezra’s room, where I’d assumed I was going to sleep. Only now I was not so sure.
I stood there, quaking, frozen. I couldn’t even fidget. Fidgeting would usually imply me awkwardly and jerkily headed in one direction. There was no direction I could possibly go. I was sexually cornered.
“Hey, so where should I...um...would you like me to...mattress?”
“Say what?” Ezra momentarily stopped feasting on the girl’s neck (hornily, ravenously, as though all he’d eaten that day was pasta and ketchup[3]) and glanced up from her flesh, “Yeah, sure—whatever you want,” and went back to vampiring her.
I considered my options. Usually, the decorum of sleeping at somebody else’s house dictated that I resign myself to the living room—or, failing that (if there was no living room), install myself in whatever other room had space—the kitchen, for example. In this particular situation, however, the living room was the kitchen, and it was also a bedroom, and all three were quite occupied—before Ezra and I had even made it to the other rooms of the railroad apartment, Benji and his date were rapidly hurtling toward nakedness. There wasn’t even a hallway.
I weighed my odds. That didn’t work. I was too tired to think. Ezra had, after all, said to do whatever I want. Pulling the mattress as far against the walls as it would go, squeezing it into the nadir of the corner, I dove inside and buried myself under every blanket I could gather. I forcibly willed myself not to listen to them, not to listen to any of the slobbery broken rocking and creaking sounds coming from any of the rooms. I don’t know if it worked or not, though, because before I could hear the results of my makeshift soundproofing, I was asleep.
[1]New York Rent Math. For this 2-bedroom apartment, the landlords charged $1600, or $800/person—affordable, if barely, as measured in 2004 New York City wages. But because the most regular income in the house came from Ezra’s weekly gig spinning records at a bar ($50, plus ten percent of the bar tabs), you added in Benjy sleeping in the kitchen, me sleeping wherever, and arrived at $400—a figure more palatable to our budgets.
[2]The crappy mall post office in Northeast Philly. Five Points // seafood / walking alone, a few blocks from the someday-dungeon.
[3]as though all he’d eaten that day was pasta and ketchup. It was.
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