There’s a point in the process of searching for an apartment in New York City, perhaps when you’re standing in a paper-bag-turned-bedroom, staring at a toilet beneath a kitchen sink next to an icebox plugged into a power strip that’s dangling from a hole in the wall, when you start to wonder if death might truly be the answer. A coffin costs less for the same square footage, after all. It’s got hardwood finishing, with bedding and draperies already installed, no year-end rent increases, no neighbors to complain that the TV is too loud, a solid foundation, and most important, no roommates to judge you for decaying in the same spot all weekend. It’s really the perfect arrangement, all things considered.
But a coffin isn’t always the answer, which is how I found myself, like millions of would-be New Yorkers every year, in search of a place my living, breathing body could occupy for less than the cost of sacrificing my firstborn. (Though, to be fair, I’d gladly sell my unborn children to a labor camp in exchange for a two-bedroom Greenwich Village loft with a washer and dryer.)
I first moved to New York City four years ago, and by most standards, my first apartment—in the deep Brooklyn neighborhood where Meryl Streep’s character lived in that movie where she kills one of her kids—was an absolute mansion. I had a bedroom that fit both a mattress and pillows, a bathroom with a mirror, and a kitchen with a window. The neighbors I shared a wall with only had vigorous animal sex once in three years, as far as I could hear. And I found only one or two cockroaches, near the refrigerator, but they were both already dead, so that basically doesn’t even count. Any apartment in New York with a mirror, a window, and a mysterious air for killing cockroaches is luxury living.
Of course, like many New Yorkers, I had a roommate: a former college classmate named Lindsey who is too pure for this world, and certainly too pure for the havoc I wrought upon our bathroom and kitchen. For three shared years, Lindsey generously cleaned our common spaces every week with no help from me. Which I justified by reasoning that she actually must really enjoy cleaning—and she did, I could see it in her eyes—but the truth is, I was lazy and she wasn’t, and every time I said I would get around to cleaning the toilet, she would rightfully call my bluff and clean the damn thing herself. Besides, I barely left my bedroom or made our apartment feel like anything more than a hole that I hibernated in when I wasn’t out getting drunk.
I was an awful roommate and an even worse person, but Lindsey never called me out on it. She just channeled her disapproval into cleaning the toilet and letting the shiny spotless porcelain bowl speak for itself. The guilt I felt for imposing my monstrous lifestyle on someone as genuine and gentle as her was too much to bear. I ended our three years of shared mansion living and began my search for a private nest I could destroy guiltlessly on my own.
There are a lot of factors to consider when trying to find a new apartment, especially if you, like me, spend twenty-three hours a day decomposing indoors. Your apartment walls have to contain your sounds and smells, your door must be thick enough to ensure any potential callers always assume you’re not at home, and your neighbors must be of the kind that are prepared to see a specimen like yourself emerge Gollum-like once daily to retrieve carbohydrates and alcohol.
Finding an apartment means you have to find the answers to a laundry list of questions that at first seem entirely unimportant, but prove to be the most important questions of all. Like: How cute are the local Starbucks baristas? Can you imagine yourself carrying out a sordid love affair with the tallest, handsomest one, communicated only through messages drawn in cappuccino foam atop your daily lattes? Will he find you the day you decide to move away and tell you that he wants you to stay—no, he needs you to stay—because he can’t imagine his life without you, can’t imagine what his days would be like without your smile walking through those doors every morning?
These are the types of questions they don’t tell you to ask. But they matter.
Also: How shirtless is the local running community? How often does the Italian family who lives next door use an entire head of garlic to make marinara sauce for breakfast? Do the tenants who live directly above your prospective unit own an elephant or other large elephant-like animal with diabetes, causing it to roam across the hardwood floors multiple times a night to relieve its diseased elephant-sized bladder? And perhaps most important, what size towel do the neighborhood bachelors use to wrap themselves post-shower, and how thin are their bedroom curtains?
Armed with the right questions, I tried at first to find an apartment on my own. If I was gonna strike out on my own, I figured, I should really go for it. Brokers, after all, are a sleazy breed of human who don’t give a shit whether you live or die. They’ll gladly sell your dream apartment to the couple waiting behind you with their IKEA bed frame at the ready, prepared to swoop in and claim the room you planned to masturbate in for their own perverted pursuits, like having sex with each other at the same time. Like monsters.
But you realize how quickly and drastically you’re willing to drop your standards when you try anything on your own. Poring through Craigslist, I found only one listing in my price range, albeit one I found virtually impossible to refuse. It was a luxury downtown loft, furnished to perfection, and completely free. The only catch: in exchange for free room and board, the man listing the apartment demanded to spoon-feed his tenant three meals per day.
“Look,” I told my parents, “it’s got exposed brick walls, stainless steel appliances, a Whirlpool bathroom, and it’s all for free. And it comes with three meals every single day, and I won’t even have to feed myself. I’ll never have to worry about going hungry again.”
But that day, some guy got killed by some other guy because they met on Craigslist, or something equally violent and tragic, and of course, that was the one night my parents decided to watch the news. And then suddenly everyone on Craigslist offering a free apartment in exchange for spoon-feeding their tenant three meals a day must be a killer.
I tried telling them everyone in New York City is a potential murderer. I mean, that’s sort of this city’s deal. Lindsey probably tried killing me in my sleep plenty of times, and I survived living with her for three whole years. What’s a guy with a spoon fetish gonna do? Feed me to death?
But I was forced to relent. I abandoned both my hopes for a generous apartment sugar daddy and the prospect of successfully finding an apartment alone.
So I hired a broker named Pam recommended by a friend. Pam was an older, oversized woman, in her sixties, who moved like she was running away from a very small, very sluggish axe murderer, which is to say, she barely moved at all, but in a very urgent way. She took deep breaths in the middle of her sentences, and spoke cautiously, like someone was listening to our conversation. Her attention was always half-focused on what was happening around us, and so she never quite seemed to notice what I was saying.
“I thought you were supposed to be a girl” was the first thing she said to me, outside the building where we’d planned to meet.
“Oh. Um. No? I’m a dude,” I said. I’d texted her I was “Arielle’s friend Matt, and I’m looking for an apartment,” but I realize now I might not have been clear enough. “Is that . . . gonna be a problem?” I asked her then.
She shrugged her shoulders and heaved herself inside anyway. I followed along, uncertain. We climbed into the elevator together.
“You’re the first one to see this apartment,” she huffed. “The landlord didn’t get me the keys until today. A piece of work, he is.” She turned to me and made sly eye contact. “The kind of guy who beats his wife, ya know?”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I mean, what the fuck are you supposed to say to something like that? The “kind of guy” who beats his wife? Does he beat his wife or not, Pamela? If he does, why are you so casual about this? If he doesn’t, what the fuck are you talking about? I looked at the ground. “Oh. Uh. OK. That’s . . . that’s something.”
We didn’t say anything else. The elevator doors opened, and Pam led me twenty feet down the hallway to the apartment. She burst through the door and collapsed immediately onto the closest piece of furniture she could find, out of breath from the taxing elevator ride and stroll. Granted, we were on the eighth floor, and it’s possible the high altitude was harsh on her feeble lungs. “Make yourself useful and turn on the air conditioner,” she barked.
I did as she asked, and left her to defrost while I reviewed the apartment, though there wasn’t much to review. It was a one-room studio, big enough to fit a small bed, a couch, and a dying old woman without feeling too crowded. There was a tiny bathroom and a kitchenette, and two windows that faced a solid brick wall, so nobody could see in or out.
Pam’s phone rang and she answered. She spoke to the other person for five minutes, hung up, and turned to me. “One of my friends just died.” Breath. “He was like a mentor to me.” Breath. “Anyway, you want this apartment or not?”
I paused for a second. I looked around for hidden cameras. And then I told Pam no, I wasn’t interested in this beautiful litter box of an apartment, but maybe the next one, and also are you sure your blood pressure isn’t dangerously low today, because that’s the only fucking explanation I can fathom for a woman behaving as strangely as you are, except I didn’t say any of that because I’m too polite, I just said, “No, thank you, ma’am. Now please can we go before you murder me?” And then we left.
The next day I got too drunk at a bar, probably because it had been forty-eight whole hours since I’d started looking for an apartment, and I hadn’t found one yet, and I was ready to die. I was slumped at a table, my friend Jennifer standing fifteen feet away at the bar.
“Bring me water, homo,” I texted her. She didn’t immediately reply, so I texted her again. “DON’T BE A HOMOPHOBE. BRING ME A WATER.” Drunk Matt assumes the worst of people very quickly. Still no response, I texted her a third time. “Why do you hate gays?!” Nothing.
A few minutes later, she walked over to the table and sat down. “Why aren’t you answering my texts?” I slurred.
“Because you didn’t text me,” she said.
And that’s when I realized I hadn’t been calling Jen a raging pro-dehydration homophobe. I was calling Pam the Broker a raging pro-dehydration homophobe. “OH MY GOD!” I screamed. “I THOUGHT I WAS TEXTING YOU!”
“OMG I’M SO SORRY,” I texted Pam the Broker. “I DON’T THINK YOU HATE GAYS.”
But she never replied. And I never heard from Pam the Broker again.
The next week, I found Pam’s replacement, a broker named Mark. He looked suspiciously like Mr. Clean if Mr. Clean had served time in a federal corrections facility for cooking meth. His shiny bald head was punctuated by bulging skull veins and his biceps were kept at a solid 75 percent flex at all times. In truth, I chose him because I was too scared not to choose him. Somehow, I thought, he’d find me and rent me an apartment and make me move there whether I wanted him to or not.
But Mark, like Pam, proved to be a person of many oddities. On our way to view our first apartment, he stopped me midsentence to ogle two women passing us on the sidewalk. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “I just get so distracted by beautiful women. You understand, though.” I most certainly did not.
The apartment we found was smaller than the one Pam showed me but livable enough, and Mark’s biceps seemed to throb in approval. Sure, it didn’t have an oven or a fully closable bathroom door, and the toilet was barely bigger than one of those training potty seats parents use to put on top of normal-sized toilets to teach their babies how to shit like civilized humans. But whatever. I was running out of time, and Mark’s skull veins weren’t getting any calmer. Two days later, I was signing a lease. (Along with a piece of paper that said I’d promise not to lick the walls. For real. The lease agent said it was totally standard. “Just a little thing that says you won’t sue us if you chew on the windowsills,” he told me. I signed it, but still. It’s a pretty fucked-up thing to ask of someone. I should be free to chew on whatever I want to in my own apartment.)
I finally had my own apartment to destroy at will, which is perhaps the greatest feeling in the world—to have the freedom to debase a space that belongs to you (however temporarily) in the manner you wish to debase it. There’s nothing greater than sitting on furniture with your bare ass knowing that it’s your furniture to defile, or pissing into an unwashed toilet you know is being seasoned like a skillet with every use, or spilling an entire bowl of cereal in bed, knowing you can ball up the sheets, toss them down the trash chute, and buy new ones the next day with not a single soul to judge you for it. Finding an apartment in New York City is perhaps the greatest struggle, but it yields the greatest and simplest reward.