East Side Reject

One of the worst things that can happen to a New Yorker is to be tossed out of the East Side. I know too well, having just suffered this humiliation.

I was not booted completely out of New York, although it was a close thing. I was able to get a finger grip on a few feet of real estate down west by the Hudson River within sniffing distance of Hoboken. I comfort myself that I am the luckiest person alive, because when I was a child I had an uncle who lived in Hoboken by the gas works, and everybody said that living near the gas works was good for you because it prevented whooping cough.

In the predawn hours, however, when the meat packers arrive for work and begin slamming sides of beef against my bedroom wall, I awaken and face the truth: evicted from the East Side.

The East Side is where the swells live, and I wanted to be as swell as the next swell when I settled in New York. I wanted to wear a mink coat to the supermarket when I went to buy a jar of peanut butter.

I wanted to have a tiny little thoroughbred poodle, no bigger than the back of my little finger. I wanted to walk my tiny little poodle through streets choked with limousines until he defiled sidewalks right in front of the town houses of multimillionaires and internationally famous courtesans.

I wanted to shop in boutiques with signs in the window that said, “English Spoken Here.”

I wanted to eat the perfect artichoke.

I wanted to rub shoulders with famous expense-account swindlers’ limousines and trade secrets with the world’s great tax evaders about where to find a pasta more perfect than the perfect artichoke.

All this, and more, I enjoyed on the East Side, and it seemed it would never end. But it did.

It was the inflation that got me. The landlord telephoned one day suggesting that I get out. He intended to sell my residence. Perhaps I could buy. “What are you asking?” I inquired.

“One million dollars,” he said. “You are insane,” I said. “Maybe an Arab will come along,” he said. I should point out that everybody on the East Side lived in a fever of greed inflamed by dreams that an Arab would come along.

The price of poodles no bigger than the back of your little finger had risen astronomically in anticipation that an Arab would come along. One day in a stomach boutique where I finally found the perfect watercress, the owner refused to sell it to me. “Maybe an Arab will come along,” he said.

I telephoned real estate agents to plead with them to keep me on the East Side. They all answered the phone by saying, “Is this the Sheik of Araby?”

“I’ll take anything, even a black hole,” I said, “as long as it’s on the East Side.” They ordered me to quit tying up their phones. “An Arab may want to call,” they said.

I offered to surrender my life insurance and sell five of my children into slavery in return for a single bedroom within walking distance of a perfect asparagus. Useless. Useless. I had been priced out, ejected, evicted, humiliated.

The cockroaches in our million-dollar property wept when the movers came, but they were crococile tears. Yes, it’s true: East Side cockroaches can weep crocodile tears. This is because they are perfect cockroaches. Our cockroaches were not the kind to give up the East Side for immunity from whooping cough.

East Side friends were too embarrassed to show up for the farewell. They were perfect friends who had dined on the perfect lamb chop, and they did not want to stand around feeling superior to friends who were being snubbed by their cockroaches.

Hardest of all was bidding adieu to the Emperor, the mighty apartment house, taller than the Washington Monument, which had blotted out our light perfectly for five dark years. From high in the clouds, the Emperor amused itself over the years by pelting us with its plate-glass windows (it was perfect plate glass) and by sending its tenants to the balconies to bombard us with marbles, eggs, potatoes and soda-pop bottles.

But when we pulled away for the last time, the Emperor did not weep so much as a single piece of garbage on us. It had neither window frames, marbles, eggs, potatoes, soda-pop bottles nor garbage to waste on people who couldn’t afford the East Side.

“Funny,” I told the mover. “That building usually tries to kill me.”

“It’s probably waiting for an Arab to come along,” he said.