AT FIRST, MELISSA AND I call it our little ballet: the way we pas de poisson past each other and the piles of half-unpacked stuff in our minuscule apartment. But — three days in, novelty out — it’s clearly punk slam dancing in an undersized mosh pit. We bang shoulders, bruise shins on bed edges, and curse over the four-inch-by-eight-inch kitchen counter.
“Is Bloomberg high?” Melissa lashes out one evening after slicing her finger while dicing a carrot on a cutting board straddling sink and stove. “I’m already sick of his micro-apartment initiative!”
I’m in the East Wing — our living/dining/only room — baffled by the byzantine directions for the Ikea fold-up table we purchased specifically to fit this space. Scrotally colliding with the edge of our tiny fireplace, I wedge into the kitchenette with Melissa and kiss her finger. It’s bleeding, but just barely. I grope for a bright side. “We need just three lights in our entire pad,” I announce. “And look at that one tiny heater! Our carbon footprint is a fifth of what we had in Queens.”
“But my carbon foot is five times bigger than this apartment,” she says, soaping up her finger. “This feels like carbon foot-binding.”
I know. To bathe in our fish-tank bathtub — it’s three feet long — I adapt the yoga pose “shoulder stand”: Head in the water, flush against the tub. Butt against the other end. Feet at a ninety-degree angle up the wall.
Then there’s the toilet. It’s impossible to shut the bathroom door when you sit because — I measured it — there’s just 10¾ inches between the front edge of the toilet seat and the door. I imagine an awkward moment of having to leave the apartment when a guest asks to use the restroom so that they might answer nature’s call with the door ajar.
And that same bathroom door only opens outward eleven inches before meeting the bedroom’s queen-sized bed.
It’s one thing, I discover, to live 12 × 12 in serene solitude, the gurgle of No Name Creek ribboning through your permaculture orchards. It’s quite another for a twosome to squeeze into a double-wide 12 × 12 in an impure polis.
Sure, we’ve winnowed our belongings way down from Queens. But we still have far too much. Moving boxes flaunt their bulk; four large paintings stand at accusatorily stiff attention against the fireplace. Where to put it all? New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s micro-apartment initiative embraces architectural minimalism, allowing for apartments smaller than the four-hundred-square-foot minimum required by the city’s zoning laws. The logic makes sense: let folks pay cheaper rents and burn less fossil fuels. But 340 square feet just ain’t right.
Besides, minimalism is just another excuse to buy. A billion-dollar annual retail industry has sprung up to sell us all the things we need to live with less. Besides the magical Ikea folding dining room table, there’s a cornucopia of niche items still too new to be discarded for easy curbside plucking. Melissa comes home from work one day with shopping bags full of razor-thin hangers to wedge 13 percent more clothes into our single closet, clever fabric drawers to resuscitate the dead space under our bed, and magnetic spice jars that allow the suspension of thyme from the edge of a Frigidaire.
At first, we toss these bags of space savers onto our despotic, still-unpacked crap pile, when a better solution appears. An index card is taped above our mailboxes at the bottom of the stairwell: “Moving Sale,” it reads. “Everything must go. Call or stop by 6B.” At the bottom it’s signed: “Wanda and Dave.”
Apartment 6B is our exact 340-square-foot floor plan, two stories down! Enthused, Melissa and I knock on Wanda and Dave’s door that evening. We’ll score space-savers at a bargain, we reason, and see how another couple has elegantly navigated minimalism’s rough waters.
The door opens, and Wanda, a slim woman in her late twenties, invites us inside.
The ensuing encounter is surreal. Though identical to ours, Wanda’s apartment feels a fraction of the size. Entering, I feel the same sense of constrained claustrophobia as under the low-ceilinged Floor 7½ in the film Being John Malkovich, but it’s not from the ceiling. Wanda and Dave have entombed the contents of a macro-apartment inside of a micro.
“This is Dave’s recording studio,” Wanda says with a curt, ironic laugh. A profusion of audio mixers and tower speakers muscle their way around a full-sized sofa. Their flat-screen television overwhelms one wall. Unable to move corporeally, I swivel my head and squint into the dim kitchen swollen with food processors, salad spinners, and all manner of pots and pans. I can hardly breathe. My heart ticks faster. The walls close in like the trash-compactor scene in Star Wars. Wanda says: “I probably shouldn’t point this out since you guys are just moving in. But living in 340 square feet . . .” She pauses, twisting up her face. “It’s not human.”
We leave Wanda and Dave’s micro-hoarding initiative, unhelped and uncomforted. Outside the building is no better. Sweaty garbage bags bunker around the Papaya Dog fast-food joint (“99 Cent French Fries!”), which leak a permanent puddle that willfully stinks up the triangle where Cornelia meets Sixth Avenue. A half dozen porn shops — their windows displaying a confounding blend of S&M whips and whimsical “fundies” (underpants for two) — line the square block around us on Sixth Avenue and 4th Street. Interspersed among the porn stores are tattoo parlors with plate-glass windows, through which leathery men with ink guns can be seen carving devil’s crosses into teenage torsos. Meanwhile, the Cornelia Street crack dealer stalks new clients.
“Our crack dealer,” an apartment neighbor puts it to me — he skirts nocturnally no matter the hour. Skinny, beak-nosed, mustached, with a Mediterranean complexion, he eyes me one evening and approaches as I return from the Korean grocer.
Ah, but for Queens! Its harmless little flight path and Hot Bagels slights! They hack down trees and vanquish squirrels, but at least there’s sky above the two-story row houses. Here, apartment towers carve up the heavens, and there’s nary a cemetery respite from the asphalt.
“Partying tonight?” the dealer asks, sporting a zombie-like “I’m-here-for-the-gang-bang” grin. I shake my head and flee through our horse entrance, up the dim stairwell, and into our overstuffed micro. I’m boxed in, no exit. Melissa’s working late. I’m lonely, hyperstimulated, and far from the balm of nature. I’ve changed locations but not demons.
THE NEXT DAY, still a little shell-shocked by my glancing encounter with the crack dealer, I venture across Sixth Avenue and wander into Washington Square Park. Its eight acres burst with daffodils and tulips, bird- and human-song.
In fact, the park is a barrage of music that at first feels almost as overstimulating as the city itself. To the north, a New York University female a cappella group harmonizes through white-toothed smiles. To the west, a large black man plays two trumpets at once — one horn at each corner of his mouth, like tusks — then repeatedly bellows “Do-NAAY-tions!” and passes a hat. To the east, a short, wiry man wheels a grand piano into the walkway, cracks his knuckles, and cajoles out Chopin and Mozart. To the south, an on-tour Korean Christian rock band singer cries out, “Does Jesus save?” A passerby shouts, “Hell yeah!”
In the center of all this, near the fountain, I see a thin, thirty-something black man, accompanied by a multiethnic mix of five other musicians, crooning Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” I walk over and sit on a concrete bench facing them. We’ve got to find a way, the man belts out, to bring some lovin’ here today! Yellow and white tulips blow in the breeze, and the tune, which is really about what I need most — healing — eases off, then rebuilds in tempo and pitch. I feel a bit of the urban craziness dissolve, and I’m amazed that only a dozen others have gathered around these geniuses.
I remain transfixed on the bench as the music segues from seventies soul to the Beatles to a little reggae, then to the theme song from the old TV series The Jeffersons. “Movin’ On Up” is sung with smiles and laughter. The crowd builds to a few dozen. I find myself sometimes clapping along, other times singing, always tapping my toe. The musicians — two Latino, two black, and two white, who play a mix of guitars, bass, conga drums, and harmonica — take turns leading songs, but one of them is obviously at the inspirational center, the body of a starfish with five radiating arms.
With a plump belly hanging over his jeans, unpretentious wire-rimmed glasses, and a balding crown, Bruce’s rather ordinary, middle-aged appearance belies the vigorousness of his guitar plucking and strumming, the range of his voice, and the acuity of his blue eyes. As the music crescendos, I notice tears in the eyes of the woman sitting next to me on the bench. There’s a mounting cohesion between crowd and musician. The Temptations song seems almost to sway with the Empire State Building rising to the north of the Washington Square Arch. Building, arch, and music lilt and flow like something Gaudi or Picasso might paint, and people clap and hoot for more.
Several days pass. Each afternoon I jump the Papaya Dog puddle, cross Sixth Avenue, and join Bruce and his ever-changing configuration of musicians and hangers-on in Washington Square Park. It’s got a name, I discover: it’s known as the Jam.
“Bruce started the Jam seven years back,” one of the musicians, a drummer, tells me as we chat between songs. “It’s his gift to the city.”
“But he always seems to be here,” I say. “How does he earn a living?”
I’m perplexed. I’ve only once seen a tip jar out. The Jam seems unconcerned with the monetary economy.
The drummer smiles. “Twenty-four hours a week, brother. Seven months a year.”
The air of leisure hovering around the Jam intrigues me. I ask the Jam’s regular dancer — Monica — about this. She’s a slim-figured, late-thirties woman with curly chestnut hair. “Like Bruce and a lot of the others who hang with us,” she tells me between songs, “I work to live, not the reverse.” A writer, Monica says she works on her laptop under the trees in the park or, on cold or rainy days, in favorite cafés and library nooks.
“But how do you afford New York?” I ask.
She takes a plastic container out of her backpack. “See this wheat-berry salad? Last night’s dinner. And it’s my lunch and dinner today. Along with some apples. And there’s something like five hundred free things to do in New York every day, including the Jam. Plus. . .I live in a broom closet!”
Living in a virtual closet myself, I don’t romanticize Monica’s even tinier quarters. Still, as I chat with her and other Jammers, a theme surfaces: they work for time as much as for money, and they earn that time by living smaller, simpler, and smarter. Bruce, for example, is a self-employed computer programmer who works as much as required and not an hour more. These Jammers have what author and activist Vicki Robin calls a “joy-to-stuff ratio” of a very different sort from our neighbors back in Queens.
Granted, some of the notions tossed around the Jam are anarchic and bizarre. Between tunes one afternoon, someone gripes about high unemployment, and a guy tuning his mandolin says: “Screw full employment. We should aim for the opposite.” Oscar Wilde said much the same in his 1891 The Heart of Man under Socialism: “It is to be regretted that a portion of the community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish.” An irresponsible sentiment, Wilde’s — and deliciously so — but certainly more honest and witty than the more prevalent notion articulated by his contemporary, the essayist Thomas Carlyle: “Man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream,” Carlyle wrote, adding, “Every idle moment is treason.”
The Jam invites me to muse, treasonously — as I decide to start my two-day workweek after a few weeks of vacation to kick off the Slow Year — on whether the idea of a “job” is unfit for the twenty-first century. Why do citizens of America, the world’s richest country, work the longest hours and take the shortest vacations? Aren’t the time-saving machines and processes we’ve ingeniously created supposed to. . .save time?
In his book How to Be Idle, British author Tom Hodgkinson — drawing from the work of historian E. P. Thompson — points out that the creation of the job is a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the Industrial Revolution. Before the eighteenth-century’s steam-powered engines and factories, work was a more improvisational affair. People worked, sure, and they did “jobs,” but the idea of being yoked to a particular employer at the exclusion of other money-making activities was unusual. For my own part, during a decade living in Africa and South America, I have puzzled over how subsistence agriculturists live mostly outside of the modern economy, and quite happily, scheduling their work by the seasons and by their moods. A Bolivian farmer, for instance, might chop wood one day, then pick kiwis the next, and then take the next three days mostly off to idle over chess or soccer with friends, the joy-to-stuff ratio of his adobe hut making even your average Jammer look opulent. These are self-paced, not employer-paced, lives.
The following day, I watch Monica smiling over her laptop under a tree, listen to Bruce riff wildly, and wonder how they’ve managed to stay largely self-paced in a society where our very self-esteem is cinched to our work. Man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream. Myself and most self-employed people I know usually become our own exacting bosses, over-scheduling ourselves — as I did in Queens — and not just to keep up with the bills. Working hard is a status symbol and even a patriotic obligation. However, is this just a myth conveniently created by the rich who, as social critic Bertrand Russell notes, “preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect”?
I crack open, for the first time, a new pocket-sized, leather-bound notebook that a friend from La Paz gave me the last time I visited Bolivia. There’s a saying in that country: Caminar preguntando. “Walk questioning.” As part of the Slow Year experiment, I’ve decided to carry the notebook with me, writing down questions and thoughts that bubble to the surface. Bruce’s strumming something mellow. Half-listening, I write a question on the notebook’s first page. For a deeply conditioned worker bee like myself, it releases a mix of conflicting feelings.
Is idleness treason?
AFTER A FEW DAYS WITH THE JAM, I see the dilemma of our micro-apartment in a new light. Maybe 340 square feet is not, as per Wanda downstairs, “inhuman.” Philosopher Thomas Merton called his stark monk’s chambers “the four walls of my new freedom.” How can I approach our micro-apartment in this same spirit? Shouldn’t lower rent and less stuff mean more free time?
One day while Melissa is at work, I stream Marvin Gaye on Grooveshark and tackle the problem of our stuff. I tinker with the micro-pad puzzle. Stashing Melissa’s unopened space savers in the hallway — intending to return most of them to the store — I unpack our boxes and create two piles: keepers and throwbacks. The latter, far larger pile is to be gifted, thrift-shopped, or stored in a small corner of the building’s basement, which our superintendent has agreed to let us use. To accommodate the keepers, I install shelving and hooks, which I have already acquired from a different vacated apartment nearby, whose exiting tenants were happy for me to scavenge their leavings.
In the evening, Melissa and I make further refinements. We stow a minimal kit of kitchenware, toiletries, clothing, and books as if equipping a houseboat’s trim hull. It’s a refreshing purge; the apartment seems to expand with each tweak. Yet one meddlesome detail remains: the stack of large paintings glaring at us from where they lean against the fireplace.
We’ve been avoiding the issue. They were painted by her late grandfather, Alexander Crane — Fafa to his grandkids — a professional artist. We both love them.
“There’s wall space,” Melissa says doubtfully.
We’ve already shed most of the twenty wall hangings we had in Queens. Now it’s the Final Four. But having tested available wall space in the micro, we’ve agreed that only one can be hung without creating a sense of clutter.
“They’re my babies,” she says, walking over to gingerly touch a canvas.
The Minimalism Czar in me steels himself. “Which of your babies,” I say, doing my best Schwarzenegger, “do you love the most?”
Melissa winces. “Ouch.”
“Think of Wanda and Dave,” I plead. “Let’s try?”
We do. She breathes deep and selects her favorite — the rest to be shipped to her relatives.
Over the next weeks below deck, Melissa and I both feel our well-being rise in proportion to what’s been shed. A chaotic apartment begins to transform. A slim metal table in the kitchen welcomes the cutting board; jackets laze on his-and-her hooks; sandals snuggle in their micro-shoe-apartment beside the door. We improvise a kitchen two-step, a bathroom waltz. Most surprisingly, Melissa’s grandfather is closer to us than ever. That’s because the stripped-down tranquility of our Zen perch counteracts the overstimulation of Papaya Dog, porn, and our crack-pusher outside, its cloud-white walls drawing the eyes to a beauty mark: Alexander “Fafa” Crane’s gold-and-fuchsia watercolor of cliffs and snow.
AFTER SOME WEEKS AS A SPECTATOR, I’m approached by the Jam. “You play?” Bruce asks.
I clear my throat. “Childhood piano lessons,” I say. “And high school band trombone.. . . But I love to just sing and clap along if that’s okay.”
Bruce fingers a lick on the guitar. “As our brother pleases,” he says. “You are welcome.”
They play. After a couple songs, Melissa arrives in a lilac suit dress, laptop bag over her shoulder. I rush to hug her. We sit on a bench to listen to the same skinny African American guy who sang Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” my first day in the park. Now he’s finishing the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” and Bruce’s face looks ecstatic as he cries out, “Take it through the roof!” Things build even more. “Break through the roof!” The small crowd goes nuts.
Songs. More of them. The side of Melissa’s body warms mine. The sun slips behind buildings stacked to the west, painting the Washington Square Arch crimson. A guy in dress slacks and opal cuff links, whom I’ve never seen play with the Jam before, strums his guitar and sings Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” which flows languidly, carrying Melissa and me with it as we hold hands and watch the crimson peel off the arch. Melissa says: “This sensation reminds me of childhood, in Santa Fe, when the parched arroyo near our house would gush with rainwater on monsoon-season afternoons. Do you know, when the rain stopped, we’d head down to the arroyo and just watch it flow?”
Bruce and the other vocalists dip into the cuff-linked guy’s lead; Melissa and I sing along, just “wasting time.” But are we, Melissa and me? I feel our Queens culture of two expand to a culture of two dozen, as if our micro-apartment’s walls are also expanding to include at least this part of the park.
Later, as Melissa and I walk back to Cornelia, light streams from headlights, shop fronts, and apartment windows. We talk about how perplexing it is to square a treasonous timelessness with a scheduled city life — particularly hers at this point. And then we’re through the Cornelia Street horse entrance and up the five flights to our stark-white abode. Melissa lights a candle in each window.
The next morning is bright and blue, and Melissa has an idea. “Let’s break through the roof,” she says, pointing at the ceiling.
I hesitate, thinking that Bruce didn’t mean that literally, but Melissa isn’t asking for my opinion. She’s already flying out the door and taking the steps two at a time to the forbidden door to the roof. The leasing agent told us it’s “heavily alarmed” and “totally off-limits.”
I chase after her.
“I have this suspicion,” she says at the top, “that they’re just trying to scare us off.” She places her hand on the bright red “Alarm Will Sound” handle.
I wince. “Wait!”
She pushes.
With a velvety swoosh, the door sails open and light gushes into the cave-like stairwell. Melissa steps onto the roof. Squinting, I follow.
A hundred buildings rise in discordant geometry and texture. The air smells fresher, summery, a salty breeze coming off the brackish Hudson. The sun threads a gap between two buildings, and I feel it on my face, feel it burning up the walls I’ve been living in. I’ve boxed myself in with expectations.
Manhattan will eat me. My mind built that box. Our apartment’s too cramped. Built that, too. There’s no sky in the city. My wife just took us through the roof.
Where are all the boxes now?
As Melissa soaks in the sun, I gaze at the Freedom Tower under construction at the Ground Zero site a half mile to the south. “Look!” Melissa cries.
In the sheltered space under the tree canopy that we’ve seen through our bedroom window, atop a wrought-iron fire escape on an adjoining brick apartment building, sit two adorable puffballs: baby mourning doves, looking almost ready to leap.