Sandra sent me this article yesterday.

I cried so much the first year we got to New York. That was October 1995. Our apartment in the Lower East Side (after 2 weeks of sleeping in a studio apt on the floor next to our friend's futon, which had him and his girlfriend in it) was $650 a month--$250 more than our palatial apartment in Austin had been--with a bathtub in the kitchen and the toilet in a closet (with no light), a nonworking oven with a warning tag from the gas company, and huge rats. Some thug kids shot out our window with a BB gun (and I retaliated by throwing Collected Poems of W. H. Auden out at them) and it stayed broken like that all winter, including through the biggest blizzard of the decade. I walked 3.5 miles to work (once I had a job, at a "big publisher," it paid 18K) or recycled bottles for subway money ($1.50) when it rained. We sold a lot of books, and all our CDs, since we didn't have anything to play them on anyway. I printed out my poems to send to all the magazines I could find in the Barnes & Noble and got rejected by all of them, regularly, till I just stopped sending them.

At least I wasn't single on top of it. We were a team, at least. (I dislike crowds/strangers and I'm not a roommate person--that always ended in disaster! God, what if I'd had to date?)

Several jobs and raises later it was better, and we made a lot of great friends, and I figured out how to freelance, started getting poems accepted. We'd moved to Williamsburg when it was still strung-out prostitutes (1996), who used our doorstep, living in a converted storefront with plywood floors. This place also had occasional rats. Our landlord evicted us for no reason in 2001, and never returned our deposit, and our swanker jobs mostly went toward the debt we'd accumulated. I bought a used book at the Strand on how to correct our credit scores by getting debt reduced or forgiven, negotiating by letter, in case we could ever afford an apartment broker who might check them. Eventually I went to grad school, and that was good for me, put me in a context. Watched the towers fall without the mediating screen of a television, just plain like the sky, from the piers in Queens (where we rush-moved after being evicted, and lived for just under a year). We moved again shortly thereafter no longer able to stomach the view, back to Brooklyn. We got married in New Orleans, felt somewhat stable, after 9 years in the city. I published a chapbook, made a blog, then my first poetry book came out, then my gaming book. I made a pretty sweet spot for myself hosting reading series and editing other people's books. But I was still stressed out and drunk all the time, insomniac with panic attacks, medicated. At the time we left (five years ago), I had been working two jobs and S was working 50-60 hours a week at something he loathed. Our apartment was "nice" finally, but still too small to comfortably hold all our shit (books, mainly and two desks), our neighbors were noisy-boistrous, and the sirens from the projects went off every night. (It was $1800 when we moved in, going up to $2200 when we left.) We fought all the time. We spent too much money going out, coping. Getting groceries from the store to the house in a little granny cart was still a nightmare, but at least I didn't have to haul the laundry anymore.


What if we'd had a kid, kids? Impossible. I really don't know how people do it, unless they leave. I mean people who are also trying to make art and also working all the time. Do they sleep? Do their heads collapse from the sucking moneyhole?

I guess I don't miss most of that.


But I guess I wouldn't undo it, either. Pointless to wish it had been easier. 


Oh the enviable luxury of the annual interns, who could afford to work for free!