My first grown-up apartment in New York was on West 104th Street, off Broadway, above what my parents referred to as the DMZ (the DMZ being 96th Street, although that is true no more when most of that neighborhood and well into Harlem is more like the Left Bank of Paris because of rampant gentrification).
The building was a roach-infested six stories with a tiny European-style elevator that could accommodate only two or three people. The only other inhabitants I remember were a pair of Hispanic call girls, or I assumed they were ladies of the night, from their tight shiny dresses and glittery stilettos. They were about my age, always sweet and giggly, whispering secrets in the elevator and spartan lobby.
The apartment itself was technically a one-bedroom with a kitchen full of ancient appliances and a bathroom tiled pink and black. When I officially graduated from college, my parents took me out to lunch and my father handed me a check for $2,000. “This is the last money you will see from us while we are still alive,” he announced, and that was pretty damn near the truth, except for $500 when I got married. No matter. It seemed a gloriously huge sum, but instead of doing the adventurous post-grad thing, like backpacking through Europe or teaching in China, I signed a lease and bought furniture. A couple of cute chairs, a small dining table, and a sofa bed upholstered in a tweedy gold fabric. I had reserved the bedroom for a studio where I still slopped around, not too seriously, with watercolor paper and acrylic paints.*
But somewhere in that first year at Macmillan, perhaps after I broke down while trying to use the adding machine, I decided I did not want a future as a production manager for a textbook publisher. I wanted to pursue a master’s or PhD in art history and prepped assiduously for the Graduate Record Examinations, learning a slew of vocabulary words I would seldom use again (jeremiad, troglodyte, sesquipedalian). I scored abysmally on the math part, but earned a stellar 790 on the verbals. A couple of professors from Princeton, including Sam Hunter, provided boffo recommendations. I was turned down by Harvard, and accepted by NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts (which offered no financial assistance) and Columbia (which gave me a full fellowship and a stipend). So to Columbia, a convenient 10 blocks to the north, I would go.
When I wasn’t working or prepping for the GREs, or messing around on watercolor paper, I was pursuing men. Anywhere and everywhere. Indiscriminately. A voluptuous co-worker at Macmillan, a flirty dark-haired woman whose father had Mafia connections, took me to a party in Grave’s End, Brooklyn, a neighborhood as foreign to me as Bangkok. I chatted up a swarthy young guy in a leather jacket, and when he told me he was a painter, I almost squealed, “What kind of paintings do you make?” He responded, “I’m a housepainter.” Never mind. I went to bed with him anyway. When my mother noticed the hickey on my neck a few days later, she sniffed: “Nice girls wear scarves.”
I never saw him again, but I did briefly date Lisa’s brother, who was brilliant in bed (or so it seemed) and took me to a bar, also in deepest Brooklyn, where the crowds miraculously parted for us, like the Red Sea for Moses. He turned out to be too seriously connected to the Mob for comfort. A gun in his glove compartment sent chills down my spine.
But there were plenty of “nice” Princeton boys around too, making their way as aspiring professionals in sensible pursuits like business or the law. One, a banker/poet, fell asleep on top of me while reciting Ezra Pound. Another took me for my first motorcycle ride, from the East 30s to my apartment many miles uptown, whizzing up Park Avenue in the wee small hours while Manhattan’s Gold Coast still slumbered. We got along swimmingly until a fiancée appeared. A third, for whom I entertained high hopes, also worked for Macmillan as a college traveler, which meant he trekked around the country trying to interest professors in the company’s textbooks. He was the heir to the founder of another publishing giant, and was of Slavic descent, devastatingly handsome, with cheekbones that looked to be designed by Calatrava or Ferrari. We got as far as the meet-the-parents stage of the relationship, and I know mine nursed high hopes that I might finally settle down, and with money, in some place far away but still nearby, like Scarsdale.
And then he went off to Amsterdam for two weeks, supposedly on business, and when he came back, we picked up our frolics until he took me out to lunch one day and announced that I had given him crabs. He would have to get all his clothes dry cleaned. I didn’t even know what the hell crabs were, and I certainly couldn’t afford to have my crappy wardrobe dry cleaned. I went crying home to Mother, who gently explained the condition and sent me out for green soap. (Oh, my dear departed patient mom….the things I put her through!)
But I mean, honestly. He goes off to Amsterdam and then accuses me of giving him crabs!?
If it seems I was a bit promiscuous after two years of celibacy at Princeton, kindly remember, dear reader, that this was the 1970s. We had the Pill and diaphragms and IUDs. We were curious (yellow) and black and red and blue. AIDS was several years in the future. I knew about gonorrhea and syphilis through reading Flaubert and Ibsen, but had never heard of crabs and briefly thought I might have caught them from the wooden toilet seat in my dingy apartment. I had noticed some peculiar itchiness “down there” but decided it was just dry skin in the pubic area.
And then my freewheeling life of stupefying boredom by day and erotic adventures at night came to a halt the summer before I was to start my first year of studies at Columbia. I somehow contracted mononucleosis, which of course had nothing to do with sex. I had to give up my apartment and move back to my parents’, where I lay flattened in my old bedroom for two or three months, scarcely able to read or watch TV. In spite of fetid breezes off the Hudson, the heat in the front rooms—the living room and master bedroom—was unbearable. The air conditioner in my room whined and dripped while I slept most of the day and gave not a damn about anything, let alone heading back to school.
I was all of 24, helplessly wondering if I would ever get my act together. It’s a question that still crosses my mind decades later.
Irish Coffee
In those cheerfully carousing years of my early 20s, I did quite a lot of exotic drinking—grasshoppers and Singapore slings, tequila sunrises and pink ladies. I also did a great del of throwing up. In spite of his Slavic heritage, the publishing scion’s favorite dive bar was a place called the Emerald Inn, a darkly gleaming pub on West 72nd Street, where we would head for an Irish coffee and canoodling after dinner or on a brisk Saturday afternoon. This is a no-brainer recipe, but there ae some tricks to make it especially special, now that we’re heading into cooler weather. Here’s a recipe adapted from a pair of cybercooks named Cookie and Kate:
1) Brew your favorite coffee. Dark roast, decaf or regular.
2) Add Irish whiskey to a mug. Jameson’s is often preferred, but. Bushmills is a less expensive option.
3) Sweeten with some maple syrup or brown sugar. A little sweetener takes the edge off the whiskey
4) Add a splash of coffee, decaf or regular.
5) Gently stir to blend. Then fill the mug with coffee, leaving about 1/2-inch at the top for whipped cream.
6) Top with whipped cream. Bonus points if you’re using real whipped cream.
6) For a festive touch, sprinkle with ground cinnamon or chocolate shavings.
*On and off throughout my long lifetime I have been seduced into making art. But now, to paraphrase Mark Twain on exercise, “Whenever I feel the urge to paint, I lie down until it goes away.”
Top: Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1925
Is the first image a Bonnard?
No bathtub in the kitchen? That was my place on E 4th St. Anyway, your old apartment is now worth $1.2 million. I also got my graduate degree from Columbia.