A Love Story

PLEASE NOTE: The following is a very silly work of fiction and as such is not intended as a solicitation for a lawsuit.

“Hello,” said the Unilever Corporation, “I am the Unilever Corporation. Here is some soap.”

The Unilever Corporation gave me a bar of soap the size of a matchbook.

“I have sensitive skin, Unilever Corporation, will this soap irritate my skin? Is it safe to use on the face or is it strictly for the body?”

“Yes,” said the Unilever Corporation.

“Yes it’s safe for the face or yes it’s just for the body?”

“Here is another bar of soap,” said the Unilever Corporation.

“Is this one better for my sensitive skin Unilever Corporation?” I asked demurely, for the Unilever Corporation was somewhat intimidating in spite of its tremendous generosity to me, or perhaps because of it.

“It is the same soap. I am only giving it to you because it is our newest line of soap.”

“I’m sorry if I offended you Unilever Corporation, I didn’t mean to be ungrateful, honestly.”

I clutched the two new bars of soap to my chest and tried to fight back the tears.

The Unilever Corporation did not respond to my apology and I became even more depressed.

“You know, Unilever Corporation, I understand that we lash out when we’re hurt but you needn’t be so cruel. Unilever Corporation, do you have something to say?”

The Unilever Corporation was much taller than me and it wore a tightly fitted dark silver suit with a red and white striped tie and blue shoes and a shining pin bearing the Unilever insignia on its lapel. The Unilever Corporation’s hair was chestnut and although it was combed neatly to the side and did not become mussed with the wind it did not look greasy or matted down by any gel or pomade. I suspected that this was a result of the Unilever Corporation using one of its own fine products.

The Unilever Corporation sighed and looked at the soap samples that it had given me.

“They’re beautiful Unilever Corporation, thank you so much. I wish I had something that I could give to you.”

“I am the Unilever Corporation,” said the Unilever Corporation.

As my eyes welled up with tears of joy I said, “Unilever Corporation, I love it!”

“As a corporation my assets will continue beyond the lifetimes of my shareholders, my bondholders.”

“I know Unilever Corporation, I know,” I said as I took the Unilever Corporation’s hand.

Perhaps it was the industrial perfume wafting from my soap but I detected the smell of daisies and they reminded me of home. I hadn’t been home since mother died- it was too painful. Home was a simple Victorian farmhouse in Saxton, Delaware on a gracious and quiet plain of land that led all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay, where the daisies grew. As the Unilever Corporation continued to tell me the advantages of a limited liability partnership, I thought of mother picking daisies to put in my hair as we waited by the docks for papa to return from his sailing trips. It was on one of those perfect golden afternoons in my childhood that mother told me about the Sherman Antitrust Act. She patted my little hand and told me I was a woman.

“Do you care for me Unilever Corporation?” I asked the Unilever Corporation.

“Unilever Corporation cares deeply about the wellbeing of the consumer, the health and safety of our products is as much of a concern to us as the price of our shares.”

“Oh Unilever Corporation, I know all of that. I’ve never doubted your commitment to product safety and consumer health, but oh, how do I put this? I feel close to you, closer now than I have ever been and, well- don’t you see what I’m saying?”

I was almost out of breath; it took every shred of courage I had just to get to this point and I was so tongue tied that I didn’t really say anything at all. I was shy and I foolishly expected the Unilever Corporation to take the hint and relieve me of the embarrassment.

“The Unilever Corporation is committed to providing branded products and services which consistently offer value in terms of price and quality, and which are safe for their intended use.”

“Yes, okay, but what if I wanted to go beyond the intended uses?”

“Products and services will be accurately and properly labeled and advertised. Any personal injury or damage incurred as a result of misuse of any of the Unilever Corporation’s products is the responsibility of the individual consumer and not that of the Unilever Corporation, its subsidiaries, or its shareholders.”

“I know Unilever Corporation, we’ve all been hurt in the past and it’s only natural to want to protect yourself, but I’m opening myself up to you here- I’m an open book Unilever Corporation, I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Yesterday my stock was trading at thirty seven dollars and sixteen cents a share. At the end of trading today shares rose sixteen and a half per cent to close at fifty eight dollars and seventy six cents a share.”

“I only want to be there for you, I want to share the ups and downs of your share value and help you analyze future earnings potential in domestic and emerging markets too Unilever Corporation. Emerging – markets – of love.”

The Unilever Corporation put its smooth and powerful hand on my face and I felt safe.

“I love you,” I said. I instantly felt an powerful and pleasing sense of relief; the hardest part was over. But before the Unilever Corporation could respond, several members of its board of directors entered the room screaming into their blackberries. A cloud of exhaust fumes followed them from the chain of idling towncars that had parked in the tiny alley outside. They were wearing business casual attire and kept trying to be seated as if they were around a conference table with chairs, but we were in an intimate café. The board members hastily placed all the small mismatched tables together to form an impromptu meeting table, but they all seemed alarmed at the prospect of sitting on stools.

“But there’s no marble,” one of them said.

“Will this support our phone system?” said another as he tried to plug an expensive looking speakerphone into a chink in the exposed brick wall.

“This is highly irregular,” said a third. He was the fattest of them all and seemed to be in charge. “Call I.T.,” he shouted. “We’ve got to call this meeting to order!”

Without the use of an integrated teleconferencing system, though, the board continued to scramble haphazardly like a flock of birds who had flown into a shoebox.

The Unilever Corporation continued to gaze at me expectantly.

“Why are they here?” I asked.

“The board meets regularly to discuss the assets and holdings of the Unilever Corporation, as well as to introduce new paradigms for our renowned products and services.”

“No!” I said, “you must stop listening to the board Unilever Corporation, you can have your own holdings and assets.”

“You mean corporate social responsibility?”

“You know what I mean, Unilever Corporation. I believe in you. I want to be a new paradigm for you!”

“Thank you. As a consumer, would agree, agree strongly, disagree, or disagree strongly with the following statement: the Unilever Corporation is honest and trustworthy in its attempts to achieve quality consumer service.”

“I don’t even know what that means! Please, Unilever Corporation, I want to talk about us. I just told you I love you, what do you have to say to that?”

“So you would strongly agree, then? Good. Would you please rate the following Unilever Corporation products from most useful to least useful using a scale of automatic numerals and or letters?”

“No, I won’t. Listen, Unilever Corporation, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I’ve never felt this way about a corporation before, but you’re so unlike any I’ve ever met.”

“As a consumer, do you feel that the Unilever Corporation is doing enough for the environment? For the poor? For the morbidly obese?”

“I know what you mean Unilever Corporation, we live in a terribly sad world, but I love that you feel a responsibility to so many people, and causes too, but you’ve got to find time for you. What’s good for you, what’s going to make the Unilever Corporation happy?”

“Dynamic solutions to the ever changing needs of the modern consumer?”

“Only you can answer that one Unilever Corporation. It’s just like Oprah used to say, you’ve got to live your best life. Goodbye, Unilever Corporation, I…”

I loved the Unilever Corporation so much, I had longed to tell it how I’d felt for ages but I had never considered how damaged, how sad and lonely the Unilever Corporation could be. I hope that you never experience the pain that I felt that day, it is a pain unlike any other. It is worse than simple heartbreak, which of course is something that everyone’s felt and largely agrees is the worst kind of emotional pain imaginable. The pain I felt in that moment with the Unilever Corporation was worse than that, and worse than even the pain of loving and longing for another. No, this was much worse. My heart broke at the thought that I would never love the Unilever Corporation and it broke again when I realized that the Unilever Corporation was probably incapable of loving anyone at all. I considered singing “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton to the Unilever Corporation (sometimes a good country song is really the best way to express the feelings between a woman and the multinational corporation that she loves), it says what anyone says when they’re rejected- that they just want the other person to be happy. If you truly love someone even if they don’t love you back, you still want them to be happy some day. But the Unilever Corporation had cold and dark eyes and I knew that the Unilever Corporation would never truly love me or anyone else.

“Oh Unilever Corporation,” I said. “I will always love you.”

“The Unilever Corporation values its relationship with all of its consumers.”

“That’s just it, Unilever Corporation- I don’t want to be just a consumer to you. Goodbye forever.”

I began to cry as I turned to leave. A team of IT experts had found their way into the café and were nervously assembling a conference system for the board.

“Wait!” the Unilever Corporation called after me. In a moment of weakness I turned around although I was already at the door.

“What?”

“Here,” said the Unilever Corporation. “I would like you to take these coupons for twenty-five per cent off your first purchase of Unilever’s new Summer Memories Shampoo and Body Wash! Feel free to give them to your friends. Limit one per household. Offer void where prohibited.”

I threw the coupons back in the Unilever Corporations face and cursed at it.

“Dammit,” said the Unilever Corporation. I was shocked, I’d never heard the Unilever Corporation used foul language like that- it was a family corporation, that was one of the things I loved about it.

“What did you expect?” I cried. “You call me back after I’ve told you I love you and you give me coupons! Coupons!? You bastard.”

“I’m just a simple corporation. Do I make a good living? Am I proud of my commitment to excellence? Yes, of course. And would I like to diversify? I don’t know! It’s scary and things are going okay for me right now, I don’t want to rock the boat. The last time I tried to date I was nearly taken over by ConAgra!”

“I hate love,” I said.

“No,” said the Unilever Corporation, “don’t give up! Just because I’m a mess doesn’t mean you can’t find someone who’ll give you everything you need some day.”

“No Unilever Corporation,” I sighed shaking my head, “love is just too silly and ridiculous for me. I’m a logical woman, it’s why I love corporations so much- they make sense, you make sense. Everything else is too preposterous for me to fathom.”

The Unilever Corporation and I stood in silence together for a long time and then the Unilever Corporation asked me if I’d like more free soap.

If that’s moving up, then I’m moving out.

My mother is staying at my apartment this week, which means she has the right to call me constantly and complain. She complains that the tv doesn’t work easily enough and that she can’t find my coffee filters. The TV works just fine to any eight-year-old and my coffee maker has a permanent filter.
My mother’s complaining is nothing new and even when I’m with her in my apartment, she complains. But last week I went out to my storage unit here in LA and sent about a dozen crates back home to New York. I had a friend come in and sort through them, but I imagine a bunch of stuff is still left out. Whatever the state of my apartment, and no matter how many times I may have been back over the past year, the fact remains that I’ve spent at least 95% of my time in Los Angeles or elsewhere on the west coast and haven’t tended to my apartment in NY with all of my heart. But that’s not the point of this essay.
The point is that my mother called and said “it looks like a “HOARDER” lives here,” which may or may not be true, I don’t know. It probably does.
After my mother called, a friend of mine called me with the shocking news that a subway line is down and that the MTA sucks.
There was a time when such news about the subways and haranguing about the unliveablity of my apartment would have been like music to me. Now it just gives me IBS.

A Few Words about the Future

What’s at stake here is the sanctity of air travel, the very fabric (to use a cliche) of what makes this country great. Over 175 years ago nobody could have predicted the widespread success of aviation and air travel, to say nothing of American Cheese. What’s more, very few people today wear neckties on airplanes, save for pilots and some very rigid gentlemen from Rye, New York, and Singaporeans. However, one mustn’t jump to conclusions about the impending doom that is inevitably faced by all doctoral students in the state of Iowa. While it is true that the vast majority of these budding academics focus their studies almost entirely on the subject of developing a better condiment for the french fry, it is also important to remember that they frequently incorporate the study of root beer into their research. Now, I am not suggesting that all children under the age of 18 ought to be placed in an enormous plexiglass egg and dropped into the Atlantic Ocean, I should clarify that I called only for those children named Benny or Melody. Of course, all children who have yet to be born ought also to be placed into the Great Atlantic Child Egg. This solution will surely free up seating space both here on land as well as on our lesser airlines. For years now, soothsayers have been warning of the end of the world which they say will come in the year 2012. This is a great tragedy for many people, not the least of whom is Nat Seidleman of Kew Gardens, NY. On March 2, 2005 Mr. Seidleman was given a gift certificate to Eisenberg and Eisenberg’s Tailor Shop in Manhattan by his mother. The elder Mrs. Seidleman, failing to predict the impending end of existence neglected to consider that her son not use the gift certificate within six years of purchase. However, for Nat, a gift certificate for a new suit became useless when he both lost his job and was dumped by his girlfriend Veronica due to problems concerning his personal odor. Following these dual devastations, Nat became despondant and hasn’t worn anything other than a pair of sweatpants and a Lake Havasu Summer Camp tee-shirt since 2005. The gift certificate is set to expire in March 2012 and while nobody, not even the soothsayers know when exactly the earth will cease to exist in 2012, one thing is for certain: Eisenberg and Eisenberg does not accept expired gift certificates! Ultimately though, the point is moot as the Mayan Budgetary Office recently pushed the end of humanity up to next Wednesday, due to cutbacks. Said Eric Nostradamus MCMXIIIth, Executive Minister of the Universe Termination Committee, “our office budget has been slashed by 45%! I had to let my secretary go last week and now I can’t even find the file with my phone numbers! I think she took it, because Deb saw her stuffing non-dairy creamer into her purse, so someone like that…well, you really can’t trust them. Anyway, yeah, all hope is lost. Repent now and be saved….blah blah blah, the end of days will soon be upon us…unless the legislature is able to free up some funds.”

And Now To Go Back To Whatever It Is That I Do!

O, my startlingly plasticine and well-preserved readers, how I’ve neglected you!  You, who listened to my insane paranoid ramblings with gusto and vigor! You, who never judged or questioned me, even as I regaled you with my woeful tales of my diminishing mental acuity and my rapidly increasing sensation that I was wealthy, famous and definitely above the law. Even as it turned out that none of these things was true, and that my grasp of reality had long since gone the way of the Dodo, you stuck by me and never even thought to turn me in to the proper authorities…. I mean, someone turned me in to the proper authorities, and a great deal of my months long absence from writing here is due in large part to the fact that I’ve spent that time under the watchful eye of Dr. Rusty Swindell of the Exuberant Blessing and Healing Clinic of Palm Desert, California.  I heard that the Exuberant Blessing and Health Clinic is where Nancy sent Ronnie Reagan when he said he wanted to be a dancer, and look how he turned out. Unfortunately, I only remember arriving at the clinic and then leaving it.  But that was last year, and according to a pink piece of carbon paper I found stuffed into my lucky pair of underpants, I am fully cured of whatever it was that whoever it was that admitted me to the clinic felt I suffered from!

As you can imagine, the past few weeks have been filled with fanfares, champagne, and red carpet caviar-filled parties to celebrate my return to normal life and my victory over mental illness. I’m sorry I didn’t invite you o my most sycophantic and self-adhesived reader, but it was strictly a B-List event and I consider you to be of the A-List. Also, it’s probably best you weren’t there, because during one of the parties a paparazzo mistook me for Matthew Morrison, TV’s “Mr. Shoo” from Fox’s hit show “Glee!”

I was ushered to the rope line by a publicist and forced to answer questions from the press.

“Well, working with all the kids is great, I suppose. It’s really all about the music, y’know?” I said to a blond faced reporter.

The more questions I was asked, and the more comfortable I felt answering them, the more confused I became. Naturally, after about three minutes I came to believe that I was indeed Matthew Morrison- the resemblance as you can see, is uncanny.

Everything was actually going rather well for me as Matthew Morrison, until three days later when I attempted to drive onto the Fox lot and was stopped by a guard.

“DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” I boomed, creating a scene.

“No, I do not!” said the guard. “You have to leave, or we’ll be forced to call the police.”

“You’re making a big mistake. Don’t you know who I am?” I said.

“No,” the guard said, bending into my car, his breath reeking of egg salad sandwiches. “Who the hell are you?”

The confrontation had already transformed me back into myself, but I still paused for dramatic effect.  Looking both mournful and forlorn, I stared off into the distance and said, “I don’t know….that’s why I asked you.”  Then I turned around and peeled off onto Pico.

Later that evening as I singing to myself in the mirror, I came to a decision.

I know what you’re thinking, my little reader. I know because you’re so easy to read and you really don’t have anything better to do than analyze my life.  You’re thinking, Boy he sure does spend a lot of time ‘coming to conclusions, doesn’t he?’ Well, yes, I do spend a lot of time concluding things about myself and about life.

Here now are some of them, in no particular order:

1) I am an artist.

2) I am none of the stars of TV’s “Glee!”

3) Pizza, when doused with acrylic paint, tastes more like goulash than goulash.

4) I used to be, in the not too distant past, a lot funnier.

 

Clawing My Way Up To The Bottom

Fran Lebowitz says that the best thing a young person can do today is “something new”.  She also said that “the trouble with being ‘ahead of your time’ is that by the time everyone else catches up to you, you’re bored”.  Well, I’d like to say that I’ve spent a significant amount of time trying to do something new, that nobody else has done before, but the fact of the matter is that everything bores me.  This is due, most likely, to the fact that not only has everything that’s worth doing already been done (to say nothing of the fact that anything that’s worth doing is also hard) but that it’s all a dull repetition. There’s next to nothing that happens in my life now from which I couldn’t stand aside and say to myself, “I feel like I’ve seen this episode before.”

In two days I return to sunny Los Angeles, for the second time as an aspiring Angeleno.  Well, not an aspiring Angeleno, but an aspiring resident of Los Angeles; I am a New Yorker and will always be a New Yorker.  This is in keeping with my long-held belief that the only true New Yorker is one who was born in New York.  This is not to say that I couldn’t become an Angeleno if I wanted to- the ‘naturalization’ rule, like the office of President of the United States, only applies to New Yorkers; members of Congress and people from lesser cities are free to do whatever they please. It’s a ridiculous statement, I know, but in this era in which New York and the people who inhabit it become less and less recognizable to me every day, I must cling to those deep elemental aspects of my hometown and, with absolute and unerring blindness remain fiercely loyal to New York’s supremacy in those areas in which New York reigns supreme: convenience (even as I find it harder and harder to access a single subway line that runs as it purports to), pastrami, pizza, museums and other cultural institutions (including theater), and the ultimate ideal of the American lifestyle as I would like to live it. Given all of this, and given my fiasco with my neighbor in LA (whose fictional name I’ve forgotten already) it must seem like madness that I’m planning to return and give my West Coast experiment another shot.

Last night I was speaking to a friend at a bar on the Upper East Side.  She was engaging in what is, thanks to Woody Allen, one of the favorite pastimes of New Yorkers: lambasting the “cultural wasteland” that is Los Angeles.  It’s become such a tired refrain that at this point I wish we could look at New York and LA as two political parties who have more in common than either would care to admit and who would be far better off if they’d simply embrace one another.  But that’s a discussion for another time…actually, that’s all I have to say on the matter, anything further on this topic bores me: LA is not a cultural wasteland, period. My friend said, “so, in LA is everyone just talking about how great the new Transformers movie is? Or what?”

The answer, in deference to my own people, is that Angelenos love to decry New York in equal measure with the badge of honor that a “deep appreciation” of New York is to them.  “No,” I told my friend, “if you go to a bar in LA, it will never be long before you hear someone say that they just got back from New York.”

“Really?” said my friend. “Why?”

“Because they think LA is a cultural wasteland too. They love their city, but for them, coming to New York is like going to Paris, in the 50′s- it’s a chance to show how intellectual they are, because there are two kinds of Angelenos: the kind who embraces trash culture, and the kind who embraces trash culture and also wants to have the status of a connoisseur.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Angelenos, not my friends of course, but people I know,” I told my friend, “will say something like this: “I just got back from New York- yeah, I saw the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney, and a recently discovered play by Ibsen at a warehouse in Brooklyn, it was brilliant, there’s nothing like that here…and then I went to see the new Transformers movie.”

I think that perfectly encapsulates where I am in my life.  A healthy amount of earnest posturing mixed in with a confusing and untraceable lust for garbage.

The question that always comes up from New Yorkers is, What are the people like in LA? It’s said with such a combination of scathing condescension and genuine curiosity, that I sometimes feel as if we’re not discussing a major city in the United States but rather a recently discovered planet in the Borkulon Galaxy filled with a race of giant monster bassett hound aliens who are all Communists.  I’m not sure what that means exactly, but the fact is that the people are no different.  Granted, a man who walks his cat on a fucking leash would instantly be thrown into a padded room at Bellevue, but in LA such a person has a (small) share of apologists; but this lunatic aside, I’ve found people in Los Angeles to be just as impatient, harried and desperate as any New Yorker. The differences between the two peoples are in the elemental differences in the way they – we – live.

Everyone keeps telling me what a “natural New Yorker” I am, and while I’m flattered, I think it’s only a sign of how desperate I am to hear someone flatter me – whether or not they mean this as a compliment is beside the point.  The fact is that I act like a natural New Yorker, and I’m so clearly comfortable in New York because I AM a New Yorker and I always will be.  I can only hope that this, the fact that I am so deeply entrenched in New York, and it in me, is the reason that although I’ve been away for so long I never missed the city in any horrible, painful way; that emergency kit of celery soda and Woody Allen DVDs was never needed.  I would like to attribute the fact that I never had the urge to sit around pining for New York because of how much time I’d spent in LA before moving, but the fact is that the New York of today is not the New York of my childhood, and it continues to change and deteriorate every day, getting less fun, less exciting and less daring, in every way.  And while I’ve stopped saying it over and over again because it hampers any semblance of seriousness I have about making my life in Los Angeles “work” (whatever that will mean), I still always plan to return to New York to settle and live out my life and do my work.  Knowing that this is always a possibility, as much as New York may change, there are some things that always remain, some things that I never even noticed before but which now, having gone through all I did in LA, seem more comforting than my mother’s voice or simply being held. When I got in from Los Angeles last week it was freezing in New York and when I got back to my apartment I took a hot shower.  There was something about the New York water, having run through miles and miles of pipe and up six or eight stories into my apartment that had such a specific and familiar feeling that it sent me back to my childhood with a complete Proustian rush.

That’s something I cannot explain and something that I know will never go away.

The “Comfort Zone” is an invisible parcel of space that is constantly referred to in relation to one’s need to escape it if one can hope to “grow”.  Perhaps when I come to the conclusion that I’ve finished growing, I can come back to New York, which is for me one enormous “Comfort Zone” filled with pleasant memories and Proustian showers (fyi: do NOT google the phrase “Proustian Shower”, apparently it’s a very disgusting French sex act!) Then again, this all seems more and more insane when I count up how many things in New York bring me comfort: family, home, security, knowledge, security – all things that I lack in LA seems so counterintutive to a goal that I think we all share: the neverending search for a more comfortable pillow. I mean life, a more comfortable life.

 

My New Life…Again

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One Bedroom

The full force of the terror came about instantaneously, just as soon as I realized how powerless I was; that I wasn’t the sort who would, or could, retaliate in any meaningful way.  I’m making it sound like I’m some abused child and while as my mother says, this should only be your worst problem, the side effects of having moved upstairs to a larger apartment are far-reaching and have wreaked havoc on my life.  Again, more hyperbole, and it continues to make me uncomfortable to put this whole fiasco in such terms but the fact remains that it’s been an unmitigated disaster.

I was never fully conviced that the move was a good idea- I had very little privacy in my tiny ground floor apartment but I had made it into a rather cozy little home. Or at least that’s what I’d convinced myself when it came time for me to make a decision about the move upstairs. My friends convinced me though, that I deserved more space and that I had in fact been miserable in the downstairs apartment. So I moved, about three weeks ago.  There were issues in getting my landlord to make necessary repairs on the new apartment, and much still remains to be done, but it’s going to be someone else’s problem now, because I’m on my way out.  Yes, after only three weeks in the big apartment, and about five months total in the building, I’m going to be right back where I started here in Los Angeles.

The “terror” that I mentioned at the top has been my downstairs neighbor, whom I’ll refer to here as Simon.  My first dealings with Simon occurred over the summer when I moved into the building.  I had been instructed by the landlady to knock on his door so that he could let me into view the vacant unit. “He’s a designer,” she told me. “He oversees the renovations for me so that we can maintain the integrity of the building.” I took this ridiculous statement to mean that he was somehow employed by the owners and in that capacity would be receptive to my emails regarding the state of the apartment.  I quickly learned, however, that Simon offered his services pro bono, and had little time for me.  Unfortunately, by that time he’d already been cc’d on dozens of confidential emails to me from the landlady regarding my financial affairs.  Over the months that I lived in the building I got the distinct impression that Simon didn’t care for me, but we really never had more contact than a silent “hihowyadoin’” in the courtyard.  The first time we spoke face to face was on the day before I was to move in to the upstairs unit.

I had just come back from Home Depot (after Ikea, my second favorite store in the city, in a tie with Target) bearing new curtain rods for the half dozen windows facing the streets and his patio. Within minutes of coming into the apartment, there was a knock at the door.  It was Simon. He’d come to tell me that he could hear me walking, that I was walking too loud, and that in the future I’d need to keep it down.

“The walls are really thin, dude, and if you can hear yourself walking, I can hear you. Just remember that!” he said helpfully.

I told him I was just dropping some things off and that I hadn’t even moved in, and Simon assured me he was just giving me a “head’s up”.  The urgency with which he’d come to warn me immediately disquieted me.  A red flag if ever there was one.  But what can he really do, I thought, I literally have the upper hand.

“Well, I’ll do my best,” I told him, “but there’s not much I can do about footsteps.”

“Yes, there is,” he said. “There’s a way to walk in an upstairs apartment- heel-toe.” He demonstrated for me, creepily shuffling across my floor not unlike a very slow penguin.

“Ok, well, I’m not going to do that,” I said.  “But like I said, I’ll do my best.  On the other hand, there’s just not much I can do, so…”

“Right, well, the noise is deafening.”

“I haven’t even moved in yet.”

“If you want to come down and listen from my apartment to hear how loud it is…”

“I don’t think that’s going to change anything, I can’t tiptoe around every second I’m at home.”

“Well, if I hear noise, I’m gonna be banging on your walls, to letcha know I can hear you, so…”

“Well, how long can you keep that up?”

“Until one of us moves.”

Well, I moved upstairs and Simon came to complain about the noise during my move, and again when I had furniture from Ikea delivered, and yet again when I was setting it up.  Each time his tone became less and less… “dude-like”, shall we say, and more and more dickish.  Mind you, I’d lived in the unit for about a week and a half:

“I’m still getting settled, Simon. I’m sorry about the noise, but I was just putting up curtain rods, and it is the middle of the day.”

“Yeah well, I can hear everything and I can’t wait around for you to finish all of your fucking shit! So, if you keep making noise, I’ll be up really late at night and really early in the morning to keep you up, banging on your floor and walls!”

“Well, that’s only fair,” I said, backing away slowly.

“Just keep it down!”

The next day I was packing for a weekend trip, going from room to room getting bags and clothes together.  The banging started as soon as I opened my closet door and got more and more violent until I walked past my bedroom window.  Simon, seeing my shadow, took the opportunity to scream out from his balcony, “HEY, SHUT THE FUCK UP! YOU’RE MAKING TOO MUCH NOISE!”  At this I, of course, shrieked out loud, as I was already on edge from the banging. When I went to take the garbage down to the dumpster, Simon heard me coming and stood in the darkness of his bathroom which looks out on the path to the dumpster.  When I went back toward my apartment, he screamed out at me again with the same declamation, and I again shrieked at the top of my lungs.

I don’t really recall what was going through my head at that point.  I was on my way out of town and I suppose I figured I’d let it blow over and deal with it when I got back.  On the day I returned however, Simon hadn’t forgotten, and as soon as I walked in the door he began banging again, and screaming from below: “TOO MUCH FUCKING NOISE!”

At this point, people tend to ask for a description of Simon.  He’s probably in his late 30’s, white, short blond hair, and a long faded scar across the side of his face- barely perceptible.  He lives alone here and has for about 12 years.  And as for him being a “designer” as my landlady so grandly put it? He’s a party planner.

Simon cursed at me some more and stuck to his promise of “punishing” me with violent banging late at night.  The banging was so violent that a stack of coins on the table would easily be knocked over by the shaking he caused. Only once did I retaliate in kind.  Simon had taken to one of his punishments in the middle of a weekday afternoon, for no apparent reason other than my walking normally from room to room. In response I turned on what I immediately decided to be the best music to blast through a stereo for the benefit of a mad downstairs neighbor: Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing. All those pounding drums and wind instruments? It’s oppressive, and it was perfect.  I turned it up so loud that I could see my speakers nearly blowing out, and so I turned it down. I didn’t really have the stomach for such a war. As I said to my friend at the time after turning off the speakers, “I don’t like this game.”

There was also the garbage disposal incident.  A new garbage disposal had been installed in my apartment when I moved in and each morning I prepared grapefruit juice and put the peels through the disposal.  Eventually, it clogged up and a plumber came in and fixed it.  The next day after using my disposal in the usual manner, with no problems, I received an email from Simon.

“Hey- I have attached three pictures of all the crap that’s coming up in my sink from your disposal.  Don’t use it until this is fixed. If you use it one more time, I’ll gather all this shit up and throw it on your doorstep!”

I of course wrote back that it wasn’t my fault that the thing was broken, and all that was necessary was to inform me, the threat was superfluous.

“I’m just telling you NOW!” he wrote back.

It went back and forth, with me trying to calm him down and resolve the issue and him berating me.  When I suggested that the situation was getting unliveable and that I had no intention of taking his advice to Google, “How to walk in an upstairs apartment*” and suggested that he ought to find a more secluded place to live, Simon wrote back, “haha u are ridiculous- every1 in the building was right, you are a piece of work. I am deleting all future emails from you. Just walk on the balls of your feet and we won’t have a problem.”

Well, who wouldn’t want to accommodate this guy?

The next day I ran into him in the courtyard as he was leaving to walk his cat- yes, cat. He has a large Siamese cat, that he was walking on a leash. I said, “I’m not going to be spoken to by you like I’m a child, and I’m not going to be bullied into leaving.”  Simon just rolled his eyes, “oh, fuck off.”

I kept telling him that he didn’t intimidate me. I told him that I felt sorry for him (I’d always wanted to say that to someone), but Simon kept walking and muttering, “shut the fuck up, fuck off. You’re such a loser.”

“I’m a loser?” I said.  “Yeah, you’re a real winner walking around with a cat on a leash.”

And that was the last we spoke.  The short story is that he’s simply insane.  He wrote to the landlady to complain about me even when I was away for Chirstmas.  He complained, according to the landlady, at 12:01am on New Year’s Eve- who does that!? He never stopped with the banging and while I professed how little it bothered me (such was the advice I received), it had bothered me. I’d never felt quite at home in this building and knowing that this guy could hear every word I was saying, and was arbitrarily deciding to subject me to noise torture which he saw as equal to my normal activity within my apartment, left me feeling violated and jittery.  After the worst of it, I spent a few nights at a hotel where I continued to fear retirubtion when I dropped a bottle of pills on the floor.  When I heard the slightest tick in the middle of the night I had the same panic as I did at home, thinking it was Simon. Fair or not, reasonable or not, he’d done his best to terrorize me and he’d succeeded.

Simon of course was never out of contact with our landlady, calling to scream at her about me and I sent her just as many emails detailing his exploits. Finally we found ourselves at a stalemate, with the landlady claiming exasperatedly, “I just don’t know what to do. I’ve heard both sides, and I just don’t know.” She urged us to try to resolve the issue amicably, but as I pointed out, Simon wouldn’t respond to my emails, and I was growing wary of his mental stability and didn’t feel like being insulted or worse if I tried knocking on his door.  One day last week he wrote an email to the landlady, cc’d me, announcing “GOOD NEWS! He’s made it through a full night without disturbing me once. I’m not sure which tactic worked, but I think he gets the picture.  No need to respond.”  I wrote back simply and truthfully: “I wasn’t even in LA last night.”

So what were my options?

1)    Stay, continue to make every effort to be conscious of my own noise, get some area rugs to dampen it, and hope that it all just blows over. (Hope also that he’s not homicidal.)

2)    Wait for him to inevitably bang on the walls again, call the police and begin the process of getting a restraining order.

3)    Move.

Option #1 seemed alright, especially since I’d just put a lot of time, effort and money into settling into this apartment and didn’t really want to admit defeat.  On the other hand, who knows how nuts this guy really is?  Option #2 never really clicked with me as I’ve never had more involvement with the police than a speeding ticket, nor do I ever want to.  I foresaw a maze of bureaucracy and forms signed in triplicate, and lawyer’s fees and countersuits and ultimately having the tables turned on me- the worst case scenario ending up with me behind bars.  I never have had good luck where authority figures are concerned. As much as I may be in the right, I can imagine the cops coming to his door and my door and he looks composed and calm, and depending on the time of day, I either look like an unscrupulous banker (if I decide to wear a suit), or a fat sweaty pervert who smells of garlic and wine and has weird classical music on in the background.  I’m exaggerating, but the point is that the less you’re involved with cops in life, the better.

It’s all over now though, and there’s even more to the story but at this point all I want to do is move on.  I’m moving out tomorrow and putting all my stuff in storage until I find a new place.

The most depressing part of all is that I hate living here now.  I know it was ridiculous to have thought it would be a cakewalk to move out here, but Simon really did a number on me.

Hello Los Angeles, we are books!

It’s a lot, I know, but they’d have been lonely back in NY, and the new ones would have been lonely here!

When I was packing up my New York apartment I was very conservative in what I chose to bring.  I had a few reasons for not packing every single thing I owned.   For starters, I didn’t have an apartment here when I left New York and everything was going to have to be stored up north in my uncle’s garage.  But more important than the fact that I didn’t know where I was going to land or how much space I’d have, I wanted to leave the possibility of returning to my New York apartment to find it almost entirely as I’d left it.

Back in New York I made big stacks of the books I wanted to bring, and pared those down to the essentials, and then from those I removed the most fragile and important books in my collections.  I carried all the signed books in my carry-on, and sent the first editions overnight with insurance.   The rest were all the books that meant the most to me, and also the ones that were the most intimidating if you were to see them on someone’s shelf, which, in LA is not very likely at all.  In fact I was acutely aware when packing my books of their power to speak to the essence of their owner.  I haven’t been in that many apartments here yet, but excluding those of my own friends, I’ve noticed the exact lack of books in people’s homes that I’d expected to encounter.

It seems there are fewer books though than I thought I’d packed.  The rest of them are still in boxes in my apartment in New York, where I’d aborted their shipment at the last-minute in the fear that removing too much stuff from my apartment might hinder my ability to slide back into my life there (as I was putting it back then).

I’ve got a great cross-section here though.  I’m proud of it, it’s the perfect starter collection for a small one-bedroom apartment and today as I mourn the passing of the great jazz singer Abbey Lincoln I find that I’ve found that perfect balance for an apartment, for a home.   Perhaps there are more things one needs to do to make oneself comfortable in a new home when they live alone than if they lived with someone.  Perhaps it has to do with living in a new city, or living as I do, on display on the ground floor.  Whatever the case, this week began with the arrival of Gloreen (my lusty 46-inch plasma tv) and her infinite channels, and it ends with what amounts to about 5% of my book collection rising out of boxes and landing in indiscreet little piles on my mantelpiece, and every table surface in my living room.

So, welcome to Los Angeles, Alain Robbe-Grillet.   You and your funny little book of literary essays will surely be the only one on this avenue, certainly in this apartment complex.   I only hope you and all of your book friends achieve your goal and your mission of identifying me and intelligent and cultured and not to be trifled with.