New York Wouldn’t Let Me Sleep
Adventures in being young, dumb and broke.
My alarm vibrated under my pillow. It’s there because I lived in a dingy house with five other people- only four of whom paid rent since E’s boyfriend decided to make camp with us, dropping out of college for who knows what reason this time– and everyone complained about the volume instead of the thin walls. 4:26 A.M. blurs in my eyes that always felt crusty at this point. I laid in bed, the only nice thing I owned in that room, aside from my books.
My father bought it for me and I cried for two reasons. The first, because my father rarely buys expensive things for me as part of our “we’re cheap” pact and he must've known something was wrong because I argued with him in the middle of the mattress store about how expensive the bed set was, and that I didn’t need it. He ignored my protest to look for something less costly for the first time in my life, and bought the $1200 dollar set anyway on credit card.
I didn’t call home for nearly three weeks after that.
The second reason I cried was because he didn’t know that I had spent the previous year and a half sleeping on an army cot that cost $16.99 from Amazon, which since then, triggered a lifelong chronic joint condition. I still think “my god that mattress was soft” nearly a decade as I write this.
If I turned on the lamp, I risked light bleeding under the french doors that were supposed to offer my “room” privacy but instead just amplified the sounds of E and her not-in-school-for-now boyfriend having some vigorous sexy time. Like last night. I turned on the lamp, and walked the four steps out of my room to the Pepto-Bismol pink bathroom. It came like that when we signed the rental lease for the house; pink tiles, pink walls, pink sink and bathtub, pink toilet. What also came with the house, were the pesky mice we were too broke to get exterminated, and the cockroaches so big we could tell which one was which.
One night, the five of us got drunk on crappy wine and named all those waterbugs with letters that started with our first initial. Mine was Hestia. I thought it was fitting, the homebody that I was. After dubbing our money-less mansion Brown Girls United because we all hated how money seemed to pour out of Girls with their Didions and effortlessly chaotic lives– E and I tried to repaint Pink Room a homemade lilac color. Only lilac just made the grime stand out more; we all still shat in a pink toilet at the end of the day.
By 5:06 A.M., I’m upstairs in the kitchen. You see the house we lived in when I was 23 was a full Brooklyn brownstone, where I had to make sure the light AND the sound of me rattling around for coffee didn’t creep into K’s room. Her shift didn’t start till 9:30am since she’s a bookseller– meanwhile I sold coffee. I found the Italian percolator my father gave me when I moved out, and promptly forgot how to put it together for about two minutes. I thought about how maybe it was called an Italian percolator (and not just a regular percolator) because it’s so goddamn complicated to put together.
But the flavor was always worth it.
My father taught me more about coffee than I ever really wanted to know. And working as a barista at B&N and two other coffee shops in Brooklyn the past two years hadn’t helped either. My anxiety had never been more awful; it interrupted my dreams and turned sleep into whispers of rest. Anyway, if you don’t know how an Italian percolator works, it basically uses gravity to force boiling water though this tiny valve and then BOOP– you have yourself some amazingly strong espresso. My father’s commented on it so I know it’s good.
He always drank Cafe Bustelo Espresso for as long as I could remember, and I followed suit. It’s the equivalent of gold in Haiti. Bustelo is strong as hell, and was the only thing that’s helped him stay awake during the graveyard shifts cleaning highrise office buildings; and in the moment I’m listening to the Brooklyn streets wake up slowly, I think about whether he spent hours thinking about all the money he must’ve cleaned around. When I was still living at home in Jersey, I would sometimes put a cup next to the coffee maker for him so he didn’t have to look for one before I went to bed. I wouldn’t have thought that I would live a shadow version of his life those days– drinking and making coffee to survive the corners of the city.
The smell of coffee should’ve woken K up by now, but she slept like the dead. And while I love her, she’s a lot for the morning and I don’t like talking to people until at least 8 (you can decide whether I meant morning or night). As I listened for the low whistle of the water boiling on the grease covered stove– I stopped cleaning it because I was the only one out of six people living in this ghost house actually cleaning well anything– I started thinking about all the ghosts. How this apartment-shack is a ghost house because it had me dream about things I wished I could’ve avoided. Like how badly I had started wondering if I’d ever understand what I wanted most. If I could learn how to finally dive out of my brain. See… it’d been doing this thing where it would get sad, and no one had given me an instruction manual on how to make my brain not sad. I’d tried a lot of things at this point to get un-sad, but that’s a story for another time.
I should’ve started the story this way— I knew the moment I got into the driver’s seat of the U-haul in Oberlin Ohio, after learning that I would be the only person driving ten hours through Pennsylvania, had gotten lost in New Jersey though I grew up there, and into New York City— that moving to the city was a mistake. I felt it the way you could feel lightning coming, that deep shiver beneath the skin. And yet, when I stuck the key into the ignition, I still drove all the way through the burning lights to Brooklyn at 3 A.M. I wish I hadn’t been so committed to my pride. But I’m Haitian, and that you can’t ever unlearn.
By 6:04 A.M. — my alarm went off again — I had walked the three blocks northeast to catch the C train to Hoyt-Schermerhorn to transfer to the G heading to 5th Ave, Park Slope. If you know a New York City Map, you’d probably chuckle, knowing that this route is a near perfect circle. However, there’s no way to get to Point A to Point B in a straight line, which I’ve learned now, seven years later. Back then, I was still thinking about the Caspers in the house. Because it had taken me too long to realize that everyone that ever came to New York had been running from ghosts— sleeping with them, telling them they could stay over– night after night to keep the real-time hauntings at bay. I’ve gone back to New York plenty since then, and find old parts of me drifting at subway stops.
Ghosts always have a way of saying hello, even when you’ve already said goodbye.