Getting to know the neighbors

On the way to the seventeenth apartment I’ve looked at since my arrival, I passed a small, fenced-in plot full of junk. There are lots of these around Brooklyn, and in that area in particular, so it wasn’t of any special interest. But as I neared the corner, I spotted a man sitting legs-out on the floor of a broken-down minivan parked inside, shampooing his closely cropped hair with water from a bucket at his feet.

There was something about the simplicity and mundaneness of this scene that struck me as “inspiring” and even “endearing.” But only a person in a position of great privilege can romanticize situations like that, so I quickly switched over to feeling lucky and open-hearted, as befits my status as a middle-class white girl with time and energy to help others if she so chose.

It was then that I spotted this hand-painted message scrawled across the underside of a broken picnic table, which was propped up against the fence next to some worn, stained couches:

DON’T BRING THIS UPSTAIRS AGAIN

OR YOU WILL DIE

The implication being, “Bring this upstairs again and I personally will kill you.”

There’s no way of knowing whether that man was or had any connection to the author of those inordinately violent words, but all feelings of pity and self-loathing quickly vanished after I realized that it could be he who was fully prepared to bring an end to another human’s life for bringing rotting furniture “upstairs,” wherever that may be.

Despite all of that, I’d still take the place I saw just down the street. Because New York levels all expectations — for everything.

I have less than two weeks to put a payment down and move into a permanent place, so anything that meets the most basic of requirements for comfortable living is now fair game. In fact, I think I have a new housing motto: “If it’s gunshot free, it’s the place for me.”