Apartment Hunting 101

If I have any writing regrets; it’s that I failed to save the addresses and notes from my Roommate Finders contacts back in 1997.

Prior to Craigslist, there was the Village Voice. Every Tuesday night the first drop of that week’s paper would occur at the newsstand on Astor Place. This was because the Voice’s offices were around the corner. Makes sense. The flurry of activity around this poor newsstand was insane, and there would often be a huge line, then a mad dash to any nearby gross God-only-knows-what’s-on-the-receiver payphone (mobile phones weren’t quite the norm yet). The funny thing was that this ritual was such a usual occurrence that many ads required you to call after Tuesday.

Last night, while coming back into the city from a holiday weekend away in CT, right as we passed the spot, my mind jumped to one of my experiences looking at a roommate situation directly off of CPW. There are a few memorable meetings that will forever be planted in the accessible part of my brain, but this one was stuck back there in my subconscious; just waiting for a moment to bring it out. It was the second apartment share situation on the UWS that I had looked at. But like several others, it was definitely a bit weird.

A young woman showed me the room that she had for rent, which was perfectly fine in size and condition. But, I noticed that there were an unusual amount of bottles of medication in her kitchen. Throughout the entire conversation, I kept darting my eyes between her and the huge stacked up pile of Valley of the Dolls meds. It wasn’t hard to notice. We were standing in the doorway of the room to be rented which faced into the kitchen, and had a direct view of her personal pharmaceutical stash. I remember searching for signs of sickness on her, which I didn’t seem to find. Was it a temporary or long term illness? Was she contagious? Was she in fact…A ZOMBIE!? The whole time I kept wondering what exactly was wrong with her, and would she die while I was living there? In the worst case scenario, would she die right there while interviewing me?

You would think that if you walked someone through your kitchen and there was an unmistakable pile of meds stacked up like a beer pyramid in a frat house, you would somehow work that in your conversation. I guess she didn’t read up on her Amy Vanderbilt book of manners. I guess I didn’t either, because there was no way I could gently broach the subject with her. She didn’t consider me for the apartment share, and deep down, I was kind of glad.

My goal at the time was to write an apartment hunting 101 type of book. In between the references and tips would be mine and other's stories about looking for apartments. These would of course be horror stories, funny anecdotes or amazing out of the ordinary finds. I wanted it to be a cross between the Newcomer’s books and the Zany’s books, and I also wanted to include my own experiences. The chapters would be named for the neighborhood and borough where the action occurred in; each story representing a different area of the city. My goal was to get away from those formal books, and offer the reader tips and hints from the people who lived it.

Sadly, in the haste to exit my temporary abode in order to get to my newly acquired apartment, I threw out my packet of information. It was a momentary lapse of reason. Turns out, I was more motivated writing a book during the period I was experiencing my own apartment hunting. Naturally, time has made me forget many of the addresses, but the experiences are there somewhere, inside my head. They are waiting for some event to bring them up to my consciousness and I can add them here hopefully for posterity.