My First Apartment
My second year of college, best friends, and living with your muses
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My first apartment was on Willow Street in Johnson City, New York, an industrial town a couple of miles from SUNY Binghamton, where I double majored in Creative Writing and Comparative Literature and minored in Spanish. It never occurred to me to study something “practical,” “useful,” or “career-oriented.” One of the gifts my parents gave me was the freedom to choose my own path of study, and I’m grateful for that. It’s also true that in 1990, state school tuition was about one thousand dollars a year, which made the stakes very low.
My father had wanted to study literature at UC Berkeley and his father made him go to the Naval Academy and study physics. I’m not sure he ever recovered from the Naval Academy. He has the same movement disorder I have, a rare genetic disease called Dopa Responsive Dystonia, but he wasn’t diagnosed until I was at age 11.
He struggled physically his whole life, and in the tough ethos of the 1950s and my grandfather’s added brutality, my dad mastered all kinds of physical challenges he never should have been made to even attempt. Standing still for hours in the hot Annapolis sun and marching in formation every day must have been hell, and I don’t know how he did it.
I’ve written about my father before in an essay called “On Spectacle and Silence,” that helped me come to terms with some of what my brother and I experienced as children. I could only write such a thing after years of therapy. I would likely say different things about family today, but it’s still a “true” essay for me—in that, I got as close to I could at the time to understanding the dynamic between childhood trauma, passivity, and political action.
I also really tried hard in that essay to see father as a little boy. As my parents get older still, I see their little girl and boy selves even more clearly. One of my favorite aspects of therapy is the healing we do of our childhood selves, and the grace it has given me to see my parents as the unhealed, un-therapized kids they sometimes still manifest.
Am I the parent to my parents’ kid selves? Am I more adult in some ways now than my parents? Maybe.
Back to my first apartment. A four-story house with aluminium siding on a working-class street that was half Johnson City residents and half college kids. There were four of us who moved into together—Chandra, Janna, Tom, and me. This configuration wouldn’t last, Tom and Janna would move out (Janna to spend more time with her boyfriend or maybe study abroad and Tom because he was sick of us I think) and we’d have sub-letters for the second semester, Rob, who ran the leftist newspaper on campus and Mark, a painter who Chandra and I were obsessed with, who preferred to be called Byron and painted under that name. But everyone was brilliant, weird, and funny.
The constants were Chandra and me, a painter and a poet, best friends from small, upstate New York towns, who dreamed of becoming famous for our paintings and poems. We were so close that we talked to each other through our radiator grates, crawled into each other’s beds most mornings to cuddle and talk, and shared our course readings and assignments with each other.
If I was reading Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser in one of my courses, then I read those poems out loud to her. When she was learning about Kandinsky and Khalo, she shared those giant monograph books with me. She and her life filtered into my poetry, and I sat for sketches whenever she needed a model, which was often. We were each other’s muses.
I think we both adored having our own home. I was relieved to be away from my parents’ messy divorce, and Chandra was finally free from a lifetime of being grounded. We’d been on our own the year before in the dorm too, but dorms are complicated spaces where you don’t have much privacy. Our artsy dorm was loud, fun, and overwhelming, but I met my people there right away.
The amazing thing about Binghamton in the early 1990s was that you could live off campus in big one, two, and three family houses for less than it cost to live on campus. I think our rent for that first house (which included a basement and a finished attic) was between $120-160 each.
I’m not sure Chandra would agree, but my favorite room was the kitchen. We spent a lot of time there together, cooking from the Moosewood Cookbook, listening to our favorite CDs—The Pretenders Greatest Hits was a top choice—talking on the rotary phone, drinking wine or coffee or tea, studying, eating, and dancing.
That kitchen had a vintage round yellow and brown table with matching vinyl chairs, a yellow matching refrigerator (or maybe it was green), not enough counter space, a walk-in pantry that could easily double as NYC bedroom, and a screen door to a tiny back porch and scrubby back yard. There was so much cheap housing in the tri-city area (Endicott, Johnson City, and Binghamton, and yes it was the home of the once famous Endicott Johnson shoes) that landlords rented whole furnished houses to students. Sometimes they’d even through in extras to get renters—new microwaves and TVs weren’t uncommon.
Over poorly-risen homemade bread and soggy quiches (my domain) and gazpacho (Chandra’s), we were artists together, drawing, painting, and writing. We also planned acid punch parties, keg parties, themed costume parties, invited friends over, and waited for boys to call us. Sometimes we called them, and sometimes they came over. We slept with some of them, and tried to make them our boyfriends. A few stuck around and we fell in love, and then they were at the table in the morning or in the beds when we crawled in.
How I loved this woman! We all called her Chanj (like say aahhh when the doctor asks you to stick out your tongue). When we first met freshmen year, Chanj’s upstate accent was so unplaceable that several people thought she was from Europe. She was incomprehensible at times, and she spoke so fast that sometimes I translated what she had said for people. When particularly excited she spoke mostly in sounds.
Didn’t quiche used to be so cool?
She was tall, had been a high school swimmer and so had a smoking bod (we all had smoking bodies and you know what, we all still do, including you!), and she wore the vintage outfits from the Salvation Army that were the hardest to fit into—pure polyester go-go dresses—short black party dresses from the mall, platform black sandals with tights. I had great outfits too, though mine were baggier and more goth.
Why I am writing about this apartment and Chanj today? I don’t know. The kitchen pops into my head every so often and I’ve never gotten it down on the page. I spend my life teaching 18-year-olds and I dream and hope they are having the kinds of fun and learning I had when I was an undergraduate. That fun and learning were tied together with our socializing.
My own kid is starting to look at colleges, and I realize more than any particular course of study, I want this for her. To be an student with a group of friends who get her and cherish her (she’s lucky to have such friends already). To feel the joy of living and working with friends in an environment that isn’t opulent, but DIY and adventurous.
There were problems there too. Some of us had a bad habit of shoplifting tiny items from the grocery store around the corner. Eventually we got caught stealing cloves of garlic and were pulled by the ears to the front of the store. The butcher thought we were underage sisters (how lucky and how privileged we were) and announced to the entire store, “You see these girls, they are never allowed in the store again! I should call your mother!” But he didn’t and we played along. The shame I felt was immense and I never shoplifted again.
There were heartbreaks and jealousies, a night when I left at 3 am on my bike to go to my boyfriend’s house because I was scared of Chanj’s date, betrayals, and tears, and fights over chores and food. We had very few boundaries, and we never had enough money, but at state school that was true for so many of us. It was a somewhat equalizing place.
Mostly, it was the first home I made, and I made it with a woman.
Enjoy the typos!
Carley
I loved this piece, which made me miss my creative roommate I lived with fresh out of college. We would gather broken furniture from the street and make sculptures in the tiny apartment...
This was a great read.