was a sheepish, older guy, definitely in his forties. Total geek. My curiosity was piqued when Newspaper Head’s new friend said, “I didn’t sign up for this!”
I didn’t know why Blond Diesel said it, but I completely understood how he felt. I’d said the same thing a lot. The first time I boarded the wrong subway and wound up in Flatbush, Queens. When I saw the metal detectors on my first day at P.S. 35. And especially after I was mugged, which I’d never told anyone about.
I definitely didn’t sign up to catch a cold just in time for moving day.
“Why would you think I’d want to move to Chicago?” Blond Diesel asked.
“It’s a promotion. You know how hard I’ve been working. You know how difficult it’s been for me there,” Newspaper Head whined.
“What about me? I can’t just pick up everything and move.”
There was a lull, a stalemate, during which two Hassidic Jews came out of the rain to consult the menu taped to the diner’s window. Water dripped from the curls that framed their faces. I sniffled and was overtaken by the smell of their wet wool, until my sinuses clogged up again seconds later.
“I’m not moving,” Blond Diesel said.
“Look, this isn’t a choice I expect you to make on the spot. I just wanted to bring it up for consideration. Could you think about it?”
“Why? It’s obvious you’ve made your decision. Now I’ll make mine!” Blond Diesel loudly announced. He added, “I’ll be at Ed’s, if you care,” then stormed away into the rain.
“Is this where we applaud?” mumbled a Hassidic Jew, and his friend chuckled. “Is it intermission? I don’t know.”
“Does anything last?” I asked out loud.
“Death,” Hassidic One said, and Hassidic Two nodded sagely.
They went inside the diner. I followed and ordered a cup of coffee. I took a sip, savoring the hot, metallic-tasting liquid, added sugar, and stirred it with a spoon. I tasted it again. Once I was satisfied with the sugar-to-coffee ratio, I nonchalantly dropped the spoon into the pocket of my cargo pants. After I finished, I left two dollars in change on the counter. I discreetly dropped the empty mug into my pocket and tried not to wince when it clinked against the spoon as I walked to the door.
It didn’t matter. It was too loud in there for anyone to hear. But as I left, one of the Hassidic Jews caught my eye and shook his head disapprovingly. Then he went back to sipping his matzo ball soup, and I was invisible once again.
Everyone I knew got a family tag as a kid. My fraternal twin, Chuck, who I beat into the world by three minutes, was “the one who breaks things.” Toys. China. Vases. Cars. Bones and teeth—his and mine. Anything breakable was at risk around Chuck. It paid off for him, because our parents freaked at what he might do to the vacuum cleaner or the lawn mower.
Our older brother, Tony, was “the one who never shuts up.” Also known as “the one who asks dumb questions.” Since Chuck and I were a couple years younger than Tony, we missed out on his Why is the sky blue? phase. But even when I was a little kid, I knew why Tony came up with gems like Do dogs have headaches? He didn’t want information, just a reason to speculate out loud about the answers. Uncle Wayne used to offer Tony five dollars in exchange for five minutes of silence. Tony’s piggy bank went hungry.
If sibling rivalry was a game, those two shouldn’t have been much competition for me. But in all other ways, they were the pride of the Dunhills. Good athletes. Good grades. Good looks. They left me no choice except to be “the one who disappears.”
It was Dunhill family lore that my mother repeatedly left me in stores as a baby. She always claimed she was overwhelmed by having three kids in diapers. I thought I was just the victim of a shopping snob. I’d never known my mother to look for a bargain or a sale. Having twins was like some kind of two-for-one affront to her. She ditched me to get rid of the evidence.
As I got older, I tended to vanish on my own. Not just when we went places as a family. Even in our house, I could disappear by not fitting in. My parents didn’t know how to deal with an inferior Dunhill, so I tried to make myself invisible.
Where’s Nicky? someone would ask, even though I was ten feet away, tucked between the back of the sofa and the den window with a comic book or a sketchpad. Who knows? was the standard answer, but it sounded more like Who cares? Then Tony the Talker would recap my misdeeds from the day. Eventually, it would end with my parents tracking me down to ask, Why can’t you be more like your brothers?
All that was years ago, but recently, I seemed to be trying to fulfill their fondest desire. Like Chuck, I kept breaking things. My Discman. My umbrella. My promises. And like Tony, I kept asking dumb questions of an indifferent, possibly even a cruel, city.
Maybe the city hadn’t made me her bitch. Maybe it was Mother Nature. Rain hit my neck and ran down my back as I hurried to join a herd of people under a bus shelter. I read the Village Voice over a man’s shoulder. Then my eyes stopped on an ad that made me turn in disgust. Apparently my favorite Hell’s Kitchen restaurant had switched to serving Thai—the third time that had happened to me. I hated Thai food. I again asked aloud, “Does anything last?”
A woman next to me thought I was talking to her. “It wasn’t supposed to rain today. Should clear up later, though.”
“Great,” I muttered, both at her and the bus that stopped to pick us up.
Inside the bus I stared at the floor and felt fried. All I wanted was to go home. I looked up and tried to see out the window, worried that I was on the wrong bus. For a second, I couldn’t remember where I was going. Then it came back to me. Home was uptown now. Way uptown.
Some hippie once said freedom was another word for nothing left to lose, a phrase that flashed through my mind when I signed a two-year lease after weeks of searching for an apartment. Of course, my generation torched Woodstock when we learned that corporate America jacked up the price for freedom. My freedom cost two thousand dollars a month, plus utilities. Even though the rent was expensive, there was no way I’d burn the place down. Especially after all I went through to get it.
Finding an apartment in New York City, I learned, was a lot like trying to find a boyfriend. You could search ads in the newspaper, like I did, and realize the descriptions and photos never matched up to the real deal. A studio the size of a closet could look damned near palatial if it was photographed with a good lens. I visited something described as an “EVil, flr thru loft, with fplce and skylight,” which turned out to be the moldering attic of a former factory in the East Village with a hole in the roof. The fireplace was a hibachi with a dead rat in it.
Ads on the Internet were pretty much the same, although most of them were faked in an effort to lure homeless saps to a brokerage firm. It seemed ridiculous to pay an agent thousands of dollars for something I could do myself. Kind of like paying an escort to pose as a boyfriend. However, walking all over the city looking at apartments I couldn’t afford, and ones that made me want to bathe in peroxide after I was in them, left me appreciating the idea of paying someone else to do the dirty work.
Uncle Blaine always told me fate brought him and Daniel together. Daniel told me in private that fate had nothing to do with it. He saw what he wanted and went for it. Fate led me to a random coffeehouse in SoHo, where I overheard some dude complaining to his friend that he had to move and hated to give up his apartment. From that point on, I went for it and got it.
It was a small, one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of an ancient tenement in Spanish Harlem. It was dingy, the four rooms were tiny, and the apartment was in the back, so all the grimy windows faced the brick walls of the neighboring buildings, but I didn’t care. In my eyes, it was perfect. At any rate, it was good enough to give up the search. It was my freedom, after all.
I’d moved the day before—as soon as ConEd turned on the electricity—and spent the first night on my own. I barely slept since I spent the majority of the night listening to the noises of a strange