Second piece

Red and I lived in a small apartment in subsidized housing in a renovated button factory in a small town called Leeds. Technically, it’s a village in Northampton and no, I’m not exactly sure how that works, even after looking it up on Wikipedia.

I always thought it was called a shotgun apartment, because you could stand in the kitchen and shoot down the hall into the bathroom.  Turns out, it’s called a railroad apartment because all the rooms open onto one hallway . The exterior walls were brick and thick, the interior walls thin and we knew a lot more about our neighbors on every side that we ever could have wanted.  

We smoked outside the apartment in the stairwell, too lazy or addict-ed to go outside.  That’s where most of our serious conversations took place, either there or her car, riding around the streets of Northampton for no particular reason other than we had nothing else to do.

We had plans, boston marriage plans, we were going to buy a house in Northampton, renovate one side and rent the other, then switch and renovate the other side, then sell the house and do it again.  I think we believed that we weren’t going to find romantic partners, or that romantic partners could never be as close as we were.

In college, I’d stage managed a couple plays she directed, we kissed once and had a class called Queer Media together. We weren’t close, or at least I didn’t think we were, but weeks after college she called me and announced we couldn’t live with our parents anymore.  She flew to New Hampshire, borrowed my car, an Olds I’d bought for a grand from a little old lady’s front yard and promptly named Dolores, and drove around New England.

My little brother was sick, his Crohn’s finally diagnosed and proving unresponsive to medication, I couldn’t stay in my parents house any longer, but I didn’t want to be too far away.  So she returned and announced we’d be moving to Northampton, the perfect amount of time away, as good a place as any.   So we did.  She went back to Vegas, packed up her life and drove across the country, I packed up my car and drove an hour and a half south, to set up camp, to set up the utilities, to wait for her.

The aforementioned railroad apartment was our second.  Our first had been charming, but our rent had been raised, our heat remained erratic, and one of our neighbors had tattled about our cats.  We’d managed to keep our landlord from discovering they existed, but we knew it was only a matter of time.  Oh, and the back porch balcony had fallen half-off in a storm, and there was a piece of machinery in the basement you had to kick to turn the heat back on, and any number of other small problems you have in the first  apartment in your twenties.

However, this apartment made no pretenses of not being a shitshow.  The kitchen existed in that timeless yellowing linoleum palette, some of the windows didn’t open and the ones that did didn’t have screens,  and the elevator almost never worked. We got familiar with Northampton’s finest, as they responded to domestics next door. Once, Red's bedroom rained from the upstairs neighbors’ illegally installed dishwasher.  

I don’t remember much of what it looked like, only little details and moments. When we had a Charlie Brown christmas tree that we decorated by buying a Weekly World news magazine and cutting out pictures of Batboy.  When I had to drive my car through side-view mirror-deep water, getting water in all sorts of parts that weren’t supposed to be damp, and I chained something like five extension cords together to run outside to the parking lot so I could use a hairdryer to coax her back to life. When we tried to make something called Guadalupe Pie and it turned out so unfortunate that we named it Guantanamo Pie.  

We were better off this year:  lower rent and a slightly better class of temp jobs.  No more ketchup and rice soup, no more hiding out at Barnes and Noble for heat, fewer dented cans, fewer decisions about cat food versus student loans. We had fun, bringing home boys and girls from goth clubs, watching new Buffy episodes each week at our laundromat.   Red had a job at a bakery for a while, and she’d bring home all the burnt or misdecorated cakes and pastries and so we once ate rum cake for breakfast for almost an entire month.

Everything fell apart in this apartment.  Everything fell apart on the back stairs outside the apartment, smoking Camel Lights and talking about the nature of disappointment.  Everything fell apart when I asked her if she could go with me to the appointment and she said no.  Everything fell apart when I ended up curled in the corner of the kitchen where the counter met the wall, cramping like crazy from the morning-after pill.   Everything fell apart, over and over again for the next year, as we tried fifteen ways to salvage our friendship, as her boyfriend and I got drunk and hooked up on my birthday that year. Everything fell apart as I carefully positioned myself as the fun-loving, low-key, heavy-drinking one, more than half in love with her boyfriend (who also happened to be our boss), as I stopped wearing glitter so she wouldn’t know anyone else was touching her boyfriend.

They’re married now. I’ve Facebook stalked him a couple times.  Once I ended up with a random dick pic on that sort of website (I couldn’t actually recognize it as his or not).  Once I ended up with the birth announcement of their first baby.