Memories of Life in the Roach Motel

My son Jackson's nightly ritual is very specific. First, he has to grab my face in both hands and plant kisses on me, starting at the left ear, crossing to left cheek, lips, right cheek and ending at my right ear. Then I have to "fix his covers." Finally, he asks me the same question every night: "Are you going to do dishes, Daddy?" He asks the question, despite knowing the answer, as do his mom and older brother.

"Yes, son," I answer wearily, "I'm going to do the dishes."

At first, I thought I was doing this simply to be a comfort to him. I used to perform a similar service for my younger brother who was extremely anxious for a time about being the last one awake in the house. "Can you make sure I'm asleep before you go to sleep?" he would ask me on the occasions that we bunked together as boys.

Last night, however, as I was doing the dishes, I had one of those memory flashes I often have during that meditative activity. This time I traveled back to the early 90's, when I first lived in Manhattan. After sharing a few places -- first with the Swedish actress Linda Udd, who was then a play writing student with me in William Packard's class at HB Studio, then with my old college buddy, Sonia Murrow, and finally in a squat in the fashion district with my girlfriend and a friend of hers from her native Toronto. When the girlfriend and I decided to get married, we found a duplex apartment at 255 West 14th Street, near 8th Avenue in Chelsea. It sounds more glamorous than it was. The details that have stuck in my mind are how narrow the apartment was, how loud the weekend nights were, when the taxis would queue up in front of Nell's, across the street and the coke-heads who closed the club would come shrieking out into the late night air, and, finally, the infestation of roaches from which we suffered in that blue-brick building.

A couple of side-notes -- other unrelated memories -- have to do with a couple who lived next door to us. I never had a conversation with either of them, but I sometimes heard them fighting through the walls. Both were middle-aged men, bearded, one tall the other not. Both weary-looking. One night I woke up when my cat sprang from a dead sleep, hissing and arching his back in that cat way that means danger. Downstairs, I could see a figure outside my window trying to jimmy his way into my apartment. My wife was not home at the time; she was, as usual, out. The breath left my body, and I made my way down the stairs, trying to yell, but not being able to, as often happens to me in my nightmares. I grabbed something hard and banged it on the window sill, as the man I now realized was the shorter fatter one from next door began tearing the screen from the window. "What the fuck are you doing?" I managed to get out. "Oh, sorry," he slurred. "This isn't my apartment." He backed away on the fire escape toward the correct window. "If I'd had a gun, I would have fucking shot you," I said, as he began clawing at his own screen. All I could do was shake my head and assay the damage to my window. "Okay. Sorry," he muttered again before disappearing back into the apartment next door.

The other memory is of walking to the elevator on my way out one day and hearing what sounded like a roll of thunder coming from the stairwell. Before I realized what was happening, a phalanx of six or seven uniformed cops were upon me, yelling in that loud, theatrical way you hear on TV. I braced myself for their nightsticks, but they turned me around and had me assume the position, and one of them patted me down with surprising gentleness.

"Which apartment are you coming from, sir?" he asked me. I momentarily forgot my apartment number, before answering.

"Thank you, sir," another said -- their sergeant, I think -- before they knocked on the door of my bearded next door neighbors.

But back to the roaches. You've got to have a lot of money (a LOT) in order to avoid roaches in New York City. I always had them, no matter where I lived. You can spray them and bomb them, but they always come back. We had the added misfortune of being above a supermarket, which didn't help matters. Add to that the fact that my new wife was caught up in an existence consisting of late nights and all that accompanies that lifestyle, and there I was, a new teacher in my late twenties, trying to keep up with her, and you've got a perfect combination if what you're trying to create is a giant, over-priced Roach Motel.

Eventually, she and I took a look at the landscape of our lives and realized that the seven years that divided our ages was a world of difference at 21 and 28. She was doing what I was doing at 21, exploring, taking risks, at some degree of peril. I, on the other hand, was getting up early, heading to work, and doing my best to try and make a difference in the lives of young people. Trying to keep up with her became a joke, and I remember the day we decided to end things, she told me she would have her father arrange for a truck to come and pick up her share of the furniture we'd gotten as wedding presents a year and a half earlier. She would stay with her friend in the squat until she would fly home to Toronto.

My first official act after the furniture was carted away was to do the dishes. I kept the now empty apartment as clean as I could for the cat and me, until we were able to find a new place in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn. I'd like to say I've never left a dish overnight in a sink since that experience, and maybe it would make for a better narrative, but that's not the case. Like everyone, I leave the occasional dish. When I do, however, I get a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, as I recall those sad, eventually liberating days living in the Roach Motel on West 14th Street.