Working Stiff (5 page)

WHAT ARE YOU
planning to do with that guitar?” asked the immigration official.

“Play it,” I said.

“For money?”

“No, just for fun.”

This was my third entry into the United States in seven months and the immigration questions were getting tougher.

“Mr. Stoddard, you have already spent a lot of time in the United States in the past few months. What are you doing here and how are you funding these trips?”

“I'm taking my time seeing the country and my parents are rich.”

He looked up at me sternly.

“Then you are a very lucky man,” he said and handed my passport back to me. “Have a nice day.”

Any residual homesickness had been flushed out of me on this last gray, cold, depressing trip back to England. I knew that I had to somehow find a way to live and work legally in the United States, though the obstacles to that end seemed to be insurmountable. I had no skill set, no specialist training, and no prior work experience. Becky had repeatedly offered to marry me, though I saw it as a last resort, not least because our relationship was beginning to show signs of cooling.

While I was away in England, I'd been trying to reckon how I would get my immigrant status straightened out. It had become abundantly clear that I wanted to be legally allowed to live and work in New York; I was in the pursuit of happiness and was gaining some serious ground. Another ninety-day visa waiver period would soon elapse and it was likely that immigration officials would not let me into the country easily after two consecutive ninety-day visits.

Everyone else in the office was dumfounded by the obstacles in the way of obtaining a work visa for me. Pre-9/11 New Yorkers looked at the people bussing their tables, delivering their lo mein, folding their laundry, messengering their documents, driving their taxis, cleaning their offices, serving their cocktails and assumed that the gateway to America was still flung wide open. The number of illegal immigrants in the United States is more than seven million. These men and women serve to do the jobs that Americans don't deign to and as a result are largely unhindered by the authorities. Conversely, the INS is well aware that white, college-educated Europeans are not coming to America to scrub toilets and are in fact vying for positions coveted by their own blue-eyed boys and girls.

While Becky was originally more than prepared to go to City Hall with me and quietly tie the knot, her motivation was becoming more romantic than practical. As a marriage of convenience became a more distinct possibility by the minute, she began leaking our plans to her mother, who started sketching out an elaborate summer wedding with all the trimmings, which had helped fire Becky's imagination, and the
two of them created this feedback loop of flowers, wedding dresses, wedding songs, prime rib, seven-tier cakes, and so on and so forth.

As I weighed a marriage of convenience against the risk of deportation, Richard Gottehrer came to my rescue. Richard offered to produce a demo tape for me and sign me to a developing artist deal with Orchard Records. Richard's business partner called in a favor with a family friend in Washington, and within a week I had an approval form for an O-type working visa, which was good for three years. It arrived immediately prior to my ninety-day visa waiver was about to expire.

Becky was happy to hear my news despite having gotten carried away with the idea of a lavish summer wedding. She had just graduated from beauty school and had been accepted as a trainee at Bumble and Bumble, a trendy midtown hair salon where countless stars came to be coiffed. I returned home for two months to finalize my visa status, tie up some loose ends, and convince my friends that I really was going to live in America for good. I was an émigré.

“So you're really going to live out there, are you?”

Everybody asked me this, having regarded my previous stays in the United States as little more than extended vacations. When I told people of my intentions I unleashed a tidal wave of resentment. When you leave England, people sort of take it very personally.

I recently read an article in a British daily paper about Kate Moss buying a place in LA that was headlined “Drug-Troubled Model Turns Her Back on Britain,” as if she'd left the rainy little island out of spite.

Having the visa in hand made it official in my mind as well as everybody else's.

While I was at home Becky began searching for a place for us to live in Manhattan, now that we would both be working there. She eventually signed a one-year lease on a tiny, newly refurbished one-bedroom on Attorney Street between Houston and Stanton. Attorney Street had been a one-stop shop for heroin just a few years earlier, but by 1999 represented the easternmost reach of gentrification on the Lower East Side. Until I moved in there with her I had never been east of Essex Street. Because she was still in education of sorts, her parents
agreed to pay a third of her $1,400 rent, meaning that Becky and I only had to find a little over $460 a month apiece, which was quite doable, even on my starting salary of $20,000 at The Orchard. Though my official job description for visa purposes was “recording artiste,” I was, in actuality, just a general office assistant, continuing with the same duties I'd always had.

“What do you do for…The Orchard, Mr. Stoddard?”

At Newark Airport, I could now answer the immigration official's questions with confidence and candor.

“I'm in a rock band.”

For the first time Becky wasn't in the arrivals lounge to meet me after I collected my baggage. She eventually turned up after about ten minutes or so. The e-mails and phone calls between us had been shorter and less frequent on this separation. For my part, the approval of my visa meant that living and working in America was no longer bundled together with holy matrimony. Becky had been working at Bumble and Bumble for almost three months and had found a new slew of friends and distractions. My sudden abandonment of our marriage plans upon getting the visa had hurt her.

Over the phone, Becky had said that the fourth-floor walk-up apartment at 161 Attorney Street was small, but I wasn't really prepared for quite how tiny it was. The bedroom was big enough for a double bed and about a foot-wide space down one side. The living room was only six feet wide, the kitchen appliances were in miniature, and I'd seen bigger bathrooms on airplanes.

“Don't freak out!” said Becky as I looked around. “It'll seem bigger once everything is in it.”

“No, it's…nice,” I said.

It was certainly not a suitable dwelling for more than one normalsized person, and I immediately felt trapped. I took Becky's word that some hastily purchased IKEA furniture would give us a better perspective on the place and went downstairs to unload the truck.

The location certainly made for an easy commute to work. I experimented with a few routes but would usually walk west along Stanton,
south down Clinton, west along Delancey, and south down Orchard; a walk of about eight minutes or so.

For me, having a relationship
period
was exciting. Having a
long-distance
relationship was extremely exhilarating. The separation engenders an incredible longing, the distance sparks creativity in communication, the time difference forces you to shift your perceptions of days, and the day's date is simply a tally toward seeing one another again, the clear and present danger of being refused entry to the country a nail-biting climax. The time you end up spending together is so precious, the arrivals and departures so fraught with emotion, the days and weeks of togetherness so fleeting. It was like having a protracted holiday romance. I had allowed the romantic drama of our transatlantic love connection to drive our relationship, and I hadn't realized it until it aged and suddenly ceased to exist, and, instead of our relationship being demarcated by ninety-day periods of togetherness and separation, it was now just us in 250 square feet, time stretching out infinitely before us. We got down to the day-to-day business of living normal lives and it suddenly became clear, to me at least, that the easy, breezy vacation part of our relationship was over.

It became apparent that Becky liked to hover within the margins of untidy and downright filthy, whereas I was coming out of the closet as a neat freak. At about the same time, she developed a stupefying habit of smoking large quantities of weed. Although I originally thought I might have been imagining it, other girls were beginning to take an interest in me and part of me began to resent that I'd gone from virgin to a cohabitating malcontent with none of the fun, casual, reckless part in between.

It seemed a terrible shame to be this unhappy with my relationship situation when so much else seemed to be going well. Though it was I who sought out a relationship between us, Becky had subsequently put much more into it, even scrapping our original plan to move back to England on my behalf. Her family had taken me in unconditionally, and as awful as splitting with Becky would be, prying myself away from my adopted family would be even more difficult.

We spent Christmas back in Madison, and on New Year's Eve I told Becky that it was over. She cried and then her parents took us to dinner at Benihana on the way back to the city. Becky was inconsolable at the hibachi table, even though the chef pulled out his best shrimp-tail flicking tricks and making the little volcano with slices of onion.

A week later I moved in with my friend Frank, who lived off the Ditmas Avenue stop, about halfway out to Coney Island. I was there through January and half of a frigid February before Becky called to tell me that she still expected me to pay my third of the rent until the lease ran out in August.

“I can't afford to pay two lots of rent money!”
I screamed.

“Well, you agreed to live with me for a year, and it's sort of not fair on me or my parents,” she said.

Though I had sort of agreed to it, my name was not on the lease. Out of respect for Becky's wonderful parents I felt I had no choice but to move back in with Becky, though this was part of her plan to reconcile. She was going to be spending two weeks visiting her sister in California, then I found an outrageously cheap round-trip fare back to England, so that took care of March. The month of April proved to both of us that there was no way either of us could endure the rest of the summer in 250 square feet of hell and so finally, begrudgingly, she let me go.

IT SEEMED THAT
by the late summer of 2000 my allotted quota of American hospitality had been almost entirely cashed. My employer, The Orchard, now owed me almost six thousand dollars in back wages, and seven weeks had passed since I'd last received a full paycheck. It had become apparent that leaving the company meant kissing that cash good-bye for the foreseeable future. In addition, my nefariously acquired work visa allowed me to work
only
for The Orchard. There was part-time under-the-table work to be had, but I lacked the gumption, confidence, and wherewithal to effectively hunt it down. Plus, the thought of washing dishes nights and weekends while my employer owed me more than I'd paid in rent the previous year made my blood boil. My father had wired me money before but had
recently lost his job. He said that he could only give me more money if it was going toward a one-way ticket home. Friends from home were buying property, two-week vacations in the Greek islands, cars, and luxury goods, and it seemed that I would have to go back and, after a good helping of humble pie, play catch-up in a race I didn't care to run. I was flat broke, but unlike the
genuinely
poverty-stricken, I was safe in the knowledge that the struggle, the discomfort, the heartache, the occasional hunger could be ended with one collect phone call. Imagining the phone call, the good-byes to my new friends, to the city I loved, the return to my old bedroom, the rain-sodden search for an arbitrary profession kept me from making that phone call prematurely.

As terrible as things seemed to be going, I felt that being poor in New York City was preferable to being rich anywhere else, especially Corringham. I adopted the sentiment as my mantra when my stomach rumbled or I found myself walking miles home from Manhattan in near hundred-degree weather. I was becoming ill, looking drawn and beaten down. I thought I'd been doing a good job at concealing my run of bad luck but realized it permeated my being as homeless people gradually stopped asking me for change.

I was now single and renting the open kitchen/living room of my friend Lizzy's dilapidated Brooklyn apartment as a crash pad, answering phones and shrink-wrapping CDs at The Orchard in the hope of being paid and living off of bagels that sandwich franchise threw out at the end of the day. They were hardly stale, and if you froze them immediately a bag might last you ten days or more. Occasionally I could stop being angry at what had become of my existence long enough to revel in my penny-pinching ingenuity. I often felt a very real sense of pride as I marched cheerfully across the Williamsburg Bridge with yet another week's starchy sustenance slung over my shoulder. Being incredibly thrifty was a game I was getting better at and even enjoyed at times. I began to amass a catalog of money-saving techniques that I'd either invent or adapt to suit my own situation. The leanest times gave me some surprising perspective on how I could make do with so little. I let this thinking inform my lifestyle further.

I always carried an empty to-go cup. I'd spot friends brunching at a diner and siphon off a cup of their bottomless coffee. I'd bring a mason jar to house parties and pilfer a few fingers of gin, then dump in the remainder of an abandoned screwdriver or rusty nail. I'd go home and put the jar in the freezer, then take it out to the next night's party and repeat the process. Some combinations were vile, but in general the resulting mixture was not unlike a Long Island Iced Tea and improved by the mouthful. I scaled back this practice after nearly choking to death on a rogue cigarette butt at a friend of a friend's movie screening.

If the universe was offering something, I'd gladly accept and decide whether or not I could use it later. One weekend's bumper harvest included a copy of the previous week's
New Yorker
, a shoe box full of well-thumbed paperbacks in Spanish, twenty-five square feet of plastic grass, a superficially damaged lawn chair, a cup of Baskin-Robbins's Rum Raisin, a ratty-looking videotape of
Moonstruck
(with the last third taped over with music videos), over a dozen assorted gourmet olives, a three-foot-tall Frosty the Snowman lawn ornament, several bite-sized panini samples, a comped entry to a local band's “showcase” gig, and a floor lamp.

Luckily, the lean times coincided with the summer months. When the weather was nice I stayed outside as much as possible. The sunshine was a great leveler and made me feel human again. I borrowed one of Lizzy's books and sat in McCarran Park or strolled around the East Village for hours on end. Three dollars would get me to the beach at Coney Island and back. On more unpleasant days, I trained myself in the art of appreciating vegetating under the covers. Many of my contemporaries had a reverence for sleep, but I had only known it as a necessity. I would while away hours listening to Lizzy's Stereolab albums and drift in and out of consciousness, willing myself back into beautiful dreams.

Lizzy and our other roommate, Albert, eventually confronted me with regards to my being habitually late with rent money and the cold cuts I'd taken from the fridge without asking. It took several minutes for me to realize they were actually asking me to leave. I was being evicted.

“You're chucking me out?” I said upon the realization.

“Well, we can't afford to cover your end anymore,” said Albert. “Plus, you're sort of a thief.”

Silently, Lizzy looked at the floor.

“It was a few slices of cheese!” I pleaded.

“Look, someone else has offered me a lot more for the space than you're paying and things aren't working out with us, so here's your two weeks' notice.”

“Where am I going to go?” I said.

“Sorry, dude,” said Albert.

The phone call home had practically become assured in an instant. I ran out of the house in a vain attempt to get some sort of grip on the situation. Aside from the beautiful people languidly crisscrossing it, Bedford Avenue—Williamsburg's main drag—is incredibly dull. When you're hungry and your clothes are out of style, it's downright depressing. I decided I would wander the Lower East Side until I had hashed out an action plan regarding somewhere to go.

The L train wasn't running so I walked over to the Marcy Avenue stop, a part of Williamsburg where gentrification hadn't dared to encroach. From Grand Avenue southward, the neighborhood was strewn with crude graffiti slogans.

“Gentrification = Death!”
“
Kill Borzois Oppressors!
” and “
Stop Gentrification Now!
”

By the late nineties it had become resoundingly obvious that a plea to stop gentrification was as ineffectual as a motion to stop plate tectonics or signing a petition opposing photosynthesis. It was a natural process beyond anyone's control. Furthermore, I'm certain that the call to arms was sprayed not by the Dominicans, Poles, or Hasidic Jews but by distraught members of the first few waves of blue-eyed immigrants who had arrived over the previous decade, people desperately aware of how more affluent later waves would surely unseat them from their cheap and behemoth loft spaces.

Before I got my first cell phone in late 2001, I had the mental agility to hold and recall fifteen of my friend's phone numbers. I had about
ten more written down in miniature on the back of a business card that I'd wrapped in Scotch tape. As I got off the train, I counted seven dimes in my pocket, meaning I was able to make two brief phone calls at best. Who I decided to call was often based more on the likelihood of them picking up the phone than on whether we had anything to say to each other, something I reckoned as I walked south down Essex in the muggy August air.

Chris Apostolou could often be found at the Orchard during the weekend; I decided I would walk across Hester Street to see him and guiltlessly make my personal phone calls on the company's tab. Aside from being the company's de facto accountant, Chris was its handyman, using his weekends to build shelves to hold more CDs, painting the walls, squeezing in yet another workstation.

“I have something for you,” he shouted over the dying din of his circular saw. Chris ran to his desk and returned with a check for three hundred dollars paid to cash. “I'd run to the bank now if I were you. I'll keep chipping away at it for you,” he promised. “Things are looking a little better. I'll have another five hundred dollars for you late next week.”

My ego bolstered by the unexpected three-hundred-dollar windfall and the promise of more cash on the horizon, I walked tall up Orchard Street and up into the East Village. I picked up a copy of the
Voice
and commandeered a booth for myself at the Odessa diner on Avenue A, ordering pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, and sweet corn, despite the late August heat outside. With a full belly and wallet, I even felt good enough about myself to casually flirt with the strawberry-blonde, apple-bottomed waitress and let her talk me into a slice of pie and some coffee. I toyed with the idea of asking for her number but became deterred as she frowned, watching me fill my to-go cup to the brim. The practice had become deeply ingrained.

I took my ratty-looking to-go cup across the street to Tompkins Square Park and had myself a think in the shade. I thought mostly about my imminent eviction and subsequent relegation to homeless-person status. My friend Mike had told me about a possible room opening up
in his place in Washington Heights on October first. I'd not realistically considered it before, as I always wanted to live within a somewhat reasonable walking radius of the East Village, but these were desperate times and he told me the place was large, clean, cheap, a block from the A express train, and I would have my own door. I pulled out my laminated business card and squinted to make out Mike's number.

I eventually found a working pay phone that didn't have blood and/ or fecal matter smeared all over the receiver and told Mike I would take the room sight unseen.

With the sun setting and some semblance of an action plan coming together in my mind, I walked back to Williamsburg, across the bridge.

The apartment was hot and stuffy. It had been for weeks. The iron bars encasing the windows of our street-level part of the house meant that it was impossible to install an air-conditioning unit. Hershel the landlord had promised the bars would be removed though warned that we would certainly be burgled. Lizzy and Albert had each brought two huge air conditioners to the house, but they sat hulking and redundant on the floor under the windows waiting for Rico the superintendent to remove the bars. It never ceases to amuse me that the apathetic alcoholics employed to keep a group of apartments in good working order are—without the merest trace of irony—typically referred to as “Super.” In the ten New York City addresses I've called home, these men have been anything but. We had a ninety-degree heat wave that lasted for two weeks in May 2000. Rico still had the central heating on full blast until June.

Driven to distraction by the heat, I turned on one of the dormant air conditioners despite its just sitting on the floor. The unit noisily coughed out some blue smoke before blowing the house's main fuse, which happened to be located in a closet only Rico had the key to. We were without electricity for twelve hours. Since then we had all been using cheap fans and misting bottles to abate the summer heat.

I decided that even though I had two weeks in Williamsburg, I would spend as little time there as possible. I started immediately and took the
now-running L train back over to First Avenue and treated myself to a late movie in the icy cool of Cinema Village East on Second Avenue. The first time I had ever been to the movies on my own. It made me melancholy but I felt that I had grown some in the process, though I can't remember what film I saw. It was after two by the time it was over, too late to ask friends to crash. I decided to pull an all-nighter.

I emerged and walked back to Odessa. A different waitress was on. She was older, harder, colder. Though it was largely unoccupied she said that I could only sit at the counter if I was just going to have coffee. I drank coffee to the point of itchiness and nausea. Five reluctantly refilled cups later, I twitched out of the diner. It had become chilly outside. It was after four and the only people around were heading to 7A, a twenty-four-hour diner, for food to soak up the booze. I did a lap of the twenty-four-hour Key Foods supermarket before I succumbed fully to fatigue. I had $270 on me—most of my first rent check at my new digs—and didn't want to sleep in the open elements. I stumbled into the Citibank ATM vestibule next door, shoving the roll of cash into my underpants. I got two hours of restless sleep under the fluorescent lights before getting turfed out at around seven. A bright Sunday morning.

In the relative safety of daylight, I laid in the park until I registered the sun burning into my face some twenty minutes later. I looked around. Crack whores sat expectantly by the chess boards, junky couples argued about ripping each other's shit off. Old Ukrainian and Polish men sipped booze and mumbled to each other, their big red noses making them resemble proboscis monkeys. I was merely playing at being homeless. I thought about who would step in to save me if I let myself descend further.

In actual fact there were plenty. But surely
these
poor pricks had friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, families. They'd gone to high school, some had attended college. I had been seeing these same bums in the two years since I'd moved to New York. They had been left to their own devices for so long that they had become living folk heroes and villains replete with colorful creation myths, nicknames, and accompanying lore.

That morning I felt sure that I would never realistically be allowed to become feral. I had great friends and I wasn't addicted to meth. I knew that if I recaptured some of the hope and optimism I had when I came to America to be with Becky, I was leaving myself open to something good. I lay back down and let the sunshine warm my face some more.