In New York City: An Incantation

(2 of 2)

Since I last poked around the block, a pernicious gouge called key money has come into vogue. By this practice, anyone vacating a flat can charge the first sucker in line for it any price the market will bear, and the market will bear a lot. Also called fixture money (this rationalization has you buying the present tenant's improvements, such as the flakes on the floor that used to be the paint on the ceiling), it is quite illegal, done entirely off the books, and you, made a felon by the simple act of trying to rent an apartment, will spend your first weeks denying to kith and kin, and to your own soul in the dead of night, that you were robbed. In my case, after agonizing to a no-nonsense decision (these are my funds, and I'll be a better man to be rid of them), the deal fell through. At the eleventh hour the fellow moving out demanded I join him in litigation against the landlord, an order that had to be satisfied before I could move in. Even I have limits. I drew the line at suing for shelter.

And walked round the corner to sign on with a new plastic high-rise. In four months, I calculated last evening, I will have paid more in rent than my father paid for his home way back when. The very dollhouse-size room in which I stood totting my sums costs $19.72 a day, my arithmetic machine told me, just before the aneurysm formed. I happened to be in the kitchen, working on the top of my toy refrigerator, at the time. I think possibly it would be unbearable to know the living room's per diem.

Just now, a print Peeping Tom to whom I am quite close looked over my shoulder and said, "Oh, cut it out, you dope. You moved here. If you don't get around to a kind word soon, everyone will think you're an idiot."

I like the blue light in Gotham's canyons this time of year. I like the cab driver I had the other day. Passing a bank that was giving away blankets to new depositors, he recalled that a bank had once given him a toaster. One morning he popped in his bread and padded off to shower. The toaster caught fire. "You get a toaster in an appliance store, it catches fire, you take it back. I defy you to try taking a toaster back to a bank!"

And I would like to have a telephone. My second day here, I waited hours for the installer, who never showed. Leaving for work, I found my building's employees doing picket duty on the sidewalk. The doorman, wearing a sandwich board and thoroughly on strike, told me he had sent my installer away. "He's a good union man," he said. So apparently is everyone else at the phone company.

"Hey," the doorman went on, "do me a favor. Call the landlord and complain."

"Hey," I shot back, getting the hang of streetwise give and take, "I don't have a phone."

"Hey," my unfazed picket said, fishing in his pocket, "here's a quarter."

"Lead on, o kinky turtle," I said, accepting the coin and dumbfounding my interlocutor. I used to feel that I owned this town. With a knock 'em dead incantation like mine, who's to say I won't again?