What $2000 Buys You

Febuary 1, 2009

For a variety of reasons, Deborah and I rarely visit the fancy pizza restaurant that opened up directly across the street from our apartment. But for a variety of other reasons, tonight we did. Once I finished my wafer-thin personal pizza and Deborah her small plate of pasta, we were still hungry and asked to see a dessert menu. "We don't have a dessert menu," the waitress said, "but let me check with the kitchen to see what we have."

She came back a moment later and told us, "Tonight we have ricotta with a little bit of honey and some raisins," which sounded to us like the chef pulling something out of his ass.

"Just the check, thanks."

We paid up and left, still craving dessert and a coffee.

"We could go to Fortunato's," I suggested.

"Where's that?"

"You know that place," I said. "We've passed it before. It's in my old neighborhood. It's always full of mobsters and cops."

Of course, the heavyset guys in polyester shirts and brown leather jackets that loiter by the doorway, shooting the shit in classic Brooklyn accents peppered with colorful Italian-Americanisms, are NOT mobsters, I mean, there IS NO mafia, but as a movie-goer, it's hard not to make the comparison. In any case, Deborah got the idea. "Oh, that place."

We pointed to some pastries in the display case, "We'll take a couple of those and a couple of those," and ordered two cappuccinos to wash them down with, then took a seat at a table by the long window. Cop radios crackled from across the room, and two old guys in windbreakers and wool caps spoke loudly in Italian. "Oh my god," said Deborah after a bite of her pastry. Then she took a second bite and said it again. "Oh my god, this is so fucking good. I'm going to miss this place."

It was a joke because she'd never been there before, but what she meant was this: we looked at apartments today. Deborah has been wanting to move for a long time now, and I promised that once the Sprouse show opened, we could start looking. Maybe we could take advantage of supposedly falling rents.

Although it sounded too good to be true, we were hopeful about our first appointment. The realtor was late, so we took a walk around the block to see how it felt. Deborah got defensive when I said it didn't feel right. "I don't know," I said. "I can't describe it. It's a gut feeling, but I don't feel like I belong here. I feel like I'm visiting someone else." Which, in a way, I suppose I was.

"What don't you like about it?" she said. "I love it. And the park is right there ."

It was located in Deborah's old neighborhood of Park Slope, adjacent to the park and about a block from the subway — two major selling points. The only selling points, as it turned out. They were calling it a two-bedroom, but it was really just a kitchen and two closets. When we arrived, three guys were being shown around by the owner. "Ignore them," said the realtor. "Take a look around, and then we can talk privately."

The apartment would've been too small for any one of the guys alone, and unfathomable as a share, but they silently listened as the owner gave his pitch. We listened, too. It was impossible not to, since the entire apartment couldn't have been more than 500 square feet. "I was born in this apartment," the owner said. "My mother wouldn't see me all day long — I'd be lost in the park! The park is great. Nothing beats that feeling when you start to see the first buds of spring on the trees. And it's great in the winter too. Great for snowing and sledding."

"You hear that?" I whispered to Deborah. "The park is great for snowing. We'll have to look into that. It sounds fun."

"Buds on the trees," she whispered back. "Thanks, but I'm familiar with spring."

But spring and snow were the only good things to talk about.

As entertaining as the owner was, the realtor was useless as she waited in the hall. She didn't have much choice, though, since the apartment was too small to hold all seven of us. We made tiny circles around the place, hoping to find a hidden door to another room.

"There is a storage room included," the owner said, and he led us out of the apartment, down a set of stairs, into a dismal cement courtyard, down another set of stairs, and into a basement. The ceiling was too low for any of the guys to stand up straight, including me. It was a back room where tenants stored their overflow in cubby holes. Strollers, tables, chairs, toys, picture frames, and dusty bottles of wine.

We stepped into the hallway with the realtor. "I'm afraid it's too small for us," said Deborah.

"For your information, this is what $2000 buys you in Park Slope," the realtor said, rather aggressively. "I'm just being honest with you, you're absolutely not going to get anything bigger for the money. It doesn't exist." She handed Deborah a color copy of the apartment listing, "Take this for your reference," she said.

Deborah handed it back. "Thanks for your time."

We were barely out the door when Deborah's phone rang. It was the realtor. "I have another apartment I can show you. It's around the corner, and it's huge. Perfect for you two."

So much for there being nothing bigger.

"We have to get to another appointment," Deborah lied. "Can I call you on Monday?"

Although we didn't really have any appointments, we did stop into a real estate office in Williamsburg. After filling out a form, we were greeted by an agent, a skinny Polish guy with a long blond ponytail. "Hello, I'm Damien," he said, and told us he had a few places we might be interested in. We got in his car and as soon as he turned the key, Ozzy Osborne's Bark at the Moon blasted from what felt like twenty speakers. He reached over and turned it down, but not much.

The first apartment he showed us was in the bowels of Greenpoint, ten blocks or more from the nearest subway. The front door opened into a hallway so narrow that the door didn't open all the way. A fire code violation, no doubt, but more importantly, a major day-to-day pain in the ass. We squeezed one by one through the door and into a slightly wider hallway billed as the living room. I tried to imagine how the previous tenants managed to move their stuff in or out. Like the Park Slope apartment we saw, this one was advertised as a two-bedroom, too. One of the bedrooms was locked, and Damien didn't have a key. "I can't show you this room, but trust me, it's really big — about the same size as the other one." The other one was barely suitable as a room for our cats.

Deborah was feeling frustrated. She's never had to look for an apartment in New York before — she's always had opportunities present themselves, like moving in with friends, or friends of friends, or boyfriends, and things like that. She imagined it was going to be a lot more fun, and that we'd be shown one nice place after another.

"Now you see why I wasn't excited about apartment hunting," I said. "It's a nightmare."

If nothing else, it helped her appreciate the apartment we have. Not that she doesn't like our apartment, she simply hates our building — the parties, the bands practicing, the coke dealer screaming at his drunken girlfriend at two a.m., or blasting Morrissey at dawn. She hates the dank laundry room with broken washers and getting her mail stolen, the bottles, cans, and cigarette butts carpeting the hallway, the bush-league graffiti on the walls, the broken windows and doors, and so on.

Fortunately, we have the luxury of wanting to move rather than having to move, and can search without feeling pressured.

We visited one more real estate office before heading home. The agent wasn't in, but his secretary took down our information and made an appointment for Monday morning. Deborah has Monday off, but I have to work, so she's on her own.

"I think I'm just going to be up front with the guy from the very beginning and tell him, 'I don't want to see any shitty apartments. And by shitty apartments, you know what the fuck I mean by shitty apartments.'"

We'll see.