Search Results for: The Stranger

Our Bodies, Our Selves

At Medium, Hunger: A Memoir of My Body author Roxane Gay created Unruly Bodies, an excellent pop-up magazine, to be delivered in installments over four Tuesdays in April — “a month-long magazine exploring our ever-changing relationship with our bodies,” she writes in the introduction. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do — to create a space for writers I respect and admire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about unruly bodies and what it means to be human.”

She tapped a diverse group of 24 writers to contribute. This first edition features an introduction by Gay, and essays by Randa Jarrar, Kiese Laymon, Matthew Salesses, Keah Brown, S. Bear Bergman, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. Writers to be featured in the next three editions: Carmen Maria Machado, chelsea g. summers, Kaveh Akbar, Terese Mailhot, Casey Hannan, Samantha Irby, Tracy Lynne Oliver, Kelly Davio, Brian Oliu, Mike Copperman, Danielle Evans, Jennine Capó Crucet, Megan Carpentier, Kima Jones, the writer known as Your Fat Friend, Gabrielle Bellot, Mensah Demary, and larissa pham.

In creating Unruly Bodies, Gay was influenced by her experience after publishing Hunger. Readers reacted in ways that were intrusive, inappropriate, and hurtful. Unsolicited (and unqualified), they offered diet and exercise advice. They judged her. They insulted her.

I wrote about my body and strangers, with both good and bad intentions, generally missed the point of what I had to say. They viewed my body as a problem to be solved, as something they could discuss and debate. But I put myself out there. I wrote the story of my body so what could I do but grit my teeth and get through it?

After getting through it, she was inspired to ask others to write about their experiences living — in one way or another — outside the straight, cis, thin, white mainstream.

I first began thinking of the body as unruly after reading Hanne Blank’s collection Unruly Appetites. It was such a provocative, honest phrasing, this acknowledgment that the things we most want and crave are rarely easily ruled or disciplined. The bodies harboring our unruly appetites are unruly in and of themselves — they are as weak and fallible as they are strong. In many ways, our bodies are completely unknowable, but oh, how we try to master our unruly bodies, nonetheless.

When Medium approached me to curate a pop-up magazine, I knew exactly what I wanted to do — to create a space for writers I respect and admire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about unruly bodies and what it means to be human. I asked twenty-four talented writers to respond to the same prompt: what does it mean to live in an unruly body? Each writer interpreted this prompt in a unique way and offered up a small wonder.

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A Clarifying Dose of Reality (TV)

fox broadcasting

Valentina Valentini | Longreads | April 2018 | 9 minutes (2,320 words)

 

After 16 hours, 5 hot dogs, 2 nacho bowls, 3 sodas, and 20,000 people, I felt more like an idiot than an idol.

***

Walking down the steps to Qualcomm Stadium’s field level, I wondered how I’d gotten there. Four days prior I was tuned into my go-to San Diego radio show, “AJ’s Playhouse” on 99.3 FM, when they plugged upcoming American Idol auditions. I cursed aloud to no one, because two years earlier — as an even younger and more attention-hungry woman — I’d promised myself that if they ever came to the city I was living in I would audition.

Ten years later, as a supposedly mature 34-year-old, seeking 15 minutes of fame is very low on my list of priorities, far below items like “find a great yoga studio” and “figure out which hair dye covers grays best.”

But back in 2008, there I was on that Saturday morning. I arrived at 9 on the dot to stand in line, eager. It took two hours — just to register.

***

I met sleek Barry and cherubic Rory while waiting in that godforsaken first line. (If only I had known what was to come.) They were a couple from Hillcrest, the epicenter of San Diego’s LGBTQ scene, hopping with gay bars and the city’s annual Pride Parade. Barry was auditioning, and Rory was there for support. I’d come alone, so my two new besties were a welcome addition to a morning crowded with narcissists. (Not including us, of course.)

Lacking for distractions in line — these were the days before cell-phones-as-mobile-entertainment-centers — we formulated theories about how it was all going to go down. Would we meet Paula and Randy? Would Simon deign to set foot in a stadium if he weren’t the halftime entertainment? Would it be filmed? Who were the crazies going to be? You know, the ones whose auditions are so ridiculous that they get aired for that reason alone.

We were excited — in retrospect, naïve is more like it — and never imagined the cattle call that was to unfold over the next 24 hours. The mastery of producing a show like this is to never let them see the wizard. But we were the wizards — all 20,000 of us, hundreds of thousands if you add up the people for all the other cities — and in my case, the wizard was a beaten-down twentysomething, mascara mixing with sweat, hopes of stardom ripped out of her sticky-with-junk-food hands.

Two years earlier — as an even younger and more attention-hungry woman — I’d promised myself that if American Idol ever came to the city I was living in I would audition.

After (finally) successfully registering, we decided to meet at Barry’s house at 3:30 a.m. — yes, a.m. — the next day to head to the stadium. I was glad to have joined up as Three Amigos and thankful that Barry and Rory were so welcoming to a near stranger. The rules explicitly said no camping, so we were confident there wouldn’t be too big of a crowd by 4 in the morning.

There were 5,000 people.

Someone with a loud bullhorn told us we’d be shuffled in by 8 a.m. They didn’t use the term shuffle, but I assure you, we were shuffled. And it wasn’t until 9 that the line — a disorganized mass, 20 bodies wide, each only centimeters from the next — began to trundle forward. Some cheered as the prospect of getting into the stadium became a possibility. The sound of those whoops coincided with the moment when excitement began to bleed out and embarrassment began to creep in.

Forty-five minutes and 50 feet later, we were at the front of the line. They were letting groups of about 100 through the side gate to the outer ring of the stadium, making us duck under a rope. Oh the horror of it. It felt like the start of the Boston Marathon, except these competitors were caked in makeup, some balanced on heels, some carrying pillows and curling irons and banjos; some with big hair and some with greasy faces. One person had even brought their own music stand. And as the cameras closed in on the overtly gregarious ones — answering our question from earlier as to whether or not this would be filmed — I wanted to be peppy like them and give a gorgeous smile for the camera. But the sinking feeling that I was a cow being prodded along just made me want to give the finger instead.

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Before We All Teach Someone a Lesson

Students dressed as the video game Tetris, shaking hands cooperatively
Students dressed as Tetris blocks shake hands with their team. (Photo by Andrew Hancock / Icon Sport Media via Getty Images)

“Trashing is insidious. It can damage its subject for life, personally and professionally. Whether or not people sympathize, the damage has been done.”

— Laurie Penny, Who Does She Think She Is?

In the right context, moral outrage can be justified and effective. When marginalized or less-empowered voices leverage a moral megaphone to remedy systemic injustice — when hate suffers consequences — those social repercussions help bend the arc of the moral universe in the right direction. In communities where we can all see each other in person, correcting bad behavior in judicious, measured proportion serves everyone in the long run.

Yet even justified social consequences can get out of hand quickly when they’re exacted by waves of anonymous online strangers. Constructive criticism tips over into merciless abuse that undermines whether transgressors can learn any semblance of an appropriate lesson.

In Mosaic, Gaia Vince examines how our first impulse offline is usually to be generous and kind to each other, but those instinctual wires get crossed online depending on how a social network is set up. Even just one bad experience with a jerk can set a formative precedent that leads to less cooperative behavior.

“You might think that there is a minority of sociopaths online, which we call trolls, who are doing all this harm,” says Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science. “What we actually find in our work is that ordinary people, just like you and me, can engage in such antisocial behaviour. For a specific period of time, you can actually become a troll.”

The good news is that this also works the other way around: well-timed, well-meaning interventions can encourage us to bring more of our evolved prosocial habits from offline communities into our online discourse.

Here, Vince visits Yale University’s Human Cooperation Lab to explore how we can redesign social networks in ways that help “further our extraordinary impulse to be nice to others even at our own expense.”

“If you take carbon atoms and you assemble them one way, they become graphite, which is soft and dark. Take the same carbon atoms and assemble them a different way, and it becomes diamond, which is hard and clear. These properties of hardness and clearness aren’t properties of the carbon atoms – they’re properties of the collection of carbon atoms and depend on how you connect the carbon atoms to each other,” [Nicholas Christakis, director of Yale’s Human Nature Lab] says. “And it’s the same with human groups.”

“By engineering their interactions one way, I can make them really sweet to each other, work well together, and they are healthy and happy and they cooperate. Or you take the same people and connect them a different way and they’re mean jerks to each other and they don’t cooperate and they don’t share information and they are not kind to each other.”

In one experiment, he randomly assigned strangers to play the public goods game with each other. In the beginning, he says, about two-thirds of people were cooperative. “But some of the people they interact with will take advantage of them and, because their only option is either to be kind and cooperative or to be a defector, they choose to defect because they’re stuck with these people taking advantage of them. And by the end of the experiment everyone is a jerk to everyone else.”

Christakis turned this around simply by giving each person a little bit of control over who they were connected to after each round. “They had to make two decisions: am I kind to my neighbours or am I not; and do I stick with this neighbour or do I not.” The only thing each player knew about their neighbours was whether each had cooperated or defected in the round before. “What we were able to show is that people cut ties to defectors and form ties to cooperators, and the network rewired itself and converted itself into a diamond-like structure instead of a graphite-like structure.” In other words, a cooperative prosocial structure instead of an uncooperative structure.

But as I’m watching the game I just played unfold, Christakis reveals that three of these players are actually planted bots. “We call them ‘dumb AI’,” he says.
His team is not interested in inventing super-smart AI to replace human cognition. Instead, the plan is to infiltrate a population of smart humans with dumb-bots to help the humans help themselves.

“We wanted to see if we could use the dumb-bots to get the people unstuck so they can cooperate and coordinate a little bit more – so that their native capacity to perform well can be revealed by a little assistance,” Christakis says.

Much antisocial behaviour online stems from the anonymity of internet interactions – the reputational costs of being mean are much lower than offline. Here, bots may also offer a solution. One experiment found that the level of racist abuse tweeted at black users could be dramatically slashed by using bot accounts with white profile images to respond to racist tweeters. A typical bot response to a racist tweet would be: “Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language.” Simply cultivating a little empathy in such tweeters reduced their racist tweets almost to zero for weeks afterwards.

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The Wolves

(Mats Andersson/Getty)

Kseniya Melnik | Tin House | Winter 2017 | 26 minutes (7,122 words)

It was nine o’clock on a balmy summer evening when Masha stepped off the last bus to Shelkovskaya, a village in Chechnya. The year was 1938, the second year of what is now known as Yezhovshchina, the bloodiest phase of the Great Purge named in honor of Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police. Historians from all around the world still argue about the number of unnatural deaths from those two years alone — the upper estimate surpassing a million. But Masha did not know it then. And even if she had, this wouldn’t have been her main concern. She was a girl, a carefree college student until a week ago, when she found out that she was accidentally, unfortunately, unhappily pregnant.

Although she was afraid of the long journey ahead, she believed that if she squeezed her mother’s small, silky hand, and if she watched her father’s coarse, yellow eyebrows wiggle in laughter, and after she spent one night sleeping with her two sisters in their bedroom — the same room where the great Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov had once spent the night a hundred years prior — her thoughts and feelings would gain proper balance. She would know what to do.

Masha watched the bright windows of the sputtering bus until it disappeared around the turn. The two men in workers’ caps and oil-splattered overalls who had gotten off with her at Shelkovskaya were also looking after the bus. Once it was out of view, they turned and regarded her with weary, disappointed expressions — or so it appeared to Masha. They bowed, spun on their heels like soldiers, and hurried off toward their village. Read more…

#DeleteFacebook? It’s Not So Easy

(AP Photos)

Earlier this year I wrote about the lack of nuance on our social media feeds and why so many people were trying to step away from it.

And, taking my own good advice, I attempted to spend less time on my accounts. I used an app called Feedly to follow my favorite writers and publications via RSS instead of on Twitter or Tumblr. I limited checking my social media feeds to a few times a day and told myself that I would post links to my own writing, share links to my friends’ work, and only scan my feeds for relevant professional news — no getting caught up in arguments and threads, and definitely no replying.

The “don’t @ me” trend is, of course, a symptom of the changing nature of social media; there are plenty of call-outs and pile-ons, but trying to open a real conversation with someone who isn’t a close friend or family member has started to feel rude. Social media isn’t really about connecting with new people anymore — a Facebook friend request means “I want to watch what you’re doing” more than it means “I want to interact with you.” (It is, in many ways, antisocial.)

Then we learned that we weren’t the only ones who were closely paying attention to our social media accounts. Read more…

“We All Had the Same Acid Flashback at the Same Time”: The New American Cuisine

Getty / 123RF images, Composite by Katie Kosma

Andrew Friedman | Excerpt adapted from Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession | Ecco | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4,560 words)

* * *

He spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him.

You could begin this story in any number of places, so why not in the back of a dinged-up VW van parked on a Moroccan camping beach, a commune of tents and makeshift domiciles? It’s Christmas 1972. Inside the van is Bruce Marder, an American college dropout. He’s a Los Angelino, a hippy, and he looks the part: Vagabonding for six months has left him scrawny and dead broke. His jeans are stitched together, hanging on for dear life. Oh, and this being Christmas, somebody has gifted him some LSD, and he’s tripping.

The van belongs to a couple — French woman, Dutch man — who have taken him in. It boasts a curious feature: a built-in kitchen. It’s not much, just a set of burners and a drawer stocked with mustard and cornichons. But they make magic there. The couple has adventured as far as India, amassing recipes instead of Polaroids, sharing memories with new friends through food. To Marder, raised in the Eisenhower era on processed, industrialized grub, each dish is a revelation. When the lid comes off a tagine, he inhales the steam redolent of an exotic and unfamiliar herb: cilantro. The same with curry, also unknown to him before the van.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Marder fled the United States. “People wanted to get away,” he says. Away from the Vietnam War. Away from home and the divorce epidemic. The greater world beckoned, the kaleidoscopic, tambourine-backed utopia promised by invading British rockers and spiritual sideshows like the Maharishi. The price of admission was cheap: For a few hundred bucks on a no-frills carrier such as Icelandic Airlines — nicknamed “the Hippie Airline” and “Hippie Express” — you could be strolling Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Élysées, your life stuffed into a backpack, your Eurail Pass a ticket to ride.

Marder flew to London alone, with $800 and a leather jacket to his name, and improvised, crashing in parks and on any friendly sofa and — if he couldn’t score any of that — splurging on a hostel. He let himself go, smoking ungodly amounts of pot, growing his hair out to shoulder length. In crowds, he sensed kindred spirits, young creatures of the road, mostly from Spain and Finland. Few Americans.

Food, unexpectedly, dominated life overseas. Delicious, simple food that awakened his senses and imagination. Amsterdam brought him his first french fries with mayonnaise: an epiphany. The souks (markets) of Marrakech, with their food stalls and communal seating, haunt him. Within five months, he landed on that camping beach, in Agadir, still a wasteland after an earthquake twelve years prior. He lived on his wits: Back home, he’d become fluent in hippy cuisine; now he spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him, like the couple in whose van he was nesting. Food was as much a part of life on the beach as volleyball and marijuana. People cooked for each other, spinning the yarns behind the meals — where they’d picked them up and what they meant in their native habitats. Some campers developed specializations, like the tent that baked cakes over an open burner. Often meals were improvised: You’d go to town, buy a pail, fill it with a chicken, maybe some yogurt, or some vegetables and spices, and figure out what to do with it when you got back.

Marder might as well have been on another planet. “This was so un-American at that time,” he says.
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The Amateur Investigators of the American West

AP Photo/Dave Martin

Fifty tourists a year get lost in Joshua Tree National Park and find their way back out. In 2010, 66-year-old Bill Ewasko went in and never came out. For The New York Times Magazine, Geoff Manaugh follows the eight-year search for Ewasko and the men who obsessed about finding him.

Search-and-rescue experts have developed lost-person-behavior algorithms to track missing hikers. They use cellphone pings to create a map and timeline, and use past behavior to try to guess their target’s behavior. Technology has also turned amateurs into sleuths and spun web forums devoted to missing people. We live in what Manaugh calls “a golden age for amateur investigations.” For some, missing persons cases become a hobby, a puzzle to solve, a form of salvation, even when wilderness areas thwart their techniques.

To hear Marsland tell it, his inaugural trip to the park, on March 1, 2013, bore the full force of revelation. He purchased hiking gear at a Los Angeles outdoors store, booked himself a room at a nearby hotel in Yucca Valley and set off at 6:30 a.m. He managed to get much farther into the park than he expected. But rather than retreat, he pushed on, walking up the side of Smith Water Canyon. At the top of the ridgeline, he found a curious pit. “It was enclosed by rocks, and you couldn’t really see it from the side,” Marsland told me. “I remember thinking that this is exactly the kind of place where you would expect Bill to be: someplace where he had fallen down, he couldn’t get out and you would never find him. I remember thinking that I had to clear this pit. I had to crawl right up to the edge of it and look down, and I remember being so afraid that I would fall into the pit myself.”

The pit contained no bodies, or even clues, but that moment of possibility was everything. Marsland began drinking less, losing nearly 40 pounds as he reoriented his free time around this quest to find a stranger. “I crossed the line from being somebody who just sat in his room and passively participated in something to being actively involved,” he said. “It was a big moment for me, and it led to a lot of other good things happening in my life.”

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Who Does She Think She Is?

Illustration from an 1883 journal, via Getty.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | March 2018 | 23 minutes (5,933 words)

 

Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny.
— Nick Cohen, The Spectator, 2011

Do you think that red hair and makeup is used for anything other than attention? Her writing? Same. That bitch is a whore who needs to die choking on cocks.
— 4chan, 2016

I think that nice Laurie Penny over at the New Statesman must actually be a conservative mole dedicated to undermining leftism from within.
— Alex Massie, also at The Spectator, 2013

Hang this clown. Hang Laurie Penny.
— Urban75 (British left-wing forum), 2011

Now I don’t want to make light of her depression, but she has probably brought this on herself.
Desert Sun, “We Need to Talk about Laurie Penny,” September 2017

* * *

It’s a clammy summer night. You’re 24, and you call a suicide hotline.

The nice lady who answers is probably in her seventies. She is very understanding as you explain to her that hundreds of people, thousands of strangers, are saying awful things about you, that some of them seem to really want to hurt you. You don’t know why. You’re just a writer, and you didn’t expect this. But some of them tell you in detail their fantasies of your rape and murder.

The nice lady is very sweet as she asks you if these voices ever tell you to do things. Yes, they tell you to stop writing. You inform the nice lady about this in a creepy whisper because your family is sleeping nearby and you don’t want to wake or worry them. These strangers tell you you don’t deserve to live, let alone have a newspaper column. Do they tell you to hurt yourself? Yes, every day.

The nice lady tells you to hold the line, because if it’s alright, she’s going to transfer you to one of her colleagues with specialist training.

No, wait, you say. You’re not hearing voices. You’re not delusional.  The nice lady can Google you. This is really happening.

* * *

The internet hates women. Everyone knows that by now, and nobody precisely approves, but we’ve reached a point of collective tolerance. It’s just the way of the world, and if you can’t handle it, honey, delete your account. Stop engaging online. Cut yourself off from friends, family, and professional contacts, shut down your business, blow up your social capital, stop learning, stop talking, just stop. Or else.

The U.N. Broadband Commission tells us that one in five young women has been sexually harassed online. Amnesty International’s latest report suggested that over three-quarters of women and girls expected violence and abuse if they expressed an opinion online. “Online” is the least significant word in those sentences. I have been asked enough times if “the internet is bad for women.” And yes, there is reason enough to warn your daughter, your partner, your friend to watch out for herself online, to think twice before “putting herself out there.” You’d warn her in much the same way that you might warn her not to walk through town alone at night, not to wear a short skirt, not to let her guard down, not to relax, ever. And the message is the same: The future, like the past, is not for you. You may visit, but only if you behave.

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Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar

Myanmar, photo courtesy the author

David Fettling | Longreads | March 2018 | 19 minutes (5,019 words)

Now what I remember most about him is what he said about the Rohingya: that they were troublemakers, not really citizens of his country, undeserving of sympathy, that he hated them. He had said it standing under a banyan tree, and I had noticed, again, his dress: he was wearing a longyi, a Burmese sarong, and with it, new-looking, Western hiking boots. His longyi’s knot was tied impeccably. His boots appeared to me to not quite fit him.

But I spent three days and walked 50 kilometers with him before he said this. Through a trekking agency I’d arranged to meet him in Kalaw, in hill-country in central Myanmar, and took an overnight bus there from Yangon. The bus was ultra-modern, air-conditioned, and near-empty. Arriving at dawn, I disembarked into cold air and a fog that obscured the tops of pine trees. I found the café where we were to meet, ordered a tea. Every few minutes a man sidled up to me and asked if I needed a guide. When I said I had one already they looked not merely disappointed but resentful; slinking away, I saw them lingering on the café’s margins.

This was a year ago, so Myanmar was still in-vogue: after decades of oppressive military government and isolation internationally, it had begun to ‘open’ and appeared to be moving toward democratization. A perception of the country as a dramatic ‘good-news story’ — a newly-liberated populace, pursuing long-denied opportunities — was drawing increasing international interest. I badly wanted to see Myanmar and Kalaw through this lens; but those sullen, hands-in-pockets-would-be-guides kept straying into my field of vision.

He arrived fifteen minutes late. He looked extremely young: early twenties, I guessed. He introduced himself as Thomas — I blinked, asked him to repeat it. Thomas was at once exuberantly friendly and palpably nervous: as he met me he profusely apologized. “I’m sorry, sir” — I never got him to stop calling me sir — “I am running late. I still have to get some things from the supermarket. I am running late, I am sorry. I think maybe you will write this on TripAdvisor.” I told him it was no problem, and we walked two streets over, not to a supermarket but to a small, dowdy grocery store. Thomas disappeared; I waited outside. Next-door was an internet café. Young men played computer games, their faces near-expressionless. The fog was clearing to a powder-blue sky, yet I felt a sense of anti-climax: this, apparently, was Myanmar’s transformation in actuality. Thomas reappeared; walking quickly, he continued to apologize. “I am sorry about this,” he said, into the chilly blue morning. “I am sorry about this.”
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With a Rent-Stabilized Lease, Finding the Line Between Luck and a Life Sentence

East 13th Street in New York (AP Photo/Ed Bailey)

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (3,988 words)

 

The whole reason I had the rent-stabilized apartment on East 13th Street was because my aunt lived in it before me. Leslie first rented the place in 1981, when she was 23, for $345 a month. In the early ’90s she left and moved to Seattle, but kept the lease in her name. When I was looking for a place to land after college, she was quick to kick out a random subletter and turn the place over to me. The subletter, a tiny Japanese woman who was running an illicit hair salon out of the kitchen, had staple-gunned bed sheets up throughout the place as makeshift room dividers. The effect, when I first came to check out the place and negotiate her exit, was a kind of diaphanous claustrophobia.

The apartment was a dingy, naturally repellent kind of place that set me on edge even as it sucked me in. But it didn’t even occur to me not to seize on it: Here was a place in New York that could be mine, alone. All of a sudden I was one of those lucky people who inherit something that’s otherwise impossible to get, and have an easier life because of it. (That last part, though, didn’t strike me at the time.) I was 22 when I lugged my boxes in on a stormy-sticky July day in 2004. The rent by then was $775.

It was a railroad apartment, somewhere around 300 square feet — a long, awkward space, cave-like and crooked, in a deep funk of cracking and peeling and generally breaking down. Horizontal surfaces sloped dramatically; all the furniture on the west wall had to be propped on blocks to keep it from toppling over. The light fixture in the tiny, sink-less bathroom was half-detached from the ceiling in a way that might have seemed dangerous if I thought about it seriously. Early on I chipped some paint off the bathroom door, exposing cross-sections of something like a dozen layers of paint beneath the most recent coat: turquoises and taupes alternating with the layers of white that signaled periodic fresh starts.

The kitchen floor — cloudy, black, sticky linoleum tiles Leslie told me she had laid over plywood some 20 years ago — was coming up in patches, ragged chunks of it breaking off and clinging to my bare feet. The only sink was in the kitchen, and so it was the site not only of always overdue dishwashing but also of twice daily toothbrushing. I paced as I brushed, returning to the wobbly sink cabinet to spit mouthfuls of spent paste without regard for any plates and utensils blocking the way of the drain. A heel-sized hole formed in a spot right in front of the sink, exposing an archaeology of the floor: layers of wood and particle board and laminate laid down and covered over and then covered over again.

The whole building was like that, a place of pilings on, of covering up, of semi-smoothing over, of barely acceptable surfaces coming undone. Five stories that were safe in the ways that mattered, and sketchy enough to confer some cred. Along the narrow stairways the walls were covered with proof of comings and goings, arced scuffs and deep abrasions from thousands of oversized objects being dragged up and down, in and out.

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