I let too many people move in to the apartment above Union Pool

chaos can begin to masquerade as structure

Photo by Lerone Pieters

It’s true when I say I feel the safest I have felt in years. I can’t remember a time, at least since before my apartment fire in Brooklyn, when I’ve felt fully at home in my own space.

My apartment in Williamsburg (the one which burned down) was nothing special, but it was everything to me. I’d lived there almost five years before the fire, and to this day it remains the place I have spent the longest, in terms of consecutive years, during my adult life.

Sharing an address with venue/bar/meat-market Union Pool, on the corner of Union Avenue and Meeker Street - 484 Union Avenue, was prime Williamsburg real estate. Two bedrooms, a decently sized living area, one absolutely disgusting bathroom (with a 1x1 standing shower), and a kitchen window providing full, private roof access to the building next door. My landlord insisted the roof was unsafe to walk on, however she never specified any danger towards the act of sunbathing.

I’d moved in during the winter of 2017, after living in a hotel for nearly eight months. I’d wound up in said hotel after running from an ex one night, the ex being my nearly fifty-year-old girlfriend (t w e n t y – f o u r years my senior), who had become increasingly abusive over our two year “partnership.” The relationship had started off on uneven ground, which is the only type of ground a 23-year-old and 47-year-old can possibly stand on together, as a couple. She was an executive for a prominent TV network when we’d met, but soon she was laid off, and most of our early days together were spent with me commuting to Soho to work my day-job as a Stylist for Diesel, while she stayed home on severance and spent time searching for jobs. When it became inconvenient for me to be working so much, I quit my job over the phone one morning, becoming her full-time live-in girlfriend, yet still fully reliant on my own finances. Stupidly, I cashed in my 401K with max penalty, at the spring-chicken age of just 24, and we burned through it quick, her convinced we should move to none other than where I currently live… Chicago. We flew here, staying in hotels, and once at her Republican sister’s house in Hinsdale, searching endlessly for the perfect apartment.

We must have toured at least a dozen places before going back to New York, and seemingly never mentioning the concept of moving states again. We wound up moving a few miles downtown, to an apartment close to where my grandmother had rented when I was a child. It was a sterile-feeling, Stonehenge managed, mid-skyrise on 65^th and 1^st Ave.

There, things took a stopping turn.

I don’t remember what we were fighting about the night I ran off, but I know all we ever fought about was the concept of controlling me. I wanted control of me, she wanted control of me, and it was a constant push and pull – her micromanaging everything from what I ate to who I spoke to, all while I was on a constantly subservient quest to be granted a sense of freedom and trust by the woman I loved. Sadly, this is a relationship dynamic I would again repeat in my early thirties.

All I remember from that night is the ending. Her storming towards me, pushing me hard, my back bouncing against the wall behind me, dropping to my ass against that wall. It wasn’t the first time, but it was getting worse. Just weeks prior, she had pinned me to the bed, her full body weight crushing me from behind, as she wrapped her arms around me in an attempt to rip my ring, which she had purchased me, off my finger. Sometimes we called it an “engagement ring,” but it was, in reality, nothing more than a tacky stop sign. She had purchased me the craziest looking, multi-carat, pave cocktail ring, which you could see glistening on my finger from at least a city-block away. She had left my ring finger bruised to all hell, along with dozens of finger-tip-sized circular bruises all along my forearms from her grasps. My arms looked like bruised apples, only slightly concealed by my tattoos.

My reaction to the attack that night was unexpected, even in retrospect. I was the calmest I’ve ever been in that type of situation. With her standing a few feet away, in our bedroom, I reached for my phone slowly, keeping my eyes fixed on her. Our eye contact didn’t break, like two wild cats staring each other down before a fight to the death. I phoned my mother, who surprisingly answered, and without a single form of expressiveness in my tone, I matter of fact stated “Hi mom. I need you take me very seriously right now. I need to leave; I need to leave right now.” This is the only time I can think of, in my life, where I asked my mother for assistance, and she pulled through in an actually meaningful way. I’ll always be grateful for that, but I’ll also never understand why.

My mother had recently renovated her own apartment, spending some months living in an extended-stay hotel with her pets, including my step-father (see: pets). So, that is where I found myself for the remainder of the year. Me, my two cats, one dog, and every item I owned, in a hotel suite in Midtown East. I felt like Eloise at The Plaza.

By this time, I had started working for Apple. I was making new friends, and was deep in the applesauce, being both very committed to my role, and to growing within the company. This was how I met my future roommate.

Sparkle (not her real name) was a recently terminated co-worker of mine from Apple’s Upper East Side location. We’d worked together for a year or so, her having transferred in from Queens. Shortly after I’d moved into the hotel, Apple had sacked her for what, at the time, seemed very unfair reasoning.

She was weird, but so was I. We bonded over being musical theater kids, and I found her particularly impressive, because she had a truly remarkable singing voice, and had grown up as a cast member in ‘The Lion King’ on Broadway. We became fast friends, meeting for drinks after work frequently, even after she no longer worked at Apple. She was in a secret relationship (secret because he was technically a direct report) with another one of my Apple co-workers. This was not uncommon at Apple – the employees pretty much all live together, fuck each other, socialize as a bubble (from my experience and observations, at least). She referred to him only by nickname, “Templeton,” and much of our hanging out revolved around her lamenting about the dynamics of their never fully-formed relationship. I was nosy, looooooove workplace gossip, and was frankly just glad to have someone who wanted to hang out with me, so I would sit and listen to anything she divulged.

After a few months in the hotel, I was feeling pressure from all directions to find my own place to live. Living in the hotel was triple the cost of an apartment, and while I was making more money at Apple than I ever had before, it was certainly not enough to sustain myself at the hotel long-term. This is when Sparkle and I decided to find a place together.

The red flags were there, glaring and waving right before my eyes, but I dodged underneath each one with a swiftness I can only attribute to naïve optimism, and trust, for my newfound friend. She didn’t have established credit, didn’t have savings for security and first month’s rent, and everyone around me raised their eyebrows with a look, which should have spoken volumes, when I’d tell them Sparkle and I were planning on finding a place to live. She had worked for Apple for about a decade before being fired, and everyone in the market was familiar with her tendencies of being seemingly always surrounded by a weighted air of drama. I was still new, and I’d told myself they just didn’t understand her eccentric nature. Sparkle and I were similar in that way.

One afternoon, on my day off, we met up in Brooklyn to tour a few apartments. Not liking anything we were seeing, we wound up at a winery in Bushwick to regroup, where I was instantly smitten with the bartender who was working there. Moments later, she recognized him, and it turned out they’d gone to high-school together. I left my number on a mailing list card, writing for him to contact me, “if you want to talk about Jesus,” a nod to a joke I no longer remember regarding him and Sparkle’s time in school together (I think he had played Jesus in a school production, and that was the joke). A few days later, I was in the beginnings of a brief, whirlwind romance with said bartender, and Sparkle and I found the apartment above Union Pool. Technically I found it, on StreetEasy. Sparkle wasn’t crazy about the look of the place, but it was cheap for the location, and all it took was a few minutes inside for me to get her to agree, it was the place.

I solely put down three months of rent as deposit, plus first and last month’s rent, and paid both our application fees, just to get us in.

At first, things were mediocre, then progressively got worse.

Sparkle was impossible, at best, to live with. She didn’t want furniture in the living room, because “it causes people to, like… hang out in there,” she didn’t want to let her cat out of her bedroom (yet seemingly never took care of the cat), she never contributed to purchasing shared household items (toilet paper, paper towels, cleaning supplies), she left strange men in the apartment when she went to bar shifts, men whom she had met the night before at the bars she worked at. Maybe five months in, I found out she hadn’t been paying rent for three months.

Things became hostile once I confronted her about her non-payment, and everything exploded after she put Nair in my hair conditioner. By the following Monday, the landlord had evicted her from the property, on the basis that I could file a police report for assault, and Sparkle moved in with her dad in Connecticut (I think, but frankly by that point, I did not give a shit). I agreed to takeover the lease in full, not really knowing how I would afford to do so, but knowing I didn’t want a roommate going forward.

I had a new boyfriend by this point (not the bartender, though I remained in a continuous limerence over him for several years). I had met my future child’s father on Tinder. We went on one date, he came over to my apartment, and simply never left. I didn’t mind this, but I wasn’t necessarily crazy about it either. We weren’t officially living together until Sparkle moved out, but a couple months later he had given up his room in the makeshift 1-bedroom-turned-5-bedroom loft space off the Morgan stop, where he had been living. He paid half the rent, until he didn’t, then I supported both of us. Eventually, a few years later, we became three. This was during COVID lockdown.

By the time our daughter turned one, he was still living with me, but we were separated, and eventually I asked him to get his own place.

You’d think I would have learned my lesson by then, but no – I started allowing my next boyfriend to essentially move in, while continuing to only pay rent at his own place. He was a deeply un-funny comedian, who I’d later find out was hoarding photos of our female friends, in a saved folder on his phone. Unaware of the fact I was committed to a secretive pervert, we spent time hopping to shows together, where either one (or both) of us were on the lineup. And during the times I had my daughter, he stepped in almost instantly to the role of perfectly doting step-dad, excitedly driving me and my one-year-old around Brooklyn; eating with us on outdoor patios, and swinging us on park swings, while I cradled my baby against my chest. The world was beginning to open up again, post-lockdown, and everything seemed to be perfectly settling into place.

The night before the place burned down, my daughter’s father and I were on the phone, going back and forth over if she should come home to me that night, or just crash at her dad’s ‘til morning. She had gotten her second dose of the COVID vaccine that day, and she seemed tired. We agreed on her staying overnight there, and I told him I’d pick her up the next day. That next morning, I woke up in a burning building.

I’d stumbled out of bed with a deep knowing of something not being quite right, opening my eyes to see a single wisp of smoke, caught in the early morning sun, which always poured into the living room of my 2^nd story window. It was oddly cinematic, moving in seemingly slow motion. The sight of this, coupled with the distinct smell of burning toxins seeping through the floorboards, add the thick clouds of smoke I could see out of my windows, it clicked. Fuck! I aggressively shook my boyfriend awake, so he didn’t die, and the firefighters broke a window, helping us both climb out to a ladder and make our way safely to the ground. Bleeding from both feet, standing on the sidewalk, news cameras in every direction I looked, I’d lost my home, and nearly everything inside it.

I don’t know why I look back on 484 Union Ave as my last place of stability, because if you’ve been reading, it was certainly nothing of the sort. The years I spent living there were full of one change after another. From living there with Sparkle, to living there “alone” with several men, to eventually raising a baby there during lockdown, the apartment itself was rarely peaceful. There was almost always another body in the room. Another personality orbiting mine. Another person needing something from me, disappointing me, loving me incorrectly, or quietly rearranging the atmosphere around me.

Yet somehow, in retrospect, I associate that apartment with safety. Maybe because chaos, when sustained long enough, begins to masquerade as structure. Maybe because I had grown so accustomed to living in a constant state of emotional negotiation, that silence itself began to feel… unfamiliar.

My apartment now is the first space I’ve occupied in years which feels entirely mine. No one monitoring me. No one sulking in the next room. No one I’m subconsciously performing for. No man leaving shoes by the door he doesn’t pay for. No girlfriend, or wife, tracking the pitch of my voice for signs of independence. Just me.

Yet it is, without question, the safest I have felt in years.

It is also the loneliest.