Babbling Brooklyn

A Difficult November (part two)

It got to January, and I didn’t even finish writing about November. I guess that’s how little I wanted to blog about how what happened next. So i’ll keep it brief.

After 13 months, we finally got our day in court with that bastard landlord who welcomed us so graciously to these distant shores. We’d already been to court for this twice this year. The first time he said that he was filing a counterclaim so the hearing was postponed. The second time the counterclaim was not mentioned, but he said that he had three witnesses, none of whom were able to make it. The judge agreed to postpone, but said that was his last chance.

In between these times we did our best to subpoena the NYPD for any record of the incident that promted our swift exit from that apartment: this included visits to several precincts, multiple phone calls to different departments of the NYPD and several trips to small claims court and other goverment buildings. We even paid someone $50 to go to Queens and find one of the attending officers to serve the subpoena personally. Apparently the officer refused the subpoena as though it was diseased. A lawyer friend gave us some phone numbers to try at NYPD HQ, but no one knew who could help. Eventually we just ran out of time

The third and final time we went to court, the landlord did bring one “witness” - his mother, who, just to be clear, was not present at the decisive incident. (Presumably he brought her as a character witness - I guess his mother is the only person he could find who likes him.) Again, he tried to postpone, again claiming that his two other witnesses couldn’t make it. He was flabbergasted when the judge refused.

So we went to meet a clerk, who spoke to us both separately. When I told him how Steph and I had just arrived from England, and we were young and stupid and desperate he just gave a wry smile and said: “Welcome to New York”. Then we went to a court attorney who acted as a mediator for us to come to a settlement figure. I suggested a carefully calculated figure that I believed that we were owed based on the number of days we spent in that apartment; he just pulled some figure out of his ass, less than a quarter of mine. I asked him how he arrived at that figure, and he said he that it had taken him three months to fill the room we vacated, and also that I personally owed him the $600 to cover the cost of the ambulance ride that fateful night - apparently the cops deemed his condition so extreme that it was necessary for him to go to a hospital.

Speaking to me alone, the court attorney said that she was sympathetic to our case, and said that we could postpone again and go to a real court hearing but she told us that without proof of why we had moved out we might get even less - it was just our word against his. By this point, I was hungry, tired, dehydrated and I just wanted it to be over. I conjured Steph’s advice in my mind, and decided to settle. We walked away with $635 dollars; I was owed $2000.

As for my other housemates, Amy got her full $600 back, and Kristen got $1240. Kristen had actually claimed for a total of $4800 - this covered her deposit and the price of the fumigation of her possessions after we got bed bugs. She shouldered the financial and emotional burden of this whole episode alone: at least Steph and I can split the damage. 

In the weeks after us moving out of that flat and trying to get back some stability, I received a letter from the producer of the People’s Court TV show. They wanted to film us debate our case for entertainment purposes. In return for appearing on the show, both parties would receive a minimum of $500, and as it was a legally binding court, were we successful we would also get the money that we were owed. Looking back now, it might have been a better option - probably quicker, just as financially rewarding and would make for a story that I could tell at dinner parties for years to come. As it is, this is one blog post that I never want to read again.

I can take from this incident some important lessons, the largest one being that the NYPD is the most useless organisation I have ever come across, and that I never want to deal with them again. I’ve also learnt that a fixation with saving money will only bring misery, and that when it comes to the crazy people of this world there is no smoke without fire.

A Difficult November (part one)

Of the many eccentrics wandering up and down the high street of the town where I grew up, there was one strange old man who has been in my mind a lot recently. He had a very severe hunch and a strange bobbing walk, and used to mutter to himself one phrase over and over: “It’s been a very difficult November”. You could ask him any question at any time of the year (and as a precocious young man, I often would) and he would always reply with those same words. I always wondered what had happened in the November that was occuring, or had just occurred, in his mind; and how he had found himself stuck in perpetually for the rest of his life? I wondered if it was some tragedy so severe that he had never moved on, his sense of time gave up and the difficulties he’d faced seemed forever like they’d been just last month.

After the glorious free vacation that Hurricane Sandy blessed me with at the end of October, karma came back around to haunt me. I had my own difficult November. It started with a bicycle; a bicycle I’d bought to take me on that self-same trip through blacked out Manhattan that I wrote about previously. A bicycle I’d been saving up for since buying Steph’s ring; a bicycle I knew I would use every day. I haven’t owned a brand new bicycle since I was 13 years old, I’ve just struggled with hand me downs, and second hand purchases that require constant maintenance. A bicycle that is fitted for you and in full working order is a real thing of beauty, a machine that can open up a city - change your commute from one of darkened tunnels and crowded tubes to one of solo flights across bridges, over rivers and through cloudless skies. I used to emerge at my work from a tunnel, as a rat; for just two and a half weeks I glided in as a bird.

One night, coming off the Manhattan Bridge into DUMBO at around midnight, I heard from behind me “dum-dum-dananaaaaaaaa-na” - the immortal and unmistakeable opening bar of the Beatles’ Come Together. I turned to see a large bald man, wearing a full length black fur coat riding next to me on a rickety old Specialized mountain bike. In place of panniers, he had strapped large computer speakers to the rear rack of his bike, and was blasting music into the cold Brooklyn night. I smiled at him, and he just nodded, like “Yeah, I know”.

I let him pass and then quickly dropped a gear and pulled into his slipstream, catching the full cloud of music that he was leaving behind. I rode behind him for a good mile or two up Flushing Avenue all the way to my block, singing along heartily to myself. As I turned on to Taaffe Place, he continued his journey towards Bushwick, and I heard the opening harmonies of Eleanor Rigby disappear into the dark.

It was a glorious few minutes, gifted to me by the sheer fact of owning a bicycle. But then a few days later, New York, in it’s infinite brutality, brought me crashing back down.

Here’s my top tip for owning a bicycle in New York City: own two. Own one that you love, and never leave it locked up outside: keep it in your apartment, or on the bike rack in your office and absolutely no where else. Own one more, with a single gear, and a shitty frame and use that for your trips to the store, to the bar, or to a subway stop on a dark street at 10pm on a Saturday night. Tip two: don’t lock it up outside that subway stop to a pole with a parking sign on top: a parking sign that can be removed in seconds by an opportunist with a spanner. Tip three: don’t be surprised when you return to find that the beautiful bike that you have owned for less than three weeks is gone, leaving you to walk through the early winter dawn, still half drunk, loathing the city you thought was your home.

Come on Eileen!

NYLON

“If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.”

― Peter Shaffer

Bring Sunny’s Home

After the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, Sunny’s Bar is having a Kickstarter campaign to get itself up and running again. Regular readers of this blog will know why this place is so important, to me, to Steph and to Red Hook and all of Brooklyn. So if you’re stuck for a Christmas present idea for me, feel free to donate instead. Weren’t gonna get me a Christmas present? Donate on your own behalf, and when you next come visit, I’ll take you there and show you why you did the right thing.

Check out the link here for information on how to get involved:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/532302555/bring-sunnys-back-home