Happy Accidents

The roughness of New York City’s streets seeped in everywhere. At that first sublet, my Chinese roommate had invited home some guys who were rumored to be connected to the Chinese Mafia, and they ended up ransacking the place. Another time, a friend of mine named John brought a trick home, and after I’d left for work and John was passed out, the guy rummaged through my stuff, took some cash and my boom box, and for some reason cut the sleeves off my sweatshirts.

Then there was my roommate in Chelsea. He and I shared bunk beds, and late one night he came into the bedroom all excited. “Hey, Jane,” he said, “I just got four hundred bucks for giving a guy a blow job!”

Wide-eyed and shocked, trying not to look like a Midwestern bumpkin, I just smiled and said, “Hey, that’s more than I make in two weeks!”

THE WHOLE TIME I WAS IN NEW YORK, I DRANK NON- stop, gained weight, and felt unsafe everywhere I went. Everything about the city felt hostile to me; it was as if New York itself were screaming, “Get out!”

The Duplex was the only place I was happy. During prime evening hours, the regulars, all of them Broadway musical theater performers, either chorus members or understudies, performed. They were fantastic singers, and I envied how close they were, how witty. I wanted to be one of them.

By around 4 A.M. I’d finally get my chance at the mike. With no awareness of the irony, I chose “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” as my signature song. It massaged my soul to warble it (drunkenly, I’m sure). Then the bar would close, and I’d stumble home to wherever I happened to be living that week.

One night, about nine months after I’d moved to New York, I was fast asleep in a big apartment in Brooklyn that housed an unknown number of other roommates, when two of them came home, drunk. They stumbled into the apartment and turned all the lights on, yelling, “Get out! Get out of here!” Startled by the shouting, I emerged from the bedroom, bleary-eyed, and freaked out.

“Get the fuck out, bitch!” one of them yelled. “Now!” They obviously were not good with my living there.

“But I have no place to go!” I said, panicking. I didn’t know anyone in Brooklyn. I didn’t even know where to catch the subway. This was my fifth sublet in nine months, but my first in Brooklyn—which in the mid-eighties wasn’t the charmingly gentrified place it is today. It felt scary and dangerous, like a no-man’s-land. I was always worried about my physical safety in New York, so putting me out on the street in Brooklyn at three in the morning might have killed me from fright, if nothing else.

The guys kept yelling, and I kept begging not to be thrown out, and eventually they stumbled drunkenly back out the door. It was the cherry on top of the horrible sundae that was New York for me.

The next morning, I got up, dressed for work, and walked to the subway to catch my train. Somewhere between Brooklyn and Midtown, I started feeling sharp pains in my stomach, like I had food poisoning. By the time I got to my stop at 50th Street, it was so bad I was doubled over.

I walked to Glick & Lorwin, but because I was early as usual, no one was there. I didn’t have a key to the office, so I just sat down on a box of paper outside the door, slumped over in pain. I thought my appendix might have burst, so I straggled back to the subway and got on a train heading for the Village, where St. Vincent’s Hospital was.

On the train, hunched over in the worst pain of my life, I suddenly thought, I have to leave New York. I have to get out of here. And my stomach relaxed. I got to 14th Street, stood up, and thought, I’m all right. The pain was gone.

I took the subway straight back to Brooklyn, packed up my two suitcases, and called my mom. “I’m coming home,” I told her. I would miss Boris and Ira (who acted like they were mad at me for leaving and wouldn’t make eye contact). But I couldn’t wait to get back home.

5

The Call of Comedy

I WAS NOW TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD WHEN I WENT back home to Dolton, back to the house where I grew up, on Sunset Drive. When I walked into my old bedroom, still with its green-and-yellow shag carpeting and bedspread, there was a big “Welcome Home Jane!” banner, with balloons and everything. I turned to my mom and, half-joking, half-serious, exclaimed, “You can go home again!”

Mom was happy to have me home as well. “Look, Jane— I organized your books,” she said, waving her hand at the shelves.

“By author or title?” I asked.

“By height.” And there they were, perfectly arranged from smallest to tallest.

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