This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Zone 2. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
My landlord and I settled our court battle last week, after more than two years. I’d withheld rent over his refusal to make basic repairs and repel the local insect community; he sued for eviction. After much wheel-spinning, we met in the middle and filed our agreement with the housing court on the first day of August. It’s a lot of sweat, and legal bills, and I’ve been thinking about what attaches me to this leaning set of dusty, dingy rooms with vinyl floors whose windows face onto, respectively, a cement factory, a cluster of Verizon cellular transmitters, and a tacky apartment complex whose one redeeming quality, the hunky neighbor who would sometimes do dance workouts with his shirt off, has disappeared.
One reason for my attachment is simple: It’s a cheap apartment, by local standards, and will remain so as long as our rent-stabilization laws hold out against the landlords. Even when I was drawing a paycheck, this felt almost like money in the bank.
But another answer is a little harder to articulate. It has to do with having been, for so long, a custodian. I mean that in a broad sense but also a narrow one, of cleaning: tending a bit at a time to a deep residue of neglect. In the early years I would clean the floors comprehensively every Saturday, with Swiffer and vacuum. This necessitated a whole ritual of rearrangement, a dance of placing the armchair on top of the couch and moving the couch away from the wall and so on, and it would take up a good chunk of every Saturday. When the pandemic came I started to break up these tasks and apportion them throughout the week—using the time freed from my commutes, but also, I think, honoring the space into which so much of life had suddenly poured.
Maybe these little repetitions made the place slightly less of a dump and raised my expectations for it. Maybe the piano’s arrival a few years earlier brought along a more elegant sensibility. But somewhere in there I started thinking it would be nice to have, you know, a front-door lock that locked and windows that closed, and thus commenced the friction with a series of building owners. Today I look around and see a place transformed—because of the objects and devices I have accumulated here to make it look nice and work well, but also because of the way it’s smartened up in its own bones.
I don’t know much about the lives of the previous tenants, but my own feels like the last big piece of this story: not how the shape or contents of the apartment have changed but what plays out here. How and what creation happens here. How and what love happens. I remember long ago standing in what was then my bedroom and starting to unpack my boxes from Los Angeles; and in my perception there’s a sadness or a loss suspended in the light of that early fall. The goal, conceived and carried gently, is to leave something else behind.
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