One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Mira Stout

my life before Hong-do’s departure. In my efforts to become a painter – and live in Manhattan – my life had become an undignified scramble for dry ground. I spent much of my time collecting cardboard boxes to move house with. Reasons for moving were various and unexciting: rent-hikes, lease-violations, buildings going co-op, and roommates like Ted, at West One Hundredth Street.

      Ted was perhaps no better nor worse than you’d expect from a New York roommate. Ted had a honking Connecticut voice, and was a former Fly Club treasurer at Harvard, possessing the strange ability to bounce cheques selectively: rent and utilities cheques failing to clear, while extravagant entertainment and wardrobe bills found deep, instant funds. Ted stole your spaghetti sauce and lowered the tone of the bathroom with his depressing litres of bargain shampoo and generic deodorant. Pip, Alice and I were obliged to take numerous phone messages for Ted from The Hair Club for Men (where, at only twenty-four, he elected to go for weekly hair implants) and then struggle to pretend that we didn’t notice anything strange about the sudden presence of oddly-tinted brown hairs which appeared on his pate on alternate Thursdays. Unfortunately for us, this did not prevent him from attracting a girlfriend called Pierce; a law student with an aggressive laugh, who left items of clothing draped on the living-room furniture to signal her presence like a cat spraying its turf. But Ted’s most challenging habit was his nude sleepwalking. Fully clothed, Ted was irritating enough, but Ted entering my room late at night, buck naked, and climbing into my bed was pretty much the last straw. He would also make regular late-night sojourns into the kitchen when we were talking, and urinate into the refrigerator.

      It was unfortunate that Ted’s name was on the lease. Although the unsolved murders of three young women on the rooftop of the building next-door cast an eerie menace over the block, and the peeling mustard-coloured paint, and tumbleweed dustballs in the corridor were slightly dispiriting, the apartment’s high ceilings, parquet floors, and wrought-iron balconies lent my existence a spurious graciousness that I appreciated very much at the time.

      Sight unseen, I moved in to my next place on a searing August afternoon during a sanitation-workers’ strike, my belongings fitting into just two checker-cab trips. It was a sixth-floor walk-up on MacDougal Street, illegally sublet from a vacationing friend’s boyfriend. The strike was a bad omen: an almighty stench of food, cooked and rotting, hit me like a damp wall upon quitting the taxi; great banks of black plastic garbage bags were shored up generously on both sides of the street, shimmering in the heat. Up and down the block, an espresso bar, shish-kebab house, hot-dog-calzone-and-pizza stand, veggie-burger cart, sushi vendor and felafel emporium made MacDougal Street a sort of United Nations of fast food, whose dependence on the city’s sanitation workers was total.

      I shared this apartment with Mona, a timid garment-district secretary from Belchertown, Massachusetts, her two neurotic long-haired cats, Mick and Mike, and a medical student, Ethan, who proudly told me on our first meeting that his father was the actor in the famous double-edged razor television commercials during the seventies.

      The apartment’s subtly crippled appearance was owed to Delia’s vacationing boyfriend being something of an amateur carpenter. Interior walls were makeshift partitions he had enterprisingly nailed together late at night, apparently under the influence of hard drugs. The sturdiness of his carpentry was such that the cats could – and did – enter my bedroom by hurling themselves against the closed door at a gallop, whereupon they would lie down and moult on my pillow.

      As it was summer, one didn’t mind that the frightening-looking gas stove was broken, but the bathroom arrangements were more testing. There was nothing as definite as a door to this bathroom; merely a friendly, cat-hairy, Indian bedspread thumbtacked to the doorframe, adding a certain anxiety to one’s activities therein. The superintendent had pledged to fix the plumbing, but in the meantime, toilet-flushing involved two trips to the kitchen tap with a bucket. Turning on the shower required the assistance of a pair of pliers. Once activated successfully, the exuberant shower-spray kept Mick and Mike’s kitty-litter tray in a continuous state of deliquescence.

      When I think of MacDougal Street, I remember the inescapable melancholy of three ill-suited people sharing a small space, and the overwhelming smell of felafel. The airduct of the Middle Eastern restaurant downstairs expelled its kitchen fumes directly outside my bedroom window, which in August had to be permanently thrown open. I awoke in the mornings lightly coated in a dew of congealed felafel exhalation and cat-hair, provoking frequent bad-tempered battles with the shower-pliers.

      That August it was too hot to paint in the studio, so sweltering free weekends were spent at friends’ summer places on Fisher’s Island and in Bridgehampton, or eating cherry Italian ices near the spray of the fountain in Washington Square Park, avoiding my flatmates. I spent many evenings at Laura’s, seated directly in the path of her electric fan, drinking cold beer and listening to the sound of other people’s stereos drifting in the stale night air.

      I was grateful to my friend Delia for helping me out with a quick sublet, but having exhausted the charms of MacDougal Street, it was now time to move on. Laura, possessing a compassionate nature, agreed to split the rent with me, temporarily, on her studio apartment on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue.

      Our narrow, sooty tenement was positioned sensitively between a transvestite brothel and a funeral parlour. Laura had a bed in the living room, while I slept on a glorified shelf above a wardrobe, accessible by ladder. Being New York, it wasn’t even cheap. I also had to pay rent on a shared painting studio in the meat-packing district above the Hellfire Club, which I used on weekends and odd evenings. To keep up these two shelters, I held a full-time job uptown, with an antiquarian bookseller.

      

      In the mornings at nine-fifteen I took the crowded subway uptown to Fifty-ninth and Lexington, stopped in at Frankie’s for my styrofoamed coffee and salt-bagel with cream cheese, and entered a modest doormanned building with my grease-spotted paper bag.

      Through the bronze elevator doors awaited Oliver’s morocco-lined apartment, alias Cadogan Books, steaming with the force of three leather-preserving humidifiers. I let myself in with a key, and generally found Oliver, ruddy-faced, in a dark suit, tie, and half-lenses, sitting at the kitchen table sourly consuming a bowl of Frosted Flakes. He would be depressed about the uselessness of his life, occasioned by having spent another evening escorting a Mayflower matron to a dull gala at the Met.

      Being a handsome, albeit impecunious Englishman of leisure, Oliver Flood was popular with various Pamelas, Aprils and Brookes. Although he felt himself well above being a walker, he was quite unable to refuse invitations, however repulsive he found them. Newly divorced, he was flattered by any reasonable attention, and admitted to being rather lonely.

      After our usual morning banter, I would sit down at an elegant mahogany desk and attend first to the opening of Oliver’s mail, which he could not countenance without a human shock absorber. Sometimes plastic charge cards arrived snipped in two. Oliver confronted the arrival of credit card statements with the ritual of cowering in the kitchen doorway, half-lenses glinting, grunting softly, like an anxious primate. When the bill was very high, he hopped painfully from foot to foot, as if standing on hot coals.

      Then began the grinding, circumlocutory task of updating the Cadogan Books mailing list and card catalogue. With a sense of hopelessness, I typed and retyped on index cards the names of cautious collectors, second-hand bookshop-owners, and changing department-heads of a number of universities and their often peevish and grand librarians (to whom I had already written) to try to sell off some rare volume, but Oliver’s books were usually too rare or too common to tempt the holders of these immensely fat-budgeted university funds. Meanwhile, Cadogan Books limped along, each day a little closer to bankruptcy.

      Occasionally someone – Mrs Doris L. Vinehopper, for example, of 21 Mashpee Drive, Winnetka, Illinois 90987 – would mail-order two 1930’s editions of Omar Kháyyam’s Rubáiyát, and the fulfilment of Mrs Vinehopper’s desire would occupy the rest of the morning, dragged out with the aid of two further cups of coffee.

      The ritual of preparing the books for their journey to 21 Mashpee Drive lent a sense of purpose to my otherwise aimless days at Cadogan Books, and kept the mind from wandering to the unpleasant reality that one was not doing any