illustration by Jameson Currier

My Glamorous Life

by Jameson Currier

(2017) This week the toilet in my apartment is annoying me. It has decided to whine after a period of non-use, as if the water in the pipes has dried up and disappeared and been replaced by a thin stream of air, as though someone were blowing across a blade of grass to make an irritating whining whistling sound that will not stop. My toilet only seems to make this whistling whine in the early morning hours when I am trying to get those last thirty to sixty minutes of sleep and even putting a pillow over my head won’t prevent me from hearing the sound. Everyone thinks that because I live in Manhattan that I have a glamorous life, but it is far from that, aside from the dysfunctional and stressful day job, my apartment is a steady stream of terror. The apartment had just been renovated before I moved into it almost twenty years ago to the day the toilet began whining whistling and I could still smell the paint on the walls and the varnish on the wood trim. Even though it was more than I could afford at the time, I thought it was glamorous and special, because it was all mine after a nasty breakup with a boyfriend who pretended to be a wanna-be partner. Those early days in this apartment seem almost idyllic—I had just entered my forties—and the baffling quirks of the building—such as the door buzzer beeping on its own after five p.m. until early morning—only seemed like the Chinese water torture I had to endure as a city dweller because the sound reverberated through the hallways and into my inner ear canal, preventing me from a restful night’s sleep. That particular mistreatment from city life was easily curable with a white noise machine and eventually someone figured out that the wiring on the front door had to be replaced, but then the rats showed up in my apartment, one after the next, rummaging through the garbage bags in the kitchen or sauntering across my feet while I was watching TV as though they were pets. I bought glue traps that caught a few of them and then small plastic boxes that lured them inside with cheese or bits of potato chips and electrocuted them, but tossing them out in the garbage on the street never seemed to remove the agitation that another one would appear to haunt and terrorize me, because the building was infested with them because the food cart street vendors parked their carts in an alleyway beneath my window, which made the rats climb up and down the walls of buildings. I could hear the walls buckle as they slipped through cracks, hear them scratching at the pipes and trying to dig new routes into my apartment. But I took the advice of another friend who had a cockroach problem and went around and sealed every crevice I could find in my apartment with steel wool and that stopped the rats from pretending they were my pets, until the day a Con Edison worker snapped the gas line under the street which lead into my building and our gas was turned off and then the super informed me that in order to turn the gas back on the pipes in the building had to be replaced because they were not up to code. My building is a small one, barely noticeably on an unfashionable street in the fashion district, built in 1900 and only five stories tall with eight apartments in total and the pipes and wires are a mishmash of messy patch jobs by unprofessionally trained workmen decade after decade. My neighbors across the hall have been in the building so long and have refused every upgrade and renovation offered that their bathroom is still outside of their apartment in the hallway and their bathroom door is next to my front door, and so every day and all night long I hear them locking and unlocking and slamming their doors. But this rant is not about that annoyance because I’ve grown accustomed to it and I was sidetracked from my tales of the broken gas lines and the return of the rats. (Yes, they were rats, not mice; every New Yorker knows the difference, especially when you encounter the really giant rants scurrying across your path on your street on your way home late at night.) Replacing the gas line meant installing new ones, not ripping out the old ones, so every apartment had to be retrofitted with new pipes, which meant drilling through the floorings and ceilings so that rats now had total access and connections to every apartment so that they could haunt and terrorize every tenant in the building. When I got the new gas line in my apartment, my stove had to be relocated six inches away from the wall to accommodate the gas line and the tin box which was installed to cover the new pipes and which to this day continues to collect rain water inside that drips down from the puddles on the roof through the ceilings and floors because the pipes were so poorly installed. When the Con Edison worker came to my apartment to turn the gas back on I told him I only wanted the gas on the stove top turned on, not the gas in the oven, because one year when I got the foolish urge to broil a steak in the bottom compartment of my stove, the steak ignited and charred the back wall of the kitchen and since that back wall is only flimsy gypsum board I thought my apartment was on fire, and I didn’t want a repeat of that. After the Con Edison work was finished I was terrorized by only one rat and once he was trapped and dead and gone and enough time had passed, so did the fear of encountering another one. But the relocation of the stove six inches from the back wall of the kitchen and the tin box which covered the gas pipes also meant that the stove now partially blocked access to the window sill of my kitchen window where the fire escape was located outside the building. When I first moved into the apartment I discovered that the window locks didn’t work and that anyone on the outside of the building could slide them open. Having had several burglaries at several other apartments I had lived in in Manhattan, I quickly devised a way for the windows to lock by bolting them with adjusting tension steel poles, which still remain in place twenty years later, despite the years when water used to seep through the walls when it rained because the pointing between the bricks on the exterior building had decayed and disappeared. At the time this was happening I tried to glamourize this, thinking that perhaps this was what it was like living in Venice and not an expensive apartment in midtown Manhattan, where every wall had artistic water stains but that silly idea disappeared when the window sill collapsed and I was suddenly plagued by stench and giant house flies that I would have to chase and flatten against the walls and then spray with bleach to remove the blood stains. One year after a near hurricane ripped through the city and the limbs of the tree in the courtyard behind my building cracked the outer glass pane of my storm window, I thought I might make a list of things that were unsatisfactory in the apartment and present it to the landlord, such as the wall with the electrical outlets without any electrical wiring and the closet rod which collapses whenever I hang up any clothes on it and, of course, the windows that didn’t lock and the recently cracked one, but the only thing I ever really ended up demanding from my landlord was a new front door to replace the one the New York Fire department damaged the night they broke into my apartment because the pipes in my bathroom froze and burst and water was flooding my downstairs neighbor’s apartment and the art gallery located on the ground floor. My first winter in the apartment the pipes to my bathroom sink froze, but it was a confusing blur to understand because the super we had then didn’t speak English and I thought the water had been shut off and the pipes did not burst. Winters are always miserable in my apartment because of the uncontrollable amount of steam heat that radiates from floor to ceiling risers that are in the oddest locations in my apartment (including one in a closet). I seldom turn on my radiator because the temperature of the steam risers keep the rooms miserably overheated, and in those early years I lived in this apartment I had to devise ways to smother or deflect the excessive heat, by wrapping tape and towels around the risers or blocking them off with bookcases and learning to keep my windows open and the air conditioner running in winter. One year the steam riser in the apartment on the top floor burst and the water flooded and cascaded through all the apartments below and water was trapped in the glass globe covering of my kitchen ceiling light and I made the super show up to my apartment and clean it out and repair it because I wasn’t about to be electrocuted by flipping on a switch, and even though the risers were eventually repaired, I still have buckling in my ceiling at the joints where the water found its way out of the light fixture and into the beams and then dripping to my floor. But then there was a winter where every day the temperature was only a single digit and the steam heat was only a dribble and I couldn’t stay warm at night, even with a lot of layers of clothing and blankets and an electric space heater, so one night I had had enough of the bitter cold and I booked a room in the hotel across the street, just to get a good night’s sleep, something I had never ever had to do. The next morning when I was returning home I saw my super in front of my building and he told me about my bathroom pipes freezing and bursting and flooding the other floors, and how the Fire Department had chopped down my front door to cut off the water supply. The super told me the firemen had sealed my front door and I would have to climb in through the fire escape window, but I told him that was impossible unless the firemen had removed the tension rod that bolted to window panes together, and so he helped me jimmy the front door open. My apartment was not as much of a disaster as I thought it would be but the inconvenience of no longer having a working bathroom and the repairs that had to be made made me more miserable than the continual cold which didn’t go away. I know there are plenty of people in the world who are way more bad off than I am and why should I be complaining so much and I am not ungrateful, thankful to have a roof over my head whether it leaks or not, and thankful that my apartment is so tiny there is no way I can harbor out-of-town friends overnight, but my apartment is seldom a sanctuary, particularly since my bathroom has seen considerable damages in the twenty years I have lived in this apartment, which is another reason why the whining whistling toilet is so irritating. For years I suffered through sporadic leaks through my bathroom ceiling in an area just above the shower knobs, usually starting and stopping when my upstairs neighbor was showering. Sometimes the leaks would stop and dry up and other times the leaks would continue throughout the day or night and I would return home from work or wake up in the morning and see that a portion of the ceiling had collapsed. It would take days and weeks and months for the super and the building management to address this, in part, because they always had to schedule around when my upstairs neighbor was at home, and after so many days a wet ceiling begins to spread mold and I would furiously spray bleach and cleaners to keep my sanity and health intact. Just as my kitchen ceiling bears its scars, so does my bathroom ceiling and walls—one year the leaks were so bad the inset bathroom cabinet had to be removed and it was never replaced, just covered over by plaster board and paint that did not match the rest of the color of the wall–and no matter how many times the ceiling and walls are fixed and repaired and painted, the water pipes in this area of my bathroom still continue to leak and cause mold. But since I am complaining about the horrors of my bathroom, I should also spend a moment explaining about the pigeons, because this spring the pigeon problem was finally solved and which is why the whining toilet has become so infuriating. On the wall above my shower, just where the leaks from the ceiling are, is an open air shaft that leads through the wall to an alley that serves as ventilation for the interior and exterior apartment bathrooms in the building. The shaft in my bathroom is covered by a white painted metal grill, which when it was initially installed I was able to open and close the slatted vents so that air could come in and out of the bathroom through the shaft, not that I ever wanted to have any air coming in from the shaft because in my opinion that shaft harbored every nasty microbe in the city you could possibly find. Pigeons have free flight through the alley so they settled inside the bathroom shafts and have built nests there, year after year after year, each generation telling the next one about the beauty and comfort of my shaft, despite my many attempts to beat them and frighten them away. It’s not the nests that are so disturbing, although one year a pigeon got stuck in the spaces between the walls and flounced and flounced and struggled day after day trying to break free and finally died and turned into a rancid smell and which brought out the giant house flies and chases and swats and the bleaching blood off the walls—no, the most annoying thing about the pigeons nesting in the shaft are the deep throated chirps and clucks which let the other pigeons know where they are and which echo through the shaft and into the bathroom and into my inner ear canal, usually when I am trying to sleep those last thirty or sixty minutes in the morning or trying to concentrate on reading or writing. The bleating chirping sound is so loud and disruptive, that I am forced to stop whatever I am doing and go into the bathroom and rattle a flattened out wire hanger that I have thrust through the twisted metal grate of the vent and into the shaft to scare them away. But the pigeons always return because that is where their nest is but finally, finally, after many many complaints, this year the super installed chicken wire in the shafts and the pigeons no longer nest there, which is another reason why the whining whistling toilet is so bothersome because I had finally been rid of the clucking birds. Even as I write this I yearn for the more idyllic days when it was only my downstairs neighbor’s tiny dog with the big annoying barks bothering my concentration. But now I sit here thinking how do I explain a whining toilet to my super, not that I have to do so with any haste, because as I was checking my mailbox last night in the building lobby, I noticed a handwritten sign saying he was on vacation. He’s probably off to some island in the Caribbean while I worry about my bathroom. I’d take the lid off my toilet and try to fix it myself except for the giant, and I mean giant, insect I saw floating dead in the water bowl one morning a few weeks ago and I fear that if I open the lid I might only encounter more of them, so I am only doing what any intrepid New Yorker would do—flush, flush, and flush again, hoping it might just go away on its own.

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“My Glamorous Life” was begun in 2005 and revised in 2017. The illustration was created in 2023.