Todd Pruzan – on his new apartment.

Brooklyn, New York
December 1, 2000

Jason, hey.

This morning I went to visit my new $1,187.18 apartment. There: I’ve answered your first question. $1,187.18 a month. Your next questions – location, dimension – might be addressed in a classified ad like this: “1BR N Slope best block, b/stone, w/f, light, steps to park, shopping, 2,3,D,Q $1187.18.” Next: How on earth did someone calculate a figure of $1,187.18? Local rent-stabilization laws are the culprit and the benefactor of such a cheap, if peculiar, sum. But $1,187.18 is enough money to freak me out, because although I won’t move in until this weekend, my lease started the first day of November, several days before I even knew the apartment existed, so really, I’ve been tossing $1,187.18 out the window while I stewed for the final month in my cramped $999.60 apartment (also rent-stabilized) a few blocks down the Slope. If you lived in Brooklyn instead of Chapel Hill, you might have seen me last weekend pacing between the $999.60 apartment and the $1,187.18 apartment with a measuring tape, trying to calculate how my sofa can squeeze out of one and into the other.

The $999.60 apartment, needless to say, wouldn’t be worth $999.60 outside New York. In the real world, it would be more like $99.60. The radiator above my entire collection of hardback books leaked shortly after I moved in; I was lucky enough to be home in time to react. Hot silty water recently gurgled up into my bathtub through the drain. An insane man swears at the top of his lungs outside my window at 5 o’clock in the morning. My next-door neighbor’s shrieking avian giggle pierces my bedroom wall as though it were foamcore; she stays up until 3 a.m., playing the only two ghastly songs from Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue – that one with Natalie Merchant, and the one that comes right after it – on endless repeat. Once she asked me if her music is too loud, and I lied, and I’ve been kicking myself for months.

You never got to see my last apartment in Chicago, the $950 two-bedroom palace that was twice as big as the $1,187.18 one-bedroom I’m about to move into. Your place in North Carolina sounds like a nice lodge in the woods; a pal of mine further south pays $300 a month for what sounds like the top floor of a tiny resort. In Baltimore, in Pittsburgh, in Denver, my $1,187.18 apartment would probably cost me, like, $500; $1,187.18 in these cities would land me in a roomy high-rise penthouse with central air and a gym that I might feel guilty enough to use.

In New York City, and even in Brooklyn, the injury of paying mad cash for a place that’s too old and small and crappy is the stuff of eye-rolling cliché, but I rarely hear anyone talk about the crowning insult: the artificial, superfluous economic construct – a shakedown, really, as though mandated by the Sopranos: the broker fee. Real-estate brokers hog all the real-estate listings and show all the apartments and collect extortionate gratuities for doing so, typically amounting to thousands of dollars, demanded upfront, from people who can’t afford to pay them. And the brokers’ offices are amazing, like a Mamet play with a hangover. One recent Saturday, I filled out rental applications in eighteen brokers’ offices, and seventeen of the offices did not contain a single computer – just three-ring binders crammed with rumpled, hole-punched photocopies of listings. B. Corp., the agency that demanded the highest broker fee I saw, was also the worst-appointed, crackling with pager noise like a cab dispatcher, and beholden to a single primitive cordless phone shaped like a package of lightbulbs that gets passed among its four wobbly antique desks, which must have been built, for children, at least seventy years ago.

The broker’s fee is a grave insult, but others do pile up: “Would you consider living in Bay Ridge instead of Park Slope?” (No.) “Have you given any thought to renting a studio instead of a one-bedroom?” (No.) “Well, for that kind of rent, I’d really want to see you pull up your salary a bit.” (You and me both, fuckface.) And here’s what’s weird: I tend to turn down brokers I like and fork over thousands of dollars to brokers I detest. A month ago, D., a nice kid my age, a stage actor with a stalled career and a dashboard piled high with parking tickets, showed me three apartments that didn’t grab me by the shirt. But two years ago, when I was having second thoughts about taking the $999.60 apartment, the broker, E., stuck her finger in my face and declared, “Y’know, Todd, I don’t like getting fucked around with.” By then, I was tired of looking, and afraid of losing the only apartment I could afford, so I caved.

Three weeks ago, the Sunday morning of the New York Marathon, I made a whimsical call to B. Corp. about an apartment in the paper, and at the B. Corp. office an hour later, I ran into – total, bizarre, Paul Auster-style coincidence – my friend S. She’d had her back to me, and when I spoke to a broker about my appointment, she turned around and said, “Todd!” Now, I’ve seen a lot of S. since she moved here three months ago, but I hadn’t expected to run into her at a broker’s office. “I had a pretty traumatic night last night,” she said, which I think was a sort-of apology for not getting back to me about maybe hanging out the night before. S. was living in a friend’s vacant room, but the friend is moving out, and the landlord, S. told me, won’t let her take on a roommate. S. hadn’t figured on playing broker poker, and she seemed flustered already, so when it became apparent to me that she hadn’t yet realized that B. Corp. demands 15 percent of a year’s rent plus three months’ rent as a condition of acquiring the keys and the lease, I just hugged her and kept the awful knowledge to myself.

I was shown to the $1,187.18 apartment. I liked the $1,187.18 apartment. I could not believe the $1,187.18 apartment cost only $1,187.18 a month. While I was looking at the $1,187.18 apartment, the buzzer sounded, and some guy who’d seen the $1,187.18 apartment the day before suddenly wanted to see the $1,187.18 apartment again. The broker told him he would have to return to his broker – a different broker – and make another appointment to see the $1,187.18 apartment. The broker shook his head and mused that I would kick myself if I didn’t put down a $1,187.18 cash deposit, right now, on the $1,187.18 apartment. He assured me that the $1,187.18 apartment would not stay on the market for more than a couple hours, tops. He confided that the smaller apartment next to it – also a bargain – would cost its tenant $1,575 a month.

I said: “Let’s play ball.”

We returned to B. Corp., and I filled out a dozen forms, and I handed over $25 for a credit check and some bank statements and pay stubs that would prove I was good for $1,187.18 a month. And then, suddenly, magically, I had to find $1,187.18 in cash.

I would not advise you to put a deposit on a New York apartment on a Sunday – unless you keep thousands of dollars hidden in a coffee can nailed to the floor of your closet – because an ATM will not cough up $1,187.18 in cash to cover a security deposit. The machine I went to shuffled out forty $20 bills and stopped, advising me curtly that I had reached my limit for the day. I tried engaging a second ATM to score an additional $387.18 but could not fool it into feeding my broker-poker habit. I spent an hour casing Park Slope’s downscale blocks, searching for an open check-cashing office, before I gave up and called my brother away from a brunch in the East Village, so he could lend me enough smash to cover the deposit before B. Corp. closed at six.

The next morning, my application was accepted. I nearly didn’t get the $1,187.18 apartment, a smug B. Corp. broker told me when I stopped by the office. I only got the $1,187.18 apartment because a rival suitor could not cross Fourth Avenue, where the New York City Marathon was in progress, after he’d come out of the subway. While he was stuck watching the race, I was inspecting the $1,187.18 apartment. If not for the marathon, the $1,187.18 apartment would be his. I considered this. I told the B. Corp. broker that I felt bad. I was lying. I felt terrific, even though I was forking over nearly the entire contents of my bank account – $1,187.18, for the first month’s rent, plus the broker’s fee: $2,136.

Tuesday morning, I got some bad news: I was still $1,187.18 short. B. Corp., it seems, had forgotten to shake me down for the final month’s rent; they wanted three months, not two. I could, and did, cover $2,374.36 in rent, but I could not handle $3,561.54. In a panic, I phoned my dad, whose monetary gifts I have always taken great pride in declining, and begged him to wire me enough smash to let me finish my application for the $1,187.18 apartment. He was pleased to help. I wrote another cashier’s check.

In three days, I spent $5,722.54 in cash to rent my $1,187.18 apartment, where I am not yet living. I now have a lease, and I have some keys. I don’t like to think about how broke I would be if I had had to pay for an apartment renting at market rate, in the $1,800 range, which I obviously can’t afford. But I think you’ll like this place when you see it. The first time I went to see the $1,187.18 apartment, two weeks ago, there was a man working in my bathtub, scraping and sanding and scrubbing; he spoke no English, and I speak no Croatian, so I didn’t poke around too much, but I was pleased to see that I was already getting some work put into the $1,187.18 apartment. I still have never noticed whether my bedroom has a door, and I don’t know how many square feet I’m getting for my $1,187.18.

S. is moving into her new place in another two weeks. I offered to help move her boxes in. Her new place is just around the corner, and many thousands of dollars, from where she started a couple months ago. It didn’t take her too long to find it – a week, pretty much – but I’ve secretly enjoyed the time S. and I have spent phoning and e-mailing each other, trading our notes and horror stories. I’m sort of glad we could share this awful experience, S. and me, so I could furrow my brow with concern, while privately, I could smile to myself – thinking, hoping, that broker poker might possibly bring us just a tiny bit closer together.

Soonest/bestest.

Todd.