Dear Paul,

When Monique and I showed up one fine afternoon at the Durham County Court’s Small Claims Division for our case against the landlord, my first thought was we must be in the wrong place. We went to the third floor, exactly as we were told. We read the signs on the offices, some as old as the building, some hand-written in magic marker, and when we found the only door that seemed to have anything remotely to do with us, we walked inside.

The waiting room was deserted. I had expected bustling litigation. Instead we had our pick of twenty-plus plastic chairs, all pushed against the walls and facing in, any one of which was powerful enough to evoke unwanted memories of high school. On the other side of the waiting room were two more doors, about three feet apart, each with a narrow arrowslit of a window. The choice between the identical doors felt like a test, something in support of a behavioral scientist’s experiment on litigants, stress, and bureaucracy. Not wanting to select unwisely, we put our faces to the glass and looked inside. Apparently these were the courtrooms. Both were empty. No judges, no plaintiffs, no defendants. We had arrived early expressly to catch our magistrate in action, hoping to glean valuable tips on how best to conduct our part in the matter of Monique Dufour and Paul Maliszewski v. Robert L. Schmitz Properties.

In the County Clerk’s office, where we went to check our appointment and double-check the location of the courtroom, several knots of people were preparing the two forms required to set a case in motion. The forms are fairly straightforward, the legal language kept to a comfortable minimum. You print your name, address, and phone number, you provide the same information about the person you’re suing, you explain, briefly, why you’re coming to court and how much money you’re seeking, and you pay fifty dollars to the state. A minimum of four people huddled around each set of forms. Some stood in a circle, the better to surround the forms from every possible angle. Some knelt around a table, as if praying to the forms. A clerk was trying to explain, slowly and carefully, to the woman in line in front of us that if she went ahead and submitted the forms the way she had them filled out she’d be suing herself on behalf of the person she in fact wanted to sue.

The woman nodded uncertainly and walked away, taking the forms back to her dream team for revision. The clerk turned to us, and we smiled and asked our question. The clerk referred to an appointment book, dragging her index finger down the dates and times until she found ours, and told us, yes, we had been in the right place.

Back inside the waiting room, I immediately slumped down in the chair nearest the door and started fiddling with a bunch of paper. Monique said, “Do you want to sit there, or do you want to sit where we won’t have to look at everyone who walks in?”

“Good idea,” I said, standing up.

We sat in the far corner of the room, directly in front of the door to the second courtroom, and started waiting. Though there was nobody else in the room, we whispered. At the sound of any approaching footsteps, we fell silent and listened.

In the past week we had worked hard to prepare our case. We dropped our disposable camera off at the pharmacy. A couple of days later we chose the most damning pictures. We talked about how best we might say, look, this landlord neglected his responsibilities as specified in his own lease, turned the apartment over to us not cleaned and not ready for occupancy, and misrepresented his property. We developed a strategy, which mostly involved agreeing that Monique was best suited to handle the big picture, leaving me to supply details and quotations.

Then one evening we watched the Orson Welles film of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” The movie is incredible, starring Anthony Perkins at his jittery best. He’s two sharp elbows, a couple of pointed shoulders, and lots of flabbergasted, slightly high-pitched protests for someone, anyone at all, to listen to him. He meets people who know more about his case than he does. Yet they only speak elliptically. In so many words, they offer no help. He encounters a man who has spent countless years on an appeal, who somehow remains blissfully confident of a favorable resolution. He wades into large rooms flooded with paper, up to his knees in writs, briefs, and law books. He pleads for order where there will never be any.

The movie was ideal for novice litigants such as ourselves. No, we were not, like Joseph K., arrested one fine morning. We were two people who invested in the law a great deal of our most abstract hopes about the eventual and satisfying triumph of right, reason, justice, and fairness over wrong, illogic, injustice, and iniquity. We were two people who wanted our security deposit back.

The day before our trial I put together a presentation of our argument, nearly fifty typed pages, including nineteen of the photographs and document exhibits A through L. This brief (if that’s the word for it) featured a full-page table of contents, copies of receipts, and our collection of Dear Landlord letters. I’m aware that some may consider the effort a bit overblown, given that the word “small” modifies our claim, the stakes, and the court itself, but I am one of those people who needs to write something down in order to figure out what I even begin to think. Without writing, I babble, I stammer or just don’t speak. I’m less than useless without notes, good lines, a soundly reasoned and previously constructed argument. So, like a dutiful student, I highlighted in yellow those passages of the lease that the landlord violated and entered them into the argument. I dug up some contemporaneous notes I wrote while witnessing the landlord’s hasty, after-the-fact effort to have the apartment repaired, cleaned, and painted. I assembled the case out of paper. It was a dreary hobby as they go, and I can’t recommend it, but I had the sense and satisfaction of making something, a castle out of words maybe.

Late in the afternoon I ditched an ill-considered initial draft of the argument in which I got tangled up in mimicking very unconvincingly what little I grasp of legal language. I sensed I was in trouble when I found myself referring to Monique as “plaintiff Dufour” and beginning sentences, “We plaintiffs therefore request here that the court hereby order the defendant….” It read like a Monty Python skit. All that mumbo-jumbo and mystification was gone, deleted; now I opened with a brisk single-paragraph summary of the complaint, moved onto an itemization of the money we were seeking, detailed the charges, and drew the conclusions. Simple. My prose was as clean as our point was clear. On paper it made perfect sense, and that made sense to me. Besides, it was quite a beautiful brief to handle, to inspect, to read. In triplicate – copies enough for us, the judge, and Schmitz – it inspired awe.

Schmitz walked into the waiting room a few minutes before our trial was set to begin. We assumed it was Schmitz. Until that moment, which I captured only out of the corner of my left eye, as I pretended to flip through my papers, we had never seen the man we were suing. We hadn’t even spoken with him. We’d dealt exclusively with his beleaguered second-in-command, rental agent Christina Coffey. He had dragged Coffey to the trial with him, and the two of them sat down at the opposite end of the room and commenced whispering. A minute later they stood and hurried out of the room.

I turned to Monique and said, “Is that him? Is that Schmitz?”

“I think so,” Monique said. “But I don’t know. Was that Coffey?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It sort of looked like her, but it sort of didn’t. If that’s her she looks like she’s aged several years.”

Monique nodded. They came back into the room. Monique confirmed their identities. She sounded disappointed. When I got a better look at Coffey, I started to lose my enthusiasm for going through with the trial. If in the last month Coffey had been elected President of the United States and served two consecutive terms, battled against partisans in Congress, and made several tough decisions to send troops overseas to fight, that almost would have explained how she had changed. Almost. If I say Schmitz was stooped and dumpy, with poor to no posture and pasty skin and those adult freckles that are always threatening to merge together into one big freckle mass; if I describe him as wearing the sort of cotton Dockers and sports shirt ensemble that department-store ads swear all fathers want to receive each and every Father’s Day, you may assume that I’m allowing our legal dispute to bias my physical description of him, but you would be wrong.

We sat in the silence. The air conditioner turned on. The fluorescent lights buzzed.

A small man with a neatly trimmed beard entered the room. He seemed vaguely judge-ish in a way that, say, the four of us didn’t. Schmitz said hello to him, by name. The man returned the greeting and scooted into the courtroom on the left. From his chair he called out the first case, someone versus the something credit union. No one moved. The judge announced the name of the case again. He was shouting from his chair, at the front of the courtroom, across the empty courtroom, through the closed door in front of us, and into the waiting room.

The judge paused a minute and riffled through some papers. When he shouted our names, we filed through the door past a jumbled collection of mismatched chairs (the gallery?), through a swinging gate that barely reached my kneecaps, and took our places around one low table in front of the judge’s desk. The judge sat elevated above the table a total of, I’ll estimate, six inches. With Monique and I sharing a Bible roughly the size of a game-show buzzer between us, the judge swore us to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help us god. After I distributed copies of our brief, we were off and running.

Monique told our story. I directed the judge to our photographs. Schmitz noisily flipped through the pages to the photographs and then laughed derisively, the way people do when they can’t control themselves, except he was making such a loud production out of snorting that it was clear he was pretending to appear as if he couldn’t control himself. Monique told the judge she didn’t come here to be laughed at by the defendant of all people and expected more from these proceedings. It was going to be that kind of afternoon, the sort where the judge doesn’t wear a robe, possesses no visible gavel, has no bailiff or court secretary, sits behind stacks of paperwork from cases past, and metes out justice from a makeshift office in a building that smells like old air. Everything that should have been substantial and impressive – that gate dividing the gallery from the courtroom, the Bible, the courtroom itself – was small and toy-like, a burlesque of what I pictured.

As we had worked to ready our brief, we had also prepared to be found wrong. In between moments of feeling thoroughly convinced we would prevail, we imagined ourselves first as Schmitz might describe us and then as the judge could see us. We enacted and reenacted all the permutations the trial might take and ran through all the possible ways we could win or lose. It was one of those times when I really wished I wasn’t so self-conscious and so willing to try out the other guy’s point-of-view.

Everything was going exactly how Monique and I had imagined it would, when we had permitted ourselves to imagine the worst-case of our case. Coffey denied she ever told Monique, “Unlike a lot basements in the south, this one stays dry.” She denied she ever said the road outside the apartment is only noisy from traffic at eight in the morning and five in the evening. Trying another angle, I asked the judge to consider that the landlord undertook a whole menu of repairs after we moved out, arguing, as I’d written in the brief the night before, that the apartment was either ready when we moved in or it needed repairs. It couldn’t both be ready and need so many repairs. I was very pleased with this point. The judge asked Schmitz about those repairs. Finally, progress.

Schmitz acknowledged he had a little work done, something about not being able to match precisely the type and quality of the tile on the roof of the awning and needing to research and order it special. His fixing up the apartment was sounding more like the fine art of restoring Renaissance frescoes. The landlord was actually sitting there dreamily confessing how he’s “always liked older buildings and architecture.” I said I saw someone in the apartment painting, for two days straight, this after Coffey had told Monique the apartment didn’t need painting and wouldn’t get any. Schmitz turned to me – we were shoulder to shoulder at the table – and demanded, “Let me see a picture that shows someone in that apartment painting. Do you have a picture of someone in the apartment painting? Do you?” The judge asked Schmitz if he had the apartment painted, and Schmitz replied, “Your honor, I cannot recall.”

Almost two hours passed like this. It felt like two hours exactly. At the height of the trial’s futility, Monique explained that we did not move out of the apartment because there were yellow streaks running down the walls; that was only one minor reason of several dozen. Schmitz said, “Do you have pictures of yellow streaks on the walls? Do you? Do you?” He was like a machine, a very simple machine. Look, I said, it’s difficult to take photographs of a white wall with a simple flash. Monique said, again, please understand we are not talking only about yellow streaks. At just this moment, when I wanted to float out the window behind the judge and be far away from the courtroom, back at our apartment with Monique, where we could finish unpacking and make our home, we heard clapping in the courtroom next door. A crowd of people started applauding. There were cheers. Someone started playing the wedding march over a boombox. That’s nice, I thought. Monique told me later she thought, at least something good happened.

The judge turned to Schmitz and reprimanded him for “really falling down on the job” and “dropping the ball” and “not going the extra mile” to see that we moved in okay. This is it, I thought, the decision’s going our way. I whispered as much to Monique. In the end, however, it didn’t go our way: we lost. The judge turned to us and said from what he could see the apartment didn’t rise to the level of uninhabitable. Whatever that meant. “I have to rule for the defendant,” he said. The judge informed us of our right to appeal. We had only ten days to act, he explained. Schmitz hurriedly packed up his papers and left with Coffey. They were gone before the judge was done speaking.

So that was it. I know Monique and I both thought we were right, and moreover wanted the judge to agree we were right. We had believed, most of the time, that we could and would prevail. Failing all that, we hoped maybe for a partial judgment, an acceptable Solomonic split of our vast differences. At the very least.

Instead, zero. The afternoon was gone and we had nothing to show for it. We were tired, hungry, and disappointed, but not, I think, defeated. Despite the fact that the judge had ruled for Schmitz, landlord and friend to old buildings of Durham, neither of us felt all that wrong. It’s not as if upon hearing the judge’s decision we suddenly agreed with him. We didn’t undergo a miraculous conversion. It’s not as if we turned to Schmitz and Coffey and said, “How about that, you were right all along!” We never agreed with the judge, nor will we ever, I suspect. Instead it was as if the world of the law cleaved away from our own world right then, and we realized that where we had traveled to the law to seek a decision that would hopefully right the wrong that had happened over in our world and, you know, order our security deposit returned to us, to jingle around in our pockets a bit, what we received, in fact, was a decision limited strictly to the narrow world of the law. What hopes we’d placed in the law, we still at least were able to withdraw from the law. They were, after all, our hopes to take away. We could keep the hopes somewhere else, in the care of some other institution perhaps, though that’s doubtful, for all the obvious reasons, or we could associate them with some abstract idea of our own fashioning. Right, reason, justice, fairness – we could find these elsewhere. Or as a character at the beginning of William Gaddis’s novel, “A Frolic of His Own,” says, “You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” So what do we have faith in? That seemed like a good question, and this seemed like a good time to ask it, however dicey it always is to answer. I personally think we have a few decent options: good writing, Kafka, and the comfort of friends. Though don’t get me wrong, it would have been nice to have our money back.

Outside the courthouse, the sidewalks and most of the streets were empty already. It was Friday and nearly five. Everyone who was able had cut out of work early. We took our time walking back to the car. Monique said, “I think that judge really liked your brief. Did you see how he read it? He seemed reluctant to return it.”

I said, “I thought you did a great job telling our story.”

Truly,

Paul

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.

Dear Scott,

Your doppelganger lives here, in South London. I passed him on Acre Lane the other day. He’s black – it’s Brixton, after all, which has the highest concentration of West Indians in the city – but the similarities were so incredibly strong, and just plain weird, that I put down my groceries and leaned up against the side of the building to watch him pass. He walked the same way you do. Not even a walk, he jaunted with the same wide, zig-zagging steps. And his hair was the same colour of absolutely unnatural yellow, and it was the funniest thing I have seen since coming here, topping the time a woman on a subway platform told me about the pleasures of Beef and Onion flavoured crisps in breathless detail, surpassing the moment I noticed Brut running down my leg and realized a cylinder of underarm spray-on deodorant had exploded in my packsack. Even funnier than that.

After the London-you passed I stayed up against the brick wall, watching him make his way towards the clock tower, missing the Canadian-you a little, missing familiarity. This all happened on the sidewalk outside Tesco, the supermarket, along the stretch of Acre Lane where the police have put up a sandwich board with an appeal on it for witnesses of a recent beating to come forward. If you want an exact locale, it happened about four steps from that sign, outside Tesco, inside the borough of Lambeth, the area called Brixton, south of the Thames, north of the McDonald’s on the corner, which is across from the KFC, down the street from Cold Harbour Lane where the riots took place years ago, and less than a kilometre from the estate housing, or Crack Central as my housemate Jo calls it. “The police don’t even go in there. Neither should you,” she said on my second day.

Two weeks ago, on my way to take the train to school, a girl walked up to me outside the Brixton tube station. Her mascara was running; she had been crying for a while. She was dressed in a private-school uniform and told me through her hiccups and tears that she was a long way from home. “I’m really sorry,” I said and walked on. She followed and stopped me again, this time at the lip of the station, where the raindrops falling from the overhang were the fattest. Her arm was on my jean jacket, which was a new sensation. I had never been touched in Toronto by someone panhandling. This was an actual, sincere touch. It was a schoolgirl trapped miles from her home. “Where do you need to get to?” I asked her. “Staines,” she said. I had no idea where Staines was, but the way she said it made it sound wicked – a place where the mothers stood cross-armed by the windows until their private-school daughters came through the gate. She shivered and looked expectant, so I acted. I walked her to the Brixton bus stop, gave her a pound coin, and stood beside her, hands in my pockets, trying to look sturdy. We waited. After ten minutes of watching double-deckers pull up and pull away, she looked at me, turned, and walked off without a word.

My London self – when I finally meet him – will not be taken advantage of so easily, or if he does he won’t stand there waiting for ten minutes at the bus stop. But my UK version is proving to be a little harder to find than yours was. Parts of the Toronto me – parts I was hoping to shrug off – have remained. The same laundry makes the same pile in the south-east corner of my room. I still look at people’s faces on escalators for a second too long, lurch around with my eggplant-coloured packsack without any sort of grace. I haven’t yet become what my roommate back home called an otter – one of those sleek urbanites who move through the city with ease, as if passing through warm liquid. They’re the ones who seem slow and graceful but are always covering ground; who cross streets without looking back and forth; who know how to fold a newspaper crisply in the middle of a packed subway car. These are people so sleek that the everyday garbage of the city slides off them. My pockets are full of receipts and Fruit and Nut wrappers. I am the furthest thing from an otter right now; I am not even a lemur.

After all my pre-departure talk of health and the purchase of the How to Live on 99 Cents a Day cookbook, I’ve embraced the opposite: a fondness for British candy. I now love Lucozade, an orange energy drink that comes in a dildonic bottle with a graphic of Lara Croft on the side, as well as the UK Mars bar, which is cheap, 35p, and distinctly creamier than the North American version, as if the makers mined the chocolate from a secret place closer to the source. It’s easy to get attached to chocolate bars here. Most have beautiful, visual names that conjure up pleasant things, like Wispa (a breath on the back of your ear) or Yorkie (that friend who saved your life in high school). Each has a different consistency; each one falls apart differently in your hands. If you break a UK Mars bar in half, the caramel twists out into tiny strings. There’s no clean way to do it. But after six weeks here, I don’t find myself breaking many chocolate bars in two.

Since our first meeting, the private-school girl has staked out her own ground on the stretch of pavement on the Brixton High Street between the newsstand where I buy my chocolate and the Foot Locker. She walks in a slow circle and sometimes leans up against the BT telephone box when commuters start pouring out of the station. I see her almost every week, same tears, same uniform. She even does her mascara so it runs down her face in those same dramatic channels.

Miss you tonnes,

Craig

Dear Paul,

It may be too early to say, but I suspect I drank the best cup of orange juice in my life at a bookstore in Durham, the morning after our arrival. We had spent our first day here, and what hours of the second we were awake, behaving like lost dogs, directionless, dirty, and ashamed. We wandered listlessly up and down the same four or five streets looking for another apartment, sensing we had to be close to one and would eventually find it so long as we kept looking. The move hadn’t gone that well. Or the move had gone fine, but the apartment we planned to move into – Monique had signed a lease back in June, and I had arranged to have the phone, electric, and gas hooked up in advance – ended up having problems, serious problems, and we had called the moving-in off for now.

We had stopped at the bookstore because we needed to buy a good map. With Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill caught in a paroxysm of building, expansion, and sprawl, our 1999 city map was strictly a historical curiosity. What we really needed was a full-time guide, an individual well-versed in local customs and language, someone undaunted by a place with a Duke Street and a Duke Road, as well as Duke University Road, Duke Forest Road, Duke Power Road, and Duke Homestead Road, all distinct, separate thoroughfares, but each referred to, in the shorthand of the oral driving directions offered by gas station attendants, rental agents, and convenience store clerks, simply as Duke. But a street-by-street map would have to do.

The bookstore didn’t have any street-by-street maps. The guy behind the register said they normally stocked a number of such maps, but they currently had not a one. He could put in a special order; however, it would take a week or two. Monique took him up on it, out of reflex, mostly.

She found me dawdling in the magazine area, and filled me in: no map. We’d need to go somewhere else. Another bookstore was just down the block, we could check there first. But neither of us was all that eager to leave. Getting back in the car meant facing the pressing problem of not having a place that we felt good about calling home.

The orange juice was Monique’s idea. She was going downstairs to get a cup of coffee and asked me if I wanted anything.

I said, “No thanks, I don’t need anything right now.” This is pretty much what I always say when asked wide-open questions regarding food or beverage.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “What about some juice? Wouldn’t you like a juice?”

“A juice, that would be good. Orange juice, if they have it, please.”

This is how I came to have what I am now calling the best orange juice of my life so far. That I hadn’t eaten anything for breakfast made it all the better. That I’d only been able to consume a slice and a half of the pizza we’d had delivered the night before insured that the juice hit my system something like a direct shot of vitamins. Before the pizza, there was a super value meal at a Hardee’s somewhere in Virginia, an episode whose details – a stray cat in the abandoned industrial lot where I parked the truck, a fast-food franchise whose manager eccentrically insisted on serving customers at their tables, Monique saving pieces of chicken to feed the stray – are as difficult to recall now as a confusing dream. The lunch had carried me as far as it nutritionally could. That the juice was freshly squeezed did not hurt its ultimate ranking.

As Monique drove, I operated the map. I had some juice left and sipped at it in between directions. Initially we confined our search to the streets around the apartment we wanted nothing to do with. We drove in ever-widening circles. The car had been acting up. It objected to the heat, tending to stall at stops. Sometimes it refused to start altogether. Monique turned a corner, moved to accelerate, and the Reliant just died. It had enough accumulated momentum to coast to the curb.

We were on the street behind the street of the place we didn’t want. I can’t imagine a nicer place to be in a stalled car. As we let the car and our tempers cool in front of a house owned by someone we didn’t know and never would, the eternally optimistic part of me pictured the people inside, whole families, emerging from the houses, coming out from behind their doors, to help us. Not help us just with the car trouble, which would mysteriously pass, with time, as it always did, but offer us a place to stay, permanent-like. I imagined that they knew of unlisted apartments, owned by friends of friends, who would naturally be overjoyed to rent to us and do their own neighborly part to help out.

Of course, nobody appeared. On most streets I didn’t see any people, never mind whole, big-hearted families. The houses were tightly shut, blinds or shades completely drawn, doors closed, signs of a desire for privacy as much as the presence of central air conditioning.

I found it impossible to shake the feeling, however paranoid it sounds, that these families, or for that matter all of native Durham, knew something we, new to town and frequently lost, could not comprehend. Some code or language, a way of getting along and being at ease that’s specific to every place. Our ease we left in Syracuse. Moving does not imply settling, as I was learning. We had moved here, sure, but we hadn’t settled yet. Moving is but a change of scenery, really. The billboards, the roads, the rest areas, and the other cars scroll by like projected background in some movie, and then you’re just there, wherever. Settling is something altogether different. Settling involves understanding the scenery, perhaps well enough to add to it. Maybe settling means becoming part of the scenery. At any rate, not being settled for any length of time, being rootless, is deeply unsettling. We were caught in that precise brand of limbo, between worlds, our possessions still packed, our progress stalled. We felt unsettled.

I probably have an unnatural worry about the codes by which places operate. The first time I ever traveled to New York City, I stayed up sleepless several nights before. I was not afraid of getting on the wrong bus or subway, of being mugged or taken advantage of. I was afraid that I wouldn’t find a place to eat. I had this idea that all the restaurants were confined to some kind of designated restaurant zone and that I was likely to walk past the very last place I could eat at. In one version of this nightmare, I came so close to discovering the restaurants, but, at the last moment, maybe mere feet away from smelling the aroma that would lead me to dinner, I made a wrong turn that took me farther away from the food I needed.

Later that night, after more fruitless searching, we ended up not quite parked in front of a payphone outside a Ben & Jerry’s. This time the car didn’t so much come to a stop as stall, cough, rattle, and then conk out several feet and many degrees shy of what would be ideal. Monique’s attempt to start it again, to situate the car completely in its parking spot, proved unsuccessful. If contemporary frustration needed its own soundtrack, I believe what might come closest is an engine that cranks and cranks and cranks but won’t catch and just won’t turn over.

Monique asked me if I blamed her for picking an apartment with so many problems. She started crying. I said of course I didn’t, that she was rushed to find something, and anyway how could she know the landlord would be dishonest and not tell us about the neighborhood and not even clean when he said he’d clean? Monique said she’d never in her life picked a good apartment. I said I thought our place in Syracuse was pretty nice, that worked out fine, didn’t it?

Next to us, a couple of parking spaces over, a tan family emerged from their mini-van. There was mom, dad, several children, and a set of grandparents. They all walked as if they were attached together by an invisible cord looped around one another’s waists. They gave us a glance or two and went inside to get ice cream. Monique stopped crying.

We spoke seriously then about returning to get the cats and just leaving, of moving somewhere else and putting some miles between ourselves and the problems. The cats were so confused and disturbed that they now elected to sleep in their carriers. Though we left them open and tried to coax the cats out, that’s where they wanted to stay. Only a day before, in Syracuse, Monique needed to force them into the carriers. I took their staying inside as an indication of how disagreeable all other options seemed. We entertained the escapist fantasy of hitting the road and driving to Monique’s family (in Rhode Island) or my family (in Louisiana). Both destinations were ridiculous, but next to what we faced in Durham, they acquired a peculiar plausibility, a feeling of “why not?” What would more driving cost us, really? Driving was easy, after all.

I asked Monique if we should just move into the apartment she had picked. Did she think we were over-reacting, because we’re tired from traveling? Do we deserve to live there, because, I mean, nothing else is working out for us, you know, and maybe we could get them to fix everything that needs to be fixed and maybe we’ll even get used to the noise, eventually. I’m just starting to feel as if we’re cursed, like we angered someone. Monique said we can’t live there. It’s too loud and the apartment has problems they can’t fix. Did you see those cracks in the foundation and all the walls? You can’t fix that. We can’t live there. We won’t be happy. The next couple of days will be like hell then it’ll get better.

The tan family was still picking out their ice cream. The kids were sidling up to the grandparents and then drifting off on their own. They were all pointing at the menu, maybe asking each other what they were getting, were they getting what they usually get, were they getting nuts or sprinkles, etc. etc. I don’t know how long we sat there without thinking, even for a second, I could really go for some ice cream right about now. We watched I don’t know how many families nearly identical to the tan family drift in together and drift out with ice cream, and the thought never occurred to us. We were there, in front of the phone, because we had planned to locate a motel that would take people who have cats, just so we could sleep in a bed. Monique called several, but all she found was one located somewhere she didn’t know how to find. We were there also because the car stopped there. We thought, let the car rest. We thought, let it cool while we rest and talk. So we sat there some more and talked it over and decided not to look for the motel, to just go back and sleep on the floor of the apartment we found wanting, because it was only one night or maybe two, and we could manage. We could find someplace else to live in the morning, or maybe the morning after that morning, and so that is what we did, and, right then, I believe we started to become settled here, even if only gradually.

Truly,

Paul

Cheryl:

Whenever I get down – and over the last year, as you well know, I’ve been way down – I go see my dad. The other day I stopped by and he was in his underwear doing laundry. Usually my mom does the laundry but since she broke her foot he’s helping out. He even went to Wal-Mart to buy groceries last week, but it was his first time in a grocery store of any kind in the last twenty years, and he couldn’t find anything and got in a fight with “one a dem $5-ah-hour jokers, the kind who couldn’t find their butts with a pair of deer antlers in each hand.” You know the type, Cheryl. Guys like me.

So the dog and I drove over to find him doing laundry in his underwear – and out of milk. In his BVD’s, white undershirt and long, pale legs Dad looked like a cumulus cloud with feet. He gave me a few bucks to buy milk – a bribe – to go shop for him so he wouldn’t end up fighting with a stock clerk again.

I went to the Good Super Wal-Mart on Highway 98 where all the new developments are going up. Another Super Wal-Mart was built since you last lived here and thus we have the Good Super Wal-Mart as opposed to the Bad Super Wal-Mart. Don’t ask me to describe the differences. All I know is the Bad Super Wal-Mart carries the Sam’s Choice peanut butter-filled pretzel bites and the Good Wal-Mart doesn’t. Yet the Good Wal-Mart has a plethora, by Hattiesburg’s standards, of soy food. So go figure.

I shopped for my dad and bought some milk and, on a whim, a Nice Price Elton John’s Greatest Hits album. I had been toying with the idea of buying it for some time but I didn’t know if I ought to. Would it lower my coolness ratio? Would I become one of these classic-rock dudes whose musical tastes stopped evolving after Three Dog Night broke up?

But, yes, I bought an Elton John record at Wal-Mart. It has “Candle in the Wind,” which might be the ultimate schmaltz crap suckdog song ever written – but it’s also got “Your Song,” and I will fight to the death anyone who disagrees with me that it’s one of the loveliest, sweetest pop songs ever made. I remember being in deadlocked traffic one afternoon in Dallas two years ago and hearing “Your Song” on the radio. I got chills. I had never listened to the lyrics before and I had never been at a place in my life where I had someone who I was glad was in the world. I was proud of myself for telling Sandi, when I got home, how much hearing that song made me think of her and I think she said “Awww…” and kissed me. It was one of those tiny moments in a marriage that no one gets when they’re not in that marriage.

Anyway, I put the E.J. CD into the car’s stereo as one of the “$5-ah-hour” guys rolled a train of shopping carts past me. And was glad that he did it quickly so that he couldn’t see me break down. I was in heaving, weeping sobs by the time the song was in its second verse. When it was over, I thought I had composed myself enough to drive. I left the parking lot, passing through the Home and Garden Center’s parade of wheelbarrows and fertilizers with wet, but not sopping eyes. It wasn’t until I was on the highway headed home that it hit me again – how much I miss her, how much it hurts to go on sometimes, how I’m happy I’m in Hattiesburg but I don’t love it, don’t need it, don’t love or need anything, really, except her. And she’s dead. Not divorced. Not living in Canada. Not remarried. Dead. I pulled off the highway into the nearby parking lot of a strip mall and sat there in the dark, spitting warm tears on the steering wheel. This fit, I thought, is taking care of that ache I had all day. This is what I needed – and I bought it at Wal-Mart.

Here in Hattiesburg, I am, I think, happier than I’ve ever been – sometimes. I like being here, renting a house my father paid $6,000 for, walking the dog when I want to, letting her crawl under the house to chase cats, working nights at the local newspaper, becoming someone that’s new in some places, old in others.

And I’m sadder than I’ve ever been, too, but since Sandi died I guess that goes without saying. I don’t revel in being sad, believe me, and people who do like being sad confuse me. I’m glad that I can cry my eyes out because it’s cathartic and cleansing even though I miss her terribly. I have to remind myself that I’m not the same person any more.

This particular day itself didn’t help either. Gray, overcast days in Mississippi seem interminable. You remember them. It’s not so much the sky as it is all the longleaf pines. They wall you off and with a low, gray sky, you feel like something’s trying to crush you.

And while I can get along in Hattiesburg and enjoy myself – especially compared to the dark months of last winter – I don’t think she would’ve been happy returning here. Because she was sick and wanted to see the world before she died. And life in Hattiesburg (or anywhere) when you can’t go someplace on your own, unassisted, is difficult.

I left my dad’s milk in his refrigerator, left his spare change by the door and locked the kitchen door while my parents slept upstairs.

It’s crossed my mind a few times how when Sandi broke up with Peter, the rich pillhead in Bloomington, Indiana, that she moved home and took her old job at Sears back and put her life back together much like I’m doing. Hattiesburg is a place to recuperate. It’s quiet. It’s slow.

I’ve felt, on more than one occasion, that I have Sandi’s window on the world now that I’m back here and missing someone the way she missed him. I’m missing her in different ways. A part of me sees myself as a sentry, standing watch over her grave and my memories and that I’m at peace with it. But another part thinks that it hasn’t completely sunk in how she isn’t coming back. Once the one-year anniversary of her death arrives, she won’t appear and ask if I missed her.

Somewhere, I hope, she isn’t miserable and complaining about the overcast sky or Wal-Mart. But I hate that she wasn’t healthier when I knew her. I hate that she isn’t here to cry to, instead of crying about.

kw

Dear Paul,

A few weeks back, I drove a twenty-four-foot truck from Syracuse, New York to Durham, North Carolina. I say it was a twenty-four-foot truck because when I tell this story to people it seems like a crucial detail, as important as where we were moving from and where we were going. Why we moved had to do with Monique’s new job. Why I had to accept a twenty-four-foot truck, when a smaller one would have worked and been less intimidating to drive, had to do with Monique needing to start work four days from then.

I have noticed people are not immediately struck by the massiveness of the twenty-four-foot truck. The detail merely slips by them, as if it’s superfluous. There is, in fact, nothing superfluous about a twenty-four-foot truck.

When we pulled into the Ryder dealership in Syracuse, and I saw the twenty-four-foot truck, three of them actually, lined up side by side, backed up against a line of trees in such a way that it appeared as if the trees were to be casually tossed in the back by giants, I said, “Is that the twenty-four-foot truck? That can’t be. That must be a thirty-foot truck.” We looked around the parking lot, drove toward the back of the building, thinking our truck might be concealed there. All we saw were those three trucks and a van. Monique said, “I think that’s the twenty-four-foot truck.”

I can provide you with as much instruction as I received from the Ryder person in four simple imperatives: Allow greater following distances. Be careful backing up. Trucks are longer and wider. Watch overhead clearances. Each of these sentences appears in bold on the Vehicle Damage and Safe Driving Tips triplicate form. Beside each sentence a yellow cartoon truck gets itself into various hair-raising pickles when its cartoon driver fails to heed a safe driving tip. The driver who doesn’t allow enough distance balances his truck on the front two wheels and crushes two cars into Wile E. Coyote-like accordions. The driver who fails to watch clearances opens up the roof of his truck like a sardine tin. I only had to place my initials next to each of the cartoons, to indicate that I understood, say, that cutting across curbs scares cartoon cats and squirrels into trees. Inhaling the distinctive whiff of liability lawsuits from the form, I plm-ed each tip. As I signed I imagined some Ryder corporate attorney rounding a table to stand in front of me and ask, Are these not your initials, Mr. Maliszewski? Didn’t Ryder in fact inform you, Mr. Maliszewski, that trucks are both longer and wider?

The twenty-four-foot truck weighs over 23,000 pounds when empty. The twenty-four-foot truck has dual wheels in the back. That means two wheels in the front and two pairs of wheels in the rear. The twenty-four feet of the twenty-four-foot truck includes only the cargo part, not the entire vehicle. It’s equipped with air brakes. Putting it into park automatically applies an extra safety brake. It has speakers installed in the bumper so that when I put the truck in reverse – and let me just say I really did not like putting the truck in reverse and avoided doing so whenever possible, driving a mile out of my way in forward, because in reverse it felt as if all bets were off, the child would certainly be struck, her beloved poodle killed, and the site of local historic interest, the one I happened to be right in front of, leveled – the truck’s bumper’s speakers unleashed those piercing, pulse-like beeps. The back of the sun visor, one of many surfaces of the truck full of yet more liability-shedding language, had some wise words for drivers: “Never forget you are driving a truck.” The reminder seemed unnecessary. I felt incapable of thinking about anything else.

We had a system for driving. Monique drove in front, in her 1984 Plymouth Reliant, a trusty car if you know its quirks. With her were our two cats, various cat supplies, and whatever we felt we needed most essentially. Before moving I thought I needed certain books more essentially than anything else, books such as J R by William Gaddis and my American Heritage Dictionary, but when it came down to it, and I had to choose, I selected T-shirts and shorts, toothpaste and toothbrush, deodorant, a box of crackers, and some bottles of Syracuse water.

I drove behind Monique. My father had loaned us his two-way radios to keep in touch. My father is sixty-one, and on weekends he likes to do a lot of work outside. A couple of years ago, with his neighbor’s help, he built a barn from the foundation up. About a year ago he had a heart attack, or nearly did, or would have had the doctors not been quick about performing an emergency angioplasty. My mother bought him the two-way radios for Christmas last year. With the radios he could, in theory, keep in touch with her while he was working outside, just in case anything happens. That’s the phrase they use: just in case anything happens. In practice, my father radios in and asks if my mother wants to go to the hardware store with him, if she thinks it’s time for lunch yet, if she could bring a glass of water out to him when he swings by the door on the riding mower.

Monique and I used the radios to say things such as “I only have a quarter tank of gas left,” “I have to go to the bathroom,” “How are the kitties doing?” and “I just heard on NPR that William Maxwell died.”

I did not drive like a menace. I didn’t speed. I didn’t swerve. Insofar as I was able, I did keep those four tips in mind. I hardly ever even moved out of the slow lane. Still, I sensed I had to be doing something wrong, endangering everyone who had the bad luck to be in front, beside, or behind me. I felt grossly unprepared to drive what I was driving. I imagined being the cause of hundreds of fatal accidents. Most of the scenarios involved both Monique in her car and me in the truck. Many ended in squealing tires, smoke, spilled oil and gas, and flames.

As I drove I was filled with fear of driving and worry, all of which stewed in the thick anxiety of leaving the place where we’d lived for seven years and not knowing anything about the place to which we were moving. For brief seconds as I drove my chest seized up and my eyes clenched at the simultaneous thought of all this and about a dozen other things. Did nobody else know how unprepared I was to haul our accumulated books, furniture, and possessions six hundred-plus miles behind the wheel of a twenty-four-foot truck? Then I criticized myself for being so self-involved and endangering others. I got a grip, you know, and kept driving.

In Frackville, Pennsylvania, we needed to stop for gasoline. This was our first stop since leaving Syracuse, so Frackville would be the first time I had to drive the truck through small city streets since scooting out of town on a series of main roads and getting on 81 South.

I missed the turn for the first gas station in Frackville because it came up too quickly and because I was not ready to turn. After conferring on the radio with Monique, we drove into the heart of Frackville.

Frackville is like many small towns located in close proximity to major highways. What I mean is that gas stations, fast-food franchises, and perhaps a motel or two cluster aggressively, jockeying for position near the highway, while the old town, the town that existed long before the highway came along, remains more or less undisturbed, economically oblivious. What this also means is that the old town is not constructed to accommodate the easy passage of trucks driven by some guy versed only in Ryder’s four tips of safe driving.

In order to have the privilege of spending $37.48 on twenty-five-odd gallons of gas at the Frackville Uni-Mart, I first circled once around the station, then executed a stunning slow-motion, three-point turn in an empty church parking lot, all to align the gas tank with the gas pump.

Once the truck was gassed up, I was not ready to start driving on the highway again. My right hand had gone numb about an hour earlier from gripping the wheel too tightly. Shaking it vigorously, as I used to in the middle of scribbling out three-hour essay exams, wasn’t helping. I pulled out of the gas station, and headed away from 81. I turned right at the next light onto what turned out to be a narrow residential street. I found a block of houses with no cars parked on the street – exactly the space I needed to park. Monique parked behind me and came and sat in the cab. A hard rain started falling on Frackville, a rain that followed us, letting up only for a few miles here and there, all the way to Virginia. We had snacks and told each other we were doing fine, under the circumstances. So what if we drove too slowly and everyone passed us. If need be we could take an extra day.

After a few minutes Monique left in her car to explore, to find a way out of the neighborhood and back to the main road. As she circled around several times, sometimes popping out on the street in front of me, sometimes coming up behind, we kept in touch on the radio.

“What if you go straight?” I said to her. “It looks like I may be able to turn around there, if it widens enough, I think.”

“I’ll check it out,” she said.

A minute later she radioed back. “I don’t think you can make it through there. Let me try this other way. I’ll be back.”

As I waited for her to discover the widest, most secure passage with the fewest tight turns, I tried to shake some life back into my hand, and to forget that in a few minutes I would once again be driving a twenty-four-foot truck.

Take care,

Paul

Dear Paul,

My girlfriend Monique decided we had to have this yard sale before leaving Syracuse, and I went along with her bold scheme. It seemed like a good idea to sell a bunch of stuff for a little bit of money instead of taking that same stuff, packing it carefully in boxes with crumpled-up pages from the local free entertainment weekly as padding, loading them into a truck and transporting them nearly seven hundred miles south, then carrying each box down a ramp and up a flight of stairs, when we both knew, and would admit if pressed, that we had no need for a bagel slicer, a cappuccino maker, a salad bowl as big around as a tractor tire, a back-up wok, a spare set of knives (with sharpener, all in the original box), a tiny, toy-sized meat-tenderizing mallet (origins unknown), assorted accumulated record albums (neither of us has a phonograph), a couple of heavy winter coats, a walkman with headphones less the walkman part, a silverware organizer, and, among much else, three sets of slightly old, slightly battered headboards and footboards, embarrassing, bulky reminders of an ambitious, never-realized plan from years before to refinish old chairs, tables, and beds.

Monique gathered together the stuff to sell, down in the basement. I made several lame, less than half-hearted attempts to scare up possessions of my own that were both something I could part with and something that could be sold to another human being. I found little of the former and less of the latter. I did rediscover two candlestick holders (with candles!) and then lost steam. Monique called them my bachelor-pad candles, and held them up, one in each hand, asking me for a price.

“I don’t know,” I said. “A dollar?”

Monique shook her head. “Too high.”

Most of what I thought I could part with, Monique did not think could be sold, so she marked them with “Free” stickers. My free junk would, in theory, be vaguely akin to the free hot dogs or baseball caps that you see given away at openings of new grocery stores. People would come for the free stuff, but Monique’s items would be what buttered our bread. I have no idea if this business model holds water, incidentally, on any larger scale. As I write this down, it doesn’t sound all that convincing, but then again she was right about those candlestick holders: they didn’t sell, even at fifty cents.

Here’s how we represented our junk in a classified ad that we placed in The Syracuse Post-Standard:

GIANT MOVING SALE
Old & new! All nice!
Kitchenware, furniture,
milkglass, so much more!

You probably want to know what milkglass is. I will tell you, just a bit later.

A month or so before our sale, the aforementioned free entertainment weekly, a publication that never proved more indispensable than it did when I wrapped our dishes in it, ran a series of articles titled “You Know You’ve Lived in Syracuse Too Long When…” Each article featured at least a hundred reader-submitted and staff-generated indicators of recognizing if you’d lived in Syracuse for too long. Most of them were beyond obscure, describing events, people, and places that had occurred, passed on, or been razed long before we entered the central New York picture. Really arcane local minutiae. For example, if you remember when the movie house that used to be on James Street (not the one that’s there now, the other one, down by the place where the Big M used to be before it moved) had those cardboard popcorn cartons that were colored red on the inside instead of plain old white, you know you’ve lived in Syracuse too long. I exaggerate, but only barely.

Anyway, Monique and I had one such too-long-in-Syracuse shock when we recognized the woman who stole a piece of costume jewelry while we weren’t looking and got away.

Our sale was supposed to start at eight, but at least an hour before that, people were milling about on our lawn. Some were sitting on the hoods of their cars, smoking. Some were trying to decide whether it was a better strategy to cover the front or the side door. This was around seven, and these people were either antique dealers or junk-shop owners. It’s hard to tell the difference at that hour. Suffice it to say they were dealers of some sort. I had foolishly counted on an hour of peace and waiting around before the first rush. Instead I already felt my patience withering. I put the first few boxes on the lawn, the pros hurriedly picked through them, and Monique collected the money. It was hardly light out. I could make out shapes of people, but no discernible details.

The dealers snapped up most of Monique’s milkglass, some of which she had picked up over the years at yard sales, some of which her mom had bought for her. (Monique’s mom doesn’t and can’t know Monique sold milkglass that she bought her.) Milkglass is exactly what it sounds like: glass that looks milk-like. There are milkglass cups, goblets, plates, platters, bowls. Milkglass is very grandmother-esque. I picture bowls overflowing with individually wrapped butterscotch and menthol candies. One shopper who saw the milkglass said, “You-all are too young to own this stuff.”

The thief arrived just as we were recovering from the initial wave of professional sale-goers. The thief was this older woman who we’d seen around town at a bunch of church and library book sales. At the DeWitt Presbyterian Book Sale she cut in front of us and about a half a dozen other people waiting for the church to open its doors. She just waltzed up to the front of the line and then stood there clutching her purse to her stomach and chewing the side of her mouth. When she showed up at our sale, I remembered the way she had stood at the church, looking at the locked door inches in front of her face, and pretending to ignore every single one of us standing behind her, looking at the back of her head.

The thief struck up some idle conversation with Monique – where are you moving, honey? Do you have any dolls for sale, honey? Any jewelry, honey? Only in retrospect did the conversation sound stilted, tinged with nervousness and calculation. Monique showed her the bit of jewelry she had, and went off around the side of the house to get another box.

In a fit of inspired marketing, I was leaning one of the bed sets against a tree, by the road, when the woman suddenly left, bolting for her car, and I remember thinking, She left pretty quickly, and then thinking, I bet she stole something. And almost as soon as I thought that, I thought, You don’t know that, you didn’t see a thing. I frequently find that I think things and then a moment later think the exact opposite. The woman floated by in her raft of a Lincoln, turned the corner, and was gone. Monique came back around the corner and happened to glance at the jewelry. A junky little watch was gone.

By ten o’clock it seemed we had nothing good left to sell or have stolen. Monique started telling anyone who showed up that all our good stuff was gone – “cleaned out” – and all that was left was junk. I heard her tell several people, “We really got picked over this morning by the dealers. All that’s left is the dregs.”

We were sitting on the front stoop. The people she warned wandered off after a few minutes. Maybe someone bought something small. Ahead of us stretched at least another two hours of waiting. “Monique,” I said, “do you think you should be telling these people that what they’re looking at is junk?” It didn’t seem like the very best sales tactic to me.

“They know it’s junk. It’s a yard sale.”

“But what if they get mad? What if they say this isn’t a giant moving sale?” I asked her.

“Tell them we meant it’s a moving sale for a giant.”

Our tables looked empty. Monique was worried. We were getting a lot of drive-bys – people stopping in front of our apartment and surveying our goods without getting out of their cars. Some drive-bys barely slowed. Monique and I took this personally. How could we not? We felt like poorly-lit figures in a natural-history-museum diorama: Late Twentieth Century Yard Sale.

Monique told me, “I’m going to find more crap to sell,” and went inside.

When she returned with assorted doilies and place mats, two vases, a handful of books, all moldy oldies, and a wooden spoon, I momentarily got caught up in the spirit of our enterprise and considered selling a bunch of old cameras and flashes. I had found the cameras – a Kodak in its Bakelite casing, a few early Polaroid Land cameras, an odd little British number, and a light-metering device of German manufacture – at some of the same yard sales where Monique bought her milkglass.

I went so far as to bring the cameras out on the porch. For several minutes I opened them all, fully extended the collapsible bellows, and tried the shutters and winding mechanisms. I can’t be sure now what I even liked about these cameras or why I started to buy them for a few dollars here and there. Maybe it’s something about their bulkiness and heft; nothing this small is this heavy anymore. The fronts of some of them are tricked up to look like locomotive engines. One camera has a two-piece viewfinder, one part a lens you look through, the other part a pair of thin wires that unfold into a perfect rectangle, a rectangle that becomes, for the eye looking through the lens, the frame of what will become the photograph. I have a hard time explaining the affection I feel for that wire rectangle, but I realized then I couldn’t sell the cameras, not one. They’d come with us.

All told we made nearly $200, which is a lot when you’re making it mostly in change and one-dollar bills. The giant moving sale will pay for our goodbye meals with friends and our food as we pack the truck. The money should last through Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and into North Carolina.

Paul

Dear Dad,

It is a misconception that you sleep in a hammock with your feet at one end and your head at the other. You’ll fall out. The proper way to do it is to lie diagonally, cutting across the hammock’s width. The Wapushani Indians of Southern Guyana, who along with their neighbors the Macuxi make the world’s best hammocks, sometimes sit entirely sideways in theirs. They make them from just one, perhaps a few, strands of rope, woven back and forth like a fishing net. You could hang an elephant in one and it wouldn’t break. It is nearly impossible to fall out of a Wapushani hammock, because they are long, broad ovals that catch you no matter how you move (mothers trust their babies to them). If you happen to go to southern Guyana, and range far enough into the savannahs to reach one of the villages, you will find the people using them like chairs, sitting upright, stable and confident.

The nearby gold miners do not have the money for artisanal hammocks, and they are not usually Indians, so they don’t get their beds made by an aunt and hung in the family home. They use inferior hammocks, though still better than most available in North America. Rather than a net, a miner’s hammock is a large cloth rug, usually decorated with a colorful design, tied to poles in the mining camp with thick nylon rope. The rope in the Wapushani hammock is soft and deceptively plain-looking, like old twine, integral to the rest of the weaving. In the miner’s hammock it is a crude graft of the annoying, yellow rope often used for pool rafts in North America. It frays easily and tends to refuse knots, but costs little and rarely breaks.

Despite their rough construction, the rug-and-nylon hammocks are better suited to the jungle, where the miners work; at night, you can pull half the cloth over yourself to keep out mosquitoes, which carry diseases, starting with malaria and heading sharply downhill from there. The hammocks are also solid fabric, which is important. Small but serious creatures on the forest floor, for example a Bushmaster snake, can’t see through the fabric to your sweaty skin, or smell you quite as clearly, and may pass by none the wiser.

I am saying all this not to expose the tremendous quantity of hammock disinformation in the Northern Hemisphere (now entering prime hammock season), but for a more selfish reason. In three months I will be heading to Guyana to research gold mining. I am going to write a book about it. This will involve several weeks in the area where they find the gold, part of the Northern Amazon, and that means sleeping in a hammock. I’ve never spent that long in one, and wonder about how it will go.
Can you take notes in a hammock? I did once before, but not for such a long time. I was on a very speculative attempt to write a magazine article about gold mining in the northern Amazon, and had come from Brazil to Guyana by bus and truck. The electricity came on for four hours at night in the towns, and not at all outside them, but I had a typewriter with me. I was so proud: this was the same route Evelyn Waugh and before that Walter Raleigh, and before that Alexander Humboldt and the Dutch cartographer Schomburgk had taken through the same jungle, after all, and there I was, nobody, clomping into town with a small backpack and an old typewriter, bought at a garage sale in Washington D.C. for ten dollars. Of course I couldn’t use it at first. Not only did it not have a “delete” key or a cut/paste function, which nearly paralyzed me, there was also nowhere to put the thing. I tried setting it up on the only horizontal fixture in town, a plywood bar under a shaky tin shelter, but the tapping upset the pennyweight scale at the bar’s far end, where they measured out the gold dust that the miners were trading for bottles of rum. They did not take kindly to the possibility of my tapping upsetting the gold dust. Other than the bar, all there was for furniture in the camp were hammocks, and a 1962 steel Smith-Corona is not ideally suited to a hammock. Still, I tried. Every time I punched a key the hammock swayed and the typewriter tilted and fell to the ground. The ground itself, which I also tried, was, though not hopelessly muddy, not good to sit in for long periods. So I took notes in a small pad with a flashlight in my mouth, then waited to begin typing everything out until I had caught a plane to Trinidad, where Walter Raleigh had come to grief on a similar pursuit.

From Trinidad I took a sailboat to Grenada. The sailboat tilted profoundly, and it was hard not to stay below deck without vomiting, but halfway through the passage I got things arranged with twine and battens on the galley table, where I could type when I was off watch. This being a sailboat table, keeping things level was out of the question. A few sail ties, normally wrapped around the relaxed sail while at anchor, held the typewriter to some pieces of wood. Then more ties held the battens to the table’s corners, with enormous knots that would embarrass a real sailor. Still, it worked. It was loud, being a manual typewriter, but the captain did not mind because it kept me off the deck, where I had proven to be more trouble than I was worth.

I was the least experienced sailor, so had few jobs to do, and had also gotten on the captain’s nerves by throwing up on the wrong side of the boat (you are supposed to get seasick over the lee rail, not the upwind rail, for the same reason you shouldn’t spit in the wind, only more so). So I typed out the jungle experience below deck and did only a little actual sailing, then flew home to write my book proposal, which sold two weeks ago or, if you prefer, three years later, a process far more complicated and difficult than finding my way through Guyana.

For the book, I will probably use the typewriter, which I still have, again. It is a peculiarity of the world’s development systems that places still without much electricity often have phones. In my past three trips, it was the case that a fax machine was fairly easy to find in the Amazon. I can take all my pages, then catch the truck through to the logging project near a place called Mabura Hill, and fax them home as I go. With the fax there, I’ll only have to bring a hammer and nails and build a small stool for the typewriter, then sit sideways in the hammock in front of it, as the Wapushani demonstrate. The fact is, we like books about jungle adventures, but no one has yet figured out how to write one on site, which is sometimes necessary. I know others have done it from notes, but I do not trust myself for accuracy if I don’t do it right there, as things happen. If I have a typewriter and stool, I think it’s possible.

Later,

Marc