A few months ago, my friend Ellen and I went on a walk. We’re the type who can easily talk for hours but our conversation revolved around the precarity of renting, being attached to ephemeral things through objects (dating, ugh), and the amount of plastic in our bodies. I encapsulated our conversation into an essay for her exhibition Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles: Plastic, Plastic, Plastic at the Mackey Apartments in Los Angeles.
In collaboration with her friend Kerstin von Gabain, their delicate but hardy sculptural work considered the idealization behind the designs of Rudolph Schindler, the architect behind the apartments, and the way we live in contemporary Los Angeles. A lit reading was held to commence the run of the show, but I was out of town, so Ellen read my work on my behalf. I’ve included the excerpt that she read two Sundays ago among her artwork (featured in images) about the two years I sublet across the cities of LA and New York. Also, please immerse yourself in Ellen’s art work!
Sublets*
I lived in more than fifteen places for a year and a half across New York City and Los Angeles in 2021-2022, during and after vaccinations for Covid-19. Some apartments were borrowed, others were sublet; I stayed in hotels once or twice at discounted prices just to avoid moving again. In between cities and sublets, I slept at my parents in San Diego or on the couch of my friends' apartment in Manhattan. The pandemic had left me houseless and job-seeking—I could afford therapy but not rent.
The hardest thing to remember in every house is which way the faucets turn for hot water. I learned the hard way every time. My fundamental ignorance on the topic of plumbing made this fiddling routine of faucets a magician’s feat, a thrill-drip of dopamine deposited into the folds of my broken, Proustian brain. I pictured mazes of tubular pipes with the right angles of Modernist paintings, sinking deep into the earth beneath the tub I had finally gotten to fill with hot enough water—using a rubber band and a ziplock bag that a woman on YouTube taught me to do. I learned the timing of water heaters; I repaired toilet johns, re-seasoned skillets, buffed beat boards, tightened doorknobs, folded towels over and over until I left bathrooms looking like hotels.
I refused the term "digital nomad"— I was not employed enough for my subletting phase to feel luxurious enough or even accurate to earn that title. I was more of a cowboy or a traveling salesman. My standard of living dropped very low—but in a fun way, I liked being efficient and minimal and tuned-in to everything around me. The novelty only wore off once a month and it was when I had to pack my suitcases again, crying about failure and what a psychic called a "weak root chakra."
I envied people with habits and long term plans. I started traveling with odd comfort items to generate a sense of continuity and permanence. For example, I carried around a mug from a thrift store for an old TV station that said "Paris News" with a tiny radio antenna drawn on a tiny state of Texas. I liked thinking about the news anchors and if they were still alive, where it sat on their desk and how it sat wherever I took it. It kept me distracted. I also kept a clock radio in my suitcase that could only find one radio station at a time, but only in one specific spot that I had to find in each home. I noted the way different types of counter marble felt under my palms—its smoothness comforting me. I attached my feelings to ripening fruit trees. I overshared with the people who made my coffee.
My memory, like many people's during this era and after, began to fray at the edges. My historic dyscalculia (the failure to understand number-based information) worsened to a comic degree: I sent packages to places that didn't exist, sent friends to the wrong side of the block—petty inconveniences that stacked up behind me like a silent diagnosis. I'd imagine I'm not the only one who routinely walks into a room and forgets why they did. I became like a child without object permanence, but I felt attached to everything around me. Confidence became a coping mechanism. I relied on my wit and my leg exercises. Did my friends and colleagues think I fell off? Do I think I fell off? Yeah, I definitely fell off. It was too painful to call it a crisis or a flop era, because in plain sight, I think it probably looked pitiful. My mother called it floundering, my friend said it was chic; a guy who slept in the backroom of a gallery and whom I shouldn't have slept with even though I did, said the one-suitcase lifestyle was enviable. Even though he lived in the back of a low-budget gallery, he still had more house than I did.
As I entered each place—each condo, each brownstone, each converted multi-family unit, I tried to imagine what tenants were like when no one was around. I embodied my voyeurism, I improvised the choreography of other people’s days. Or tried to. I imagined all the people who lived here before me. The interiors of people's homes say less about their taste or decorating skills than it does about how they live inside it when no one is around to see them. The way a space is used, imprints a pattern onto its aura, like if you took every single frame in a film reel and stacked them on each other and shined a light beneath it. A hazy way to see everything that happened in that room, visually, at least for one second. Then it's gone.
By my seventh sublet, I was at an old friends' house who kept her vitamins in her silverware drawer. I dropped a tube of lipstick on the floor and it rolled away from me as if pulled off stage by fishing wire. An uneven foundation or a ghost, who's to say? How long was stuff just stuff? Where did she end and I begin? My clutter on her counter, stirring my coffee with her grapefruit spoon. Tightening the screws on her table like it were mine, trimming the plants, sleeping on her pillows and changing the sheets.
I liked looking at her jewelry, at the old photos of her relatives in black and white. The routines of her neighborhood outside her living room windows became mine: When the dry cleaner pulls the rollup garage door down, the sky turns a dusty blue. When the sign for the Korean restaurant lights up, radios on the street get louder. The illustration of a snarling tiger delivering a take-out box with a green silk scarf grins through her office window with an orange glow through the potted palm leaves. I sit in her chair, with its screws tightened, and stare out the window, pretending it's my life. This is my life. This is my life in her house, with her stuff. But this is my life—with the tiger and the radio and the roll-top door; this is my life. ☼