Coney Island Baby

Song of the Day 07/20/2022

Coney Island Baby by Lou Reed

I’ve never liked to sleep in basements. The reason is obvious: I don’t like the idea of living underground, sleeping in a place reserved for the dead. As per Jewish tradition, when I die I’d like to be buried underground in the soil, in an unadorned, inexpensive wooden casket with no metallic components. It’s my eventual goal to decompose naturally. While living, something I for the most part love to do, I’d like to sleep above ground. Call me stupid and superstitious, I don’t care.

After graduating college I was broke and in need of a new apartment. I wouldn’t be able to find my own place, and didn’t know anyone looking to move out at the same time as me. I began looking at rooms in flatshares; everything I saw was squalid and damp. To mention the possibility of ‘natural light’ for $1200 per month, a lot of the rooms didn’t even have windows.

I didn’t really have a budget for anything I could afford, as I didn’t have any money or income. But $1200 per month, utilities included, seemed like a reachable figure if I were to do enough random, menial labor. One of the jobs at my disposal included driving around the city and dropping off grocery store coupon packets in the lobbies of buildings. It paid $100 per day in cash. This was a lot better than stepping foot into an office. If I did it for 12 days per month and wrote freelance, I’d for sure be able to get by swimmingly.

A friend of a friend’s friend told me about a room in Bushwick that would soon be available. The woman mentioned it was off the Jefferson L, the Bushwick stop closest to the city. I immediately said no, it would probably be too expensive. ‘No! You, no!’ She exclaimed. ‘It’s rent-controlled!!’

The ‘room’ was an entire basement of a nicely renovated ground-floor two bedroom—620 square feet for $1350 per month. I would be sharing the apartment with two men in their 30s, one a lawyer who apparently was ‘never really there.’ The other was a graphic designer with a chubby and vocal beagle. It seemed like he was there a lot.

‘It’s pretty cool down here, so the good news is you’ll probably not need much AC in the summer.’ The man with the beagle told me.

‘What about the winter?’ I asked.

‘The heating is decent.’

The prospect of 620 square feet to myself at 22 years old seemed appealing enough to accept living underground and even pay a little more than expected. I saw a few caterpillars on the floor, but it didn’t seem like the biggest deal. The guy asked me not to kill them.

‘I wasn’t going to.’ I responded.

Another nice thing about this apartment was that, as it was a connection through a friend of a friend’s friend, there was no real application process. No need for a guarantor or something called pay stubs, which I didn’t have. They wanted $250 for a security deposit, I found that doable.

There’s no real event or epiphany that took place shortly afterward. I just thought about it more, and given the reason I mentioned in the first paragraph, eventually chose not to take it. Two weeks later I moved back to Berlin and house-sat in Neukölln for a famous opera singer that I met on Facebook. Eventually, I would move into a room in a friend’s apartment for 450 EU per month, all in. I was very happy there, living above ground.