Transcript of Shortstacks, January 29, 2013
Intro: Bitch Radio plus Audio Smut equals Shortstacks: short sexy musings inspired by Bitch’s latest issue.
Audio Smut: In the 1980s New York City’s lower east side proved to be the perfect storm of government and city negligence, poverty, homelessness, and self- determination. Dozens of buildings were seized by the city for back taxes and laid empty. Naturally, people went in them and started to build homes. This is called squatting, or sometimes referred to as urban homesteading. My friend, Famous, lived in a squat on New York’s lower east side for about twelve years. The first time she visited New York she stayed at the Umbrella House. Before arriving at the now famous squat, she didn’t really know what a squat was. Her first day in New York City ever was in an abandoned building with no heat, no electricity, no running water. And in her words, she found herself very comfortable there. After her first trip to New York, Famous traveled throughout North America for a few years, consistently coming in and out of New York City. When she was in New York, she would stay at the Umbrella House, putting in labor in exchange for housing. Since these buildings lay empty, repairs were always needed. If you wanted to stay, you needed to put in time and build relationships with the people who lived there. After all, it’s someone’s home. We start this story here. Famous is leaving New York City one summer.
Famous: I left pregnant. I terminated that pregnancy, but in the mean time, I had a good amount of time to think about where I was in my life, what I was doing in my life, how I felt about being a mom. And by now I’m coming up on maybe 24, and some of my travels had also been kind of shopping for a city. I came to the conclusion that if I got to choose [what] the next phase of my life would look like I would build a house and I would put a child in it. The place I felt most at home and most at ease and most capable of taking care of myself and providing for myself was New York City of all places. At the time, there were all of these abandoned buildings and the work was really hard, the life was hard, and definitely took its toll in many ways. But it was possible.
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Famous: I started out at Umbrella House because it was the building that I knew best. And I didn’t work out there. So I moved up to 7th Street. The person who ended up being my daughter’s father took me in, to his place. We talked about having a child together, but it didn’t necessarily need to be in the context of being partners. Maybe a partnership would work out, maybe it wouldn’t, but we could probably raise a kid. It’s curious to me how much we were really just talking shit. We had no idea what we were actually talking about and that that storyline was the one we ended up having to figure out. So, I ended up pregnant, he and I were not committed to being partners, although we were, at the time, very much still in love. And so that’s when I approached the building for a space of my own. Someone had just moved out, there was an empty space. I asked for it. He lobbied for it, a couple other people lobbied for it also because of the pregnancy. It kind of moved “need” closer to “urgent” and when I got my space, it was a space. It was just a space, four stories up. There had been a big fire in that building that took out a whole stack of apartments from the first floor all the way through to the roof. People in the back of the building would walk out to the stairs – the landings outside their apartments and just see sky. And building that place out was my pregnancy meditation. There was a lot of work to be done. I had a community of people really showed up for me. Folks that I hadn’t really known so well before, I didn’t necessarily have developed relationships with. They just kept showing up. “What needs to be done today?” By the time it was time to sheet rock the ceiling, my belly was big enough to where I could still lift sheet rock, I never stopped carrying things, but I couldn’t actually get around my belly. There was like this baby in the belly in the way. And they would hold the sheet rock up for my while I screwed it in. They would help carry it up the stairs, like whatever. There were some mornings close to when Felix was due that I would come downstairs to my space and there would already be someone working because they could just see what needed to be done. It was pretty amazing.
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Famous: I was being independent, self determined, and living by my own means for so long that it didn’t occur to me to start enlisting any support in this pregnancy until later in the pregnancy. I did prenatal visits by way of my Medicaid insurance, but actually having the support for the pregnancy didn’t occur to me to that I really needed any, or I just figured that I didn’t have time for that. I was already 7 months pregnant before we started interviewing midwives, which is late. So we had interviewed one, we liked her, it took me a couple weeks to get back to her, and she’s like, “Now I’m already full for that month.” And I was like, “What? What? Now what do I do?” and she recommended somebody else and that phone call led to another phone call led to another call led to another phone call where I finally landed with this woman, Alice, who was not doing homebirth anymore. You know, looking back, she was in her 50s, she had five kids, you know, suburban house in Queens, had raised all her children pretty conventionally in that they had a stable and secure upbringing, good school, she had put them all through college… those kinds of things. The lower east side was pretty notoriously still a quote-un-quote “bad neighborhood.” Cabs didn’t cross Avenue A. You could not get a taxi cab to come into the neighborhood, much less find one in the neighborhood to leave. She drove in, she stood out on the sidewalk. We were still under black-out which meant that while we had electricity in the building, all of the front of the building was blacked out so you couldn’t tell from the front of the street that we had electricity. We didn’t have good windows in front of the building, we still had a lot of them boarded up, and it looked like an abandoned building. We didn’t have doorbells or anything like that, so she had to figure out [and] she had to holler up at the building to get someone’s attention. I was working on the fourth floor and we were living on the fifth floor so she had to stand out there and holler before somebody could notice that she was there and then go all the way down and let her in. And opening the door, the building still smelled like an old abandoned building. There’s a particular smell that I didn’t… that I took for granted at the time. But I recognize it now, that this building has be unoccupied for a period of time where the infrastructure, the guts, the mortar, what makes this building, has gotten to take over. And we had this crazy pit bull who lived in the hallway – she was our hallway dog, Morena. She had lost a litter in the fire. She was someone’s dog when the building had a fire, she had lost a litter, and she had kind of gone crazy. She had kind of gotten pushed around. People took care of her, maybe took her in in the winter but as spaces in the building were renovated and more and more spaces were occupied, and less abandoned, she got pushed to the lower and lower and darker levels of the building until she was living in the back of the first floor at the end of the hallway, nested in a pile of fiberglass. Dark, never saw the light of day, rats, cold all the time. So, someone went down and let her in, so the first thing that she encounters is this dark, dank, stinky hallway and then this crazed, growling, barking, chasing, pit bull coming right at her. And that woman still came on in the building (laughs) and came all the way up to the fifth floor and I was busy. I was building my house and I wasn’t there wasn’t there to greet her. I wasn’t very gracious. I really wasn’t, I was busy. I was 8 months pregnant by then, which should be also a sign to any midwife [that] “this person is a nightmare.” And I had this big belly, I wore this little cotton tube skirt, I know I was wearing my bra, and that’s it. And a tool belt. And I climbed in the window off the fire escape like it was no big deal, like this child really didn’t slow me down much. And she made some comment, about the fact that I was agile like that, which seemed to impress her. And then we took her downstairs to show her my house that I was working on, where we were planning on having this child and it was very much a construction site. It wasn’t a home that was unfinished, it was a construction site. We were like ,“She’ll be born here” with every confidence and everything that we didn’t know and she’s like, “Okay, well, all we really need is the baby needs to land somewhere soft, we need to be able to keep the baby warm, and we should have water at hand.” (laughs) We were like, “Okay! Basics, we can do that. We can do those things. Something soft, something warm, water. Got it.” I really don’t know why this woman took us on, just looking back on it I cannot imagine, I cannot fathom what she was thinking. And this woman charged us the price of an oxygen tank, because she didn’t have one, because she wasn’t doing home birth at the time, a fish scale, to weigh the baby, because she didn’t have one because she wasn’t doing home birth at the time, and we installed a dishwasher for her. She had five children and they were grown and they were starting to have families of their own and family gatherings. The dishes were overwhelming, so what would really make a difference in her life was a dishwasher. So they bought the dishwasher and we installed it. That’s what she charged us. An afternoon’s worth of labor, an oxygen tank, and a fish scale. That’s it. And she took very good care of us. I moved in two weeks before my daughter was born and by the time I moved in there was sheet rock on the walls and it had been taped, it had been floated. The floor was painted, although it was still a plywood subfloor. There was plumbing. We had run all of the pipes, both waste pipes and water pipes, all the way down to the basement. That entire stack of apartments got water and waste because I needed to move into my place. Same with the electricity.
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Famous: There were nine of us there for Felix’s birth. People I knew and trusted. People I loved and trusted. And one of them was in charge of keeping the place warm and it still makes me smile. He was so intent and focused on his responsibility that it was the beginning of November and fucking 90 degrees in there. It was 90 degrees in there. To the point where I was begging people to open the window and nobody would open the window because maybe the baby would get cold and we did have running water. We didn’t have hot water, the hot water heater had not been installed, but someone who had helped finish the last bits of the apartment so that we could move in brought me a thermos – a pretty fancy pump thermos to keep water hot in. And that was our answer. That was our solution. And Alice just went with it. But everything went well, everything went beautifully, and my child was welcomed into the world by the people who would take care of her, her whole life.
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Famous: We still have that that apartment was Felix was born in. She lived there either with myself or her father until just last year. But that was her home. It is still her home. She still has keys to the building, she still knows everybody else who lives there. When Sandy came through, it was in the flood zone, it was affected, [and] that was the first place she went.
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Audio Smut: That building on 7th Street between Avenue B and C is no longer a squat. After years of struggle, that building, along with many others, are now legally owned housing co-operatives. Famous moved out of that apartment a few years ago.
Famous: If I stayed in the same place, on 7th Street between B and C, I would be secure for the rest of my life but I would be on 7th Street between B and C for the rest of my life, and that’s it. It’s kind of a hard choice.
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Outro: This Shortstack was lovingly produced by Audio Smut for Bitch Magazine’s latest issue, “Habitat”