Blog About Photography

As usual, this isn’t proof-​​read.

I just sat down at my desk for the first time in more than two months. The last time I was here was in this apart­ment was on May 21, I think, at around this time, get­ting ready to fly out to LA to meet the dudes in the Jon­benét for the tour. And when I got here tonight it was a total scene worth sit­ting down to immor­tal­ize via the world­wide web.

In order to sub­let this place (a totally open loft space with no walls, no pri­vacy and a seri­ous rodent prob­lem in the most dan­ger­ous neigh­bor­hood in the New York City) we had to find peo­ple who basi­cally had no choice in where to live. We needed peo­ple who were des­per­ate and going to take the first thing they could find. We found exactly what we were look­ing for in four col­lege stu­dents up from Mon­ter­rey to intern at the Mex­i­can consulate.

I remem­ber being light on the details when I started talk­ing nego­ti­at­ing with them back in May. I was already on the road when they responded to my CL post, and I needed to lock them in. “It’s a Spanish-​​speaking neigh­bor­hood,” I think i said, maybe even adding some­thing along the lines of, “You’ll get along there bet­ter than we do. They moved in. They paid my room­mate June’s rent in cash. We were majorly relieved. 

June went pretty smoothly, if I remem­ber cor­rectly. I got a call at one point that the fridge was bro­ken. I called the super about it and that seemed to put the issue to rest. July was a dif­fer­ent story. 

I was in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia vis­it­ing my Uncle and his fam­ily when my room­mate called. We were eat­ing din­ner so I didn’t pick it up. But then he called again and then again. I called him back. The con­ver­sa­tion went some­thing like this. 

“There’s a prob­lem at the apart­ment,” I remem­ber my room­mate telling me. 

“Is it a crisis?”

“Well. It’s not a cri­sis really because it already hap­pened and there isn’t really any­thing we can do.”

“They’re leav­ing.”

“No, no, they’re staying.”

“Thank God.”

What had hap­pened was that the sewer had backed up into our base­ment. Every­thing sit­ting on the floor down there (includ­ing all the cloth­ing that I hadn’t taken with me on my trip, will’s bass and amp and a friend’s drum kit) was ruined. Also, like so much icing on a shit-​​flavored cake, the com­pany that owns our build­ing had just been pur­chased by another com­pany, and so total strangers were march­ing in and out of our apart­ment all week long get­ting the prob­lem fixed.

While all that was going on, a wad of cash had van­ished from the hid­ing place where one of the girls had been keep­ing it. As a result, she wasn’t able to pay her share of the rent, as Will explained to me after I got back to New York. So the girls had an out­stand­ing bal­ance of $225 that I would have to collect.

This whole time, nei­ther Will nor I were able to call these girls because they had an inter­na­tional cell phone num­ber. When I got back, I used skype to call them, but I would just get an oper­a­tor mes­sage in Span­ish I couldn’t under­stand. The same thing was hap­pen­ing for Will. I emailed them, but no response.

“They don’t come home until like 11 at night,” Will explained to me. He had been liv­ing with friends upstairs and said that when­ever he had to get ahold of them for some­thing, he just rang the bell every cou­ple of hours until some­one was finally there. At one point, both of us need­ing things from inside, we actu­ally broke in. This required my wrig­gling thru the secu­rity grate and going in through a semi-​​open window. 

The first thing I noticed inside is that the kitchen trash can was gone. I let Will in and then went to take a piss. The bath mats were miss­ing from the bath­room as well. Other than that the place seemed in pretty good shape – way neater than we ever man­aged to keep it — only that they seemed to be hoard­ing empty cans of Ari­zona tea. They were every­where. I’d even knocked over the ones that had been neatly arranged on the win­dow sill com­ing in from out­side. Will and I agreed we had no idea what they were doing with all those fuck­ing cans.

We got what we’d come for and left them a note with my phone num­ber instruct­ing them to call me.

“I need to know when they’re leav­ing so I can get the keys back,” I told Will a cou­ple days later when I still hadn’t heard from them.

“Oh. They’re leav­ing on the 30^th. At like three in the morn­ing,” he told me.

I emailed a cou­ple more times with no response. The 30^th came.

Tonight I walked from the friend’s place where I’ve been stay­ing to my apart­ment on Stock­holm street in Bush­wick. I fol­lowed some peo­ple in the front door (my unit has no func­tion­ing buzzer) and rang their door­bell. I stood therein the hall­way look­ing at my own front door. I could hear the Lion King.

“They’re watch­ing the Lion King.” I actu­ally said it out loud.

The door opened. It was Ale­ján­dra. I intro­duced myself and put out my hand which she awk­wardly shook and then she kissed me on the cheek. There were only two of them in there. One had gone home early I was told, and another was out say­ing good­bye to her “sum­mer lover.” Every light bulb in the apart­ment was burnt out save one in the back. The inter­net had been dis­con­nected. The bath­room was lit by can­dles. A cou­ple of trash bags were piled up where the trash can used to be. My com­forter was miss­ing. They had no plan about how to get to the airport.

Over the course of the next few hours, while they packed and cleaned, I help them make arrange­ments to get to Laguardia. This took a lot of time because with­out the miss­ing girl, the two were hes­i­tant to make any deci­sions. In the end, we set­tled on the sim­plest plan. at 4, I would call Bush­wick Car Ser­vice, my being the only per­son with a phone.

At 2:45, Georgina turned up with her “sum­mer lover,” a Greek guy who had to be push­ing 40. (The girls were all 18.) He sat down on Will’s bed, and we talked about pol­i­tics while the girls fin­ished get­ting ready.

I just saw them off. When the car showed up, Georgina hag­gled with the dri­ver over the cost of the ride. All the times I’ve taken Bush­wick to the air­port, I’ve never actu­ally thought to do this. I have, how­ever, changed many light bulbs in my day. Tomor­row, I’ll change many more.

How to present Dol­drums has been a prob­lem. Yes­ter­day after look­ing at all Pete’s new shit I decided to copy him, and put the pic­tures into a grid. I think it really helps.

are awe­some. check them out. peterzacharyvoelker​.com.

Here’s a story from the front page of the Sun­day Times. As usual, they’ve cut right to heart of the one of the most press­ing issues of our day in this hard-​​hitting inves­tiga­tive piece. Appar­ently, they’ve dis­cov­ered that some peo­ple stay in their col­lege town even after they’ve grad­u­ated from col­lege. I would have gone to my grave only anec­do­tally under­stand­ing this phe­nom­e­non if they’d buried it back in the edu­ca­tion sec­tion somewhere.