Prey City
The first time I ever interacted with the NYPD, they came to my apartment. They arrived after I called them, after I called the local department but couldn’t get anyone on the phone on a Saturday evening, after I called 911 and explained to every operator that this wasn’t exactly an emergency—I was just informing them of a concern I had. I did this after prodding from my mother, who tends to sound alarm bells fairly early. My boyfriend had gone home to stay with his family for the weekend. I think it was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.
For people who are Jewish, the paired holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the holiest days of the calendar. Rosh Hashanah represents the New Year, and “Yom Kippur is the moment …when we dedicate our mind, body, and soul to reconciliation with our fellow human beings, ourselves, and God.” I am not Jewish—although I considered converting when it looked like my boyfriend and I were headed for marriage—but I’d always envied the connectivetissue that ran like a circulatory system among the people who shared his identity in the upper middleclass suburb we called home. I’d felt isolated there, and now, alone again, inside the world we’d carved inside our tiny apartment diorama.
I lived in New York City for three years. Every day, I felt exposed—like I was too seen, somehow raw from eyes sliding up and down my skin. I learned to be prey. Although I kept my gaze fixed on my feet as I walked along the sidewalk—the city is riddled with hazards and semi-hazards every few feet—I always knew what was happening 360 degrees around me. I began to cultivate a “city walk,” which is my version of an aggressive stride. It is difficult to both walk like you’re headed somewhere and temper the sound of your steps so that no one finds your pace threatening.
In The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead writes, “it’s the biggest hiding place in the world” about Port Authority (the crowded bus station in Midtown), but he could have been talking about the entire metropolis. So while minorities might feel too visible on the streets—steeped in Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk terroir—I always felt out of step. I never felt safe.
I became practiced at slipping in and out of the edges of scenes, inhabiting the periphery. I walked around feeling like I wanted to disappear, even as my relationship—my anchor to the city and a kind of plumb bob that I thought was helping me return to the magnetic center of my true self—began to fall apart.
The third year I lived in the city, my boyfriend and I shared a tiny apartment in the West Village. We were on the second floor, which felt like luxury personified, when buildings in our neighborhood could have up to six floors without an elevator. (I think ours only had four floors, but in the entire year I lived there, I never walked up the stairs past our place.) We were also two doors up from the trash room, which is far enough to avoid the smell and not so far that it feels like commuting.
The front door of our building was barely marked, opening onto West Fourth street between a “Spanish Mexican restaurant” and a sex toy shop called The Cherry Boxxx. Any time I walked out that door, I was knee-deep in Village vibrancy. I always felt I like I was wearing a costume, like I was dressing in camouflage. I’d carefully curate my clothes and my make-up before opening our door, even if it was just to deposit refuse inside the trash room inside my own building. I had to stand out enough to belong in the village—if you are clearly a tourist, you’re also a target—but not so much that I drew excessive attention to myself. Walking around the street simply being a young woman in New York City was enough of a perceived invitation for harassment.
And yet, that year I lived without curtains. I didn’t exactly think of this as exhibitionism, since the direct view of our apartment was a building so far away that I never saw any silhouettes in the darkened windows over there; I figured they couldn’t see into ours either. (One of my favorite movies at the time was Hitchcock’s Rear Window, so I definitely should have rethought this assumption.) I’ll justify it now by saying that this choice to go curtainless maximized the sunlight coming in—to place my parents affectionately nicknamed The Shoe Box—with its efficient 376 square footprint. There were five nearly floor-to-ceiling windows sliced into its longest wall (three in the living room and two in the bedroom) with deep wooden sills. I imagined they were the kind Audrey Hepburn could strum her guitar on. Like in Holly Golightly’s apartment, one-and-a-half of the living room wall’s windows were diagonally transversed by a fire escape.
Through the metal grating and the unobstructed window, we could look out into a shaft of daylight about 1500 feet across (the depth of the two buildings forming the sides of the square perpendicular to my own), and if you didn’t look down at people’s trashcans and crustybackdoors flooding out onto the concrete ground, there were screens of trees and the back of a building a whole block away. I could forget that I was living inside the gut of New York City. In my head, I called it “our open-air courtyard,” like it was something we owned.
During the day, this tree-touched square of breathing room provided visual relief from always being among people and buildings. (I purposely ignored the buildings in Midtown on my way to school every day because, if you look up, you are definitely a tourist. I felt their presence though; on trips to my parents’ home in the Philadelphia suburbs I would wallow in the refreshing blue-blankness of the sky.) From the second floor of our sanctuary, it was easy to gaze across and imagine that there probably weren’t hundreds of other people absorbing the same view from the backs of the three other buildings at any given time.
Now it’s Saturday night, and I’ve spent the day inside my apartment alone. I haven’t showered, and I’ve worn my pajamas all day, and I’m trying to get some homework done. I’d been eating leftovers instead of having food delivered, which would have been an occasion for concealer at least.
Home alone and unwashed, I decided to treat myself to a documentary my boyfriend had brought home but we hadn’t had time to watch together before he decamped for Philadelphia called Outfoxed. I can’t remember where he got it—maybe from his father, who worked for one of the networks and would often get advance copies of various new releases. It could have been from the place that rented DVDs down the street. This wasn’t from the big chain that everyone thinks of first—it was the Village in the middle aughts—but we had a membership to the tiny independent “video store.”
I was just awakening to my political identity then, although I had some vague sense of wanting to prove myself to be a ‘good liberal.’ It seems incredibly naïve to me now, but as a culture, we were just starting to catch onto this idea that some media outlets might not be valuing core journalistic principles of impartiality or fact-checking. That, in fact, they might be presenting themselves as “fair and balanced” but be preying upon our inexperience with “news entertainment” pushing an indisputably biased agenda behind the scenes. (This was also before social media had gained much traction.) In a video promotion released on the ten-year anniversary (in 2014) one of the speakers offers, “I’ll tell people about Outfoxed today, and they’re like, ‘yeah, everybody knows that Fox News is conservative’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, you wanna know why? It’s because of that movie.’”
As I sat in the dark that evening, in an apartment about forty blocks north of the gaping holes in the earth at Ground Zero (in the years I lived in the city, columns of light shone into the sky each evening as luminous reminders of everything we’d lost), I was shaken. When the credits rolled, I felt physically vulnerable. Maybe because I was dating a newsman’s son, I knew there was always more to the stories than what was covered on air, but I hadn’t imagined that a whole network would twist the facts to suit their patron’s purpose.
I was marinating in anxiety when a bright light shone into my peripheral vision. My prey instincts instantly activated. It was Saturday evening in the West Village, around 9 o’clock, which is too late for daytime activities and way too early for the kind that would warrant lights. But a flashlight beam shone over the wall across my courtyard. It was followed by a man in a harness, trailing a belay line. Two other men appeared, scaling up and over the wall into view. They were not teenagers, but they appeared to be younger than middle age, and they werewearing flannel shirts and sneakers. It was nearly October in the city, so night air could sliceyour fingers. This all seemed odd, and suspicious too. If my boyfriend were there, I probably would’ve deferred to his good sense to Not Get Involved. (If my boyfriend were there, maybe Iwouldn’t have felt so vulnerable.) I tried to call him two or three times, but he was in holidayservices, so he didn’t answer.
Eventually I surrendered and called my mother, who, predictably, freaked out. Before she’d let me off the phone, she made me promise that I would call the local police station and report the urban rock climbers, who were making progress setting anchors into the mortar to cross the pocked brick wall, swinging in and out of shadows of trees in the far corner of the courtyard. The local police station had a voicemail message on, so I proceeded with the only option left to me: I called 911. When the operator picked up, I remember expecting her to repeat the voiced over part of too many beginnings of episodes of Law and Order: SVU: “911, what is your emergency?” I don’t remember what she said, but it wasn’t that.
Caught off-guard, I had struggled to explain that this wasn’t exactly an emergency, but there were some men scaling a wall across a courtyard and it seemed suspicious. She transferred me. The second woman transferred me. A third woman transferred me and I was finally connected with what I was told was “a local dispatch.” After the fourth time of telling the story and feeling increasingly doubtful of its significance in the life of this teeming city, my reluctance rising into my throat, as the final operator asked the address. I didn’t know the street address of the building I’d spent most of the year gazing at the back of, so I reasoned, “it’s probably…Cornelia Street?” The operator responded, clearly exasperated with, “what is your address?” and I gave it to her.
I was shocked into action about twenty minutes later when my doorbell rasped as I was getting ready for bed. I answered the page from downstairs, and it was the police. They said they’d been sent to address “the disturbance.” I buzzed them in and about 25 seconds later, they were outside my door. I had barely moved the chain away from the lock before they were in my apartment. I did not have time for make-up. I sheepishly pointed out the window at the three guys in the rock-climbing gear who had made it about halfway across the perpendicular wall toward me. A youngish officer stepped over my homework—still spread out all over the floor—to perch on my windowsill, which was almost the same depth as his dark shoes. He struggled to open the window and when it gave in, I remember realizing for the first time that, if unlocked, the top sash could slide down far enough to let a body out. Or in. I think I temporarily left this physical plane in embarrassment then panic as he pushed his head into the darkness and called out to the men: “Hey, what’re you guys doing? Because, this lady, she called the cops!”
I couldn’t hear their answers, partly because I was still inside and partly because the blood rushing to my head made the world seem both very loud and very far away. It felt like falling backward into an ocean with wave after wave of sound closing above me, even though my eyes attested that I was inside my messy apartment.
I know there were two police officers that night, but I only remember the one perched there like a bird of prey.
He jumped clumsily down from my windowsill, announcing, “They say they’re from the phone company.” This seemed implausible bordering on ludicrous. What phone company employees work Saturday nights after nine in mismatched flannel uniforms?
Perhaps he noticed my pale face and nervous eyes, because he decided to try to make conversation. Looking around at the two desktop computers [one was mine, one was my boyfriend’s] and one laptop [his], the man who had just put me in mortal danger pulled back his lips in a smile showed his incisors when he smirked, “I guess you like computers.”
I wanted to get him out of my apartment as quickly as I could, so I responded
dismissively, “I’m dating a Computer Science major, and he needs them.”
This did not deter the young police officer. After he conferred with his partner who’d stayed in the hallway, they decided to “go around” and “talk to these guys.” He turned back tome and lobbed one last miscalculation that, to my piqued instincts, sounded like a threat: “Maybe we can meet another time, under different circumstances.”
“Yeah, sure. Maybe.”
I couldn’t believe that this man had the audacity to flirt with me. I practically pushed him out into the stairwell.
When I stepped back from the deadbolted door, I was sweating. I was sweating in my smelly pajamas, on my scalp through my unwashed hair. I turned to the windows and felt a cold rush of panic move up my spine. My mind flew to a catalog of possible safety measures. Settling on Audrey Hepburn’s actions in Wait Until Dark, I ran around my apartment turning off all the lights. If I was lucky, the surprised “phone company installers” hadn’t had the time or the wherewithal to count the windows and floors to see which one that obnoxious officer had shouted from. If I wasn’t lucky, they would break into my apartment from the fire escape.
They say New Yorkers don’t call the police when they hear screams. The advice often given to women who might be assaulted on the street—petite women like me—is to scream “fire!” instead of “rape” or “help” because bystanders are more likely to report a fire to emergency services. All I could think about was, if I were attacked in my own apartment, would anyone ask what I was wearing? Pajamas and no make-up, my city mask pulled aside.
I hid under my blanket, panting with fear, until my body collapsed into sleep.
It wasn’t until the bare morning light poked its fingers through my windows the next morning that I realized I was safe. This prey animal had made it through.
Now I explain that time of my life to myself with a sense that I never lived among
people. I gave that apartment as my address for a whole year, but I did not meet a single other person who lived in the building (outside of the person I shared the apartment with). I don’t even remember seeing that many of my neighbors in the stairway—maybe one other? The only reason I knew there were upstairs residents was that one day someone began rehabbing the apartment directly above us and they did not relent for a single weekday until two months later. Every morning by seven, the jackhammer would start up like a particularly vengeful rooster. I foundout later from our landlord that an older woman had died up there. I didn’t ask how long her body had been decomposing above us before someone found her.
Outside of the nuisance of noise, I felt at the time that there was a bit of a ‘live and let live’ attitude surrounding us. I didn’t think I was acting any differently from any of my neighbors in mutually pretending that the other simply did not exist. Rationally speaking, perhaps this is the inverse of what happens in the street all day long: there, it is hard to ignore the fact that you are one of many, so at home, you imagine that it is just you. But gets to you… I found myself retreating further and further into my own world.
When my relationship ended and he took his last taxi away from our apartment to the airport, I walked back up to my Shoe Box and crawled under a blanket to cry. Even inside my own home, the only place that I felt safe to let out all of that hurt was under a natural down muffler. In the end, no one wants to hear or see that.
After/Thought Literary 