Fourth Comings Read online

  “SAMSS,” I pronounced. “More familiarly known as Sammy.”

  Within thirty seconds, even before we had crossed the threshold, Hope and I had already invented a nickname for our future home. Though Hope and I had never before given much though to Sweden or its fine people, we were entranced by the prospect of living where muscle-bound Brooklyn Vikings once worked themselves into a sweat.

  “Do you think Ursula is really serious about the fifty-percent rule?” Hope asked. “Will I be quizzed on all things Swedish?”

  The academic family has been officially on the lease for fifteen years—and they still are. Ursula could have terminated their contract when they left for sabbatical in Europe, and made some minor renovations to jack up the rent to its ridiculously high market value. But Ursula, despite her hostile exterior, does have a heart. She’s loyal to her renters, and sort of sees their family as an extension of her own, so she agreed to sublet the apartment for the next year under one strange condition: Fifty percent of the occupants had to come from Swedish stock. Apparently, such pro-Scandinavian discrimination isn’t considered xenophobic when it’s in the name of historical preservation and rent stabilization. It’s one of those strange New York stories that I would never believe if I were not personally involved.

  I spun around. “Quick! Who’s your favorite Swede?”

  “Hmm,” Hope said, giving the question its due consideration. “A toss-up between Ingmar Bergman and Astrid Lindgren.”

  “Oh.” I knew Bergman, of course, having studied his suicidal black-and-white films for a fun fun fun seminar titled “Cinematic Expressions of Existential Crisis.” I had no clue who Astrid Lindgren was. I’d find out later that Astrid Lindgren was the author of the Pippi Longstocking books. I never read them, but Hope loved them as a kid, mostly because she and the titular character are both redheads. At the time I didn’t get the chance to ask about Astrid because Hope had already volleyed the question right back at me.

  “Who is your favorite Swede?”

  “I’m not the one representin’ Scandinavia,” I said. “I’m gonna bigup to all my Anglo-Scotch-Irish boo-boos in the UK!”

  “Holla,” Hope said like the honky she is.

  “Favorite Swede,” I mused, tapping my finger to my temple. “Favorite Swede…There’s just so many to choose from.” Then after a moment I snapped my fingers. “I got it!”

  “Who?”

  (Do you, Marcus, know my favorite Swede? Take a guess. Don’t peek. I’ll start on a fresh page to keep up the suspense.)

  fourteen

  “The Swedish Chef.”

  (Did you get it right? Or did you guess another Swede? Did you guess Max Martin? Max Martin was the mastermind behind the catchiest late-nineties teen pop. He wrote contagious hits for all the boy bands: *NSYNC, Hum-V, and yes, the Backstreet Boys. “Quit Playing Games with My Heart.” “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely.” “I Want It That Way.” We all owe a great debt to Max Martin for these audio viruses and so many more. You were wearing a Backstreet Boys T-shirt outside the principal’s office when you drawled Jess Darlin’. I think you were wearing that T-shirt, or that’s how I remember it. If you were to ask me to name my favorite Swede, I would say Max Martin because you used to come to school with Kevin, Nick, A.J., B-Rok, and Howie D. on your chest.

  You were wearing T-shirts ironically before anyone in our high school even realized that one could wear clothing ironically. I was alone in my appreciation of the joke. Yes, for you my answer would have been Max Martin. But you’re not the one who asked.)

  For the next few minutes Hope and I tested the limits of childishness by singsonging nonsense like the cleaver-welding Swede from The Muppet Show.

  “Yorn desh bern, dor reett dor geet der du,” sang Hope.

  “Urn deesh, dee bern deesh, dee urr,” sang I.

  “Bork! Bork! Bork!” we sang together.

  “Sprangten unga teem der muken Swedish pancakes?” I asked.

  “Der muken Swedish pancakes?” Hope asked.

  And then I reminded her, in English, about the Swedish pancakes her mother used to make whenever I slept over her house.

  “My mother never made Swedish pancakes.”

  “Yes she did! They were sort of like crepes. Thin and golden brown with crispy edges. And she would dust them with confectioners’ sugar—”

  And then I suddenly stopped myself. Hope’s older brother used to snort sugar off our pancakes with a curly straw, flinging his rangy frame around the kitchen, banging his body into countertops and appliances in imitation of a crazed, coked-up SNL cast member. Six months after the last time I remember him doing this routine, Heath was dead from mainlining a bad batch of heroin. Had it been insensitive for me to so casually mention the sugar? Did the memory of her dead eighteen-year-old brother leap to Hope’s mind at the time? Of course, it’s too late to undo a conversation from four months ago.

  And if the memory had stung, she didn’t let on. She stopped humming “Dancing Queen” only long enough to correct my mistake.

  “My mother made German pancakes.”

  She was perched on the bottom step like a frog on a lily pad, her long legs bent and splayed out wide as she hunched over the ever-present sketchbook resting between her feet. Her hand never stopped moving, her eyes didn’t lift from the half-finished sketch of a homemade rain-smeared sign taped to the nearest corner stoplight. In the sketch, as on the sign that inspired it, the central image was blurred beyond recognition. Only one word was legible: LOST.

  “Really?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Ja,” she replied.

  “How are German pancakes different from Swedish pancakes?”

  “I have no idea,” she replied, tapping her pencil. “Maybe they don’t have as many sex partners?”

  “And they’re really bureaucratic….”

  Memory is a strange thing. I distinctly remembered those pancakes as being Swedish. Why would my mind randomly swap Swedish for German? After we discovered that our landlord was, in fact, Swedish-German, there was a brief, embarrassing moment where I thought my memory slip might really be evidence of an underdeveloped form of ESP. And then I literally smacked myself on the forehead for being suckered into one of the human brain’s most common contrivances, one that gives deep significance to mere coincidence.

  “I think that if we get to live here, we need to be more respectful of the many contributions the Swedes have made to our culture,” I said seriously.

  “We will sing ‘Dancing Queen’ and other ABBA songs,” Hope suggested.

  “And Ace of Base….”

  “And we will eat many Swedish fish….”

  And so it went. The apartment had already become a part of our history.

  Instant inside jokes were reason alone for renting the place, even before we found out that our basement apartment had served as the bowling alley for the Swedish American Men’s Sporting Society, which explains why it’s very long and very thin. And also very dark, since Swedes are genetically accustomed to getting little sunlight.

  Sammy comes completely if unimaginatively furnished by the Swedish geniuses from IKEA. Behold our overstuffed Olga couch with the celery green Fjeliin slipcover! Our Nökskaagen steamer trunk/coffee table and stainless-steel Måkdorrpvat bookshelves! And Sammy boasts a washer and dryer stacked on top of each other and located in the bathroom in what would normally serve as a linen closet. I don’t have to subject myself to the indignity of dragging my dirty duffels to the Laundromat! Imagine! Who knew such luxuries could be afforded to someone so desperately in debt?

  The only possible downside to our apartment is the neighborhood. In this overwhelming, real-estate-obsessed metropolis, you are your neighborhood. People make instantaneous assumptions about who you are based solely on your address. Everyone does it. It’s a necessity in this city of eight million, an instant ID badge that defines you as a member of a more select community among the masses teeming in anonymity.

  It reminds me
of what I’ve heard about huge public universities, where first-year students feel pressured to rush a fraternity or sorority because it’s the easiest way to develop an on-campus identity. (Well, easy if you don’t mind consuming grapes that have fallen out of your pledge brother’s ass crack.) You get a bid from Sigma Whatever and everyone knows that you’re an alcoholic jockstrap. You pledge Kappa Kappa Fill-in-the-Blank and everyone knows you’re a rich girl whose inbred equine features kept her out of the sorority for rich hot girls.

  The same holds true here in the city. What’s more, we all go around preaching our allegiance wearing the post-college equivalent to Greek letters (Gawker T-shirt, YSL ski goggle sunglasses) and pledge pins (skull pendant, Tiffany solitaire).

  Some quick and totally subjective free association:

  UPPER EAST SIDE=ARISTOCRATIC

  UPPER WEST SIDE=ACADEMIC

  LOWER EAST SIDE=ADDICTED

  These are totally biased observations, of course. Certainly there are welfare moms on the UES, college dropouts on the UWS, and triathletes on the LES. (Then again, maybe not.) I should really make a better effort not to stereotype, especially since I fall victim to such casual assumptions. We happen to live in a very desirable neighborhood, but not one that comes close to accurately reflecting who we are, because:

  PARK SLOPE=BREEDERS

  Yes, the Slope is known for having more sidewalk-hogging sancti-mommies than any other neighborhood in all five boroughs. Whether this is really true, I don’t really know. It seems to me that annoying mommies are hardly limited to the confines of Fourth Avenue, Prospect Park West, Flatbush Avenue, and Fifteenth Street. Still, Ursula has lived here for twenty years, and often waxes nostalgic about the good old days, when “zere were more dykes den tykes.”

  The Park Slope Mommy is a peculiar, oft-ridiculed mommy, one who is stereotyped as both crunchy and uppity. Oh woe to the straggler who stands between her double-wide Urban Mountain Buggy and the seminar on sustainable permaculture at the Food Co-op. And when it’s a dozen Maclarens deep at Tea Lounge, do not even think about apologizing if you accidentally brush an elbow up against the shrieking red bundle slung across her body. The Park Slope Mommy will mow you down and Croc-stomp your ass, because Park Slope Mommies don’t play. (Seriously. They don’t. They engage their children in “multidisciplinary explorative colloquia.”)

  Again, I don’t know how much of this is really true. But childless singles like myself swap PSM stories all the time. Creating these urban legends is a big part of this neighborhood’s appeal because New Yorkers just love to one-up one another in their tales of metropolitan woe.

  In that vein, I get a lot of mileage out of the fact that I’m sharing a bedroom for the first time in my life, and bunk-bed style at that. But at least I’ve got the bottom bunk, and the top bunk is Hope’s. And really, at only $550 a month, all grievances are moot. Considering my income-to-debt ratio, I’m lucky to be living anywhere at all, let alone in relative comfort in one of the more desirable neighborhoods in one of the acceptable outer boroughs. I love this apartment so much that it almost didn’t bother me at all when I heard the biggest drawback to living here unlocking the front-door dead bolt before I was even halfway through my first cup of coffee this morning, my silent prayer unanswered.

  “Good morning,” said the biggest drawback as she half-walked, half-shuffled toward me with a weary grimace, as if she resented the very idea of complying to the laws of gravity, of actually having to lift her limbs off the ground.

  “Good morning. Uh. Manda.”

  fifteen

  I’ve defended this choice before, and I’ll do it again.

  Yes, I’m well aware how the only thing more unlikely than Hope and me sharing the rent with Manda Powers, our promiscuous Pineville High classmate, is sharing the rent with the promiscuous Manda Powers and her lesbian girlfriend, Shea. Or rather, her genderqueer boifriend, as Manda prefers, that is, if I insist on using labels because I am brainwashed by the heteropatriarchal paradigm.

  For someone so devoted to hedonistic pleasures of the flesh, Manda sure has a knack for lecturing us in a self-righteous tone that instantly drains the fun out of everything. Case in point: On that very first afternoon outside the apartment, she showed up in her I HAD AN ABORTION T-shirt and asked, “Would you be making jokes if it were the African American Men’s Sporting Society? The Puerto Rican Men’s Sporting Society? What is it about the Swedes that makes it okay for you to be racist with impunity?” Manda has subverted the classic female dilemma by being both holier and whorier than thou. And yet, as you’ve repeatedly pointed out, I am voluntarily and hypocritically living with her.

  The city’s stratospheric rents make for bizarre living arrangements. And I know you’ll disagree, but by New York standards our story is not at all unusual. One of the twins’ two mommies is Manda’s aunt, the out-of-the-country academic. Manda and Shea met posing in an all-nude photo shoot for Rut, “the high-minded hard-core magazine for the Rutgers University community.” After graduating in May, the former sexhibitionist offered the latter the opportunity to share bedroom #1. For a little more than a month, the second bedroom (ours) was occupied by a barista of Swedish stock and his vegan-chef boyfriend, until they suddenly decided that they’d rather tour the country promoting alternative fuels in a VW bus pimped out to run only on recycled vegetable oil.

  News spreads fast around our small hometown, especially around college graduation time. All parents want proof that the diploma they paid for was a smart investment, and they need to find out whether the neighbors’ kids have better post-college prospects than their own. My mother will shamelessly grill any Pineville mom on how and where her child is making a living, which is fairly infuriating because my parents stopped paying for my Columbia education after my sophomore year. But if it weren’t for that Pineville parent-to-parent gossip hotline, it’s unlikely that Manda would have discovered that Hope and I were tired of living with my sister (me) and crashing on floors and futons (Hope) and were looking for an affordable (ha!) apartment just about anywhere in the city. Manda texted me: apt 550 mo. r u/hope swdsh?

  Yes, I needed an apartment. And $550 was a price I could sort of afford, that is, until my student loan payments bumped up to match my “elevated earning potential,” as the loan officers very optimistically put it. But was I or Hope…what? Single White Divorcees Seeking Husbands? Swinging Women Doing Sexy Homos? Single White Dick Sucking Heteros?

  It’s indicative of my desperation for affordable housing that I didn’t ignore Manda’s cryptic and possibly kinky message altogether. ok. wtf swdsh?

  After Manda explained Ursula’s Swedish clause via e-mail, I called Hope in Rhode Island to give her the bad news.

  “We can’t get the apartment unless you just so happen to be part Swedish.”

  “I am part Swedish,” she said. “On my mother’s side.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way,” she said. “Her maiden name is Johansson.”

  I loved that I didn’t know this about her, as it hinted at all the other things I had yet to discover about my best friend of ten years.

  As I just documented, one week later Hope and I traveled to Brooklyn and fell in love with SAMSS. We were nervous about the prospect of moving in with Manda but figured it was safer than finding someone through Craigslist. (“Better the nympho you know,” was our motto at the time.) We moved in two weeks later, constantly joking about how Manda and Shea might try to seduce us into their ominsexual union.

  Manda and Shea work the eight P.M. to four A.M. shift at Cave, a hipster sinkhole in Bushwick known for hosting a retarded carnival of pointless posturing known as Fuckyomomma.

  WILLIAMSBURG=HIPSTERS WITH TRUST FUNDS

  BUSHWICK=HIPSTERS WITHOUT TRUST FUNDS PRICED OUT OF

  WILLIAMSBURG

  I have kindly declined Manda’s invitations, but I’ve bled out the eyes as she’s shown me digital picture after picture of wannabe or slumming Williamsturdburgers trying too hard
to outdo one another in their kaffiyeh neck scarves, scraggly crustaches, and Jheri-curl mullets. This morning Manda was wearing the omnipresent terry-cloth headband with a red velour strapless booty-short romper. It’s an altogether frightening standard that’s being set when this American Apparel–Nymphette getup comes across as one of the less exasperating aesthetics du jour. I don’t need to pay a twenty-dollar cover charge to suffer ocular hemorrhaging in person. No. Thank. You.

  (I know. I’m forgoing the Four Abodes. Dissing the dharma. Deepening my dukkha. For someone who doesn’t claim to be a Buddhist, you’re damn good at dokusan. But come on, if I can’t hate on ridiculous hipsters, who can I hate on? Now, that’s a Zen koan worth riddling.)

  Manda’s and Shea’s jobs require them to lead a nocturnal lifestyle. They spend most of their daylight hours in bed, but not always sleeping, if you get my horrified drift. This is why I rarely work from the apartment even though working in one’s pajamas is supposed to be one of the greatest benefits of being a freelance editor. (Though I’d trade that in for medical benefits because on January 19, 2007, I turn twenty-three and will be officially removed from my parents’ health plan. Without that protective coverage, I am destined to contract a hanta virus on January 20.) Manda also works some afternoons at Planned Parenthood while Shea works similar hours at a video store. If I do my editorial work for Think from Ozzie’s coffee shop all morning, then go straight to Bethany’s to babysit Marin in the afternoon, I can time it so Manda and Shea are heading out the door for work just as I’m coming home. I’ve arranged my schedule so I hardly ever see them, which is the only reason our roommate situation works. As for how they spend the rest of their nonsleeping daylight hours while I’m out of the apartment, I don’t really want to know. It apparently requires a lot of lubrication, as indicated by the Post-it reminder stuck on our bathroom mirror: BUY K-Y.