Some places I’ve lived

42 Perry Street, 1990-1992

In New York, among a certain subset of people, Perry Street is best known for Perry Street, which is shorthand for a popular AA meeting room that just happened to be a few doors down from my second apartment in New York. I inherited the place from my cousin Doug when he moved to Park Slope with his girlfriend. For the first year or so of living there, I was confused as to why there were people congregating outside of a nondescript address at all hours of the day, but eventually I figured it out.

I had previously lived just a block or two away, in a sublet I’d inherited from an editor at my first job who was moving to the west coast. It was a one-bedroom, with two boxy rooms that didn’t possess much of anything in the way of personality or charm. It was my first real apartment in New York, though, and I was proud of it, and of the sofa I’d bought at Jensen-Lewis on Seventh Avenue: my first real piece of grown-up furniture.

To transport my stuff to Perry Street, I hired the mover with the biggest ad in the Yellow Pages, which turns out not to be the best way to hire a mover. When the sofa of which I was so proud wouldn’t fit in my new front door, the movers just left it in the (already narrow) hallway, which didn’t seem like a great way to ingratiate myself to my new neighbors. I had to pay a different moving company to come take it away.