Making Rent in Bed-Stuy by Brandon Harris

Author:Brandon Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

The cracks in the facade of stability at 730 DeKalb became too prominent to ignore as 2013 became 2014. On the first Sunday of 2014, a record cold swept the city; I’d smoked at dawn on the landing of the rickety wooden staircase leading into the garden and felt the sensation of a thousand pins pressing against my flushed skin with each gust. I had planned to host a soiree to coincide with the Cincinnati Bengals’ NFL playoff game against the San Diego Chargers that day. The affair never went off, however; I awoke to a strong knock on the front door, just outside my room, and an overwhelmingly humid sensation. My downstairs neighbor, a Mexican cabdriver who spoke little English, gesticulated wildly. “Agua! Agua,” he exclaimed, “from the ceiling!”

Pipes had burst all over our apartment that morning. My bed, an orthopedic number that had been a graduation present from my eldest aunt, lay on the floor alongside a wall that contained a burst pipe. It had been soaking in warm water all morning but I didn’t notice until I returned to my room with my animated neighbor and discovered a long trail of water leading across my floor. The paint along the wall near my bed had bubbled up, distending over the bed, and was warm to the touch.

Before long there was water all over the house as uninsulated pipes throughout the property began to burst. I spent much of the afternoon ladling water from strategically placed pans along the walls into buckets, hoping Neftali would return our calls for a plumber. He never did, and ultimately we called our own. I had started a batch of Cincinnati-style chili in our Crock-Pot in hopes the party could be salvaged, but once it became clear that finding a plumber on short notice in Bed-Stuy on the coldest day of the year was damn near impossible, I called it off, slurping chili and bourbon alone as I frantically scooped water and watched the Bengals lose. When a plumber did arrive to stop the bleeding, much of the flooring and walls had been terribly damaged. A jagged hole, larger than a square foot, sat right next to my new waterbed.

The heat went out the following week. It stayed off for a full seven days, the absurdity of the situation compounded when Neftali brought by some completely inadequate space heaters and said it would be taken care of soon. You get what you pay for. I was a food-stamp-collecting adjunct professor and I knew I’d never find rent this cheap again, in the only neighborhood I’d ever really thought of as home in New York. The episode was weirdly assuring, though; he’s not going to raise the rent, not after this, I must have thought.

It was going up across the street, however. All over the neighborhood, whenever I ran into my friends, often in the new bars that seemed to be springing up everywhere, our once-interesting conversations would naturally drift to the subject of pricing Negroes and first-wave hipsters out.

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