Scream by Tama Janowitz

Author:Tama Janowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062391339
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

i buy an apartment

In 1987 I had money for the first time, so I bought an apartment. I had saved and saved and finally had forty grand, enough to pay the deposit on an apartment under two hundred thousand.

It was a one-bedroom basement apartment, dark and overpriced, but it had a large garden. I was determined to have a garden, not a terrace. I wanted to be able to open the door for the dogs and I wanted to plant things. Note to reader: if you want to do that you should not live in New York City.

I had enough money—barely—to buy the place, from the success I had had. My success was not from Slaves of New York (book advance: thirty-five hundred dollars) and not from Andy Warhol’s acquiring of the movie rights (purchase price: five thousand dollars). At the time when Andy said he wanted to make Slaves of New York into a movie, he said I could have five thousand dollars or choose one of his paintings.

“But Andy,” I said, “what I really need is a place to live! I don’t have anywhere to live and I can’t find an apartment. You have a lot of different property in New York City, can’t you let me stay in one?”

But he said no.

“Okay, I will take the five thousand dollars,” I said. Because what was I going to do, with nowhere to live, walk around the streets of New York carrying a Warhol under my arm?

But I had saved money in a myriad of ways: the stories I sold to The New Yorker, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, becoming the Alfred Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton (a paid salary position), and so on, but mostly by virtue of never buying anything and never spending anything. (And some money Merchant Ivory paid for the movie rights after Andy died. Who knows how much they had to pay Andy’s estate for the rights he had previously bought from me?) So finally I was able to buy an apartment and I threw all my stuff in there, still in boxes, half unpacked, and then left for my book tour.

First I went home to see my mother. “I wish there was a way I could make copies of these phonograph records,” I said. “If only there was some way I could get them on tape.” You see, back then we had records, and tapes. Cassette tapes. I had a tape player but no record player. My mother had a record player but no speakers. I wanted my childhood music—Marais and Miranda, for one, South African folk singers who sang, “the baboon climbed the hill.” But there was no way to get the tunes heard, or to move them from one format to another.

You go to different places on a tour: the first time it’s fun, the second time it’s not so much fun, and by the third time, forget it. This was only my second time out, though, so I was still enjoying myself.

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