We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning

Author:Corinne Manning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

the painting on

Bedford Ave.

On August 14, 2003, I decided to put my roommate’s painting out on the curb. My girlfriend, Tracy, and I weren’t living together, but I was living in an apartment on Bedford Ave. with two of her friends from college. Tracy got me in when my last roommate situation ended horrifically: a bout of bedbugs, a robbery, and my roommate eating all my cream cheese and not fessing up to it. Tracy’s ex-girlfriend had finally moved out of the apartment on Bedford and my moving in there meant she would get to hang out with those friends more regularly again. I should have seen that she was dooming me to some kind of pattern of hers, but I was only twenty-four, of middle-class stock, and hadn’t yet learned how the system is rigged, or that people have a tendency to fuck up in a specific way, over and over, repeating with varying degrees of severity the same goddamn problem, the same goddamn habit.

I aspired to be a poet and, after a treacherous job search, settled into work at an organic market for most of the week and at a theatre in Flushing, Queens, where I wrote thank-you letters to donors in an office they’d fashioned out of the electrical closet for the other two days. There was one moment when I thought my New York time had come—the world shifting in preparation for something to truly happen—at a party where a former professor introduced me to the poetry editor of the New Yorker, one of those not-for-profit-for-life lesbians with lavish hats who, as we shook hands, looked me up and down and said, “I like your handshake.”

By the end of the night, she’d given me her card and told me to come in on Monday and she would see about setting me up as a fact-checker. But when I showed up, she wasn’t in the office, and though I followed up by email, I never heard from her again.

My roommates, Tamara and Dev, were artists: the former a dancer, the latter a writer and dabbler in oil paints who mostly made a living writing occasional short articles for hip online blogs and established conservative newspapers. Dev’s parents very obviously supported her between gigs, so this made it easy to criticize and resent her, especially when, because her bedroom was the smallest, she paid less rent than the rest of us. This didn’t add up, as she had taken over a substantial part of the living room as her office. It seemed to me that we should each contribute $583.33, rather than Tamara and I both having to pay $650, but this was the way things were long before I arrived on the scene.

This “new guy” status meant that I was put in the strange centre room that had no windows except for one desperate six-by-twelve-inch slit up near the ceiling that, if I climbed up a ladder, revealed a view of three concrete walls. I got one

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