Astoria
Vol. 3, Issue 24
After five years in Manhattan, I moved to Astoria in 2005 to be roommates with my friend Aileen. I told myself I was moving there because there was more space and it was more affordable, but I just said that because I didn’t want to admit my professional failures. But I was excited to live with Aileen. We met at American Lawyer Media and she was basically my first New York City friend. Her apartment was much bigger than the one I was living in on the Bowery, plus it had this large open foyer with a dining-sized table. That would be a great place to put a fish tank, I thought. I asked Aileen if I could get one, and she said yes and – lucky us – we were walking distance from Petland Discounts.
The store was small-ish and very disorganized. There were lots of sloppy cat litter and birdseed bags stacked up in every corner and there was newspaper everywhere. Plus it smelled funny, like they were pumping some sort of fruit aroma in through the air system to disguise the overwhelming stench of parakeet shit and rotten fish flakes. It was the type of haphazard disarray my mother would call a "complete disgrace."
I wanted to get a smallish tank but I also wanted lots of fish. I told the sales kid with a flat face and too many black bracelets what I wanted and he said if I had space, I should go bigger. He upsold me to a 50-gallon tank. "You could fit 30, 35 fish in there easily," he said. He also told me if I put some salt crystals in the filtering system I could make the water brackish enough to purchase some more exotic freshwater fish. I was in. I got the tank, a few bags of gravel, a filter, a pump, some salt crystals, a bubbling treasure chest, a deep-sea diver with a trident, and a variety of wavy purple and green plastic plants.
Even though it was a short walk back to the apartment that tank was wide and clumsy and all the gravel made it heavy so I’d stop every ten steps to set it down until I could feel my forearms again. But I got it there, and within a few days, I began populating it with fish.
Soon I was hitting Petland Discount a couple of times per week, especially on early Saturday mornings when they’d get their new fish drops. The sales kid began to treat me as a regular and would always point me in the direction of the most expensive fish that would work in my tank. I cycled through a series of green puffers and tiger Oscars and freaky clown loaches and angelfish and tetras. But I loved African cichlids. There were beautiful neon blues and yellow ones with black stripes but they were super aggressive. I also used to love these albino frogs that would just hang out and chill at the top of the tank but the cichlids would always tear them apart. The sales kid told me I needed an enforcer fish – one that had some intimidating size to keep the other fish in line. I got some green terrors which were bigger than the cichlids but they didn’t do the job.
On my next trip back to Petland Discount, the sales kid saw me and said “I’ve got something for you.” He took me to a mostly desolate aisle of tanks, that were either unoccupied or being used as triage stations for sick fish. There was one tank on the floor covered in a sheet. He pulled it off and inside was a plastic volcano-shaped thing about six inches in diameter. “We got an eel in here. It’s kinda big, but you might like it.” I did. I didn't see all of it, only a side view of its body. I told him I’d be back.
I went home and excitedly told Aileen all about it, but she was not amused and asked me to please not buy the eel. She would be scared of it, she said. I smirked and told her I wouldn’t buy it, but I knew I’d wear her down. A few days later, I bought the eel. That was the type of person I was then.
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Right before I moved to Astoria, I got my first big-boy blog job, it was at a gambling site called Oddjack, which was briefly part of Gawker media’s stable, but it was also its first blog to ever be shut down. I got hired for the job, despite my limited knowledge of gambling. All the nuances and knowledge necessary to be a solid gambling blogger would come later, I thought. I just needed to be funny until then. By the end of my first month, most of my posts were desperate ones, making fun of fat poker players or producing my own, imaginary betting lines on the culture at large like “Who Will Be the Next Person to Get Hit By Russell Crowe’s Cell Phone?” or “Which Celebrity Will Unexpectedly Pop Up on a Float at the NYC Pride Parade?” I was fired by Thanksgiving.
I was drinking heavily and doing blow far too often when I had the job and I didn’t slow down after I lost it. By the time Christmas rolled around I was using payday loans to buy cocaine which I felt okay about because it wasn’t “real money.” Then things got really dark.
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When I went back to buy the eel, the sales kid told me I needed to use live goldfish for food and that it was a night feeder. He said to make sure that the tank lid was very secure and had no open spaces because the eel “liked to escape,” especially when it was hungry. He took off the sheet and got one of those big freezer storage bags to put it in. He lifted up the volcano and the thing uncoiled and darted around and did a slinky, terrifying shimmy. It almost jumped out of the tank before he could corral it.
It was a lot bigger than I anticipated, too. I waited with it at the counter and it just thwacked and thwacked against the bag. It seemed really pissed. The sales kid walked back to one of the goldfish tanks and scooped out two full nets of them into another bag. He recommended I keep them in a separate tank until it was feeding time so I bought one of those cheap ones used for hermit crabs that you’d win on the boardwalk. I also bought that volcano thing.
Aileen wasn’t happy when I bought the eel home and she really wasn’t happy when I told her to be careful walking around the apartment at night because it might jump out of the tank and try to escape.
But for a short period of time, the fish tank looked absolutely beautiful. We had a New Year’s Eve party and lots of our guests stood in front of the tank and admired it like it was an art gallery display. And the eel stayed hidden under its plastic volcano on most days, but its presence certainly restored some order in the tank. There were a handful of nights when I actually heard it slam against the lid but it never got out.
After the holidays ended, I had a tough time finding a job and would always forget to file my unemployment on time each week but I still made rent, although sometimes it was late. I still partied a lot but I think Aileen could tell I was fading.
She went back home to Philly for a weekend and things got real ugly at the apartment while she was away. My friend Jim came over with a couple of six-packs and we’d committed to playing caps all night until one of us died. (“Caps” is the drinking game where you engage in a knockout-style battle against an opponent by throwing a cap into a partially full red solo cup. Whoever misses first has to drink the cup, which is quite disgusting and metallic-tasting after bottle caps marinated in it.) Jim destroyed me, but I was all coked-up and still ready to compete in something or break something. So we both laid down on our backs on the floor and took turns spit-shooting the goldfish into the tank. Same deal – whoever missed after a make had to drink some warm dirty beer. Most of the goldfish were gone by the end of the night. Some of the lucky ones made it into the tank only to be eaten by the eel later. The others died flopping around on the floor.
Jim went home that night and I tried to clean up afterward. I was exhausted yet wide awake. I laid back down on the creaking wood floor and it was sticky and gross with fish slime. There were scuff marks and scratches all over it, plus the floor nails were all warped and stuck out enough to snag your socks. While I was down there I closed my eyes and imagined I was on the hull of an old warship that was hit by a cannonball. I was so depressed.
I woke up the next day and the apartment still stunk. Also, the eel had no more food left, but I was too hungover to do anything about it. When I sat at my desk, the smell made me dizzy. It turned out I had accidentally rolled my chair over a goldfish. I tried to scrape it out with a nail file but the guts were pretty crammed in there. I grabbed a hammer and knocked the wheel off and threw it away. I used a stack of books to hold up the wheel-less leg and tried to remember not to roll on it anymore but sometimes I’d forget and tip over. I still sat at that broken chair for a long time because that's the type of person I was then.
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The tank went completely to shit after that. It became too hard to clean and the eel became too hard to feed and I became too strung out to care. I came home one day and the whole tank was swirling with dirt, a sad tornado of algae and fish crap. The eel didn’t even hide underneath its volcano anymore. It just laid there, surrounded by tipped-over plastic plants and half-eaten fish corpses, too weak to move as it desperately gulped for clean oxygen.
When it finally died, the whole apartment reeked. Aileen thought there was a dead mouse inside the wall. I played along with that idea because I didn’t want to admit it was the eel, so I did nothing. I stayed at my girlfriend’s apartment on the Lower East Side for a couple of days as it decomposed but I was sure everything would work itself out.
Aileen couldn’t wait for me any longer so she called over our friend Will to get rid of it. She knew he’d be able to take care of it because he had lost his sense of smell as a young kid so he wouldn’t gag. She also knew he’d be able to take care of this dead eel problem – now her dead eel problem – because he was more reliable than I was. I don’t know why Aileen continued to live with me after that, but she did. And all this eel nonsense happened after I pissed on her laptop.
****
In January of 2006, I finally got a new job at a startup men’s newsletter called Thrillist.com. My new coworkers took me out to the opening of some Midtown steakhouse that was typical of that era in New York – it had brontosaurus-sized rib eyes and like nine side selections of creamed everything and whiskey flights hand-selected by the fifth-ranked mixologist in the world and bacon bacon BACON. After that, we went out to a dive bar to play Buck Hunter as we drank buckets of pony beers. I still made it home early enough to catch Aileen before she went to bed. I was definitely drunk but coherent enough to have a conversation with her. She had been up late working – and she had to wake up very early to finish what she was working on. She hated her job. She was glad I had fun.
She closed her laptop on the coffee table and then she warmly said goodnight.
I finished a cigarette and stretched out on our brand new couch to decompress before bed with the television on. I passed out, though, and woke up just as I began to urinate all over the couch. Half-asleep, I quickly flung it to the right because I was so worried I would ruin the new couch but, in doing so, I firehosed ten-beers worth of piss directly onto Aileen’s laptop. The next morning I couldn’t believe what I’d done and didn’t know how it happened. But I knew why it happened – I just wasn’t ready to admit that yet. I tried to dry off her laptop with a paper towel but it was toast.
Aileen woke up and sat on the couch and wondered why I was wide awake and rolling in my desk chair, anxious and ashamed.
“I pissed on your laptop last night,” I said.
She opened it up and tried to turn it on, unsure if it was an extremely not-funny 6 a.m. joke. The laptop made no noise and the screen stayed dead and blank. Her face was expressionless as she processed how real and terrible this situation actually was. “I don’t know what to say,” I said over and over and over again. She just stared straight ahead and grabbed the remote. The TV wouldn’t turn on, either. Apparently, I whizzed on that, too. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
Aileen got up off the couch and went to her room. I left the apartment for a couple of days and gave her some space.
****
I promised Aileen I’d buy her a new laptop once I got my first Thrillist paycheck but I wasn’t sure exactly when that would be. In the meantime, she asked if I could take it someplace to see if the hard drive could be salvaged. I called a random, unlucky repair shop and told them “my cat pissed on the laptop” and the person on the other end of the phone laughed and said to bring it in and they’d have a look. The friendliest-sounding man called back a couple of days later and gave me the bad news – the hard drive couldn’t be saved. He said when he opened up the laptop to get to it he was shocked by how much liquid came out. “It ran out all over my desk – how big was this cat?”
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I eventually bought Aileen a new laptop but it took longer than I thought it would. We didn’t re-up on the lease after that one year together. I moved back to Philly after that; she moved to Brooklyn. Once we both got out of that apartment, we were fine.
But I called Aileen before I wrote this essay because we’d never spoken about our time in Astoria since I've been sober. I usually apologized to her each time I did something fucked up back then and we never had a real falling out, but something still felt off. I realized that when I make my list of people I need to make amends to, I usually focus on people I know are still mad at me, especially the ones I probably won’t ever speak to again. I assumed that if I’m still on speaking terms with someone then we’re all good. But maybe I’ve been doing this all wrong? Maybe the people I need to focus on are the ones who still loved me in spite of who I used to be – maybe those who love me the most got hit the hardest and need the most mending.
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I also asked Aileen to write about what she remembered from that time period – she hadn’t thought about it in a while either. I read it once, but not thoroughly because it's tough to look at. There was so much I’d forgotten, so much I never knew. I think it was healthy but maybe I'm wrong. Read Aileen Gallagher's full recollection of events in the feature pit down below. – AJD
All Illustrations by Edith Zimmerman
What It Was Like
by Aileen Gallagher
When we became roommates in Astoria in 2006, I was excited to live with my friend. But it was clear that you did not want to be there, that this was a step down for the Manhattanite you thought you were supposed to be. I wanted you to like it there, or at least like living with me.
You did a lot of coke in that apartment and lied to me about it. You knew that I didn’t want it in the house, nor did I view it as a Tuesday night activity. So you’d just sit at your desk in the corner, sniffing away, and I would pretend to ignore you. I remember being worried about you and you being dismissive, but I don’t think I knew how to put all the pieces together to equal cokehead, or even what I could do about it. You paid the rent and were sometimes not an asshole.
You wanted to buy a fish tank. I asked you not to buy an eel because I hate snakes. You bought an eel. The eel died. You weren’t home much, instead, you spent most nights with your girlfriend in Manhattan. The eel died and you didn’t come and clean it up for several days. I know I had to ask/remind/demand more than once. I felt powerless. I wasn’t going to clean the fucking thing up, and clearly you weren’t, either. Our apartment smelled of rotting flesh. But I was the one who had to live there.
Some nights you would sit on the couch and say nothing, your leg bouncing up and down for hours. You were so agitated you frayed the upholstery. Your silence was sullen and oppressive. I knew you weren’t mad at me, but it’s hard to live with someone who broods. I would say “good night” and you wouldn’t even acknowledge me.
As for the night you pissed on my computer, I don’t know if I’ll ever understand how that even happened. You were ashamed when you told me. I could think of no response. I cry when I get really frustrated, and I remember sobbing in the shower because my life felt particularly hopeless at that moment. I hated my job, I hated my roommate, and it did not seem like there was an escape hatch for either situation. The only reason I didn’t kick you out was because I didn’t have the money to find a new place to live and could not imagine finding a new roommate. Most of our friends were partnered up by then. I was too embarrassed about my living situation to call my family and ask them for help. Being your friend at that moment felt difficult to justify.
And yet… And yet sometimes we had fun, and when you were fun, you were the most fun. I remember you made something called “Fat Kid Pasta” that I loved. We spent hours playing Tiger Woods on PS2 for a dollar a hole. I beat you all the time. Will came and stayed with us for a while, and I have great memories of those days. For my birthday that year you took me out for omakase and then we made a night of it. When you were you, it was an adventure. We had a lot of adventures.
At some point, after the computer, you decided you needed another way. You were looking into rehab, some outpatient program in Manhattan. Instead, you went it alone and stopped doing blow. You exercised a lot. You had terrible nightmares. A couple of times you hallucinated. Once I tried to wake you up and you looked at me, terrified, as though I were a stranger. I was afraid you were going to hit me, but you stuck your arm in the toilet instead. You said you thought it was on fire.
The lease ended. I don’t remember talking about it but clearly it was time to move. By summer 2007 I was living in Brooklyn with a different friend. We hung out a lot then, and it was like you were a different person. We’d sit on my porch and drink wine and eat duck rillettes on Triscuits. We played hours of Yahtzee outside at Zombie Hut. You moved to Philly and came back. At some point I realized you had some other set of friends who were the drug friends, and you mostly preferred their company. I did not try to compete.
You asked me recently if I knew you had a problem when we lived together. I don’t know if I would have even acknowledged it then, as though your drug problem were about me, an indicator of my own bad choices. But I did know you before when you were the first friend I made on the first day of my first job as a real, live journalist in New York City. I was 21 years old and you were 25. We had all the cliched big dreams you could have. Some of them we actually did, together. I cannot remember being young without remembering you.
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Illustrations by Edith Zimmerman
