My wife and I are what are known, charitably, as budget travelers. Years and years ago, we traversed the globe multiple times spending less per day than I now spend just on whole milk. You might have seen us. We were the weeping couple at the outdoor cafe in Paris, having mistakingly ordered bottled water and thereby blowing all of the money we had saved for the rest of our meal. We were the gaunt, junkie-looking backpackers who sat in a restaurant in Denmark for an extra half-hour repeatedly pouring and licking salt off a plate that had once held a single order of pommes frites. We were the two sitting on the floor of the fume-choked engine room of a slow-boat to Angkor Wat, not quite able to splurge our way to seats in the main compartment.
On one memorable occasion, my future wife was in the downstairs bathroom stall of an overnight ferry from Italy to Greece when she overheard two women talking about how horrible it would be to travel like the two people sleeping up on the deck above. "And the smell," one remarked to the other. Upon our arrival in Athens, my wife made us splurge for a room with a private sink and we spent our first full day in Greece washing our clothes in it.
We were not proud, but man did we travel.
So when I tell you that I came to New York City three years ago and stayed in a very questionable place in the Bowery that cost less per night than most parking spots there cost per hour, please understand that it was by choice. I was reliving the good old days.
I was in the city for one purpose: to find a place to live. Not just for me, mind you, but for my whole family, including my daughter and the as-yet-unborn twins who were at the time keeping my wife within a 10-foot radius of our downstairs toilet back in Austin. And I wasn't in the city for very long before I realized how impossibly stupid my quest was. Families of five do not belong in New York, not in any of the boroughs, not even Staten Island, which is part of New York in much the same way that your appendix is part of you--ambiguously useless and mostly forgotten until something bad happens there. I had exactly three and a half days to spend on my quest and three of those days passed with vain searches for a place with either (1) a closet or (2) enough room to park a double stroller, my dreams of finding both those features together having been crushed early by a Realtor who was evidently willing to give up her hefty finding fee for the chance to laugh openly in my face for 8 minutes straight.
Each night I returned to the flop-house, tired and discouraged. The last night I found, in the basement of the hotel, a coin-operated computer. A single quarter bought five minutes of Internet, and so I sat down there for hours, until 3 A.M., plugging in quarter after quarter, searching on-line apartment listings and trying not to wonder if this was the first time that computer had ever been used to search for anything with so few tits. Just before I ran out of quarters, in a horrible mix of desperation, exhaustion, and fear, I typed in those two search terms that I swore I never would: new and jersey.
Three years have passed since that night, and for two and a half all of them, my family and I have been living here, in a rental house I found on-line that night. There are worse things, I know, than renting a house in New Jersey. Owning a house here, for one. But I must admit that now, three kids and almost two decades from our globetrotting days, I do wish my wife didn't have to sit quietly in the bathroom stall at work and listen to her coworkers talk about how horrible it would be to live here like us. And the smell.
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