Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage, which includes an essay by Angie Cruz, is adapted from the unattributed article "First Addresses, Seared in Memory" (©2006 by The New York Times).

In the full article "First Addresses, Seared in Memory," several established writers respond to the quotation from Breakfast at Tiffany's by exploring how their first apartments influenced them as writers.

In the introduction to his 1958 novella "Breakfast at Tiffany's," no less a luminary than Truman Capote wrote of his first New York apartment, a one-room apartment in a brownstone in the East 70's:

The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.

With housing costs throughout the city more prohibitive than ever, acquiring one's first New York apartment is a far more daunting task than it was even a decade ago. But there is no question that the experience of one's first place in the city is a transforming rite of passage. Angie Cruz remembers hers:

In 1997, I returned to the city from college upstate to study creative writing at New York University and found a sublet in my old neighborhood, Washington Heights. It was a steal, $600 a month for an L-shaped one-bedroom in a prewar building at 615 West 164th Street. All the apartments faced the courtyard, and as if watching a stage from a production booth, I saw my relatives and longtime neighbors across the way from my second-floor window.

Because I wanted color and to hide the defects on the walls, I painted the bedroom an oceanic blue, the living room the color of a mango, the bathroom a leaf green.

The apartment bore signs of its past and wasn't perfect. The dumbwaiter had been turned into a pantry. The kitchen cabinets didn't close all the way, and the wooden floors were hidden by beige industrial tiles. Then there were the plumbing ghosts. My toilet flushed randomly, all by itself, and the sink in the kitchen filled up with bubbles when the lady upstairs did her wash.

I woke up in the morning with the sunlight, and from my kitchen window I often greeted my grandmother, who lived across the courtyard, her asking me, "Are you still studying up there?"

That had been my explanation when she asked me why didn't I have a job with good benefits. "Estudiando" is the one word that magically answered all the questions from my relatives when I locked myself up and didn’t pick up the phone, even when they saw that my light was on. "We are estudiando," I said, when my relatives stood at my front door holding plastic containers filled with dinner, and saw a group of women crowded in the living room plotting an event, discussing politics, sharing their writing.

Although my apartment was a snug 500 square feet, filled with books, museum posters and my very bad but honest figurative paintings, the rooms seemed to swell in size when other writers needed a place to stay. And so my apartment was often full of people coming and going, crammed with additional desks and beds for short-term stays. There was always a fresh batch of iced tea in the fridge, an answering machine to answer my calls, photographs on my desk of all the people I love.

The wooden and ceramic dolls I collected from different parts of the world watched over my laptop. My desk faced the courtyard, a neglected garden overgrown with weeds. In the late afternoon I could see if my sassy grandmother was home from her job at the lamp factory in New Jersey, and when the radio next door wasn't at full blast, I could hear my aunt, who also lived across the courtyard, yelling after my teenage nephew from her window.

There were also moments when it was quiet, when kids were at school, people were at work, and the merengue-loving neighbors were taking their afternoon siesta. In one of those rare quiet moments, I remember having a revelation while staring at a draft of my first novel on my desk, that if I had waited to tell my story until I had a room of my own, as opposed to a place that always brimmed with people, I would never have finished that novel.

But even more so, without all the family members, who showed up with leftovers and slipped $20 in my hand when I looked tired from long nights at freelance jobs teaching, editing and even window-designing while "estudiando" for my master’s degree, I wouldn’t have had the confidence that I was right to continue to live my life as a writer. It was the spirit of all that collective activity inside that apartment with elastic walls that gave birth to my first novel.