A few months ago, I was walking down West End Avenue, in Manhattan, and I remembered with a sadness that nearly knocked me off my feet just why I’d come to New York seven years ago, and why I was now about to leave. Certain kinds of buildings seem almost too gorgeous to exist—in the United States, anyway—and I’m still amazed that massive, ornate residences like 838 West End Avenue, with its yellow façade and geometric terra-cotta panels, or 305 Riverside Drive, with its elegantly carved limestone cornices, receive mail and spill kids out of their front doors like pretty much any domicile anywhere. When I was growing up in northern New Jersey, just twenty-five miles from Manhattan, I had no idea that ordinary people could live in such places. Then, when I was seventeen, I walked into an apartment at West End Avenue and 104th Street and decided that I had to be one of those people.
It was the summer of 1987, and I was learning how to drive a stick shift. My father, who is a composer, had allowed me to drive him to Manhattan in our Plymouth Horizon to drop off some scores with a music copyist. There was nothing particularly striking about the copyist’s apartment: it was a modest four-room prewar with moldings around the ceiling, and I have since mentally supplied it with faded Persian rugs, NPR playing on the radio, and porcelain hexagonal tiles that were coming loose in the bathroom. It’s difficult to imagine a time when I didn’t walk into someone’s apartment and immediately start the income-to-rent-ratio calculations, and I would now guess that the apartment had been rent-controlled for decades, and that the copyist paid perhaps three hundred dollars a month. But on that summer night, looking out the living-room window toward the river that so famously and effectively keeps here safely away from there, money was the last thing on my mind; I just knew that this was where I wanted to live, and from that moment on every decision I made was based on that conviction.
I’ve always been somebody who exerts a great deal of energy to get my realities to match my fantasies. I’m also pretty good at “getting by”—especially if you apply the increasingly common definition of the term, which has more to do with keeping up appearances than with keeping things under control. So it wasn’t until recently that I realized I wasn’t having such a good time in New York anymore. Like a social smoker whose supposedly endearing desire to emulate Marlene Dietrich has landed her in a cancer ward, I have recently woken up to the frightening fallout of my own romantic notions of life in the big city: I’m twenty-nine years old, and I am completely over my head in debt. I have not made a life for myself; I have purchased a life for myself.
For the better part of the last year, the balance of my Visa card has hovered around seven thousand dollars. A significant chunk of that debt comes from medical expenses, particularly the bills for a series of dental procedures I needed. As a freelance writer, it would cost me three hundred dollars a month to buy health insurance in New York State. That’s far more than I can afford, so I don’t have any. Although I try to pay the three-hundred-and-thirty-nine-dollars-a-quarter charge to keep a hospitalization insurance policy that will cover me if some major disaster befalls, I am often late in paying, and it gets cancelled. But medical expenses represent only a fraction of my troubles. I also need to make an estimated quarterly tax payment of fifty-four hundred dollars this month, which is going to be tough, because I recently paid back three thousand dollars to my now ex-boyfriend, who lent me money to pay last year’s taxes, and I still owe three hundred dollars to the accountant who prepared the return. My checking account is overdrawn by a thousand seven hundred and eighty-four dollars. I have no savings, no investments, no pension fund, and no inheritance on the horizon. I have student loans from graduate school amounting to sixty thousand dollars. I pay $448.83 per month on these loans, installments that barely cover the interest that’s accruing.
It’s tempting to go into a litany of all the things that I do not spend money on. I have no dependents, not even a cat or a fish. I do not have a car. I’ve worn the same four pairs of shoes for the past three years. Much of the clothing in my closet has been there since the early nineties, the rare additions usually taking the form of a sixteen-dollar shirt from Old Navy, a discounted dress from Loehmann’s, or a Christmas sweater from my mother. I’ve lived without a roommate only for the last two years. My rent, a thousand and fifty-five dollars a month for a four-hundred-square-foot apartment, is, as we say in New York City when describing the Holy Grail, below market. I do not own expensive stereo equipment, and even though I have a television, I cannot bring myself to spend the thirty-five dollars a month on cable, which, curiously, I’ve deemed an indulgence. With the exception of a trip to Egypt to visit a friend, in 1998, I have not spent money on overseas travel. I’ve still never been to Europe.
Instead, I’ve confined my spending to certain ephemeral luxuries that have come to seem like necessities. I’ll go to Starbucks in the morning, and then order sushi for lunch. I’ll meet a friend for drinks and drop forty-five dollars on Merlot and chicken satay. I make long-distance phone calls almost daily, with no thought of peak calling hours or dime-a-minute rates. I have a compulsive need to keep fresh-cut flowers in my apartment at all times, and spend eight to ten dollars a week on tulips from the Korean market. But these extravagances are merely symptoms of a larger delusion. It’s easier to feel guilt over spending sixty dollars on a blender, as I did last month, than to examine the more elaborate reasons that I’ve found it increasingly impossible to live within my means.
Once you’re in this kind of debt—and by “kind” I’m talking less about numbers than about my particular brand of debt—all those bills start not to matter anymore. If I allowed them to matter, I would become so panicked that I wouldn’t be able to work, which would only set me back further. I’ve also noticed that my kind of debt is surprisingly socially acceptable. After all, I went into debt for my education and my career—broad categories with room for copious rationalizations, and I make full use of them. I live in the most expensive city in the country because I have long believed that my career is dependent upon it. I spend money on Martinis and expensive dinners because, as is typical among my species of debtor, I tell myself that Martinis and expensive dinners are the entire point—the point of being young, the point of living in New York City, the point of living. In this frame of mind, the dollars spent, like the workings of a machine which no one bothers to understand, become an abstraction, a vehicle of taste.
As I try to sort out the origins of my present financial situation, I always come back to the ineffable hankering I had as a teen-ager for some sort of earthier, more “intellectual” life style. I come from an affluent New Jersey suburb whose main draw is its good public-school system, but I wanted to live someplace that looked like Mia Farrow’s apartment in “Hannah and Her Sisters.” (Little did I know that it was Mia Farrow’s apartment.) To me, this kind of space connoted not wealth but urbanity. These were places where the paint was peeling and the rugs were frayed and the hallways were lined with books; places where smart people sat around drinking gin and tonics, having interesting conversations, and living, according to my logic, in an authentic way. As far as I was aware at seventeen, rich was something else entirely. Rich meant monstrous Tudor-style houses in the ritzy section of my town. Rich was driving a BMW to school. I had the distinct feeling that my orthodontist, who had a sprawling ranch house with front steps that were polished to look like ice, was rich. None of these particular trappings of wealth held my attention. In fact, nothing outside of the movies really held my attention until that night in 1987 when I saw the apartment on 104th Street.
I planned my escape from the suburbs through the standard channels: college selection. My logic, informed by a combination of college guidebooks and the alma maters of the brides featured in the Times wedding announcements, went something like this: Columbia rather than N.Y.U., Wisconsin rather than Texas, Yale rather than Harvard, Vassar rather than Smith. My ranking system had little to do with the academic merits of the schools. It was more a game of degrees of separation between me and an apartment full of houseplants on the Upper West Side. Somehow, Vassar emerged as the best contender for closing that gap. I wanted so badly to go to a particular kind of artsy college and mix with a particular kind of artsy crowd that I wasted an alarming amount of time during my senior year of high school throwing trash into various wastebaskets from across the room, saying, “If I make this shot, I get into Vassar.”
As it turned out, I did go to Vassar, and although it would be five years until I entered my debting era, my time there did more than expand my intellect: it expanded my sense of entitlement so much that, by the end, I had no ability to distinguish myself from the many extremely wealthy people I encountered there. A sense of entitlement can certainly be an asset, but it has also played a supporting role in my financial demise—mostly because it made it hard to recognize where ambition and chutzpah end and potential bankruptcy begins.
When I graduated, in 1992, I followed a herd of my classmates into Manhattan; many of them moved back in with their parents on Park Avenue. I got an entry-level job in publishing, and, along with a couple of friends, rented a five-room prewar apartment with chipping paint on 100th Street off Riverside Drive, a mere five blocks from the scene of my high-school epiphany. Such expert marksmanship! I was ecstatic. My job, as an editorial assistant at a glossy fashion magazine, paid eighteen thousand dollars a year. The woman who hired me, a fifties-era Vassar graduate, told me that she hoped I had an independent source of income, as I certainly wouldn’t be able to support myself on my salary. But I did support myself. My roommates—an elementary-school teacher, who was making nineteen thousand dollars a year, and a film student, who worked part time at a non-profit arts organization—supported themselves, too. We each paid around five hundred and fifty dollars a month in rent and lived as recent graduates should, eating ramen noodles and ninety-nine-cent White Rose macaroni and cheese.
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Looking back, I see those years as a cheap, happy time. It was a time during which a certain kind of poverty was appropriate. Unlike the West Seventies and Eighties, my neighborhood seemed like a place for people who knew the city, for people from the city. Though I was living hand to mouth, I loved it there, and looked forward to moving ahead in my career and one day being able to afford my own place in the neighborhood. Then, that seemed well within the realm of possibility. It was 1993, I was twenty-three, and I’d received a raise, so that I was earning twenty-one thousand dollars a year. I had no idea that this was the closest I’d be to financial solvency for at least the next decade.
I’d been told I was lucky to have got a job at a magazine—I had, after all, graduated into what was being called the worst job market in twenty years—and even though I had little interest in its subject matter, I didn’t dare turn down the position. Within my first week on the job, I found myself immersed in a culture of money and celebrity. Socialites sat on the editorial board in order to report on trends among the rich and famous. Editorial assistants who earned eighteen thousand dollars managed to wear Prada, have regular facials, and rent time-shares in the Hamptons. Many of them lived in doorman buildings, for which their parents helped foot the bill.
This wasn’t my scene. I felt as far away from my “Hannah and Her Sisters” fantasy as I had in the suburbs. After a year of office work, I decided that an M.F.A. in creative writing would provide the most direct route to literary legitimacy. I applied to Columbia, which, not coincidentally, happened to be within walking distance of my apartment. It also has one of the most expensive writing programs in the country, a fact that was easy to forget, because the students, for the most part, seemed so down to earth and modest. In their flannel shirts and roach-infested student housing, they seemed as earnest and poor as I was, and I figured that if they could take out twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year loans, so could I. In the three years that I spent at Columbia, borrowing more than sixty thousand dollars to get my degree, I was told repeatedly—by fellow-students, faculty, administrators, and professional writers whose careers I wished to emulate—not to think about the loans. Student loans, after all, were low-interest, long-term, and far more benign than credit-card debt. Not thinking about them was a skill that I quickly developed.
If there is in this story a single moment when I crossed the boundary between debtlessness and total financial mayhem, it’s the first dollar that I put toward my life as a writer in New York—despite the fact that I was hanging out at the Cuban coffee shop and traipsing through the windblown trash of upper Broadway. The year I entered graduate school was the year I stopped making decisions that were appropriate for my situation and began making a rich person’s decisions. Entering this particular graduate program was a rich person’s decision. Remaining there when it became clear that I was not going to get any scholarship money, and that the class schedule would prevent me from holding down a day job, was also a rich person’s decision.
But it’s hard to recognize that you’re acting like a rich person when you’re becoming increasingly poor. Besides, I was never without a job. I worked for an anthropology professor for nine dollars an hour. I read manuscripts at ten dollars a pop for an ersatz literary agent. I worked at a university press for ten dollars an hour. Sometimes I called in sick to these jobs and did temp work at midtown offices for seventeen dollars an hour. A couple of times, I took out cash advances on my credit cards to pay the rent. There was a period during a particularly miserable winter, in 1994, when I tried to make it through three weeks on thirty-four dollars, walking sixteen blocks to school in subzero temperatures and stealing my roommates’ food, hoping they wouldn’t notice. One day, I slipped on the ice three times, got in a cab, and decided to take out a private loan from Columbia for two thousand five hundred dollars. A thousand of it went to pay off part of a credit card. I used up the rest within a month.
There were a handful of us who were pulling stunts like this. One of my roommates had maxed out her credit cards in order to finance a student film. I knew several women, and even a few men, who were actively looking for rich marriage partners to bail them out. One aspiring novelist I know underwent a series of drug treatments and uncomfortable surgical procedures in order to sell her eggs for twenty-five hundred dollars. Whether or not one is paying twenty thousand dollars’ tuition a year to try to make it as a writer, New York City in the nineties is a prohibitively expensive place to live for just about anyone. Although I devoted a lot of energy to being envious of Columbia classmates whose relatives were picking up the tab, it later became clear to me that the need for outside financial support is not limited to those in entry-level jobs or expensive graduate programs. These days, pursuing a career in the arts in New York is often contingent upon inheriting the means to do so.
As I was finishing at Columbia, however, I began to get some freelance work, so I continued to hedge my bets. I was publishing magazine articles regularly and, after a few months of temping at insurance companies and banks, scored some steady assignments that, to my delight, allowed me to work as a full-time freelance writer. After five years and eight different roommates in the 100th Street apartment, I was earning enough money to move into my own place. More important, I had found a two-year sublet in a rent-stabilized building, and the fact that I had done so through a Columbia connection seemed almost sufficient justification for the money I’d spent on grad school.
Things were going well. In 1997, I was twenty-seven, teaching a writing course at N.Y.U., publishing in a variety of magazines, and earning about fifty-five thousand dollars before taxes. (The teaching job paid only twenty-five hundred dollars for an entire semester, but I was too enamored of the idea of being a college instructor to wonder if I could afford to take it.) I had a decent-sized apartment with oak floors and porcelain hexagonal tiles that were coming loose in the bathroom. Like an honest New Yorker, I even had mice lurking in the kitchen. I bought rugs and a fax machine. I installed a second telephone line for the fax. Finally, I was leading the life I’d spent so long preparing for.
Then came the dental bills, which I was forced to charge to Visa. I tried not to think about that too much, until I ended up making a few doctor’s visits that, because I was uninsured, I also charged to Visa. When April rolled around, I realized that my income was significantly higher that year than it had been in any previous year, and that I had woefully underestimated what I owed in taxes. Despite a profusion of the typical freelancer’s writeoffs—movies, magazine subscriptions, an $89.99 sonic rodent-control device—I was hit with a bill of more than twenty thousand dollars. And although the I.R.S. apparently deemed sonic rodent-control devices an acceptable deduction, it seemed that I’d earned too much money to be eligible to write off the nearly seven thousand dollars (most of it interest) I’d paid to the student-loan agency or the three thousand dollars in dental bills. In the months it took me to assemble that twenty thousand dollars, I had to reduce my student-loan payments from the suggested eight hundred dollars to the aforementioned $448.83 a month. Most heartbreaking of all, my accountant determined that my sixty-dollar pledge to WNYC—my Upper West Side tableau couldn’t possibly be complete without the National Public Radio coffee mug—was not entirely tax deductible.
It was around this time that I started having trouble thinking about anything other than how to make a payment on whatever bill was sitting on my desk, most likely weeks overdue, at any given time. I began getting final disconnection notices from the phone company, letters from the gas company asking “Have you forgotten us?,” collection calls from Visa. A friend who had been a member of Debtors Anonymous urged me to put a note over my phone that read, “Owing money does not make me a bad person.” I didn’t do this, partly because it wouldn’t have fit in with the décor of my apartment, and partly because I wasn’t sure she was right. She did, however, persuade me to call Visa and put a hold on my account for six months, which would reduce my payments to a hundred and five dollars a month and freeze the interest. This required telling the customer-service representative at Visa that I was experiencing some financial “hardships.” When she asked me to be more specific, I told her that I had medical expenses, and hung up the phone feeling as if I had a terminal illness.
I noticed that I was drinking more than I had in the past, often alone at home, where I would sip Sauvignon Blanc at my desk and pretend to write when in fact I’d be working out some kind of desperate math equation on the tool-bar calculator, making wild guesses as to when I’d receive some random eight-hundred-dollar check from some unreliable accounting department of some slow-paying publication, how long it would take the check to clear, what would be left after I set aside a third of it for taxes, and, finally, which lucky creditor would be the recipient of what remained. There’s nothing like completing one of these calculations, realizing that you’ve drunk half a bottle of $7.99 wine, and feeling guiltier about having spent $7.99 than about being too tipsy to work. One night, I did a whole bunch of calculations and discovered that, despite having earned a gross income of seventy-eight thousand dollars in 1998, despite having not gone overboard on such classic debtor’s paraphernalia as clothes and vacations and stereo equipment, despite having followed the urban striver’s guide to success, I was more than seventy-five thousand dollars in the hole.
There are days when my debt seems to be at the center of my being, a cancer that must be treated with the morphine of excuses and rationales and promises to myself that I’m going to come up with the big score—book advance, screenplay deal, Publishers Clearinghouse prize—and save myself. There are other days when the debt feels like someone else’s cancer, a tragedy outside myself, a condemned building next door that I try to avoid walking past. But the days when I can pretend that money is “only money” are growing farther and farther apart. I have friends who are getting rich off the stock market and buying million-dollar houses. I have other friends who are almost as badly off as I am, and who compulsively volunteer for relief work in Third World countries as a way of forgetting that they can’t quite afford to live in the First World.
But New York City, which has a way of making you feel like you’re in the Third World just seconds after you thought you’d conquered all of Western civilization, has never really belonged to the rest of the country. I suppose that part of the city’s magical beastliness is the fact that you can show up with the best of intentions, do what’s considered to be all the right things, achieve some measure of success, and still find yourself trapped in a financial emergency.
As I write this, I have to be out of my sublet within months. Even if I try to assume control of the lease, the landlord will renovate the apartment and raise the rent to two thousand dollars. When I reported this calamity to a friend the other day, hoping she would gasp in sympathy, she instead replied, “That’s cheaper than our place.” A two-bedroom apartment down the street recently rented for forty-five hundred a month. A small studio on the Upper West Side will go for an average of twelve hundred and fifty dollars. West 104th Street is totally beyond my means. Worse, 104th Street is now beyond the means of most of the people who made me want to live here in the first place. The New York that changed my life on that summer night when I was seventeen no longer exists.
Several months ago, on a day when the debt anxiety had flared up even more than usual, I found myself fantasizing about moving to Lincoln, Nebraska. I’d been to Lincoln twice on a magazine assignment, met some nice people, and found myself liking it enough to entertain the notion of moving there. But both times I’d discarded the idea the minute the wheels hit the tarmac at LaGuardia. Surely I’d never be able to live without art-movie houses and twenty-four-hour takeout. During my last round of panic, however, I convinced myself that it was a good plan. I can rent an apartment there for three hundred dollars a month. I can rent an entire house, if I want one, for seven hundred dollars. Full-coverage health insurance will cost me seventy-five dollars a month. Apparently, people in Nebraska also listen to NPR, and there are even places to live in Lincoln that have oak floors. Had I known that before, I might have skipped out on this New York thing altogether and spared myself the financial and psychological ordeal. But I’m kind of glad I didn’t know, because I’ve had a very, very good time here. I’m just leaving the party before the cops break it up. ♦
