buffalo bill

So I am in the middle of a heartbroken hunt for a new place to sleep/stuff my Social Studies 10 textbooks. (Tocqueville - why have I kept you unopened on my shelf for seven years? Habermas...Habe-what-what? Simone de Beauvoir? More like Simone de Ho-voir! Apologies to my thesis advisorl.) I have had a run of luck in meeting the least cohabitable people in New York, who also happen to be the people renting their uninhabitable apartments for the most unconscionable prices!

For example, on Monday, I looked at a room in Buffalo Bill's apartment. Buffalo Bill, for those of you not old enough to remember Kris Kross, was the "transsexual" villian in the 1991 Academy Award Best Picture©-winning film Silence of the Jodie Foster who kidnapped heavyset women, starved them, then skinned them to make himself a "woman" suit for evenings out/lounging about the house. But what you don't know from the movie is that Buffalo Bill lives on the Lower East Side and has a room for let in his 2-bedroom for $725/month! And he has a flatulent chow chow who appears to enjoy eating crusty entrails out of a wilted tupperware cannister. I walked into the windowless kitchen of the apartment, which was lit only by one flickering donut fluorescent fifteen feet overhead, to find the walls covered in artifacts from different cultures (kimonos, burlap shirts, military artifacts) all of which looked like strung-up torsos. Lining the top of his kitchen cabinets were about a dozen hands in different states of rigor mortis. It could be presumed that these hands were made of "plaster" and that my soft-spoken, shifty-eyed Buffalo Bill was the "artist" he claimed to be, but still I gave a quick "I have other places to see" and booked it home to cry/continue the neverending Craigslist trawl.

Yesterday, I went out to Park Slope to see a "studio" (read: living room partitioned by a black tapestry) let out by a Buddhist (read: unkempt + prayer flags) couple (read: a white guy with stubble and a white girl with a nervous, high-pitched giggle) for an absurd price (read: four digits!). The doors were duct-taped shut. There was more Hello Kitty paraphernalia than I was comfortable with. I could sense that, with March 1 fast approaching, their Buddha-blue eyes were filled with not just lovingkindness but some measure of desperation as they kept trying to pawn off what was clearly a raw deal as the catch of the century. We're never home! they said. It's so nice in the summer! they said. So close to the park! they said. Thank you, I need to go home now! I said.

Another fun figure from the last week's apartment hunt is the top-heavy twenty-something who tried to convince me that $900/month for a 6'x6' room with a neck-breaking sleeping bunk in an apartment full of uptight hobags would be my good fortune to secure. Ran out of there, too.

This weekend: New Haven, then a tiny railroad room in Bushwick (bend over and I'll show you East Williamsburg) with a dog door and garden access. We Shall See.