On or around January 5, 1993, I tried to get into my dorm, but this time, my ID card didn’t work.
The
security guard at the front desk looked puzzled. “You live here,” she said, and buzzed me in.
After
that, I would slip in through the visitors’ gate when the guard wasn’t looking,
or if I happened to see someone I knew, I asked them to sign me in.
Classes
stared again, but not for me. I
was a woman without a campus. I
kept sleeping on my roommates’ couch.
Soon I looked in the
campus paper and rented a room for $275 in an apartment with a chemistry grad
student who lived three blocks off campus. I took the subway downtown to Odd Lot and paid $30 for a
futon and hauled it back and plopped it on my rug to sleep on at night. All of my life’s possessions were in a
few boxes.
I had managed to save a
little money over the past summer and from my new job. For $1,000, I bought a Macintosh
Classic, my first computer. That
way I wouldn’t have to keep going to the library to write and to update my
resume, or to work on my fiction.
My new roomie said that her ex-roommate was a writer and had used a
discarded door that was left in the hallway as a desk. I found the door, positioned it on top
of two milk crates, and stationed my Macintosh on it.
From
then through May, I went to my internship in Trenton twice a week, and worked
at a heavily windowed building on Arch Street in downtown Philly for the other
three. The building was near the
Ben Franklin Bridge and I enjoyed watching the light bounce off the cars
heading to New Jersey each morning.
I wondered when it would be my turn to leave. I sometimes took the train to New York for publishing job
interviews, even though the three-hour trip each way on commuter trains was
long and expensive. I also had
time to enjoy the Penn campus, going to more club meetings.
I
landed a few second interviews for jobs, requiring me to head back to New York
on the train. I found out that the
Helmsley Hotel had bathrooms on the first floor that you could access without
staying there, so I often used them to freshen up before an interview. I walked all around the city in heels
because it didn’t dawn on me to use sneakers and then switch.
In May, a girl I knew
who had graduated from Penn the year before me had a room for rent in her
apartment in Weehawken, N.J. for $330 per month. $330 per month!
I could afford that. It
wasn’t in New York, but commuting would just mean paying a dollar for a shuttle
bus through the Lincoln Tunnel.
There was even a view of the Empire State Building from the apartment
bathroom.
I
hadn’t realized there were affordable ways to live so close to New York City.
I finished my internship
in Trenton, gave notice to the disability job in Philly, and loaded up all my
stuff in a junky used car to head north.
I
lived in Weehawken for three months, temping and still looking for that
full-time job in the publishing mecca of New York. During the recession, it was difficult to find any work, and
I was competing with every English major on the planet – including women who
had taken the fabled Radcliffe Publishing Course. The jobs started at $17,000 to $23,000. One job as an assistant for a literary
agency was paying $16,000.
Luckily
I had the typing skills to secure lucrative temp assignments. Even though the agencies insisted on
testing us on typewriters, I clocked in at 80 words per minute.
But three days after I
moved to Weehawken, I got sick.
I was sitting at a temp
job in my navy blue suit and having chills.
At home, my insides felt
heavy.
I
looked up the doctors who would take my insurance. There was one a mile away in Hoboken, a city I’d never been
to. My dad had mentioned that it
was becoming known as a hot town for young people just out of college. It was a mile square in area and
directly across the water from midtown Manhattan.
I
headed out in my car. When I got
there, I was amazed. A mayoral
election was being held. Since I
was interested in politics, I looked around curiously.
One
group of people was clustered around a huge electric sign that said “Big election
today.” Folks were yelling at each
other across Washington Street, the main thoroughfare. Also on that street: Brownstones, historic buildings, bars,
restaurants.
The
doctor examined me, asked for a urine sample, and said I probably had hepatitis
A (the kind you get from eating contaminated food). I figured the food trucks of West Philly were to blame. The doctor said I would have to stay
home for several weeks to recover.
It was my first full week on my own in (well, near) the big city, and
now I couldn’t earn a living.
While
I was home in bed, my roommate, who worked for a publishing company, brought me
freelance editing assignments to do.
I revised my novel. I wrote
forlorn letters to friends, most of whom did not have e-mail yet. Summer got hotter.
I got a call from a
young editorial assistant at a publishing company in response to a book I had
submitted. She said her company
was interested and not to send it anywhere else. Yesss! That was
welcome news. It was a book full
of lists of Gen X pop culture called “The Twentysomething Fact Book.” But in the end, nothing came of it.
Eventually
I started temping again. In
September, I moved to Hoboken, taking an apartment share for $375 per month.
Over
the next few months, I worked at some long-time temp assignments and even got a
job with a Democratic political consultant in New York (more on that another
day, maybe). That job came to a
crashing halt when the consultant failed to pay his bills. I kept looking for something in book
publishing.
In
spring, more than a year after I’d graduated, a full-time job opened covering
Hoboken for the town newspaper. It
was, in some ways, more alluring than publishing: I’d be dealing with fact rather than fiction, what I wrote
would have an impact on people’s lives, and I could walk around town during the
coming summer and get to know my neighbors. I was tempted to take it. But as usual, I didn’t make things too easy for myself. I
told myself that I should continue trying for a publishing job in New York,
even though I kept jumping through hoops.
I
thought about the reporting job. I
could spend that spring and summer doing something I loved. Why kill myself trying to commute to
the Big Apple every day when I could cover Hoboken?
But
was I dooming myself in the long run, since I’d gotten a bit turned off to
journalism in college? The career
progression would be to move from a weekly to a daily paper, and I really
didn’t want to write about murder and crime for a living.
In
the end, I took the job. I got a
new apartment and it happened to be just four blocks from the newspaper
office. I pinned the painting of
the dove on a bulletin board on my bedroom wall. I’ve been in Hoboken ever since.
