Bostonblog

Feeling slightly homesick…thus the following mildly sentimental Bostonblog.


I spent the last eight years running on the path that flanks Boston and Cambridge’s respective banks of the Charles River. As I gradually moved from apartment to apartment, from one side of the river to the other, my loop widened and my starting point shifted. Every place came with its own unique living situation, its livability dictated by neighborhood, the building’s degree of disrepair, and, above all, the other people inhabiting the space. In the tumultuous life of a renter, that run along the Charles, mile-marked by bridges from Science Museum and back, was a welcome constant in a world of variables.
My first route started at the Boston University Bridge. It was a quick walk from the front door of a five bedroom Allston house with shag carpet whose residential time line was decipherable via the gum collection, dotting the floors in varying degrees of decay. Due to an impulsive decision backed by exactly zero hours of research, I ended up in the basement room with the weight lifting equipment belonging to my four Skinhead/from Jersey/Yankee fan roommates. As a neophyte athlete those “runs” were characterized by a lot of walking. I would breathlessly perch over the banks of the river, hands at my knees. It was impossible to know that I would later be able to tell what season and time of day it is by the color of the water. By the time my internet-discovered roommates blew up and chained to the living room wall an inflatable blonde, I had mastered the BU-Science Museum-BU four and a half mile course and secured an apartment in another part of town.
The Lakeside Apartment complex provided shelter in another basement, but this time with a nice young man. Living in a small carpeted carbon copy of its neighbors we sank into a happy sunless permanent dusk, spending long mornings and evenings dream talking, thinking we might get married. So I ran less, taking the train downtown in my shorts and running the seven and a half back to my nice young man in a basement.
We moved closer to town, taking a place with bright gleaming surfaces and French doors. Closest to the Massachusetts Avenue bridge, whose span of the Charles offers two views. One of the clustered bump and gold dome that is Beacon Hill and, alternately, the river’s winding retreat toward Watertown and less polluted, tree lined shores dotted once with the neon splotch of Fenway and Kenmore Square. My runs got long again, always beginning or ending with the trip over Mass Ave, where I’d stop, stretch, and stare out over the city I was coming to know so well. Despite the sunlight in that new apartment, things between my nice young man and I began to fall apart. I started spending sunsets on the bridge, timing my runs so I could watch the sky go pink and attribute my post-run tears to how just incredibly beautiful that sky could be. For months I returned to a dark apartment, surface-gleam reduced to the gray-blue of moonglow or flickering blue of tv light.
After five years of running and three years of that nice young man, I paired up with a friend of mine, signing a lease for a closet-sized apartment some realtor had the gall to list as a two bedroom. In Beacon Hill, prestige trumps size. Though I cursed the apartment every time I had to shimmy by my bed to get to the “desk” (slab of wood), the only other piece of furniture wedged into my “room,” on the night I accidentally ashed my cigarette onto a man in a very nice suit who, turning around, revealed the long regal face of John Kerry I had to hand it to my Beacon Hill-enthusiast of a roommate, it was a cool place to be.
The best thing about the place was its proximity to the river and my runs picked up in frequency. It was following one such run that I found my door chained from the inside but no answer from my roommate, supine on the couch. An avid drinker, this scenario was not unfamiliar - her substantial belly rolling to one side, her mouth hanging open, unresponsive to all manner of noises, calls, things thrown. It wasn’t until I had assailed her motionless figure with balled up socks, one shoe, and a tank top that I simultaneously noticed the brimming mouthful of vomit and the overturned clear amber bottle whose shape and color is singular to prescription drugs.
Breaking into one’s own apartment is a difficult experience, because of the damage inflicted upon one’s own space as well as the realization that a human being no stronger than oneself is capable of overriding whatever security measures are in place. That said, shouldering my way through the chain lock in the name of emergency was not without a certain twinge of self satisfaction. Also, at this point relations in the closet “two bedroom” had degenerated into a venerable battleground situation. I know what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t just that she was a chain smoking Yankee fan Republican with no concept of personal space. Nobody ever wants to admit having inhumane thought processes, but I will let you in on the fact that I saved her life based on the sole reason that if she died I would never get back the money I had loaned her.
If the apartment felt small with the suicidal non payer back of large loans, it felt microscopic when, during her tenure at McLean, her mother invaded our prestigious Beacon Hill address. With her daughter strapped to the finest psych ward bed money can buy, I should have excused her constant reminders of how I ought to maintain an orderly and germ free apartment. Her stay ended abruptly with a curt note regarding her relocation to the Holiday Inn across Cambridge Street approximately two yards northeast. It is no coincidence that during this time I ran three 10Ks, two half marathons, and every 5K jog around town I could find.
Three months later, she came in like she always came in – loudly, and dangling a Marlboro from her bottom lip, looking only slightly paler than normal. I hadn’t taken out the trash in weeks. In a third floor apartment, late August, the evidence of such a lapse is immediately obvious. She took her cigarette from her lip and pointed its red end to the garbage bags piled in our “kitchen,” and said, “All of my personalities are pissed at you.”
Whatever stage of recovery she was at, it didn’t mesh with a life in the city, and she moved soon after to what the doctors had called Mclean – “someplace quiet.” Thus began a new roommate and apartment search, Beacon Hill’s prestige no longer trumping its size or its price.
Enter Brookline. Between Boston University and Boston College, a quiet predominantly Jewish neighborhood with great schools and no overnight parking. Enter also a predominantly Jewish high school friend who had no known suicidal leanings. Having only the furniture that would fit into the prestigiously-located-but-overwrought-with-drama apartment, this spacious two bedroom looked, all 365 days of our tenure, like we were waiting for the Jordan’s delivery truck. Still, we settled into happy roommatedom, free from argument, suicide attempts, and borrowed-money.
At this point, I began seeing other bodies of water. I still ran along the Charles regularly, but I also took occasional jogs around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. Populated by almost entirely Boston College runners, the track surrounding the reservoir provided constant reminder of just how unremarkable an athlete I was. Endlessly I heard footfalls approach, momentarily run alongside, and then pass me, little pairs of BC emblazoned shorts growing smaller and smaller in my line of sight.
Ending my term as a Boston renter on a good note, I ventured to the other side of the river where the People’s Republic of Cambridge, in all its Harvard-harboring glory, welcomed me into a colorful place with a balcony. After seven years of running the same direction around the Charles, I suddenly switched. For the first time, I noticed that the Citgo sign is missing chunks of its display on its backside.
The colorful apartment (accent walls in shades including but not limited to “Holly Red” and “Fire Glow Orange”) came with a roommate found on that endless flea market in cyberspace, Craigslist, where you can find anything from a date that essentially guarantees rough sex to a vintage pair of roller skates. Or you could find someone who’s inclined to combine the two. She was a woman so taut one constantly flinched in her presence, her face in my memory an exaggerated cartoonish representation of a rubber band stretched back from the thumb of a particularly mischievous ten year old boy. When I came home to her loudly engaging in premarital relations with my ex boyfriend my initial reaction was to go for humor. Probably in an emotional version of the sort of shock that allows mangled persons to leave scenes of horrific car accidents, I put track number four of my Disney Classics Volume One CD (of which I am reluctantly right here and now admitting possession) on repeat and blasted Elton John’s Can You Feel the Love Tonight sixteen times before relenting and allowing the album to continue on to Let’s Go Fly a Kite. He was out the door somewhere between the love theme from Cinderella and a Fantasia instrumental. She was out of the apartment three months later.
This marked the period where my running career was supplemented by boxing lessons. I jogged up my stairs, throwing post-run punches from a hooded sweatshirt, darting and weaving, humming a certain Bill Conti number way off-key. My teary-eyed stretching routine made regular comebacks. I posted a roommate-wanted ad on Craigslist that included the line “must not smoke, have pets, or sleep with anyone I’ve ever dated. Ever.”
Eventually I chose one of the many women who responded with vows to never sleep with anyone I even knew as long as I would let them in my heat and hot water included apartment. As far as I know, she is still there, putting things where she likes them, cleaning or not cleaning based on her own whim.
I have since left the Northeast altogether, and am taking the plunge into roommatelessness. For a person who still feels like she’s trying on someone else’s clothes when donning a suit, the prospect of living alone feels distinctly, foreignly adult. When I come home there is absolutely zero chance (well, not zero, but it would be extremely unlikely) that someone will have chained a blowup doll to my wall, or tried to off themselves on my couch, or be a person I thought I might marry, or be engaging in premarital relations with anyone I ever thought I might marry. But no one will be there to ask how many miles I did that day, either.
With my car filled to illegal levels due to the obstruction of my rear window, I postponed my drive a thousand miles from Boston by an hour to go for one more run along the Charles. It was early in the day and summer but I didn’t have to stop on the bridge and look down to know that the water looked like old coffee. I was thinking that maybe the Ohio River will look like coffee too. Or pewter, like the pre-dawn Charles. Or oil, like the clear-night-deep-into-winter Charles. Or maybe it will look, refreshingly, like water.