Studio 1021

A few days after I got home from that mistake in the desert, I decided to get a studio, a writing studio (or an office, depending on my mood). I had been batting the idea around for about a month or so, and after I recovered a proper braincell count (having lost many over the weekend), I made my move.

I combed the Craigslist ads, made a few phone calls, and visited a couple of places. One was a disastrous concrete box with no windows, stuck inside someone's photography studio. And let me tell you, her photography was crazy-awful: one picture was of some prarie-dress-wearing chick holding a clump of dirt in her hands. It's that kind of imagery that makes me want to give the whole art world the "one-finger salute."

The next place I visited was a vast improvement, a building downtown called the Spring Arts Tower. (The Mexican Prostitute was right: downtown is the future.) Originally, the SAT was a bank in the twenties. It's still retained many beautiful Art Deco features, including a marble lobby and lots of dark wood. From the moment I saw it, I knew it was perfect, exactly what I wanted: a beautiful old place, scrappy and cheap, lurking in the anonymity of downtown.

The building manager is a guy named Kevin, who reminds me a little of a good friend who shall remain unnamed but who I once said has "the culinary tastes of a cab driver." (Now that I think of it, that describes a lot of my friends.) Kevin is laid-back, and I felt instantly comfortable around him, though he is weird--he has floppy black hair and horrible fashion sense. But we make each other laugh, and he's probably the coolest landlord I've had yet. He also has, like, forty tins of crackers in his office. The tins (yes, tins, like WWII rations or something) look like they are from the '40s, sort of like Cracker Jack boxes. When I asked him why he had so many, he looked around, and seemed completely surprised to find several tins of crackers crowding every surface of his office. "I dunno," he smiled, and then started laughing. "I just like them." Kevin also published a book of "erotic" poetry he once discovered written by an old Hollywood screenwriter, quite famous in his day, named Ben Hecht. So, points for that, too.

The building is a crazy mess--they're rehabbing so much of it--and charming as hell. Kevin showed me "the bull pen," which is on the 4th floor. Here is where they retained many of the building's original features. They use the bull pen in many cop shows set in NYC, and for period pieces. It looks just like a precinct from back in the day, with frosted glass doors just begging for names like Sargeant Tim O'Riley to be stenciled on them.

My studio is on the 10th floor, #1021. The floor is poured concrete of a coppery kind of color. The walls, for now, are white (wallpaper ventures are planned, more next time). On one side of the room, a cabinet with shelves for my books. There's a closet with an unworking sink in it that will soon be removed. There are two giant windows that don't give the most glamorous view in the world--it shows the other side of the building and the uneventful courtyard--but they let in plenty of light, and that's all that matters.

The other inhabitants of the building include painters, jewelry and fashion designers, lawyers, a couple of other writers, and film and TV people (Miramax has an entire floor). Oddly enough, I am most excited about meeting lawyer friends--I've already got enough people who paint and make t-shirts, blah, blah, blah. I want someone who can give me solid tax advice.

So far, the only thing about this building that gives me pause is the completely freaky elevators. And even those just give me a good kind of pause. For one thing, I've been to SAT three times and each time, the elevators take an eternity to come down. The second time I rode an elevator there, all of us--including a trashy fashion couple and a mute middle-aged man who acted like this kind of thing happened to him everyday--ended up fleeing it as soon as the doors opened. It was doing this stomach-curdling thing where it was "yo-yo-ing" at each floor. I ended up climbing down some eight flights of stairs, trailing behind a pudgy Latina who called out the number of each floor in her heavy accent: "seeben," "seex," "fife," etc...

The other day, when I came to sign my lease, the elevators, once again, were weird. There was a sign on the 10th floor saying "Elevators Out Of Order," but as soon as I called for one, it showed up, like a little eager death carriage, empty and beckoning. In fact, the light above the elevator doors eminated from an ominous and cracked red bulb. The doors jerked open and I paused for a second, and felt a flush go up my legs: Don't go on! Don't go on! But in a rare moment of not trusting my instincts (I've walked up or down many flights of stairs when confronted with these feelings before), I hopped on just as the doors were closing. For the entire descent, I clutched my purse and watched the numbers drop, and maniacally analyzed every flutter of the elavator ride, checking for any inconsistencies that would rationally allow me to pull the emergency knob.

Nothing happened. The doors opened on the ground floor, and I was set free.