Write Place, Write Time

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you -- it will come out of that wall.
- Anton Chekhov

Jami Attenberg

I live in a crumbly old loft building in Brooklyn, where people are always coming and going and leaving a trail behind. I bought this table from a neighbor across the hall from me who was moving out and selling everything in his apartment.  He was some sort of musician/interior designer/con artist, and I will admit he had a lot of nice stuff. He was very masculine and overbearing.  He told me how he was moving out to go work on a dairy farm in Oregon for a summer, and when he came back he was going to move in with his wife, who lived elsewhere in Brooklyn.  He said that sometimes they lived apart, but sometimes marriages worked better that way.  I could not argue with him.  I could barely stand to be in the same room with him, so maybe his wife had the right answer.  

But I did like that table! The top of it was actually the floor of a back patio from a house he owned in Seattle, and he had built the base of the table himself. He wanted me to buy the chairs that he had been using with the table, even though they were not a matched set.  They were tiny and wooden and expensive.  What am I going to do with a tiny chair? I have a tremendous ass.  He was really insistent I buy them, like he was actually a total dick about it, but I held my ground. When he finally moved the table into my apartment he was still angry that I had not bought the chairs.  He had gotten another neighbor to help move in the table - it’s extremely heavy - and after he deposited it in one location he had said, “That’s enough. We’ve done enough for her.”  And then he left without a goodbye.

The morning after I bought the table I got up early, probably around 7 AM, to go for a walk and I saw this young woman sneaking out of his apartment.  She was wearing a bodysuit under a pair of cut off denim shorts, and the bottom of the bodysuit was a thong, and the shorts were pulled down low.  Our apartments are at the intersection of three different hallways and it can be a bit confusing even for a sober person, let alone a wasted girl, who was also probably getting minus brain points for the bodysuit.  I watched her take a few steps in one direction, stop, then turn and take a few steps in another direction, then stop, and try another way.  She was like a lost little windup doll.  I finally took mercy on her and pointed her toward the exit.   

It has taken me a long time to be able to claim the table as my own. His personality vibrated on it for months.  I just started using this as a reading table this spring.  For about a year the table was totally empty all the time, and then it became a place where I dumped my mail and my purse.  Occasionally I ate at it.  I have finally given it a promotion to reading table and now I sit at it in the mornings and also late in the afternoon.  I think I needed to spread books all over it to finally feel comfortable with it.



I wrote my first two books on this desk. It was originally painted yellow, and I bought it at a junk shop for forty bucks in the East Village, where I lived for my first six years in New York.  I can’t bear to throw it away even though I have a new writing table now.  So I painted it white, and now it’s a ghost desk.

 
In 2008 my entire apartment building got evicted for various safety reasons not the least of which was there was a matzo bakery in our basement that apparently could have exploded at any minute. (Who knew?)  Five months later we were all able to move back in, and I decided to get a different apartment with my boyfriend at the time.  As with many apartments in the building, there was some furniture left behind by the previous owner. (Many of us had just fled when we were evicted and took only what we loved.)  So this table was there when we moved in, and I immediately claimed it as my new writing table.  I love it. It’s the perfect size and height, and it’s so solid and industrial, but still very light and easy to move around.  When people visit, they always want to sit with me at this table with their own laptops.  I had always hoped the ghost desk would be the guest desk, but I guess it’s nice that people want to sit close to me.


My apartment faces the Williamsburg Bridge, and I can watch the cars and the JMZ subway line go by all day long. I can see the top of the Empire State Building, and some of midtown Manhattan.  I like it when it rains, I like it when the clouds move fast, I like it when the sky turns all peachy right before sunset.  I love the first big snowstorm of the year when there’s a whiteout, and the bridge disappears before my eyes like some magic trick. I do not like any of the snowstorms that follow, however. It can sometimes feel dire here in the winter months, a big window onto nothing but gray and white.  But mostly this view inspires me.  I can write here.  I keep thinking I should move, that I can’t live in this environment forever.  I should be more of a grown-up.  But I don’t know where I would go, or how I would find a view that would make me happier than this one.  If you find a place you can write, you should probably stay there forever.

Jami Attenberg is the author of Instant Love, The Kept Man, and The Melting Season. Her fourth book, The Middlesteins, will be published in October 2012. She has been blogging since the late 90s at whatever-whenever.net.

  1. electriclust reblogged this from writeplacewritetime
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  3. keeptomandcarryon reblogged this from writeplacewritetime and added:
    read this woman’s...awesome way she writes
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