Bushwick Memories
Or, saying goodbye to our home for the last decade
One of the ways in which I’ve been abundantly fortunate in my life is that I’ve always had a place to call home. Not just a house or an apartment, but a home. Even at Ohio University when I lived in the dorms of O'Bleness and Martzolff halls, they became a real home. When I was a baby, my family moved from Collinwood in the city of Cleveland to Willowick, a suburb, and spent my entire childhood there. I loved that home so much I considered getting it as a tattoo1.
This is the last week I will live in the only home I’ve known in New York City, an apartment my wife Amanda and I have lived in since September of 2011, which in NYC apartment years is like five decades. I remember once, many years ago, I was at my parents’ home in Cleveland talking about heading back to NYC and being more comfortable there than in Cleveland. My dad said something to the effect of, “That makes sense, it is your home now.” He meant it sincerely, as a matter of fact, and it felt like a significant moment to me. Yeah, it is my home, isn’t it? I’d never intended for it to become my home, but it was.
This is a different kind of essay. I wanted to memorialize the time we’ve spent here, and so I put together 10 memories about this place. Home is important to us as human beings. We need a refuge, a personal sanctuary where we feel completely at peace. There are many, many ills in the world. Perhaps the one I understand the least is how we can allow so many people to not have a home. It’s hard for me to countenance that a well-ordered society with the proper values would have an epidemic of unhoused individuals. This post doesn’t aim to answer some question or provide guidance about the human condition except to say: Many of us are fortunate enough to have memories associated with a place or condition we call home…but many do not. And we shouldn’t accept that as a necessary or inevitable state of affairs.
And now, a short list of memories. I hope you find them entertaining or at least interesting.
Brain Surgery
When I was in college, I had brain surgery. My friends found me wandering around campus in a daze and unable to explain basic things about myself. Turns out, I had hydrocephalus resulting from a ventricular stenosis, which means that the natural fluid that circulates in my brain couldn’t escape my skull and just got stuck there. Doctors placed what’s called a shunt in my head to regulate the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, and that is how I am alive today.
There was a little hiccup in 2011, however. You see, the same year I had brain surgery, I also had an appendectomy. As a result of that appendectomy, I got an infection in my stomach. Over the course of a few years, that infection worked its way up into my brain and was preventing my shunt from operating properly.
So, it’s September of 2011. My then-girlfriend, now-wife and I had just moved into our apartment, we had no furniture, and my internship had just ended so I didn’t even have a job at this point. I had a really bad night’s sleep. Basically, I didn’t sleep at all because I had a headache that just kept getting worse and worse and worse. When the sun came up, I realized I couldn’t look at the light without throwing up. I tried to take ibuprofen but couldn’t keep it down. I started to feel pressure specifically behind my eyes, and that was when I knew what was going on. My wife was at work, and I was alone, so I called an ambulance on myself, which is something I hope nobody else ever has to do.
This was probably the scariest moment of my life. I wasn’t afraid the first time around because I was more or less blacked out—maybe I was acting scared, but I have no memory of it. This time, however, I was terrified, because I knew that once the fluid was blocked, you are on a timer. Eventually, your brain gets saturated with fluid and gets so heavy, it falls backwards and crushes your spine. The awareness that this was on the table…I can’t really put it into words.
But once again, doctors and nurses saved me. And that is how I remember beginning my time in Bushwick.
Bushwick Kitchen
One of my goals in life was to become “a regular.” I wanted to walk into a place where everyone would know my name, like Cheers. I’d order things not on the menu. I’d go into the kitchen and just BS with people. If I needed to borrow something, like a hammer, I could just ask my buddies where I was a regular.
It’s now 2012 and I have returned to New York City after being bedridden for months (when you get a hole drilled in your head, it’s hard to stand up for awhile). One of the first days I’m back, I was locked out of the apartment in the rain. I wandered down the block to this restaurant that hadn’t opened yet and asked if I could just hang out until my girlfriend got home. I ended up spending a couple hours drinking wine with the owners.
Over the next year or so, we probably ate there at least once per week. I had everything on the menu, and a few things not on the menu. I went into the kitchen to learn a few things about cooking. And once, I needed a hammer and I figured they’d have one, so I walked over and borrowed one. I was a regular!
Sadly, the Bushwick Kitchen did not last. The BK, as we called it, did not ever get a liquor license and in my opinion, that’s what killed it. But the story has an epilogue. Several months later, I ran into one of the co-owners—we’ll call him Paul for the sake of the story. Paul, by this time, had started a new sandwich shop. He told me that his partner—we’ll call him Jake—sold the Bushwick Kitchen without telling Paul, kept all of the money, and that if he ever saw Jake, he’d kill him. Serious stuff. These guys had been good friends who met each other working in kitchens and decided to set off on their own.
A few weeks after that chance encounter, I am walking out my front door and who do I see but Jake, who is carrying an extraordinary amount of baby formula. I say, “Jake, what is going on? You need a hand with that?” I ended up helping him carry the formula back to his apartment around the corner. Once inside, I asked Jake: “What happened to the Bushwick Kitchen?”
He says, “Oh man, I got a great offer from someone to buy it for way more than we paid for the space. I’m good for a while.”
I didn’t mention Paul. I haven’t seen Paul since. I haven’t seen Jake since. I really have no idea what happened. But, for a brief time, I was a regular.
“Cleveland, This Is For You!”
Even as a fan of Cleveland sports, I witnessed so many memorable sports moments in this apartment that I could make an entirely separate article just about those.
First and foremost, the Cavs won the NBA Finals in 2016 (was obviously hyped)
The Browns drafted Johnny Manziel (was hyped)
The Browns drafted Baker Mayfield (was depressed)
Baker Mayfield entered the game in week 3 against the Jets and the Browns won their first game in over a year (was hyped)
Stipe Miocic defeated Francis Ngannou to defend the UFC heavyweight title (was hyped)
The Browns beat the Steelers in the playoffs (was unimaginably hyped)
A bunch of Kentucky Derbies
Annual tradition of watching the first NFL game of the year with my buddy Tom
Annual tradition of watching the NFL Draft with friends of mine
Becoming a Liverpool fan following the 2014 World Cup
Rajai Davis homered in game 7 of the World Series against the Cubs (was hyped)
The Indians (now Guardians) lost the World Series to the Cubs (was depressed)
Ohio State football defeated Oregon in the 2015 National Championship
So as you can see here, it’s been a whiplash of highs and lows. Admittedly, mostly lows. But the highs were extremely high. The first championship in Cleveland in 52 years will always be one of my fondest sports memories. I’ll always imagine jumping up and down, calling my family back home, and feeling inexpressible happiness in this apartment.
COVID Christmas
Ah, COVID in New York City. What a treat. More or less didn’t leave the house for a year. There were times I had to sit down and calculate the last time I’d seen the sky without a window in front of my face. But all things considered, we made the most of our time in this little apartment, and I can’t complain. Others had it far, far, far worse. And our 2020 COVID Christmas will always have a special place in my heart.
I love Christmas, and I always have. I’m lucky that my parents and family in general made Christmas a proper event. Christmas Eve and Christmas are easily my favorite days of the year, and December is my favorite month of the year. A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite stories ever told in any format or on any medium. I just love it.
Since I am from Cleveland and my wife is from Pittsburgh, the way we do the holidays is we spend Thanksgiving in Pittsburgh, and Christmas in Cleveland. But in recent years, her parents have come to my parents’ house to spend Christmas with us, which I really enjoy. In 2020, though, we spent the holidays in New York City, just the two of us. And ya know what? I of course missed everyone, and I wouldn’t ask to do it again, but it was a lot of fun.
Amanda and I watched a different Christmas movie every day from December 1 to Christmas day. My friend Brendan made this awesome playlist on Spotify (heavy Kenny G) that I listened to constantly and it became kind of an inside joke. I also discovered an Audible edition of The Christmas Carol narrated by Tim Curry that I listened to about 100 times. Amanda and I did our own version of the “Feast of Seven Fishes,” an Italian Christmas Eve tradition. We got a big Christmas tree (big for us is about 6 feet).
We knew around this time that we’d be moving soon. To be honest, we thought about it a lot sooner than we actually did it. On Christmas Eve, really, really late, maybe around 2 a.m., I went outside and sat on the front stairs of my building for a long time. I breathed in the winter air and absorbed the calm. I tried to sear everything I saw into my memory. I repeated this several times over the last couple years, and I’m glad I did, because it helped me prepare to say goodbye.
Trivia
You’ll certainly recall that at the height of COVID, there was little to nothing to look forward to. No sports, no new releases, nothing. Into this void, a miraculous thing happened: A group of six friends started having weekly trivia contests. This was not trivia for the faint of heart.
Here’s how it worked. The six friends were actually three couples. Every other week, one of the couples was responsible for creating the trivia contest that the other four would compete in as individuals. Of course, this was all done via a PowerPoint presentation over Zoom. There was a loose set of guidelines but ample room for creativity. The basic structure was six rounds with four questions in each round. Each question had a musical accompaniment that may or may not be a clue. There was a halftime question and a final question. Along the way there were bonuses and all sorts of shenanigans.
At some point we realized that making the trivia was more fun than playing trivia. The trivia increasingly departed from the template. For example, one week, each round was modeled off a different game show (i.e Jeopardy or Who Wants to be a Millionaire). We did this for months. And it was critical. It gave us something to look forward to. It gave us a reason to interact with our friends. It helped us cope without how dreadful everything seemed.
Somehow, out of the bleakest of times came one of my greatest memories.
Engagement and Wedding
In a literal sense, I neither got engaged nor married in this apartment, but my wife and I were living here at the time. So when we moved in, we were boyfriend and girlfriend, then fiancées, and now are leaving as husband and wife. We’ve never had any other roommates. Our New York lives are inseparable, and aside from a few months in the summer of 2011, we’ve lived in this apartment the entire time. Our wedding day was the best day of my life so far, and the day we got engaged is up there, too.
We got engaged in the Hudson Valley—an important place in our relationship. We’ve gone there several times to get away from the city. We try to get up there as often as we can. We were staying in Tarrytown to celebrate our (dating) anniversary, and we took a trip to Hyde Park to tour Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s home and presidential library because we (maybe specifically me) are nerds. I knew I was going to propose this day, but I didn’t have a set plan. I was going to ride the lightning and seize the opportunity when I saw it. I’m pretty sure I almost made an extremely bad decision.
Hyde Park is unbelievably beautiful. Behind the home, there is an obstructed view of the valley and you can see for miles. It was so gorgeous I thought maybe I should propose there. I had the ring in my pocket, all I had to do was pull the lever. But…it felt corny. Engaged at FDR’s house? Plus there were people around and it would ruin the moment, I thought. But mostly I just felt like a nerd.
I knew that the room we were staying in had a balcony overlooking the Hudson River and I knew that we had about two hours until the sunset. So I made a tactical decision: We had to hurry the fuck up, get back to the room, and be on that balcony as the sun was falling. Amanda was curious why I was rushing, but not that curious. I drove like a maniac. We made it. She said yes. A couple years later, we got married.
The part of the wedding that pertains specifically to our apartment, I think, is that because we got married in New York City, it was a destination wedding for most of the attendees. Many made it a mini-vacation. So in the days leading up to our wedding there was a parade of friends and family entering our apartment. Friends and family who hadn’t seen each other in a long time all congregated in our little apartment—many who had never seen our apartment.
It’s impossible, I think, to put a wedding into words. It’s like that old saying, it’s impossible to truly “explain” a book—you just have to read it. Weddings can’t be explained, only attended. The entire day was a whirlwind that seemed to simultaneously last forever (in a good way) and was over in an instant.
People Sleeping on The Couch and Other Tales
This is less a story than an acknowledgement: Many, many people have slept on our couch over the last decade. Since we moved to NYC right after college, our apartment served as a kind of Welcome Center when people visited or moved to the city. Several people literally lived in our living room—a week here, a week there. Other times, late nights with friends ended in our apartment and people decided to just stay instead of trek back to wherever they lived. There’s at least a dozen people subscribed to this newsletter who have slept on this couch.
This may be an odd thing to include, but this couch, to me, represents a certain kind of hospitality that I’m proud of. I liked that in the last decade, people seemed to feel at home here. I know for a fact that others have memories of this place—good memories!—just like Amanda and I.
Also: The couch is coming with.
There’s one arrangement, however, I need to point out specifically. One summer my cousin Nick literally lived downstairs, but we watched so many great films sitting on this couch, and I’ll always cherish that summer and those memories. I also acted in one of Nick’s short films and can’t believe I haven’t been contacted by a Hollywood agent yet.
Only Murder in the Building
You may be familiar with the Citizen app. It launched in 2017 and it’s basically a police scanner on your phone supplemented with comments from users. Anyone who's ever listened to a police scanner for any length of time is aware there is an extremely high noise-to-signal ratio. Anyone who has ever read comments on the internet knows that there is an astronomical noise-to-signal ratio. Put these things together and you have a witch’s brew of hysteria and false alarms.
Last year, I was playing my PS4 around midnight and my wife shrieked. I ask what’s the matter. She says, “The Citizen app is reporting there were shots fired…in our building?” Gunshots are unequivocally a cause for concern. The dilemma was that we had not heard any gunshots in our four-unit building. We can generally hear people doing karaoke and kids jumping up and down, so I assume we’d hear gunshots. I shrugged it off as nothing. About 30 seconds later, sirens were blaring. Forty-five seconds later, we heard police banging on the front door of the building. We heard them enter, talking on their walkie talkies and knocking on other doors in the building. My wife and I are now concerned. We gathered by the door to our apartment, listened, and strategized: “So if they knock on the door, do we pretend we’re not home?” I whispered. “I have no idea,” she said. “Let’s play it by ear,” I said.
We never had to make a decision. The police eventually just left. To this day, I have no idea what happened, but I’m pretty sure there were no shots fired and there were definitely no murders in the building.
Slingshot
I started a company that covered esports in late 2015 and a couple years later, it failed. The story of Slingshot Esports is a story for another day, but it was one of the most important and formative experiences of my life, and it began and ended while I was living here. I have two specific enduring memories that stand above all the others.
The first was when my friend Vince showed up to my door after he moved to New York. When I decided to start this company, I knew I wanted Vince as editor. When he arrived, we sat in the living room with ambition and excitement, and more than a little anxiety (speaking for myself, anyway). I look back now and I think that Vince and I didn’t know it at the time, but we had already won regardless of what happened afterward. We were taking a big swing and setting out to create something together (along with another friend, Derick, and my cousin, Joe). But it was Vince and I sitting in my living room that day. I wish I could go back in time and tell us both, “Relax. You’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to be better people when this is over in several ways. And that is regardless of how Slingshot the LLC performs.” But, I know it now, and that is good enough.
The other memory is the day I told everyone that Slingshot was going to shut down. I was not feeling very well that morning and debated not going into the office. But I felt that I owed it to everyone to tell them we had no more money and they should start looking for a job. It was incredibly painful, but it was also a relief.
I think most of us have an innate sense when something is going to fail or is coming to an end, and while we work as hard as possible to avoid that, a part of us wishes it would just end. That was where I’d gotten with Slingshot. Every day was harder than the day before. I felt numb getting out of bed. I felt like I let everyone down because I failed to raise additional funds. I felt like I’d gotten my one chance to make something of my own and I blew it. Maybe I was naive or I just had such tunnel vision that I couldn’t see or realize that nobody else felt like this, or at least they didn’t act that way when I told them we were closing up. They were just glad I’d asked them to come on the ride and that we’d had fun and made memories along the way.
I’ll never forget coming home that day and lying down and falling asleep. I felt the most peaceful I’d felt in three years.
Trump
What to say? Trump happened while we lived here. The entire experience from him coming down that escalator announcing he was running in 2015 to, well…it’s still kind of going on, isn’t it?
I choose to focus, however, on November 7th, 2020, when the news networks began calling the election for Joe Biden. I’ve never experienced a day like that and I doubt I will ever again. After a week of waiting on pins and needles for a decision, I saw CNN had called it for Biden. About three milliseconds later, Brooklyn erupted. It shouldn’t be a political statement or even surprising that Brooklyn and New York City in general aren't big Trump areas. Someone in the apartment building next to us yelled “FUCK YES!” so loud, and it could be heard so clearly, that it served as a starting gun. After that, there was a perpetual din throughout the neighborhood. Music, cheering, street parties. Just yesterday, someone referred to it as “Joechella.” It was like the last scene in Return of the Jedi when the entire galaxy is celebrating. Of course, about half the country was in despair—a fact not lost on me in the moment—but that doesn’t change the fact that here in Bushwick, it was a day unlike any other in my life.
This was a short-lived and almost universally condemned idea.