She Came From Planet Claire

I didn’t have a guidance system, only a heading: New York City. I was fresh-out-of-college foolish with nothing more than a boyfriend, and the left side of his childhood bed. It hardly mattered. I was hopelessly romantic on the subject of post campus life. I was Class of ‘80 cool.

I was gear down.

On final.

Cleared to land.

The apartment was on the 4th floor of a prewar on the Upper West Side. My boyfriend’s parents tossed us the keys on their way to finer digs on Central Park West. They left behind tired furniture, snoring appliances, an ancient green parrot, and their bed — which was so worn it was like one of those inflatable river rafts that sends passengers, who lose their grip on the lip, flying toward the center. We didn’t dare climb in.

The apartment’s dozen or so windows hadn’t been washed in years. Their bleak offering of swirling, dust-infused shafts of light gave me the spooks. Surely this was the sort of matter that divined ghosts. When the filth and the glare wasn’t making it impossible to see out, the very alive exhibitionist in the brownstone across the street would appear. He liked to stand naked on the banquette that ran the length of his large bay window, spread his arms and legs, and creep the shit out of anyone who happened to look up.

Sometimes he’d get a girl to join in: Sex in the City, 80’s-style.

The lobby of our building was a total letdown, which is bad because the role of the lobby is to say something spectacular about the people who live above it. Ours was beyond drab. There was a table, a dim, partially oxidized mirror, and the year-round odor of wet snow, and whatever the super’s wife was cooking. There was no awning. No carpet. No velvet rope. No “ta da!” moment when the doorman, seeing you approach, rushes to let you in, helps you with your things, sees you to the elevator, and presses the button for your floor.

It didn’t take long for the apartment’s population to go up. My boyfriend’s older, soon-to-be-a-spook, brother moved in. He took the master suite where, each night, I prayed the bed would swallow him whole. A college pal moved into the remaining bedroom. He needed a cheap place to crash while he clawed his way out of the mail room at William Morris.

Adding to our numbers, my boyfriend, an aspiring actor, took to inviting all manner of wannabe big stars to our apartment to rehearse god-knows-what. As far as I could tell, none of them were ever in anything other than our living room, where they drove me wild, not so much because they sucked, or because they were in our space, but because they clearly had the resources to do whatever they liked without doing a thing.

My boyfriend took no note of the crap that put me in a mood. After all, I was living in the greatest city on earth for one-hundred-twenty-five dollars a month. If anything, he was doing me a favor.

It’s easy for dreams to fall wide of the mark in New York. That “I’ve made it!” jolt you get on arrival is not to be taken literally. I missed that. I came in dreaming big, fueled by a stint with ABC Sports at the Winter Olympics where I’d been clothed, fed, housed and paid to schmooze with people whose ad dollars made the network rich. When I wasn’t at the games, or at an elaborate dinner, I was on a snow mobile with a fellow hostess, the spitting image of Patty Hearst, in search of a hidden case of Johnny Walker Red - a marketing stunt that was all the rage that winter; or smoking pot with the cameramen who skied backwards while the likes of Phil Mahre powered his way forward.

It was a fairyland job in a fairyland setting — only I read it as the real deal. I took it as a harbinger of what lay ahead. I took it as ‘hot damn, I’m golden!’

…except I wasn’t.

Headed into midtown, C.V. in hand, my coordinates locked on an entry level job at Nightline, I made it to the door only to discover that my top floor sports contacts were worthless. That news and sports were rivals. They didn’t take one another’s calls, they didn’t do one another favors. They didn’t even work in the same building.

Finding myself thrown wildly off course, I had no alternative but to crash.

I dumped my boyfriend, took a p.r. job, and moved into an apartment with one filthy window that looked out onto a rooftop water tower, and the penthouse apartment of a friend’s ex-college boyfriend. Their romance had ended badly. For amusement, I spied on his comings and goings, that is, when I bothered to pay attention, but mostly I lay on my bed and looked out at the blank sky.

My plans, torn up and scattered, fluttered to the corner behind the door, hoping, like me, that a whoosh of air would send us aloft. Take us far into the space above the city’s skyline, where I could reset my coordinates, head westward, and get on with the rest of my life.