Victoria Bekempis

When I moved to Monroe Street in late 2015, my apartment was, by normal people's standards, a complete dump. The apartment was located in a back tenement and, given its age—I want to say late 1800s or early 1900s—was not legally required to have heat.  I had to replace the stove and, when I did so, discovered an animal skeleton which, to this day, I still cannot identify.  The walls were disintegrating from day one, making it impossible to keep anything clean. The linoleum floors were also in a perpetual state of decline, the stains gradually being supplanted by bumps and bubbles as time wore on. Rats started to congregate in the garbage area where I walked through to enter and exit my building. It was 180-square-feet. To me, however, this apartment was absolute paradise.  It was a deal—a $1365 rent-stabilized one-bedroom in Lower Manhattan—but ate up more than half of my take-home pay. I did not care about how hard it was. It was all mine. 

My love of this apartment, and willingness to put up with this, also had to do with the relationships that grew and strengthened around quotidian activities. These weren't friendships, to be clear, or even acquaintances, but people I would see almost every day, and genuinely be happy that they existed. I think they might have been happy that I existed, too. There is beauty in bullshitting at the deli for 20 minutes or bitching about insurance with the new pharmacy owner down the street. There is magic in ordering from the same takeout place over-and-over again, and always exchanging pleasantries with the same delivery man. 

That restaurant was called Happy Family, which still ranks among my all-time favorite Chinese takeout restaurants and, maybe Chinese restaurants generally. For almost seven years, I'd order from Happy Family around twice a week, more if I could afford it, always getting the chow fun or mapo tofu or both. The same man would deliver this food every single time. Our interactions were brief, but the greetings grew in length as the months and years went on. We never learned each other's names, nor shared details about our personal lives, but we weren't supposed to. It was the kind of relationship that is more than transactional, but not the kind that was meant to turn into something else. Maybe this makes sense, maybe it doesn't, but I think we all have had this, and appreciate the delicate stability that characterizes these interactions. You care about this person, but due to how you met and interact, you are limited in acting on that care. That they exist, that conversation can be had with them, has to be enough. 

In March of 2020, something happened with Happy Family. The Seamless page didn't work, and they didn't pick up their phone. At some point, a web directory marked Happy Family as permanently closed. I was sad, not just because the death of a small business marks the death of a dream, but because I would never see this delivery driver again.  I don't know if he survived the pandemic. If he survived, I don't know if he is doing OK. I should have tried to learn more about him and said "fuck you" to boundaries, that phrase millenials love. Had I done so, I might have been able to exchange "how are yous" with him again or helped if he needed help.

Happy Family has been replaced by one of the crab boil joints that have become ubiquitous in the last year or so. I don't eat crab, so I haven't been.  

I officially left my Monroe Street apartment around May of 2020. The move had been in the works since late 2019, but was delayed because of the pandemic. I had wanted to stay in "Two Bridges," but I just got too old for a heat-less apartment. I was just too old to split such a small space with a boyfriend and two cats. There weren't affordable options that met our simple needs in the area. We moved what I had long considered too Uptown—near 8th Street.  I walk around my old neighborhood as much as I can, probably as much as when I lived there. There's even more urgency, now, to spend whatever money I can on coffee and newspapers and other small items. I don't want to lose any more of these exchanges, however minimal they might seem.