My first apartment in New York was a charmless hybrid thing, a corner of a small tenement building in a section of Brooklyn none of my Manhattan-dwelling acquaintances had ever considered living in, when Smith Street was a strip of failing bodegas and E-Z Credit furniture stores, with no sign of the runway of prcey eateries it would become a decade later.

Its two small rooms were brilliantly configured to serve all household functions equally poorly. It had a back room shaped in such a manner as to foil attempts to fit a bed in it, so the pull-out futon (do you remember when we all based our living arrangements around the ubiquitous pull-out futon?) in the front room served as sofa and bed. It was an ungainly thing that never really resolved, when folded up, into a couch. It remained nothing more than a heavy mattress, draped over frame of slats, upon which one could perch for a while, if one didn't mind it eventually sliding forward onto the floor over the course of the evening.

The sofa faced the apartment's grand architectural feature, the wall of exposed, discolored brick which constituted the place's sole resemblance to the loft-y space of my New York fantasies. To the left, a wall of cheap cabinets, a dingy refrigerator and ancient stove revoked whatever small aesthetic benefit the brick wall had added. Since I effectively slept in the kitchen, I learned not to cook particularly odorous food late at night.

The room in the back became the "office" where I parked the enormous government surplus desk my father had salvaged for fifty bucks from his old offices. It was made of some indestructible wood-composite, and weighed fourteen million pounds. It got moved to three other apartments before I finally got wise and sold the monstrosity to a neighbor. In the back room I'd sit at my fortress of a desk and stare through the tiny window, across a courtyard and straight into the kitchen of the neighborhood firehouse. I remember one Sunday night as I sat studying, I could hear the sound of the television from their kitchen, punctuated every two or three minutes by a roar of laughter from the guys. One of them shouted "Go Al!" and I realized that they were watching Married...With Children.

I shared a wall with a mysterious figure who almost never left his apartment. He left the television on constantly, a perpetual stream of voices and music that came through my wall just below the threshold of intelligibility. I could never find the show on my television that matched the one he was watching. Late at night, it seemed that he found some channel that played perepetual old cop shows from the seventies, of the Barnaby Jones type. I'd hear muted dialogue, mournful music coming to a crescendo and then dying away. And then the sound of a gunshot, and tires screeching. More mournful music -- doodle-do doo! Dum! Da-da-da-da...dum! Once I heard him open his door, and I raced to catch a glimpse of him through the fish-eye of the peephole in the door -- a hulking t-shirted back, shuffling down the hallway.

The only really pleasant times in that apartment were Sunday mornings. I would go out the night before, late, and buy the morning paper and a small carton of orange juice, and some eggs. In the morning I would get up and make french toast, or pancakes from a box of Bisquick. I had a tiny white table by the window which overlooked the street, and I would bring my breakfast there with the paper, and sit in the sun, and I would put on this record. And it became in this way my home.

(Though I moved in a year, and was very, very happy to do so.)