P.S. My parents did have another baby. My sister, Elizabeth, was born 15 months after me.
Our most mad night of college, the night we went wilder than we ever had, came in December 1992, the Friday classes were all over but for finals. In another week, we would go home for Christmas break.
Snow began burying Poughkeepsie, New York in the afternoon and there must have been six inches on the ground by twilight. Even in this weather, for a buck each, we could have had a cab driver take us to an off-campus keg party or we could have gone to Sidetracks, the bar where you had to be eighteen to get in, twenty-one to drink. Or rather pubescent and careful not to flaunt your beer in front of the bartender and bouncer. It was our junior year and we were all either nineteen or twenty, desperate then to fall through time and land on our twenty-first birthdays. But that night, we stayed in. Home was a townhouse on the Marist College campus, bucolic in the middle of Poughkeepsie, a town with good bones on the Hudson River.
Townhouses were three stories tall with a living room, full kitchen and they typically housed ten students, two to a room, but ours had an extra bedroom off the living room because we had the handicapped unit. Six of us who’d been friends since freshman year lived there, matched up with other girls who became our friends as well.
In the evening, with the snow still coming down, we took the huge garbage bags that fit the industrial trashcans supplied by the college. We ran outside and climbed in the bags and used them to fly down the hill behind our row of townhouses. They made fantastic, slick sleds. Others came out. Everyone was sober, giddy. Unable to steer, we crashed into each other, limbs tangling. We laughed as we staggered up the hill for another run. As we flew down the hill, it was easy to believe we might launch ourselves off the earth. Without a moon or god to howl at, we screamed at the falling sky, shrieked our throats raw. It was easy to believe we would never die and that we would all die, that very night, perhaps that very hour.
Jeanmarie was almost certainly dying.
Hours earlier, she’d called Denise and told her she did indeed have cancer. Again. Like my roommate and I, Jean and Denise had been put together by the Marist College roommate questionnaire. They lived down the hall from me and Meaghan on the second floor of Leo Hall. Eileen had been on the fourth floor, Katie on the sixth.
At thirteen, Jean had bone cancer in her leg. I never once heard her give the proper name of the disease. Her tibia was removed and replaced with a metal rod, a new procedure at a time when amputation was the sole option. A scar ran from knee to ankle. She did not wear shorts often but sometimes, she did in the privacy of the dorm but only later, after she’d gotten to know us. She nervously told Denise about her medical history in their first phone conversation which took place the summer before they’d met. Jean spoke very quickly: Okay, so I had cancer when I was a kid and it’s probably something you should know because I have this scar... And Denise said, Yeah, so?
That scar brought hands to mouths. Eyes either skittered away or stayed fixed. It looked like something that should have been fatal--it was. But it spoke of frantic dark roads and spiderwebbing windshields. Yet someone who looked closely might notice the neat edges that spoke of surgery.
Jean limped, badly. We were walking across campus one night and others had gone ahead. She and I walked together and she thanked me for keeping to her pace. Like me, she came from an Irish-American family of New York City firefighters. We didn’t look alike, yet we matched the same description, Brown hair, blue eyes, freckles, an unmistakably Irish face. She could sing. Her major was Communications and she thought she’d like to be a broadcast journalist but wasn’t quite sure what it entailed. She was afraid she wasn’t a good enough writer. She also wanted to help children who had cancer, to give back somehow. The middle child between two brothers, she’d been a tomboy, an athlete. Soccer had been her game. She believed, if she’d been able to keep playing, she might have gotten a scholarship to college. Not to brag, but I was good, she said.
Marist College had been a necessity because it was close to her parents’ home in Sloatsburg, NY and to her doctors. She’d entered college on academic probation. The missed school from when she was sick coupled with hearing loss from chemo made classes a challenge. And truthfully, Jean liked to have fun. She loved to have fun. Well, I nearly died, she said.
Once, Jean went on a ski trip for kids with cancer and cancer survivors. The counselors kept urging her to take off her leg to go skiing. She told them that she could not remove her leg. They told her she didn’t have to be self-conscious, not among them, certainly. It’s my leg, she said.
She thumped it and laughed as she told the story, but she knew very well that with a prosthetic, she could have skied. She would have walked without a limp. She was a pioneer in the war against pediatric cancer. I would love to run, she said.
In between our freshman and sophomore years at Marist, she had surgery to adjust the rod. Her ankle was able to turn almost all the way around. She came back with a cane. She and Denise named it Cane.
At the end of our sophomore year, Jean thought she had an impacted wisdom tooth. That tumor was taken care of easily. The biopsy revealed it had not spread to her lymph nodes.
A few months later, our junior year, she’d gone to the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital up the road from Marist. Katie went with her. I’d had classes most of the day and when I came home in the late afternoon, it was already winter-dark and Jean was still at the hospital. None of us were particularly worried. Stomach pains didn’t seem like that big a deal. It seems astonishing now that we did not realize that they are, in someone with Jean’s medical history, a very, very big deal. An enormous, horrible deal. The doctor at the emergency room looked at the X-rays and told her to go home to her parents, that they couldn’t do anything for her.
She went home. Surgery. Jean’s father called and told Denise she came through it ok. They’d removed tumors. They’d taken out an ovary. We had been joking about her boobs getting bigger. She had gone up half a cup size. Puberty at twenty? What the hell?
Jean always swore she would never get chemo again because of how it made her feel. But she did. When doctors saw it wasn’t working, they told her they could give her an experimental drug if she wanted. There were no guarantees though. She told them to go ahead. Should I just lay here and die?, she asked.
As it turned out, they couldn’t even try. The cardiac damage from her previous rounds of chemo were too severe; the new drug would do more, too much.
Jeanmarie Murtagh died on April 14, 1993, the day we returned to Marist after Easter break.
That Friday night back in December, after sledding, we went inside and lay on the living room floor wrapped in blankets, eating microwave popcorn and watching the Wizard of Oz.
A link to an article from the NY Times, March 9, 1989 in which Jean is mentioned.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/09/us/health-new-device-is-saving-the-limbs-of-some-young-victims-of-cancer.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Dear Trav,
We are enjoying a warming trend and finally getting some tennis in. We had a squirrel build a nest on our roof where there is an overhang between the old and new section. I tried to pull it apart by reaching up from the deck and lo and behold down comes a baby.
In water that is 40 degrees Fahrenheit, your fingers turn a dusky pink and your palms an alarming shade of blue. Washing your hair is surprisingly painful. Imagine cold water running directly into your brain, blade-like.
"You know, these things happen.”
A quote: my landlord to another tenant in my building, regarding the fact that we were on our 37th day without heat and the second week without hot water. It was out five days last week, came back on and then went away again. We all enjoyed its brief, though tepid, resurrection.
Today, February 25, 2009 is Day 39.
Okay, my landlord is not likely a millionaire even though he and his partner do own and manage several buildings in Brooklyn, New York. However, I am too pissed off to fret over semantics. It’s a safe bet that he’s got more money than I do.
When my boyfriend and I decided to leave our separate apartments and move in together—he had roommates, my place was a studio—we considered Queens where we knew we’d get more space for less money.
Travis has lived in Brooklyn since moving to New York from Miami in 2004. I’m fourth-generation Brooklyn on my mother’s side and my father’s parents came here separately from Galway and met at a dance at St. Gregory the Great, a Brooklyn parish. My American grandfather worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and had second job at Prospect Park’s boathouse. He was in charge of renting out paddleboats. My Irish grandfather was a sandhog who helped build the Lincoln Tunnel. My American grandmother worked at the Carmelite Cloister on St. John’s and Bedford. My Irish grandmother collapsed and died on a Brooklyn sidewalk on her way to morning mass. My mother was an ICU nurse at Kings County Hospital from the beginning through the very worst of the AIDS epidemic. My father and four uncles are retired FDNY: 3 Lieutenants, a Captain and a Chief. My cousin is now on the job in Bed-Stuy. Together, they have about 150 years of fighting fires in this city. Brooklyn is bred in my bones. Travis and I decided we did not want more space.
Problems with the heat and hot water began on October 27th. Out for a week. The heat went out again in November and again in December and then for good on January 18th. Since winter began, the water has never truly been hot. As of this week, February 23rd, the boiler has been condemned by the city. So says the big red sticker. We will have neither heat nor hot water until the boiler is replaced.
When will this happen? Excellent question.
The landlord says he cannot replace the boiler until the gas company, Keyspan, installs a new gas line. Keyspan has said—I’m Brooklyn paraphrasing—bullshit. A boiler could be run temporarily on the old line, providing some measure of relief until the new line is installed. Which should be real soon. In a few weeks. Sometime in March.
All of the tenants have made complaints to New York City’s Housing and Preservation Department, (HPD) an agency established to handle exactly this kind of thing. Inspectors have been to the building many, many times and issued violations, imposed fines. The fire department has also done inspections and issued violations. One violation states there is not adequate fireproofing around the boiler.
HPD says they can replace the boiler and bill the landlord as an emergency measure because no heat or hot water equals inhabitability thus creating an emergency situation that the city must remedy with emergency measures. Yeah, they’re working on it.
Our apartments are rent stabilized. In New York, with non-rent stabilized apartments, a landlord can raise the rent to whatever he or she wishes and is not required to offer a renewal lease. So rent-stabilized apartments are Holy Grails. By law, a landlord must offer a renewal lease for a rent-stabilized apartment and can only raise the rent a certain percentage until that tenant moves out. Once a tenant does move, a landlord can make ‘improvements’ to the apartment and submit to the city for approval of a new, higher rent. Once an apartment is ‘improved’ past a value of $2,000, it is no longer rent-stabilized. They can charge full market value. This is a quick explanation for a complicated law and it’s as I understand it from reading Tenant’s Rights websites. I may very well be missing some nuances. I am no lawyer.
I do know that in our building, the highest rent is $1790. The lowest is about $300. These tenants have been in the building since the late ‘70’s. Landlords are, to say the least, not fans of rent stabilization and it’s obvious why if someone is paying them $1400 less than the landlord could be getting for an apartment.
We pay $1600 for our one bedroom, the second highest rate in the building. Given all of this, I can’t help but wonder if the landlord is trying to freeze out the tenants who are paying so far below market value. Or us, so he can hike the rent above stabilization rates. I have no evidence, except common sense. I think it’s highly improbable that a good-faith effort to replace the boiler would take the entire winter. Does the landlord not have the money for a new boiler? Is he suffering from some awful malaise? Is he simply trying to raise incompetence to an art form? Questions abound.
And we are still cold.
On Tuesday, February 24, we held a tenants’ meeting in the freezing stairwell of our building. It lasted two hours. Wednesday, February 25, we saw a lawyer together and discussed our options. Take the landlord to Housing Court, which the lawyer has said will be a lengthy process as most judges will begin by giving him a month at least to correct the problem, even though this has been going on all winter. Rent strike. All of us stop paying. This does open us to eviction proceedings for nonpayment of rent. Try and get HPD to move on installing the boiler, probably our best bet. We will decide this week and let our lawyer know.
Thankfully, there are no children living here. Nobody is rich and nobody is poor. My boyfriend edits audio books from our apartment and I write fiction. I have published eight short stories, been paid once. My agent is shopping my novel, but in this economy I probably have a better chance of finding Jimmy Hoffa than selling a first book. I work forty hours a week as a receptionist. One woman works for a nonprofit, another in a hospital. One man is retired. One designs software. Another is a graphic artist. One woman is a dentist-turned-pathologist.
We all get that there are people far worse off than we are. We do. We just want what our rent entitles us to by law—decent living conditions. Some shred of decency in the landlord would be nice, but if you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it.