July 18th 2019

One year later

***

Of all the books to be stuck in an elevator with, a paperback copy of Your Successful Real Estate Career was, unsurprisingly, a less than ideal companion. The only reason I grabbed Your Successful Real Estate Career off of its mildewed shelf was because the title earnestly delighted me at a time when I was living in a state of post-breakup numbness so noiseless and complete, only the truly silly could awaken my pleasure. Your Successful Real Estate Career was one ofthose rare respites: haughtily titled, dusty, published in 1983 and pressed between a hardback copy of He’ s Just Not That Into You (who knew it was a book first?) and a blue ray dvd of “TheBreak Up”.

Your Successful Real Estate Career was exactly the sort of thing that could lift my mood when nothing really could. I thought that of all the places to find one’s path in life, the basement laundry room of a Silverlake apartment complex seemed perfectly suitable. I didn’t want to be a real estate agent. But I did want to be successful. Amusement bloomed over me when I saw it, the feeling rippling in warm waves first through my cheeks then chest then arms. It occurred to me that there was likely an abundance of journalism majors with their faces plastered on lawn signs and on the backs of bus stop benches. Maybe I could give up the ghost, join them.

The shelf I found Your Successful Real Estate Career on, I had come to understand, was the place where everyone in my new apartment building (“new” only to me— the building itself was actually far older than I was) left whatever it was they didn’t want anymore. The shelf above a line of coin-operated washing machines housed at various times various items: a set of men’s ankle weights with visibly sweat-warped mesh fasteners, a dog’s tug-of-war rope that had been thrashed to shreds, plenty of romance books and dvd sets of old western television series, and once, a box of expired tomato sauce cans with the question “still good?” sharpied across the label. And now this: Your Successful Real Estate Career. 

My Successful Real Estate Career.

A dazzling new addition to the menagerie of forgotten toys. Someone in my building had decided they didn’t want a successful real estate career anymore. I was in the laundry room because I’d vomited into my last clean towel the night before after binge drinking within an inch of my life with my favorite barback from work. I’d tried to sneak us onto my roof for a fuck (my dog wouldn’t let other men onto what he considered his bed) and what was intended for our conjugal kip became a makeshift basket that I pulled taught between my hands as I heaved cocktails into the shallow terricloth basin. The barback stroked my back and sang Bob Marley to me so softly, I almost forgave him for it. I’d then carried the vomit-laden towel down to the basement (but not before making a pit stop at my apartment to retrieve all ofmy other dirty towels— why waste a load of laundry on just the one?) and the barback left sans kiss, sans fuck. I’d then forgotten the towels in the dryer in the morning before rushing out the door for my brunch shift.

And so there I was, the afternoon of July 21st, 2018 dutifully fetching towels, my hair and hands still reeking of egg and orange juice. I wrapped one towel around my head, as if I’d just gotten out of the shower, hoping to muffle the throbbing behind my temples. I shuddered.

As I stepped into the elevator, I began counting on my fingers. One two three four five six. Seven and a half hours since my dog, Jumbo, had been out to pee. The elderly pitbull, named for the strip club I found him outside of, pissed on the floor only when he really needed to go. Though as he aged these desperate times grew more frequent and my ex had grown more impatient.

This was one of the many loose threads that eventually unspooled us— I always sided with the dog. I told Jumbo, out loud in the elevator, not to worry, that I was on my way to him, and that if he did end up peeing, it was okay because I peed on the floor once too. I then re-told him the story about the time when my ex and I did molly without eating and then drank through three-buck-chuck wine like it was the water we were actually craving. I woke up in piss-soaked jeans on the kitchen floor and I was happy and unhousebroken.

I believed that Jumbo could hear my reassurances all the way from inside my apartment the same way he used to wake from his deep, dementia-addled slumber “several minutes” before I’d arrive home, sensing that I was close before he could have known it for sure. My ex sent me a video of it happening once, Jumbo starting awake and then huffing and pacing the floorboards in the entryway until the timestamp on the recording read 2:31 and I walked through the door. In the video Jumbo and I erupt into mutual squeals of delight for a full thirty seconds before I so much as glance up at my ex.

There was no one at home to send me videos of Jumbo while I was away anymore. So I tried to telepathically tell Jumbo every time I reached the elevator that I was close so that he could perform his primordial loyalty rituals ahead of my arrival.

As the elevator accelerated towards the first floor, I noted that Gina had not gotten on for her usual afternoon “fag ride”. That was what the elderly woman (dyed black hair, thick eyeliner, first floor resident, New Jersey native) called taking the elevator to the roof for a cigarette. Gina called me “stupid beautiful”, texted me disturbing articles about recent crime in our area and told me frequently that I could model. When I once replied “I look more like I ate a model” she hit me surprisingly hard on the arm and I never said anything bad about myself in front of her again.

The weekend I moved in, Gina caught me in the elevator on her way down from the roof and invited me over for an almost undrinkably bourbon-heavy glass of her homemade sweet tea. I remember she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up (even though I’d just regaled her with the story of my twenty eighth birthday in which I had pissed on the floor, indicating that I was in fact, already grown up).“ A reporter,” I told her.

And then, like it was the simplest thing in the world she just shook her head, her straw between her teeth and said out of the corner of her mouth, “Then go get the scoop, baby.”

As the second floor grew nearer I fumbled for my keys in my purse. Your Successful Real Estate Career slipped from my crowded grasp. It fell face up. And instead of saving it, I stared at it. Something about specifying “successful” was what did it for me. The word gave it a certain “the lady doth protest too much” quality that just absolutely tickled me. The smugness of the word “successful” stuck between the possessive adjective and the subject. I imagined that the author’s older brother had years before published “Your Real Estate Career” which had done numbers on the bestsellers list until it all came crashing down in a fantastic crescendo of failure when a plucky, deep-diving reporter had unearthed the brother’s decades long string of white collar crimes. Embezzlement. Fraud. Laundering. The works.

And so, ever the opportunistic little asshole, the youngest brother had published this book. A cheeky, cruel chess move one only makes after a lifetime of suffering an avalanche of crippling inferiority: Your SUCCESSFUL Real Estate Career was published while Your Real Estate Career was still warm in its grave. The older brother read it from jail. I imagined that the younger brother had a Times profile written up about him with the headline: Am I My Brother’s Schemer?

When the elevator jolted to a halt at the third floor I waited and the doors did not open. This moment of stillness lasted a little too long and then entirely too long. Once it had been concerningly long I sat down on the ground and outstretched my brunch-sore legs. I left Your Successful Real Estate Career where it was, on the floor. I clutched the wad of towels to my stomach, which gurgled at the application of pressure.

If the elevator was really and truly stuck, I was going to be there for a while. Jumbo was going to piss on the floor. If it got bad enough, maybe I would have to piss on the floor too. But sometimes these stoppages resolved quickly. A minute. Two. Ten. Gina had said that sometimes people got stuck in the elevator for long stretches, hours at a time, but I’d never experienced that. When I questioned her on it she’d said “jot this down, baby: I’ve lived here longer than you’ve been alive.”

In the elevator, I pulled out my phone to text her, hoping she’d feel vindicated by my misfortune. “Stuck in the elevator…” I wrote, then, “pray for me that this doesn’t last long”. I let my phone clatter to the ground next to Your Successful Real Estate Career. I had done such a

good job of not allowing myself to be alone in a quiet room since the breakup. But it caught up

to me. Fate, God, the elevator. Whatever. They had me now.

I remembered that at our place together, my ex and I had never taken the elevator because he was terrified of confined spaces. As we climbed the stairs with groceries I’d joked that this was ironic given that he never left the house. As he ascended the switch back staircase a few paces ahead of me, I saw the thin-lipped fury splayed out across his face. He started taking the stairs two at a time and I was left behind with my unkindness. That was how it always went with us— a real thing said in jest, too slippery for the victim to catch, too stinging for them to ignore. And the loving things, the mostly the false things, were said in long, cloying run-on sentences that ended in feelings no stronger than the ones we’d started with.

My comment was too true. He did stay inside all the time. Eventually I did too, succumbing to the passivity the way one might stop fighting sleep on an airplane or a long drive. I did not go quietly, but I did go. And then I punished him for my dissatisfaction with these kinds of passing cruelties: mean things said in stairwells while we had our hands full. He got back at me with small stunts: he unsubscribed from my “neighborhood mysteries” substack where I reported on the asinine goings-ons on our cul de sac (for example, a think piece on the person named Sadie who littered Jack in the Box outside of our building almost daily, ordering always a side of fries and a cup of ice).

I found his kind of retaliation chillingly private— I was always preferential to conflict that happened out in the open which he pointed out made me a bad journalist. “No one does bad things out in the open,” he’d said once as he half-heartedly washed a pan with a sponge I’d clearly labeled “for counter”.

“Then what do you call what you’re doing right now?” I’d asked.

We were over within the week. But our spitefulness broke like a fever as soon as we decided we should no longer be together. And the last days of our entanglement were sweet— sweeter, I think, than we ever were, even in the beginning.

And then I moved into my own place across the street from Trader Joe’s. And eventually the sharp, dizzying pain of the loss gave way to a worse kind. This throbbing numbness. I let my head sink to the floor. The wrapped towel provided a pillow of sorts as I looked at the elevator buttons from below and longed for the early days of the breakup. The days of recent devastation— when tragedy was a glass bottle crashing over my head and not the dull, thumping headache that followed the blow. I curled my knees into my chest and checked my phone. Only a few minutes had passed. Gina had not responded.

I thought then for the first time about opening Your Successful Real Estate Career. But like a survivalist lusting after water, I decided to wait. I would be wise to ration it, the potential lift from boredom and regret, until I absolutely had to have it. I would plaster my face on a billboard next to “3 Million dollar home sold” only when I was absolutely out of options.

My legs twitched. I eyed the space, deciding if it was large enough for a quick downward dog. Even if it was, I thought better of it. During a recent stint of true unemployment (where I was not only not working as a reporter, I also wasn’t even working as a waitress) I’d filled most of my time listening to true crime podcasts which necessitated that I make regular efforts to calm myself back down which I attempted to do with a dedicated at home yoga practice. The result was that I’d inadvertently trained my brain to associate certain yoga poses with certain crimes.

The burn of my psoas in pigeon pose for example provoked a flashing memory of a case in Georgia where a mother of two shot both of her children while they sat strapped into their carseats. The sting of my hamstrings in downward dog sent a twinge of the Chicago hitman who killed the wrong brother sirening through my body. Child’s pose. A 1970’s sorority house slaughter. Warrior one, a mass shooting at a Kansas City mosque. Perhaps, I thought, I belonged on the laundry room discard shelf with “still good?” written across my forehead.

I was getting hot. I thought maybe I would get so hot, I would eventually think that I was actually cold. A reverse hypothermia of sorts. I could always read Your Successful Real Estate Career. But I didn’t need it yet. Not yet not yet not yet. Seven and half hours. Jumbo had definitely pissed on the floor, I thought. And then there was the explosive sound of metal against metal somewhere in the distance. I now know that this was th  man’s car accelerating into the power pole on the corner of Monon and Hyperion. But in themoment, I just heard the crash and then the immediate rush of sirens— water pouring instantly through a split dam— and couldn’t contextualize it.

I went to text Gina again and then there was gunfire. I counted one two three four five shots, then three more. Gina had already texted me before the ricochets had died down: “Stay where you are,” she wrote (as if I had a choice), “they’re shooting at the Trader Joe’ s.”

Then it was silent somehow. She did not specify who was shooting. I looked down. I could have chosen a different book. There were others to choose from, ones that had been there since I’d moved in. Classics like The Hemingway Stories and Summer by Edith Wharton. Nonfiction including Women in Media Careers and then an airport page turner ominous titled, One of Us is Dead. Anything would have been better.

I looked at Your Successful Real Estate Career and thought about how I could have chosen a different life. I could have wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and fucked the barback straight on the bare rubber roof. I could have just left my ex and changed my whole life instead

of being mean to him on the stairs. I could have chosen to run across the street for something to eat on my way home from my brunch shift. I could have left Trader Joe’s at the exact right moment or at the exact wrong moment or at no moment at all. As sweat seeped through the towel that was still tight around my head, I wished with an overwhelming and crumbling sense of panic that I’d chosen everything in my life differently, even the things I had not chosen at all. Even the things that had worked out in my favor.

Whatever the story was out there happening loudly and then silently outside of the elevator, I couldn't get to it. The fact of this impossibility filled me with prickling, head to toe dread that slowly percolated through the surface of my numbness. At the moment that this sensation was

accumulating inside of me, I now know that the man who held the Trader Joe’s hostage was demanding that one of the 30 or so strangers fetch him something to tourniquet his bullet-grazed arm with.

In the elevator, just a half a block away and nearly three stories up, tingling dread turned to hot, throat-closing panic and I stood up and pushed the towel from my head. I now know that by this time, the 27 year old store manager who had exited the store at the exact wrong moment was likely already dying just inside the automatic sliding doors.

Then, as I paced inside the elevator, a sudden flood of cooling relief came over me. As my blood slowed its hot throb, I found that I recognized the feeling of relief. It was the pacifying assuredness that I did not have to do anything with my life if I didn’t feel like it.From my standing position, an idea occurred to me as I examined the buttons on the wall opposite me. I glanced at the emergency button, the numbered floor buttons and then I pressed the one I was looking for, two triangles pointing away from each other. I pressed the “doors

open” button and they did.

I ran to my apartment and Jumbo was already sitting up, looking at the door. It didn’t smell like piss. He ran at my heels with the speed of a much younger dog as we made our way down the stairs to street level. He peed on a parked car’s tires as I checked the time, counted the number of law enforcement vehicles, and pressed record on my phone camera.

***

Two days after my byline on the hostage incident was published, I found Your Successful Real Estate Career still sitting on the floor of the elevator. No one had bothered to pick it up. For a moment, a flash of embarrassment coursed through me— was I the only one in the entire building pitiful enough to be intrigued by the promise of success, no matter how meaningless?

Gina had printed out copies of my article (pop up liposuction ads and all) and taped them up inside all of the buildings’ commonspaces: the elevators, the lobby, above the shelf of left behind things in the laundry room. I looked at the book laying there on the floor as the elevator carried me up to meet Gina for a rooftop cigarette. I thought of my interview with the man who had run from the store and made it out just in time, I thought about Jumbo sniffing his ankles as the man trembled, I thought of the “door open” buttons that obeyed me the moment I thought to make them: what if I had not been there? What if I had?

I picked up the copy of Your Successful Real Estate Career and carried it into my apartment. Now it sits on my desk. Each time my eyes flick to it as I search for a word, a sentence, a useful comparison, a phrase for a fact, I swell with a mixture of panic and elation. It’s the kind of feeling that holds me afloat, captive inside of myself for a too-brief moment. Then I go on writing and try not to think about how the tragedy of a boring existence can, in a moment, collapse spectacularly into a black hole of “what if’s” from which one might need to actively resist tumbling backwards into forever.