Place I’ve Lived: The Hurst, A Child’s Bedroom, and My Childhood Home

by Zan Romanoff

Where have you lived, Zan Romanoff?

Elm Street, New Haven, Conn.
June 2007-June 2009
$490/month, plus utilities

I spent my first two years of college in some of the nicest dorm rooms in America: both featured wood floors and window seats and fireplaces, and gargoyles carved into the woodwork in corners and over doorways. Obviously, then, nothing would do but that I leave all that behind to spend my last two years in a dirty, ill-kept apartment building, once beautiful but starting to lean precariously with age. There were vestiges of old luxury — chipped marble stairs, tiled lobby floors, built-ins and molding and high ceilings and huge windows — but the place had been awkwardly subdivided and poorly maintained over the years.

This was partially the fault of its having become a de facto undergraduate haunt (the only non-student tenant was a man well into his seventies, who, as far as I know, still lives in his fifth floor apartment) and in part due to the landlord, who was crazy. He was personally crazy — he tried to teach me Russian by refusing to speak to me in English — and crazy in how he managed the building — the no-English speaking phase coincided with the first of three times that part of my apartment’s ceiling caved in, the fault of years and years of untreated water damage.

The building was a kind of common property, a beloved source of myth: Everyone knew the door code, and everyone who passed through has a Larry the Landlord story. It was sort of comfortingly awful, full of sticky cabinets and whistling radiators and silent Russian handymen who would appear at your front door some mornings to fix things you’d never mentioned being broken. It was the perfect place to be a listless undergraduate, a person who thought herself full of promise, but had trouble regularly washing her hair: It was a place that had been ceded to twenty-somethings by the adult world and left for us to play house in. It was shabby and charming and demanded nothing of us but that we be shabby and charming, hosting dinner parties where we cranked pasta by hand and asked guests to sit on empty kegs when we ran out of chairs. There was a bar across the street that served beer in pitchers, and Belgian frites with a variety of dipping sauces. Our neighbors were a commune, a liquor store and a pizza parlor.

Hancock Park, Los Angeles, Calif.
June 2009-June 2010
free

I got my heart badly broken senior year, so it suited me to graduate into the worst of the recession: I moved back in with my parents and worked a bunch of odd jobs (gallery assistant, freelance journalist, substitute teacher), comforting myself with the thought that there weren’t really any good jobs anyway, so it didn’t matter that I wasn’t trying to get them. My overwhelming memory of that time is that it rained for almost two weeks straight, a rarity in Los Angeles, in the period when I worked at a jewelry store during the Christmas rush. Every minute that I wasn’t selling men expensive presents for their wives and girlfriends I spent at home, watching Lost in bed.

Howe Street, New Haven, Conn.
June 2010-July 2012
$1000/month

The organization I’d interned at in college hired me full-time; I was by then a regular teaching assistant at a school where I’d been substituting, so I waited for the academic year to end and moved back three days before I was to start work in Connecticut. I was miserable about the whole prospect but it paid pretty well, so I decided to treat myself to a downtown one bedroom, which I signed a yearlong lease on sight unseen. The apartment itself was actually great — the kitchen was tiny but everything else was spacious, and I had three whole closets, to the deep and abiding envy of visiting New York friends.

There was only one thing wrong with it, but it was, in retrospect, kind of major: I could never sleep properly there. I don’t think I ever made it through a whole night without waking up, at least to pee but not infrequently still screaming, panicked by nightmares I could only barely remember. My first summer back I had episodes of sleep paralysis so awful I had to beg friends to come stay with because I was too afraid to face sleep alone.

I weathered two hurricanes and a handful of snowstorms in that apartment; when I turned 25 I threw myself a birthday party there. I spied on my across-the-courtyard neighbors incessantly. The bar that had been across the street from my undergraduate apartment was kicked out of its space by the landowners and moved in down the block; they stopped serving pitchers but there were still frites. The building was located next to a sushi restaurant where I knew the owner and most of the waitstaff, so that most weekend nights when it was warm out I’d stumble home from bars to find them drinking at the picnic tables outside, and I would join them, and my night would go on an hour or two longer than I’d intended.

Linden Street, New Haven, Conn.
August 2012
$300/month

Moving back to New Haven turned out to be the best thing I could have done for myself, but eventually it was time to leave again. I told my employer I’d be done in December, which left me four months between the end of my Howe street lease and the road trip back to Los Angeles. How hard could it be, I reasoned, to find a semester-long sublet in a college town?

Impossible, it turned out. Luckily a friend was housesitting for a professor in the nice neighborhood northeast of downtown, and she offered to let me crash with her until I worked something out. My bedroom there belonged to an eight-year-old girl, so there were butterfly mobiles over the twin bed. There was air-conditioning, sure, but the room was basically a maze of my packed boxes and I never quite felt at home. Instead, I almost always decamped to my then-boyfriend’s place, an apartment in my old building, where we spent the long end of summer evenings watching the Olympics and drinking beer.

Tilton Street, New Haven, Conn.
September-December, 2012
$508/month, plus utilities

Eventually something did work out, and I moved from Linden to an apartment in a funny yellow house on Tilton street, which I shared with two perfectly pleasant graduate students. The room came furnished and there was a dishwasher and a tiny porch out back. The friend who was housesitting lent me an ancient bike that I rode around town, because it wasn’t really safe to walk home alone at night.

Hancock Park, Los Angeles, Calif.
December 2012-?
My dignity, mostly

It didn’t make sense to get a place in L.A. until I had a job, so I moved back in with my parents, optimistically declaring it to be “just for a little while, this time.” That was almost a year ago; I have only recently cobbled together enough part-time work and freelance projects to feel safe starting to browse Craigslist for a place of my own. I understand — believe me, I understand — how lucky I am, that my parents have a home with room for me in it, that they don’t mind my being here. It’s been a rough year, but a good one: In the absence of paid, directed work I’ve had the luxury of time to pursue creative projects. My brother is living at home, too, working an underpaid internship, and the four of us are in the same house for the first time since I left for college in 2005. It’s actually pretty great: My mom cooks still, mostly, but sometimes I do, and my brother makes us all drinks or buys fancy beer on his way home. We wash the dishes together after dinner. We all stand around the kitchen and complain over coffee together in the mornings.

Zan Romanoff lives in L.A.

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