Tale of a Toilet

My girlfriend and I have been talking about moving, for lots of reasons: we own a little house, but taxes are high and going higher, and while the little house was what we could afford when we bought it, it's really not what we want now.  Not to mention the fact that our relationship is in major transformation (future still unclear), and the living space has taken on some of the freight of the negotiation of our individual needs.  (Sometimes we talk about a place where we share a bedroom and living room, and have everything else separate: cuddle, sleep, have sex, watch Glee, and then split up to do whatever else we do -- trying to escape lesbian co-dependency.  It's hard to avoid the dream that a simple reorganization of space will resolve all personal problems.)

Thinking about moving, of course, means considering new neighborhoods -- from the next train stop up the line to radical shifts: Brooklyn?  the Bronx?  And so it also means consideration of what new neighborhoods (especially the ones we can afford) would really be like to live in.  And that brings me to my theme of the day: the tale of a toilet -- or, more precisely, the reframing of a toilet into a desperate narrative about self.

Moving to a new neighborhood involves a new narrative to weave the problematic bits of a new place into a story that sells the new home to one's friends and fits it into one's self-image.  Maybe this is the marker of being middle-class (a dividing line I've puzzled over for years, being English and thus obsessed with subtle class gradations, and with the lack of translation between those and American class).  Moving to a new place requires justifying it -- it can't just be a place to live, it has to be a place that mirrors one's sense of self.  One's abode is a signifier of one's worth -- not monetarily, necessarily, but in terms of style.  You can live in a crummy neighborhood, if it signifies that you're a cool hipster; if you're cool enough you can be the first to move into a new neighborhood as long as you can tell people why it's cool -- it's not enough just to live there (and god forbid just to live there because it's cheap), you have to tell a story about it.  Take Bensonhurst and Williamsburg, for example: they have a lot in common, but people managed to sell one as cool, while the other remains a real problem, in terms of image.

This is a tale of a toilet because a toilet figures in my quintessential tale of how to tell stories.  Twenty years ago I was living temporarily in Paris as a poor graduate student; one of my professors was also there for a while, living in a much fancier neighborhood, of course.  She was a very insecure person, though it took me years to recognize that, because I couldn't yet understand how such a successful academic could still be so insecure; her need to spin everything she did -- coupled with her inability to do it effectively -- simply puzzled me intensely.  One night we went out to dinner at a little restaurant near where she was staying: as she described it to me, it was "an unpretentious little couscous restaurant, really authentic."  The two words unpretentious and authentic were of course the key: the restaurant was in fact a completely blah, unmemorable place with -- the only thing about it that stuck in my mind -- a Turkish toilet (a hole in the floor, basically, still common enough in Paris then; you squatted on a kind of draining board and peed into the hole).  I'd seen plenty of Turkish toilets in Paris, especially in the places students lived, but the actual puzzle was her attempt to weave it into her narrative.  If she was a sophisticated academic, and she chose to frequent a restaurant that served so-so couscous and had a Turkish toilet, then she had to weave a story that made sense of the anomalies.  It had to be unpretentious and authentic, loaded signifiers that transformed it into values in her cultural worldview, and that signaled those values to others like herself, who could then judge her on her taste.  The real question is, why couldn't she just say she went there because she liked it?  If she'd been brave enough to say that, she'd have been one of those neighborhood pioneers, the ones who make taste instead of following it.

Barbara Corcoran (real estate mogul) once wrote a column about changing neighborhoods, saying you could tell when a neighborhood was gentrifying when it had gay pride flags hanging on houses with flower pots on the stoops: she identified gay couples as the first wave of gentrification in so-called dicey neighborhoods -- and I suspect it's not just because they bought houses and fixed them up (without needing to worry about the school system) but also because gay couples were especially good at telling stories about neighborhoods that made them cool.  After I read that column I went outside and looked at our house: yup, we were the first on the block to strip off the vinyl siding (some of our neighbors thought we were insane, since clapboard requires much more yearly maintenance than vinyl), and there were the flower pots and rainbows.  Surprisingly, we'd moved into a neighborhood that later became gentrified, so we no longer had to tell so many stories about why we lived there (oh, don't worry, it's full of artists, and there's such a cool little Cuban restaurant where the ropa vieja is just great ...).

A few years ago, I happened to have a brief conversation with a young woman who told me that her apartment in Greenpoint was worth more now simply because she'd lived in it.  She was a trust fund baby who could afford to do a full-time internship after college because someone else paid her rent, so I was perfectly willing to be outraged at her chutzpah, and make fun of it.  But in retrospect, she was right: she'd probably decorated her apartment with all the right things -- the Williams-Sonoma kitchenware, the original art, the complete lack of plastic flowers.  So when the next yuppie walked into her apartment to rent it, it had become legible to a new group of people -- people who'd be willing to pay more.  They could see it as the right sort of place for people like them, because the little intern had re-framed it in that particular way. Her taste-markers made a new narrative of the space.

So have I finally reached the point where I can move into a neighborhood simply because I like it? Maybe it feels safe, has the perfect building, has some restaurants I like, has a good park for the dogs: maybe I can tell people they can visit me there if they want to see me, not just because it's the next up-and-coming place where you can still get in on the ground floor if you hurry ...