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myself what I would do if I couldn’t get something going in the art world and my answer was to shake my head and pray that lightning struck.
    There was an expression to describe people who were inescapably drawn to a disaster: fatal flaw. And I had it.
    Everything I owned was in this one room. A wooden table with two chairs served as both my desk and kitchen table. I found them at a flea market for thirty dollars. By adding two coats of paint and new foam cushions to the chairs, they were good as new.
    Even though my apartment was tiny, the high ceiling and two windows made it appear less claustrophobic. Painting the walls a bright white helped, too. I had a large walk-in closet; one thing I liked about the place. All the other studios either had a tiny closet or none at all.
    Besides my table/desk and two chairs and the love seat sofa I sat on, I had a double-size bed with a backboard I made myself from a piece of wood covered with fabric, one wicker nightstand, an old trunk suitcase for a coffee table, and some bookshelves that I put on the wall myself. The open kitchen was tiny, just enough room to stand in, but I wasn’t much of a cook anyway. Besides, fast food often cost less than home cooking, especially for someone like me who didn’t have the condiments.
    As a student, I had lived in a fifth-floor studio walkup in Chelsea and now gravitated back into lower Manhattan because the area had a certain energy to it and was affordable. Only this time I found a place on the cusp of Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown. I was back to living with “working people,” back to being part of the anonymous masses that limos and ecology-raping SUVs splashed water on as they pulled up to curbs on wet days.
    The street life here was much richer and more diverse than the sterile Upper East Side along the park. Worker tenements shouldered ten-million-dollar “lofts”; the sign at a postage-stamp-size parking lot on Mulberry Street in Little Italy read “Mafia Only”; and if you looked like a tourist, you couldn’t move ten feet in Chinatown without someone edging close and whispering, “Handbags?” Of course, the bags were knockoffs of high-end designer labels.
    The building I lived in needed a paint job on the outside and the inside lobby needed a serious makeover, but the rent was cheap. No elevator again, so my legs got a workout taking the stairs up to the third floor.
    The tenants were ordinary decent people, just trying to make a living and raising their families. They went to their jobs five days a week, whether they liked it or not, had little left over after paying bills, enjoyed their two days a week off, and went back to work again. On weekends when the sun was out they took their kids to a park. Same routine week after week until they retired or died.
    These people worked for essentials—food, shelter, clothes—as I did when I was struggling through college and launching a career. When I was on top, I could have lived on a fraction of what I made. Instead, I had worked to enjoy a life of luxury: hiring an interior decorator to do my penthouse, sleeping on the finest silk sheets, dining in restaurants without menu prices, driving a car that turned heads.
    I wish I could say that life beside simple people who worked hard for a living was the best thing that ever happened to me; that like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life , a near-death experience had brought new meaning to the simple joys of life … but dragging myself up long flights of stairs to a cubbyhole apartment with the smells of spicy jerk chicken and Spanish language TV soap operas blaring through doors was no match for a snooty Upper East Side penthouse in a building where the doorman parked my Jag and the reception area had handwoven Persian rugs tossed on plush carpeting.
    Sure, my poor-but-honest working-class neighbors were a lot friendlier; they smiled more and unlike that shit of a landlord