We Own Nothing In Queens

The Sports and Transportation borough is in our past.

Today, twenty-four hours sooner than planned because of the impending snow Armageddon that Bloomberg is using to polish his image, we closed on our apartment in the coop’s lawyer’s office on the fifteenth floor overlooking Flushing Meadows in Queens. (One always wonders why they girded that park with highways on either side. The residents of its adjacent neighborhoods can only wonder what is beyond those packed roads.)

The buyers and sellers (us) arrived on time. 2PM. Our lawyer was thirty minutes late but was very prepared and swift. He really is a great guy. His name is Guy. He has a fun office in Astoria. We used him when we bought this little place five years ago and so the closure on this end gave it all a nice symmetry.

The buyers are a long term couple. They seem to be in a “rearrangement” of their relationship which includes the male buyer moving into our former studio. They have been together for thirty years. They are kind and smart and knew a good deal when they saw one. I hate to have to say it, but part of the problem with their relationship is that he is now disabled. There are other things going on, I am sure, but one cannot pry when one is waiting for cashier’s checks.

The realtor, whom I will get back to in a moment, arrived five minutes before our lawyer.

The lawyer for the buyers was the last to arrive. He was old, disheveled, with an amazing head of hair and the look of a former movie star, but shorter. At one point I made a joke about his drinking before noon, then I realized, “Oh, it seems like he really has been drinking since before noon.” He cracked jokes to make up for his lack of knowledge when it comes to real estate law (he has never done this before), but he was kind enough, affable, certainly not a problem. And because our lawyer was so easy going and helpful, we pushed through without issue.

Now back to the realtor. This has been the problem all along. She was on both sides of the equation, representing the buyers and the sellers, taking the full 6% vig. During the past three months, at times she would act like she cared about us and then at times she was very combative, almost threatening, certainly on the verge of hysteria, bulldogging it for the buyers and often accused me of over overemailing when the real count was six from her for my every one.

She arrived today in a long purple coat, the color a king would wear in a cartoon, with a dark fur collar, real or not I do not know, a DG bag, whorish boots, and apparently (I did not notice but was told later) some sort of skimpy outfit that included tights, an ass grabbing skirt and some sort of chemise with a plunging neck line. She smartly never took off her fake Ready-for-Queens-Boulevard fur collared garment. She flirted with our lawyer. But here was the worst part: all she could talk about was how excited she was about going shopping with the money she was about to receive from this transaction. This was not the first time she has said, since mid-December, “I can’t wait to go shopping!” Was this person really meant for a service profession?

Why these narcissists end up in my life, well, it must be all my fault since the theme is recurring. She rode with us on the subway back toward Manhattan. She wants to come see our new apartment. She wants to sell us our next apartment. She wants to stay in touch with us. When we got to Jackson Heights (halfway between Flushing Meadows and Manhattan), it was her stop and she asked, unbelievably since we just closed on the apartment and she knew we have been living in Manhattan since December 23, “Are you getting off here?” We had to say to her, “No. We do not live here any longer. Why would we get off here? Goodbye.”

And as she walked westward on the subway platform in her Halloween outfit and the subway doors closed, we turned to each other, safe on the molded plastic subway bench, and said, “Never darken our doorstep again.”

Something about her turning the closing into a festival for herself in full fake rich woman celebration, well, it was so first generation outer borough trashy that it got my third generation outer borough trashy ire up.

Though I am grateful that she sold the apartment to the first people who looked at it on the first day it was for sale and got us a fair price. I mean, she did her job well.

For three months we have been in super bed with all these people. Now, we are not. It is like a show closing.

I deposited the checks, there were three, in Wachovia Bank (a Wells Fargo entity), went to The Container Store and bought shelving for the new place. And a cute bamboo-press-on-tri-hook for the bathroom door.