Subletting Go
By Mark Wasserman
The hardest part about moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles wasn’t exchanging fog for smog, walking for driving, or even the villagey vibe of North Beach for the anonymous aura of Hollywood. The hardest part was giving up my beloved apartment, where I had lived for nearly a decade.
That’s why I didn’t give it up – quite. Observing the tradition of many a renter before me, I decided to sublet. Subletting is the ultimate have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gesture. It’s the housing equivalent of doing a gymnastic split. You get to take that huge step into the next phase of life while leaving one foot behind just in case things don’t work out. You tell yourself you’ll try it out for a few months. Stake out some territory. Soon your life feels splayed out between yesterday and today, between who you were and who you’re starting to become. The two rental checks you write out each month only confirm your double life. Meanwhile you worry about your sublettor trashing the place and your landlord finding out.
Naturally, furnishing your new place takes a bit longer. You leave empty spaces where you plan to put things from your previous life. “My mirror from apartment number one,” you think, “will fit right here in apartment number two. “That photograph will go perfectly on that wall.”
Which is why finding just the right sublettor is key to minimizing stress. Basically you try to find someone who will accept your furniture as their own. I left a bed, a kitchen table and chairs, secretarial desk, and many books, mostly novels and books of poetry.
But of course I also left many sense memories. From my kitchen window, I could watch the Golden Gate Bridge peeking between curtains of fog. I could hear the barking of sumo-wrestling sea lions down at Fisherman’s Wharf. And always I breathed that briny breeze of ocean. My Hollywood digs, on the other hand, have never felt quite as romantic. Look out the kitchen window and aglowering TV Guide sign looks back. The most exotic animal sounds are pigeon clucks and errant coyote howls from the Hills. The air smells of diesel.
Naturally my phone calls to my sublettor always left him anxious. “So how’s it going down there in LA?” he’d ask with forced cheeriness. If I answered with anything less than unqualified optimism, he was quick to encourage me. “Oh, I’m SURE it’s gonna get better,” he’d say. I knew what was going on. Who could blame him? I missed my apartment terribly.
Whenever I’d return to San Francisco (staying with friends) I always made one trip to my apartment. Ostensibly it was to transfer something from my storage space to my new apartment in LA. But I also wanted to check up on things.
I soon found it wasn’t necessary. My sublettor was taking excellent care of the place. In fact, it looked irritatingly cleaner than when I lived there.
Things took a surreal turn when my sublettor invited me to stay there while he took an extended trip. From the moment I walked through the door, I felt something I never had: unfamiliarity. My sense of ownership was deteriorating. How could this happen in a place I’d lived so long? Some mornings, still drowsy, I’d look around at my half-alien home and feel as if I were transforming into someone else. When did I start buying expensive gin? Why was I reading about computer browsers? How was I fitting into those extra-large shirts hanging in the closet? It was like a dawning sensation that I’d been stricken with partial amnesia, with the inkling of having had unknown experiences, having formed unknown tastes. Your home, they say, reflects your mind. Clearly my apartment was suffering from a kind of design dementia.
Or maybe it was just me. Either way, the feeling ended when I got a letter from the land-lord saying she’d found out about my arrangement. Subletting, she reminded me, was forbidden in the lease I had signed so long ago. My “friend,” the landlord wrote, would be first in line to get the apartment if he seemed a reliable renter. I accepted the news with shocking immediacy. It felt like a relief. I hadn’t realized how much energy maintaining two residences required.
Moving day passed in a sweaty haze of packing, selling, donating, or abandoning. Back in my Hollywood apartment, my recovered belongings seemed to race into their appointed spaces like children delighted to finally arrive at their new home. As for me, I felt like I’d finally arrived at a kind of cranial Feng Shui, my mind flowing with promise, peace, and a newfound chi.
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Mark Wasserman specializes in writing unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. He has not left the country in twenty years and has an itchy foot to do so.
Photograph used in conjunction with Flickr’s Creative Commons Agreement. It can be found, in its original form, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/wili/.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
