Free How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley Page B

party to not one but several unaccounted-for phone calls that night. I am the thing even rarer than a ghost: a chatty pot smoker.
    “This is going to drive me crazy.”
    “Oh, I don’t know.” Mac put a thumb over the neck of his beer and turned it upside down. “From where you’re sitting, I think you can walk there.”
     
     
     
     
    INQUIRIES WERE MADE. MINOR INVESTIGATIONS launched with finesse so as not to set off any “How many fingers am I holding up?” alarms. When those proved inconclusive, it occurred to me that it didn’t matter. Perhaps this is always how ghosts appear in real life. More the suggestions of themselves, a series of shadows and arrows and unaccounted-for conversations. Even if I did move downtown, I would probably never see one of McGurk’s famed prostitutes in all her detailed glory. I would just see Sang, sitting barefoot at the Norwegian picnic table, one leg drawn up to her chest, staring into space. And she wouldn’t be able to do that for long....
    Just as Nell and I had gotten back into the rhythm of things (me hiding my possessions and her hunting them down like Easter eggs), she moved out. Shortly after a new roommate moved in, I happened to walk past 295 Bowery. The building was boarded up from the inside, and a piece of official city letterhead was stuck to the door. I ducked under the orange tape and peered through a cloudy peephole. It looked the same as it had when it was inhabited. But that wasn’t saying much. The only real difference was that the framed pictures were gone.
    Despite valiant efforts on the part of the long-term tenants to get the building recognized as a landmark, McGurk’s was evacuated and set to be torn down as soon as the city got around to it. When they did, 295 was replaced with the universally abhorred high-rise that currently bloats the space between Houston and Stanton. The building is tall and reflective, covered in futuristic (if by “future” you mean 1984) windows. They enable the residents to live on the Bowery but not live on the Bowery, to pick over choice pieces of the past and dump the rest. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not one to stand on principle when I can sleep in a duplex. I wouldn’t kick gentrification out of bed if it crawled in there free of charge. But it never does. And so despising it becomes not only the right thing to do but the economical thing to do. Reading the ordinance, I found some small consolation in all this, both morally and personally. My haunted real estate heaven would have quickly become a living hell. A few months of freestanding fireplaces and toothbrush haircrafting and the whole building would be dragged down into a pile of rubble. Not reduced but worse—replaced.
    Already replaced was my conviction that my whole New York existence hinged on my address. Nell ceased to bother me as much once I realized how close I came to leaving her, how easy it would have been to say good-bye if Sang had welcomed me into her home with track-marked arms. I was a grown person and free to do as I pleased. It was the unhappy whores of McGurk’s who were trapped at that site. I knew a thing or two about ghosts. So I knew a bulldozer, though a literal interpretation of “confronting the ghost head-on,” wouldn’t actually release them. Instead, they would be forced to move into the new space, fixed and displaced at the same time. They would confuse one homogeneous condominium for another. Lose one another in identical walk-in closets. Find themselves shoved into odorless rooms, where they would be doomed to run like mercury along those perfect lines where the walls meet floors for all of eternity. A horizon of happiness around every corner.

It’s Always Home You Miss
    E very New Yorker’s personal annoyance scale is best pictured as a cell phone commercial. The semipermeable bars of varying colors and heights extend up from people’s heads as they move along the sidewalk. One person finds an open-air cigar smoker