Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling Read Free Book Online Page A

Williamsburg, which had plenty of chic coffee shops, cool boutiques, and cute, straight guys. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to afford those coffee shops and boutiques, or had the nerve to talk to any of those hipster guys, but I would have liked to be around them, and felt that it was plausible I could have that life. After visiting several basement-level tenements that were out of our price range, we settled for Windsor Terrace. When we moved there, Windsor Terrace was a Park Slope–adjacent mini-neighborhood that could’ve been the exterior set for much of Welcome Back, Kotter. Not grim, but not great. It was populated mostly by middle-age lesbian couples who had taken on the noble challenge of gentrifying the neighborhood.
    Brenda and I shared the center bedroom and the single queen bed it would hold, and Jocelyn fashioned herself a sort of bohemian-chic burrow out of the last bedroom, which, while it was the only room with true privacy, was also the size of a handicapped bathroom. She installed a twin loft bed and hung a batik tapestry over the lofted area, where she would read books and magazines for hours. Jocelyn is the kind of person who goes into any room, sizes it up, and immediately tries to loft a bed there. To this day, she lives in an apartment with a loft bed.
    This was a good arrangement because Jocelyn has hoarding tendencies, and some degree of containment was crucial. (Hoarding has pejorative connotations now, but you have to understand this was before the show Hoarders depicted hoarders as gruesome loners with psychological problems. Joce is a hoarder of the cheerful, social, Christmas-lights-year-round variety.) Jocelyn would save stacks of six-year-old magazines because there might be a recipe in one of them for jambalaya, which she would need someday if we threw a big Mardi Gras–themed dinner. (This wasn’t crazy, because we would occasionally do things like that.) People who visited our apartment and saw her curtained lair probably assumed Jocelyn was a gypsy we had inherited as a condition of getting the apartment.

    I was going through a phase where all my photos had me making a “whoo!” face.
    And the stairs. Oh, the stairs. The staircase in our third-floor walk-up was the steepest, hardest, metal-est staircase I have ever encountered in my life. It was a staircase for killing someone and making it seem like an accident. Our downstairs neighbor was a toothless man, somewhere in his eighties or nineties. He lived with what seemed like two younger male relatives, with “younger” meaning in their sixties. In the dead of summer or winter they would wear those ribbed white tank tops grossly named wife beaters, which is how we knew they were rent-control tenants (if anyone wears year-round wife beaters, it is the same as saying they are enjoying the benefits of a rent-controlled apartment). They also spoke a language with one another that seemed like a hybridized version of an Eastern European language and the incomprehensible mumble of Dick Tracy henchmen. They would’ve been frightening, except they were incredibly timid and scared of us for some reason. Like when that monster in the Bugs Bunny cartoon gets scared of a mouse and runs screaming all the way back to his castle.
    In the summer, feral cats in heat clung onto the screens of our living room, meowing mournfully until we threw a glass of water at them. When it got cold, the roaches migrated in and set up homes in every drain. Sometimes, when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I would feel a disgusting crackly squelch under my foot, and I’d know I’d have to rinse off a roach from my heel. That was our apartment. We took the bad with the pretty good. Plus, we could afford it, Prospect Park wasn’t too far, and people already assumed we were lesbians, so we fit into the neighborhood right away. It was all good.
    Until we tried to pursue our dreams.

    Jocelyn accompanies me on the subway to my first-ever