Brenda Vaccaro

I’m pretty sure it’s her. There’s a short woman with a big smile and a newly fluffed red ‘do walking out of a salon on Broadway. She waves to the car waiting for her and for a split second my chest tightens. I want to ask, “Are you Brenda Vaccaro?” but if there’s anything I’ve learned about bumping into celebrities on the street it’s that they don’t want to speak to anyone they don’t already know, or haven’t known for at least five years. She’s grinning ear to hear, running her manicured hands through her newly blown-out waves, and she’s radiant. She reminds me of my mother. Not because they look anything alike, but because the first time I was made aware of her she was playing Gloria Tribbiani,

Joey’s mother on Friends, when my mother saw her and recognized her immediately–she had an endless catalog of actor faces and names she drew on throughout her life, and now when I can’t place someone’s name I hear her voice in the back of my head knowing exactly who it is. While the divine Miss B is certainly more than that, she of the sixty-some-odd year career in showbusiness with an Emmy and a Golden Globe to her name, it is mom’s sighting in this particular form that ties me to her. It’s the spirit of my mother that’s there, and on this particular day I need it.

I am looking for a new apartment. I have just come from a brownstone on the Upper West Side being rented by a man who lives in and owns the building, and when I ask him for the criterion he is looking for in a renter he cannot give me an answer. I am holding it together on the outside but I notice my hands gripping the back of a chair in front of me as I wonder what hoop I will have to jump through this time, what apparently unnameable, unknowable factor will determine my worthiness of a place to live.

Trying to find an apartment lives in my collected vision of what hell must look like, one that also includes people only wearing athleisure, nail polish that won’t dry, being ghosted, waiting for a delayed train in the dead of July heat, and tuna melts. And if it weren’t difficult enough for people with regular jobs, as it is by now of course well-documented, I am a freelancer. I do not have an employment contract or pay stubs or a boss, but I have excellent credit and for 12 years I have been consistently paying my rent on time in New York City, and have been vouched for as an excellent tenant by my landlord of eight years. I am proud of the life I have built for myself and I am not interested in changing it to suit someone else’s idea of what a good tenant looks like. The proof is there that I am capable of paying the rent, even though it comes in a different package than someone might be used to. But who ever moved to New York because they wanted to be like everyone else?

I am not the only person like this. And as the gig economy grows and New York continues to attract the creative entrepreneurs it always has, something eventually will have to give. However, while I am waiting for New York City real estate to catch up to me, I am watching people in athleisure eat tuna melts in the dead of July while I wait for a train at Union Square with wet nail polish after being ghosted. I am, in short, in hell. And some of the apartments I have seen thus far belong there as well.

Astronomical rents for only a mini-fridge, no stove but only two burners, grime-covered and sticky carpets, garbage dangling from entryways, dark apartments that won’t hold more than a couch, if that. And even with what I have seen, I’m sure I’ve not seen it all; I’m sure there is much worse that exists and what’s more, I’m sure there’s someone out there willing to shell out for it.

So after I am leaving this brownstone on the Upper West Side with this landlord who cannot even communicate what he is looking for in a tenant, my eyes are swelling with tears. I am wondering if and how I will maintain the energy to do this. I have a matter of weeks to find a place to live. There’s a reason why I haven’t done this in eight years. I remember last time I was so stressed out by looking for a place and walking across Manhattan in the heat that I lost 15 pounds. But I still can’t remember if it was this hard, this insulting, last time. While there is certainly solace to be found in the fact that finding an apartment is hard for everyone in New York, that freelancers who make four times the money I do have the exact same problem, at this particular moment when I am walking down West End Avenue, I am only feeling defeated. And when I am feeling defeated and I am on the Upper West Side, there is only one place I go. And that place is Zabar’s.

My brain is barely functioning but my legs are carrying me toward 80th and Broadway for an iced coffee. And it is on that walk that I see the divine Miss Brenda Vaccaro walking out of a salon, smiling and fluffing her red hair. Or at least I think it’s her. I want tell her about the first time I saw her on television with my mother, but my eyes are filling more fully with tears now and even if I did try to open my mouth I would just start crying. And while I’m sure Brenda Vaccaro is a lovely woman, I don’t imagine she wanted to spend part of her Friday afternoon listening to some woman on the street pouring her heart about apartments and landlords and moms and work she did 25 years ago. So I just look at her as I walk past. She has that sunny fluff and sparkle my mom had, and I want so badly to call my mom up and tell her about it. And while I know I can’t do that any more, there has to be something special about this moment, that as I am in the depths of this draining, agonizing search, traversing the last vestiges of any nerves I have left, that my mother is there sending a message in the form of an Emmy and Golden Globe winner that she is here, that everything will be okay.

I walk past and breathe, my platforms clicking along the sidewalk as I peer over my shoulder at Brenda Vaccaro. She waves down her car, a dark black SUV, and drives away.