My first apartment in Chicago was a sixth floor studio on West Roscoe. When the rental agent informed me that we were going to look at a studio—and this is embarrassing to admit—I immediately pictured a light-flooded loft with vaulted ceilings, cathedral windows and an industrial elevator, the type with doors that rolled up from the bottom and down from the top. I thought, Maybe I’ll put an easel in the corner and try my hand at oil painting. Maybe I’ll put up a basketball hoop and shoot baskets during my oil painting breaks. These were the sorts of activites that I imagined studio denizens doing.

The apartment, as anyone who has ever lived in any city anywhere could have told me, was only slightly larger than a department store changing room. The ceilings, which were so low that I hunched over when I initially walked through the door, were coated with what appeared to be dozens of layers of popcorn spackle. There was a brown stain in one of the far corners which had not been painted over enough times—there probably wasn’t enough paint in the world to cover that stain—and which would become a never ending source of mystery for me. In the span of approximately six relatively soul-crushing seconds I learned that in city-speak the word “studio” meant “miniscule room designated for a person who is on the cusp, i.e. someone, like me, who was new to the city or someone who was on the verge of being forced out of the city.” Which, I would discover, described my neighbors perfectly. They were failed actors, alcoholic writers, alcoholic waiters, housecoat-wearers, weirdoes, perverts, cat-owners, hoarders, and old people.

A few weeks later, during an interview for a waiter job, I’d tell a restaurant manager where I lived and he would say, “You live in one of those Gidget buildings.” He explained that Gidget was a character played by Sandra Dee in the 1959 movie of the same name. “If Gidget moved to Chicago, that’s exactly where she’d live,” he said.

My first few nights in the apartment I slept on the floor. One of my neighbors saw fit to play the Whitney Houston ballad, “I Will Always Love You,” at full volume day and night—just that one song again and again. During the few seconds when the song would end and before it could begin again, I could sometimes hear the sound of open sobbing. On Tuesday I returned home to discover that someone had thrown up in the elevator. No one bothered to clean it up until Friday. During my first weeks in Chicago, I was always having moments like this—moments where I’d try to understand how someone could do something like throw up in the elevator or play a song a hundred times a day with no consideration whatsoever for the people who lived around them. My neighbors, on the rare occasions when I’d encounter them in the hallways or the lobby, had the drawn, lost faces that come from living on the cusp for a very long time. I knew that if I stayed in that building long enough, I’d eventually get that drawn, lost look too. If I stayed in that building there long enough, one day I’d throw up in the elevator and I’d walk away from it without giving it a second thought.