I Used to Live Upstairs from a Brothel

It was the bicycle that I first noticed. A bright orange mountain bike of sorts--hard to miss in a gray city with only one proper hill which was tube stops and tube stops away from the flatlands of Clerkenwell. Always a different guy riding the bike. Always a man, but always a different man. Always a scraggly sort. With shifty eyes and gap teeth and that sort of faint odor hanging around him. The kind of eyes and teeth and odor that make you hold on to your purse, that make you nervous, slightly.

I have a bicycle. You probably do too. I'm the only person who rides my bicycle. And you're probably the only person who rides your bicycle. I mean, you're probably not as anal as I am. (And if you know where this story is going, that pun was really truly NOT intended.) I don't let anyone ride either of my bikes. Because they're mine.

At some point, I noticed the bath towels. My bedroom overlooked their private walled garden, where they had stretched a flimsy laundry line and mismatched pegs. There were always bath towels out to dry. Lots of them.

I had bath towels. Three or four of them. Maybe one or two were in the wash at a time. Not twelve. Definitely not twelve.

"Who takes this many showers?" I'd wonder. "And who lets this many friends ride their bicycle?"

They must be popular, was my answer. And in the deepest dark of night, in the weeks after they first moved in, I confirmed that they were indeed very, very popular.

"Who gets this much action? I'd ask no one in particular, over the dull sounds of incessant thumping, alone under the duvet in my flannel pajamas, fuzzy socks and face mask and everything.

And the cigarettes. Always the cigarettes. Always under my window. Some nights, I'd come home late and my bedroom would reek of Marlboros, so many would they have smoked. Right under my window.

The tenants, from what I knew, were two ladies of a certain age from the East End. True Londoners, with true Cockney accents. They had a small dog. They sprayed their hair pink, and they sprayed the small dog's hair pink. Eccentrics, I thought.

And then things would happen, like the one drizzly weekday morning where I headed off to work, but couldn't get past the thin and swarthy man outside, ready to introduce himself and shake my hand.

Or the fresh-faced well-dressed, posh-sounding 20-something who greeted me at the front door on a Sunday morning at 4 a.m., as I was heading for Heathrow to Amsterdam, suitcase in tow. "You're leaving?" he asked, in that sort of alarmed and incredulously posh way. "But you said you'd be free until 6!"

Or the handsome, taller, muscular older man with the golden curly hair and the wedding ring, who gave me the up and down that first time and looked more than a little bit pleased, in that way. I saw him a few times a week for a while, his schedule inconveniently overlapping with mine. After a few awkward encounters at the front door--him at the buzzer, me with my key--I started greeting him like a neighbor. "How are you? Nice day isn't it? Good to see you again." It was awkward not to. He stopped coming.

One day, the man would look like an estate agent. The next, he only spoke Portuguese. Sometimes, he had no teeth. Others, he looked like a movie star. Or a bike messenger. Or a builder. Or a billionaire. Or the guy at the kebab shop or the Chinese takeaway up the road. Or an old man. Or a young man...too young of a man. Sometimes there'd be two men. Usually young men, with biceps and hair gel and cologne and cigarettes and starter Nokias.

And then one day, more than a year later, after a weekend of incessant thumping and cigarettes and doors slamming and SOUNDS, I called my landlord and cried and said I felt unsafe and that they MUST have guns in there given all the traffic and all the towels and all the cigarettes. He put in CCTV the next day and the men and the women and the bicycle and the towels all disappeared the day after that and, later, two Swedish boys moved in, golden in all their Swedishness.

They liked to hear me ask them for a beer in Swedish. And I would laugh and wait to see if they'd invite me in for one. But they never did.


From Krista: Yes, this is a true story. There are other elements of it that I'm working on. Stay tuned. 

Fajitas Don't Come with Tortillas

Every so often, I get myself into these arguments. You know the type...where you are so sure you are correct but the other person is so sure you are wrong and there's no solution really but to give up and pretend that they are right, even though you know you are right and they are wrong.

I went to a Mexican restaurant in London once with my crazy Romanian friend. She had never had Mexican food before. So we went and I ordered some fajitas and my Romanian friend ordered a burrito and we sat back to gossip and drink copiously cheap margaritas. Our server was from somewhere east of Germany and admitted to never having Mexican food at all either. In her entire life. "Not even during your lunch break?" I asked. "Surely there must be an employee discount of sorts?"

"No," she said. "And I vould not vant to eat it . For me, it is too svicy. And there are no potatoes."

Eventually, our food arrived and my fajitas came out sizzling--as they should--on a long metal board of sorts. They looked perfectly acceptable, given that London is not really very close to Mexico and my request for an agua downstairs at the bar was met with blank stares. This was going to be okay.

"So you'll bring the tortillas in a second, right?" I asked.

"What tortillas?" says our server.

"The tortillas that come with the fajiatas."

"Fajitas don't come with tortillas."

"Um, yes they do...

"Not here they don't."

"Um, I've eaten a lot of fajitas in my life. They always come with tortillas."

Our server looked mildly annoyed. "Well, we don't serve them that way here. Sorry." She moved to walk away.

"But wait...can't I buy some tortillas? I mean, if I have to pay, I'll pay."

"We don't have any tortillas to buy."

I looked pointedly at my friend's burrito. "Um, okay. I see a tortilla right there, but if you won't let me pay for any tortillas, how about some nacho chips?"

"You'll have to pay for those."

Great. Done. But even my Romanian friend in all her Eastern-bloc-ness was trying to argue for the server. "Krista, this isn't Mexico. They probably don't have tortillas here. It's not like ordering Mexican in the U.S."

"But that's a tortilla right in front of you!!" I shouted. "Your burrito is IN a tortilla."

"But maybe it's a different kind of tortilla..."

"There is only ONE kind of tortilla. And it's right there!!" I stabbed her burrito with my fork. "And fajitas are always served with tortillas!!!"

A few minutes later, as I was scooping up my chicken and onions with nacho chips, our server returned and dropped a container of freshly microwaved tortillas on the table, said nothing, and disappeared.

Play the Gipsy Kings and The French People Will Dance

Ages and ages and ages ago, during that decade of your life after college where your friends of friends would have house parties and you would move from one to the other on a Friday night en masse in your khakis and turtleneck sweaters, I went to my friend Jason's house for a party. There wasn't any hummus or crudités, because this was when we were 24 and the only thing you had at parties was Miller Light.

Someone was responsible for the stereo because you had to have THAT friend in the late 90s. There was no Apple Remote. There was only a stack of CDs and that friend who would spend all night swapping out the CDs from Pearl Jam to Stevie Wonder and then back again. Sometimes I was THAT friend. Sometimes I wasn't.

For this particular party, I wasn't that friend. But I had some thoughts. Because off in the living room, clustered on the sofa, were five or six French people. We didn't get many French people in Chicago in those days, so they were a bit of an anomaly. And so many of them! All at once. Even odder. In a room where everyone was dancing to Big Country by the band Big Country on the album Big Country, they looked miserable, poor French people. And I knew why.

French people do not like Pearl Jam. Or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Or Hole.

French people like the Gipsy Kings. (And MC Solar, but we didn't have any of that.)

The Stereo Master, was busy swapping out Third Eye Blind for the Notorious B.I.G. as I approached. "Do you have any Gipsy Kings? I whispered.

"Yeah, somewhere I think. I was going to play that Bamboleo song later."

"Can you play it now, do you think? And after Bamboleo, can you play "Djobi, Djoba" and then after that can you play "Volare?"

"Whoa..." he said. "I can't play three songs by the same band all in a row."

I looked over at the cluster of French people, in their skinny jeans and scarves. His eyes followed mine. "Play the Gipsy Kings and the French people will dance."

Silence.

"Really. If you play the Gipsy Kings, the French people will dance. I promise you. And then this party will take on a wholenother dimension. I'll do it, if you want me to. You can get a beer."

Being the Stereo Master at parties those days kinda sucked because you could only socialize in three minute intervals before it was time to swap CDs again. The prospect of an uninterrupted beer break was enough for him. He left me in control.

And I played Bamboleo. And the French people stopped playing with their scarves for a moment and looked around cautiously. And then stood, quickly, and then grabbed hands and spun each other around the room and Miller Light went everywhere but no one cared because suddenly we had a living room full of dancing French people, dancing in that serious European way. And soon, everyone was dancing.

"Again!" they shouted. "Again again!" And I did play it again, and then again, in one uninterrupted stream of Gipsy Kings until the French people collapsed, laughing, into each other in a huge heap on the sofa.

And now sometimes, when I hear the Gipsy Kings, I can see that room full of dancing French people, and I can smell that odd combination of Glade and a 24-year-old boy's apartment, cigarette smoke, Miller Light, and that very distinct smell of French people, dancing.