Hoy Hing

My first apartment after I graduated from college was in Brighton, Mass. It's not the heart of Boston, but it's the city, enough so that after I moved in I got a letter from the cops: "Hello. Welcome to Brighton. We see you have a Honda Civic. Honda Civics are the most frequently stolen kind of car. Just letting you know. Peace out! -- BPD." (For the record, I never got my car stolen, but someone did steal my H from the hood -- THE BAHSTID.) The apartment, the second floor of a triple-decker, was on a busy street, with frequent bus traffic. This was terrific because I could get on a bus practically outside my door and take it into town. However, the buses (especially the diesel monsters that route was running) were loud, and they ran from like 5 in the morning until almost 1 a.m. It was early September when we moved in. My bedroom was at the front of the house, and I quickly determined that it was too noisy for me to sleep with the windows open.

By the time spring rolled around, guess what? I'd acclimated to the city. It was still loud, not to mention that there were bright lights that stayed on all night, including the bright red neon sign of Hoy Hing, the Chinese restaurant across the street, which was open (on weekends at least) until 3. (I once tried to read in bed without the light on, and while it wasn't bright enough to be practical, I could just make out the words on the page.) But I could hear everything through the closed windows anyway, so I tried sleeping with them open as an experiment, and slept great. In fact, the constant traffic and the buses were a kind of white noise, variable but constant, like the ocean. For as long as we lived in that apartment I kept the windows open throughout the warm months. In the summer I'd have a fan on, but if it wasn't hot enough for that it would be just me and the street.

I witnessed a few fights out my window. After the bars down the street closed, people would wander down and get Chinese food. It was mostly yelling and general drunkenness, but on at least one occasion I saw someone getting knocked down and punched repeatedly. I was just turning to go get the phone when I heard a neighbor, from my building or another one, screaming at them to stop because "THE POLICE ARE FUCKING COMING RIIIIGHT NOOOOWWW." They wandered off, trying to look nonchalant. The yelling would wake me up (and I'd peer out the window, feeling like Gladys Kravitz), but even that was mostly just part of the atmosphere.

The only time I was dramatically startled awake was when a van came careening down the street and crashed into a car parked across from my house. I had leaped out of bed and was standing in front of the window before I even realized I was awake. That may be a cliche, but it is the literal truth -- I'll never forget that feeling of being wrenched from a dream and realizing I was standing at my window. The van had a company logo on it, and the drunken morons in it got out and tottered off into the night laughing, so it's a good bet they were fired the next morning, unless the van was stolen. There was a second crash on a different occasion -- into a car parked in the exact same spot. We tried never to park there.

Hoy Hing was not a great Chinese restaurant. It wasn't the worst or the most MSG-y (that would be China Maxim III on Market Street -- I thought my temples were going to explode), but it didn't pretend to be classy or anything. It had a few booths, but it was clearly mostly a takeout place. The counter was a cutout between the dining room and the kitchen, with light-up pictures of various dishes, in varying degrees of discoloration, around the opening. The booths were padded with red vinyl, much of it ripped. The tables were fake-wood laminate. The walls were wood paneling. There was a windowseat, which was always completely covered in a messy pile of promotional magazines and brochures and out-of-date fliers. In the back, up high on a little wall shelf, was a red altar that I guess was Buddhist, always with a neat stack of oranges in front of it.

The kitchen/dining dividing wall was perpendicular to the street, so the kitchen was also at the front of the restaurant. When we ordered takeout from them, which we did frequently, we used to like to stand at the window of our apartment when we called and watch the owner pick up the phone. My roommate used to swear that one day he would get it delivered -- I don't remember if he ever really did or not -- and we would joke that when told the address she would turn around and see us waving at the window. Other times I didn't even bother to call; if I was getting off the bus from work I'd run in, order what I wanted and hang around until it was ready. I don't think I ever made rice in all the years I lived there -- I'd just go across the street and ask for a small steamed rice, which was a buck. The owner -- I think she was the owner; she was always there when they were open -- wasn't overly friendly, like cheery conversational friendly, but she was always nice and always smiled during our brief transactions. I figured she must have recognized me eventually, but she never said anything and neither did I.

I sometimes felt bad for her when the late-night drunken chaos started. People would be half in and half out of the restaurant, waiting for their food on the sidewalk or in the doorway. Mostly it was a happy atmosphere, but as I said, there were spats, and I always wondered if she ever felt unsafe, since quite often she was there by herself (sometimes there was someone else cooking, but not always). Or maybe the counter served as more of a barrier than it really was; maybe drunk guys in a rage about whatever with whoever didn't see her as anything other than a food-dispensing robot, and maybe she liked it that way (I would have). I don't know if she ever called the cops on anyone -- you'd see cops out there once in a while, so maybe she did. I never heard her yelling at anyone. I wondered how long she'd been here -- she spoke English fine, though with an accent that suggested she wasn't born in this country -- and if she thought Americans were all a bunch of alcoholic food-gobbling assholes or what. Or, since the after-bar crowd was her bread and butter, if she liked them despite the rowdiness. Or if she saw them as nothing but vague outlines that provided her with an income.

Even though it was a busy street, when it got late enough the traffic did die down. On weeknights especially, it would get very quiet. When it was warm, the Hoy Hing people would open the kitchen door -- they didn't have any more air conditioning than we did, and I'm sure it was broiling in there. When everything was stopped, if I didn't have my fan on, I could hear, lying in bed, the sounds of cooking from across the street. Mostly chopping. Sometimes what sounded like a whisk in a metal bowl. Once in a while, the phone ringing and a voice answering. It was comforting in a strange way -- maybe like the feeling of going to sleep as a child when your parents are still up, putting away dishes, puttering around, watching TV with the volume low. The nights full of drunk twentysomethings would come and go, the buses would start and stop, and the lady at Hoy Hing would still be chopping vegetables and making soup. If I was ever still awake after Hoy Hing closed, I felt lonely.

I moved to an apartment on a much quieter, tree-lined street, where it was so dark at night that I had to use a nightlight for a while. First I missed the traffic noise; eventually, I came to appreciate the lack of late-night yelling and sudden diesel-engine revving. Now, in my equally quiet condo, I have the windows closed in winter and the fan (or even air conditioner) blowing in summer, but there are spaces in the spring and the fall -- the spring one will be here again soon -- when I have nothing but open windows and outside air. There are few drunken revelers (thankfully) and no buses. When I'm lying there in the nearly complete dark, sometimes I'll remember the open door of the Hoy Hing kitchen and the quiet cooking sounds, and miss it.

Whoops, probably should have noticed THAT sooner

Sometime it may come to pass that you pick three adorable tiny gourds out of a picturesque Maine field on Columbus Day Weekend, and display them festively in your home because it's fall, fuckfaces. And after a couple of weeks two of them rot, but one of them, seemingly immortal, stays pristine. And so you put it on your living-room shelf, where you can enjoy its beauty forever.

When that happens, it probably isn't really FOREVER forever, so you should try to actually look at it once in a while to make sure it hasn't sunken into putrefaction.


Yep. That would be a good idea.

The Water Heater: A Battle of Wills

This has happened to me like three times.

If you look on your water heater, there's a temperature dial. Usually somewhere in the middle it says "Hot" or "Medium" or "Normal" or something like that. Then at the end of the dial it says "Scorching" or "Incredibly hot" or "Super fire hot" or "Volcano" or "Do not turn the dial here or your skin will blister off" or "I don't know why we even let the dial go up this far" or "Eleven."

I think it must be a rule for plumbers or what have you that when they come into contact with a water heater, they have to turn it down to the middle part of the dial. Because it's happened to me more than once. I'll be taking a shower as I normally do, and I'll notice that the water isn't very hot. And I'll think "Maybe I let the water run too long before getting in." Or I'll think "Maybe somehow some hot water got used up before I got in and I just don't remember." Or "It's really really cold today; it must be harder for the heater to heat up the water." Or "Oh crap, my water heater is broken."

I don't remember how I figured it out the first time. That would have been in Brighton, in my first apartment. I must have gone down to the basement in desperation, wondering if there was some way I could magically fix the water heater. And I must have seen the temperature dial, and seen that it could be turned up a lot higher. I must have read the warnings posted all over the water heater: if you turn it all the way up to hot, you might get scalded. Well, duh. I turned it up. My hot water was back to normal. Quite possibly it would have occurred to me at some point that someone had recently been in the basement working on the water heaters.

Since then, I've been on to it. Now, I'm not talking about taking a 40-minute shower and being mad at the end that the hot water is petering out. Or about throwing a tantrum because the water doesn't get hot the instant I turn it on. It's that creeping feeling of disappointment when you stick your arm under the shower to see if it's hot yet, and it's not anywhere NEAR hot. And you turn the tap waaaaaaay to the left, well past where you would normally turn it, and stick your arm under again, and it's...a little warmer. And you get in anyway, because your hair is dirty and you have to take a shower, and you try to hurry, because you're afraid that what little warm water is there will run out quickly. And maybe right at the end you turn the faucet all the way up to the hottest it gets and try to soak up the warmth before you have to get out, into the not-very-warm bathroom.

I mean, really. Is there anyone in the world who, when taking a shower, just turns the water all the way up to the hottest it gets and then dives in without checking the temperature, assuming that it'll be just right? Or accepts as fact that the water only gets as hot as their personal hotness preference and no hotter? Since I was a toddler I was taught to be careful with the hot water, never to run only the hot tap in the sink (I ignore that now, of course, since I live on the third floor and it takes like two minutes for the hot to even get up here), to be careful because it would warm up slowly. Are there really people who are dumb enough and irresponsible enough that they would burn themselves on hot water and then, I don't know, sue the last professional who'd been down there? I guess, this being America, I should know the answer to that already.

It happened to me again at the beginning of last week. The first morning I thought, "Man, it must be really cold today." The second morning I thought, "Maybe I'm imagining it." The third morning I thought, "Goddamnit, my water heater is broken." Finally I remembered that my neighbors' water heater had conked out a few days before, and they'd had to have it replaced. So, yes, someone had been down there with the water heaters.

I went down to the basement with a flashlight. My water heater had a temperature dial, like all the ones I've ever had. It was set to medium. All sorts of warnings were written on the heater. Scalding may occur. Please don't turn it all the way up if you want to live. Et cetera. I turned it all the way up -- almost, because even now, I wonder if there is something to these dire exhortations. I took a shower. The water was back to normal. Except a little cooler than normal, since I hadn't turned it up quite all the way.

I mean, really. Next time I'm considering leaving a note down there, saying "I am aware that turning the water all the way to hottest means there is a possibility I could burn myself. I accept this responsibility. I absolve the reader of this note of any responsibility. Please, don't turn my temperature dial down again. I don't want to go through three or four lukewarm showers before I figure it out."

Even if it shortens the life of my water heater or something, I don't care. Even if it adds to the gas bill, which I'm sure it does. I can't live in a world where I have to stand under tepid water every morning. I promise I'll be careful.

Bowl of grapes, never leave me

I have been literally storing the bowl of grapes on the coffee table in the living room. So I can munch on them throughout the day or evening. If I'm sitting on the couch, I just put the bowl next to me on the couch. I must say, it's nice to be able to wave my arm vaguely to the right and have it come into contact with a grape. I feel like a Roman emperor or something. If only I could train the cat to feed them to me.