Marika Hughes - The Drip

 

 

I was living in the parlor apartment of a beautiful brownstone in Harlem, surrounded by all this old, grand furniture left to me by my grandmother when she passed away. When I realized, actually, I want to live in Brooklyn. [audience chuckles] I decided to move to Brooklyn because that's where so many of my friends lived, and that's where I found most of my work was. I'm a cellist. So, I went to see the first apartment I found, and when I walked in, I said, "I'll take it, but I won't stay long." It was what a realtor would describe as charming, but the only word that came to my mind was tiny. So, I decided it might be a good place to live for a little while. It might segue into something better down the line.

 

So, I packed all of my grandmother's things into storage, and I took my cello and my music and my books and my bed. And I moved into this apartment in Prospect Heights. And I loved living there. My career was going great, touring, making records. I kind of fell in and out of love. And I even managed to have some extraordinary dinner parties in this small, small space. And then about two and a half years into living in this apartment, early on a Sunday morning during a terrible heat wave in June, I got a call that you hope to never receive. The man on the other end of the line called to tell me that my younger brother had just died. He was found dead in his bed that morning.

 

I don't recall exactly what happened to the phone, but I remembered I couldn't get air in or out, and I thought I might throw up, but the air wasn't coming. And I called my best friend to try and tell her what happened, but the words wouldn't form. I was absolutely devastated. My younger brother lived in England, and it was decided that he would be cremated a week and a half later on a Friday at 2:00 PM in England. My father and I, both New Yorkers, realized we wouldn't be able to get there in time for the cremation. And we live rather far from each other here in the city. But both agreed that we each wanted to be outside and, in the elements, when this event happened, when my brother was cremated.

 

So, the Thursday night before this event, I was eager to get to bed, anticipating a very emotional following day. So, I fell fast asleep. And then suddenly I awoke in the middle of the night because there was a leak from upstairs dripping into my bed, and it would hit the mattress and splatter all over. And it woke me up. And I was so focused on my little brother Nico, that I thought, "It doesn't even matter." I rolled over and went right back to sleep. But then I was woken again because it was coming down at a faster clip and hitting the bed and getting all over me. So, finally I thought, "Okay, I better go talk to my neighbor." He has this terrible habit of running the bathtub in the middle of the night and forgetting about it.

 

So, I went up and I knocked on his door and he didn't answer. And I thought, "Okay, fine, be that way." I went back downstairs and protected my mattress it was from any further damage. And I tried to get the little sleep I could on my small couch. It was a restless and fitful sleep. And in the morning, I woke. It was already really hot outside, and I was so eager to get outside, anticipating this day that I forgot to change my clothes. I just went out funky in the sweatpants and T-shirt I had slept in. The first place I thought to go was to the roof of my building. My brother and I grew up here in New York, and we had spent countless days, on summer days, actually, on what we would call Tar Beach.

 

We call it Tar Beach because New York City roofs are full of tar. And we would grab towels and friends and a boombox and hang out, essentially. So, I went up to the roof expecting to have a very emotional experience. It was 8:00 AM in New York, 2:00 PM in England, but in fact, I couldn't really feel what I thought I should feel. And I was almost fighting the air to feel something. I had spent days and days crying, but suddenly not a tear. So, I decided to change locations. I went to Prospect Park, and I walked around struggling to feel what I thought I should feel, except all I really felt was guilt that I didn't feel what I thought I should feel.

 

So, I continued walking in my neighborhood and found myself at my local cafe. And I got a cup of coffee, and I thought, "Let me call my father and check in with him, see how he's doing." And in our family, we're really good at sharing joy and love and happiness. But when it comes to emotional hardship and pain and loss, and we've had our fair share, we're very, very private individually, very stoic and very supportive. And that was the tenor of the conversation we had. So, it was no surprise that I quickly turned the conversation to what I felt was a great distraction from this fitful rest I'd had had from this leak in my apartment. So, my father said, "Well, why don't you go back to your apartment and deal with all that business." So, I went back, I put my keys in the kitchen, and I went up to knock on my neighbor's door again. And he still didn't answer.

 

So, now I was concerned. So, I hustled up some neighbors in the building, and it turned out other people, too, were saying, "Well, actually, we haven't seen him in a while." So, a collective decision was made to find the extra keys somewhere in the building and to go in and check on him. A friend of mine had just arrived. We were going to spend the day together. So, we stood in my kitchen right by the front door with the door wide open, while the neighbor who found the keys walked up the stairs, and we heard her put the key in the door, open the door and walk in his apartment. And then we heard her call his name. "Randy Spruels. Randy Spruels." And then she screamed, "Call the coroner. He's dead. He's decomposing. There are maggots and flies everywhere."

 

And then she came charging down the stairs to the threshold of my apartment, looked me straight in the eye, and she said, "Dear, you need to take a shower, and Lysol. That's his dead body all over you." [audience aww] As you can imagine, I felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me. I fell straight to the ground. And I wept and I wept, and I didn't know if I was weeping for my brother or for my mother who had died almost 20 years earlier, or for my grandmother, or for this poor old man who had died and nobody even noticed. Or maybe I was weeping for me. I thought, "Poor me. There's literally death on me." I don't know if I was down there for 10 seconds or 10 minutes, but whoop, like that.

 

I stood up, I looked at my friend, and I said, "I got to get these clothes off of me and in the shower.” I ran to the bathroom, taking my clothes off as I got in there, and I jumped in the shower, and I took what I now call the Silkwood shower. [audience chuckles] I screamed, scrubbed my body like I have never scrubbed before. It's amazing. I didn't draw blood, really. When I got out, I put a towel on and I came out into my apartment, only to discover that there were police and EMT and neighbors swarming my apartment. Right away, someone came up to me and said, "You know, dear, you probably won't be able to sleep here tonight." And I thought, "Yeah, okay," and just trying to keep the towel up.

 

And another friend of mine randomly had come by, and he looked at me and he said, "You look like a little girl." I could only imagine how bewildered I was in this chaotic scene. And then suddenly, someone came running in the apartment and said, "The body's going to fall through the ceiling. The body's going to fall through the ceiling. The floors are compromised." So, we were suddenly moving everything from one side of my tiny apartment into this kitchen. And we were struggling to get around chests and shelves and et cetera et cetera. And then someone else came up to me and said, "You know, it might be a week or two before you can sleep here." And all I could think was, "I need to get some clothes on." [audience chuckles]

 

I was trying to find a place in my apartment where there was nobody It was maybe 350 sq ft, and I found a little corner, and I put on some clean clothes, took off my towel. And then suddenly it hit that stench and stank, the sour sour smell of death. It had permeated the building at this point. So, then we were suddenly busy creating little compresses out of cotton swabs soaked in witch hazel and lavender oil to protect the cops and the EMT as they walked into this apartment full of the stank of death. And then another woman came up to me and she said, "You know, actually, Marika, it could be over a month before you can stay here again." And I thought, "You know what? It really doesn't matter because I am never sleeping here again, ever." [audience chuckles]

 

[chuckles] At this point, a number of my friends had shown up and were willing to help me. And we were grabbing my cello and my music and clothes and gear. I had tons of gigs that week I had to prepare for. Another friend of mine had called when she heard what happened and said, "You have my keys. I'm out of town. My apartment in Fort Greene is yours." So, we jumped in my friend's car, and they dropped me off at her apartment, and I ran up the stairs and I walked in the apartment and the door closed behind me. And for the first time since all this craziness has happened, I was alone. And suddenly I thought I was going to go mad. I felt like I was actually going crazy. I started to shake. My body was shaking. And I had to hold on to the kitchen counter and the kitchen island just to stay steady. And I thought, "I'm cursed. I'm cursed. My brother and this old man death is literally on me. He died on top of me. I'm going to go absolutely crazy." And then I remembered to breathe. I tried to take those deep breaths I couldn't take the morning I heard my brother had died. And I breathed in and out slowly. And in those breaths, I thought, "Call daddy. He always makes you feel better. Just call daddy." So, I called my dad. I told him I thought I was going crazy. And he explained to me, "No, your brother's death and this old man, these two deaths have nothing to do with each other and nothing to do with you. And you're not stained, you're not cursed. You're going to be okay."

 

And I was glad to have called him because I hung up the phone and I started to feel a little bit better and realized I need to get outside, I need to be around people. So, I grabbed my bike, one of my prized possessions, it's covered in flowers on the front arms and in the back on the basket. And I rode up the hill to Prospect Park to one of my favorite music events in New York, Celebrate Brooklyn. Friends of mine were playing there that night as well as had lots of friends in the audience. And right away I started to tell people the tale of what had just happened with the drip. And as you may imagine, it spread around Brooklyn like wildflowers.

 

No sooner had I told someone this story when someone asked, "Well Marika, what are you going to do?"  And without a thought I said, "I'm going to find a full one-bedroom apartment with good light, a cross breeze, a window in the bathroom, a bathtub, an eat-in kitchen, and a nice building in a neighborhood I'd like to live in near the train and all on a musician's salary." [audience chuckles] They laughed too, [audience laughter] but something inside of me said, "It's going to be okay. You can find this place." And all summer I spent going from couch to couch. People were my friends and people I didn't even know were so kind to me. I stayed in kids’ rooms when they were at camp, on people's couches, and in houses when people are on vacation.

 

About a few weeks after this whole event had taken place, I was sitting in a bar with a friend of mine in my old neighborhood and a bass player I know came up to me and he said, "Marika, I heard what happened to you. What are you going to do?" I said, "You know, I'm not scouring Craigslist. I'm not going to knock on Super's doors and find out if there are apartments in there." And I gave him my spiel about what I was hoping to find. And he looked at me and he said, "Marika, my friends just emailed me last night. I think they have exactly what you're looking for in a beautiful old Victorian house in Ditmas Park. Get in touch." Well, you know that night at the bar, I emailed his friends.

 

The next day I went to see the apartment. And it was everything I had said I wanted, except it was two bedrooms. [audience laughter] So, I woke up at the end of the summer on the last couch I had to call home. And I took my cellos and my suitcase and I went to move into this new apartment. And I watched the movers arrive from the storage company as the movers hauled all of this grand old furniture of my grandmother's that I had so missed for the three years I lived in that small apartment. They brought boxes and grandfather clock and chests and dressers, and they left it and the door closed behind them. And I stood there and suddenly I started to cry again. I was there then, surrounded by the love and the memories of my mother and my brother and my grandmother.

 

Three people I had loved more than anyone else on this earth who were no longer here with me. But somehow with these things, knowing they had touched them and breathed air around these things, I started to feel a little bit better. I opened a box and I found photographs of my brother and I from when we were little that I hadn't seen in years. And I found a box of journals my mother had kept when she was a woman about my age, I didn't even know she had. And in this moment, I remembered to breathe again. I was alone once again in an apartment, and I was crying. But in those breaths, I started to really feel much better. And I realized, yes, this is where I can live. Thank you.