Lauren Gordon

“I have some news,” my boyfriend of five years whispers into the phone. I might have felt my heart scrape down my esophagus and lodge itself into my small intestine.

“Now what?” I asked warily. I rubbed my shoulder to massage the soreness away from a recent (as in three days prior) car accident in which my beloved vehicle crunched into un-salvageable oblivion.

“I was offered a full time position at Games.com!” he bursts. After two years of working freelance out of his hobbit-hole of a room, he tells me at a rapid fire pace all of the important details. After hours of phone calls back and forth discussing salaries, job titles and the like, it was official; he accepted the position. The catch? It was imperative that he relocate to NYC in four weeks.

Pardon my French, but I almost shit myself.

After hanging up the phone, I remember numbly sitting on my bed. It was no contest that I would do whatever I could to go with him. I was the Assistant Editor of Philadelphia RowHome Magazine, and with their support, was able to transition into a telecommute position. With the job secure, first thing had to come first–we needed a place to live. Fast.

Having never lived on my own–I even stayed home for college–I was at a loss for where to start. So where do two clueless, house-hunting individuals go when up the creak without a paddle? Craigslist, duh.

After a week of scouring pages, mindlessly trying to assert what places like “Bedford Stuyvesant” (protip: Bed-Stuy, for short) meant, and fainting over the rent-to-square-footage ratio, we lined up several apartments with brokers (like fools) and set off to apartment hunt.

On a rather dismal Saturday, we met Broker #1 in what we thought was Inwood. To make a long, painful story short, after we were schlepped around questionable parts of Manhattan that were not the neighborhoods we requested, into four buildings with all five story walk ups and kitchen slash living rooms, I was pretty sure suicide would have been the better answer.

We shook off the morning and decided our afternoon in Brooklyn would have to be better. After getting on the Q train and riding the subway for 45 minutes, we arrived at the Avenue J, in the heart of Midwood. Walking down from that station after the morning we had was like walking into heaven.

“Look there are trees!”

“And real houses!”

“And kitschy stores!”

“And less traffic!”

After walking a short four blocks to our designated spot to meet Broker #2, we decided that lunch needed to happen before any more painful decision making. Noticing that a main strip of stores lay ahead on Coney Island Avenue, we were fairly confident that a slice of pizza would be easy to spot. Quickly, we discovered how very wrong we were. In fact, not only were the all of the food vendors closed, but everything was closed– including the five (yes, five) wig shops I counted along the way.

This, my friends, should have been our first clue.

“Weird how everything is closed, huh?” I remarked to Joe.

“Ah it is probably a holiday, or some weird renovations we don’t know about.”

Considering I’d been living in a cloud of stress for the past few weeks, I accepted the explanation with little argument.

As we waiting at the corner of Avenue K and 10th, we spotted a frantic, diminutive man in the distance. Bouncing from car, to door, to cellphone, we quickly concluded that this was our broker and made our way to say hello.

Thus, our first encounter with the craziest Brooklynite commenced. After taking 10 minutes to decipher what he was saying, another five to get into the building and another two to figure out how to open the door, we walked into the Holy Grail of apartments. The blathering idiocy this man spewed off faded as as the din of angels singing entered my ears. Hardwood floors! A real bedroom! A real kitchen! A huge living room! A reasonable price! We exchanged our first hopeful look all day, and knew that we were home.

On the terrifying car ride to the broker’s place to sign the lease, we began chatting about the neighborhood.

“Is it always this quiet on the weekends?” I asked.

“Uh… yeah. Yeah,” he reluctantly responded.

“There seems to be a lot of shops and food stores around,” Joe happily remarked.

“Oh yes!” was his enthusiastic response, “there are tons of places to eat and things to see and do! You guys are going to love it here.”

Laughter was had, hand shakes were exchanged and about 200 signatures later, we became the official owners of our very first apartment.

It is four months later, and all I can say is that life in Midwood was not as we expected. The area is predominately populated by Orthodox Jewish folk– which actually dictates much more of our lifestyle then we had ever imagined. The only non-kosher food market is 10 blocks away. Every store is closed from sundown on Friday evening to sundown on Saturday. You cannot order cheese and meat in the same location, and in fact if you do, it is highly offensive. You cannot buy any women’s pants and should refrain from wearing shorts in public. If you are obviously not Jewish (as I’m not) many will attempt to speak to you in Russian. Though Brooklyn College is close, I lack any interaction with actual peers. There are no bars.

As a woman who once drove herself to the food store, could walk down the street in shorts and look men in the eye to say hello without feeling an ounce of guilt, life is quite different.

Don’t mistake this post as a bigoted one–I do not harbor any hate for the community I am cohabiting with, rather I find almost everything about it comically different. I’m just saying, if you think that I live like Carrie Bradshaw, swigging back afternoon cocktails and making millions off of 1,000-word freelance columns, you can rest assured that I most certainly am not. I’m just a lonely Gentile in search of a deli where I can get a turkey and cheese sandwich in this crazy, mixed up world.