Where I've lived

I think I love this apartment, but I can't help wondering, is it a good deal compared to the new-cheap renovations from Craigslist? Am I sleeping better than I have in decades despite or because of being in a room so tiny if I rolled out of bed I'd be in the yard or in my dresser? Should I care that anyone walking by can look right in since I keep the blinds all the way up?

I've never lived in a mainstream apartment. In LA, from my teens to my early 20s, I lived in the following:

A pimp-infested building off Hollywood Blvd with my girlfriend Denise that a roadie for the band Rufus let us stay in while he was on the road. This was perhaps the most mainstream of apartment layouts with a new-cheap renovation.

A room in an enormous pink stucco house on Fountain Blvd in Hollywood, owned by born-again Christians with strict rules about who resided there and who played the organ or watched tv in the main room with tenants. Also in the house was a lesbian that I tried to have a crush on because it was so convenient but she was bland and doughy and made the same stir-fried vegetables with brown rice every night and then smoked a cigarette on the back steps.

A studio apartment over a garage on N. Hayworth in Hollywood with a huge eat-in kitchen that I never once used and built-ins in the short hall from the main room to the bathroom. I had a twin bed and a desk without a chair, lots of clothes and shoes, collections of license plates and snowflake shakeups, and not much else. I spent most of my time in a Beverly Hills swinger mansion owned by Bernie Cornfeld, formerly owned by George Hamilton, where the man I worshipped, Howard Sackler, a playwright almost 25 years my senior, who is now dead, lived in a room over the garage. I once entertained a jockey in my studio apartment and he left his wingtips before heading to the race track. They were the tiniest men's shoes I ever saw.

A terrific one-bedroom apartment on Horn Ave in Hollywood on a steep street above Tower Records and the Sunset Strip. I lived there, in the front apartment above the garage, with my older boyfriend, a skinny British man, also named Robin, who was a wannabe movie producer but really a petty thief who stole credit cards. Later in life he became a born-again Christian and a saxophone player. The apartment had a view of the Hollywood Hills. Next door were gorgeous and trendy Italian lesbians who were moving back to Europe and sold me many things from their apartment including the beautifully framed botanical drawing of calla lillies by Thalia Lincoln, 1973, that I'm looking at right now hanging in my kitchen.

The top floor of a duplex house on La Jolla in West Hollywood facing what was then and continues to be a well known and active gay male cruising alley immortalized in an awful 80s film called Making Love featuring Harry Hamlin. The very weird, overly made-up, slutty old landlady and her German psychiatrist sometimes-boyfriend didn't mention that come sundown, the alley lit up with rowdy, horny, drunk gay men; cops with bullhorns, and blaring car radios. I don't think I slept for 2 years.

In 1984 I moved to NYC and lived in an apartment on Mott St. with my boyfriend. It was a four-floor walkup with a view of the lovely, tree-shaded old cemetery at Old St. Patrick's cathedral, a homey little church. I found the apartment by asking in Little Italy delis and bodegas and was approved by a jury of old Italian women in sidewalk lawn chairs after convincing them that I was Italian and married to my Italian boyfriend.

After meeting Russell a couple years later, we lived in his Soho loft that has never stopped morphing to make room for me, then our kids, then his wife Diana, and always his studio. There was the house in Bellport, a 1930s cape, walking distance from the bay. In Northampton I lived in an oddly shaped 1890s tiny Victorian that I never really liked except for my sunny office -- my first "room of her own" that was no ones but mine, though it was pilaged by exes who looked for clues to who I am.

Now I'm in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The neighborhood is pristine and out my door, to the left, down the street, is one of the most beautiful parks I've ever see; a Frederick Law Olmsted classic, Prospect Park. Mine is a garden apartment in a row of brownstones. I, and the other garden apartment dwellers, live beneath our wealthy brownstone landlords. In a sense, I am living in the garage.