Sublets

West

What do you want to be when you grow up? If I’d been a more clever child, I might’ve answered, “a Californian.”

I wasn’t, except perhaps on paper. I was born in San Diego, where I lived for six weeks until my family moved to Connecticut. We went back twice before my fifth birthday—two family vacations of which I remember only tiny pieces: our bungalow in Mission Bay, a visit to Seaworld, my first bad sunburn. We never went back after that, not to San Diego or anywhere else in California.

I forgot almost everything about those trips, but they added to the belief that I was born somewhere very different from what I knew back home. California was a place that people sought out. It was warm and sunny year-round. It was relevant and recognizable. For a middle-class kid growing up in the northeast, it was almost exotic. When someone asked me where I was from, I’d often start by saying that I was born in San Diego, as if it made me more interesting. On some level, I think it does.

Although I’d experienced only a tiny fraction of California, the popular idea of it—expressed through books, movies, TV, and music—would come to occupy a large share of my imagination, so much so that after college, I moved to the Bay Area without ever having visited and without any understanding of Northern California climate.

I arrived in August without a jacket and with only one long-sleeve shirt, which I wore every day for two weeks until my dad sent me cold-weather clothing. What I didn’t understand from afar was that there were many Californias; I’d get to know only a few, and I’d mark my time there not by cities, years, or jobs, but by sublets.

Vernon Ter.

My first sublet was in the Adams Point neighborhood in Oakland, where I rented a dead-end hallway (furnished with a cot, privacy curtain, and padlocked cupboard) for $300 a month. It was a two-bedroom apartment with seven residents: one in each bedroom, one in an enclosed back porch, two in an attic accessible only by ladder, me in my dead-end hallway, and a master tenant who slept in a tent in the living room. He was a law school grad who’d failed the bar exam and whose only apparent income was the difference between what he charged us and what he paid the landlord.

I’d found the apartment on Craigslist and secured my spot via a money order sent USPS, which is almost unthinkable today. It was an above-average flophouse and a suitable landing pad—an address that I could give to AAA and say, “I need directions here.”

I only lived there for a month and I don’t remember my roommates very well. What little I do remember I’ve exaggerated to the point of caricature, like a game of telephone played only with myself. If you asked me about my roommates, I’d tell you things, with confidence, that I know to be untrue. The guy who lived on the back porch was a gay rights activist with the most well-sculpted eyebrows I’d ever seen (reality: he was gay, worked for an environmental non-profit, and had nice eyeybrows). The guy in the master bedroom was named Brandt and looked like Philip Seymour Hoffman (reality: he was mildly overweight and had a great speaking voice).

There was a communal iMac in the living room, which I used to browse Craigslist for living situations that didn’t resemble a TV sitcom. I was 23 and sleeping on a cot at the end of a hallway, but I was officially out on my own.

Carleton St.

Jason needed a new roommate to share his 2BR on Carleton Street, just west of MLK in Berkeley.

I replied to his Craigslist post, and when he gave me a call, we discovered an unlikely connection: my new boss was his old roommate—and ex-girlfriend.

That wasn’t a dealbreaker for Jason, which spoke to his open-minded nature. We liked the same kind of hip-hop and were both looking for someone who’d help keep the place clean. Those commonalities got us a long way.

Jason worked at a home for mentally disabled adults and endured a work environment that would’ve chewed through pretty much everyone else I knew. He left all that stress at work; the apartment was clean, quiet, and predictable.

Jason was calm on the outside, but was not to be messed with. When our landlord (“Art”) refused to fix a small leak in the bathroom, Jason called the city housing inspector, who mandated a fix. When Art failed to do that and a new leak sent water streaming through our electrical panel, Jason’s first call was to the inspector, who made Art not only fix the leaks but also repaint the entire building, remove an illegal hot tub, and pour thousands into other repairs. Art told Jason he’d pay us to leave, so Jason moved in with his girlfriend and I was back on Craigslist.

We were never great friends, but we shared a year of being young, near-broke, and responsible only for ourselves. Beyond shared experience, there was—is—an affinity between us. He’s my kind of person. I think of him on his birthday (a day before mine), I think of him whenever I listen to Common or De La, and I think of him whenever I cook his “impress the girl” dish—which still works.

Telegraph Ave.

I’d been accepted into the Oakland Teaching Fellows, the district’s now-defunct program to fill its critical teaching shortages. I needed a place to get me through the program’s summer institute, which led to a three-month sublet in a two-story, eight-bedroom loft on Telegraph Avenue.

Yes: eight bedrooms. During the academic year, the apartment was occupied entirely by Boalt Hall law students, but during the summer it was a 50/50 mix of aspiring lawyers and other upwardly mobile nerds. Living there was like being on The Real World if every cast member had taken the SATs in middle school. I paid my rent checks to an LLC that the year-round tenants had incorporated themselves. We had subscriptions to the NYT, WSJ, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and countless other publications, which were not just delivered but actually read.

I miss those subscriptions. I don’t miss sharing a bathroom with three people.

Vermont St.

Gail, Lorena, and I met through summer institute. I don’t remember how we decided to live together; that whole summer was a hectic blur. In the span of about three months, we had to study for and pass the state teaching tests, teach summer school, find placement for the fall, enroll in a credentialing program, and find housing. One day I said I was looking for roommates and two weeks later the three of us had signed a lease.

We rented a 3BR apartment—the bottom half of a sun-soaked, stucco duplex near the Grand Lake Theater. We were halfway up the steepest hill I’ve ever lived on and about a mile from the flophouse where I’d landed the year before.

We made a faltering attempt at furnishing the common areas, doing a great job on the kitchen but giving up by the time we reached the living room. I had big plans for a leather sectional but we settled for a free sofa I’d found on Craigslist, an old TV (on loan from our landlords), some folding beach chairs, and an instructional poster we’d stolen from summer institute (an infographic that attempted to explain BEING AN EFFECTIVE TEACHER IN A HIGH NEEDS SCHOOL).

The living room was Gail and Lorena’s territory. They were classroom teachers; I was not. They liked multi-tasking; I did not. They really, really liked Love and Basketball; I thought it was just OK. They must’ve watched it thirty times while prepping lessons—a familiar comfort amidst the unrelenting grind of first-year teaching.

Our landlords lived in the unit above us and were an unexpected delight. They were a middle-aged couple, a Kurd who fled Iran and a Serb who fled Yugoslavia. They met in Switzerland and emigrated to the US in the late nineties with little to no assets. They rented a studio apartment in east Oakland back when that was a risky proposition, each working multiple jobs and cooking dinners on a hotplate. They hustled, saved, and bought Oakland real estate at just the right time, in the wake of the dot-com bust.

I worked in East Oakland, not far from where they once lived. Most days I rode my bicycle to work, pedaling through a few of the many Oaklands—past the mansions of Trestle Glen and quiet Glenview bungalows, into the slowly-gentrifying Dimond neighborhood where I worked. It felt like the American Dream was cementing, locking folks in or out, and yet people like my landlords wiggled their way through the cracks out into the sunshine.

Haste St.

Three years of teaching was enough. I got my foot in the door at a cleantech consulting firm and followed that job back to Berkeley. I rented a 2BR, found a quiet roommate, and tried to recreate the experience I had with Jason, but it worked too well: it was too quiet—almost sterile. I wanted a home with more activity and energy. I wanted to live with friends.

As luck would have it, a few track club teammates were feeling the same way. We found a four-bedroom apartment, the upper half of a duplex just a short walk from downtown Berkeley. Our “trackhouse” was born.

The apartment itself was strange in the way that most off-campus housing is. The unit was neither neglected nor well-maintained—it was precisely adequate. The layout would’ve been oddly uniform for anyone but students: a square, vaulted common area comprised of living room and kitchen, with bedrooms (and two bathrooms) extending from the corners.

At a basic level, I think we all got what we wanted from the track house—a place to come together, not just for us but for our teammates. Carpooling to a weekend race? Meet at the track house. Movie night? Track house. Potluck? Track house. We never lacked for company.

What I hadn’t anticipated was the communicable boredom of grad school. My roommates were all well into their respective PhD programs and starting to tire of them. They never dumped any of that onto me, but it unavoidably shaped our living situation. It was like they were inching along on the NASA crawler and I was already at the launch pad, ready to blast off.

For me, the apartment came to symbolize these doldrums: the creaky stairs, the rotting picket fence, the rusted patio furniture. My roommates were stuck for the time being, but I was not. I was in the final months of my twenties, the San Francisco tech scene was booming, and I wanted in.

Hayes St.

Lindsay lived with her sister (Lauren) and cat (Oscar) in an elegant Hayes Street duplex that they co-owned with their parents. It was almost 2,000 square feet, with two large bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, and a 60-sq ft room (“the nook”) that they occasionally rented out for short-term stays.

Lindsay and I met through our track club. She was—to borrow another friend’s words—a different kind of human; I think that’s why I liked her so much. I admired her searching mind, razor-sharp wit, and literary chops. We both liked running, sardines, and other simple pleasures that most chose to avoid. We weren’t great friends, but I liked her enough to ask if I could rent the nook for a couple months, and she liked me enough to share the idea with her sister.

Lauren was only three years out of college and more of an unknown to me. She was about a year and a half younger than Lindsay; they were clearly sisters, but with their own personalities and interests. A classic middle sibling, Lauren was easygoing and kept a strong network of friends. She was about to start law school, had a fantastic collection of boots, and could rock a hat better than anyone I knew. True to her agreeable nature, she was fine with me renting the nook.

Oscar (the cat) didn’t know me at all, and if he’d had veto power in the decision, I would never have become their roommate. But he abstained, I moved in, and we quickly warmed to each other. Oscar and I shared important commonalities: we both had long legs and were exceedingly weird in private. We enjoyed quiet afternoons on the couch and hid in our rooms during parties. We balanced the house in gender and temperament: Lindsay and Lauren were loud, petite, and open-minded; Oscar and I were quiet, long-limbed, and somewhat aloof. Without Oscar, the sisters would’ve outmatched me and the whole dynamic would’ve been different.

The apartment, well, it was wonderful.

It was the nicer half of the duplex, but the whole building had an understated beauty and quiet self-assurance. From the street, it didn’t grab the eye, but if you looked carefully, it was the nicest house on the block.

The front door opened to a long hallway with a line of sight all the way to the backyard. It was the spine off which everything branched: our shoe pile (my size twelves comically mingled among the sisters’ threes and fours), bedrooms (Lauren’s then Lindsay’s then mine), tiny half-bath “poop closet” (an underrated home amenity), full bath, well-appointed kitchen, and a brightly-lit open space (including dining room and living room) with a door to a private deck and large fenced-in yard.

From front to back, the apartment had a progressively jaw-dropping quality to it. It was a linear argument punctuated by a stunning backyard. I’d sit on the porch or long, brick-laid patio and it seemed as if the fog broke just before reaching us. Two blocks west—thirty seconds as the fog traveled—and we would’ve been under its damp shadow.

It was a good metaphor for how San Francisco felt to me, then. America’s oldest city west of the Mississippi was in the middle of another gold rush. Facebook had just gone public in the largest tech IPO in history. By years end, smartphones would make up more than half of the US mobile phone market. Venture capital was pouring into tech, tech workers flooded the city, and the neighborhoods they occupied were rapidly gentrifying. Everything seemed to be breaking for us, in that precise place, at that precise moment.

It felt like I’d arrived, and it was even more thrilling than I thought it would be. I met others who’d opted into this San Francisco, and our excitement ricocheted off each other. Linsday quipped that every friendship in San Francisco was a three-way with the city, and it really did feel that way, without a hint of irony.

The city was a venture-funded sandbox: we worked for companies that didn’t make money and we spent our free time enjoying goods and services from other companies that didn’t make money. I lived in a million-dollar home that I most definitely had not earned. It seemed that every week there was a new thing to do on your phone—some new way to unlock the city’s delights and hidden treasures—built by people you knew. Where else could such riches have felt so normal? When else has technological change felt so momentous, yet so casual?

It was amidst this unearned bounty that my two-month stay on Hayes Street turned into three years. I never had sisters of my own, but Lindsay and Lauren gave me a sense of what it might’ve been like. I went running with Lindsay, watched movies with Lauren, and used all the overhead storage they couldn’t reach. I had crushes on some of their friends and met the boyfriends who would become their husbands: Lindsay eventually moved out to live with hers while Lauren’s boyfriend (Justin, a truly wonderful human) made plans to move in.

San Francisco housing code states that when the number of renters in a unit exceeds the number of owners, the unit’s legal status changes and it becomes much harder to kick tenants out. This was too much risk for Lauren’s dad, and he asked me to leave. I was sad, but didn’t argue with it. If you get extra time at the top of the Ferris wheel, you don’t complain when it starts moving again.

Upper Ter.

Jeff was a running friend and fellow Upstate New Yorker. He’d rented the same apartment since 2011, but needed a new roommate right as I needed a new sublet. The apartment was the only rental in a five-unit condo building, one of ten that surrounded Mount Olympus, the hill and namesake for our tiny, one-street neighborhood. This oddly-named hill was the geographic center of the city, but almost no one knew about it. To get to our part of Upper Terrace, you either had to be going there, exploring, or lost; it wasn’t on the way to anything. I joked that Mount Olympus was a fake neighborhood made up by realtors to inflate home prices, but it needed its own name; it just didn’t belong to anything else.

To get to our unit, you’d ignore all the other, more obvious ones, walk down two flights of stairs, and continue down into a poorly-lit alcove, a process that felt a bit like trespassing and required either confidence or curiosity. It was a hidden apartment in a hidden neighborhood on a hill that no one knew about.

The defining feature of the apartment—as with all units in the building—was the view. The far side of the living room had floor-to-ceiling windows and a sliding glass door leading out to a balcony that wrapped from Jeff’s master bedroom to mine. From it, I could see Sutro Tower, Golden Gate Park, Golden Gate Bridge, Angel Island, and countless wonders in between. From my bedroom, I’d watch the sun set over the Pacific, the same glittering lure that pulled me west more than a decade before.

Emptiness, too, was a defining feature. Only three of the five units in the building were regularly occupied. Jeff and I were away from our apartment more than we were there, and when we were home, we were usually in our rooms, each a little apartment unto itself. Jeff commuted to Mountain View every weekday, leaving the house around seven and usually not getting back until nine. I was becoming increasingly addicted to work and was going into the office seven days a week.

That is to say that while I was living on Upper Terrace, I was primarily living at work.

To get to the office, I’d put on running clothes, stuff work casuals into a backpack, and jog the three miles down to SoMa. When I had time, I’d take a short detour up and over Corona Heights, a small hill of exposed, terracotta bedrock with panoramic views of almost half the city. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d start my run before dawn, cresting the hill in the twilight to find the city asleep and horizon aglow. Both the morning and my work downtown were still ahead of me. They were still abstractions, and bewitching ones, at that: so full of potential and with none of daylight’s blemishes.

From Corona Heights, I’d take the terraced steps down towards Castro and hook left onto Market Street. I’d race the trolley cars downtown, past the San Francisco Mint, Central Freeway, and Uber HQ. The most direct route was to take Market all the way to Sixth, then take Sixth to Mission, but I hated those blocks. They required weaving through a daily spectacle of human misery: open-air drug deals, dirty needles, human waste, and hopeless cleanup efforts. These scenes required a filtered vigilance—notice everything, see nothing—which I found dehumanizing to everyone involved.

Instead, I’d hook right on Tenth and go left down Howard. This was the second of two detours on my way to work—one for pleasure, one for self-preservation—both reflecting a preference for distance. For abstraction. For swapping out the craggy reality of San Francisco with a postcard panorama.

I worked at a software startup, which also reflected my preference for abstraction. Software was just a few steps removed from raw thought, and startups were so open to new ways of thinking and doing. Nothing was set in stone, and intellectual freedom was generally prized above conventional wisdom. If something was broken, it was relatively easy to fix or even throw out and start anew. I found a certain romance in startup work: it was the unbridled future, like the West of my childhood imagination. It was my California Dream, and it was intoxicating.

Our startup was venture-backed, meaning that investors gave us millions of dollars in exchange for an ownership stake and the expectation of rapid growth. These large infusions of cash allowed us to move fast and ignore details, some of which didn’t matter and some of which truly did. The cash (and the growth expectations that came with it) made it harder to know which was which. “Speeding tickets, not parking tickets,” our CEO would say. And so I worked as hard and as fast as I could, leaving other parts of my life behind in a blurred streak.

I didn’t take good care of myself, those last few years in San Francisco. I don’t think the city took good care of itself, either. I got so wrapped up in ideas that I lost touch with the city’s surfaces and the people who shared them. Perhaps that also explains some of San Francisco’s problems: too much love for the idea of itself, not enough attention to people and surfaces.

East

In July of 2019, I said my goodbyes, sold or donated most of my stuff, and loaded up the same silver hatchback that brought me out west all those years before. I was headed east—not to any place I’d called home, but in the direction of family and old friends. They would be closer and that was enough.

For most of my twenties and thirties, I was a Californian. If I made one mistake, it was that I stopped being one before I actually left. I convinced myself that California would never feel like home and then made sure that it wouldn’t, walling myself off from deeper intimacies that would make it harder to leave. Except I didn’t leave, not for another two years.

Leaving required coming to terms with what I’d known all along: that restlessness—the force that pulled me west, pushed me into the office before dawn, and made it harder to settle into relationships—would follow me wherever I went. I also had to recognize that I’d find belonging not by moving from a place, but by moving toward people. I had to value relationships more in general before I could prioritize the ones most important to me. I had to want connection. This seems to be a lesson I must learn over and over again.

As for my time in California, I wouldn’t change a thing. I met wonderful people and even shared apartments with a few of them. I found a calling and saw a gold rush with my own eyes. I watched the sun rise over Yosemite Valley and set over the Pacific. I met just a few of California’s many landscapes: they were honest; they were exceedingly generous; they were real.