NY blues

For a while we were so crowded that my bedroom was a walk-in cupboard on the second floor. Later, when my grandmother moved in, she took a whole room for herself and I slept in the living room.

A few years after I left home I spent a year working in a homeless centre. It was a soup kitchen in a ghetto – a violent neighbourhood with gang fights, murders, hundreds of crack vials lying in the street. One night I woke up on the third floor and watched a shoot-out between rival gangs on the rooftops. But I liked living there.

I witnessed some profound things. One day I happened on a teenage kid who had been shot on the street and I was there while he died. It seemed like a turning point – his death was an incredibly profound thing that made me think something had to change. But the next day it all just carried on – gangs and crack and violence – business as usual.

My worst home came later, in an old factory loft in Brooklyn that had been cut up into apartments. It was infested with cockroaches and the heating pipes would start knocking at five in the morning. It was bleak and dark, just an old factory with walls put up, a raw space with old light fixtures hanging down like a turn-of-the-century sweatshop. Eventually the place was condemned as unfit for human habitation.

I lived there because my girlfriend liked it, but that relationship ended when I said I couldn’t stand it any more. There were no trees or green spaces in that neighbourhood – it was entirely factories with an expressway half a block away. The building was right off Metropolitan Avenue where there’s traffic night and day. It was loud and dirty, a post-industrial place filled with struggling artists.

At weekends, while I was living there, I started going to a place called Goldens Bridge, 40 or 50 miles north of New York City, to go hiking or climbing. I found someone advertising for a housemate in the classified ads – that was the best place I’ve lived. It was an old summerhouse on a lake on an acre of land, with a big stone fireplace, a 100-acre nature reserve nearby, an apple orchard it was idyllic.

I lived in that place four years and every morning I would see birds, foxes and deer. We always had fires and I would chop the wood. In the winter you could ski out the front door.

That place was so quiet – the three of us in a big house, nothing but the woods nearby. I grew up in a dense urban neighbourhood with lots of people around. I think that only gradually I came to realise that I wanted to live differently, that I craved quiet.

Patrick Quinlan is an author. His latest novel – The Takedown – is published by Hodder Headline.