NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN Untouched By Lame-O Editing Hands "It Happened To Me"

We ran an It Happened To Me. The writer posted that it was “heavily edited” and that she wasn't happy. So in a Sassy/Jane/xoJane/AJPT first, we are publishing her original. Here it is.

Hello there,

Over the crazy amount of years I have been working with writers and publishing their stories, I have developed some pretty inflexible editing policies. Actually, that's a lie. I obnoxiously came right out of the college gate at the age of 21 into my first editing job (hello, defunct McCall’s magazine!) with these already strict policies that haven’t changed. Then I was lucky enough to become an Editor-in Chief a couple of years later, where I could demand that everyone else on staff follow my specific editing rules.

They involved and involve, among many other annoyingly persnickety mandates that anyone working with me has to put up with (current thanks to Charlie and Corynne, past thanks to Christina Kelly, Vanessa De Luca, Jane Larkworthy, Pam Anderson, Andrea Linett, Mary Clarke, Kim France, Emily McCombs, etc wonderful editors etc): We never change a writer’s words to make them fit our idea of how they should be expressing themselves. (We also don’t use the word should.) I don't even like a word being changed in order to avoid repetition of that same word within the paragraph. Just leave it alone!

I do work a lot with writers to make sure that their words reflect their own natural spoken-sounding voices, rather than language that has been indoctrinated into them via other media. (Some time I will tell you the story of the study I did for my senior paper at Oberlin - involving a survey of prisoners and how they absorbed the language of the media even more exclusively because it was all they were exposed to. If I find a copy, let's all look at it and see if it's really dumb now.)

So when Jessica Max Stein, who I respect tremendously along with every other author here, wrote when her story was first published that she was unhappy with the heavily edited version of her piece that we ran, I felt sorry and wanted to make it right. I told Jessica Max that I would love for readers to see her story exactly as she wanted it published. So in an editorial first for AJPT and for me in my whole worklife, I am publishing her original version here. I'm thrilled to do it for her, for you who want to read what the writer intended, and for those of you who are like me and interested in comparing the two. Take a look at both if you are so inclined. Note that we did add in these photos (supplied by Jessica Max) throughout the piece but kept the captions exactly as they were sent to us.

I thank Jessica Max tremendously for giving us another chance to publish this. I thank you who take a(nother) chance to read it. I hope this won’t deter you from sending me your It Happened To Me stories for publication, too! Send them if you want to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com.

I love you all and let's talk about this and anything else in the comments, as we do!

-Jane

It Happened to Me: I Found an Apartment (And With It, Adulthood).

My Brooklyn coming-of-age adventures in grief, sex, and real estate

By Jessica Max Stein

If someone were to write my biography, 2003 would get its own chapter.

Our whole family was knocked off balance when my mother died on February 15: my father, my big sister, but probably me most of all, since I wasn’t that balanced to begin with. I was 25, a week short of my 26th birthday, just a couple of years out of college.

In those two years I lived in six different Brooklyn apartments, all circling Prospect Park: south of the park above a drummer who practiced at all hours; in Park Slope where my roommate broke into my room, banging the lock open while I slept; in a Prospect Heights share where the radiator exploded over my books; on Eastern Parkway where my roommate locked up the living room, lied about the rent (apparently I paid all, not half), and finally took up with a Dutch nudist; and others for shorter stints, each one worse than what had come before. Mom had thought Brooklyn was a bad idea to begin with. She grew up in the Bronx, and resented having to commute into Manhattan, which to her was still the center of the world though she’d lived in Schenectady for over forty years. But I liked the park, I liked the dykes around the neighborhood, I didn’t mind the trains, and I wanted to make it work.

My beloved Brooklyn apartment, the front half. Looking over Prospect Park, early spring 2024.

I was dating a jerk when my mother died. Boys were a stretch for me; I’d been a dyke since puberty and never noticed men until a couple years earlier, when I started wondering what all the fuss was about. Men seemed easier than women, easier to find and draw in, and they didn’t need to process everything. I met this guy at the progressive newspaper where we both spent most of our time. After staying up all night putting the paper to bed, it was easy enough to go to bed with each other.

Technically he and I were broken up when my mother died. We had been (sleeping) together for about six months when I asked him what we were doing for Valentine’s Day. Horrified, he said we didn’t have that kind of relationship, so I replied that I guessed we didn’t have any kind of relationship at all. So I dumped him and then my mother died and my life yawned with a terrifying cavernous emptiness so I started hanging out with him again. At least he was familiar: his weed, his magazines, his Lower East Side apartment, his warm body beside me when I couldn’t sleep.

I needed a place of my own. It beat like a drum as I earned an MFA in writing in May; it beat like a drum as I started spending entire days in Prospect Park to get away from the jerk and from the Dutch nudist. I tried to hide up in Schenectady with my dad but he was becoming a hoarder, the den stuffed with boxes of food products with a narrow exit lane between them, precarious towers of newspapers. How had I not noticed how much my mother did around the house, even while she was dying? How had I not realized that someone who had been dying for over a decade would probably actually die?

I needed a place of my own. I got a job adjuncting where I had just graduated, starting in the fall. So now I had money to get a place, I just had to do it. I knew I could go to a broker, but I thought they were a ripoff. I knew I wanted to be by the park, but I couldn’t afford the Slope. I walked all the way around the park until I came out the other side, at the Lincoln Road exit.

My apartment was a haven during the pandemic. I taught over Zoom, but I still dressed up for work. April 2020.

The vibe was different over here, more chill but also more frenetic, folks hanging out on the corner, playing stereos and smoking. It seemed like somewhere you could relax, somewhere you could hide out. I went to [redacted] Ocean Avenue and rang the super’s doorbell. Frankie was a skinny Dominican guy, even then kind of old for all the heavy physical chores his job required, but this building and the one next door were his domain. He gave me a form to fill out for the landlord. I put down my name, my job, my income. He showed me a studio, one sunny room about 350 square feet with two windows on the park, a vista of trees. The apartment was rent-stabilized; the rent would only go up a specific percentage every year or two, as decreed by the city’s rent control board. And I could afford the rent: $635 a month. Most importantly it would be mine, all mine, a place to get away from everyone, to string two thoughts together, to do some writing. I called the jerk to see what he thought, but he couldn’t care less. “It’s kind of small, but I guess I won’t be living here that long,” I said to him.

I moved in on July first. I stayed in that apartment for 22 years. It was time, when I left, and it was right; but it broke my heart.

A picture I took in 2023 of Prospect Park looking particularly magical.

I had plenty of other adventures in 2003: the citywide blackout, just a few weeks after moving in; breaking up with the jerk for good; my first day of teaching; riding my bike into a van on my way home from my first day of teaching, flying off the bike, breaking my collarbone, and riding home in a police car – but it all starts with my mother dying, and me realizing that no one was going to come along and put together my life, that I had to put it together myself, and going out and getting that apartment.