Member-only story
I’m Going to Hell
Does anyone need anything?
I moved from Alaska to New York City when I was twenty years old. And like most twenty-year-olds, I had no money and no clue what I was doing, but at least I was hot and ambitious, a combination that will get you far in life. New York had been luring me to move there my entire life. Finally, on August 23, 2004, I quit my job as a news reporter for the ABC affiliate in Anchorage and flew on a one-way ticket to Manhattan.
My first apartment was on twenty-third street next to The Chelsea Hotel. I had a Canadian roommate named Tricia who is still one of my good friends nearly two decades later, even though we hated each other by the end of our one year lease. Ethan Hawke lived in the Chelsea Hotel at the time and would greet me when we passed each other on the streets. I’d never lived near a celebrity before, the closest thing I ever got was when Jared from Subway came to Fairbanks and the reporters I worked with fought over who got to interview him.
Then I lived in Hells Kitchen for two years above an Ethiopian restaurant and a deli. Tenth avenue was a different world back then. Every morning the Mole People would come up from an abandoned subway line to look for food. And at night the sex workers would emerge to start their evening shifts.
