Norfolk VA: Happy Second Anniversary

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, COOL CATS! Two years ago on January 15, I departed the great & powerful New York City to launch a new life chapter in Norfolk, VA. The crazy cool Frank Lloyd
Wright-inspired home that beckoned me here offers joy every morning as the sun bursts into my bedroom, while I raise a glass daily to sunsets on the patio.

I’ve planted a hundred bulbs and sunflower seeds. I’ve hung a thousand lights on trees. I relish visits to Home Depot and paying less than $5 for eggs at a huge supermarket. No more quarters to do laundry! I even get to drive a car again. Yeah, being a suburban dwelller is mad fun!! Two years (and counting) of inspiration and bliss.

Adding to the aesthetic at home, I have replaced the HVAC and 18 windows & sliding doors, filled in a decrepit pool, gutted 2 full baths… and this month begin renovating my kitchen with respect for its midcentury modern imprint. I spent 13 years renovating my Brooklyn apartment: Can you tell I love a project?

And there’s more. In November 2014, I began hosting guests here via airbnb. Who knew what a joy (and a boon) that would be, with 200+ folks & families sharing in this space since, providing companionship from all over the world: British, Austrian, South African and Parisian families; brilliant Asian and Indian college students; a black bachelorette party (oh, the stories!); gorgeous weddings; southern evangelicals (true accepting Christians, the way we were raised); and so many individuals from whom I've learned so much. Here, I have perhaps absorbed more diversity—more intimately—than during 18 years in the big city.

My greatest trepidation in leaving NYC was that, as a freelance journalist, the work would cease. As if location matters in today's connected universe. I’m still writing like a madman, continuing to earn a living… but now with a lake view instead of a Brooklyn brick wall. So all’s well that end$ well.

Two years. Life has profoundly changed, for sure. The question I am most often asked: Do you miss New York? Of course I do. But by the time I departed January 15 2014, the NYC that treated me like a king had already deflated. Thankfully, I recognized when it was time to turn the page, instead of trying to hold onto or recreate an era whose time had passed.

This is where I’m supposed to say the best is yet to come, right? Oh, please. I’m 50+ and I’m hardly that naive. How’s about: Today is real good. With another sunset on the patio tomorrow, we’re looking just fine.

One Year Later... A New Life In Virginia

In “The Book of Questions,” there’s a query that goes like this: “Which would you prefer: a wild, turbulent life filled with joy, sorrow, passion & adventure, intoxicating successes and stunning setbacks—or a happy, secure, predictable life without such wide swings of fortune and mood?”

It’s a question that has remained in my mind’s eye since I discovered the book in 1987. Ultimately, when I moved to New York City in 1995 for my dream job at Billboard magazine, I experienced the former. Life was crazy cool: so many highs amid a career that allowed me to prove my moxie as a writer in a forum that mattered—and apparently made a difference to the many artists I supported.

Among my roles there, my calling card was Singles Reviews Editor. I was the geeky pop guy that championed acts that seldom garnered kudos from the mainstream press. From Celine Dion and Jim Brickman to those 90s’ pop boom acts (‘N Sync, BSB, Jessica Simpson, 98 Degrees, Christina Aguilera, BBMak, Hanson), I became the de facto champion of “great melodies.”

I also had the opportunity (and the real estate) to amp newbie artists that deserved press from the industry’s “music Bible.” I recognized the power that BB’s team of veteran journalists possessed in an era when the mag still mattered—and man oh man, was it paid forward—through a lifetime’s worth of awesome memories (not to mention a robust Starfucker wall of grab & grin photos).

In 2009, when Nielsen was looking to sell the company, the recession presented an ideal excuse to excise Billboard’s veteran writers and lean up its bottom line. One by one, the talented scribes were laid off. March 25 was my D-Day. I was called in, fired—and yet had two interviews scheduled for the afternoon: a video

interview for billboard.com with Ashely Tisdale and a phoner with Lionel Richie.

Buck up, baby! I walked around Billboard’s East Village neighborhood for an hour after getting canned, shared the news with my work besties Kristina, Christa & Donna, whimpered a bit, and then put it aside to get on with business.

After the Lionel interview, I got an email from the label’s publicist that went something like this: “I don’t know what just happened, but Lionel said he had one of the best interviews of his career with you. Obviously, you got him—and he surely got you.” Well, then, a fitting finale.

The point of all this is to define life since then… and the details matter, because life was profoundly different in the years following. Suddenly, I was a “freelance journalist.” I know meeself: Give me an assignment and a deadline and I’ll deliver. I’m the ultimate minion. As a self-starter, um, not so much. I’m a fine writer but unfortunately, a less enterprising entrepreneur.

Thankfully, the U.S. Census came to my rescue. For nine months in 2010, I had the time of my life working with wickedly smart folks and learning to love my Brooklyn in a brand new way. I was there long enough to gambol through snowdrifts and then trod the streets with a summer flop sweat. Indelible. I also met Suzanne, a lifer friend.

In 2013, I finished renovating my Brooklyn Heights apartment. It took more than a decade and suddenly, I was… listless. Meanwhile, I tossed my own 50th birthday party the year before and recognized that… the times are a’changing.

Folks move on, lives change and friendships fade. Not to mention that NYC was no longer my bounty: no more wining & dining, free concerts, countless glamorous events or… most important… a concrete reason to be in the most expensive city in the nation. It didn’t help that my 10-year relationship came to a rather disastrous end in 2011.

And so: What the hell am I doing here?

In the summer of 2013, I began fantasizing about a new chapter. I sniffed out Las Vegas, Austin, San Diego, parts of Florida… I wanted warmth (the endless New York winters were exhausting) and space and a car and the ability to stretch out both arms without smacking a wall (in my 950 square foot apartment). I wanted my doggies Abby & Spencer to be able to RUN.

When I came to Hampton Roads that fall with life-long pal Trix in tow—staying with 20-year friends Bill & Mary—I was only “exploring” the area. I never expected to FIND MY FOREVER HOME. On September 13, 2013, I walked into this house in Norfolk and said: “I want to die here.”

On January 15, 2014, I began to LIVE here. That was one year ago today. And this is where I return to “The Book of Questions.” Highs and lows, indeed. First, this house is ridiculous… a 4,000sf mid-century modern “estate” that has maintained its aesthetic since it was built in 1962 (the year of my birth!). I am madly in love.

As soon as I hit Hampton Roads, I got busy: I’ve gutted two bathrooms, replaced all windows & sliding doors, installed a new HVAC system, ran a gas line, filled in a huge but sadly decrepit concrete pool… oh, and painted the front door red. That was among my only DIYs (I’ve learned over so many years to depend on the experts; I can’t cut a straight line with scissors).

I’ve worked the land, growing tomatoes, planting bulbs and harvesting sunflowers, I observe geese, seagulls, raccoons, squirrels, so many birds… and have witnessed sunrises & sunsets that foster a physical reaction that’s so warm & fuzzy you’d think I was experiencing my first kiss. Oh, yeah, and there’s that, too. I’ve even reignited that pitifully lacking aspect of my life (here in lil’ ole Norfolk). I've met new friends… and lost 25 pounds. (I’m particularly fond of the latter.)

Over the past year, there have also been challenges (here come the lows). Losing my beloved Schnauzers Abby & Spencer within three months, in August and October—with different illnesses—is the most difficult life event I have ever dealt with. I cannot understand it. My heart is still broken and I continue to cry.

In addition, when you’re 50, it’s not so easy to connect with newbies. And god knows when you work from home, it’s pretty much impossible to connect (duh). I’ve worked to put myself out there (I could do better, but couldn't we all?)—and there are a handful of wondrous new friends—but everybody has their established lives. I get it.

The good thing is that I am a writer. Is there any career that is more solitary? I think fellow journos will understand this: We are the ultimate extroverted introverts. Writing is wholly solitary. All of my life, that has been joyful. It’s just me and my beautiful words. We get along fine. And so… if I occasionally feel isolated in my new life here in Virginia, I step back and say to myself (not out loud… I haven’t reached that point yet)… “Damn, Chuck, you entertain the hell out of yourself.” So I guess we’re... uh... I’m happy enough. I happen to enjoy my own company immensely.

In all, ONE YEAR LATER, I am filled with joy each day to wake up with the sun rising through my bedroom window (drapes? hell, no!). Over coffee every morning (in the winter months), I open my iPhone weather App and compare Norfolk & NYC and utter a big “heeee.” Blissful weather!

Getting in a car on a whim and going anywhere… wheee!! Freedom! Taking a road trip to the Eastern Shore or Williamsburg… wowsah! Sniffing around Walmart, Dollar General, Big Lots, Dollar Tree and gargantuan grocery stores and paying next to nothing compared with $$$ in NYC... rah rah!! Even though I left NYC, I still live like a "depression baby."

And I have family here: my beloved Francie, and Mary & Bill, and that handful of new friends that I adore (more to come in 2015? I’m a fun guy, right?). My parents are now a 4-hour drive away.

Yes, I am fortunate to have this crazy cool home that I dig, indulge and truly treasure as a blessing. It's just plain fun. I know this is the kind of place that will "never be done," which, to me, is a beautiful thing. God knows I love a project. And right alongside, I am still in the midst of the grand evergoing project known as life. This still feels like a new beginning, with all hope for so much good to come. *

"Now my story has been told, time for the future to unfold..."—Junior Turner

ONE MONTH ANNIVERSARY IN NORFOLK! Part Three (Finale)

"Luck in life is an engineered effort."

And now the final chapter in this trilogy regarding my mid-January exit from NYC to VA amid a most egregious effort to get the hell out of New York City. See previous posts HERE and HERE.

So here we are, in the midst of the heinous, blustery, truly unpleasant two-and-a-half-hour closing for my Brooklyn Heights apartment… as buyers’ attorney deemed Dick (by my attorney) is interrogating me—in condescending fashion—about electrical non-issues that the buyers' Corcoran agent “discovered” during walk-through.

And just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, the attorney representing my coop announces: She has received an “addendum” from my Montague Street building’s Managing Agent. Huh?? In the midst of closing?

It states that the Board is not convinced that the four days I spent rebuilding my kitchen after it flooded—uh, utilizing the contractor THEY HIRED to do the work—is up to par. They're apparently concerned there may be moisture remaining in the ceiling and so… despite repairs for which I laid out major ca$h (which succeeded 100% in drying all moisture and properly sealing & repairing damage caused by my neighbor above's burst radiator pipe)... hey, you know what… We might tear it all apart!! And guess who pays for the “pre-existing damage”? Yep. Of course. Me.

No one at the table saw this one coming. After I had frantically and successfully rebuilt my kitchen after a waterfall decimated the drywall four days before closing, here we are with a last-minute notice from my coop saying, “No deal unless Chuckie understands that it might be fun to tear it all apart—on his dime."

Buyers’ attorney Dick eventually negotiated with my attorney Z to place a shitload of my money in an escrow account so we could all just get the hell out of there and close the deal—allowing the poor blindsided couple buying my apartment to take possession of their new home, while allowing me to just get out of town. (I can imagine how happy my buyers—with a 1-month-old infant—were really looking forward to the coop coming in & tearing apart their brand new kitchen...)

So ultimately, I was forced to leave $5,000 in escrow for 1) the previously described bogus electrical repairs and 2) potential demo of all the kitchen work I had just completed.

And then, at long (long) last, I was able to sign the last of 873,892,759,847 documents, and close on my apartment. Outside, as it poured rain, I had a sweet moment with the new owners of my home, wishing them happiness there.

At 5:30p, once I arrived home to spend my last moments in the apartment that I had nurtured for some 13 years, you might imagine that I might like to spend an hour reflecting, reminiscing and bidding a sweet farewell.

Honestly, after such a sullied closing, I pulled my new Ford Focus in front of the building and decided that despite it was the midst of rush hour, I’d rather sit still in traffic than wait for a single overhead light bulb to potentially burn out in the apartment—because, for sure, the buyers’ Corcoran agent would pound on the door, swearing the entire apartment was miswired.

My exit from the HOME that I bought in 2000 and transformed from a dump into a palace was, in that moment, so very bittersweet. I made a final hasty walk through each room that I had lovingly renovated over the course of 13 years and then said out loud, “G’bye.” And I closed the door.

The next turn of our story doesn’t get much better, I’m afraid. As I motored down Brooklyn’s BQE, traffic moved at a clip. Hurrah! Abby & Spencer were relaxed and dozing in the front seat next to me. But as I passed one annoying toll road after another (Verrazano Bridge, Goethals Bridge, New Jersey Turnpike, Delaware Memorial Bridge), I drove

past the rain… and right into dense, impenetrable, thick-set FOG!! Seriously?

For five hours I pretty much could not see 20 feet in front of me… roaring forward every time there was a vehicle in front of me on what turned out to be deserted coastal roads... just to follow in their taillights, until they ultimately turned off the road, leaving me anxiously slowing down at some points to 30 mph. All the while, I'm pondering my epitaph: “Poor guy. He moved out of New York City and drove off a bridge on the way to his new house…” Honest to god, it’s as if I were driving through cotton candy for 5 of the 7-hour journey.

And that’s where this long-winded tale reaches its blissful end. As I crossed the

Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel just after midnight on January 15, 2014, I exhaled that I had survived one of the cruelest days of my life. And I inhaled with gusto for all possibilities of this brand new chapter.

As I write this, it is now my two-month anniversary as a resident of Hampton Roads, Virginia.

An NYC pal asked me on the phone last week, “What do you miss most about New York?” I paused and responded: “Except for the people… not much of anything. Actually, nothing."

I was ready. It was the right move at the right time. And here we are. The page has turned and the colors on this side are as bright as could be.

Hey, and Spring is allegedly coming (following the cruelest winter the East Coast has seen in 30 years), so I will have an entirely new & colorful world to discover beyond the doors of this wowsah property in Norfolk, Va., that I have been fortunate enough to make my home. I am blessed, I am a lucky man and I wake up every morning recognizing the bounty before my eyes.

P.S. Thankfully, I got the ENTIRE $5,000 returned from the escrow account (cool cats, that's why it took me 2 months to post this: get it?). Obviously, those electrical issues turned out to be bogus. And thankfully, either the coop decided not to decimate the new kitchen—or the new owners refused to let them tear apart my beautiful work.

P.S.S. Har, har, har... And yet it's not over yet. The coop decided in February that the building is not responsible for the damage that occurred between walls (they are, via the bylaws) and are now leaving it up to me to have my homeowner's insurance company duke it out with the coop—which, mind you, I, of course, CANCELED at the end of January. Guess who is going to end up ponying up more cash months after getting the hell out of BK?!

And herein is my great lesson learned: Enduring luck in life is an engineered effort. I am a fortunate man, feeling lucky once again. *

ONE MONTH ANNIVERSARY IN NORFOLK! Part One

This weekend I celebrated ONE MONTH of my spanking new life in Norfolk, Va. I’ve made 3 major moves in my life: from home/college/JMU to Washington, D.C. in 1984, New York City in 1995… and now, some 18 years later, a truly arbitrary relocation… as I recognized the time was

ripe to renew, challenge and indulge a gentler quality of life.

I’ve discussed all the why’s that I was ready to leave NYC previously, so let’s pick up four weeks ago, shall we? Unfortunately, it’s not all pretty. Leaving New York was a living hell—not emotionally, but logistically… The Thursday eve before I was closing on my Brooklyn Heights apartment, I hosted a casual finale gathering at Central Bar, a familiar haunt from my Billboard mag days. It was perfection: dozens rolled in and offered a farewell toast.

Ready for this? When I got home that night (here’s the part I’ve never publicly shared, because it’s too damn depressing), I was feeling all warm & fuzzy and went to bed, looking forward to moving ever closer to wrapping up my apartment sale the following Tuesday. And then, at 1:15 in the morning, I awoke to the sound of rain—only instead of coming from outside, it was clearly INSIDE my apartment.

Turns out the apartment above me—after single-digit temps the week before—had a radiator within a wall and as temps warmed up and the pipe expanded, it BURST, creating what ultimately became a

4-hour WATERFALL in my kitchen. I scrambled to wake the resident (who, ironically, suffered NO damage in her apartment) and my super and the building’s coop president… Ultimately, while the water in the entire building was turned off, it just kept raining and raining from the ceiling.

I sat on the floor scooping water into a trashcan, trying like hell to keep it from flowing overtop the saddle that separated my kitchen from the rest of my home. Had it seeped over the top, my hardwood floors would be ruined, not to mention my furniture, carpets, etc. Let’s just say my entire apartment would have been fucked. And so too, would I be.

There were times I simply paused, wondering if the water would ever stop coming down—if using the dog’s food dish to scoop 8 ounces of water at a time was laughably futile. It rained through my kitchen pantry, through the ceiling drywall seams (which melted away), and then THROUGH the ceiling fan and along the edges of the walls. The wall outside the kitchen bubbled up like a fat man, filled with water. The wood moldings began to swell… This, of course, is within the week that I am set to sell my apartment…

One friend termed it beautifully: “That is just UNFAIR.” Indeed, it was well after 4 a.m. when the water slowed to a drip… and somehow I did manage to scoop scoop scoop scoop scoop for

3 hours and keep it from tipping the edge into the rest of the apartment… as I sat on the floor, drenched, in an inch of cold water, wondering if this was going to sabotage the sale of my apartment and ultimately short circuit everything that I had been planning since September.

The next day my coop, thankfully, moved into high gear, as I discovered that not only was my kitchen wrecked, but the first-floor unit below me, into the basement, where dozens of storage units were also flooded. Can I mention again that the rez above me that wreaked all havoc had a small paper towel kinda puddle in her apartment? Yeah, thanks a lot…

But then, as is typical in a New York cooperative, things became... difficult.

At first, management sent a drywall dude (DD) to start tearing down the damage in my ceilings and walls. Miraculously, my cabinets, granite counters and ceramic floors were unharmed… but, of course, everything was drenched. So over the next 4 days, DD returned again & again to try and deal with the disaster, which took days to even begin to dry out and be ready to repair… that is, until…

On day 4, my building manager contacts DD and tells him to STOP working in my apartment, cause there are insurance issues and the coop has decided that I am re$ponsible for $ome of the en$uing work. Okay, fine. But it would have been constructive if you'd told ME, before calling DD and telling him not to show... as it's now TWO days before my buyers' scheduled walk-through.

In the end, on Sunday, I begged DD to return to finish the work, and ultimately paid him a small fortune out of pocket so that when my buyers came in that Tuesday, they would see that all good faith had been pursued to SOLVE a problem, instead of presenting them with one (of course, I notified all parties of the disaster Friday morning).

Oh, but it gets worse (before it gets a lot better). TO BE CONTINUED!!

Chuck's NYC YA Soire... Thanks For The Send-Off!

The Thursday before I departed NYC for Hampton Roads, I invited friends from two decades-past to join in a final toast at Central Bar—where I used to hang nearly every Friday with my pals during the Billboard days.

Incredible night, with so many keepers that made the effort to stop in, offer a hug and share a memory or three. It was just perfect: Some 90 folks in total. And I only cried twice... At last, a night to remember in pictures! Thanks again... *