The Bone Collector

Dear Succotash,

When I first lived on my own in New York City, I lived in Washington Heights. I'm sure by the time you roll around Washington Heights will be all solid rock crystal condos, but in 2000, when I lived there, it was largely Dominican, and really quite poor. I also was rather poor, which is why I could afford my own apartment there. Other women my age bunked in together in respectable downtown apartments of five or six, or else their parents paid their freight, but I lived uptown, and I lived alone.

I'm something of a loner, imaginary baby. I wonder if you will be too.

Anyway. I made very little money, and I was trying to save as much of it as I could. So I oftentimes stayed at home and ordered in from Box Office Pizza.

Box Office Pizza was a pizza and VHS delivery service. Genius. You'd get the menu, and it would come with a list of movies. So I'd pore over it, and I'd call up, and I'd be like "Hey, can I get a pineapple and onion and also have you got the copy of Reality Bites?"

"Nope. That one's out."

"Okay. What about The Sixth Sense?"

"I think that one got stolen."

"All right. Ummm. Scream?"

"Nope. Sorry."

Then I would sigh heavily and say "Okay, I guess I'll take the Bone Collector again."

I don't know how many times I watched The Bone Collector. Certainly more than three. But this was before I had internet at home, and before I could afford cable TV. The pickings were slim.

Now, of course, my life looks very different. I am nearly twice the age now that I was then. My apartment is bigger, and nicer, and has real furniture in it and a couple of paintings and shit. And tonight, for the first time, I am undergoing a rite of passage common to many forty year old women who have achieved a certain amount of success in their career. I am learning how to give myself hormone injections ahead of IVF.

So imagine my delight to discover that HBO, to which I can now afford to subscribe, and which is now streaming on demand through the ether like magic, is showing The Bone Collector.

I settle back in my den in a respectable neighborhood of Midtown, two new tiny band-aids on my tummy, glass of wine in hand. Twenty years older, fifteen pounds heavier, wiser and with a better haircut. I point my Roku remote and I smile quietly to myself.