Kareem Rahma’s viral video series, Keep the Meter Running, Subway Takes, and now The Last Stop, all have New York (and often transit) at their heart. He moved to New York from Minnesota 12 years ago and found his midwestern friendliness clashing with the cynicism that comes with the city. Rahma’s first year in New York was swept up by Hurricane Sandy, the boom of Vice Media, and the underground arm-wrestling circuit.
I moved to New York City on May 5, 2012. It was my first move ever. I grew up in Minnesota, and I just had to get out of the Midwest to figure out what the hell was going on in the world. I had to break up with my girlfriend to move. Her father said to me before I left, “I hope you found what you’re looking for.” I was definitely going out west for gold, except I was going out east for money. To get myself hyped up on the plane and get the momentum going, I read The Alchemist. I remember calling my mom on Mother’s Day, only a few weeks after I first moved, telling her, “You wouldn’t believe it out here. The juices cost $12, and the pizza costs $1.” Now, that’s so normal, but for a fresh-off-the-boat Midwesterner, it was crazy. I got a bike and had it for one day. It was stolen within 24 hours. I got another, I went to work and came back — stolen. Two bikes were stolen in one month of living here. It was pretty sad.
I moved blindly into an apartment that I found on Craigslist. I sent him an email laying out my story and he was like, “Oh my god, I’m from Minnesota too. But I’m gonna be in Bali for a month. So the place is all yours alone.” It was a big basement apartment on 6th Street between Avenues B and C. I could hear pickers going through the trash, and I was scared people were breaking in. I paid around $650 for it. He was a solopreneur yogi trying to live a nomadic lifestyle, and the apartment was disgusting and filthy. It looked like an episode of The Leftovers where there was a guy who disappeared, so there was still a bong on the table and beard hair all over the sink. Man-hair everywhere. The room I was renting was simply a twin mattress on the floor with no sheets. I remember lying there thinking I had just made a huge, big, bad decision. I stayed for three months, then moved to a sublet I also found on Craigslist in Williamsburg with two bisexual women. I didn’t know why they let me move in. I must’ve given off a nice quality.
I came with no job and wore wool suits on the subway because it was the Mad Men era, and I thought that dressing up like that would help me get a job. I ended up getting a job at Vice through a really long and embarrassing blind cold email, like “Hi. My name is Kareem. I moved to New York so that I could work at Vice” (not knowing what Vice even was). I sent the same email to Warby Parker, Kickstarter, Vimeo, and all those types of companies. “I’m the perfect fit for Warby Parker customer-service associate, I’m motivated and driven!” I started at Vice in my second month. The official title was “activation manager.” It entailed integrating branded content within the Vice world. My boss was two years older than me, and I was like, “How do we activate?,” and he’d reply, “I don’t know, just put together a media plan,” but I had no idea what a media plan was. I remember in a meeting early on, somebody said “Good job” to me, and then some co-worker of mine was like, “He never says that to anyone,” and I was like, “My God, I’m that bitch. New York is awesome.”
At Vice, I went from having one friend to having at least 100 acquaintances who were my age. It felt like getting my M.B.A. while also being abused and getting barely paid. Working there, you got thrown into this whirlwind of parties that were work-related but still had rampant drug and alcohol abuse. A lot of media people at the time were really mean, and I was really nice. I hadn’t really experienced a lot of cynicism or skepticism in the Midwest. I remember wearing a Mishka shirt to the office one time, and someone looked up and down and said, “Why are you wearing branded content to the office? That’s not cool.” I thought I was cool but kept being told otherwise. I got along best with people who were born and raised in New York. They thought I was funny because I was just confused all the time. They had seen it all, so my midwestern naïveté was a breath of fresh air.
Later that year, I wanted to sign a lease with my friend Blake. We must’ve seen 40 apartments. Our budget was $2,400 for a two-bedroom. I wanted a big space, and he wanted Manhattan. I remember suggesting we could live off the Montrose L stop, and he was like, “It’s dangerous there, you don’t want to go past Bedford.” It came to a point where I told him I wouldn’t room with him unless we signed the next lease we could. We walked into this place on 5th and Avenue A with a bunch of other people seeing it at the same time. Our Realtor, this weird yoga guy named Adam, told us we needed to run to the ATM and put the deposit down immediately. We let both of our accounts go negative and ran back with a wad of cash. The landlord was this Russian guy named John Black — definitely a fake name — and he looked at us and said, “Why don’t you make more money? I had three jobs — you guys both have one job each.” We made $32,000 a year each, and the apartment was $2,450 a month. “How are you gonna pay for it?,” he asked. I freaked out and convinced myself he was right and that I should’ve been grinding harder. I told him I’d become a bartender, too. But I didn’t end up getting a new job, and we took the apartment. It was 450 square feet, and I paid a little bit more and got the bigger bedroom. It was so dumb of me to drain my bank account for it, but it was the best apartment. We ended up living there for two years. My bedroom was furnished with things I found on the street.
Maybe because of where it was, but the apartment became the center of my social scene. People would just come over, even just to take a piss if they happened to be in the neighborhood. One time, eight dudes I didn’t know who were all in a band asked if they could sleep over. “Sure.” That night, there were seven men just sleeping on our floor and one in the bathroom. All of our other friends were subletting or in between places or living with girlfriends. We had a big living room, and it wasn’t a dump, so everyone always came to us. There was enough space for 20 or 30 people. It became the spot for pregaming, but the pregame lasted from 5 to midnight. When we’d leave, we didn’t go far. I had a one-block bar crawl that was just 5th and 6th Streets in between A and B.
We had just moved into this apartment when Hurricane Sandy happened. We were in the flood zone but on the second floor. All the businesses near us closed early. We went to Sidewalk Cafe for our last meal before the storm hit. I didn’t think it could be that bad because I had never experienced hurricanes in the middle of the country. We went to Sunny and Annie’s Deli and grabbed two sandwiches and 15 bags of chips, just in case. Then the power went out, and when we woke up the next day, we walked uptown from the East Village to charge our phones. Everyone who lived downtown had to find places to stay. A girl I had been flirting with at Vice lived in Williamsburg, which wasn’t as affected by the storm, so I texted her, “Can I sleep over?”
At a friend’s Vice going-away party, people were betting money in an arm-wrestling contest, which was sort of a common thing back then, but it was a toxic environment. I insisted I didn’t want to arm wrestle anyone because I was really good at it. I had been training for a good four or five months because I wanted to be able to strike up a conversation with people and win rounds at bars. Then, my deskmate challenged me. I accidentally broke his arm. As we were waiting at the hospital, he exhaled and said, “This is all karmic energy coming back to me.” He had been sleeping with my ex-girlfriend, the same Williamsburg girl from Vice I’d been having a situationship with before people called them situationships. He’d known all the details of the fling because we sat next to each other, and we’d talk about all of it. They’re married and have a kid now.
