Interviews >> Carmit Levité                                                                        

Carmit Levité

(USA via Israel)

Pg.: 1,2,3,4,5,6

6. The glamorous or not-so-glamorous,
funny or not so funny faces
of living in New York.

Cristina: Let’s go back a little. So you stayed with that friend in the beginning, for six months. And then?

Carmit: And then I had to leave. At first, when we emailed, he said "No problem, pay when you can, when you start making money". When I stepped through the threshold of his door, my first day in the U.S., he said "I need money." Just the day before my grandmother gave me $150 for early survival. I had to own it up and give it to him. I said I’d pay him as soon as I got a job. I did get a job, after about a month, but it was making coffee somewhere and I wasn’t making too much money.

At some point his girlfriend began to hate the fact that I was living there. So I got an apartment on 8^th ave. and 54^th street that I shared with a very funny Chinese girl. She had a boyfriend upstairs and wanted someone to rent a room, but I wasn’t allowed to bring men there, because the boyfriend didn’t like the idea that I would be sleeping with a man in the same bed. Funny, a couple of months later I bumped into her and she said they split because he was cheating...

We lived there for three months but she became really psychotic at some point. I think I took a little bit of toilet paper once and she started to scream “It’s my toilet paper! You can’t use it!” That incident scared me so I moved in a place on 72^nd street. This woman I knew went on a tour for three months and I moved into her little studio. That was in September of ’98. When she came back I had to find an apartment. I had nowhere to go; I didn’t know what to do.

Finding an apartment in New York was a very hard thing, especially for what I could afford with my waitressing salary. But I think someone was looking out for me up there because I had to move by the first of the first, in ’99 and the week before I didn’t have a place to go but someone from Stella Adler was also in NYU (New York University); they have a database that only NYU students have access to, that shows you available apartments. He snuck me in and I found a place for $350 on 1^st avenue and 1^st Street, 10 minutes from my school. I went there right away. I called the landlord and when he interviewed me I almost broke into tears. “I have to have this place, I have nowhere to go. Please take me, I’ll die if you don’t.”

Cristina: Sometimes it helps to plead your case…

Carmit: Yes… well, I was going to be in the streets. He did call me back and said the only reason he gave me the apartment was because I was that desperate. He actually wanted to give it somebody else.

So I moved in with this guy who turned out to be a Buddhist monk. Every morning at 7 o’clock he went to his little shrine and started chanting … “num-wo-ho-rengaekyo, num-wo-ho-rengaekyo, num-wo-ho-rengaekyo”, every single morning.

Cristina: For how long?

Carmit: For 15-20 minutes. I had to get earplugs.

Once I went out with friends – and I don’t ever get drunk, but that night we had apple martinis which taste like apple juice so I drank a lot, got drunk and didn’t even notice it. It was Saturday night! I came home at six in the morning and because the next day was a Sunday I was planning on sleeping all day. Nine o’clock in the morning, three hours later, I start hearing a crowd of people chanting: “num-wo-ho-rengaekyo, num-wo-ho-rengaekyo ’. I could not believe my ears. I opened the door and there they were, fifteen people, next to the shrine, chanting. He didn’t even tell me. He didn’t leave a note on my door telling me that there was going to be the chanting session from Hell. I made my way out, between them, looking very pissed might I say, bad headache, minimal eyesight. Luckily I had a friend who was out of town so I went there and crashed.

7. Dating.

Carmit: On a different note, I had a boyfriend in Connecticut and I was there most of the time. A lot of weekends I was up to his place. I needed that balance.

Cristina: How did you meet him?

Carmit: Waitressing actually. He came into the restaurant one day and we started talking. I wasn’t really swept off my feet, but I got to know him and four months later it just happened. We were together for two years.

He was really amazing to me because when I lived in New York I was working eight days a week, and I was still trying to get used to the city itself, six months after I moved. After I met him, he started taking me out to shows and jazz sessions and then I understood what New York was about.

Cristina: What do you mean?

Carmit: Well, before I’d just been working and went home. I didn’t meet that many people. I didn’t really go out with the people in my class. We were together from nine to six and didn’t want to see each other after that. David (my boyfriend) took me out to places. We did things. Theatres, a lot of theatres, restaurants, and clubs. We hang out with a lot of jazz musicians. I never knew jazz before and he introduced me to jazz so for two years I knew nothing but jazz and I loved it.

He lived in Washington / Connecticut; there is this beautiful Eden up there. Trees, lakes and the air smells differently, like an enchanted forest. He had a house in the forest that was amazing.

Cristina: Is dating different in America? For instance, in Los Angeles there is a different “dating” culture than, say, New York. People have all these rules and rituals… If you meet somebody you like you can’t really call them right away, you have to wait two or three days. Or if you spend the whole day with someone, that’s a really big deal. I personally never quite understood those. I still do what I think I need to do, which probably killed a few romantic prospects. But that’s alright.

Carmit: To me everything is the same. I hate calling it “dating” for some reason. I never got it down. It’s strange, in America I had this two-year relationship in the beginning and after that I had these little romances. I don’t know what it is. But I realized very fast that if you don’t have chemistry from the beginning the relationship is not going to work.

I never played that sort of game, “He’ll call me, then I’ll call him” and that stuff back and forth. It was always something like I’d meet someone, get to know them and something would happen. I think in Israel the rules are exactly the same. I’m trying to remember because it’s been so long since I dated in Israel.

Cristina: Have you met guys who are afraid of that sort of commitment?

Carmit: I think everyone is different and you can’t really generalize. I think you attract people in the way that you are. I know for a fact that every single relationship that I’ve had had a reason. It’s a life lesson. I learned that if you’re not attracted to someone you become a mean animal. We need it. Animals always need to be attracted to someone. I thought it was really superficial of me to break the relationship for that reason, but I learnt that it wasn’t, that I became mean if I didn’t have it. That relationship taught me that.

8. Friendship. Making new friends (or not) and
learning how the baboons scratch
their backs (or not) in various parts of the world.

Carmit: I wasn’t getting along very well with my class mates and didn’t really socialize much with them. I was still getting used to the mentality. I don’t know what it was… perhaps the combination of European, or Israeli, or South-African mentalities, but it was for sure not the American mentality.

Carmit: The way people do things, the way people think, the way people speak ... these things were different for me. I’m still trying to figure out what exactly are these mentality differences. Even the fact that I say “[ t o m a’ t o ] instead of [ t o m æ’ t o ] got to them. They called me “The Princess”.

The first scene I ever did was from “A Streetcar Named Desire” which is a really hard scene. Tennessee Williams is just hard to do and you have to work very hard but my scene partner didn’t really want to do that. We would have rehearsals, I’d wait for him and he wouldn’t even come. I would be pissed, then he would get pissed that I got pissed.

Some of them were actually really good actors but I just didn’t get along with them very well. For example they would have a whole conversation about TV shows, that I wouldn’t participate in, because I didn’t know those TV shows. I never watched them because I never grew up here. And even the sense of humor… I have the Monty Python gene, I love them. And they have other people. It just makes you see things differently, appreciate things differently. They had a whole way of thinking that did not coincide with my way of thinking.

Cristina: Do you keep in touch with your friends in Israel?

Carmit: Absolutely. But we’re not in the same place anymore. Most of them are married with children.

Cristina: In terms of mentalities, people here have such a “can do” attitude. They want to try things, they have this entrepreneurial spirit that translates into “If I want to do something I’m just going to do it. I’ll try it”. The old country doesn’t necessarily have that. So we’re not on the same wavelength anymore. You start viewing life differently.

Carmit: What happens is that every time I am with my Israeli friends it feels like we never left each other. It could be years that we didn’t talk but when we see each other we are best friends again. We have trivial conversations such as “What did you eat today for lunch?”, as if we haven’t been apart. It’s great in the beginning and then we slip back to where we were. I think that is indicative of a very good relationship. A very good friendship.

But now… once they get married and have babies you don’t hear about them anymore. They are doing life as life intended: they have marriages and kids and having a good life. I think I’m the only one who decided to do something as crazy as this. I just took off and traveled. I think a lot of them would say they’d never do it, but they appreciate it for me.

 Read more: pg.4

FEATURED BOOK:

Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape

by Andrei Codrescu
Taking into account his own exile from Stalinist Romania, as well as the plights of such greats as Garcia Marquez, Breton, Dada, Kundera, and Milosz, Codrescu issues a call for those living in a free society to reach beyond a benign reality founded in technology and commercialism by tapping into their imaginations and striving for a better, evolutionary existence.

Sonia Choquette. (first generation born in the USA)
"The first thing to say about the experience of an immigrant is that people are like a tree whose roots have been cut off. Fortunately the human spirit is regenerative but only if you acknowledge that you have suffered a major psychic wound, even if you move under the best of conditions. So you can build new roots." Read more...