Kurt Vonnegut’s house. Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

In my earliest childhood memories—the big blur we will call the gear shift between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a distant star. Fuzzy, soft, a blurred edge that feels so far away in the way that childhood always feels so far away. Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a small upstate city between the rivers Mohawk and Hudson. Home of the perfect 12345 zip code. The location of the General Electric Power headquarters. Girls wearing low-rise jeans to rent VHS tapes at the Hollywood Video on Balltown Road. Street names: Brandywine, McClellan, Union, Glenwood Boulevard, Nott, Van Vranken. A white clapboard church hovering atop a hill on a rural route—I used to take modern dance classes there. An ice-skating rink next to an Air Force base where the pilots flew to Antarctica, always flying so low when they went over my house. NXIVM ladies planning their volleyball trips to Lake George. My parents knew the exact address of where the Unabomber’s mother and brother lived, in a historic district called the Stockade. And as for me, I do not remember when I first registered that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, a small hamlet in Schenectady County, named after the Dutch expression aal plaats, which means “a place of eels.” (There were no eels that I am aware of.) I think it was in high school. I think my hair was cut short. I think it was when I was a virgin. I think it was when I got a job as a bookseller at the Open Door on Jay. I think I was probably sixteen.

I already loved Kurt when I found out that for a few years after World War II he lived an eight-minute drive from the house I grew up in. As a teenager in Schenectady, I read not all but most of his books. It was because of my father, who also loved Kurt. He gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it was the first time that I fell in love with a novel, because it was brutal and hilarious and weird and terrifyingly sad. Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be … In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.”

Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five and a guy who will live in a human zoo later in the novel. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut did not own a lovely Georgian home. He was there, in Schenectady, because he got a job at General Electric’s corporate campus, working in the publicity department. Working at GE got him into writing science fiction. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he said in an interview, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.” During his time at GE, he wrote Player Piano, his first novel. His thing is that he wanted to just do that full time. Write books. But he wasn’t ready to do that full time yet, thus the job. So Vonnegut moved into the house, not far from the GE campus, in Alplaus, a middle-class hamlet on the Alplaus Creek and Mohawk River. 

In August, I decided to drive to the house for the first time. I did this with my father, because he was the one who gave me Slaughterhouse-Five, and also because he’s now semi-retired and agreed in advance that it would be “funny,” and “cool,” to accompany his twenty-seven-year-old daughter on a “reporting trip” four miles down the road from his house. “Did you know he lived in Schenectady before you moved here?” I asked my father. “No, I don’t think so,” he responded. Out the window: my former elementary school and preschool, the Chinese Fellowship Bible Church, anonymous corporate campuses, new housing developments that when I was a kid were huge, empty fields.

Vonnegut’s house, which I found by googling “Vonnegut’s house Schenectady NY,” is set directly overlooking Alplaus Creek, on a quiet side street. It is kind of in the woods. Lots of big trees on the street. The houses are old but not old. None of them are big. A few of them have big campers and ATVs out front, and the occasional snow mobile. Old cowboy boots used as planters and wind chimes. Vonnegut’s house is red, slightly set back from the road. It has seen better days, but it is kind of charmingly shabby, overgrown with plants spilling out of the gutters. No plaque. It is not marked in any way. There is a camper parked in front, empty water coolers lying on the front porch, and an early aughts VW bug in the driveway. It remains a private residence. When my father and I showed up, we basically hid behind the camper for a few minutes. He narrated the scene out loud. “Alplaus, New York,” he said, “where the state bird is the mosquito!” I sat there in silence on account of being shy. 

Thus: I failed to stop my father from talking to the pink-haired teenage boy who saw us basically hiding behind his parents’ RV.

Thus: “Do you know that Kurt Vonnegut used to live in this house?” my father said to the teenage boy with pink hair.

“Uh, yeah,” he said.

“Do you have people stop by your house all the time asking about Kurt Vonnegut?” my father continued.

“Sometimes,” the teenage boy responded.

The boy’s father came outside, probably because he saw him chatting with a strange middle-aged man and his sullen adult daughter. The boy’s father was a man named David Lovelady, from Liverpool, England. He was very friendly. Excited to talk to us about Kurt Vonnegut’s house, shepherding us onto his front lawn and introducing us to his three chickens. David did not know he had purchased Kurt Vonnegut’s house until he and his wife had basically closed on it. He had found out that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, and when he googled it, he was delighted to discover that not only had Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, but he had lived in the very house that David and his wife had just bought!

His wife, Gail, came out; so did the rest of their kids. They asked if we wanted to see inside. The thing about the house, they told us, is that it was not haunted, because ghosts are not real, but also a copy of Player Piano, sitting face out on a bookshelf, kept falling on the head of one of their kids and as a result the family had this inside joke about it being Kurt’s ghost. Obviously, I wanted to see the haunted bookshelf so they showed me the haunted bookshelf. It looked pretty normal. Also facing out was a stuffed animal gnome holding a coffee cup that said “Best Mom,” and a book about raising chickens. I cannot stress enough that the house of Kurt Vonnegut is now just a completely normal house where people live and is full of completely normal things that appear in completely normal houses. Which to me makes a lot of sense. Vonnegut in my opinion is a charming and scrappy weirdo. He is not the kind of person you think of as living on some kind of grand estate. 

Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

David asked my father and me how we even knew the house was here. I told him I probably learned about it at the bookstore I worked at in high school, people would occasionally come in and ask about it. How in the early 2010s you still had a handful of people who did not know about the magic of Google Maps and therefore you had to physically give them directions. I tried to remember what this was like. To have once been a girl, age sixteen, telling people to “turn right onto Freeman’s Bridge.” To drive past the abandoned Alco factory that is now a casino where I was once forced to see a U2 cover band. The ice cream place, Jumpin’ Jacks, where they show fireworks on the Fourth. The banquet hall, the Glen Sanders, where we had my senior prom.

My father and I decided we had stayed long enough at the house. Our hosts were headed off on a trip to the coast. They (the Lovelady clan) suggested we go down the street to an old general store where Vonnegut had rented some office space, so we did that and took some more pictures. This part was not interesting. It involved my father and me doing some reconnaissance for about five minutes and then deciding we were done. Additionally, I was criticized for not taking iPhone photography in landscape mode. So we drove home, back to the house where I grew up. I logged on to the internet and I did some research about when Vonnegut left Schenectady. The answer was basically: as soon as he could. He moved to Cape Cod in 1951 to write full time, decamping to the village of Barnstable to a similarly unassuming but lovely small house.

He was not a very ostentatious guy. Of all of the places he lived, the most regal was a brownstone in Turtle Bay, a slim white home down the street from where E. B. White also once lived. Apparently he (Vonnegut) once almost burned down the house because he was obsessed with smoking inside. This to me is almost a comforting thought—Vonnegut carelessly lighting cigarettes inside of his abode. This makes sense to me, that he lived a little messily and not for show, because he is the kind of person who wrote beautifully and hilariously about being a person. He wrote science fiction novels that were not corny or ridiculous or dorky. Just in a way that feels extremely human, which, if you are writing all the time about outer space, is a triumph. 

Sophie Frances Kemp is a writer in Brooklyn, originally from Schenectady, New York. She has published nonfiction in GQ, Vogue, and The Nation, and fiction in The Baffler and Forever. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.

The line outside the Sale of the Century. Photograph by Sara Bosworth.

In the high noon heat of the big hot sun, the intersection of Broadway and Lafayette was an ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail, a snake that was not a snake at all but actually a line of mostly women—who were nearly all young and definitely all well dressed—waiting to go inside a NoHo loft to go shopping. But okay—this was not some sort of run-of-the-mill sample sale. No one waiting in that line was there just because they were looking for a little something to do on a Sunday morning in May. These girls were in line because inside that loft was a woman named Chloë Sevigny. She was there because she was selling her clothes. These girls were waiting in line because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was Chloë’s stuff, at an event quite literally advertised, in the promotional materials, as the Sale of the Century.

It is not that insane to wait in that ouroboros of a line for three hours, when you think about it. She’s Chloë: Harmony Korine’s muse, wearing bleached eyebrows in the movie Gummo. Dancing to the O’Jays’ “Love Train” in a subway car in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. Appearing naked and pregnant on the cover of Playgirl. She’s the kind of celebrity who can get her one million Instagram followers to wake up early on a Sunday to buy her toothpaste. The second the sale began, it was already a viral event—like Black Friday for fashion-school freaks. TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram were flooded with vibey haul videos, memes implying sartorially motivated violence, posts about new female friendships forged in line, allusions to the Bush presidency, and suggestions that maybe you could find a girl to date among the racks? And most importantly: a reminder that “if you’re in line for Chloë Sevigny’s storage-unit sale, please stay in line.” It is true that a specific subset of New Yorkers seemed to be saying (or posting), “chloë sale! chloë sale! chloë sale!”

To be clear, I am one of these girls, a lover of Chloë, someone who has spent years showing the stylist at the hair salon a picture of her in Kids. But I did not have to stand in the ouroboros of girls, for a few important reasons. The first is that Chloë wasn’t the only person selling clothes in NoHo that afternoon. The Sale of the Century was actually put together by Liana Satenstein, a former Vogue staffer who organizes closet clean-outs for fashion icons. In addition to Chloë’s stuff, the sale also featured selections from the closets of Sally Singer, the former creative director of Vogue who now heads fashion at Amazon; Lynn Yaeger, a Vogue contributing editor known to wear whimsical Comme des Garçons frocks; and the longtime Paper magazine editor Mickey Boardman. I was Sally’s assistant at Vogue when I first moved to New York, once upon a time. Therefore, when I arrived at 676 Broadway at 11:55 A.M., I sent her a text and floated to the front of the line with my friends Anika and Sage. The other reason we got to skip the line is because it was my twenty-seventh birthday, and sometimes when you turn a new age you get lucky. 

At the sale, in the loft, were, predictably, racks upon racks of clothing, some of the items costing hundreds of dollars, or hovering around a thousand. Still, some of it was very reasonable for good-quality designer vintage. A wall of antique Victorian blouses with high-necked, intricate embroidery, more or less all under a hundred dollars. A literal chess set from Chanel, priced to sell at $450. A gray Brooks Brothers suit with shorts instead of pants. A reddish-pink ballerina skirt with a Blumarine vibe. A scarf commemorating the nuptials of one Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Prada purses and a pair of Birkenstocks. A lot of it looked like normal vintage clothing—it was better curated, but the items more or less achieved their mystique because of their former owners. 

And the people: it was not as crowded inside as you would expect, but it was still crowded. And the media: an army of photographers from every fashion magazine in New York, asking the shoppers their age, their job, how to spell their names. Blasting from the speakers was electronic, compressed, sugary music that made me feel like I was in a movie about going to a Chloë Sevigny closet sale. A girl with drawn-on eyebrows was wielding a vintage camcorder, walking around and interviewing shoppers. A mother with blue hair and her twenty-something daughter told me they had gotten in line at nine thirty in the morning. I heard a rumor that a few girls got in line at 6 A.M., and it doesn’t really matter if the rumor is true. There were club kids in platform sneakers and fashion gays in polo ties; girls with shaved heads in tattered slip dresses and girls who dressed like little orphans from a sketch by the hand of Ludwig Bemelmans. Anika got photographed by W magazine and gracefully changed in front of the photographer into the new outfit she had just purchased—the Brooks Brothers suit and a baby-doll blouse—like some kind of movie star. At one point I accidentally began to talk to a reporter from the New York Times, answering his questions—(my name: Sophie; my age: twenty-seven, as of three hours ago; what I was doing here: shopping for various items)—before he abruptly stopped when he realized I too was a writer.

And Chloë was there with her son, a beautiful little three-year-old boy with a halo of blonde curls. Mostly she sat on a couch by the back entrance to the loft, but she wandered into the dressing area too. In fact, she walked past me as I was trying on this bizarrely baroque white linen horseback riding suit. It seemed reasonably priced at eighty-five dollars, fit me perfectly, and made me look like a tragically beautiful stable boy in a Watteau painting. “Looks great,” she said as she watched me check myself out in the mirror. “I wore that to dinner with Nicolas.” (She meant Ghesquière, the legendary former creative director of Balenciaga). Obviously I bought the suit. What would you have done if you were in my situation? Sage and a nineteen-year-old twink in Marie Antoinette makeup were told by one of the reporters that they should get married because, in Sage’s words: “We didn’t beat each other up over what was best described as a Union soldier cosplay crop top.” 

I walked around and observed, pretending I was a feudal lord of a different époque and that all the shoppers, these girls and gays in their opulent little outfits, were my beautiful serfs. I said hello to Sally and locked eyes with Tommy Dorfman. I saw on social media later that day that Chelsea Manning had been there too—the Daily Mail had written about it, calling her a “35-year-old security consultant.” I leafed through Lynn Yaeger’s rack of Comme des Garçons skirts and briefly considered buying a see-through purple Gucci blouse from Sally. I ended up making two important purchases, both from Chloë’s rack: the baroque horseback-riding thing and this gorgeous sleeveless Victorian blouse with a high neck, priced at sixty-five dollars. Then I was shepherded outside by a crowd-control person who gently suggested leaving now that I had completed my shopping. 

The line was still incredibly long—only forty-five minutes had passed. A frantic British woman in hangover sunglasses came up to me and asked if I thought there would still be clothing if she got in line now. I said probably not. What I wanted to say was: Save yourself babe, it is really crazy in there. 

We left, and Anika and I walked into the Village. I stepped inside of a café bathroom to change into my new riding suit thing and splash cold water on my face. The buzz of my morning caffeine had dulled and I now felt exhausted leaving the Sale of the Century. I got on the F train to go to Red Hook and when it went above ground at Smith and Ninth Street suddenly it was summer and the music in my headphones was Prefab Sprout and New York looked like a big fantasy snow globe that you could buy at a gas station somewhere very far away. As it turned out I had stayed up until 5 A.M. the night before and slept with my ex-boyfriend; I texted him a procedural question about what had happened and he said that twenty-seven was going to be the best year of my life. And how could it not be? I had my new clothes. I was living in Chloë’s New York.

Sophie Frances Kemp is a writer in Brooklyn, originally from Schenectady, New York. She has published nonfiction in GQ, Vogue, and The Nation, and fiction in The Baffler and Forever. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.

Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

I was trying on brassieres at Azaleas, the one next to the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue. All the brassieres looked terrible on me. This is because I have very small breasts (which is okay, because I have absolutely fabulous areolas). I picked out one that was a very pale blush pink, and paid seventy dollars for it. Then my phone rang. It was my roommate. There were bumps all over her body. “They are very itchy,” she said, and asked me if I had them, too. I did not. When I got back to our apartment in South Brooklyn, I stripped my sheets off my bed. There was a large brown bug sunbathing on my mattress. I poked it with a pen. It made a movement that seemed to say: Ouch. I scanned the bed: there was a constellation of ink-colored droplets. 

The bedbug summer was in 2019. I had just turned twenty-three. I was working at Vogue as an assistant. I was making very little money. I thought I was punk because I would often show up to work with a gin hangover, plug in a pair of headphones, and play YouTube videos where various artists performed industrial music. I thought I was punk because all of my clothes were from the garbage or had been gifted to me by people who also worked at Vogue (okay, I did buy stuff, like the bra). I thought I was punk because I was dating a former child jazz prodigy who lived in a DIY venue in Gowanus with no shower, no kitchen, but massive windows, hardwood floors. A posh nightclub had opened up next door and I sometimes went there to pee because I liked the soap. It all made me feel very cool even though in reality it was pathetic. My boyfriend slept on a twin-sized cot inside of what was functionally an electrical closet. He was the first person I called about the bedbugs. That evening he took me to the nightclub and bought me a cocktail. He had a freckle inside his eyelid and it looked like a wet pebble. I was totally in love with him.

It was not a good situation. The next morning, there was a large man in my apartment. It was the Fourth of July. The man was wearing a hazmat suit. He was going to do what he called a radical intervention re: the bugs. It involved a breakthrough in technology. He had come from New Jersey in a Sprinter van. He met us at an ATM on Newkirk Avenue so we could pay him in cash. My roommate tried to blame the whole thing on me. And why wouldn’t she? She had a nice boyfriend in medical school who liked to cook her dinner. I told her that she was insane, to make me pay for the whole thing. This was New York City. Nefarious individuals could have come into our home during the night and sprinkled the bedbugs on our sheets. We had to at least get the landlord involved. The landlord called us gullible idiots and then said she’d split it three ways because the exterminator we picked was too expensive. The man left our house. I still was not itchy. On the internet it said not everyone was allergic to bedbugs. I liked this fact: I was some kind of biological miracle? I did not want to spend any more time in the bedbug apartment so I went to my boyfriend’s DIY venue and poured a bottle of Bailey’s into an XL Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee cup, and then we took the subway to Far Rockaway. 

After a few weeks, the bedbugs were physically gone, but I continued to see them everywhere. In my clothes. In my backpack, which I had taken to ironing at least twice a day just to be safe. I had given them to everyone at Vogue, probably. There was this thing where my boyfriend told me that a woman he used to fuck also had gotten bedbugs, not long before we started dating. I started flipping over the mattress on his cot to inspect it every time he went to the bathroom after sex. I would crawl around on the floor completely naked, aiming my iPhone flashlight at the ground, like a coal miner. I was subsisting on a lot of Cool Blue Gatorade and really cheap Thai food. Around this time I was attacked by a cat in a bodega. It became clear to me that my boyfriend was probably addicted to smoking marijuana. I had basically stopped letting people into my apartment, including myself. 

I decided I was being punished, Old Testament–style. I would sit at my desk at work and think of how I had been affected by each of the biblical plagues:

(1) Water turning to blood: I had been menstruating for almost a decade at this point.
(2) Frogs: I had seen frogs in various ponds. 
(3) Lice: I had been spared from this one, so far.
(4) Flies: I am from upstate New York and they are always talking about black fly season there. I had personally experienced this—a swarm of them around my head in the High Peaks Wilderness.
(5) Livestock pestilence: I used to eat semi-rancid deli meat when depressed.
(6) Boils: To this day I am a hormonal acne sufferer.
(7) Hail: Again, from upstate New York. There is a joke among locals that is like, What are the seasons in upstate New York? Winter, winter, winter, roadwork. Ha ha ha.
(8) Darkness: Constant, neverending.
(9) Locusts: This was the bedbugs.
(10) Slaying of the firstborn: A false positive from a pregnancy test purchased at a pharmacy near the Jules Joffrin station in Paris. The father would’ve been this guy Antoine, who used to pick me up from school at La Sorbonne and then have sex with me while we watched music videos by the artist Micachu and the Shapes on the television in his apartment in Belleville. He was a decade older than me. He was one of the first people that I’d ever had sex with. If we’d had a daughter she would’ve been so pretty. 

By the start of the fall, I had completely lost my mind. It was comical. I started seeing a therapist and was swiftly diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. My boyfriend had made it clear to me that even though I loved him, he did not love me. I was tired of being punk. I was tired of walking around in a bikini as a shirt. It was all such a weird season. In January 2020, after a long breakup—far overdue—I moved to a small but stunning apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone. There were no bedbugs there. My new roommates were nice. I pushed my bed into a corner and sat on the fire escape and drank wine out of a mug. The plagues were over (or so I thought). A few months later, I realized that all my clothes were infested with moths. 

Sophie Frances Kemp is a writer in Brooklyn, originally from Schenectady, New York. She has published non-fiction in GQ, Vogue, and The Nation, and fiction in The Baffler and Forever. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.