I lived in four different homes in England. Then, when I was 14, we moved across The Pond.

Our first home was a Residence Inn in Vestal, NY (the one next to the Fox 40 WICV TV station), where we lived for 2 weeks pending the settlement of buying our new home in the sticks of Binghamton. It was right next to where my dad worked and swung his H1-B to get the rest of us into the promised land.

And I'd never seen so much snow in my life. It actually stuck to the ground! And it stayed there for months, year after year, for about 5 years. In England we'd lived on the south coast, where the submarine jet streams carried warmth from the tropics and moderated the weather. It was wet, it was often cold, but it rarely froze like this.

In '95 or so, after my dad had lost his job in the wake of the company's collapse, we moved to a rental house down the road from the former IBM headquarters in Endicott. The town had been polluted, Erin Brockovich-style, from a chemical spill in the 80s, and we were a block from one of the permanent pumping stations that IBM had set up in the middle of a row of Victorians. Endlessly pumping water into the ground, sucking it back out, filtering the gunk from the spill, and cycling it all back in again. One of these days the town will let them tear it down and stop paying its multi-million dollar utility bill.

A few years later we lost that house and, thanks to a favor from a family friend, moved two more blocks away to an apartment building. Someone strange moved into where I'd once lived, and because we were still so close I got to see them every day, occupying a home we'd been too poor to afford.

I landed a job with an independent dial-up Internet Service Provider on Long Island less than a year after that, and packed my things to move into the back of someone's garage. It was an illegal apartment, chopped out of the corner of someone's house in Levittown.

The history of Levittown is: WWII ended, lots of GIs laid their honeys the minute they got off the boat, and a couple of entrepreneurs called the Levitt Brothers purchased some old potato farms in Long Island and ramped up the construction of some of the first production-line homes to absorb the baby-boom of the 1950s. The couple I rented the hovel from had moved in on Day One and never moved out. They were anchored, and growing spectacularly old.

The ISP was owned by the son of a rich couple, who financed the whole operation until they discovered that their engineering-oriented progeny hadn't billed customers for nearly 2 years while he worked on the Best Ever Perl Module For Producing Postscript Formatted Invoices (tm). Then a software company next door wiggled their accountant's fingers and "acquired" us. I think they just liked having a bigger office, and thought the cost of the acquisition could be financed with subscription income. This wasn't Silicon Valley, see. This was Long Island.

I lived in Levittown until this acquisitive company--always one contract away from starvation--ran out of cash in the payroll account. While I went freelance for a while, I moved out of Nassau County the moment I got a steady job further east.

Nassau County is, to me, a shanty town. Take the Hempstead Turnpike, for example. Imagine a scar you've been picking for the last ten years, so the flesh is dark pink and rubbery, and translate that--in your mind--to the blistered asphalt of a suburban boulevard rimmed with the clotted curtain of telephone poles sagging with orphaned utility cables, shopping malls with a supermarket as their anchor store, squat buildings, and what rumor says is Billy Joel's "Mr. Cacciatore's down on Sullivan Street, across from the Medical Center."

Getting out of there to Suffolk County was, at first impression, bliss. But I'd leapt from the frying pan into the fire, because I'd moved into a "house share" situation with some new friends. As the highest wage-earner, I found myself the Lender of Last Resort for things like utilities, because if I didn't pay for the oil, we'd all freeze. We enjoyed some choice blackouts until I got electricity in my name.

A weird thing happened two years later. The owner of the house we were renting had, apparently, financed the mortgage through his grandfather in order to land a better interest rate. We wrote rent checks to the landlord, and he wrote a check to his grandfather, and the grandfather wrote a check to the bank.

Then one day we were informed by a nice man from the bank knocking on our door and attempting to serve papers, and then in more detail from the landlord, that Grandpa had a gambling problem and hadn't been paying the mortgage.

I went to the Internet and found another house nearby, like 3 minutes drive away across the town border, that was big enough for all of us. As a whopping bonus, the rent was hundreds of dollars less than we were paying for Foreclosure House. In a delusional state, I took my financially questionable friends with me, and the situation went from bad to surreal.

On the first night that we moved in, a cold day in mid February, we took advantage of the hot tub in the backyard. I put on swim shorts, turned up the bubbles, and jumped in. My muscles were full of the kind of "ouch" you get from lugging furniture and boxes for two days, and the hot water was a miraculous contrast to the frost on the ground. Then my house-mate jumped in, followed by one of his lady friends. He was wearing shorts. She was wearing a smile, and nothing else.

A few hours later the new neighborhood we'd moved into was pitted in an epic struggle of Good-versus-Riff-Raff. We didn't even last a whole 2 months. The gate to the back-yard was damaged before we moved in. Ah-ah-ah! Ordinance violation! Swimming pool with unlocked gate! $250, please. We didn't know what the garbage pickup schedule was, and on the first day we had several sacks of garbage from unboxing our stuff, more than could fit in a single can. Ooopsie, garbage outside of a container. Your neighbors helpfully reported this twelve seconds later and another $250 fine.

They spread a petition around the neighborhood. Convinced that we were drug dealers and pedophile rapists, I watched my sensible neighbors escort their children to the curb every morning to get on the school bus. Then there was the Town Hall meeting.

I showed up. I shouldn't have, because the rest of the street had, too.

I sat at the back and watched people look over their shoulders at me, and I vibrated with adrenaline. My turn came up and I walked to the front, asked the town council to address the audience (a packed house), and laid it out with a shaky voice. Someone stood up and accused me of calling it a witch hunt, and I don't remember much of what I said to them. I remember mostly the imaginary rebuttals, the righteous ones you imagine in the sleepless nights after the fact. L'esprit de l'escalier.

We retreated, weeks later, to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, hastily rented. It was the most gorgeous property I have ever lived on. I'm not kidding. Here it is:

A farmers market across the road. A bar within staggering distance. A pond with ducks and geese.

I had to move again last year, this time alone, and to a corporate managed apartment complex, and I don't care anymore. I moved because all my friends who were splitting the rent with me found other threads of their lives, followed them, and moved out. I couldn't afford it anymore. My father had a heart attack, which he survived, and I decided to move closer to him.

Now I live in a Big Hotel Room, and it's exactly what I need right now. I hate moving.

Oh, and that place we got chased out of because of le femme au naturale in the hot-tub? One of my house mates got violently sick after moving in. After we moved out, the landlord found another family to take our place. They also got violently sick. The entire house was rotten to the core with Stachybotrys. Toxic mold. It's presently spreading to the neighbors who chased us out, or else devaluing every abode on the street by simply being there.

Karma. What a bitch.