In 2004 I taped this photo over my work ID photo because I was in that kind of mood. When I left NYCHA in 2010 and surrendered my ID I removed my old photo. During the six year period my baby picture was on my ID I was never stopped by security in any government building.
"Someone Should Keep an Eye on Him"
“That’s
it. I’ve had it.”
Staring
at the dirt encrusted window I made up my mind to cheer myself up. After September 11, 2001 my job relocated
from a building overlooking the World Trade Center to the industrial center of
Long Island City - the old Bloomingdale Warehouse on a concrete hill
overlooking the Long Island Railroad yards. I sat in a windowless closet dead center in the core of the
immense building where it took thirty seconds to walk to the nearest window to
see if it was light or dark outside. My space
reminded me of Limbo.
Limbo is the place
in Catholic mythology where lost souls take mail. As a kid they used to show us catechism
slides in preparation for our first confession, communion and
confirmation. Same slides were used for
all sacraments. The nun would pep up the
slides with a little bit of color analysis.
“Remember children, if you are not
baptized a Catholic, God will never welcome you into Heaven. You will spend eternity in a way station.”
“A what station?”
“A way station. Limbo is a way station.”
“A gas station?”
Kids usually enjoy pursuing this
line of questioning until it is stone dead but Limbo erased our curiosity. It was so boring the kids lost wind. The Limbo slide was a Twilight Zone drawing
of a group of men and women in 1950’s styled dress clothes standing in the
middle of a room with no windows looking up through a hole above the room where
the ceiling should have been. Alone at
night in my closet, I’d imagine the ceiling lifting away and some brooding
higher being staring down at me, drumming her finger against her chin.
After 31 months in LIC we made a
second temporary move. Our downtown
building, 90 Church Street, was still under renovation. My business moved me to the center of my New
York universe, 14 Street and 5th Avenue. My building straddled the West Village, East
Village, Union Square and Washington Square.
I pinched myself.
My job was boring. The only thing
making work tolerable was the location.
I loved our building. I loved the neighborhood. The energy in the streets was palatable. The schools and media/arts in the area
converged sending an electric charge through the air. Old churches with welcoming grounds, five
minute walk down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, my new iPod. I was getting in tune.
Unfortunately, the building owner
was not in tune. Our lease was up in six
months and cleaning our windows was not on his list of things to do. It drove me crazy to turn around at my desk
and see my seven-foot high window loaded with gook. The lack of natural light made me sad. All
that amazing people watching down there - I was losing a fantastic opportunity
to daydream a portion of my day away.
After several failed efforts trying to get building services to respond
I determined, “I can do this.”
I’m mechanically challenged. As a boy my parents paid me to leave our
Queens apartment over the weekend. They
planned to paint the apartment and did not want me anywhere near a brush or
paint can. They came to that decision
earlier when I used an entire gallon of paint to partially coat a small
closet. Most of the paint ended up on
the floor and my clothing. I finished up
by painting myself into the closet’s back wall.
My parents would not stir the paint till they were sure I had gotten on
the subway to Manhattan. This hamstrung
my home decorating development. I’ve decided to move once or twice in my life
rather than deal with painting an apartment.
If I walk pass a hardware store with a Benjamin Moore sign I can feel
the help looking out the window shaking their heads side to side. I am pre-judged. I walk the earth as Cain never to know the
satisfaction of a home project well done.
Up to three years ago I‘d stare at
a screw not knowing whether to turn it left or right to tighten or loosen
it. My cousin Jimmy, god bless him,
taught me a short poem, “Righty Tighty, Lefty Lucy”. I still mumble it under my breath when I
introduce myself to a screw. When my
daughter was five she said to her Mom, “Someone needs to keep an eye on
him.” This was her response to the crash
she heard in the kitchen when my make shift ladder, a chair with a milk case on
top of it, crumbled leaving me hanging from the cabinet over the sink.
Back on 14th Street, I
stared at the work window studying the problem.
It was heavy and huge. It could
hurt me. I stood on the sill gently
swinging the window in to let it lie across my desk. The dirt and dust flew in
with the breeze scattering my papers around the tiny office. Fifth Avenue roared below. The sound and the air felt good. I saw the caked up dirt and measured the
assignment. I needed loads of paper
towels and a bucket of water. It was
five thirty, the office was mostly empty so I took off my dress shirt and
turned my garbage can over enlisting it for bucket duty. Heading for the bathroom, I ran into my
office neighbor, Barry.
“What are doing?”
“Washing my office window.”
No kidding, I’d love to do that but
my window doesn’t swing out. It’s blocked
by the wall jutting out. What are using
to wash it?”
“This garbage can and paper
towels.”
“I bought a squeegee for cleaning
my car windows today. Do you want to
borrow it?”
“Absolutely, thanks.”
Filling the bucket with a few
gallons of water I returned to the window with my borrowed squeegee. It only took two to three passes of the
squeegee to blacken the water. I was not
clear on how the building would feel about me washing my own window. I decided to finish the job with the dirty
water rather than chancing a run in with a security guard walking the
floors. The squeegee had a one-foot
handle that allowed me to clean most of the window but not the very
bottom. There was no room on the side of
the window for me to approach it that way.
The only way to clean the bottom of the window was to let a little bit
of water pour down the glass from the top and take the dirt off the glass on
the pass. This worked well and my spirit lifted as I saw the dirt peel away
like volcano lava. The water fell from
the bottom lip of the window and spread out along the marble ledge outside my
window. Here is where my alternate
reality began playing tricks on me.
I love film and I love
architecture. Sometimes these two
subjects dovetail in my mind and what I see in film becomes my reality. I love Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and
Harold Lloyd. Their incredible stunts
tickled me to no end. Anytime I saw a
city scene in a silent film or an early talkie I assumed it was all taking
place in my world, Manhattan. Walking a
skyscraper’s ledge, hanging from a clock or tip toeing a plank bridging two
building roofs. It all took my breath away and it was all happening in New York
(not true, but what did that matter to me). I was mesmerized. As a boy I’d roam Manhattan looking up at the
tall buildings. I’d daydream about what building belonged in what film and if
it didn’t belong in that film didn’t it look just like the building that was in
that film. It got to the point where I
stopped looking up. It no longer
mattered. My mind was made up. Further viewing was not required.
I was convinced all tall buildings
between 14 Street and 23 Street on or near Fifth Avenue were built by insurance
companies. Each had been used as a
location in some old film involving a treacherous escape, rescue or
pursuit. How could I forget Harold Lloyd
hanging from the clock in “Safety Last”, or Oliver Hardy hanging by a telephone
wire out of a top floor window. All
these buildings had elaborate ornamentation - spires, towers, big face clocks,
columns, pillars, reliefs, gold roofs, chevrons, cupolas, and much more. Some
were stone wedding cakes with a complex series of ledges starting at the mid
floors leading up to the top floors kissing the sky. Armed with my fuzzy celluloid driven view of
the local building architecture I ill advisedly approached my cleaning chore
with faulty data.
So as the water dripped off the
window onto the outside ledge I gave no thought to its final destination. Because my building was built around the time
of the Great War in the last century the water-spilling out my window onto the
ledge would of course move onto another ledge, then another ledge then another
ledge till all the water was dispersed or evaporated. I was on a high floor. My building had many tiers to its wedding
cake and most of them were below me. I
was sure of this based on my movie memory rather than me ever performing an
actual visual assessment. Say for instance
me standing in front of my building and looking up. This never happened. What was the point?
Pleased with the way the window was
beginning to look I continued pouring the black water on the window. This was going so well I got caught up in the
moment and figured what the heck and emptied the entire bucket onto the
window. High floor, many ledges, the
building would soak it up on the way down.
My bucket empty I soaked up the
water on the glass with paper towels. I
was beaming, thinking to myself, “Mom loved a clean window, she’d be proud of
me.”
I threw all the dirty paper towels
in the bucket and began walking to the bathroom to wash up. When I came back to my office a security
guard and a building engineer bounced in right behind me.
“What are doing?” they
screeched. I knew the answer but shut
up. They were not here to congratulate
me on a job well done. Plus I still had
the bucket and the squeegee sticking out of it under my arm. My non-response encouraged their curiosity.
“WHAT ARE DOING?
YOU SOAKED SEVERAL PEOPLE IN THE
STREET.
YOUR WINDOW IS RIGHT OVER THE BUILDING’S
ENTRANCE.”
I stared at the two men thinking, the
great thing about life is the potential to learn something new everyday. The problem is sometimes you learn the new
thing on the wrong day. Now if I learned
a day before I washed the window that my office was right over my building’s
Fifth Avenue entrance, and that same day learned my office window’s ledge had
no sister ledge beneath it, then I would have developed a different plan for
washing my window. Much to my chagrin,
neither the security guard nor the building engineer was interested in life’s
potential or the order in which I learned new things.
I stood stupid in my wet T-shirt
absorbing their taunts and blows,
“You can’t do that?”
“”It’s against building
regulations.”
And each of them added my all-time
favorite Dad question to me.
“What were you thinking?”
I almost answered, but convinced
myself I was having an out of body experience and that this was happening to
someone else, not me. I stood
there, arms hanging at my sides, till they wore themselves out.
********************
The last time I remember seeing baby pigeons in NYC was the day we moved into 83rd Street on Rory's first birthday, June 20, 1957. Well, I saw them again out an air shaft's window three years ago.
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Admission is $8 with a free drink. Show starts @ 6pm. No reservations necessary. Pryor's hosting and telling one from his memoir, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys - tales of a scrappy New York boyhood."
