That evening three burly men from the warehouse my employer used helped me unload the U-Haul and push all my belongings up the four candy-cane shaped flights of stairs to my new apartment. It was a tricky operation, and it didn’t take long before I was sweat-soaked and swearing, vividly cursing each rotten step and impossibly placed turn. The guys laughed at me. I was inexperienced.
Spike, the company foreman, spat over a tall stack of crates overflowing with paperbacks, “All these books and you still don’t know shit about moving a box!” There was laughter.
I was soft to the real world. I was, as far as the movers were concerned, not worth very much at all. One of the guys, Oscar, called me a Chuckle-Head.
“You think you know a guy until you move his stuff!” cried Johnny Whip, a tall young man with tattooed eyeliner and bleached-blond hair.
These jibes didn’t prevent me from inventing new words as I climbed the stairs, foul sounding things rocked up with lots of consonants to color the hatred I had for evil tenement builders. And then, near the end of the move, I stumbled while hefting my dresser up the stairs with Johnny Whip. Johnny lost his balance, I lost my grip, and the corner of the dresser crushed my toe against the iron railing. The pain was tremendous.
“Pick it up!” I shouted, flailing. “Pick it up!”
Johnny cocked his head but didn’t move.
“My toe! It’s broken! Oh God - I think it came off!” I screamed, “Pick it up!”
Johnny shrugged, the corner of the dresser came up and I tumbled backwards, rolled, and fell face first onto the filthy third-floor landing.
The hall filled with muffled laughter.
“NOT FUNNY!” I shrieked, knowing well that my toe had been severed. The muffled laughter gave way to sonorous hee-hawing. Angrier words formed on my lips as I rolled against the tiled landing, but they failed suddenly as a young woman, barefoot, with brightly painted toenails appeared in front of me. The storm of laughter abated quickly.
“Is everything okay? Do you need some help?” Her voice was light, and cheerful.
“He needs help,” said Oscar, breathlessly. “He stubbed his toe.”
“It’s not stubbed!” I shrieked, bloodied lipped, “It’s… this is serious! I’m sure it’s...” And then, still too wretchedly embarrassed to bring my gaze up again beyond those toes, I muttered, “I can’t feel it...”
“Let’s take a look,” she said, gently and knelt beside me. Our eyes met. She was pretty, very pretty.
Doubled over, I grabbed my shoe with both hands and shook it. “It’s not good...”
Her chin quivered a bit. She smiled. “I don’t know. If you’re hurt I can grab some things - bandages, I have a first-aid kit. Let’s take a look.”
I waited. She waited. Johnny popped his head over the railing from the floor above. The show-off had managed to get the dresser up the last flight of stairs without any assistance.
“God,” I mumbled, “I can feel the blood soaking through…”
She didn’t move. I pulled off my shoe and peeled off my sock with one finger and cringed.
The toe was still attached and there was no blood.
“Maybe it’s the other foot?” she said, holding back a smile.
“It feels like it’s been severed,” I whimpered.
“He tripped on himself!” Johnny railed from above.
“I didn’t - didn’t do it!” I stammered. “It’s this building. It’s the stairwell!” I turned to the pretty woman. “You live here! You know!”
And so I found myself on my back with my foot in my hand, suddenly sputtering awful things to this dark-haired beauty about more than just the pain from stubbing my toe. It was my duty to tell her that there were terrible injustices in the world, and that there were people, horrible people, who fed themselves, without consequence or concern, on the flesh from the backs of those who toiled every day to earn an honest dollar. I wanted to tell her about turkey-hawks and buzzards. This twisted staircase, this twisted tenement, had been built upon the burned and crumbled ruins of other past abominations. But all I could do was sputter these things, sputter them no farther than the edge of my lower lip. I sputtered, and as I sputtered, I ogled her toenails. They were really dazzling, those toenails… those toes.
“Did you bang your head too?” And she bellowed, almost gleefully, into the stairwell, “He’s mumbling! Can you hear him?!”
She leaned over again and smiled. It was a gift of beauty and civility. “We’re all clumsy sometimes! Listen, it looks okay to me. But if you need anything - an ice-pack,” she smiled again, “or an ambulance… you know where to find me! I live in the 3a – it’s that apartment, one floor below.” She pointed one long, beautiful finger to a door at the end of the hallway, and then floated away.
This beautiful woman, I thought, I would have to do something, something to redeem myself in her eyes - something mighty, maybe something touching. I could save her life, or perhaps bake a cake. I sat on the landing with my foot in my hand.
“You just gonna sit there?” Spike dropped a box in my lap.
Up and down.
I got to meet a few other neighbors as we finished up the move. Mary, a slight, brittle woman with an exploded firecracker hairdo introduced herself at the entrance to the building and told me in gruff voice, “It’s a climb! Thirty years ago I wanted to live upstairs! So I say, Harry, let’s move to six!” Then, with a weed-whacker chuckle, she said, “We moved to six and he doesn’t want the stairs. He decides he’s better off dead!”
A few other elderly residents welcomed me with smiles and short, pleasant introductions.
These were the ‘Nesters’, seniors who had lived in the building most of their lives. They were a group of locals, the last of the lower middle-class tenants who had spent upward of fifty years moving from one apartment to another, always up, aiming toward the top of the building where the apartments had more light and less noise than the lower apartments. These were the villagers of a previous era who were blameless in their inability to anticipate the rampant influx of vast new wealth into their neighborhoods, a wealth that would dwarf them, render them helpless and deny them any claims to luxury in their golden years. They grew old waiting to move up and I immediately loved them for their patience and determination. I loved them for knowing me instantly.
I lived on four and that made me lucky. Four gave me the advantage of a bright, sunny apartment, a coveted perk. This was because our building stood six stories between adjacent buildings only three stories tall. It also meant that my kitchen window looked onto the roof of one of those adjacent apartment buildings. I could, if I wanted, climb out my kitchen window and step nimbly over a one-foot precipice, onto the neighboring roof. When we finished moving, I tipped the men, gave the keys to the U-haul to Oscar, and went back to the apartment to let my cat out of the bathroom. He’d been locked up in there for hours.
“How’s it going Fraidy?” I asked, inching the door open. Fraidycat peered out from below the cast iron tub and growled.
