Chapter 4-1

       

SuperDuper 4

    I put in for a week of vacation and pledged to avoid the bars for the duration. I had barely seen my own apartment in the daylight and FraidyCat was getting very edgy spending all his days alone, sharing only a few early-morning hours a week with a hundred and forty-pound wheezing hang-over. 

    With a one-week vacation I would spend quality time with FraidyCat. I would visit the local markets and cook food at home. I’d lounge around the apartment, read a heap of books in the cozy shaded corner of the front room. There would be air - more air than possible - filling the apartment and it would be lightly laced with the aroma of green tea and honey. I made plans to buy a small, soft rug to place on the delicately polished oak floor. I’d sit on the rug and meditate. I’d speak gently to the pale green hanging fern that I would buy at the Korean market. It would be a happy fern. I would get to know the neighbors in my building, maybe the woman with the toes. We could bake a cake and share some joy. I had big easy plans for my week off.

 

    Saturday morning. 

    The cash machine in the bank’s atrium whizzed and spat, whizzed and spat. It was glorious. The crisp bills snapped out from the machine, perfectly aligned, perfectly stacked, on and on and on. “Zziiip-plat! Zziip-plat! Zziip-plat! Zzip-plat!” I got excited thinking that perhaps the machine had gone bananas.

    I smiled, finally expecting the machine to stop. I put a hand out to grab the dough, but the machine didn’t stop. I swallowed hard.

    My heart began to beat harder, first pounding in the chest and then spreading outward, upward, until it felt like I had a squirrel on each shoulder leaning in on my ears, whispering things to me between tiny squirrel-fisted furry-nailed jabs at my eardrums. 

    ‘What if it really happens?’ Whack! ‘If the machine is busted!’ Whack! Whack! ‘If it dumps its load right here?’ 

    I cringed. 

    Enjoying a momentary fantasy about a cash machine gone hog-wild and having a cash machine actually go hog-wild were two completely different things. One required absolutely no effort and exacted no consequences, and the other thing…

    “Zzip-plat! Zzip-plat!” Those bills shot out so fast and in such perfect alignment, they made a little movie! Jackson winked, pulled off his masks one at a time and there I saw the faces of my clients, associates, designers and architects. My boss was in there too. 

    The squirrels shouted, ‘Had to have the cash, huh? Now you have it! Look into the camera - don’t look surprised!’ Whack! ‘You don’t have to give it back! They’ll never know!’ Whack! Whack! Whack! 

It had to be eight-five degrees outside. I’d already been sweating and there was no way to avoid the camera. The damned thing would catch me. The money would dump. I’d take it and then get arrested six hours later.

    ‘Give yourself up!’ Whack! ‘Never! Take the money!’ Whack! ‘Leave it there! Sissy-Boy! Go to jail!’ Whack! ‘Weiner-head!’ 

    “Zzip-plat! Zzip-plat! Zzip-plat” It sped along with no sign of letting up.

    I hate making decisions. Snap decisions are the worst. That’s why I hate going to fast-food restaurants; if you don’t spit out your order in less than six seconds everyone looks at you like you have a belt of dynamite strapped to your waist. I freeze up. It never fails. That kind of pressure is crushing. I get confused, angry -what are my options? Anxiety. Pick a meal and be done with it! In four seconds I could ruin myself, end up twitching over the counter, blubbering, pulling out half a line from the regular menu, half from the meal menu. It comes out backwards and upside-down. “Four regular mediums, soda burger jumbo, fried-three with fries!” And it doesn’t end there. It never ends there.

    And so I found myself eyeing the bills as they rocketed endlessly out of the ATM thinking, this really can’t be happening!

    Then it was my feet. They were jigging around against the tiled floor, tapping out a strange and frantic S.O.S without my consent. I leaned over to get a better look. It was astonishing. 

    “Zzip-plat! Zzip-plat! I squeezed my head between my palms. It wouldn’t stop the squirrels.

‘Take it!’ Whack! ‘Wait and see!’ Whack! Whack! ‘Whiffer! Act natural! Keep’em guessing! Don’t blow it!’

    I didn’t want to blow it.

    Whistling a tune for the camera was useless, my mouth was dead dry. After two attempts my mind went blank. Clear white forever - I’d passed out on my feet - a mummy inside layers and layers of pure white gauze and winding sheets. There was no feeling in there but my mind was working. I was thinking. 

I was thinking that I wouldn’t feel guilty about stealing the bank’s money. It was quite a surprise. Taking money from a bank was not a crime in my book. I thought about Robinhood and then there he was, in there with me, in my mummy-state. He didn’t say anything but he looked good swinging back and forth from a long length of gauze. His green cape and green tights and funny green booties gave me a laugh. He whispered something in my ear and I don’t know what he said but it outweighed any righteous ambivalence I had about doing the right thing with the bank’s money.

    None of that mattered. What mattered was this: I didn’t want to be a chuckle-head, or soft to the world, and I certainly didn’t want to pass out in the bank. At what point did the rules about the direction my life become based on jaw-breaking snap decisions? How did this happen?

    I wanted to be like Robinhood. 

    The gauze and the winding sheets came away in one great pull: The atrium of the bank came back, the ATM machine was in front of me and my feet were still there dancing around – bip!-bitty-bip!-bitty-bip! – like crazy below the knees. 

    I hadn’t lost yet.

    ‘Do something! Whack! Say something! Whack! Whack! Throw’em off!’ 

    But without a plan I was an imbecile. Conspicuous. 

    I tried waggling my tongue into the security camera above the ATM.

    Then another thing began to happen: I heard a small voice saying, “oh dear…ohhh dear me…” It was so faint.

    “…Oh-lord,” it said, “Mercy and heaven…” It came without an ounce of strength, dishrag limp. It came from a very small, old woman standing in the adjacent ATM stall. She’d heard me screwing around, heard the squirrels. She might have been crying. The way she fingered her hair when our eyes met, that said something. She was clearly unhappy.

    I made like a miracle with my hands. “What?” I asked, “What?”

    But she ran out of the bank without another word or whimper, purse clutched to her chest. Once outside she turned to catch a look at me through the window. Her hair was the color of tinfoil. In the sunlight her whole head lit up like an alarm.

    I turned back to the machine. 

    A receipt chugged out from the top of the machine. It was over like that. I grabbed the green stack, slapped the sweat from my forehead, clawed the receipt, and bolted out the door.

    There’s a comfortably shaded courtyard park that spans the length of La’Guardia Place between Bleeker Street and West Third. The bank opens out onto this park and this was where I tore about, running in short, jagged, figure-eights like a trapped ant looking for a crack in the ground. The money and receipt were still clutched in my outstretched hand and more than a few people turned their heads to see what I was up to. A strolling couple with two innocent looking children eyed me while fingering cameras that hung from their neck-straps.

    “See the crazy man? See him? There are a lot of crazy people in New York City, aren’t there?” said Mom, in baby-talk, to her youngest. “Should we take a picture of the crazy man?”  

    I ran circles around the statue of Fiorello La’Guardia. The Old Patriarch, the mayor of mayors, larger than life, captured forever in a strangely exuberant, exultant gesture, filled with vigorous energy. I’d imagine him up there offering a terrific rallying cry to throngs of invisible citizens. A man of action! A man’s man! A man who drew up the plans for his own future, denying fate’s options! 

    I sank to my knees in front of the massive bronze. The receipt hung from my fist, crushed and soaked in sweat. I squinted down at the limp tab and focus on the small dripping numbers. It told me that there were five hundred dollars in my hand. The same amount I had asked for. The bills tallied correctly. Laughter slowly crawled up and over the wad of self-loathing lodged in my throat.

Pet Parade, Pet Paradise, Pete’s Pets, Pets’nVets, The Pampered Paw – all within four blocks of my home. 

    In the pet section of the phone book you will find: Pet Adoption, Pet Bereavement, Pet Boarding, Pet Cemeteries & Crematories, and on and on. There are over sixty listings under Pet Shops in the Manhattan phone book. There are a lot of well-tended little beasties crawling and swimming and flying around this town. Something irked me. I looked up the word Shelter. Not shelter as in pet shelter - that’s under Pets - Pet Adoption. I was looking for shelters as in Homeless Humans. There was one single listing for a shelter in New York City. Imagine that. I flashed from the Pet pages to the Shelter page and imagined what it would look like if the typesetters accidentally replaced the word pet with the word homeless. The listings would read: Homeless Adoption, Homeless Bereavement, Homeless boarding, and so on. 

    I looked at FraidyCat for a moment, picturing instead, Fraidy the Homeless man curled up on my livingroom floor next to the radiator. It would never work. There were problems with that. There were a million problems with that. The whole thing looked wrong. It had to be a mistake. I made a note to look into the homeless situation in Manhattan. 

Chapter 3-2

    Three balled up dollar bills flew over the balcony. Fez and I snickered as the bills sailed down. Two of them hit Mike and one hit the bar. All four heads came up at once. Fez waved.

    Mike shook a fist and shouted through a pirate face, “You’re an idiot!” 

    “Hey,” I shouted down, “From up here you could see down every blouse in the joint!” 

    Ten minutes later I was back at the bar. “The Fez apologizes for our behavior and asked me to tell you that I’m not allowed up there anymore.”

    There was a small, smirking, fidgety pause among the group. “He’s kind of a scary guy, The Fez…”

    Jen burst out laughing.

    I grabbed my second vodka tonic and took a seat on one of the available overstuffed lounge chairs to the side of the bar. It felt good. The first vodka had gone down well. I felt like a freshly laundered gym sock when you give it that big stretch to loosen it up.

    “That was super!” announced Jen. 

    “Super Duper!” added Mike.

    I laughed. “That’s me, Super-Duper!”

    “Super duper dummy!” said John, half-seriously. “Where’s the bartender, I’m telling him we don’t know you…”

    I turned to Carly. “So, let me get this straight. Because I make a leap of faith I’m creating loose ends?”

    She nodded. “That’s right.”

    “But, where’s the leap of faith?” I asked. “I know where I’m going. It’s just the human mind at work, doing what it does best. I’m being logical, as best I can. Logic tells me that the train goes from Brooklyn,” I marked the air with my finger, “along a specific route that I can see on a map. It makes stops on the way and Bingo!” I poked a hole in the air, “There I am in Manhattan!”

    John came back from the bar with large tray of shellfish over ice. He took the overstuffed lounge seat on the opposing side of the table. We were slowly migrating to the low ground at the periphery of the bar.

    “Yes,” John said, resuming the discussion. “But don’t you see? That train could have taken you anywhere between stops! You trust that it follows the same route, at the same speed, because you end up in the same place, more or less at the same time every day. But what if the train went along another route? What if the train and the city were both moving around, in cahoots?”

    I wanted to break John’s head.

     “What do I care?” I said, “As long as I end up at my office I couldn’t care less where that damned train takes me!”

    Mike smiled. He took pleasure in my annoyance - he took pleasure in anyone’s annoyance. He pointed a shrimp at me. “Lighten up, Bert.”

    Carly said, “This is important. You have to understand that. Of course the train’s not going to Maine, and the city is staying put, but you don’t really know that for sure. That’s all. Unless you choose the path yourself, you’re taking a leap of faith, whether you like it or not. Deductive reasoning gets you through the day, but deep down, the animal in you wants to know what’s going on, it’s not satisfied and it takes your time away from you in an undercurrent of worry and confusion.”

    “Now we’re talking about animals. Why are we talking about animals?”

    Later, Mike and I stumbled around Chelsea on our own and worked our way downtown to late-night spots. In one particularly dark bar I found myself thinking of what John had said.  Mike was tipping a beer into the general vicinity of his mouth.

    “What about it - this ‘leap of faith’? Am I wrong for not caring?” 

    Mike used the rim of the beer bottle as a pivot to turn to me. His eyes were pointing in different directions. “Maybe true, mostly crap.”

    “That’s what I figured.”

    “Witchcraft!” Mike pounded his bottle and slurred, “What’sis name, the cat in the box…” he leaned nose-first with a slow wobble through the drunken space between us. “Humdinger!” He smiled.

    “Schrődinger.”

    “Yeah, him! Cat’s alive, cat’s dead… I say to hell with the cat!”

    John and Carly had been knocking on a door that I’d already briefly opened in the past and as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t worth the effort. I’d leave the big ideas relating to the ‘ifs’ and ‘uh-oh’s’ of determinism and the likes to the big boys. 

    “Einstein was a bore!”

    “To hell with Heisenberg!” 

    “The only probability that I can see is the one involving a hangover!” We tapped our beer bottles together and Mike fell off his stool.

    I found myself crossing through Washington Square Park alone at four-thirty in the morning concentrating, not on ghosts, but on those few blissful moments up into the secret nest at Birdy-Birdy when I felt like a little criminal. 

    The next dozen or so nights started out the same way, in Birdy-Birdy, with strong, expensive drinks and crew of friends willing to give it a go. Birdy-Birdy became my port of departure for discovering the decadent joys of the city. More often than not, Mike was there to help lead the way. He knew the city better than I did and he had a healthy appetite for booze and music and good food.

    I had found the dark carnival. When the sun went down the carnie lights came on and the attractions pulled me in. 

    By August the party was over. The carnival had taken its toll. I was tired, pale and bloated. My work was suffering.

Chapter 3-1

SUPERDUPER 3

By noon on the following day, I had my phone and utilities up and running and my belongings strewn across the apartment. Fraidycat had assisted by indexing every object that came out of a box with a quick swipe of his ass or nudge of his brow. When we got tired I called the office.

    “Hey, Mike!

    …I know I’m not there - I took the day off.

    …No, I don’t care. Say, I had an idea, you want to go on a boat ride?”

    For a few bucks you can hop a tour boat on the Lower West Side and chug the waters around the Island of Manhattan. Giant painted tin cans filled with tourists roll and heave, day and night, in never ending circles around the city. Mike and I took the complete circuit.

    “How’d you get out?” I asked as we barreled south into the wide windy mouth of the Hudson. 

    Mike smiled. “Said you’re arm got stuck in the toilet.”

    We hung against the railing, watched the water, the shore and the buildings passing slowly against the horizon. We passed the Battery and South Ferry without speaking. It was beautiful.

    “So,” Mike asked, “what’s with the boat ride? Shouldn’t you be painting or something?”

    “I wanted to see it. You know, the whole thing,” I drew a line around the city, “all the way around. It’s my home now.” 

    Mike laughed and told me I was being miserably romantic. I told him to shut up. We argued about the value of romanticism. I told him it was important. He scoffed at the notion.

    The tin can headed north up into the East River, into lime green water. We hit the bridges: The Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Williamsburg. The deafening whiz of autos from above pierces through the bridge’s lower decks like a mechanical thunderstorm. I said it was beautiful, and Mike knocked the ride with a thunderous and theatrical show. 

    “Sure!” he bellowed, scanning the deck for an audience, “For the tourists this is a trip to remember, filled with miracles! It’s a testament to the achievements of mankind, a profound spectacle, the brilliant metropolis as promised! You get your money’s worth, that’s for sure!” He made like hugging everything.     “The whole package wrapped up neat, and clean - It’s all in perspective! After this boat ride you can go home and tell the family that you’ve seen the big picture, that there’s a ribbon around the place with your name on it! What a load!” Mike threw his arms up in disgust. He loved it.

    “What’s the matter with you?” I laughed. “What’s wrong with that? Why are you shouting?” 

    “Don’t you see?” he said, exasperated. “It’s not real. This!” he held out his hands over the edge of the railing, “This is fantasy!”

    “I know what this is,” I said, “You see I’m happy and you can’t stand it! What fantasy? What’s your problem?”

    Mikes idea of friendship had mostly to do with needling sarcasm.

    “Wait!” he barked. “You’ll see! When you live in this town, even when it’s just a week, things don’t seem so clean and neat, even on a boat trip! When you become part of the city it happens fast, in one great shot.” Mike smiled and made like putting on a shirt. 

    “It’s put on you to wear. It comes over your head, Whoosh! Whether you like it or not you’re wearing the city around your neck, it’s a giant pajama top, a weave of streets and avenues! Every step you take puts you in the middle! That’s when the clowning starts. That’s when you realize that the city isn’t a place you could ever put a ribbon around. It grows and stretches; you can’t touch the edges, and all the maps are hokum!” 

    “Hokum?”

    “You betcha!” He held his hands out again and made like squeezing a sponge. “This isn’t real! If you want to understand the exact dimensions of this city you must calculate the misery, the joy, the circumstance, the stupidity! After a while, your maps, they stop making sense. This is what you begin to know when you live here. This is what bears down on you when you wear the giant pajama. This,” Mike threw his chin out as we passed under the Triborough Bridge. “This is nonsense!”

    “Wow,” I said, “you’re an angry fellow.”

    “Oh yeah? Just wait. You’ll see,” Mike said, smugly. We watched the rest of the tour quietly. The boat lumbered up into parts of Manhattan I’d never seen before. At the top of the ride we begin to wonder whether or not the tin can would fit the passage or get grounded in no-mans land. But we pulled through at Spuyten Duyvil and curled back into the wide mouth of the Hudson for the ride back downtown. I thought about what he said and tried to sift the truth from the bluster.

    My first two weeks living in the city were spectacular, at least what I can remember of them. It all began innocently enough, with an offer of welcome cheer from friends and associates from work who also lived in Manhattan. 

    The office in which I worked was on Park Avenue South at Twenty-First Street. Gramercy - a ritzy part of town. I had been working as a senior project manager for the design department of a highly successful interiors firm for nearly ten years. We designed and furnished offices for the largest corporate clients in the world. I was a little big-shot without a recognizable name or face, like so many other little big-shots in town. It was my job to cater to the whims of CEO’s, corporate presidents, board members and other unscrupulous people who swam in rivers of paper money. It had been my job to reassure these titans of commerce that their creative and aesthetic sensibilities were as strong as their bloodlust. I was a convincing liar and entertaining jester. I did my job well and had the bank account to prove it. But there is a disturbing amount of behind-the-scenes effort that goes into performing a good show for the captains of industry. Every good trick, every slight of hand and perfectly placed trick-mirror requires practice and preparation. The work was grueling and often left a very foul taste in my mouth, pungent traces - decay, I believed - rising from a very real place within me where my souring soul cried like a beaten beggar.

    So, when I was asked by my associates to join them for a drink at the end of the workday on my first Tuesday as a city dweller, I accepted gladly. Eagerly.

    “Drinks at six-thirty!”

    And so it began.

    Four friends and I in sat in Birdy-Birdy, chatting, rummaging around perfectly squared ice cubes stacked askew in oversized tumblers. The bartenders were real artists with innate talent and a bag of fakir’s tricks. They mixed only the finest concoctions, some tinted with thin amber or pale lime infusions, others bubbling dark, rich froth coming up long delicate curves of expensive glass - Birdy-Birdy wasn’t a place for rummies and guzzlers. Each drink was a masterpiece. 

    We were up at the bar. I was about to say something easy when Mike, clamped a strong hand on my shoulder. 

    “Here’s to no more stinking commute for you!” 

    I tipped my tumbler back and drank swiftly. Then the four of them were staring at me, waiting for me to say something. They were smiling and waiting. I scratched my head, gave it a little knock. It was empty.

    “You know,” I said, wondering what my next words were going to be, “it really hadn’t occurred to me until now...”

    “What’s that?” asked Jen, Mike’s managing assistant.

    “Well, I just never realized that commuting took so much time out of things.” I waved my vodka tonic around. “I suddenly seem to have all this time I didn’t have before.”

    Mike winked at me. “This, my friend, is the luxury of living in the city.”

    “I just didn’t think a thirty- or forty-minute commute made that much of a difference. I guess I was wrong.”

    John and Carly, two friends from another firm laughed. They were long time Manhattan residents, classic Village Bohemians. John taught a class in Tantric yoga on Monday evenings and read tarot cards before he made any big decisions. Carly, a long, narrow woman, sporting a slightly orange pallor due to a strange carrot addiction, was into auras, biorhythms and magnetic healing. Their general level of happiness and satisfaction with life disturbed me. They were successful, enjoyed their work, and had few complaints. I always figured that some untold misery lay festering somewhere in their lives; no one could be happy like that, unless of course there has been some physical trauma to explain it – a blow to the head. Was it possible that they’d both been involved in a terrible accident? I would never be able to ask. The way I had it figured only idiots and Buddhists could ever really be happy.

    “The problem with commuting,” said Carly, “it’s not the time that ruins you; it’s the loose ends.”

    “The what?”

    “It’s all the loose ends you get buried in. Climbing in and out of trains, taxis, planes, buses…” she rolled her eyes, “It ruins your fluidity; you never know where you really are.”

    “I’m not sure I’m following you,” I said, smiling, wondering if a head trauma theory wasn’t too far off the mark.

    “You see,” she continued, “It’s like this: Every time you go down into the subway you’re being asked to make a leap of faith. You descend into a hole and a half hour later you climb up out of another hole and, presto! You’re somewhere else. When you travel like that, I mean, even if you’re on a bus and you can look out the window, the ride becomes an abstract pathway from here to there. Even if you can plot it out, you’re not controlling it. You take a leap of faith.” 

    Carly sat up straight and made like a marionette. “And somewhere in the back of your head there’s a little guy with a pair of scissors and he’s cutting another loose end open in the fabric of your fluidity.”

    Mike shrugged and gulped his drink. I could see a wide broken grin in the bottom of his tumbler. I threw a twenty at the heap of bills on the bar. “Have another drink, Jen!”

    John said, “Listen, what Carly is saying is that you don’t necessarily have that much more time on your hands now then when you did when you commuted, right?” He nodded for me. “But you just said that you feel like you’ve got all this time that you never had before. So what do you think happened?”

    “I don’t know. I’m not making loose ends?”

    John smacked his knee. “That’s it! But it’s no joke. When you live in the city it becomes your town. You get to know it intimately, on a personal scale. When you walk to work you know the streets not by the street signs that signify clips of space on a grid, but by the buildings on each street and the bricks or stones of each building, and over time even the subtle qualities, the patterns, impurities and details of each brick or stone. We weren’t made to whiz by things.” John waved a finger around like it meant something. “It’s confusing for us to hop on a train, lose track of where we are, even for an instant, and then find ourselves somewhere else wondering how the hell we got there. That’s loose ends, my friend. Your brain spends a lot of quiet time backtracking – step-by-step - literally trying to figure out how you traversed the local landscape. That’s where some of your time went!”

    I had begun, vaguely, to get the drift. Mike ordered another round and I got up to explore the half-packed restaurant with what was left of my drink still in my hand. I’d only been in Birdy-Birdy once before, it was brief and I remember being angry and drunk. 

    Birdy-Birdy was an upscale restaurant and lounge for big spenders of new wealth. There was nothing modest about it. The cavernous space, originally a bank, boasted a thirty-foot high open dining area, a vaulted ceiling and a row of full height Corinthian columns. There was a second level that you reached by climbing a sprawling curved staircase, a sweeping tapestry of delicately wrought iron. The odd structure hung down magically from the center of the free-spanning second floor without visible support. I took the stairs and when I reached the top I was astonished to find two additional full bars and a dark, Moroccan styled lounge to the rear of the space separated by a series of tall, red velvet draperies. 

    Behind one of the drapes was an arched corridor that led to a recessed balcony overlooking the main dining area and bar. The balcony was strewn with Persian rugs and sitting pillows. A couple of patrons smooched in one quite recess. When I was close to the spot above the bar where my friends sat, a waiter wearing neat red vest and a matching red fez approached from the opposite direction. He carried a brass tray filled with empty glasses. 

    I passed the waiter and found myself suddenly overlooking Mike and the gang. They had no idea I was there. A gigantic chandelier that hung down from the vaulting over the main space obscured the overlook. It was a magnificent network of wildly curving steel rods studded every inch or so with colored glass balls, feathers, and countless clusters of thin brass leafs. All that twisting finery did a great job of camouflaging the secret balcony without disrupting the vantage from above.

    I drew a crescent wedge of lime from the bottom of my glass, nipped off a bit of rind and aimed for Mike’s head. The lime went wide. The second piece missed his nose and landed against his tie. There was no reaction. The third bit hit Carly on the noggin. She flailed. 

    “Hey! Who’s throwing stuff?” Her voice echoed angularly up through the vast space. It came to me, ghostlike, disembodied, weighed down with an uncanny depth of tone that - for an instant - made me feel that I was very, very alone.  

    “Did you feel something?” Mike pivoted on his stood. 

    “I thought I felt something too!” 

    I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed the lime, stuffed it in my mouth for another bite but choked on the last of the small section while sinking to my knees. When I looked up The Fez was standing over me.

    “Sir?”

    “Just this one last shot and then I’m outta here.”

    “Sir!”

    I reached into my wallet, pulled out a five, and stuffed it into the little pocket in Fez’s vest. He smiled. We had an agreement.

Chapter 2-3

 

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.

chapter 2 - 2

“They are throwing us out!” He brayed like a mule and bubbled up at the mouth. “Throwing us all out!” He shook a document up between us. He choked it and throttled it and waved it around. He was trying to squeeze it out of existence. I couldn’t tell what it was.

“Who is?” My heart conked itself sideways in my chest.

“The fire department came! The people from the city came! We are being evicted by the city!” he cried. “Enrico is crazy with madness! He says you did this! Is it true?” The bubbles ran down his chin. He’d have killed me right there, it was in his eyes, bloodshot with hatred, but he was too damned broken to do the job.

“I didn’t… I don’t know,” I said nothing.

On the South side of the park I paused and took a seat on the grass near the spot where the Hangman, Daniel Megie, once had a small wooden shack to keep him warm when he wasn’t busy hanging criminals or burying their corpses. I wanted the first trip to my new home to last - I wanted to enjoy it for all it was worth and didn’t want to think about the hangman. There were better things to think about. No more bastard subway at five PM! I’d walk home from the job on Twenty-First Street, a civilized man - I patted the grass - on civilized ground!

I took it all in, the mid-summer revelers, bouncing children chasing grinning dogs - mutts and pups folding themselves in half with joy as they tripped up and down the steps at the edge of the fountain, the pool in the center tinted smooth orange with diamonds set ablaze by the setting sun.

And then unable to leave well enough alone, it came - the flip side. It smashed down hard against the inside of my skull. The whole park turned over on a pivot like a tremendous coin flipping from head to tail: The cool shade, the children, pets, and tourists, the musicians, hotdog vendors, all of it vanished in one wrenching flip. The park came up and spun over like a ten-foot thick pancake tossed on a giant, dark griddle. Now, instead of cherry Italian ices and grass laced blankets against nine acres of summer paradise there was a horrific landscape painted in hellish blacks, nightmarish browns tinged with blood and green mire. The underside of the park took its turn. Tens of thousands of skeletons hung broken and tangled from torn, towering root structures of inverted trees. A miserable stench of disease and decay belched up through viscous rot. Splintered headstones studded the scene, giant teeth strewn across a dark battlefield.

The police were at Enrico’s when I pulled up to the curb with the U-haul, two cruisers and an ambulance. Enrico had hanged himself in the livingroom of his apartment. He dangled from a thick hook in a ceiling beam that had once held a brass chandelier belonging to his mother. The hook was available because Enrico had sold the chandelier for six bucks to a junk store down the block. He died flanked by two large oil paintings, well-rendered portraits of his youthful mother and father, once prosperous and well-respected patrons of the church. They had watched from their strange and timeless vantage, as their son made the last bad decision of his life.

The park flipped back around. I stood up, wiped off my trousers and shouldered my briefcase. The children ran again in the creases of their own shadows, the wind came up and pushed leaves in the trees into a summer song. I turned out of the park into what was about to become my very own Greenwich Village thinking, “That, that was not my fault.”

I walked the two blocks to my new apartment. A quiet and cautious elation replaced the aggressive joy I had felt on the far side of the park. I was starting something new. I hadn’t chosen it for myself but it was given to me, a gift of the flip side. The U-Haul loaded with all of my possessions sat parked at the curb outside my new home. I’d parked it there in the morning before going to work. My life was waiting to be unpacked. That made me smile. Before I turned into the foyer of my new home I readjusted my telepathic link for optimum transmission as I put my key into the door. “Fuck you, Enrico” I whispered, “Fuck You!”

chapter 2 - 1

          There is a flip side to everything. The universe, in all it’s awesome and unfathomable splendor, has been carefully balanced to insure that no one component within it will ever have un-tethered superiority above any other existent component or combination of components, large or small, significant or apparently otherwise.

This fatheaded headed jumble of words, like a bucket full of flying hogs, came screaming through my mind as I passed under the arch of the Washington Square Monument.  It was a special day. I was on my way home, for the very first time, to my new one bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. There was a riot of beaming enthusiasm in my veins. I was winged Mercury, armed with a slick, silver bow of triumph! I let loose arrows of sharp prospects, pierced those flying hogs, sent them spinning, exploding in the sky, pink and purple piñatas filled to bursting with sweet ideas.

Sparrows and small yellow parakeets circled above me. I’d never seen it. Under cotton-candy clouds they came tweeting and fanning their outstretched wings, brilliant florescent feathers, so gracious. I must have been feverish, maybe they were pigeons, but to me they were small yellow parakeets with brilliant fluorescent feathers.

            I winked at the battle-garbed George to the left of the arch and telepathically explained to him that the way the universe achieves this equitable situation is by imbedding self-regulating and diametrically opposed qualities into every last nugget of physical matter, energy, action and thought.

            I continued my position to the statue of George the Statesman on the right:

“It’s like magnets, George, everything is like magnets – such careful forces, opposite charges - both positive and negative - delicately contained and perfectly aligned within a given structure. This perfect alignment enables that structure to perform, to participate in the magic and power of existence. It enables while keeping that careful tension needed for ultimate and perfect balance, just like when we were kids and used to play with those magnets that held the paperclips. Remember George? Remember those magnets?”

            Halfway through the park, nearly blind from the skidding reflection of white July sunlight off silky foot-worn paving stones of the fountain perimeter, I changed my telepathic channel and focused my attention to a conversation I had been having earlier in the day with my former and now-dead landlord, Enrico.

            “You see Enrico, now you are dead and I am walking into my new and wonderful dream life! How does that suit you? What’s that? Why yes, same rent! May your miserable soul burn in hell for eternity! - Except now, Enrico, I live in Manhattan. As a matter of fact, it’s down the block from where I stood, fifteen years ago with my best buddy, Hank, where I said to that good young man, “Hank, one day I’m going to live right here!” That’s what I said to him. And now, Enrico, guess what? You’re dead and I’m walking home. Can you see the park, Enrico? They say it used to be a swamp where they buried criminals after being executed for committing very nasty crimes. It’s all covered up now, bodies and all, but the hanging tree is still there – can you see it – just there in the northwest corner of the park!”

            And so it was true. I wasn’t lying to Enrico. The park was a swamp in the early days of Manhattan. It was originally used to bury those who died during the cholera epidemic of 1797. It was later used to ditch the bodies of those hung from the limbs of the big tree over in the corner of the park. At the end of that century the land was used across its entire expanse as a pauper’s graveyard as well as a formal graveyard for the local German citizens of the village.

And I thought, ‘Man oh man! Twenty-two thousand bodies! That’s a lot, a lot of bodies!’ and I whistled, “Phweet-Phweew!” cause it really was too much to think about, and what kind of numbskulls would build a nice park on top of something like that, because as far as I knew they were all still there, just under the grass.

As I moved past the massive flowing fountain surrounded by smiling bikini-clad sun-beauties, hippie folksingers, Japanese tourists, buskers and showmen, I had to wonder what they would have made of their day had they known that they were enjoying a late-afternoon sunning just a few feet above the remains of over twenty-two thousand cold and wretched souls.

“There’s a flip side to everything, Enrico. You wouldn’t give me heat and hot water in the winter. Now the summer’s here, you’re stone cold dead and I’ve got a healthy sweat on.”

My frequent complaints about the lack of heat during the winter months had been disagreeable to the man. It gave Enrico heartburn. He didn’t want to hear it. “Why do you complain?” he asked, nose poking out above a blanket wrapped around his short, fat body.

“Enrico, my cat’s got icicles hanging off his whiskers! He’s knocking out frozen turds! I can’t feel my kneecaps! It’s not right! I should be able to feel my Godamned kneecaps!”

I got the eviction notice at the end of May. He had waited until the weather had cleared up. He was a shrewd bastard. He waited until the cold was just a memory before putting the second floor apartment up for rent again.

Enrico had enough money without saving the price of oil heat. He bilked it from his sickly mother’s savings and added to it by illegally converting his basement into a third apartment for letting. It was a deathtrap down there. A young husband and wife lived in the basement with their child. They used their oven to keep warm. They were pale, thin people with long faces. They were sad for too many reasons. Enrico took advantage of them and it made me miserable.

In the end, after two months of avoiding Enrico completely, I found the eviction notice taped to the wall of the stairwell. He had added a handwritten note explaining that I had threatened him and he had gone to see a lawyer. I was, as he explained it, in no position to win a lawsuit. It was nonsense. He wouldn’t have spent the money to go see a lawyer and I knew that. But by that time I was fed up and angry.

I didn’t mean to have Enrico kill himself. It wasn’t part of the plan. All I wanted was a little justice. But something had gone wrong. I signed the new lease just days before I was to move out of Enrico’s. Then I called the fire department, the housing department, and the Internal Revenue Service. We had pleasant chats about code violations, unreported income and other indiscretions. The hate-screen in my head prior to making those calls had little to do with the real consequences my actions would have on the pale-family downstairs. I figured, naively, that Enrico would simply have to pay some whopping expenses for the work and permits required in bringing his building up to city code, and that the IRS would climb up his tax return for a while. Instead, the day before I packed my things into a U-haul, I got a knock on my door. It was the pale man.

end of part 1 - chap 2