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

Chapter 1 - 1

         The story of a real life superhero does not begin with a bang. The cape and mask come without that fabled moment of metaphysical rebirth, without a ludicrous spectacle like some great and colorful cosmic baptism signifying a magnificent transformation of character. There are no columns of fire-blue space rays beaming down upon a lonely bone-dry mesa at sunset, or alluringly delicate pinpoints of ruby light weaving profound and epic messages against ashen midnight skies. Concentric rings of shimmering alien cloud formations - those are absent here.

There is none of that in this.

I wish there was. I would very much like to say that I witnessed such metaphysical splendor. I would like to say that these kinds of experiences exist and that I know of them, am part of them, live as a perfect extension of such wonders. It would be a terrific way to start this story.

I wish I could say that I was a spectacularly tortured soul born into secret misery, weighed down by suffering, some unthinkable physical ailment - a disorder of the liver, a dribbling secretion of glowing poisonous bile, taking blood and bone, leaving nothing left but a whisper of a shell, an empty vessel. Or, better yet, a blessed creature, something rare and other-worldly, a divine misfit of nature, enhanced, ethereal, a one of a kind roll of the dice, just by chance, the distillation of the most powerful and gifted genes; a Darwinian wonder.

            But these things, if I said them, would be lies.

I am five-foot and eleven inches tall, one hundred and forty pounds. My legs are as thin as pipe-cleaners and the climb up from there – well, it’s a formula that doesn’t want to be seen in a pair of tights. I also believe that my head is a bit too small for my body and I’ve got a weak chin. At thirty-five years of age I firmly believe that I should have more hair on my head than I do now. Some picture. I am not suggesting that I am grotesque in any overt, Quasimoto-like way. In fact, I have been told that I am a fairly attractive man. This is subjective of course.

I am the kind of man that you might bump up against, nose to nose in a crowded elevator, and never see. There is no hint of superhero in the geometry of my physical being.

My brain is reasonably reliable but I am not, by any standard, gifted.  My IQ is tepid. I know enough to know when I have done something stupid, but I am not nearly bright enough to avoid doing stupid things for any practical length of time. This is not the stuff that makes for a high-tech, braniac superhero. I did not devise a superhuman, electromagnetic skin-suit based on quantum mechanics or the theory of special relativity. Math and science were never my strong points. I will never strap myself down to a cold, perfectly milled bed of titanium held at an acute angle under an ungodly proportioned laser-syringe with the intention of injecting myself right between the eyes with a futuristic nano-syrum. It just won’t happen. And furthermore, I have not been, nor do I ever expect to be, blessed with any particularly charming attributes like sudden-psychic-awareness or uncanny catlike agility.

One final confession: my childhood was mostly uneventful. My formative years were pale and bland, churned out into the tired and even consistency of an old piece of gum. There are no outrageously sad or rattling events to splinter memories of my youth. I am not the victim of ghastly family trauma. My parents are no nuts. Insanity does not run in the family. My family tree is as colorless as cardboard.

One man becomes a real-life superhero the way another might become a dentist a shop-clerk or a thief; one day you look in the mirror to find that you’ve become a housewife, a tailor, or a movie star. It happens simply, it happens a little bit at a time. I turned around one day and found myself stuffed in an orange leotard with rubber beak strapped to my face. Was it a surprise? Sure it was. Was it magic? No. There’s no magic in the becoming – I can say this now - the magic is what you make of what you have become, or perhaps more curiously, what it makes of you.