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