Being
a Mover in New York City was seasonal work, like picking fruit. Oh,
there were jobs in the wintertime, mostly shifting offices from one
building to another, and sometimes I stuck around and worked when I
could, but it was no fun I can tell you. The Big Apple is not
Connecticut where, as any New England Yankee will tell you, they have
Real winters, but it was bad enough. There were mornings we stood
around with our hands in our armpits while two of the guys tried to
start the newest of the trucks, one working the ignition while the
other sprayed canned ether into the carburetor intake. There would be
this soundless flash of blue flame and mostly on the second or third
try the beast would belch and shudder and come to life; then we could
use it to jump start the other vehicles . No fun, as I say.
When
I could afford to I would take off in November and travel over to
Germany or Hungary where I had friends, but one winter for reasons
which have nothing to do with this story I came back early, in mid
February it was. Of course I had no apartment; at that time I had
been 'subletting' a room in an apartment on tenth and first –
that's Tenth street and First avenue, just on the border of the
Lower East Side. I
gather they have posh names for all the old neighborhoods now, but in those days the Lower East Side was the old immigrant
section, roughly between the Williamsburg and Brooklyn Bridges,
three to four story cockroach infested tenements with rusty fire
escapes. Not to bad mouth the roaches, you understand, everybody had
them. We used to say that Jackie Onassis had cockroaches which
might have been true for all I know, it was just that on the Lower
East Side they were a little more...assertive might be the word. It
wasn't worth while to bomb them because sure as anything they'd get
mad and attack your downstairs neighbor. Then you'd have Mrs. Suarez
in 3G yelling up at you to 'leave the roaches alone! You don' bother
them they ain' gonna bother you!' That was the Lower East Side, live
and let live.
Where
was I? Oh yes. Well, the fellow-let's call him Bill- whose apartment
it was hadn't been expecting me back, so the room that had been mine
was rented out to someone else. It was a pity, because I had fixed it
up myself with a loft bed ( actually two wooden pallets nailed
together and fixed to the wall overhead which created a nifty little
work place underneath) but I could hardly turf out the kid who had
taken it over. For a few days I pitched my tent in the living room
but that was an imposition and besides I could see myself turning up
in one of Bill's Performance Art pieces about homeless people.
I
had work; my old outfit 'Nice Jewish Boy with Truck' agreed to
take me back on when I called at the offices, so all I had to do was
to find someplace to live. I went over to Rivington to see a
landlord I knew, the same fellow who had rented me my first ever
apartment in New York City, a railroad flat, so called, painted
mustard yellow with three rooms connected in a line (like you could
drive a train through them, I suppose) and the bathtub in the
kitchen to save on plumbing. He had nothing to offer on this
occasion however except, he explained apologetically, one floor in a
loft building with no heat or hot water. Would I be interested? One
fifty a month, he coaxed, and he would take care of the electric.
I
have to explain. You say 'loft' in New York these days and it
conjures up a vision of polished ball room floors, cast iron
pillars painted white and panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline.
Granite worktops, spiral staircases to elegant sleeping lofts, and
a price tag equal to the net worth of a small kingdom in the
Balkans. Back in the Eighties, however, a few canny developers had
started renting derelict industrial properties to artists and
musicians. These creative individuals, desperate for
studio-cum-living space, would on their own install plumbing, sand
down the floors, bribe a Con Ed employee to tap into the City's gas
main so they could have free heat, that kind of thing. Of course what
they did was illegal and against zoning regulations, so it was a
simple matter to evict them once the building was habitable, apply
for change of use and so on, and go chuckling all the way to the
bank.
Looking
back I suppose that my old landlord had visions of being able to pull
off a deal like that, but in truth he was just a slumlord living in
one of his own slums and not in the same league as the big boys like
Donald Trump. I had visions of my own, of being an artist in New
York City with a loft of my own like Jackson Pollock. You might say
we were both living in a mutually supported fantasy, which kind of
sums up the City as a whole, then and now.
We
went over to see the place, which was on Norfolk street just off
Delancey, the street that runs to the Brooklyn Bridge and over
the East River to, well, Brooklyn. The building was small, no
bigger than one of the tenements, and had just three floors.
'Somebody living there,' my landlord informed me as we passed the
ground floor entrance and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He
unlocked the door and I peered inside, to be met with a ragpickers
dream of piled junk that filled both of the rooms that comprised the
entire floor space. 'I clear all this out,' he assured me. He pointed
to a single burner hot plate on a windowsill. 'You can have this to
cook on,' he said magnanimously. I looked at the plaster falling off
the laths and watched my breath smoking in the air which was as cold
as outside and said , 'OK, when can I move in?'
I've
never met anyone in the Arts yet who wasn't handy with tools, it
seems to come with with the territory. Over the following weeks I
managed to plumb in a tub I'd persuaded the landlord to part with,
added a shower- well, OK it was cold water but I was young and
healthy. Also, if you want to know, slightly nuts. I thought the
lathe boards showing through the plaster added atmosphere so I tacked
a large canvas over the worst part and incorporated the lathe boards
into a tromp d'oeil painting of a dock twisting off into the
distance over a stormy sea with a solitary female figure standing at
the very end. I solved the heat problem with a small sheet iron stove
from Taiwan that I found on Canal Street and fed with scrap wood
from the warehouse district around there.
I
remember my Landlord was so proud of my industry that he brought a
friend around show it off. I was cooking pancakes on the little stove
as they stood at the door and his friend said wonderingly, ' He is
livink like in former times!' as if I was a diorama in the museum of
Natural History.
I
met my fellow lodger on the ground floor, a middle aged woman, a
sweet and somewhat vague individual so wrapped up in various woolens
that she looked like a walking parcel. She lived with five dogs that
she used to walk on leashes made of grocery string. I never knew how
she kept warm but presumably the dogs took care of that.
There
was one other space in the building that I didn't know about at
first, a basement that was entered down a flight of concrete steps
from the outside. My first intimation that anyone used it was the
first Friday night I spent in the building. First several cars pulled
up in front, which was unusual enough in itself, as the only other
vehicles you ever saw parked on the street were burned out wrecks
abandoned there by car-jackers. Peering down from my window I saw a
number of well dressed people filing down the basement steps, and
after a time came the muffled sound of drums being played. Some sort
of Salsa club?- I wondered because it had a slightly Latin feel.
Then
came the night of the big freeze. I had let the stove go out
because being cheap it had no proper damper and the only way to keep
it going was to constantly chuck wood in. I huddled in my sleeping
bag as it got colder and colder and around 2 AM I had to go to the
necessary and found that the flush wouldn't work. I muttered
something unprintable and went back to bed.
The
next morning the sun came out and began to thaw everything. I got the
stove going and began to thaw myself out and that was when I
discovered that the pipes had not only frozen, but popped the joints.
Soon there was a fountain going, water spurting everywhere as I
searched frantically, soaking wet, for the shut off valve. To no
avail; I threw on my coat and dashed over to the Landlord's place who
thank God was home (well, it was Sunday the day after his Sabbath
so I suppose God had something to do with it. ) Where was the shut
off valve, I pleaded. In the basement, he said. But it's locked, I
said. You go through the old lady's place and there's a hatch in her
closet, he said. Back I dashed, pounded on first floor's door, and
explained the problem when she emerged. This was unnecessary as water
was pouring through her ceiling in a steady stream, but she let me in
and pointed me to the closet. This unfortunately proved to be the
place where the dogs relieved themselves when they weren't able to
get out, but I was beyond caring. I took hold of the wooden hatch in
the floor and heaved it back, then lowered myself gingerly down to
the floor below. And froze.
There
was around four inches of water sloshing about dimly lit by the light
filtering through the curtains on the street level windows. More
water was dripping steadily through the ceiling making a sound like a
lunatic on a mandolin – plunk plunkety plunk plunkety – echoing
from the concrete walls where staring at me accusingly in the
wavering light were a dozen or so of the ugliest wooden statues you
can imagine. Each one was about five feet high and combined animal
and human attributes with a fine disregard for anatomical
probability. They would have looked eerie even with the lights on,
but in the semi dark with the reflections from the water making the
faces seem to move and change expression it was like a nightmare.
There's
little more to tell. I found the big valve and shut off the water at
the main. In about an hour or so the landlord showed up with a friend
who mended the burst pipe, then treated me to a little lecture about
tying down the ball cock in the toilet tank so that the water
running all night would keep the pipes from freezing, like I should
have thought of that myself. Maybe I should have, and I pass that
little trick on to whoever might find a use for it someday during the
next Ice age.
Oh,
and next day the people showed up in their cars, dragged out the
sodden carpets, loaded everything else in and drove off never to be
seen again. I saw some looks ranging from accusatory to downright
hostile directed at my window, but no one nailed a butchered black
rooster to my door or informed me that a little wax doll baptized
with my name was being slowly lowered into a fondue maker. I later
learned the basement had probably been a temple of the Hispanic
Santeria Religion, Cuba' s answer to the Voodoo of the Haitians.
None of the Hispanic people I knew and worked with would so much as
mention the Santeria; I only found out about it from my German friend
who was doing her Doctoral Dissertation on subcultures in American
Urban Centers.