Henry and Don
I lived in a decrepit tenement for seven years. It was affordable non precious livable work space, one of four ground floor storefronts in a two story Victorian building that was over one hundred years old. It measured an astounding sixteen inches out of plumb from the roof of the top floor, producing a parallelogram rather than a rectangle as its silhouette. My space was 1200 square feet of roller coaster floors with incoherent wiring, Rube Goldberg plumbing and neighbors from Dantes Inferno. Four legged structures like tables and chairs could have only three legs reaching the floor at any one time, with shims of up to one half inch required for complete contact. A painting hung from a nail in certain walls could be as much as one inch away from the wall at its bottom edge. A circuit breaker in my space mysteriously controlled an outlet in a space two doors down from me. The height of the ceilings and the draftiness of the windows made warmth impossible in the winter. The roof drains for rain water emptied into the same pipe as the sewers, and in heavy rains the two functions mingled and came up in the bath tub. Precocious rats and invincible roaches rounded out the constants of this existence.
The variables were the neighbors, adjacent and upstairs. They ranged from benevolent art types like myself in the three other street level store fronts to a few serious bad actors, usually short-term transients, in any one of the thirteen apartments upstairs. Within their repertoire one could find drug and alcohol abuse, larceny, brandishing and firing weapons, attempted arson, physical and verbal assault, a sordid gumbo of petty misdemeanors spiced with a few felonies. They represented a small minority amid those who came and went overhead. The majority were folks wobbling in low-level orbits around poverty and pathos with few choices in their lives.
And there was Art the junkman. The side windows of my storefront space looked directly onto Art's junk yard, where I could see Art, full of Rabelaisian gusto, and his bristling German shepherd watch dog, Dandy, surveying their domain with relish and contentment. Dandy could summon an impressive routine for the benefit of passers-by: he would start running at the back of the yard, attain full velocity a few yards short of the front fence and leap, hitting the chain link fence in full flight with all four legs, snarling angrily. A few late night drunks had their carefully tended glow ended by Dandy's' surprise attacks, but once you were inside the yard the thing Dandy wanted most was to play "fetch" with his favorite toy, a partially deflated saliva encrusted basketball.
There were three apartments above my storefront space. Many occupants came and went and were noted only for how little noise they made, slow shuffling sounds, random thuds, water running briefly, sounds of sweeping, long stretches of silence. Others made more of an impression. There was an old guy up front in number one whose name I forget but who is memorable for a few things: he was eighty-four years old and let you know it, he was subject to some kind of seizures and drank vodka instead of taking his medication, and, his teeth fell into his over-flowing toilet as he was trying to unclog it. The job of unclogging the toilet and retrieving the lost teeth went to Marilyn, the queen sized manager of the building, who somehow maintained a friendly humor in spite of the misery and comedy that intermingled around her. Marilyn lived in number two, the middle apartment above me, and made very little noise. Her son disappeared with a tape recorder and a Braille machine belonging to Doug, the sincere blind guy who lived in the back apartment, number three.
One day I heard repeated banging sounds, substantial thuds, coming from the front of the building. I found Doug hurling his slight sightless self against the door to the upstairs, cursing and complaining that it was stuck. I looked into the stairwell through the small glass in the door and could see the old guy from number one wedged asymmetrically between the foot of the stairs and the door. He seemed broken and lifeless. I called an ambulance and went around to the upstairs back door, through the labyrinthine halls and into the stairwell. The old guy had fallen down the stairs and came to rest against the door. The tumble had dislodged his recovered teeth. He clutched a pint of vodka in his gnarled hand. One half of a bologna sandwich had fallen from the pocket of his grimy suit coat. The ambulance arrived. The old guy sprang to life just as the paramedics gingerly moved him from his contorted position. He struggled to his feet, shoved his teeth back in his mouth, picked up the components of his sandwich and put them in his coat pocket, called us all assholes, and went back upstairs. This event was enough for Doug. He had endured burglary, wildly sloping floors, and now this. He left a few days later for an equally decrepit boarding house in another part of town. There was a brief period of silent vacancy in his number three apartment preceding the arrival of Henry and Don.
Henry was about twenty years old. Don, his father, around forty. I could hear fragments of their conversation through my bedroom ceiling when they stayed up drinking. I first met them when a cascade of water poured from overhead into my "living room". I went upstairs to number three and told Henry about the water. He seemed mystified. He had no idea where the water could be coming from. I told Marilyn the manager and she called the landlord who dispatched a technician, who drew a blank after a flaccid inspection. A few days later the same thing happened, more shoulders shrugged , and no solution. After a few more episodes I insisted that I personally inspect for any leaks, and after some vigorous denials that any water was in use, I gained access to Henry and Dons rooms. I saw in their kitchen sink several pieces of laundry floating under the running tap with water pouring over the sink, onto the floor and into my living room. I pointed this out to them and Don ambled listlessly to the sink and turned the water off. While this was going on I was able to glance around the apartment, into their lives. I saw things I had thrown away: a kitsch religious postcard, an arty looking wine bottle. Attempted decorations transformed by the ambiance of enfeebled lives into wincing tragedy. The surroundings made it impossible to be angry. I cheerily expressed relief that we had gotten to the bottom of the leaking water mystery, and, since the source of the water had been determined, it wouldn't be happening again. They both agreed. Several days later more water poured from the ceiling. I charged up the stairs in a rage which evaporated upon seeing the aimless torpor of this truncated family. Once again Don shut off the water.
It was clear that these guys didn't care - about me or themselves. I decided to cope with the problem more obliquely. I made a rectangle of about six by eight feet out of one by four pine. I stretched a piece of polyethylene plastic tautly across the rectangle, forming a large shallow basin, four inches deep, with wood sides and a plastic bottom. I cut a hole the diameter of an old plastic vacuum cleaner hose in one of the short sides of the rectangle, inserted the hose, and sealed it with silicone. This structure was then suspended from my ceiling at a slight incline toward the outside wall of my place so that the vacuum cleaner hose was at the lower end of the rectangle. I made a hole in the wall above the window and put the end of the hose through the hole so it protruded into Arts junkyard, and waited. Predictably, water cascaded from above, but instead of flooding my home it pattered drum like into the plastic contraption and poured down the inclined plastic membrane, through the plastic hose and down the outside of my window, harmlessly watering the morning glories that were holding up the building, and confounding Dandy the watchdog. It was a triumph of technology over the forces of chaos, but not the last fallout from Henry and Don.
I continued to hear late light snatches of conversation from my bedroom. I think Henry and Don drank all night every night. There were long sullen silences, incoherent out bursts, dialogues where rubble was sorted and catalogued, only to scatter again when their attention lapsed. Moments of clarity were excruciating: "Son, we don't have no money to be spending on hamburgers". They both seemed too young to be so beaten. They were the conduit of an irresistible vector of resignation that preceded and would exceed their lives. There was a residual kindness in Henry's face, a muted undertone stained by subsequent thrashings. Don seemed wounded and bewildered. He gave the impression that he had walked in on his life in mid-course, so stunned by the disarray that he would never gain an equilibrium that would contain the debacle that unfolded in slow-motion. One evening of their lives was sufficient atonement for a life-time of their imprudent laundry practices.
Sleep wasn't easy in these circumstances. Gamboling rats, Henry and Don's liquid and aural intrusions and alcohol fueled outbursts from the neighbors. The ernest couple next door was actually raising babies in this environment. I was awakened one evening by a woman screaming. It was my neighbor discovering a slug on the baby bottle she had groped for in the darkness preparing for her new daughters two o'clock feeding. Dandy the watch dog serenaded the passers-by at all hours. A mother cat arrived one night with five kittens. Tenants started fires, accidentally and intentionally.
One evening I was awakened by a sound that seemed to be disturbingly close. It was a thud, an impact simultaneous with an exhalation and a groan, as if a very large person had hit a smaller person in the ribs. There was no follow-up and I sank back into sleep. Moments later I was reawakened, this time by the dreaded sounds of Idling diesels and red lights pulsing. Fire trucks at a one hundred year old tinder dry wood frame building, in the middle of a winter night! I got up and went out the front door where the trucks were parked. I saw the door to the upstairs open and two firemen in full regalia emerging, breath fogged in the cold. One of them was carrying a flaming record player on a wide square shovel like device. The firemen exchanged "can you beat this?" looks. Jean Cocteau would have been envious. The fireman heaved the metaphor laden relic into the gutter and hosed down its final rhapsody.
As the embers of the record player ebbed, Henry emerged from upstairs. "Where's my father? I used the pay phone in the hall to call the fire truck and when I got back he was gone! I could see the door the whole time! He's gone!" There was another round of rolled eyes and slapped foreheads. Some disturbance drew our attention to Arts junk-yard. A giant search light on one of the fire trucks was aimed into the yard, revealing a sight to rival the flaming record player: The missing Don was standing and swaying in a forest of rusted sharp steel scrap, with Dandy the watch dog eagerly wagging his tail and offering his crusty basketball for a nocturnal game of "fetch!"
The pieces fell into place. Henry and Don had turned on their gas heater, with the record player on top. The record player started to burn. Henry went to call for help. Don, terrified of fire, panicked and wriggled through a bathroom window the size of a dough-nut and plunged miraculously un-impaled into the junkyard. His alcoholic lassitude allowed him to compress and rebound rather than shatter. That was the thud that first woke me up. Dandy regarded him as a playmate from the sky. As Don stood in the lime-light of the fire truck Art the junk man emerged from the cinderblock hut in the yard where he sometimes spent the night. He was a rotund bald fellow with a white mustache, wearing the worlds largest pair of striped boxer shorts. He yelled: "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING IN MY JUNK-YARD?" Perfect.
By now the excitement had brought all the tenants of the building, many neighbors and a few passers-by at the late hour to this scene illuminated like a prison break. Art put on his overalls and opened the gate. Don threaded his way through an impossible landscape of scrap metal and walked slowly to the gate, Dandy still eagerly lobbying for a game of fetch. This episode was one more anvil on the yoke of Don's life, one more line on his martyr's brow. His bearing was regal. Patient. The crowd parted from his path as he walked, back to his apartment, back to his son.
© 1994 Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
The variables were the neighbors, adjacent and upstairs. They ranged from benevolent art types like myself in the three other street level store fronts to a few serious bad actors, usually short-term transients, in any one of the thirteen apartments upstairs. Within their repertoire one could find drug and alcohol abuse, larceny, brandishing and firing weapons, attempted arson, physical and verbal assault, a sordid gumbo of petty misdemeanors spiced with a few felonies. They represented a small minority amid those who came and went overhead. The majority were folks wobbling in low-level orbits around poverty and pathos with few choices in their lives.
And there was Art the junkman. The side windows of my storefront space looked directly onto Art's junk yard, where I could see Art, full of Rabelaisian gusto, and his bristling German shepherd watch dog, Dandy, surveying their domain with relish and contentment. Dandy could summon an impressive routine for the benefit of passers-by: he would start running at the back of the yard, attain full velocity a few yards short of the front fence and leap, hitting the chain link fence in full flight with all four legs, snarling angrily. A few late night drunks had their carefully tended glow ended by Dandy's' surprise attacks, but once you were inside the yard the thing Dandy wanted most was to play "fetch" with his favorite toy, a partially deflated saliva encrusted basketball.
There were three apartments above my storefront space. Many occupants came and went and were noted only for how little noise they made, slow shuffling sounds, random thuds, water running briefly, sounds of sweeping, long stretches of silence. Others made more of an impression. There was an old guy up front in number one whose name I forget but who is memorable for a few things: he was eighty-four years old and let you know it, he was subject to some kind of seizures and drank vodka instead of taking his medication, and, his teeth fell into his over-flowing toilet as he was trying to unclog it. The job of unclogging the toilet and retrieving the lost teeth went to Marilyn, the queen sized manager of the building, who somehow maintained a friendly humor in spite of the misery and comedy that intermingled around her. Marilyn lived in number two, the middle apartment above me, and made very little noise. Her son disappeared with a tape recorder and a Braille machine belonging to Doug, the sincere blind guy who lived in the back apartment, number three.
One day I heard repeated banging sounds, substantial thuds, coming from the front of the building. I found Doug hurling his slight sightless self against the door to the upstairs, cursing and complaining that it was stuck. I looked into the stairwell through the small glass in the door and could see the old guy from number one wedged asymmetrically between the foot of the stairs and the door. He seemed broken and lifeless. I called an ambulance and went around to the upstairs back door, through the labyrinthine halls and into the stairwell. The old guy had fallen down the stairs and came to rest against the door. The tumble had dislodged his recovered teeth. He clutched a pint of vodka in his gnarled hand. One half of a bologna sandwich had fallen from the pocket of his grimy suit coat. The ambulance arrived. The old guy sprang to life just as the paramedics gingerly moved him from his contorted position. He struggled to his feet, shoved his teeth back in his mouth, picked up the components of his sandwich and put them in his coat pocket, called us all assholes, and went back upstairs. This event was enough for Doug. He had endured burglary, wildly sloping floors, and now this. He left a few days later for an equally decrepit boarding house in another part of town. There was a brief period of silent vacancy in his number three apartment preceding the arrival of Henry and Don.
Henry was about twenty years old. Don, his father, around forty. I could hear fragments of their conversation through my bedroom ceiling when they stayed up drinking. I first met them when a cascade of water poured from overhead into my "living room". I went upstairs to number three and told Henry about the water. He seemed mystified. He had no idea where the water could be coming from. I told Marilyn the manager and she called the landlord who dispatched a technician, who drew a blank after a flaccid inspection. A few days later the same thing happened, more shoulders shrugged , and no solution. After a few more episodes I insisted that I personally inspect for any leaks, and after some vigorous denials that any water was in use, I gained access to Henry and Dons rooms. I saw in their kitchen sink several pieces of laundry floating under the running tap with water pouring over the sink, onto the floor and into my living room. I pointed this out to them and Don ambled listlessly to the sink and turned the water off. While this was going on I was able to glance around the apartment, into their lives. I saw things I had thrown away: a kitsch religious postcard, an arty looking wine bottle. Attempted decorations transformed by the ambiance of enfeebled lives into wincing tragedy. The surroundings made it impossible to be angry. I cheerily expressed relief that we had gotten to the bottom of the leaking water mystery, and, since the source of the water had been determined, it wouldn't be happening again. They both agreed. Several days later more water poured from the ceiling. I charged up the stairs in a rage which evaporated upon seeing the aimless torpor of this truncated family. Once again Don shut off the water.
It was clear that these guys didn't care - about me or themselves. I decided to cope with the problem more obliquely. I made a rectangle of about six by eight feet out of one by four pine. I stretched a piece of polyethylene plastic tautly across the rectangle, forming a large shallow basin, four inches deep, with wood sides and a plastic bottom. I cut a hole the diameter of an old plastic vacuum cleaner hose in one of the short sides of the rectangle, inserted the hose, and sealed it with silicone. This structure was then suspended from my ceiling at a slight incline toward the outside wall of my place so that the vacuum cleaner hose was at the lower end of the rectangle. I made a hole in the wall above the window and put the end of the hose through the hole so it protruded into Arts junkyard, and waited. Predictably, water cascaded from above, but instead of flooding my home it pattered drum like into the plastic contraption and poured down the inclined plastic membrane, through the plastic hose and down the outside of my window, harmlessly watering the morning glories that were holding up the building, and confounding Dandy the watchdog. It was a triumph of technology over the forces of chaos, but not the last fallout from Henry and Don.
I continued to hear late light snatches of conversation from my bedroom. I think Henry and Don drank all night every night. There were long sullen silences, incoherent out bursts, dialogues where rubble was sorted and catalogued, only to scatter again when their attention lapsed. Moments of clarity were excruciating: "Son, we don't have no money to be spending on hamburgers". They both seemed too young to be so beaten. They were the conduit of an irresistible vector of resignation that preceded and would exceed their lives. There was a residual kindness in Henry's face, a muted undertone stained by subsequent thrashings. Don seemed wounded and bewildered. He gave the impression that he had walked in on his life in mid-course, so stunned by the disarray that he would never gain an equilibrium that would contain the debacle that unfolded in slow-motion. One evening of their lives was sufficient atonement for a life-time of their imprudent laundry practices.
Sleep wasn't easy in these circumstances. Gamboling rats, Henry and Don's liquid and aural intrusions and alcohol fueled outbursts from the neighbors. The ernest couple next door was actually raising babies in this environment. I was awakened one evening by a woman screaming. It was my neighbor discovering a slug on the baby bottle she had groped for in the darkness preparing for her new daughters two o'clock feeding. Dandy the watch dog serenaded the passers-by at all hours. A mother cat arrived one night with five kittens. Tenants started fires, accidentally and intentionally.
One evening I was awakened by a sound that seemed to be disturbingly close. It was a thud, an impact simultaneous with an exhalation and a groan, as if a very large person had hit a smaller person in the ribs. There was no follow-up and I sank back into sleep. Moments later I was reawakened, this time by the dreaded sounds of Idling diesels and red lights pulsing. Fire trucks at a one hundred year old tinder dry wood frame building, in the middle of a winter night! I got up and went out the front door where the trucks were parked. I saw the door to the upstairs open and two firemen in full regalia emerging, breath fogged in the cold. One of them was carrying a flaming record player on a wide square shovel like device. The firemen exchanged "can you beat this?" looks. Jean Cocteau would have been envious. The fireman heaved the metaphor laden relic into the gutter and hosed down its final rhapsody.
As the embers of the record player ebbed, Henry emerged from upstairs. "Where's my father? I used the pay phone in the hall to call the fire truck and when I got back he was gone! I could see the door the whole time! He's gone!" There was another round of rolled eyes and slapped foreheads. Some disturbance drew our attention to Arts junk-yard. A giant search light on one of the fire trucks was aimed into the yard, revealing a sight to rival the flaming record player: The missing Don was standing and swaying in a forest of rusted sharp steel scrap, with Dandy the watch dog eagerly wagging his tail and offering his crusty basketball for a nocturnal game of "fetch!"
The pieces fell into place. Henry and Don had turned on their gas heater, with the record player on top. The record player started to burn. Henry went to call for help. Don, terrified of fire, panicked and wriggled through a bathroom window the size of a dough-nut and plunged miraculously un-impaled into the junkyard. His alcoholic lassitude allowed him to compress and rebound rather than shatter. That was the thud that first woke me up. Dandy regarded him as a playmate from the sky. As Don stood in the lime-light of the fire truck Art the junk man emerged from the cinderblock hut in the yard where he sometimes spent the night. He was a rotund bald fellow with a white mustache, wearing the worlds largest pair of striped boxer shorts. He yelled: "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING IN MY JUNK-YARD?" Perfect.
By now the excitement had brought all the tenants of the building, many neighbors and a few passers-by at the late hour to this scene illuminated like a prison break. Art put on his overalls and opened the gate. Don threaded his way through an impossible landscape of scrap metal and walked slowly to the gate, Dandy still eagerly lobbying for a game of fetch. This episode was one more anvil on the yoke of Don's life, one more line on his martyr's brow. His bearing was regal. Patient. The crowd parted from his path as he walked, back to his apartment, back to his son.
© 1994 Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.