Spitting Off Tall Buildings Read online

  I remembered seeing the cuts on my arms and I remember the ride by cab to the emergency room but I don’t remember harming myself. One of the gashes was deep enough to need minor surgery to repair the tendon. The other ones were okay to just stitch up.

  I lied to the admissions guy so they let me go the next day. I copped to being drunk but said I’d fought off a mugger. I was sent home with a supply of tape and gauze and some pills for the pain.

  I promised myself that I’d quit this time for sure. Scared shitless by my own madness.

  And I did. I stayed completely sober and without any alcohol of any kind for three days.

  Early on the morning of the fourth day I was awake. Sweating. Uneasy. Five a.m. Sitting on the side of my bed, smoking cigarettes and waving my gray legs one at a time above the shadows on the linoleum, I knew. I was thirty-four years old and I knew; alcohol had become my medicine, the thing that kept me in balance. It was my wedge against my attacking, endlessly filibustering, condemning mind.

  I realized that I was unable to stop. And at the same moment that realization came I also was aware that, if I continued, sooner or later I’d be out of control again, that one night in a blackout I’d find the razor again or maybe jump in front of the Eighth Avenue bus or a speeding cab. Considering both conditions, both sides, weighing out the pros and cons, I came up with what was the only decision possible; I had to drink. The rest was the tradeoff.

  I got up, locating my pants in the street-light, my shoes and my shirt and my thick coat. Then I walked. Up Eighth Avenue, along Central Park South, Fifty-ninth Street, until 6 a.m. when the bars reopened.

  Chapter Eight

  THERE WERE A bunch of jobs in a row after that. Four. #1: Driver for a bootleg airport shuttle service operating out of the midtown hotels, #2: Peddling belts at lunchtime on Fiftieth Street by the Time-Life Building and around Times Square, #3: A ticket-taking gig at an after-hours club on Forty-sixth Street, and #4: A wacko stint as a window cleaner.

  I liked the airport shuttle service best because I got to drive around the city and because they paid in cash at the end of each shift. Everything I earned was off-the-books with no deductions to the government.

  I’d seen their advertisement under ‘Drivers’ in the Times and got hired on the spot because the morning of the day I walked in, one of their guys had called up and quit over the phone.

  At first, because I didn’t know the city, I made constant mistakes and had the passengers pissed off at me. But the company had a high turnover and my dispatcher didn’t care about anything other than me showing up for work. When I’d get jacked up or in trouble about a destination, I would radio in and he’d give me directions.

  Mostly, I spent my shifts bopping back and forth from La Guardia and Kennedy Airport and then back to the city. Pick ‘em up here - drop ‘em there. The tips were good.

  Our barn was in the South Bronx and the service was owned and run by two Puerto Rican brothers, Alesandro and Hector. We were technically a gypsy cab and illegal because what the brothers had done was to make a back-door deal with the legitimate, larger services to carry their overflow without having to pay any of the heavy New York City licensing fees.

  The problem was the equipment. Our vans were shit. The brothers owned three vehicles that stayed in operation fifteen to twenty hours a day. There was no towing insurance, and no back-up or contingency in the event of a breakdown. When one of the mini-buses would give out on an airport run, Hector would come out in his Chevy station wagon with the torn seats and missing headliner and complete the drop by delivering the passengers himself. Sometimes it would take him two hours to get back, attach a thick link tow chain to the front bumper of my van, and pull me back over the Tri-Boro Bridge to Gerard Avenue in the Bronx.

  The brothers were both certifiable wacks and their operation ran in continual bedlam. Yelling was the only communication method. Also, they’d jerry-rigged and substituted so many parts under the hood of each van to save money that what had been fixed only days before almost always would re-break right away.

  The best mini-bus of the three ran good but had no heater. The driver and his passengers would freeze their asses off but usually always get to their destination. The second one had a secret gasoline leak that stank up the vehicle and a weird alignment problem from an accident. It crabbed down the thruway at an angle and would wear out a set of front tires every couple of weeks.

  The last one was the worst. I was low man so I was stuck with it. Two of the motor’s cylinders were inoperable and a billow of thick, uncombusted oil smoke trailed me through the New York streets like relentless fucking Jobert in Les Miserables.

  Passengers griped constantly and self-righteous ecological motorists would honk and gesture at the virulent gray gook as it billowed out the tail pipe. Once, at a stop light, an indignant, coughing pedestrian with a metal-hilted walker cane put a crack in the driver’s side window by tapping too hard.

  In my third week on the job my van’s engine finally seized up and quit. I was in rush-hour traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway five miles from Kennedy Airport. A sudden lurching occurred, then a clanking, then a thud. Ugly, black smoke and the stench of burning rubber began filling the interior of the van.

  My passengers were forced from the vehicle and had to wait by the side of the freeway in twenty-degree weather until Hector arrived in his Chevy repair station wagon. They all missed their flights.

  That night, when we finally got back, Hector gave me fifty dollars, laid me off, and confessed that they could not afford to have the van’s engine rebuilt anytime soon.

  Chapter Nine

  THE TICKET-TAKER DOORMAN job was from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. at an after-hours club called Ponce in Times Square. Tips only. I had been misinformed about the earning potential, retaliated by reporting drunk, and was let go on the third night.

  It was lunchtime. I walked cross-town to the bank to cash an old Workpower company check for $16.23 that I’d been keeping in my wallet as a back-up. Eight people were waiting for service in the customer line and there were two tellers. Only two tellers. Lunch hour. I waited. Minutes passed but none of us in the line moved.

  Then one of the tellers, a Middle Eastern-looking human, having finished with the patron she’d been attending, put her ‘NEXT WINDOW PLEASE’ sign up, and walked away.

  I began yelling. I yelled at the official-looking assholes sitting behind the railing at the desks. The suits. There were two of them. I also yelled at the one remaining teller, a bald guy. What I yelled was as follows: ‘Hey goddammit, I’m a customer here! Hey! An American-fucking-citizen! Look at me when I’m talking to you!…Hey, goddammit! You’ve got people waiting here for service. Where are the tellers? Are you fucking blind? You need more tellers! Our money sits there in your fucking vault earning interest so you can live in New Rochelle and bribe union guys and invest in oil stocks but we can’t get a fucking check cashed in your bank or consummate a simple chickenshit transaction?…You sir, at the desk, does the word asshole hold any meaning for you? Oh sorry, how about rectum?…Hey, don’t you get it? Wake the fuck up! We need some service here!’

  The guard came over. A dildo wearing a gun with a different kind of foreign accent and enlarged pores on his nose. The guard put his hand on my arm and told me that I would have to quiet down. I yelled at him too and I continued yelling until after they called a beat cop to get me out of the bank. But they cashed my check.

  Chapter Ten

  THE BELT GIG was okay. My rooming-house neighbor, an actor queen named Dylan, who I always passed in the hall, had another friend in the building named Neil. A dancer. Neil’s room was on the top floor. Neil was a petulant, high-strung guy but very resourceful. When he wasn’t a gypsy in a show he would support himself by his street-peddling business or teaching dance. Neil had a team of six people selling leather belts on the street. They worked the lunch rush from twelve to two and the night rush at five o’clock when the midtown offices closed.

  Neil
put me on and supplied me with the belt rack. The split was fifty-fifty. It was just after Thanksgiving so business was good on the good days, and I would earn a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars for three hours’ work. Tax free. But, because of the cold weather, the bad days outnumbered the good. I was drinking more too but I still managed to show up and I continued to work on my play in the morning.

  One difficulty with being a street peddler of belts is that the rack is large and clumsy and easy to spot from a police car. And other than the cold, the main drawback to the job was the frequent arrests. Peddling anywhere in midtown New York is not legal so when the paddy wagon shows up and you’re a belt guy you are always one of the ones to get arrested because running with a seven-foot-high rack complete with dozens of leather belts is very difficult, especially on the wide avenue blocks, when the wind is catching the rack and billowing the goddamn thing like a sail.

  The wristwatch guy had a light TV tray table and the girl who made the baby-bracelets used only a blanket that she spread out on the sidewalk and could easily pick up and run with. They usually got away. Not us. Me and the costume-jewelry peddler with his fold-up bridge table, and the stocking-hat guy with the big cardboard box, we’d get popped again and again.

  The job lasted until a week before Christmas when Neil and I had a dispute. After one arrest they’d kept me twelve hours in a holding cell at the precinct for no reason other than to harass me. When I got back Neil insinuated that the arrest was my fault because I lacked the desire to run down the block with the full rack of belts. I got disgusted and decided to be sick and stay home and take some days off. Drink wine. Work on my play. Watch TV. Fuck Neil.

  On his way out, he continued to knock every morning wanting me to come to work. I’d tell him to go away but he’d stand in the hall nagging at me through the door about how my not selling his belts during the holidays was screwing his business.

  Finally, that Friday, three days before Christmas (and payday for most of the office secretaries at the Time-Life Building), he convinced me to come back.

  I’d set up and been working for only twenty minutes when the cops came and I got popped. It was bitter and freezing on Fiftieth Street that day and all the best spots were taken by the other peddlers: the good doorway and building-entrance locations between Sixth and Seventh Avenue. Nothing was shielding me from the mean wind whipping in off the river from Jersey. I saw the squad car but I was too cold and numb to run.

  Later that afternoon, in a lousy mood, I got back to Neil’s room to turn in my cash. The precinct cops had confiscated my rack again. And one of the hookers in the holding cell with me had a bad cold and had coughed and sneezed in my face non-stop for two hours. I’d convinced myself she had contagious TB. So I was pissed off. Ready for trouble.

  High-strung Neil made a stupid mistake, again accusing me of being lazy and again blaming me for the arrest.

  My problem is that I hold grudges. If you and I have had an argument and I’ve come out second or you are my boss and you’ve abused your authority in some way, I will wait, allow the annoyance to fester, even pretend that everything is okay between us, then, with what normally to others would seem like a minimum provocation, without notice, I will overreact and behave like a cornered snake. It’s a bad personality flaw and I’ve had to pay the tab for it again and again. I’d also been drinking on the way home to keep warm and prevent illness from the hooker’s coughing germs.

  When pussy Neil started in and got hysterical about the impounded belt rack, my automatic first brain impulse was to punch him in his face several times, and that’s what happened.

  After I’d left his room and got back to my room, after shattering his glass coffee table by kicking it and tearing my wad of dollar bills in half, I realized that I’d been out of line. Overreacted. But, of course, by then, being sorry didn’t mean shit.

  I had eight hundred dollars saved so I remained at home most of the time. I’d see both Neil and Dylan going in and out of the building but they avoided me.

  I got through all of Tennessee Williams’ plays again and all of Eugene O’Neill.

  But the blackness started again. I drank more to fight it. Again too much. For too long. But I didn’t hurt myself this time. Nothing violent happened.

  To break the cycle I rode the subway. For two days. The Woodlawn Line.

  When that train gets to the Bronx it busts out of the tunnel into the sunlight and runs on the elevated tracks by Yankee Stadium.

  And there you are. A few feet away. If you’re riding in one of the cars toward the end and you stand when the train is pulling into the One-sixty-first Street stop, you can make out home plate. Where Ruth and DiMaggio and Mantle and Yogi Berra and Reggie slammed the shit out of that pill. You are right there within touching distance of the shrine.

  I rode to the end of the line both days. A couple of times. By Woodlawn Cemetery. Reading Hubert Selby Jr., The Time of Your Life by Saroyan, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Reading those guys or staring out the window at the Bronx.

  When I had to smoke I’d go to the last car. Usually it was empty. Sometimes I’d get off the train, stand on the platform, smoke my cigarette, then wait for the next Woodlawn Express. Then ride on.

  By the first week in February I was completely broke so I had to start looking for work again.

  Chapter Eleven

  WINDOW CLEANERS IN New York City are mostly wine drinkers and head cases, the ones that work freelance non-union on the high-up buildings. And fools too. They’re an overlooked demographic and someone should do a study.

  I applied for the job cleaning glass with a firm called Red Ball Maintenance. The company held a contract to clean all the windows of all the state office buildings north of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. They did apartment buildings too. Large buildings.

  I got the interview because of Brad O’Sullivan who I had met at the staple-pulling assignment at the TV ad research place on Madison Avenue. Brad lived in my neighborhood in Hell’s Kitchen and it turned out that we were both boxing enthusiasts. Once or twice on Tuesday night, fight night on TV, I’d run into him at Gleason’s Bar on Ninth Avenue. The saloon showed boxing. Braddie’s uncle was Johnny Murphy. A huge guy with a great, protruding belly. Murphy was the shift manager at Red Ball.

  When I came in and sat down in his office, Murphy glanced at me from across his desk, scooped up my job application and began reading. He knew already from talking to Brad that I needed the gig, that I’d been out of work for weeks.

  He completed reading and looked up. Studied me. My face, my hair, giving me an embarrassing once-over. Then he glanced back down at the top of the application where my name appeared. It happened to me a lot at job interviews, especially in New York. My name, contradictory appearance and coloring would cause people to do double-takes. Murphy’s aggressive leer made me feel like a lab specimen.

  ‘Your name’s Dante?’ he asked.

  ‘Correct, Bruno Dante.’

  ‘You don’t look like a Dante. You don’t look like no I-talian.’

  He was right. But he was being too pushy with his authority. He twisted his gelatinous neck around the side of the desk to see the rest of me. Because of my shortness my legs barely touched the floor when I sat upright in the chair. Murphy noted this and grunted. I watched his big lips curve downward and form a sneer. Hating him instantly was no problem.

  ‘My mother’s people are English-German,’ I said. ‘I get my light coloring from her side.’

  You’re not from New York either, are ya?’

  ‘Los Angeles.’

  Another sneer. ‘Oh, Hollywood?’

  ‘I was brought up in L.A.’

  ‘Everybody in the city would give their dick to get to the sunshine. And you go the other way?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I talked to Braddie. Braddie says you’re okay, that you’ll give me a day’s work. It so happens I may have an opening.’

  ‘I appreciate Brad�
��s recommendation.’

  ‘A lot of men apply here, Hollywood.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m appreciative.’

  ‘You are, huh?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Ever do glass before, Hollywood? High-up work? Forty, fifty, sixty floors up?’

  ‘No. But it’ll be okay.’

  ‘Did Braddie tell you about how it gets when you’re up there?’

  ‘We didn’t discuss how it gets. What Brad told me was what you just said; that some of your buildings are over fifty floors. He mentioned that he worked for you for a while.’

  ‘Yeah, for about fifteen fuckin’ minutes. Braddie ain’t cut out for this deal. Did he tell you about cleaning the outside glass?’

  ‘You mean about using the belt to hook on? I know about that. We talked about that. I’ve seen it done.’

  ‘You scared?’

  ‘Scared? No. I need the work.’

  ‘I start my new guys off on the state contracts. Smaller jobs. Smaller buildings.’

  ‘Heights don’t bother me.’

  The fat fingers of Murphy’s hands came around from the top of the desk and knitted themselves behind his neck causing his gut to thrust toward me like a charging sandbag. ‘Not yet, Hollywood,’ he cackled. ‘You ain’t eighty floors up in five degrees temperature with the wind up your ass yet, either. I pay good. I bet he told you that, didn’t he?’

  ‘Right. That’s what peaked my interest.’

  Murphy was a true asshole. ‘Peaked…your interest? Peaked?’

  ‘Is there something wrong with wanting to make money?’

  ‘I pay by the pane; inside and out, up and down. A full window. Three bucks a pane. Sometimes we get more depending on the size of the windows. Four bucks, sometimes more.’