Living with Legends

Sarah is an older lady, scatterbrained, though endearingly so, with a wild mane of curly gray hair.  A jewelry designer, she’s lived here in the Chelsea since the sixties, provided gems for the Warhol superstars.
         Sarah’s large apartment/workshop is filled floor to ceiling with a lifetime’s accumulation of dusty junk: tools, boxes of metal clasps, beads, tiles and fixtures, bolts of cloth, old sewing machines, teetering piles of old magazines, you name it.  I’ve offered several times to help her clean out her apartment, which has become so cluttered that there’s not much living space left, but she’s collected all this stuff for a reason, and, who knows, never can tell when it might come in handy.

But one afternoon she called me and said she did have a few things to throw out, so I came down to her place to help her move them out.  Mostly, it just looked like her usual trash, but she had a box or two of papers for me to carry out, and there was a metal cabinet, the drawers filled with ticket stubs and receipts and other scraps of paper, that she thought she could live without.

            When I had carried all that stuff out, Sarah said, “I’ve been thinking of getting rid of this.”

From somewhere in the bowels of her rooms she had drug out an old drafting table.  Of dark wood, the table was worn and beaten but still sturdy and functional, with an ancient, heavy iron mechanism to control it’s slant.

“Wow!” I said.  It was a really good looking piece of furniture, must have been seventy or eighty years old.  But then I caught myself and said.  “Yeah, get rid of it.  And how about some of these old magazines too.”

“Those have my designs in them,” Sarah said.

We turned our attention back to the drafting table.  “I don’t use it anymore,” Sarah said.  “Never have.  But it belonged to Charles James, so I’ve kept it all these years.”

Charles James, a great courtier, famous for his lampshade shaped dresses, who used to live at the Chelsea.  He has a plaque on the fashion walk of fame on Seventh Ave.
          “Oh, did he give it to you?  Did you know him?”

“I did know him, but no, he didn’t give it to me.  I think Viva gave it to me, but I can’t really remember, it was so long ago.”

I made to seize the old table.

“I just don’t know,” Sarah said.  “It seems a shame to throw it away.  Maybe I should just keep it.”

“Sarah, you have to get rid of something,” I scolded.

The upshot of this was that, in order to make Sarah feel less guilty, and just so she could get rid of something—since the piles of junk were threatening to fall over on her and bury her like the Collier Brothers–I agreed to take the table.  (I must admit too, that I harbored a secret desire to own the table—because of it’s origins, because it looked cool, and also because, like Sarah, I’m a pack rat at heart and can’t bear to throw anything out.)

I thought for sure I was in for trouble.  My girlfriend and I had had arguments before about my habit of dragging home junk.  But maybe I was kind of hoping she would bitch me out, so that would give me an excuse to get rid of the table.

            Instead, she had even more enthusiasm than me for the table, especially because of the Charles James connection.  “Oh my God!  That’s really cool.  But what can we do with it?”

“Well, maybe I can use it for a desk,” I said, thinking of replacing the one I had, but knowing all the while that that wouldn’t work at all.  The table was too high, and wasn’t really meant to lay flat.  It was for an artist, rather than a writer.

Folded up as far as was possible, the table sat in the middle of our room for a year.  Everybody who came to visit thought it was really nice, but nobody actually wanted to own it.  Finally, it just got be too much of a hassle to move it whenever we wanted to get into our closet.

            Late one night, when I knew Sarah would be in bed, I set the table out by the elevator with a note on it that said: Charles James’ Drafting Table: Free To A Good Home, and it was gone within the hour.  I was sad to see it go, but glad in a way also because I felt it had gone to someone who needed it, and maybe, with any luck, someone who could tap into the energy of the old designer in a way I wasn’t quite able to.  (Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton)

THE BAD COFFEE

My girlfriend likes her coffee with cream, no sugar.  So that’s what I tell them in the deli every morning when I go to get the muffins and coffee.  But you have to watch these guys, because if you turn your back on them for a moment they’ll shovel about six spoonfuls of sugar into the cup, and then you’ll really be screwed.  It’s a moral thing with them: you ought to have sugar in your coffee, whether you like it or not.

            That’s what happened one morning: I was hung over and I must have been distracted; I think I started playing with the little gray deli cat.  So when I get back to the room my girlfriend takes one sip of the coffee and declares that she can’t drink it.

            “Alright, goddamn it,” I said, annoyed.  “Give it here.”  I grabbed the cup and put the lid back on it.  “I’ll take it back.”

“Don’t worry,” she said.  “Go ahead and eat your breakfast.  I’ll get it myself.”  She got up and made to leave.

“Take this with you,” I said, proffering the cup, “or else they’ll try to make you pay again.”

“No, I don’t want the hassle.  Their coffee sucks, anyway.  I’ll just get it somewhere else.”

            “Well, what do you want me to do with this?”

            “Just throw it out.”

            I did just that.  I took the full cup of coffee out to the trash bin, opened the lid, and threw it down in the can.  It landed straight up, without spilling, in the bottom of the empty bag that lined the can.

I went back in and sat down and had a bite or two on my muffin.  About a minute later I hear this god awful racket from out in the hall: “SHIT!  AH, FUCK!”  Then somebody slammed down the lid of the trash bin.  A second or two later somebody opened the bathroom door and a moment after that slammed it shut.

What was that all about? I wondered.  I didn’t put two and two together.  Like I said, I was hung over, slightly slow that morning. Just an unrelated bit a Chelsea lunacy, I thought, nothing out of the ordinary.  My girlfriend got back with an acceptable cup of coffee and we finished our breakfast.

            Then I went to use the bathroom, and when I opened the door I was startled to see that someone had sprayed the place with a milky brown liquid.  It was all over everything: the walls, the sink, the toilet, the mirror, even some on the ceiling.  A real mess, still wet and dripping.  Obviously somebody had got the bad coffee out of the trash and, standing in the doorway of the bathroom, slung it boldly, creatively, in a wide, sweeping arc.  The Jackson Pollack of bathroom slobs.  It was hard to believe there was that much coffee in that little deli cup.

What on earth!?  Who could have done it?  I immediately suspected the trash man.  Who else would have got that coffee out of there?  Remembering the noises I had heard, I figured he had burned his hand, and, pissed off, had chosen to display his anger in a manner suitable to the art-infested realm of the Chelsea.

So why didn’t I feel guilty?  Because I figured it was his own damn fault.  He only needs to empty the trash two or three times a day, but instead he empties it twenty times or more.  He goes around and grabs every little scrap of paper out of all the trash bins on every floor.  A half an hour later he’s back again, whether anybody has thrown anything in the trash or not.  If he had just waited an appropriate interval, until there was liable to be something more in the trash, it wouldn’t have happened: the coffee would have cooled, there would have been stuff piled on top of it, and he never would have burned his hand.

Puzzling, also, was the choice of venue.  Why the bathroom? I wondered.  Why not the hallway—that was the obvious choice—or, if creativity was at a premium, the supply closet, or the elevator?

I decided that it must have been directed at me.  He must’ve seen me come in with the coffee.  This was more than mere paranoia.  Everybody knew I was the crazy bathroom person for this floor (every floor had one), the guy who would lurk around the corner to see who was stealing the toilet paper, the guy who would make sure the lock was changed regularly so no junkies got in.  Apparently, this was a revenge sloshing, and a warning to me to avoid such offenses in the future.

It pissed me off a little, both the part about messing up of the bathroom, and the warning part.  “I’m gonna ask that trash man about this,” I said.

“Just drop it,” my girlfriend said.  “It’s no big deal.  It’s not worth it to get involved in somebody’s crazy games.  That’s how this place sucks you in, and the next thing you know, you’re nuts too.”

“I’m not getting involved in anything.  I’m just curious, that’s all.”  I felt like I had to confront him.

I threw out the deli bag with the remains of our muffins and coffee, knowing the trash man would be around shortly to collect them.  When I heard him slam down the lid I ran out there.

            Hugo, the trash man, was a middle-aged Russian or eastern European man, his face haggard, bloated from drinking, his coal-black, balding hair slicked back with grease.

“Hey Hugo,” I said, “was that you who slung coffee all over the bathroom?

He gave me a dirty look.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  He was probably hung over too, just like me.

“Well, I don’t care.  It’s not me who has to clean it up,” I said.  “But I’m telling Rita it was you!” I said, half-jokingly.  Rita was the maid; she would scream at Hugo and bitch him out.

“You go on,” he said, with real hatred.  “You tell her that.”

I tried a different tack.  “Hey, I’m sorry I threw that coffee in the trash.  I just wasn’t thinking.”

“I burned my hand!  You must be crazy!  Who would do that, throw a full cup of coffee in the trash!?”

“Why don’t you just wait?”

“Wait for what?”

“For there to be enough trash to make a load.  You don’t have to take out every single piece of trash as soon as anybody throws it away.  Wait a couple of hours and then load up you trash cart.  The rest of the time you could just be sitting around, taking it easy.”

            Hugo sighed.  “They’d just find something else for me to do.”

Locked up in this magical fortress of bohemian madness, I had forgotten the simple lessons of manual labor.  This was one of those rare instances of relative sanity around the place.
Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton