The Great Leap Forward
WHEN I FIRST MOVED TO NEW YORK, I shared a reasonably priced two-bedroom apartment half a block from the Hudson River. I had no job at the time and was living off the cruel joke I referred to as my savings. In the evenings, lacking anything better to do, I used to head east and stare into the windows of the handsome, single-family town houses, wondering what went on in those well-appointed rooms. What would it be like to have not only your own apartment but an entire building in which you could do whatever you wanted? I’d watch a white-haired man slipping out of his back brace and ask myself what he’d done to deserve such a privileged life. Had I been able to swap places with him, I would have done so immediately.
I’d never devoted much time to envy while living in Chicago, but there it had been possible to rent a good-size apartment and still have enough money left over for a movie or a decent cut of meat. To be broke in New York was to feel a constant, needling sense of failure, as you were regularly confronted by people who had not only more but much, much more. My daily budget was a quickly spent twelve dollars, and every extravagance called for a corresponding sacrifice. If I bought a hot dog on the street, I’d have to make up that money by eating eggs for dinner or walking fifty blocks to the library rather than taking the subway. The newspaper was fished out of trash cans, section by section, and I was always on the lookout for a good chicken-back recipe. Across town, over in the East Village, the graffiti was calling for the rich to be eaten, imprisoned, or taxed out of existence. Though it sometimes seemed like a nice idea, I hoped the revolution would not take place during my lifetime. I didn’t want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks. The money was tempting. I just didn’t know how to get it.
I was nearing the end of a brief seasonal job when I noticed that my favorite town house had been put up for sale. “A Federal Gem,” the papers would have called it. Four stories tall, the building stood on a quiet, tree-lined block enclosing a private garden. As far as I was concerned, the house belonged to me. I’d spent a lot of time spying into the walnut-paneled second-floor study and imagining myself dusting the bookcases. It would take a lot of work to keep the place clean, but I was willing to make the sacrifice.
A few months after being put on the market, the building was sold and painted hot pink with tangerine trim. The combination of colors gave the house a raw, jittery feeling. Stare at the facade for more than a minute, and the doors and windows appeared to tremble, as if suffering the effects of a powerful amphetamine.
Because I had always noticed this house, I found it remarkable when, through the recommendation of a casual acquaintance, the new owner hired me to work three days a week as her personal assistant. Valencia was a striking, tightly wound Colombian woman with a closetful of short skirts and a singular talent for appalling her neighbors. After painting the walnut-paneled library a screeching canary yellow, she strung a clothesline across the nineteenth-century wrought-iron balcony the former owner had brought up from New Orleans.
“Show me where there is a law who says I cannot dry my clothes in sunshine,” she said, crumpling up one of the several anonymous letters of complaint. “Maybe these people should just mind to their own business for one time in their life and leave me alone, my God.”
It was rumored that Valencia was some sort of heiress and had paid for the million-dollar house in cash, much the same way a normal person might buy a belt or an electric skillet. Money seemed to embarrass her, and though she was obviously quite well off, she preferred to pretend otherwise. The house was furnished with broken tables and chairs she’d picked up off the street, and every service was haggled over. If a cabdriver charged her four dollars, she’d wrangle him down to three. Should someone demand the previously agreed-upon price, he or she was accused of trying to fleece a poor immigrant woman with a small, struggling business and a child to feed. Worn out by the bickering, a surprising number of people eventually caved in. Often these were cash-strapped independent merchants and laborers, and I was always surprised by the joy she took in saving a few dollars at their expense.
Valencia’s business was a small publishing company she ran from her garishly painted fourth-floor study. It was more a hobby than a moneymaker, but the work satisfied her dual interests in art and in a certain, listlike style of writing. In her first year of operation she had produced two volumes of poetry, written by men known mainly for their violent tempers. Once or twice a week an order would come in, and it was my job to fill it. There were occasional errands to run or letters to Xerox, but for the most part all I did was sit at my desk and mentally redecorate the house. A go-getter might have dreamt up clever ways of promoting the two unpopular titles, but I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment.
Around the first of the month, when the bills came due for the phone, gas, and electricity, Valencia would have me go through the books and make a list of everyone who owed her money. She’d notice, for example, that a bookstore in London had an overdue account of seventeen dollars. “Seventeen dollars! I want you to call them now and tell them to send it to me.”
I’d point out that the long-distance call would cost more than the money she was owed, but she didn’t seem to care, saying that it was the principle that bothered her. “Call them now before they have their tea.”
I’d then pick up the phone and pretend to dial. There was no way I could get heavy-handed and demand that an English person send me money, even if he owed it to me personally. Holding the receiver up to my mouth, I’d look out across the garden and into the orderly homes of Valencia’s neighbors. Uniformed maids entered rooms carrying tea services on silver trays. Men and women sat on chairs with four legs and stared at their walls without the benefit of sunglasses. What worried me was the thought that I actually belonged in Valencia’s house, that of all the homes in New York, my place was here with the Barefoot Contessa. “London’s not answering,” I’d say. “I think today is a British national holiday.”
“Well, then, I think it would be good for you to call that store in Michigans who owe us the twelve dollars and fifty cents.”
In the late afternoon we would often be visited by one or more of the failed Beat poets who always, very coincidentally, seemed to find themselves in the neighborhood. They were known for their famous friendships rather than the work they had produced, but that was enough for Valencia, who collected these men much the same way that her neighbors collected Regency tea caddies or Staffordshire hounds. Occasionally these poets would show up drunk, carrying found objects onto which they had scrawled cryptic messages. “Look what I did,” they’d say. “Want to buy it?” Such works decorated the house, and I was often scolded for accidentally throwing away Robert’s Styrofoam cup or Douglas’s very special paint stick. Valencia was incredibly generous to these deadbeats. She memorized their poetry and excused their bad behavior. She poured them drinks and forced them to eat, but had she been as poor as she normally pretended to be, I doubt they would have wanted anything to do with her. In their presence she was charming and attentive, but they seemed to need more than just her friendship. Watching her in their company, I could understand why wealthy people usually had other wealthy people for friends. It was one thing to be disliked, but I imagine it must really smart to find yourself repeatedly taken advantage of.
My career as a personal assistant hit rock bottom one summer morning when Valencia greeted me with a flyer she’d taken from the window of an exotic-bird shop located on the corner. Beneath a fuzzy Xeroxed photo of what appeared to be a chicken was a description of a missing African grey parrot that had flown out of the store when a customer opened the door. It was noted that the bird answered to the name of Cheeky and that a $750 reward had been offered for its return.
“So there it is,” Valencia said. “We will find this Cheeky bird, split the money, and then we will be rich!”
The chances of finding the parrot struck me as fairly slim. It had already enjoyed two days of freedom, and even on foot it would have easily made Brooklyn long ago. I went to work filling a book order, annoyed that Valencia took such great pleasure in pretending to be poor. Finding the bird would have been nice, sure, but it was silly to act as though she needed that money to survive. Somewhere along the way she’d got the idea that broke people led richer lives than everybody else, that they were nobler or more intelligent. In an effort to keep me noble, she was paying me less than she’d paid her previous assistant. Half my paychecks bounced, and she refused to reimburse me for my penalty charges, claiming that it was my bank’s fault, not hers.
I was stuffing a book into an envelope when Valencia hissed, “Psst. David, look! Outside! I think I see the seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar bird.”
I looked through the open window, where, standing on the branch of a ginkgo tree, a male pigeon was examining his misshapen foot.
“Call him into the house,” Valencia whispered. “Tell him you have some good bread for him to eat, and he will come.”
I told her it was just a pigeon, but she denied it, holding up the smudgy Xerox as proof. “Call him by the name of Cheeky. Grab him with your hands, and we will split the money.”
I thought once more of my bounced paychecks and realized that had this been the actual parrot, she would have found some way to renege on the deal and change the split from the promised fifty-fifty. I could clearly see her saying that she had been the first one to spot the bird and that she deserved more because it had been captured on her property. In the past I had put up with her tantrums and said nothing when she’d yelled at me in front of the deadbeats, but this was asking too much. Although I could humor her by courting the bird, I knew that I definitely could not call him Cheeky. It was just too embarrassing.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Hurry, before it’s too late.”
I lowered my voice and produced a series of gentle kissing noises. I promised food and comfort, but the pigeon had no interest in entering the house. He stared past me, as if judging the broken furniture and brightly painted walls, and then he flew away.
“How could you let him fly like that?” Valencia screamed. “We could have made important money, but instead, you were so stupid with those noises you preferred. Really, how could you!”
She threw herself on the bed she kept parked in the corner and sulked for a while before picking up the chipped telephone and calling someone in her native land. I’d studied Spanish in high school but had no idea whom she was calling or what they were talking about. Her tone of voice suggested that she was possibly begging someone for a heart or kidney, something urgent. The pleading was followed by an extended period of screaming that ultimately gave way to more begging. Such calls were common, and though she sometimes wept, she never mentioned the conversation after slamming down the receiver.
Valencia had been on the phone for maybe ten minutes when the Spanish stopped and she switched to English. “David! He’s back. It’s the seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar bird, and this time he wants to come into the house. Get him. Get Cheeky!”
It was another pigeon, this one with two healthy feet and a noticeably shorter attention span. He flew away, and again I was screamed at.
“You are competent at nothing. I cannot believe this situation I am having with you. What good is a person who cannot even catch a bird?”
The scene repeated itself through the course of the week and marked the beginning of the end for Valencia and me. She started calling early on my scheduled days, saying that she wouldn’t be needing any help. I knew that she had recently bought a computer and was paying a college student to teach her how to use it. The student was cheerful and efficient and enjoyed Beat poetry. If asked to, she could have capably wrangled seventeen dollars from the English or caught a pigeon with her bare hands. The name Cheeky would have come easily to her, so it made sense to phase me out. I should have handed in my resignation, but as lousy and low-paying as the job was, I didn’t want to have to look for another one. And so I stayed and waited to be fired.
I was down to a day and a half a week when Valencia called a mover to cart a load of furniture to an apartment she’d rented for one of the deadbeats. The man came alone, not bringing any helpers, as he’d been told it was a one-person job. It’s hard for one person to carry a sofa down three flights of stairs, so, seeing as I had nothing better to do, I offered to help. The man’s name was Patrick, and he spoke in a soft, hypnotic voice that made everything he said sound wise and comforting. “I can see that you’ve really got your hands full with that one,” he said, rolling his eyes toward Valencia’s office. “I’ve known broads like that all my life. She wants to be artsy and has settled on being cheap. I can tell I won’t be getting a tip out of her.”
After we’d carried the furniture to the deadbeat’s new apartment, Patrick offered me a job, and I took it.
“Terrific,” he said. “Get yourself a back brace, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
Because he was a card-carrying communist, Patrick hated being referred to as the boss. “This is a collective,” he’d say. “Sure, I might happen to own the truck, but that doesn’t make me any more valuable than the next guy. If I’m better than you, it’s only because I’m Irish.”
I’d never cared for any of the self-proclaimed Marxists I’d known back in college, but Patrick was different. One look at his teeth, and you could understand his crusade for universal health care. Both his glasses and his smile were held together with duct tape. Notable too was his willingness to engage in actual physical work. The communists I’d known in the past had always operated on the assumption that come the revolution, they’d be the ones lying around party headquarters with clipboards in their hands. They couldn’t manage to wash a coffee mug, yet they’d been more than willing to criticize the detergent manufacturer.
Patrick’s mugs were clean and neatly lined up on the drainboard. He lived alone in a tiny rent-controlled apartment filled with soft snack foods, letters from imprisoned radicals, and the sorts of newspapers that have no fashion section. His moving collective consisted of him, a dented bread truck, and a group of full- and part-time helpers hired according to availability and the size of any given job. Together we resembled the cast of a dopey situation comedy, something called Grin and Bear It, or Hello, Dolly. The part-time helpers included Lyle, a guitar-playing folksinger from Queens, and Ivan, a Russian immigrant on medication for what had been diagnosed as residual schizophrenia. I worked full-time, most often with a convicted murderer named Richie, who, at six feet four and close to 350 pounds, was a poster boy for both the moving industry and the failure of the criminal rehabilitation system. Convicted at the age of fifteen, he had served ten years in a combination of juvenile and adult penitentiaries on charges of arson and second-degree murder. The victim had been his sister’s boyfriend, whom Richie had burned to death because, in his words, “I don’t know. The guy was an asshole. What more do you want?” He thought of what he’d said and then retracted it, saying, “Rather, I found him to be untrustworthy. How’s that?” In an effort to impress his latest parole officer, Richie was trying to improve his vocabulary. “I can’t promise I’ll never kill anyone again,” he once said, strapping a refrigerator to his back. “It’s unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.”
It would be a stretch to say that I enjoyed coaxing mattresses up five flights of stairs, but it was nice to work as part of a team. The money was nothing compared with what other people earned answering phones or slipping suppositories into the rectums of senior citizens, but it was more than I had earned working for Valencia. The cash was bounceproof, and most everyone included a tip. After having spent a year and a half cooped up in a little office, it felt good to get out and move around. Rego Park, Bayside, Harlem, Coney Island, the job introduced me to the various neighborhoods of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs. It gave me a chance to look into people’s lives, to meet my fellow New Yorkers and carry their things.
Because Patrick didn’t believe in having himself bonded, we rarely moved anything of great value, no museum-quality paintings or extraordinary pieces of furniture. Most of our customers were moving into places they couldn’t quite afford. Their new, higher rents meant that they’d have to cut back on their spending, to work longer hours, or try to wean themselves off their costly psychiatrists. They were anxious about their future and quick to complain should a part of their past get scratched or broken. “The transitory state fucks with their heads,” Richie explained during my first week of work. “Me, I just try to ignore their stressed-outedness and concentrate on the gratuity.”
Moving heavy objects allowed me to feel manly in the eyes of other men. With the women it didn’t matter, but I enjoyed subtly intimidating the guys with bad backs who thought they were helping out by telling us how to pack the truck. The thinking was that because we were furniture movers, we obviously weren’t too bright. In addition to being strong and stupid, we were also thought of as dangerous. It might have been an old story to Patrick and the others, but I got a kick out of being mistaken as volatile. All I had to do was throw down my dolly with a little extra force, and a bossy customer would say, “Let’s just all calm down and try to work this out.”
I began to change in subtle ways and quickly lost patience with people who owned too many books. What had once seemed an honorable inclination now struck me as a heavy and inconvenient affectation. The conversation wasn’t as sparkling, but I found that I much preferred the stuffed-animal collectors. Boxes of records made me think that LPs should be outlawed or at least limited to five per person, and I soon came to despise the type who packs even her empty shampoo bottles, figuring she’ll sort things out and throw them away once she’s settled into her new place.
When faced with an apartment full of boxes, I’d pretend to be an ant assigned to transport sandwich crumbs back to my colony. There was no use trying to estimate how many trips it might involve, as that sort of thinking only wore me out in advance. Instead, I just took it box by box until it was my turn to guard the truck. Once we reached the new building, the process would be repeated, hopefully with an elevator. Standing in their new apartments, the air noxious with the smell of paint, the customers would determine the order of their new lives. “The sofa bed goes here — no, over there maybe. What do you think?” The schizophrenic was the best at giving decorating advice, though Richie wasn’t bad, either.
After a job was finished, we’d stand on the street drinking beer or foul-tasting Gatorade. The tip would be discussed, as would the disadvantages of living in this particular neighborhood. It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan. Customers quitting the island for Astoria or Cobble Hill would claim to welcome the change of pace, saying it would be nice to finally have a garden or live a little closer to the airport. They’d put a good face on it, but one could always detect an underlying sense of defeat. The apartments might be bigger and cheaper in other places, but one could never count on their old circle of friends making the long trip to attend a birthday party. Even Washington Heights was considered a stretch. People referred to it as Upstate New York, though it was right there in Manhattan.
Our bottles drained, Patrick would carry us back to what everyone but Lyle agreed was the center of the universe. Moving people from one place to another made me feel as though I performed a valuable service, recognized and appreciated by the city at large. In the grand scheme of things, I finally had a role to play. My place was not with Valencia but here, riding in a bread truck with my friends. My friend the communist, my friend the schizophrenic, and my friend the murderer.
The first of the month was always the busiest time, but there were more than enough minor jobs and unhappy marriages to pull us through. In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment. Leaving a spacious, reasonably priced one-bedroom in the middle of the month usually signified that someone had done something really bad. We’d empty a place of half its possessions and listen to the details as we drove the former tenant to a quickly rented storage space. The truck made a good deal of noise, and although the injured party was always eager to talk, he had to significantly raise his voice to be heard. I liked being told these stories, but it was odd hearing such personal information shouted rather than whispered.
“THEN SHE WHAT?” Richie or I would scream.
“FUCKED HER EX-BOYFRIEND ON THIS SOFA I’D BOUGHT FOR OUR ANNIVERSARY.”
“ON THE WHAT?”
“THE SOFA I’M SITTING ON. SHE FUCKED HER EX-BOYFRIEND ON THIS SOFA.”
“HOW MANY TIMES?” we’d ask.
“HUH?”
“I SAID, ‘HOW MANY TIMES?’”
“JUST ONCE THAT I KNOW OF, BUT ISN’T THAT ENOUGH?”
“IT DEPENDS. HOW MUCH WAS YOUR RENT?”
When the citizens of New York went looking for a new apartment, they came to us. Some movers charged for their inside information, but, with the exception of Richie, we gave it away for free. Strangers would often flag down the loaded van and ask where we were coming from. “Do you know if it’s already been rented? Does it have a tub or a shower?” They asked the same thing of the emergency medical crews pulling up to the hospital morgue. “What floor did the victim live on? Did the apartment get much light?”
I’d been raised with the impression that it took a certain amount of know-how to get by in New York, but a surprising number of our customers proved me wrong. Here were people who packed two hundred pounds of dishes into a single box the size of a doghouse, or even worse, people who didn’t pack at all. One evening we went to move an attractive young woman who found it charming to spell the name Kim with an h, a y, and two ms. The door opened to the sound of nerve-shattering club music broadcast from an enormous stereo system. Popcorn snapped away on the stovetop and everything appeared to be in its rightful place. I assumed that we had the wrong apartment and was ready to apologize when she said, “Are you the movers? Great, come on in.”
The phone rang and she talked for a few moments before covering the mouthpiece to say, “I couldn’t find any boxes or anything, so just… you know.”
“Just ‘you know’ what?” Richie asked. “Just use our fucking magic powers or just, you know, go home?”
He and I were ready to leave. It irritated us that this girl couldn’t even manage to pack. You don’t just place a red-hot skillet on the floor of a moving truck, and besides, if she couldn’t bother to round up a few dozen boxes, there was little chance she’d come through with much of a tip. Khymm struck me as the sort of person who had always gotten by on her looks. People had probably forgiven her for all kinds of things, but I doubted she’d get much sympathy out of Patrick. It was my understanding that communists preferred beefy, corn-fed girls with thick ankles and strong backs, all the better for threshing wheat and lugging heavy sacks of rice.
“Well?” Richie asked.
Patrick threw up his hands. “Oh, what the hell. We’re here, aren’t we?”
The young woman had a small dog, a Pomeranian, that yapped nonstop during the three hours it took to empty the apartment. She herself did nothing to help but rather talked on the phone, occasionally pausing to yell, “That’s very collectible,” or “Be careful with the fish, I’m pretty sure the female is pregnant.” While climbing the three flights of stairs for another armload of shampoo bottles, I entertained cruel fantasies, which grew more pronounced once we’d packed up the truck and arrived at her new apartment, on the fifth floor of yet another walk-up building. Just as I had predicted, our tip consisted of a toothy smile and the ridiculous suggestion that we have a nice evening. Patrick gave us a little something extra for our troubles but refused to join in when Richie and I grumbled about the girl’s prizewinning idiocy.
“Oh, give her a break. She was a good kid.” He could be very unpredictable that way. Sometimes we’d walk into an organized, well-packed apartment, and if the client was male and obviously very successful, Patrick would cancel the job, claiming that his axle had just broken or that the truck’s transmission had given out. “Sorry, friend, but I just can’t do it.” He’d give the guy the number of one of his competitors and then he would leave, delighted by the great inconvenience he had caused.
“Guys like that are bad news,” he’d say, heading back to the truck. “So how about it, boys, are any of you up for a piping hot cup of coffee? My treat.”
I was rarely appeased by the words piping hot. I didn’t want a cup of coffee, I wanted to work. “What was wrong with that guy?” I’d ask. “It was an elevator building, for God’s sake. That was good money.”
Patrick would throw back his head and let out his hearty communist laugh, an extended bray that suggested I was young and could not yet tell the difference between good money and bad.
“We’ll do a big job tomorrow,” he’d say. “Relax, brother. How much money do you need?”
“Enough for a town house,” I’d say.
“You don’t want a town house.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, then, you’re definitely in the wrong business.”
He was right about that. Carrying boxes up and down stairs wasn’t going to earn me a million dollars. Still, the extra money in my pocket allowed me to walk down the street not caring that other people had more than I did. I’d go to a movie or buy a dime bag of pot from Richie and not feel burdened by envy. I just had to understand that for Patrick, moving a certain kind of person was the equivalent of me calling a pigeon Cheeky — it simply wasn’t worth the money to him. Maybe he felt those men looking at his teeth and thinking him a loser. In their great, tenacious drive to succeed, perhaps Patrick saw the futility of his own struggle. Detailed questions about his decisions only led to the quoting of Marx and Lenin, so I soon learned to stop asking.
The best of times were snappy autumn afternoons when we’d finished moving a two-bedroom customer from Manhattan to some faraway neighborhood in Brooklyn or Queens. The side doors would be open as we crowded in the front seat, Patrick listening to a taped translation of Chairman Mao boasting about “the great leap forward.” Traffic would be heavy on the bridge due to an accident, and because we were paid for travel time, we’d hope that the pileup involved at least one piece of heavy machinery. When the tape became too monotonous, I’d ask Richie about his days at the reformatory and pleasantly drowse as he spoke of twelve-year-old car thieves and boys who had killed their brothers over an ice-cream sandwich. Patrick would get involved, saying that violent crime was a natural consequence of the capitalist system, and then, eventually, the New York skyline would appear on the horizon and we’d all stop talking. If you happen to live there, it’s always refreshing to view Manhattan from afar. Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.