From Me Three #2...

Clinton Street Days
By Tyler C. Gore

When I first moved to New York, some fifteen years ago, I rented a tiny cockroach-infested studio on Clinton Street - Lower East Side. I loved it. Living on Clinton Street was like living in a foreign country. Nearly everyone who lived there was Puerto Rican or Dominican and all the store signs were in Spanish. There seemed to be only three sorts of businesses on Clinton Street: bakeries, bridal shops, and heroin dealers (who operated out of storefronts half-heartedly stocked with laundry detergent and dusty old cans of Alpo). This mysterious three-sided economy made the neighborhood seem even more exotic to me.

Even during working hours, the street bustled with activity. People rushed up and down the street, calling to each other in Spanish over the blare of a dozen radios blasting merengue and salsa music. Although much of the neighborhood seemed to be unemployed, there was nonetheless a great sense of industriousness everywhere.

I particularly remember the man who used to sweep the streets. Scruffy and tattered looking, he always wore a dirty white T-shirt over a pair of ragged blue jeans actually held up by a rope. He had the cheerful, weather-beaten face of a chronic drunk, and yet he always seemed to be up by dawn. When I’d go off to work in the morning, I’d see him out there in the middle of the road, sweeping the street with the ecstatic, maniacal fury of a whirling dervish, as if God had chosen him to single-handedly clean the entire city in one giant, demented effort. Cars piled up behind him, blaring their horns, or swerved dangerously around him, but nothing could break his fanatical concentration. I have never seen a man so utterly devoted to his work, while so utterly ineffective. Although he worked all morning without rest, he never actually swept anything into a pile. He just pushed it back and forth, all over the street.

One day, I found he had switched occupations. He was as ragged as ever, and still in the middle of the street, but now he’d set a policeman’s cap at a jaunty angle on his greasy head, and had tied a two-by-four to the rope around his waist as a makeshift nightstick. Around his neck, he had fastened a tin whistle with a bit of string. He directed traffic with the same deranged intensity he had applied to street sweeping. He blew his whistle furiously, and snapped out his arms with triumphant abandon as he attempted to guide traffic onto the sidewalk.

I developed a certain fondness for the man. I found myself impressed by his sincere, if somewhat misapplied sense of social responsibility, and I admired the gusto with which he threw himself into his tasks. He certainly worked harder than I ever did. My enthusiasm lessened, however, when he took to sleeping inside the foyer of my building, in a cardboard box tucked under the stairwell. He didn’t make a mess, and was always back out in the street by morning, but I resented having to tiptoe up the stairs in order not to wake him.

* * *

I don’t know who had set him up there, but I suspect it was the super: a fat, irritable Dominican woman who had many unsavory relatives. Whether or not the street-sweeper was one of them, I never figured out for sure, but several others lived in or near the building, and would periodically gather en masse to cram themselves into her tiny studio apartment for food, music, and loud arguments. Her relatives were always traipsing in and out of the building, but the one I’d see the most often was her nephew, a slovenly derelict who lived in the building — in an actual apartment — but preferred to spend his days hanging around on the stoop as a kind of de facto doorman. Whenever I’d enter or leave the building, I’d find him waiting there, grinning moronically, as if there were no one in the entire world he’d rather see. “Heya, Poppy,” he’d say, disconcertingly spreading that stupid smile a little wider across his unshaven face.

One evening he came knocking at my door around midnight. Not entirely happy to see him there at that hour, I asked what he wanted.

He smiled hopefully. “Poppy, you got a dollar?”

I stared at him. “What?”

He scratched his head and broadened his smile. “All I need’s a dollar,” he said, shuffling his feet like some bashful six year old. The effect was entirely repulsive.

“Why don’t you go to your aunt?” I asked, annoyed.

“Well…” he said, sheepishly, “she’s sleeping.” He shuffled about a bit, and then adopted an earnest man-to-man expression. “Anyway, Poppy,” he continued, “I want to get a beer and she don’t like me to drink.”

He didn’t get the dollar.

Some weeks later, when I ran into him at his usual spot in front of the building I immediately noticed something different about him. Down the left side of his face, he had a long, nasty looking slash, bristling with black stitches. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“What happened?” I asked.

He shrugged and looked at the ground. “I got some problems with some people,” he mumbled. He didn’t want to talk about it, but it was easy to guess what had happened. In that neighborhood, a slash down the face meant that you had stiffed a drug-dealer, and been marked as a bad customer.

* * *

Actually, I think everyone but me who lived in the building was related to the super, with the exception of the punk rock couple who lived upstairs.

Physically, they made a strange match, as if they’d been paired by God for maximum comic effect. She was a short, dumpy white girl with bleached blond hair, and he was a tall, lanky black guy with dreadlocks. At night, I’d hear them screaming at each other with murderous fury, but when I met them in the hall they always smiled and said hello.

Once they invited me up for a beer. I’ve certainly never been a paragon of clean living, but even to me the squalor in which they lived was utterly appalling. Empty beer cans and heaps of garbage — burger wrappers, half-eaten slices of pizza, rotting containers of Chinese food — lay strewn around a ripped-up mattress occupying the center of the room. Someone had knocked large gaping holes in the wall, seemingly at random, and the words MISSING FOUNDATION had been spray-painted above the window. Roaches swarmed all over everything.

“It’s the mattress,” my hostess explained matter-of-factly. “I don’t know why but they love it.”

She sounded almost affectionate. A sudden wave of queasiness forced me to turn my attention away from the floor. I noticed that someone had haphazardly glued several egg-cartons to the surface of the walls and the door, and asked why.

“Soundproofing, man,” the boyfriend said. “I used to play the drums, you know?” By way of illustration, he drummed the air frenetically, but then suddenly stopped and frowned. “Yeah, but I had to sell them,” he said, gloomily. “You know how it is.”

I nodded, as if I did.

Although they invited me up again from time to time, I always managed to excuse myself. But one night, at about three in the morning, a sharp insistent rapping at my window jolted me out of my sleep. With bleary eyes, I stared into the dark night, and made out the ghoulish face of the punk rock girl, staring into my room from the fire escape. With her pale skin and heavily mascaraed eyes, she looked exactly like a vampire.

I squinted at her hazily, partly convinced that I was having a nightmare, but then she banged again on the window and I bolted up from the bed, heart pounding. “Jesus, what are you doing?” I shouted.

“Relax, man, it’s okay,” she said in a tone of distinct annoyance, apparently put out by my bug-eyed reaction. “I just need to use your phone,” she explained, her voice muffled by the windowpane.

“My phone?” I repeated, baffled. She made it all seem so ordinary, like knocking on the door for a cup of sugar.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Can I use your phone?”

“Right now?” I asked, with a helpless gesture that was meant to encompass the entire situation — the darkness of the room, the distance from my bed to the window, the late hour, the unusual and creepy proximity of the punk rock girl to the interior of my fifth-floor apartment from the outside of the building.

She shot me a withering look of disgust. “Oh, just forget it, man.” She shook her head at the uncoolness of it all, and crawled back up the fire escape...

Want to read the rest of this essay?  BUY ME THREE #2!