I’d stayed in Ithaca for two years after getting expelled because off-campus rooms were cheap. I worked a lot. Cleaning houses and offices, mostly. They were satisfying jobs; I feel calm once I put messes in order. When snow packed onto Ithaca’s hills during the long winters I pretended my apartment was a ski chalet. This time was so much fun for me that I hardly slept. I didn’t want a moment to pass without me. My living room clogged with Arthur Machen, Joe R. Lansdale and the Dictionary of the Supernatural. Twenty Years of Congress by James G. Blaine just because I thought the title was a funny fucking pun. The most uninspired life can seem charming to a twenty-one year old. Sitting next to Beebe Lake on Cornell’s North Campus, reading Lord Dunsany’s awfully overblown prose, I had a laughing fit because I was so blessed.
Without a warning Ledric opened a plastic container that emitted a smell bad as bunion paste. To my right, there he was, with the plastic container balanced on his serving tray of a stomach. His face was so greasy that it reflected light.
— What are you doing? I asked him. What is that?
Ledric breathed heavier than lust. — There’s salmon and some perch in here. Pike too.
— That’s fish?
It looked too old to be fish. Maybe the rumor of fish. A fable of fish.
— Not that bad, Ledric answered. I let this sit out for twenty-three days, he said.
The salmon wasn’t even that appealing bright pink anymore. Just a gray custard saturated with orange oil.
— I’ll go get you some KFC, I offered. Anything’s got to be better than that.
He shook his head. — You don’t understand.
— Just put the fish down and I’ll take you out for some pizza.
Instead he mashed the stuff around with his spoon. Some delicate grayish-white bones stuck out of the meat. The food made squelching sounds when he touched it.
Ledric looked at me. — I can’t wait ten years to get skinny. I can’t do it. Not no more.
— That’s diet food? I think you could find better stuff through Weight Watchers.
But Ledric would not be stopped.
The guy who’d given me lip before started banging on our metal door.
A woman stood so fast that the chair stuck to her ass while she went to the glass and yelled.
Ever see that film The Thing? John Carpenter’s version. The people in here were like the dogs that had been shut off in a cage with the alien. The canines scratched, yelped, barked to get out because they were encountering an unnatural terror. A creature so hideous that it would destroy them. A Magogdamn terrible sight.
— There’s cestodes in here, Anthony. Ledric enjoyed the drama. He dug two fingers into the pulp then pulled out a wad of chaw. He swabbed a dollop of rotten fish between his lower lip and gum, then chewed.
A guy at the door begged. — I need some air! I need some air.
— Cestodiasis, Ledric said to me.
— Why did they lock us in here? I yelled as the thin people ran from their section.
— Whenever we get a new guy they block the door so you can’t leave, Ledric explained.
I heard the key go in and twist.
— What are you doing?! I screamed at Ledric.
— Tapeworms, he said.
5
I quit my moving job after falling down a flight of stairs. We were taking an old Quaker woman from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania so she’d be closer to her friends. Books were already boxed when we got there, with categories written on the side. History, Literature, Geography, Religion-West, Religion-East.
A framed letter from Lyndon Johnson was still on the wall. In it the departed President thanked the Quaker’s deceased husband for his speechwriting work. I told her I didn’t know why Kennedy got sole credit for helping out black people when it was Johnson who signed the Civil Rights Act.
— He was a locomotive with a little boy at the engine, she said.
Holding an armful of books I walked from the third floor of her house to the second when this asscrack of a man, another mover, dropped his box on top of mine. Said he needed water but before I could tell him to set his load at the top of the stairs he laid it on me; I shut my mouth to get the work done faster.
Four hundred and fifteen pounds going down makes more noise than a subway car derailing. Three hundred and fifteen pounds of me lay on the landing next to one box called ‘Architecture’ and the other, ‘Divine.’
I tried not to vomit while the Quaker woman did what Quakers apparently do best. She brought me a cool cloth compress for my forehead; she brought Band-Aids though I wasn’t bleeding. She disappeared.
Moving furniture wasn’t for me. For days I’d been pretending my chest didn’t hurt dramatically at the end of each strenuous job. That everyone gets light-headed from taking a small lamp up two flights of stairs. I liked the idea of being a mover more than the work. Cleaning houses had calmed me, but really I was only washing dishes, rearranging the living room: small acts of tidiness. I’d thought that packing, lifting, moving whole homes would be exponentially easeful. Instead it felt like I’d flattened a few disks in my spine.
The Armenian foreman, who was also the driver of our truck, asked me if I was going to be okay, but as he asked lifted ‘Architecture,’ and his question trailed off down the stairs toward the sidewalk. Leaving me sweating, staring at the box of ‘Divine.’
Later the foreman butted one chubby forearm into my gut as a friendly gesture. He spoke a melted English; only half of each word was actually spoken. — You’re not so bad, right? he asked. You’re a big guy, shake it up.
How could I ask to go to the hospital when the company didn’t have insurance? Their business sign at the main office on 138th Street and Amsterdam was written on posterboard in black marker. Every two weeks they discarded one company name then made up something new. No paychecks, always bills, none larger than a twenty.
I was compensated for the seven-hour shift, $42. Then the Armenian put me in a cab to Rosedale which cost as much as I did for a whole day. My only regret about leaving early was the tip the Quaker would give. Probably $20 a man if the foreman didn’t pocket much.
Better to go home, though, because I couldn’t think properly the rest of the afternoon. I poured soda in a soup bowl. Grandma rubbed mentholated cream on my back and made me rest in bed all evening.
It was Grandma who woke me the next morning because Mom and Nabisase had left for work and school. If they fought that morning I didn’t know it. I tried to go get some bandages Mom kept in her room, but she had actually installed a new lock on the door, as threatened. One that used a key. I twisted the knob for a few minutes, strenuously. Stubborn sturdy mechanism. I pressed my nose to the door crack trying to smell my mother’s secrets. I listened patiently, but her room offered no sound.
I was actually doing well enough that standing, bending, working was possible and I would have felt childish pretending with my grandmother. She expected people to act maturely. She was glad I woke up early. She rubbed the mentholated cream on my back again and gave me a card for a job advertised on the posterboard over in the Associated Supermarket on 228th Street.
The company was nearby. Twenty-minute walk; ten minutes on the Q85. Just past Green Acres Mall, which meant that it was actually in Long Island. The mall and the company were on Sunrise Highway, the expressway that started near my home at the ass end of Queens, then ran like a long intestine to the tip of Long Island where, seasonally, waste was stored in the great colon known as the Hamptons. (Thus I strike a blow for the masses! How’s that Ahmed Abdel? Lorraine?)
They hired semi-temporary laborers. Do badly and get fired the same day. Do better and they’d keep you on. It was a husband and wife from Baldwin, Long Island. Men so rarely applied that the office manager thought I’d read the ad wrong. Clean Houses— Get Paid, that’s easy. The owners were a middle-aged couple who, like most people, never left the era of their bloom. Curtis Mayfield on the office stereo. Otis Redding, like that. And they called the business Sparkle.