It is spotless, hands-and-knees clean.
The exterminator looks at all the places he put the spray for the roaches. They are all gleaming. You could lick the corners and cabinets without a worry, and that is just what the bugs were doing.
Ilsa had scrubbed all the poison off as soon as the exterminator left.
The first time my dad bought drugs was from a guy named Junior that had lived on the block all his life. Junior was Italian, connected with the Mafia, and he pronounced “Jewish” as “Jooich.”
When my dad went to pay, Junior starts screaming:
“What are you, fucking stupid? I’m a drug dealer, you gonna pay me by check? You got rocks in your head?”
Junior starts to kick the shit out of my dad.
Willy walks by and pulls Junior off my dad like he was a piece of lint.
Willy didn’t drink or smoke, but when he did one he did the other.
He’d bum cigarettes off my dad, but never bought them because he didn’t smoke.
But after a scotch or two he did.
When Willy wanted to lose weight, he would buy a big can of cheap sardines. Then he’d make a rule that for two days all he could eat was sardine sandwiches.
Halfway through the first sandwich, Willy would get disgusted and lose his appetite for two days.
There were lots of things like that with Willy. He would let himself drift, and then pull himself back to what he considered to be the right place.
Cap’n Jack was a super you kept at arm’s length. He took care of an insane amount of buildings.
Any more than four buildings at a time was insane to my dad and Willy. The whole point of being a super was to not work.
You had to deal with the garbage and mopping the halls. Once you went over four buildings it was like you had a real job. And if you were willing to have a real job, there were a lot better ways to make money.
Cap’n Jack took care of twenty or thirty buildings, but this isn’t what made him seem insane.
Mostly it was the smell.
He always had on the same outfit that he wore till it fell apart. Lots of denim and fur. It seemed more like two outfits than one. He never washed his clothes, and never bathed, though part of his outfit was a shower cap.
Wearing his shower cap as a blindfold, Cap’n Jack’s hands were always full like Lady Justice’s. In one hand he carried a scratched-up cane, and in the other was a plastic bag full of plastic bags. Symbolizing not justice and objectivity, but what a total whack job he was.
Cap’n worked hard. Too hard. His buildings were not just little brownstones but big co-ops with a hundred tenants. He made a lot of money being a super.
But Cap’n didn’t really spend money on anything. Certainly not his clothes. And he had a rent-controlled apartment. Which is like an R.S. apartment but five hundred times better. The rent never goes up and the only way to evict you is if you die.
Some New Yorkers have borne children just to pass down their R.C. apartments. As though the R.C. apartment is an eternal flame that will let them live on in proxy.
My dad knew a guy named Nick that had a sweet R.C. apartment on Barrow Street.
$135 a month, forever.
During World War II Nick had developed the technology that paved the way for whipped cream in a can. He made his first fortune by inventing automated baking machines.
The machines turned out hundreds of loaves and rolls a minute, and destroyed the traditional baking industry.
Nick made his second fortune with spray foam. The type you use for home insulation.
Armstrong, and lots of other brands, had been in the industry for a while. But it was discovered that the formulas they were using caused cancer.
Somehow aware of this, Nick had bought the rights to the one spray foam formula that was noncarcinogenic. He discovered, along the way, the same foam with some dye in it was a good way to mail seedlings.
And that was how Nick made his third fortune.
He had a huge house in Westchester, but kept the R.C. apartment all his life. His daughter may still have the place.
The list of rich and rent-controlled is long. BFD.
Plenty of people truly needed their R.C. and R.S. apartments. Scrappy orphans, single mothers, poets, seniors, and nutso couples that had five kids.
But there was a flip side to R.S. and R.C. apartments. You got trapped by the low rent and never bought your own piece of New York.
Whatever the faults, R.C. and R.S. kept the Village diverse with a banker, baker, and candlestick maker all on one floor.
It wasn’t a perfect system. But neither is life.
At some point, property sharks started buying all the buildings in the Village. Emptying them of working-class and poor tenants, bending the rent stabilization laws till they broke.
The sharks then either flipped the buildings for an instant profit or ran them as cash machines, raising the rents up and down the block.
And the Village changed. Some people think it’s better. You can lick the corners and cabinets of it without a worry.
But that hadn’t happened yet.
The fringe people still found a home on Morton Street.
A GIFT
When it snowed, Cap’n Jack would be fucked. So he would hire Willy to shovel half his walks. My dad would always be pulled in to help.
They cleared the walks for extra cash, but also because Cap’n Jack was part of the block, and he was drowning.
Besides, if his walks didn’t get shoveled and salted, no one could get down the street.
People looked out for each other even if it was a pain in the ass. This might have been because the Village was more dangerous and hardscrabble, because people lived there longer, were in more need, or just talked to each other more.
Note: I wasn’t born yet.
Plenty of fucked-up shit went on. There was a gang of boys that lived on Eleventh Street who would beat up black people for fun. Drug addicts sleeping the day away. Homeless people living in children’s playgrounds. The smell of piss on the street. It is easy to cite the bad in the filthy chaos of New York before luxury condos. It is harder to express the spirit, life, and community that the chaos and inefficiency bred.
Mr. King Kong, this is your last warning: YOU MUST HAVE A TICKET
On top of this, things were still made in NYC. The cost of rent for workers and businesses was lower, so paper factories dotted Tribeca. Garments were made in the Garment District, and The New York Times was printed in the New York Times Building near Times Square.
The transistor was invented in the West Village at the Bell Labs Building on Bethune Street. Lots of things were invented there under the umbrella of improving telephone service. Amplifiers, vacuum tubes, solar panels, etc. And during the world wars, the labs helped perfect radar and other essential military electronics like voice scramblers.