Jesus’ Son

Posted on October 28, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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I first heard Lou Reed on the radio when I was 16, and the song was appropriately “Rock And Roll,” from The Velvet’s Loaded album. It as on Scott Muni’s afternoon show that started at 4P.M. I would get home from Brooklyn Tech and turn on the 1950’s vintage radio I’d begged my parents to buy for $25 from a neighbor. That was a princely sum in those days, but it was a fine radio with the best bass you could ever hope to listen to.

Of course, at the time, I didn’t know that he’d already left the Velvet Underground or that this was the final album, but I went to Korvette’s department store in Union Square the next day and bought a copy of Loaded. I think Lou would have been pleased at the New Yorkness of it.

I saw him for the fist time three years later at Alice Tully Hall, it was the Trasformer tour and there were no colored girls singing “Do, do-do, do-do…” just the boys in the band doing a falsetto interpretation. By this time I was at Pratt and had bought every Velvet Underground album I could lay my hands on, and I was totally smitten.

One day I spray Painted Give me Librium or give me Meth, something Lou had said in Interview magazine on a wall in the main building at Pratt. I also did White Light, White Heat on another wall, they were both up for years, the only time I ever spray painted graffiti.

Lou Reed stirred up something inside of me that no other rock star ever could, he spoke to a lot of things I felt and thought but could not express. He was smart, literate, dark, and funny; things that were also inside of me.

When Transformer came out, there were big posters all over the subway system like this:

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One day I took a mat knife with me to my local subway stop, paid the 25 cents to get in, and after carefully scoring around the edges of the poster, I peeled it off and rolled it up and took it home. That poster was a prominent feature of anyplace I lived for the next few years. I went to see him at the Bottom Line, then at the Palladium, the Rock And Roll Animal tour.

 The Stooges came to New York in 1975 to play Max’s Kansas City, and I went to see them. I was listening to the Stooges before I’d even heard of Lou Reed, but not by much.

There was an after party at Max’s that I crashed, and everybody was there. David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Todd Rundgren, all of the New York Dolls, and Lou Reed, of course.

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I remember following Iggy and Johnny Thunders into the bathroom and watched them snort something in one of the stalls. They wouldn’t give me any. Then I took a piss next to Iggy, who by this time he was wearing a silver lamé miniskirt and nothing else. He looked at me as he was pissing and said, “I’m so fucked up.” It takes balls to go to the bathroom in Max’s barefoot. Or you have to be really fucked up.

At some point that night, I spotted my idol, Lou, sitting alone at one of those little round tables that seat two, a glass of liquor in front of him. I went over and sat in the empty seat opposite him.

“I’m a really big fan of yours, Mr. Reed,” I started.

He looked startled, he glanced around wildly looking for something, or someone, and then he made a come here gesture and the next thing I knew there was a hand on my shoulder, it was a big black man with a Caribbean accent who looked down at me and said, “Mr. Reed doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

Though hurt, that didn’t stop me from loving him, I went to see him a few more times after that, including a benefit concert for the said bouncer in 2000. He was ill and had no money for medical bills. Lou had organized the benefit and performed, alone (he sang Sweet Jane) and with Garland Jeffries.

I saw Lou one last time a couple of years ago at the Highline, he played one song and then came out for an all-star jam with Pete Seeger’s kid, of all people.

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Lou Reed at the Highline Ballroom. That’s the actor Tim Robbins to his right.

I’m really sad he’s gone, he gave me something no one else has given me, a sort of acknowledgement that I wasn’t sick and crazy for thinking the things I think or doing some of the stuff I did, that after all; it was all right.

Thanks, Lou.

 

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Resentment

Posted on October 26, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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Me and my dad just before he died at the age of 97.

I watched a documentary recently on HBO called First Cousin Once Removed by Alan Berliner. It was about the poet Edwin Honig, his cousin. It was a sad and moving essay, lyrical and poignant, until it got to the part about Honig’s children, and their relationship.

Up till then we see a kind, handsome elderly man still use words poetically, despite his ever-worsening Alzheimer’s disease. A man who wouldn’t hurt a fly, a man deserving of all the love and admiration he could get. A beautiful, creative man, still beautiful and creative. There is a mischievous look in his eyes as he plays with words with the interviewer.

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Edwin Honig.

One son comes to visit, the other doesn’t.

The one who was too busy to visit explains how his father had once torn up some of his drawings, how when his mother told him his father was moving out of the house he rejoiced, how his father only knew how to show love by being cruel to him, saying “I guess he loved me a lot.”

That statement took me back to 13 years ago this September, when I took my aging father to live in a nursing home. He was infirm, he had advanced diabetes, and he was incontinent. But he was lucid. A touch of dementia, but he knew who I was till the last time I saw him, shortly before he died.

I was caring for him the best I could, but it wasn’t enough. He needed 24 hour care and his doctor convinced me to admit him into a nursing home. I felt guilty but relieved.

The day I took him to the home, a place called Bainbridge in the Bronx, I was assisted by the head nurse that day, who helped getting him settled in.

We were in his new room, we’d gotten him to sit on the edge of his bed, and I was saying goodbye. The nurse, a kindly woman in her forties, close to my age at the time, looked at my father indulgingly and stroked his head. My father sat there and basked in her touch, a little grin on his face.

“He’s such a nice old man.” She said. Suddenly my face flushed hot and I blurted:

“Well, he wasn’t always that way!”

The nurse stared at me in shock, and after a second she turned the indulgent smile on me.

“Perhaps you’d like to talk to our social worker, maybe there are some things you’d like to work out.”

My dad looked up at me with his little mischievous grin. He hadn’t even had to say a word to get me one last time.

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My dad when he was young.

I did go talk to the woman, and I talked to a great many people after that, therapists, counselors, friends. I was in the midst of a divorce, and changing the way I lived my life for a long time, recovering from some stuff. I had already realized that my father wasn’t going to change, that whatever he’d done to me, or I perceived he’d done to me, I wasn’t getting any apologies for. I was going to have to take it and like it, or move on, leave him to die by himself in that nursing home.

My father was a drunk, and he was both physically and verbally abusive. Not extremely physical, but the verbal abuse was brutal and constant. There were times I wished him dead and I certainly would have rejoiced had my mother told me he was moving out.

He was in a coma for six months when I was 17; he’d gotten hit by a truck on Atlantic Ave. one drunk and rainy afternoon. Those six months were the most idyllic months of my youth. But I also cried and worried that he would die.

I was able to be kind to him before he died, I didn’t argue with him or try and humiliate him the way I’ve seen other adult children do to their aged parents, I might have at one time but luckily I’d learned to live my life differently. I wish I could share that with Edwin Honig’s son.

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My son Javier and his grandpa. 

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The Pecking Order

Posted on October 22, 2013 by xaviertrevino

chickens feeding webYesterday morning on my way to do the laundry I encountered the usual bunch of women and their children waiting for the Children’s dental Center next door to open. They line up according to who gets there first, but sometimes that’s debatable.

Children's Dental Care

Children’s Dental Care

There was a really large woman at the head of the line, large in both height and girth.

“I was here before you.” A smaller woman was saying to her.

“No, baby, you’re mistaken. I was here first. You didn’t see me, because I was leaning on that car over there. But I was here first.”

I could see the bigger woman was going to win the argument; none of the other women in the line was even close to her size. She looked like she could and would take on all of them, some seven or eight women and assorted children by 8:45 AM. The place opens at 9.

There are four dental centers on my block, three on my side of the street and one across the Street next to Little Caesar’s. One of them, this one,

Don't ever go here!

Don’t ever go here!

was on the news once. The staff had forgotten a patient who’d been sedated in a chair and had all gone home, locking the hapless woman in. She’d come out of sedation in a darkened dentist’s office and called the police. The police in turned called the fire department who broke open the locks to the roll-top gate and then forced open the door to get the woman out. Beside the damage to the door, I believe the woman is suing them. Not the place to go if you need any work done on your teeth.

Back to the pecking order. When this country was young, the Irish were the poor and downtrodden, there were signs of “no Irish allowed” in certain places. They were considered dirty and stupid and useless, except as manual labor. The Irish worked hard to overcome this stigma, but they in turn treated the Blacks and Chinese with equal distain when it was their turn to be the low man.

When I was a child, there were very few Mexicans in New York, and I went through grade school to the taunts of “stupid Mexican” and “Frito Bandito.” This from my mostly Black and Puerto Rican schoolmates, who were passing on the tradition of low self-esteem.

Where I work the laborers are now mostly Ecuadorians, who have replaced the Poles and Mexicans as semi-skilled laborers. Let’s not forget the Poles, who fit in there somewhere between the Irish and the African-Americans in the labor history of New York.

I bet the Mexicans and the Poles try to piss on the Ecuadorians when they work on a job together.

I take a writing workshop at the JCC, I’ve done so for a number of years, and when I was new in the class I was awed my all the magazine editors and published writers in the class. I asked myself what I was doing there, I felt I didn’t belong. But I’d been accepted into the class on the strength of a writing sample, so maybe I wasn’t such a bad writer after all.  Now new people look up to me when they come into the class, I’ve moved up a notch despite my humble employment.

Last year, in the fall, we had a new young woman in the class. She was grossly overweight, and was writing about her struggles with food addiction. I’ll call her Sally. She writes really well, she’s funny and self-deprecating but with a touch of hope, and I like her. She is very pretty and would be super hot if she lost a hundred or so pounds. I can identify with her because I was that overweight at one time.

We both came back for the winter semester, and we’d developed a rapport and would sit across from each other and joke and make faces at each other during class. On the first day we were two of the first to arrive, and we greeted people we knew and welcomed newcomers.

Then a new woman came into the room. She was enormous, probably over 400 pounds on a five foot-three or so frame. She grunted each time she took a breath and a step, and a feeling of unease started growing in my gut. It was hard to look at her.

The new woman was bigger than this.

The new woman was bigger than this.

Sally looked at me and her eyes went wide as her jaw dropped.

“Somebody lower than me!” Was what I could gather from that look, since we said nothing to each other.

I guess low self-esteem is part of the human condition, and I inadvertently managed not to pass on too much of it to my son. I guess that’s all I can do, besides doing my best to treat others fairly and with kindness, despite who they are or what they look like.

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But Wait, There’s More!

Posted on October 19, 2013 by xaviertrevino

 

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Last Tuesday I took the long train ride out to the house we are trying to buy to meet with an engineer who was to inspect the house. This is a necessary step in house buying, and my first time doing it.

This house in The Rockaways needs some work, that’s why the price is low. The kitchen floor is open, it suffered some flood damage during Sandy, and the kitchen needs to be put back together and the floors need sanding and polyurethane. By my estimate less than $20,000 worth of work, if I do most of it myself.

The engineer had let himself in through an open window; I was late getting there. He was an Italian guy in his early 60’s named Tony.

Tony wore dark khakis, a bright blue shirt and the loudest orange tie I’ve ever seen tucked into the midsection of his shirt, the way soldiers did in the 1940’s. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone tuck their tie in except in old war movies, so it was a little weird.

We shook hands and the first words out of his mouth were:

“You have no foundation. There are cinderblocks supporting the frame, but I was able to put my screwdriver straight through the bottom of one.”

From there it was all downhill. He also mentioned the crack in the outside back wall, a result of having no foundation.

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He was in the process of pulling down the ladder for the attic, I knew the roof was new, at least that would be OK.

“The water is off, let me turn it on so we can check the burner and water heater.” I said to him. I didn’t want to hear anymore yet.

I went outside and opened the trapdoor to the water main, and turned on both ball valves. Right away I noticed water was leaking from the bottom of the meter.

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I also heard water shooting out from somewhere inside, and I ran in the house to turn whatever it was that was left on, careful not to fall into the gaping hole in the kitchen floor.

It was the shower, and Tony had beaten me to it, he’d turned it off. I tried the bathroom sink taps, and there was hardly any pressure.

“The roof is not insulated and it has been improperly reinforced. The two by fours are spaced 18 inches instead of 16 inches, and…”

I was writing in my notebook furiously, recording this litany of bad news.

“Is this all going to be in your written report?”

“Yes.” I put the notebook away.

“Ok, I’ll read all about that. What about termites, you’re supposed to do a termite report.”

“I found no sign of termites.” Really? No termites? There really is a god!

“Let me go turn on the hot water heater and the furnace.”

I went outside to the shed, which contained the furnace and heater. I heard the water before I reached the door of the shed. There were already a couple of inches of water on the floor of the shed, and a jet of water from a hole in the feed pipe to the burner was spraying water everywhere. I ran to shut the water off. This was really dismaying; I was ready to run back to the A train and head back to Brooklyn.

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“Ah, there’s a leak in the feed to the furnace, I don’t think we can test it.”

Tony followed me out to the shed.

“By the way, the hot water heater has no chimney.” More wonderful news from the always-optimistic Tony. I looked, the vent was there, and it just wasn’t connected.

“There’s a lot more, but I’ll let you read the report.”

“Sure.” He was done, we couldn’t test the utilities and he’d seen everything else.

I wrote him a check for $525.

“The electrical system looks new.” I said.

“That’s correct. The electrical system is new and up to code. Of course, you don’t know if any of the BX cable was damaged in the flood, since it’s in the wall.”

I gave up. After he left I noticed water dripping from the kitchen light and fan. No wonder the water was turned off, this place was leaking like a sieve.

I had a headache after talking to this guy. But I know one thing, everything he found wrong, and by the way, the new roof is sagging, according to Tony; but all of these things can be fixed. But Tony’s sense of style will be bad forever.

 

 

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Alms For The Poor

Posted on October 15, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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Sunday night I boarded the 11:07 A train to Far Rockaway at 86th Street and Central Park West for my last ride home from work of that week. Monday and Tuesday are my weekend.

It’s good that the 11:07 is the Far Rockaway train; as if we get the house in the Rockaways this will be my train home. The next train, the one that comes at 11:20, just after the yellow garbage train, is a Lefferts Boulevard train, and I would have to wait some more for the next Rockaway train.

At the next stop, 72nd Street, the stinky homeless guy with the trombone in an old cardboard and vinyl case got on, and after taking his trombone out of the case, began to play. I have no idea what he played, because I had my earphones on and was listening to Les McCann’s Compared To What. What I did hear over the music was apropos, as the trombone is a traditional jazz instrument. It didn’t clash, as it would have had I been listening to The Clash.

I’d seen this guy before, and I’ve taken to thinking of him as the “Stinky Guy With Trombone”, as he is obviously homeless and doesn’t change his clothes very often, therefore the stinky smell he exudes as he walks by hand out looking for a tip.

The times I’ve seen him, and I can’t be sure it’s always on a Sunday night; but he’s been wearing the same clothes each time, and I’ve seen him for a few months now. He’s added a down vest now that it’s getting cooler. I wonder how he hangs on to that trombone, which despite it’s falling-apart cardboard and vinyl case is in pretty good shape and sounds fine.

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Not the actual Stinky Guy.

When I was in Junior High, I had to take music class. They gave me the trombone because no one else wanted it. The vibration hurt my ears when I played it, so I didn’t like it. So I am full of admiration for anyone who can take that pain, and I feel that for this guy.

Sometimes I give him money, a dollar; which is my standard donation to a homeless person unless I haven’t got any loose dollar bills. Sometimes I look at my iPhone like I’m deciding what song to play next and ignore him.

Sunday I’d gotten a six-dollar tip from a Chinese woman in the building for helping her unload what seemed like $500 worth of Costco groceries from her car. A five and a well- crumpled and worn single. It was a dollar more than my last tip, for loading considerably less stuff onto another tenant’s car. I was ahead by a buck and didn’t want to give it to Stinky Guy With Trombone; but the sight (and smell) of him was so pitiful that I relented. He smiled from beneath his dreadlocks, a smile full of brown rotted teeth but a genuine smile nevertheless, and said thank you. I smiled back and nodded.

I was homeless once myself, many years ago before I decided I liked my comfort and started to learn how to care for myself. I didn’t get as bad as this guy, a friend let me live with him in a big garage in Washington Heights for a while, but if you don’t have a key to someplace or a lease, in my book you are homeless.

I used to get judgmental, looking at the beggars down my nose and wanting to say, “If I can do it, so can you.” But I’ve since learned that it takes some people longer than others to “do it,” and some people for whatever reasons never get to do it at all. They live and die in the street. I’m grateful I don’t have to do so.

One time I was with my wife Danusia and there was a young couple on the J train begging with a baby in tow. You can get arrested for that and have your baby placed in protective custody. They were obviously addicts; the boy had festering track marks on his arms. It was heartbreaking, but I gave them a dollar.

“Why did you give them money?” She asked.

“You know what they’re going to do with it.”

Actually, I don’t know. They might buy drugs with it, but they might also feed the baby.

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They don’t make cases like this anymore.

 

Stinky trombone guy enters the train with the trombone in its case, sets it on the floor, and takes out the trombone to play. Sunday night I noticed he also placed a tall boy of beer tightly wrapped in a paper sack next to it. He’ll buy more beer with the money, was my thought. Whether he will or not, though, is none of my business. 

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The 400 Plastic Tomatoes

Posted on October 12, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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For the past six years I have lived with 400 plastic tomatoes that came all the way from China. On occasion, I’ve had to transport them, or at least part of them, most notably on an airplane trip from London to Dublin to Boston, then across Boston by bus to another bus headed to N.Y.C. You wouldn’t believe what a giant suitcase filled with plastic tomatoes weighs.

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They first arrived at my job in the city in four large cardboard boxes from China. They took up a lot of room in the lobby and I asked my then boss Glenn if I could store them in the shop for a few days until the lovely Danusia could come and pick them up.

“What’s in those boxes?” He asked

“Plastic tomatoes.”

“What do you want with plastic tomatoes?”

“They’re not mine, they’re for my wife.” Like the cat, the tomatoes belong to my wife. But also like the cat, sometimes I have to take care of the tomatoes.

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The Wall.

Danusia wrote and performed in a one-woman show called Wonder Bread; it was originally to be called Tomatoes, for obvious reasons, but was changed. For good reason, arriving in a new and different country can fill one with wonder.

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Her show was about a girl from then Communist Poland, the daughter of a tomato farmer immigrates to America and finds herself. In the show she tears down a wall of tomatoes, a good metaphor for tearing down the bindings of Communism and the subtler binds of family. (Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbochev!)

The wall of tomatoes was an effective part of the set and the knocking down of it a dramatic and impressive scene in her funny but poignant story of discovery. But dealing with those tomatoes was a real pain in the ass for me.

Before each show I had to help construct the wall, which we did by building Lucite boxes to hold six tomatoes each. Believe me, it’s a lot of Lucite boxes, and they are even heavier than the tomatoes. Then after each show, I had to help pick up the tomatoes, and put them back in the boxes that had survived the crash. There are broken pieces of Lucite in theaters here in New York and in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’m sure there is a plastic tomato or two hidden in the corner of some stage as well; we haven’t counted them since they arrived from China. There were also 400 red plastic balls, but most of those stayed in London.

After the Fringe Festival three years ago we spent twelve days in London, it was supposed to be only a week, but courtesy of hurricane Irene and the control freak Mike Bloomberg who closed the airport, we were there an extra week. We had to fly back separately and divided up the tomatoes, and decided the red balls had to stay.

Danusia had taken a whole crew, her director, Aleksey, and a couple of other people from her theatre group to help, but there were only two of us stuck with the tomatoes on the way back. The Lucite stayed as well, thank god. You can buy Lucite anywhere, but these tomatoes can only come from China.

She was lucky enough to get a direct flight to New York; I had to fly to Boston, hence my harrowing trip through Boston with a big bag of plastic tomatoes; not to mention lugging them up and down the four flights of stairs in our building countless times. The things you do for love.

She stopped doing the show last year, started working on a new project, not so labor intensive. There was talk of letting go of the tomatoes, too, good news since they take up a lot of room in our apartment. And the Lucite boxes, of course.

Danusia decided to video the knocking down of the wall, than if she ever wanted to do Wonder Bread again she could simply project that scene onto a wall or screen.

“Good idea!” I said, seeing the end of the uninvited guests in sight.

Last week a guy came over with his video camera and they built and knocked down the wall over and over again, scaring the hell out of the cat, who just wanted to chase rolling plastic tomatoes.

Well, the Lucite is going, bit by bit, and the tomatoes will soon follow. But I can’t help the feeling that I will keep finding stray tomatoes around for a long time to come.Image

 

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Consequences

Posted on October 8, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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We are buying a house, Danusia and I. I guess we are “in contract”, as it is called. We have pre-approval for the mortgage, I downloaded the contract, have an appointment with a lawyer from the union, we’ve made an offer and it was accepted. All we need is to send the contract to the bank and wait for the appraiser.

I’m entitled to a guaranteed home loan from the V.A., due to my brief stint in the 82nd Airborne 32 years ago. That brief stint also figured in my citizenship bid.

Another thing we have to do is buy insurance for a house we don’t even own yet; talk about a Catch-22.

A friend suggested we go to USAA, the company that provides low cost insurance to veterans and their families. If you watch the History or Military channels you’ve seen their commercials, “I got mine over the Pacific in 1943”, or “in Vietnam in 1968”. I should have gotten mine in Ft. Bragg, N.C. in 1980, but since I was not the most compliant of soldiers, I didn’t.

After being in the Army for 18 or so months, and going through a typical “Dear John” breakup I decided I didn’t want to be there anymore. It being a volunteer army, they really can’t stop you if you want out. But they can make you pay.

I thought it was just paying back the bonus (or part of it) that I’d gotten for signing up for “combat arms”, i.e.; being a grunt rather than a clerk or typist or some other thing I was probably better qualified for. They thought I was crazy when my GT test results came back and I chose the infantry.

“You can be anything you want”, the guy who gave the test said.

“You can go to officer’s candidate school”. But I wanted the money, and I chose to be a grunt.

When I wanted out, I was offered a “General Discharge”, which said “under honorable conditions”. To me it sounded good, it wasn’t “dishonorable”; but it turns out it’s not honorable, either.

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Me shortly after my discharge.

So yesterday, when I was on the phone with USAA trying to get this insurance for the house I don’t even own yet I found out I didn’t qualify. I qualify for the house loan from the V.A., but not the insurance from a privately owned company.

I asked if I could qualify if I get my discharge upgraded, and they said yes. So today I am off to the V.A. offices on Varrick Street to see what I can do about my DD-214, which is what the government calls your discharge papers. I never even read what the DD-214 said until a few years ago, when I was sitting for my citizenship interview. The interviewer said, “So why did you do badly in the army?”

“Excuse me?” As far as I was concerned, I was a good troop up to the point that I decided I didn’t want to be there anymore.

“It says here you were discharged for ‘failure to maintain proper military standards.”

“Oh.” Oh is my standard reply when I can’t think of how to explain my sometimes-irresponsible behavior.

“That was a long time ago, I’m a different person now.” I added when I had a couple of seconds to think.

I did become a citizen, and I will probably get the upgrade, but not in time to get the lower cost insurance.

When the loan people at the bank ran a credit check I discovered that my credit score was higher than Danusia’s, which surprised the hell out of me since she seems so much more fiscally on the ball than me. So yeah, I have changed a lot; when I got that discharge in 1981 I was living on one hot dog a day and sleeping on the floor of my brother’s studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, working as a foot messenger for $3.95 an hour and not a credit card to my name. And now I can buy a house.

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A bungalow like this one, actually.

So, if you are young and reading this, or even if you are not so young but still on the irresponsible side, take note- things do come back to bite you on the ass. But you can also do something about it, if you are willing to take the time and put in the effort to do so.

 

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Realty Bites

Posted on October 5, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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My friend Maggie Estep recently posted a couple of items about becoming a real estate agent, and I posted something about her having to learn to “lie real good.” She wrote back that that was in the 90’s.

Yesterday 2 apartments in our building went on the market, and within seconds of being posted on the website I started getting calls. Unfortunately the tenants were in the process of moving out of one and the other is still occupied.

ImageRealtors celebrating how much money they made off you.

“I want to show 15D and 11D,” a woman demanded. I won’t mention the name of her company, they’d probably try to sue me; but I’ll say this: I’ve been dealing with their agents going on12 years, and it hasn’t been what I’d call a real pleasure. They are mostly women, and mostly Israeli, and mostly pushy and very creative with the truth.

I’ve heard things like “I just talked to the agent and he said it’s OK.” (To show.)

I call the agent and he says, no, it’s not OK to show.

Or, I just spoke with the super.

“In the Dominican republic? Really?”

Not to sound all peevish and spiteful towards ALL real estate agents, but give me a break.

Our company has some very specific rules, no pictures, no weekends without prior approval, no viewing without an escort, which means a staff member. But that doesn’t stop them from trying to take pictures or dragging people to the building unannounced on a weekend and trying to bully their way in.

“But they came all the way from China!”

On weekends there is only a doorman on duty, and you cannot leave your post to go show an apartment. So by showing up, they are putting the doorman on the spot.

I once told an agent I could loose my job if I let her up to an un-vacated apartment without an escort, she guaranteed I would not lose my job. Better to piss off a realtor than my boss, so I had to decline her guarantee.

Most are pretty cool, they call ahead, know how to take no for an answer, and treat me with respect and kindness. Once, one even brought me a coffee, from Starbucks, no less!

Another thing they do is promise tips, a percentage. I know that if anyone is going to see any money, it isn’t going to be me. So it’s just plain sleazy to do so. It’s almost as bad as the locksmiths who promise a commission for calling them, but that’s another blog post, TK.

I showed an apartment a couple of years ago, when I was the handyman. The realtor was a guy I’ve known for years, an Israeli guy who was always nice but not pushy nice, like the ones who approach you with an aggressive outstretched hand like you’re some long- lost loaded uncle hemorrhaging money.

We were in the apartment with his client, and he said:

“I haven’t seen you in a while, you do this now?” Referring to my different job.

“Yeah, I’m the handyman now.”

“I rented an apartment on the 10th floor, you showed it to us, remember?”

I did remember, a woman took it; it was one of the few times someone I showed to actually rented the apartment.

He took out his wallet, extracted a $20 bill and handed it to me.

“This is for that time.”

“Thanks, I said.” He never made any promises, I never asked him for anything; I was just doing my job. I’m always professional when showing, I answer all questions, explain what everything is for, know which way the windows are facing and smile. Nobody wants to live in a building with sullen staff members.

ImageA typical floor plan

Well, I hope they teach Maggie to be nice and not pushy in her real estate classes. You can probably read about it on her blog by clicking here: Machine Guns and Underpants

A guy came in one day with a woman from Texas in tow, looking to show an apartment. He hadn’t called or anything, and the floor of this unit had just been polyurethaned. I told him so, and he became incensed that I wouldn’t let him up. He demanded to see the super. I called the super, who came down and said, “the floor is wet, and you can’t go up.”

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“The doorman could have told me that!” The man said.

“But I did tell you, sir.”

The woman from Texas who’d just witnessed the whole scene said to him:

“You just can’t seem to get anything right today, can you?”

That was a good moment.

 

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No Respect

Posted on October 1, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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This will be short and sweet, as I have a piece to write for my writing class. It’s just a story, an anecdote, I didn’t learn anything from it, but it is one of those stories that just need to be told. That’s what my wife, the lovely Danusia says, so here it is.

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When I was 21, in 1975, I went to Provincetown Ma for the summer to work. I’d been there the summer before, and didn’t know it was a gay town, and spent the summer by myself. This summer, the summer of ’75, I bought my own girlfriend with me.

I went straight to The New world Deli, the place I had worked the summer before, and was hired along with my girlfriend. I was a sandwich man and she became the coffee girl.

The New World Deli had moved, to a bigger place right across the street from the police station. We were the only place that stayed open after the bars closed, and our shift started at 8pm. We closed at 4am, and I became one of the managers along with a gay girl names Susan.

It was always packed after the bars closed, and I guess I made a mean sandwich because people, especially bar owners, always wanted me to make their sandwiches.

One busy night I heard a familiar voice call to me from the other side of the counter.

“Hey, kid, you got any orange soda?” I turned to look at the speaker, and it was none other than Rodney Dangerfield.

“Yes, sir, we have orange soda on our fountain.”

“Good. Gimme a Coke.”

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I got a big clear plastic cup and filled it with ice and than Coke from our fountain.

He became a regular every night, and on my night off I found out where he was hanging out.

There was a bar called The Crown And Anchor, one of the bigger places on Commercial Street, mostly disco dancing but on some nights they ran a drag show. The star of the show was an old queen called Arthur Blake. He was fat and old, and he wore long gowns and wigs and lip-synched old torch songs and told jokes.

On my night off, I went there, not because I wanted to hear Arthur or disco dance, but because the owners liked me and gave me half price drinks. I sat at a stage side table with Anna, my girlfriend to watch the show. It was usually pretty bad, but this night there was Rodney Dangerfield, sitting even closer than us at a table by himself. Himself and a small white toy poodle, which sat in his lap.

ImageThe dog looked like this.

No sooner had Arthur come out and started his act when Dangerfield start heckling him.

“Hey, where’d you get that wig? McCrorys?”

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If you don’t know what McCrory’s was that’s too bad.

That’s the only one I remember, but he was pretty funny. They should have been paying Rodney instead of Arthur. And he talks about getting no respect.

So that’s it. I got to watch Rodney heckle Arthur once more, he was in town only a couple of weeks, but how could I ever forget serving a coke to Rodney Dangerfield?

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Hanging Chads

Posted on September 28, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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I know a woman, a sort of friend- who once asked me, “is it true men think of sex all of the time?”

“Well, maybe not every second, but yeah, I would say a lot of the time.”

She scowled, it wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear, at least not from me, but I was trying to be honest. Like Opie and Andy when they told the girl it wasn’t the dress that made her look fat in the TV commercial. I love that commercial, it’s honest.

At work; I’m a doorman on the Upper West Side for those who don’t know, one of the perks of my job is to stand in front of the building, holding it up; as a lot of the tenants are fond of saying- and watching people walk by. You see some interesting people, but of course, the women I see walking by are the most interesting.

This summer I’d like to think of as the summer of hanging chads. Not the political kind from the election of 2000, but the skin and muscle kind you see hanging from the shortest shorts imaginable that a lot of girls were wearing this summer.

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Hanging Chads

As a result of engaging in this activity for more years than I care to remember, I’ve made a few observations.

A lot of women don’t like being stared at, (some do) and they show their displeasure by scowling as the walk past, and tugging at their very short skirts (or shorts) in an effort to minimize what can be seen. But why wear that stuff in the first place if you don’t want the men to stare?

A lot of them want to make sure you did look, and they do this by inadvertently turning their heads sideways to look at their reflection in the windows on the side of the building. At the same time they cast a peripheral glance backwards to see if you are indeed looking.

The glance at the reflection is reflex; a woman cannot help but to look to see if she looks all right.

A man staring at said woman is also a reflex action; we cannot help this, it was what we are hard wired to do; to notice, stalk, and pounce, just like cats.

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Of course thousands of years of evolution have trained us to do the stalking and pouncing selectively, in a civilized manner, as in asking for phone numbers and dates rather than jumping on a possible mate.

I came to this conclusion by watching and playing with my wife’s cat, Kiwi.

The lovely Danusia insists Kiwi is our cat, but I’m afraid I will always think of Kiwi as her cat. I had a turtle and it died, and I always thought of Tia the turtle as my turtle.

If I dangle a string, or better yet a shiny chain in front of Kiwi she immediately pays attention, her eyes fix on the end of whatever it is I am swinging, and follows the movement with rapt attention, totally focused.

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Kiwi

Her body tenses up, she goes into the stalking crouch, ready to pounce at any second. I watch as the muscles in her back twitch with anticipation, ready to strike.

Of course, it’s only a string, or chain, and with me at the end of it there is almost no chance at all that Kiwi will get it, I’ve demonstrated this to Kiwi time and time again in the past 30 or so months, but each time I dangle the string, I get the exact same reaction from Kiwi.

And so it is with men and the women who walk past them.

Now some guys can be extreme- whistling or shouting “hey baby!” I know this can be annoying to women and I don’t blame them a bit for scowling or even giving the finger or shouting, “fuck you” to the miscreant. I get a lot of construction guys in the building, and most of them react this way.

Once one of them said, “wow, did you see the ass on that girl?”

I mean, we saw her together, I had no idea why he needed the conformation or acknowledgement, so I simply said, “haven’t you ever seen a woman before?”

So ladies, don’t fret or feel humiliated, we are not out to humiliate you, we just can’t help it, and it’s a visceral reaction. Some of us are better than others at controlling our reactions, but I think we are the exception to the norm.

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