Simon Fraser (IV)

Freddy was 20; he had been living alone in New York for almost three years.

In all that time, he had not let anyone see where he lived – a roach and rodent-infested flat in Brooklyn, sparsely decorated, a futon in each of its three rooms. It was incredibly good rent for what he was getting but he didn’t realize it until much later when he lived in worse.

The flat had only three windows, two in the living room which looked out on to the street, their surfaces stained with monoxide grime, and another in the tiny backroom which looked out over the small wooden deck. None in the kitchen, no sun in the bathroom, a viewless bedroom.

It was in the tiny backroom where he did most of his writing – words and ideas coming down upon him like a lost parachutist landing on his deck, doubling over, dying and releasing a bounty of gold.

The worse part of his living arrangements was his landlord, Kostas, a Greek restaurateur who always seemed to be angry (far more than the Portuguese family at the corner store.) His friends called him Gus… so nobody called him Gus. He was short, more stout than fat. He had a Buddha belly but could hardly be called a tranquil man. Short black hair circled his head drawing attention the shiny bald dome on top. Sometimes he had a full moustache where there had been none the day before.

His restaurant, a dark dank greasy spoon populated with local hobos, tramps and wanderers, was directly below Freddy’s flat, no doubt equally as infested with pests.

Gratefully, Freddy only ever had to see Kostas once a month to hand him a rent check. He was the most intimidating man Freddy had ever met, hardened by years of short-order cooking for two-bit bums and five-dollar whores.

Once, on the first of the month, Freddy went down there to Kostas’s “New Gold Restaurant” to deliver his rent and pick up his new phonebook and yellow pages. He asked for the two books and Kostas replied, “Yeah sure, I got your books. You got my money?”

“Yeah right here,” Freddy said, offering him the rent check. Kostas looked it over then disappeared into the back room. He emerged a moment later with the yellow and white and slammed them down on the counter in front of his tenant.

“Here ya go.”

“Thanks,” Freddy muttered politely, slightly confused by the seeming sordidness of an ordinary exchange, as if these two volumes of names and numbers were stolen, rare or worth dying for. The rental of the flat seemed almost secondary. He had paid for the two phonebooks. That was the first time that Freddy thought, “I’ve gotta get out of this place.”

It was a jungle, his home. He’d set out mousetraps to eliminate the pests; within days, he’d killed one mouse; the snare snapped its spine in two across the mid-section, unholy bulging black eyes that no longer knew the fear of death, embraced.

Another mouse had almost gotten free with the peanut butter bait but its front leg was snared, broken, useless. It jittered the trap on the floor, stirring Freddy at two in the morning. He went to the kitchen as the dying creature flushed its bowels at the hint of mortal doom.

Its captor/killer couldn’t stand to see it in pain and he’d once heard that the most peaceful way to die (if there was such a thing) was by drowning – once the lungs fill with water and the body’s violent reaction waives. Freddy had heard it was comparable to the effects of LSD.

He picked up the trap; the mouse dangled, squeaking, terrified; he took it to the bathroom and held it deep under the surface of the toilet water. The mouse shook, scraped, tried relentlessly to be free and alive, slowly, less, going under, until it moved no more, floating lifeless beneath the world.

“Sorry, pal,” Freddy said to it, the corpse, as it came down from its short-lived acid trip. He carried it to the kitchen, put it in a bag, tied it shut, took the bag downstairs, outside, tossed it in a dumpster. Dust to dust.

The same year, Freddy woke one morning to find a dead calico cat on his wooden deck, frozen in the morning dew. This was a conundrum to him. He had to dispose of it somehow but could not simply toss it in the dumpster like a mouse.

The cat had been someone’s pet; it had a name to which it would respond. Freddy did not know what to do.

He called Animal Control for a solution and they told him to “wrap it up, pack it up and put it on your door step; we’ll come by, pick it up and dispose of it.” He gave them his address then got down to work.

He already had a roll of duct tape. He purchased some industrial-strength garbage bags and gardening gloves at the local corner store run by the Portuguese family that always seemed angry, yelling and cursing in their native tongue.

Freddy stood on his deck, looking down at the corpse, one of its front legs outstretched as if it were reaching for the bright white light at the end of a long dark hallway, not quite making it all the way. Its paw was curled like a hook, retreated at the tip. Freddy donned the gloves, took a deep sigh and picked up the creature.

It was stiff from rigor mortis and its body shifted not an inch out of form. Thank God its eyes were closed and Freddy didn’t need to look into the glassy darkness of its empty windows to the soul. With his left hand, he shook open the end of a garbage bag; it resealed itself with its natural static cling.

He tried again, using the cat’s hooked paw to hold one end. But different parts of the creature kept catching on the outside of the bag, missing their mark, and the bag kept resealing itself.

“Come on, get in there,” he said to it. “Wouldja please – come on! Wouldja let me –”

Frustrated, after several attempts to stick a dead cat into a garbage bag, Freddy put the feline down, shook the bag vigorously, billowing air into it, laid it on the deck (allowing gravity to hold one end) and slipped the cat into it horizontally. He folded the bag over, put it in another garbage bag, folded it, put it in another, taped it along the opening, put it in another and taped it along every seam it had, until he had what looked like a care package he’d once received at summer camp.

He wrote the words “ANIMAL CONTROL” on a blank sheet of paper and taped it to the package, the Shroud of Morris. It still wasn’t enough. So he wrote the letter R-I-P on the label as well.

Satisfied, he took it into his flat, down the front steps, to the street and placed it beside his front door, waiting to be picked up and taken away and disposed.

A few hours later, Freddy went back down to see if it had been taken – it had. Blessed be the folks at Animal Control. He wanted to thank them for their expedient processing; never before had he encountered such care from a government body.

He phoned them back and was informed that they had yet to send anyone by to pick up the dead cat. And that left Freddy with a question he didn’t necessarily want answered.

Cities are very much like the universe. Someone pitches a tent with a big bang, then another beside, and more until there is a camp; the construction rolls out in all directions on the compass, like ripples in the water after the stone was dropped. The tents become shacks and cabins, mud to log to stone to brick to steel; some dilapidate like stars imploding their masses, evacuated of the life that once sprang from the gaseous innards.

When the forebearers emigrated from their inner city haunts, from their ramshackle flats and condensed milk-fed lifestyles, they took to the outskirts of the city, their dreams and resorts. Broad clean streats, smooth as silk under the radial tires, lush green lawns, fresh and trim, each with a tree that only recently had begun to grow, two-car, three-car, four-car garage, aluminum siding on two-storey homes to protect the family from the elements and 6′ high wooden fences and shrubs to protect the families from each other, doors and window trims awash in the dullest beige, canary, tan and olive hues. Heading for a white picket fence but never quite getting there. Water sprinklers hissing in staccato and air conditioners gurgling in low torque.

They had fled the rush of the city for the illusive antiquity of new country. And they were short-sighted. It’s the people that make the city and when they left, they brought the city with them.

The suburbs is where Freddy grew up. But that is not where he grew.

New York is a great human cycle. This can best be noticed at night, in bed, with the covers across you, with the window opened wide enough to allow the perpetual din entrance to your sanctum, from the cumbersome air sparkling with floating ash, through the blackened mesh of the window screen and into the dark and barely decorated room; the hum of humanity rolls over the body.

First comes the rumble of a garbage truck as it winds around potholes and late-night jaywalkers, grinding to a pressing stop before a line of garbage five yards long, the hollers of the filthy men and the stretching of plastic being grappled by large mitted hands; the nadir of its existence, of garbage’s existence, is in mid-air, as it flies without wings, propelled only by the strength of a unionized worker. It graces an arc off the curb until gravity finds the bag and drags it down into the mouth of the compactor, cracking and smashing amidst its neighboring contents. A button is pressed (or lever pulled) and the hydraulic hiss covers up the abduction of the garbage into the mechanical belly of the truck, taken for granted.

After the garbage truck departs, there is a calm that replaces it. The emptiness in the air is palpable, like a door opening between two temperatures. It is quiet…

Until another city vehicle arrives on the scene of the missing refuse, this time a street cleaner, smashing its hard brushes against concrete and asphalt, spraying a painfully forced mist of water, or chemicals mixed with that great soluble, upon its victimized landscape; the driver weaves his cleaner around parked cars, hugs the tightest corners, spinning on the edge of a right angle with more ease than a Democrat has cheating on his wife, or a Republican has stealing an election.

As quickly as it happened upon the spot, it is gone, and the barometric pressure wavers as the spray it left behind begins to evaporate into the air and drip down into the gutters of the city. And it is quiet again.

The street cleaner is only an interlude, though, between the first act of the garbage truck and the much louder, more climactic second act of the siren. Not the siren of Greek myth; this siren is in no way attractive. But like those nautical temptresses, this siren is first heard through a weary fog. And it is inescapable.

It bounds down the darkened corridors of late-night traffic, reflecting off the city’s many structures of brick and glass, refracting through the screens of open windows and quickly filling the air of the sleeper’s den. The noise bullies through anything that would stand before it; there is no way to contain Pandora’s screams.

The eyes have lids to blind the seer from a vision but the ears cannot be closed; they have no defense from the punch and rising wail of an emergency vehicle. Yes, even the deaf can be envied. As the ambulance or police cruiser or fire engine passes and the crescendo peaks, no other sound can be heard; the only thoughts one may have are “Someone is in trouble” or “I hope my ears don’t start bleeding.”

As the insufferable noise departs the immediate vicinity, it takes all decibels of attention along for the ride, leaving only their memory (which too will eventually fade into the subconscious).

There is a serenity here as the eardrums re-accustom themselves to the vacuum the siren left behind; the sound of traffic over there, a car horn on a perpendicular avenue, the featherweight waves of pedestrian conversations, click-clack in high heel shoes, laughter; a car door closing, the ignition of its engine, last year’s model humming under last year’s hood; gentlemen exiting a gentlemen’s club, clip-clop stepping down the sidewalk; a wetback struggling to finish his day and return to his family in a different borough, hauling an over-sized trash bag to the curb, returning inside for the second, the third, another and another, until he can finally “call it a night.”

But it already is a night and, in the distance, a few blocks away, comes the night cycle anew, another garbage truck rumbling down the street with a belly full of waste and a goal of civil sanitation.

On the occasion of Freddy’s first night in New York, at the age of eighteen, he whipped the bed cover’s away, leapt from his slumber, closed the window and crawled back towards the sleep that was the gift of his tolling day of travel.

He was more akin to suburban crickets and rustling A-C’s.