the known universe

As one day runs into another, I’m starting to feel a little like the blogging houseplant. Regardless of my perceptions, however, things are moving along faster than I thought. I thought I had another week before getting my staples out, but the doctor’s office just called to confirm my appointment on Monday. A pleasant surprise. It also means I’ll soon start putting a little weight on my foot and begin testing the new hardware. I’m not sure if it also means I’ll be graduating from crutches to a cane or not. When I mentioned the possibility to my friend Richard, he reminded me of an episode of Seinfeld:

Jerry: No more crutches, that must be a relief.

George: Yeah, with crutches everyone has questions.

Jerry: Not with a cane?

George: Nah, with crutches it’s a funny story, with a cane it’s a sad story.

A cane I can deal with (although I’ll probably get even more people telling me I look like Dr. House than usual) I just hope that a gradual progression back to frolicking in the playground doesn’t involve an orthopedic shoe along the way.

Crutches = Funny.
Cane = Sad
Orthopedic shoe =Eww.

My friend James dropped by after work last night. I offered him a beer and we went to the roof. The sun was setting and the sky slowly turned a dark pink while the buildings glowed a somber orange and their lights twinkled various shades of yellow. The traffic on the expressway below whooshed like crashing waves. Some car headlights were dim and tawny, others burned like icy blue lasers. The Brooklyn Navy Yard dominates the view to the west, a view simulatneously dismal and dramatic.

James works at a production company where I occasionally freelance but I haven’t been there in a while and we spent some time making small talk about work. until we got bored of it and changed the subject. The last time I saw him he told me that his girlfriend had moved in with him so I was curious to hear how it was working out. Prior to this new arrangement he lived alone for ten years so it has been an adjustment, he said, but it was all good.

“What does she do anyway?” I asked.

“She’s working on her PhD,” he said. “In Molecular Biology.”

“There’s good money in that racket.”

He told me he finds it a little boring, or hard to relate to, and when she gets on a tangent he has trouble paying attention, feigning interest while his mind wanders. Of course, that would probably be the case regardless of her field of study.

“Have you ever gone to her lab?”

“Sure.”

“What kind of stuff does she do there?”

“Oh, she mostly just dissects fruit flies.”

“Wow, that sounds pretty challenging.”

“It’s all done with a microscope, of course. The flies are anesthetized and there’s a tiny suction device that holds them down while she operates. Then she uses tiny instruments to do her thing.”

“Wait, she does this while they’re alive?”

“Yeah, usually.”

“What does she do to them? Inject them with stuff?”

“No, she usually cuts their genitals out.”

“Seriously? While they’re alive?”

“Yeah. She needs them to be virgins.”

“And you sleep next to this girl? I think you better start paying attention.”

On my way out the door to meet Deborah for dinner last night, I passed a woman in our courtyard. A rather short, middle aged woman with tight. frizzy, black curls. She saw me on my crutches and beamed a smile. “Hi,” she said in such a familiar way that I thought we must’ve met before. “What happened to you, poor thing?”

“Broke my foot,” I said, while my mind raced to place her face.

“Your ankle or your foot?”

“My foot.”

I pointed to the corresponding bone in my hand to illustrate where the break was, and told her how it had to be screwed together.

“Oh dear, how did it happen?”

“Motorcycle accident.”

She gave me a look that was part school-marm, part concerned mother. “Are you okay?” she asked. She seemed so earnest, as if my being okay wasn’t just important to her, but to the entire city, the whole country, the very world itself. “I mean, you’re okay, right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. That’s it, just my foot.”

“You can’t put weight in it, right?”

“RIght.”

Then she pointed to her own foot and that’s when I noticed that she was wearing a removable cast, not unlike my own, only hers was black, and taller than mine with a couple of additional velcro closures.

“Oh, hey,” I said. “I didn’t even notice. What did you do?”

She flinched as if shocked by static electricity and then looked at me as if I had just asked her how old she was, or how much she weighed. She turned and from the corner of her mouth said, “Something different than you.” Then she walked away with a barely perceptible limp.

“That was weird,” I thought. “Maybe she was run over by a motorcycle.” But then I thought about how concerned she was about my being okay that maybe she herself wasn’t okay. Maybe her foot was somehow related to a more serious condition and I had inadvertently insulted the gravity of her situation by focusing on the least of her problems. Or maybe she was just a big phony in the middle of an insurance scam and my recent crash course in foot anatomy made her leery of trying to bullshit me. Who knows?

In any case, I continued on my way, struggling through our building’s front gate, and onto the sidewalk where I was suddenly face to face with another broken foot — or leg or ankle. A guy on crutches, being helped by his girlfriend or wife, had just gotten out of a car and was making his way to the gate. He had a fiberglass non-removeable cast that ran from his knee to his toes and was so perfectly clean he may very well have been coming home from the hospital. We looked at each other and laughed. “Howzit going?” he said, somewhat sheepishly.

“Oh, pretty good, I guess. Howzitgoing with you?”

“Meh.”

My car was waiting and I was running late so there wasn’t time to trade war stories — he didn’t appear interested in chit chat anyway — but regardless, as I got in the car, I couldn’t help laughing at such a funny coincidence — three people in the same apartment building each with a broken foot, and all of us coming and going at the same time.

Must be the season.

When I met Deborah, I told her about the impromptu meeting of the broken foot brigade. “It’s hard to judge by just a cast,” I said, “but the guy looked worse off than me. He had one of those fiberglass jobs that went all the way to his knee.”

“Maybe he broke a bunch of bones.” said Deborah.

“Maybe.”

“I know I keep saying it, but you’re lucky.”

“What’s today, Wednesday? Did you buy a lottery ticket today?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Oh good. We’ll see how lucky I am.”

I’m not sure I got the story right, it was windy on our roof and there was a lot of chatter among the people gathered there to watch the fireworks off in the distance, but between sips of beer and the muffled poofs putts and pops of the fireworks, Jason told me about a friend of his who owned some property in Williamsburg. The property is currently just a vacant lot and Jason may or may not have told me what his friend’s long range plans are, but regardless, instead of letting the property sit idle in the meantime, his friend decided to organize a flea market. Or maybe he turned it over to someone else to organize, I don’t know, all I know is that the market, named simply The Williamsburg Flea Market, runs every Sunday from noon ’till 6. This past Sunday (yesterday) however, was something a little special for the 4th of July weekend. In addition to vendors there would be be a cookout, DJs, drinks, bands, ad so on.

Jason said that he and his girlfriend, Erika, were planning to go and that if we didn’t have any other plans we should meet them there. When Erika overheard Jason, she was quick to say that there was no fucking way she was going to be there anytime before 3 in the afternoon.

Deborah and I were awake early on Sunday — we still haven’t put up any curtains or blinds in the windows of our new place, and the sun burns in at all hours of the day, bouncing off our “French Vanilla” walls and making it feel like we live inside an incandescent bulb. The switch gets flipped as early as 6A.M..

Deborah made some French toast and we enjoyed a lazy Sunday breakfast, but by the time we finished, it was still too early for the flea market. Although many flea markets open at the crack of dawn, this is Williamsburg we’re talking about. Noon is about as “crack of dawn” as it gets.

In the afternoon we called Jason, who was busy in his garage fiddling with his vintage Yamaha 2-stoke motorcycle, while Erika slept. We told Jason we were heading to the flea market, and he told us that, assuming the bike was running, he’d ride over and meet us there in an hour or so.

Deborah and I called a car and five minutes later were picked up by a fastidiously clean and well-dressed Indian gent who didn’t have a clue about how to get where we were going. I gave him directions for the two mile drive, and he nodded and smiled. He was genial, I suppose, and eager to please, but the way he kept completely turning around in his seat as he drove, imploring me to reassure him that we were on the right track, was more than a little terrifying. Every time he turned, the car would list one way or the other, veering towards parked cars, or worse, oncoming traffic. A GPS unit attached to the windshield was feeding him audible directions to who knows where. At every intersection, the robotic GPS voice would say to turn, causing the driver to stop, look over his shoulder, and give me the look. “Straight,” I’d say, and tell him to ignore the GPS. Regardless, he stopped at every intersection, presumably to be ready in case I suddenly came to my senses and blurted out “Turn here! Turn here!”

Surprisingly, we made it to the flea market without crashing.

“What do we owe you?” I said.

“I’m new,” he said, “Today is my first day. I don’t know.”

“Well it usually costs us seven dollars for a ride like that,” said Deborah. I handed Deborah a ten dollar bill so she could pay the guy and get a receipt while I struggled to get out of the car and stand up on my crutches. But the car doors were locked and I couldn’t get out.

“Seven?” the driver said. “No no. At least eight.”

“Eight? That’s ridiculous!” said Deborah.

The driver made his best innocent-look-of-a-child face and said again, “Eight.”

Without a meter like the yellow cabs have, car service rides often end with an awkward negotiation if not a down-right stand off and I was braced for a fight, but Deborah was in an unusually compliant mood and just shook her head and paid him the money. “Ridiculous,” she said.

There wasn’t much going on at the flea market when we were there. Even at 2 in the afternoon, we were probably too early. The vendor’s tents were set up on gravel which was difficult to navigate on crutches. I made one loop before telling Deborah I was going to find a place to sit while she poked around. “We can just go,” she said. “There’s nothing here I want to look at.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

We decided, instead, to find a place to eat and have some lunch. We spotted a burger joint conveniently located a block away and headed for it.

“Williamsburger?” said Deborah, reading the sign out front. “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s gotta be the worst name for a restaurant since ‘Pluck U’. I don’t even know where I am. I feel like I’m in a college town.”

I handed Deborah one of my crutches, braced myself on the door frame and hopped up the single, absurdly steep step. We took a table and the waitress handed us menus. The menus said something about hipsters, I can’t remember exactly — something like, “Feeding skinny hipsters since 2009″ or something like that. But looking around, I didn’t see many skinny people, hipsters or not. Sure one passed by on a bicycle now and then — a fabulous couple whizzed by on a bicycle built for two looking like a summer catalog — but for the most part, everyone fell under “new average.”

At a table nearby sat a couple — the guy was a bit of a nondescript schlub, pasty, with a hairy gut peeking out between his black T-shirt and his black jeans. It’s hard to say if his girlfriend was chubbier or not, but she was showing more skin, so it definitely seemed that way. She was dressed in layers of black, and wore sunglasses with brightly colored cheap plastic frames that clashed with her impossibly red hair. When she moved, you could see her tattooed flank. Black line work in the classic old school style with a decorative scroll which inside said, “Looking Good.” In case there was any doubt, I suppose.

Outside, a guy pulled up in a brand new BMW looking like James Spader. A group of his Preppy friends were waiting on the sidewalk and they huddled around the new car. The guys did, anyway, kicking tires with their Sperry Topsiders while the women were content to watch from the curb, smiling Pepsodent smiles, bouncing Gerber babies on their hips. It would’ve been hard to imagine a scene like this existing here as little as ten years ago, when a homeless crack addict was murdering area prostitutes and leaving their bodies to rot in empty lots like the one the flea market occupies. But there it was. And there we were, watching, eating a couple of undeniably delicious williamsburgers.

And so it goes.

After lunch we decided to wander around the neighborhood for a little while. I didn’t have the stamina to crutch myself all over town, but a few blocks this way and that felt good. Fresh air and sunshine and all that good stuff. As we wandered, we passed an overpriced furniture shop called Cosmos that’s been there for years. From outside, I spotted an antique rolling stool that I thought Deborah might like for her workbench.

Six hundred dollars. The fucking thing could’ve had a price tag of ten thousand dollars and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Absurdity abounds.

Outside the store, a tall guy was on the sidewalk refinishing a cabinet. He noticed me on my crutches and stopped what he was doing.

“They got you too, eh?” he said.

I didn’t know what he was talking about and gave him a quizzical look.

He pointed to my foot. “They got you too,” he said, then he turned around, took off his hat and pointed to the back of his head. It looked as though a kid with a staple gun had gone to town on it, stapling the guy’s skull willy-nilly. “Twenty staples,” he said.

“Wow, what happened?” Deborah asked.

“I fell off a truck head first onto the pavement.”

“Whoa, you’re lucky.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, not lucky, not lucky. It’s been two weeks and I’m still a little slow.” He tapped his temple with a stained finger. “I was knocked out for eight hours. My head had cracked open like a melon.”

He showed us the wound again, a mass of silvery staples. Deborah shuddered and turned away.

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, it’s okay, it’s just…” she shivered.

“I don’t even know what happened. They guy I was with gave the cops three different stories. But I’m suing everyone, the truck company, the driver’s insurance company, everyone. Hopefully I won’t have to do this job anymore. I’ve been here two years already, I’ve had enough. Next time you come by, if you don’t see me, you’ll know why.”

Today I ventured out to drop off a rent check. Okay, I didn’t exactly venture out since I never left the building, but considering I haven’t left the apartment in a few days, it counts as something. It wasn’t a rent check for our apartment — Deborah took that one to the management office on her way to work yesterday — instead it was a rent check for the basement garage where I park my truck. When we first moved in, it felt like a decadent luxury to park in a garage, but considering my current situation, I’m not sure what I’d do if I had to worry about the street cleaning laws.

I asked Deborah to take the check down to the basement on her way to work today, but she said no. Partly because she wants me to maintain a certain level of independence, but mainly because she was afraid of the garage owner’s Rottweiler. The dog nipped at our friend Jason last weekend. Jason and Deborah took my truck to return a defective air conditioner and when they came back with a new one, the dog lumbered toward them to investigate. Jason cautiously lifted the new air condition out of the truck bed and put it onto a luggage dolly, careful not to make any sudden moves, but when he began to roll the laden dolly, the wheels scraped across the cement floor. The dog suddenly took a nip at Jason’s pants.

A growling Rottweiler is an evil specter, but a nipping one is a menace, and they called out to the garage attendant to ask him to watch the dog, hoping he might take it into the office. The garage attendant doesn’t speak a lick of English but there was no reason to believe he didn’t understand what they were asking. As a matter of fact, he did exactly as they asked: he watched.

The dog looks damaged. Mentally challenged, with a dopey look on its face that’s perhaps a result of breathing a mixture of gasoline fumes, exhaust, and cat piss all day long. (The cat piss smell comes courtesy of the garage’s other menace, though one far less life-threatening, a dirty, grayish-orange tabby.)

The dog’s coat looks like an oil stained rag and it’s paws are covered in greasy dust. I feel bad for him, but in the way someone might feel bad for Mike Tyson. Maybe he had a hard life, maybe he’s misunderstood, but still…

This afternoon, I rode the elevator to the garage and lurched down a ramp on my crutches toward the office. The dog heard me coming and started barking a sinister bark that echoed through the garage.

I reached the bottom of the ramp and saw one of the attendants through the window of the office. He glanced over his shoulder to see what the dog was getting riled about. The dog’s massive head hung low as he stalked toward me. I continued slowly but when his barks morphed into growls, I stopped. I pulled the rent check from a bag slung over my shoulder and waved it for the attendant to see, hoping he might come out to meet me — to get the check and scold, or at least settle, his dog. Instead the attendant just nodded. I continued slowly until I reached the door and then knocked. I had only seen one guy through the window, but there were two guys inside the office watching Spanish-language soap operas. The second guy came to the door and opened it. He looked almost exactly like the dog except he was wearing a shirt. I handed him the check.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Can you keep an eye on the dog for me. I think he’s a little freaked out by my crutches.”

He didn’t understand me, or pretended not to anyway. Either way, he just cocked his head. “¿Que?”

“El perro,” I said, pointing to the dog with my right crutch.

The dog was quiet, watching us with something resembling a smile, drool dripping from the side of his mouth, his tongue hanging like a slab of raw steak.

“El perro,” he said. “Si?”

“Never mind.”

As penance for featuring a picture of the staples in my foot in a post that mentions girls in summer outfits, here’s one from yesterday afternoon of Deborah in a bikini on the roof as she watches an ominous wall of grey clouds advance towards our tar-beach-blanket-bingo-party at breakneck speed. A moment later the sky split open, vomited rain, and spoiled our fun. The first lightening bolt burst through the sky with such a violent crack that if my foot wasn’t broken, I would’ve jumped ten feet.

This fucking accident sure has turned out some long-ass posts.

An insurance adjuster visited my motorcycle this morning and took some pictures. He wasn’t that experienced with motorcycles, he told me, and had absolutely zero experience with vintage bikes, so he was having a hard time figuring out how to put a price on the damage. Someone at the garage spoke to him and answered his questions as best they could, but the garage where the bike is kept isn’t particularly well-versed with 40 year old bikes, either. The best thing for me to do was do what I was planning to do all along — from the moment I shook away the bluebirds and stars that were circling my head — I called Hugh at Sixth Street Specials.

Sixth Street Specials has been around for over twenty years and if anyone would understand the peculiarities of valuing, and more important, fixing a vintage pretzel, it’d be Hugh. I spoke to him briefly on the phone and gave him the basics. “Bring it by,” he said. “we’ll sort you out.”

Easier said than done since neither I, nor the bike, were in running condition, so I arranged with my garage for a tow for both the bike and me.

“Lots of accidents,” said Rudy, the driver, when we met at the garage. Rudy is pleasant young guy from the Dominican Republic who’s accent makes him nearly impossible for me to understand. I think he has a little trouble understanding me, too, but that’s nothing new. “Djew know dat guy, de reely tall guy weeth de big bike. De reely big bike,” said Rudy, standing bow-legged and raising his arms up high to indicate straddling a fat bike with ape-hanger handlebars.

“Hmm…I’m not sure,” I said. There are a couple of big choppers in the garage. and the way Rudy mimed riding the bike, it could’ve been any of them.

“De guy dat don’t wear a shirt when he work on his bike? I know djew know him.”

“Oh, yeah, that guy, sure,” I said. The guy was tall all right. Six feet four at least. A handsome model type with a well chiseled chest that he wasn’t shy about showing off. He had an attractive girlfriend, too, whose shoes were as extreme as her boyfriend’s bike.

“He dead,” said Rudy.

“What?” I was shocked. I didn’t know the guy very well, but I knew him well enough to say hi when i saw him. He worked on his bike a lot, and while its orangey-brown sparkle paint job and doublewide rear tire wasn’t really my cup of tea, his bike had style — not a bike to go unnoticed. “No way,” I said. I couldn’t believe it.

“Si,” said Rudy. “Same weekend as your accident.”

We got in the truck and started driving to Manhattan. Rudy told me as much as he knew about the details of the accident — that the guy was heading to New England for a court appearance and got as far as the Bronx. before the crash. That the guy’s girlfriend was on the back and suffered some broken bones. And that the guy was wearing what is often referred to as an egg shell helmet which, evidently, offered as much protection as the name implies. Rudy admitted that he didn’t really know the whole story. “I think, I thnk,” he kept saying. (I teenk, I teenk.)

(It turns out our communication gap was larger than I thought. The guy who was killed is not the guy I thought it was.)

Rudy double parked the pickup truck outside of Sixth Street Specials and waited while I hobbled out of the truck and struggled up the shop’s stairs to find Hugh.

“Just a minute,” said Hugh, who was busy working with a customer in the back of the shop.

A guy was using a drill press near the front door and I chatted with him while I waited. He saw my bike out the shop’s window. “Nice 500,” he said, but his tone became a little more serious when he noticed the bike’s front end — noticed it from a good fifty feet away — “Ooh. It’s bent up,” he said, and then took a look at my foot and put two and two together.

“Yeah,” I said, anticipating the question. “It’s all part of the same story.”

The guy fetched a chair for me. “Here,” he said, “Have a seat.”

I sat down and, while the guy took the part he was working on to the other side of the room, I looked around at all the ephemera hanging on the walls — faded photos, wind-torn banners, creased magazine clippings, and posters. I looked at the assorted tools, engine parts and frames resting on the benches and the floor. Taped to a column nearest the door was a series of sun-faded photos that appeared to be taken from a roof. It was a sequence of about seven or eight pictures of the World Trade Center as the second tower collapsed into a cloud of dust.

“Hey,” said Hugh, his Scottish brogue apparent with just one word. “What do we have here?” he said, wiping his hands with a rag and nodding towards my foot cast.

“What you might call a mishap,” I said.

“Sorry to hear that. You’re okay, though, right?”

“Yeah,” I shrugged. “I’m okay.”

“How’s the bike? Let’s have a look, shall we?”

He walked through the open front door and sprung down the front steps while I lagged behind, fiddling with my crutches, trying to stand. I hopped down the stairs in time to hear him whistle. At least I think it was him, it might’ve been the guy who was now coming out of the shop’s basement to have a look.

“Who ran the light?” said Hugh, piecing together the accident immediately. “You or him?”

“Him!” I said. “A stop sign.”

“Where, in Williamsburg?”

“Yup.”

“I knew it. Every time I ride around there I fear for my life.”

Hugh and his guys set up a ramp then climbed into the truck bed and began unfastening the tie-downs. Once Hugh realized that getting the bike out of the truck wasn’t going to be as simple as rolling it down the ramp, he stopped for moment and took a long look at the front end. “Yer lucky to be alive, Jamie. Seriously.”

Once the guys wrangled the bike out of the truck and into the shop basement, using a dolly under the front wheel to deal with the fact that it was completely uncooperative, Hugh emerged from the basement. “We can talk out here so you don’t have to deal with the stairs again. Just let me get a pen and some paper.”

One of the guys brought a chair outside for me to sit on and when Hugh returned, he took a seat on the stairs. The sun felt good shining on my face. I haven’t been out of the house much lately, and even if I had been, it’s been gloomy and gray for weeks. Until today. We spoke about the prospects of returning the bike to it’s former glory, stopping now and then to watch the girls breeze by in their summer clothes.

“It’s like this all summer long,” said Hugh, waving his hand back and forth, up and down the street. “The girls walk past here on their way to and from the park down there. I’m telling you, this is the best seat, right here, all summer long.”

A girl paused at the corer to wait for the light, and our conversation paused right along with her.

“Okay,” said Hugh when the light changed. “Where were we?”