First heat (Oct. 1980)
Garrick made jewelry with Lewis at an artzy-fartzy place in Hawthorne, piece work that paid as much as the old mills did on Saddle River where our ancestors once worked – though none of us had much money then, forcing us to balance on the high wire of high finance in order to make certain we could pay the rent, stay warm and feed ourselves.
Since Garrick’s aunt owned the building, he didn’t have to worry about rent, but he loved to eat and so decided the best way to save on expenses was to keep from turning on the heat as long as possible – an idea me and Pauly inherited when each of us moved in after Garrick moved out, the practical Pauly having a real job for so short a time money mattered more to him since he could not count on the good graces of Garrick’s aunt to relieve him of rent, and though he ate less than Garrick did, he still needed food, and so decided the heartless gas company would have to wait.
While I real jobs most of the time, they paid as little as Garrick’s and while I could live with less food, I dreaded being put out as Pauly eventually was, and so I needed to balance rent overheat and took Garrick’s pledge to avoid turning on the heat until December 1.
God only knows how Garrick came up with that date, when I might have chosen November 1 instead, though heat in many of these cold water flats meant a sidecar gas heater attached to the stove, something with an questionable regulator which controlled the size of the flame, not the temperature inside the room, and at best at full flame managed barely to heat the first of the two rooms, this meaning in Winter we abandoned what would have been a bedroom to sleep inches from the stove.
I rarely lived up to the commitment, as addicted to warmth as a junkie, holding out with each drop in the thermometer until like a boiled lobster reaches the point where he is cooked, I surrender to the inevitable and decide it is a matter of life and death, and turn on the stove.
Garrick, who looks and acts like a big brown bear, might survive the chill; I could not, and I’m convinced Pauly, who is more squirrel than bear, likely gave in sooner, unable to deal with the chatter of teeth, and the lack of feeling in his toes and fingers.
Even my hamster, Merlyn, has complained in his way, curling up into a ball at the corner of his cage, ready to hibernate, unable to cope with the constant flow of cold air that finds every crack and crevice in this old house, howling down the alley along one side, stirring up the blankets I’ve pinned up over the windows when the curtains poise no barrier at all.
This is not a diatribe against winter.
There is a quiet luxury in this world, filled with the absence of sound other seasons bring, no tap-tap-tap of the basketball on the pavement outside or the ring of the missed shots on the rusted hoop someone installed over the shed that houses the trash cans. Winter muffles the voices of the screaming kids, forced into four walls of other apartments – no more games of tag that inevitably wails down the alley louder than any wind, no more high-volume radios playing songs I can’t even imagine the words to, and shudder to imagine what I might think if I could.
I hear the old lady upstairs, pacing inside her apartment as if waiting for death, and the spoiled brat stomping up the stairs to see her and ask her for money to play video games, some grandchild from some long-expired romance leaving the mother and child living in yet one of the other cold-water flats nearby.
I hear, too, the cry of the gulls floating over the river two blocks away, stirred up by the chill and the deep hunger for fish they cannot reach under the ice below, always hovering, always waiting for that crack through which they can plunge and feed.
Sometimes, I hear the neighbors argue over who will walk the dog, and by the time I get out to run, the sun has risen, melting down the frosted edges of the river, leaving only the colored reflection of changing leaves that will soon turn brown. Bums huddle behind the church, making fire out of paper and discarded furniture, their wind burned faces lost in the steam of their own breath.
Watching them, I'm glad I have the option to turn on or off the heat, sink hole as it is, hoping I don't find myself in their place some sad October.
Comments
Post a Comment