On Sunday, because friends would be dropping by later I
vacuumed half the kitchen then cleaned the bathroom sink, toilet and floor.
While I was in the middle of that Sundar the super knocked on my door to ask if
I had a crowbar because my neighbour at the other end of the hall had lost the
key to his apartment. I went out in the hall and saw that the guy was trying to
use a chef’s knife to see if he could wedge it in to turn the lock. I went to
my tool drawer and brought back my long flat head screwdriver, a chisel and two
metal putty knives. I asked him if he could use any of them and he told me
gratefully that he’d try them all. This was the first time I’d heard him say
more than “Hi” in the last few months that he’s lived here and I didn’t notice
that he has what sounds like a Latin American accent. I’m guessing that he’s
from Brazil since he doesn’t look like he’s of Latin or Native descent like
someone from one of the Spanish speaking countries down there might. Brazil is
more of a melting pot but then so is Argentina.
Sundar was
standing there watching him try to get into his door and I asked why he didn’t
have a key. He said that he has a master key but it didn’t work. He tried I in
my door and it turned, but not in the other guy’s door. I don’t like the fact
that he has a master key that fits my door. I suggested that he could use the
ladder that’s out on the deck to climb up to his window, but it was padlocked
to the fire escape and Sundar didn’t have a key for that either.
I went back
to cleaning the bathroom but checked every now and then on my neighbour’s
progress. He wasn’t making any, other than to become progressively more frustrated.
Finally he started declaring, “I’m ready at this point to break down the
motherfuckin door! How much does it cost? $300? I’ll pay it!” He kicked the
door hard a couple of times but it didn’t budge. He said that he was moving out
next month anyway. I cleaned my bathroom floor and while I was drying it there
was a knock on my door and my neighbour had come to give me back my tools. I
asked if he’d busted open the door and he said he had. I wondered how he was
going to lock it. He answered that he’d buy another lock.
Shortly
after that I heard Nick Cushing shout up at my window. It turned out that he
was there with Bruce March as well, who was in town for a rehearsal with the
band that he plays bass for, “Frequency Zed”. I made tea for Bruce and we all
sat at the kitchen table chatting. I was wearing a tank top and Bruce asked me
if it was a “wife beater”. I really hate that term but my response to it was as
usual, “I’m not married!” Mine is black and traditionally the white tank top
tends to be referred to as a wife beater”. But women wear white tank tops more
than men, so why don’t they call them “husband beaters”? It occurred tome later
though that perhaps Bruce asked the question as a roundabout way of proposing
to me.
Nick had me
re-read a script for a character for an episode of his animated web series. I
had read Hector Nectar’s lines previously but Nick told me my voice hadn’t been
sinister enough.
The week
before that I had gone around to various stores trying to find a microphone
adaptor with a jack that was small enough to fit into the mic input in Nick’s
drift cam. The problem had been that the jack that looked like the right size
wouldn’t fit past the rubber of the camera’s casing. Nick showed me that I
could have just peeled off the casing at the end where the inputs are.
They headed
out and I hung around home. I couldn’t ride my bike that afternoon because the
headset had broken in half the day before. Not from any impact but just from
twenty years of wear and tear.
I did some
knee exercises in the late afternoon while listening to an episode of Amos and
Andy from 1946. A lot of the jokes were about shortages in the post war period.
The big department stores had a thick catalogue just to show people all the
things they didn’t have and the small stores were going out of business because
they didn’t have enough of nothing to keep going.
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