My first super was named Murray. He was in charge of the five-story red brick building on East 33rd Street between Second and Third Avenue where I had my first apartment in Manhattan. That was in 1974. The rent was one eighty-five a month.
The apartment, two small dark rooms with an eat-in kitchen, whose tiles I tore up in a frenzy one hot summer afternoon, exposing the lovely pine floor below, had been passed down to me by my cousin Joan’s boyfriend Martin, who was finishing his residency in brain surgery at New York Hospital, which was half a block away. Martin was always bragging about how much money he was going to make when he went into private practice.
The building was within walking distance of my first job in the city, a convenience that meant nothing to me. I never wanted to live in that neighborhood. I never wanted that apartment. And I hated that job. Besides, walking around the city was my favorite thing to do in those days; it was my way of taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the city and its people, which for me, a girl from Long Island, where everything was the same and everyone was white and middle class, was exciting to behold.
Murray would be my only American-born super. He was big and fat and had a very productive-sounding cough and he always dressed in the same dirty white T-shirt and the same baggy corduroy pants whenever I saw him—summer, winter, spring and fall. He reeked of tobacco from the unfiltered Camel cigarettes he smoked all day long. I would occasionally grub cigarettes off Murray, but I can’t recall ever asking him for anything else. I had never lived in an apartment building before and I didn’t know that supers were supposed to fix things.
The building was heavily populated with doctors doing their internships like my cousin’s boyfriend and I imagine they didn’t have much time to do anything in their apartments but sleep. I doubt any of them had the luxury of hating their apartments anywhere close to as much as I hated mine. For them, those cramped little cells were just brief stopovers in careers filled with purpose, privilege, money and prestige.
Living in the apartment directly below mine was a doctor who was a friend of my cousin Joan’s boyfriend. One day he invited me to his place to show me his needlepoint collection (Joan had told me about his needlepoint collection, which she thought made him interesting—meaning, I suppose, that at least he had an interest).
After showing me his little treasures, he told me that he really liked sex and he asked me if I would be his sex partner until he found a suitable candidate for the position of wife. It didn’t occur to me to be insulted because nothing ever insulted me, I can’t say exactly why that was—I suppose it might have had something to do with my somewhat nonexistent sense of self. I tried my best not to laugh when I politely declined his offer.
My next-door neighbor was an old woman named Georgia. She was Greek and had a high squeaky voice. She was very short and had a dwarflike appearance, although she was not a dwarf. She used to be an antiques dealer and had a collection of delicate China cups and saucers adorning the walls of her living room that I admired one day when I went to her apartment to help her open up a jar of strawberry jam.
I was surprised to discover from the picture of her that sat on the mahogany end table in her vestibule that Georgia had once been very pretty. During that visit I also made the chilling discovery that Georgia had lived in the building since she was twenty-one, my age at the time.
Finding a better apartment was to become an obsession of mine for many years to come. Although the state of my finances never improved all that much, I did manage to find better apartments, all of which I found by knocking on supers’ doors.
Except for the place I am living in now, I hated every one of those apartments, and except for Murray, who, when I moved in, charged me two hundred dollars for a broken air conditioner, I felt affection, or something like affection, for all my supers and most of them seemed to have felt a kind of affection for me as well.
My second apartment in the city came to me by way of the head waiter of Bill’s Gay Nineties, where I found my first job as a waitress—waitressing, next to being a go-go dancer or a stripper, was the only career I had any interest in pursuing at the time.
It was a quiet one-room, white-linen tablecloth restaurant, a holdover from the 1940s when people were nostalgic for the 1890s; there were just two people working the floor, Stanley, the head waiter, and me. Stanley was in his late seventies. Jeannie, the waitress who was training me to take over for her, warned me to watch out for him stealing my tips. That was why she was leaving.
The idea that this nice old man, with his bowtie, his shiny black suit, his starched white shirt (tragically frayed at cuffs), his white hair slicked back, could do such a thing—that anyone could--was inconceivable to me, and this, along with my overall obliviousness to such matters, was why I failed to draw any correlation between my predecessor’s warning and the fact that I never went home with more than ten dollars and change in tips.
Stanley had found out about the apartment from a friend of his, a fellow waiter, who lived in the building. The super there was Jetmir, a short, sturdy Armenian with short stubby fingers who mistook my habitual friendliness--and my excessive gratitude for his help installing the window gates I picked out of the garbage the day after I moved in--as an invitation to romance. Jetmir was always telling me how beautiful I was; yet when he came to fix the valve on my radiator it wasn’t the nude photograph of me hanging above my baby picture that captured his attention; it was my baby picture. Pointing to my baby cheekbones, he couldn’t get over how much I resembled my baby self. I had been kicking myself for having forgotten to take my naked photo off the wall in preparation for Jetmir’s visit. His reaction to my baby picture gave me a charge; it made me like him.
My bedroom window had a lovely view of the cityscape, which was obliterated a year after I moved in by a high rise that went up across the street. In addition to spoiling my view, the building blocked out the morning and midday sun. But I could still see the cherry tree that grew in the backyard garden of the ground apartment, which to this day I still regret not taking, since I ended up buying my apartment when the building went co-op during the co-op craze that swept New York City in the 1980s, and a garden apartment would have been a lot easier to rent out than a six-floor walk-up. I took out my frustration over that mistake by writing a short story about a garden apartment, which turned out to be my first published story. The eat-in kitchen and the tree are features that I now enthusiastically extol to perspective tenants, whose salaries are at least six times anything I have ever made in a given year.
That apartment was located in the East 80s in a part of the city called Yorkville. It was a block away from the former headquarters of the German American Bund, an organization that had been created to cast Nazi Germany in a favorable light. Knowing this lent a subtle irony to my enjoyment of the quaint German restaurants, the curious little bakeries with their elaborate marzipan sculptures in the windows—all of them long gone. Gimbels on the corner of 86th Street and Lexington Avenue is gone as well, as is the Papaya King, where I would stand and look out the window, a hot dog slathered over with onions and sauce in one hand, a papaya drink in the other, which together cost a dollar seventy-five, while watching the people pass by. Much of 86th Street has been replaced with chain stores that make the neighborhood resemble the main drag of the suburban town in Long Island from which I escaped five decades ago.
My favorite restaurant in the neighborhood was the Ideal, on East 86th Street, where stainless steel frying pans, black around the rims from years of caked-in residue, were wielded by a scary-looking German with a glass eye. The scent of the Ideal’s delicious home fries would embed itself in your clothing and whenever my friend Hannah came to visit me after feasting on a breakfast of bratwurst and eggs, the oily smell of the Ideal’s home fries would come wafting out at me before I opened my door to let her into my apartment.
The Metropolitan Museum was within walking distance. I would sometimes go there and sit undisturbed in the wonderfully enormous cafeteria that used to be situated just beyond the Greek and Roman sculptures (it, too, is long gone, having been replaced by a pricey waiter-service-only restaurant) to do my freelance writing and copyediting, which, having decided that working in an office was not for me, was how I started to earn a living in my late twenties.
I was living in that Yorkville apartment when I met my husband, who lived in the East Village at the time—I can still recall the image of the lovely East Village apartment that flashed through my mind on my way to visit Phil in what turned out to be a tiny, roach-infested studio with one big dirty window that looked out into an airshaft strewn with garbage. When Phil first came to visit me, he spread his arms out wide, declaring that I lived in a mansion. He moved in with me almost immediately, but kept his place in the East Village in order to preserve the illusion that escape was still possible.
Three years after Phil moved in with me was when the building on East 85th Street went co-op. I can’t recall the exact sequence of events, I just know that it was around that time I started asking Phil when he was going to ask me to marry him. I was almost as obsessed with getting married as I was with finding another apartment and after two months of knocking on supers’ doors I found us a place in Washington Heights.
The apartment had the same railroad layout as my apartment in Yorkville, but it was twice as big. The day Phil and I moved in we were delighted to discover that when one of us was in bedroom and the other was in the living room, we could wave to each other from the windows, which were at right angles from each other.
The super for that building was a husky Yugoslavian with a head of curly brown hair, who once told me proudly that he never rented to “the Spanish”--which must have required a good deal of effort since at the time Washington Heights was largely populated by immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Unlike other supers, David Elezovic did not live in a basement apartment; he had a big, beautiful apartment on the first floor that was decorated like a castle, with a big crystal chandelier in the vestibule and heavy red-and-white brocaded drapes in the windows.
A pile of trash had greeted Phil and me when we arrived at that, our first Washington Heights apartment, a week before the move-in date specified in our lease. I assumed that since I was in such a hurry to lay claim to our new apartment I hadn’t given David time to finish cleaning it up, but I would soon learn that David regarded any request to do the sorts of things supers are supposed to do as an imposition—nevertheless we got along; he had an intensity that appealed to me and he always seemed happy to see me, except after that one December when I decided to send him a Christmas card. I had taken a lot of care in selecting it and had given a lot of thought to the words of appreciation I inscribed in it. I was unfamiliar at the time with the age-old custom of giving supers holiday bonuses and David never forgave me for my mistake. I can understand now how much the sight of that card in an otherwise empty envelope must have grated on him.
I loved Washington Heights. I loved the old-fashioned look of it—with its steep hills and its immense flights of cement steps and its art deco brick buildings, the majority of which were no more than six stories tall. I was so enthusiastic about our move here that I drove Phil crazy with my effusions of joy, which wasn’t the first time I made him feel that way. He said I didn’t give him room to know how he was feeling about our move here, which he had been so ambivalent about.
I loved how evocative my new neighborhood was of a different time, a different place. Many German Jewish refugees had migrated there after World War II and the sight of the elegantly dressed old women walking up and down Ft. Washington Avenue with their white gloves and their little hats and their little leather handbags gave the neighborhood a European feel. A close-knit community of Orthodox Jews lived a few blocks away and the men in their long black coats and the women in their long skirts and sheitels walking to synagogue every Saturday made me feel nostalgic for my Jewish heritage and a bit guilty, too, about having so completely forsaken it.
My apartment was just a few blocks away from the Port Authority bus station, the exterior of which resembled the futuristic architecture depicted in science fiction movies in the 1950s. Whenever I passed it, I would see kids in the neighborhood doing wheelies in the large empty space across the street.
The bus station, which used to be a hangout for drug addicts and homeless people, was turned into a shopping mall ten years ago. Although I rarely had occasion to visit it, I liked knowing that it was there just the way it was, and it makes me sad to see yet another part of old New York disappear--and shocked to realize that I have lived here long enough to witness yet another dramatic change in the city.
I loved my Washington Heights apartment at first. I loved the sight of the ivy-covered wall of a nearby apartment building I could see from my living room; I loved the glimpse of the little sliver of the George Washington Bridge that was mine if I stuck my head out my kitchen window; I loved the oak floors and the French doors and the high ceilings and I loved knowing that beneath the layers of white paint covering the moldings and the cabinets in the kitchen lay solid oak. Phil, in an unprecedented display of initiative, stripped the paint off the cabinets and for a while the sight of all that oak was a source of pleasure for me, as well.
When I got pregnant with my first child, I started feeling restless. The apartment didn’t have much light, and that began to wear on me, as did the boring layout and the noise from the busy street and I again became obsessed with finding another apartment.
For two years, I knocked on the door of every super within a twenty-block radius, and following the birth of my daughter, I found a better apartment, right around the corner, but it wasn’t until the birth of my son that I finally found an apartment in which I could feel sufficiently at home to put an end to my endless quest for a better place for us to live.
My apartment has six big sunny rooms and a panoramic view of the George Washington Bridge cushioned against an abundance of sky; rectangles of the Hudson River are visible from the windows in both my bedroom and living room. It even has two bathrooms and a pantry. I consider finding it to be one of my greatest accomplishments. The low rent is a source of pride for me, but not nearly as much as it is a source of despair for my landlord, who in a moment of exasperation shouted out at me in his heavy Brooklyn accent that the rent I am paying was “Highway robbery! Highway robbery!”
My favorite supers have been the ones in this building. This is where I was living when my son was diagnosed with autism, this is where I was living when the struggle of my life began. This is also where I have come face to face with my own mortality, both because of the astonishing number of people I have seen die since moving here and because I know that this is where I will be living until the day when I, too, am no more.
My first super here in this my final resting place was Armando, a sweet Cuban man with an enormous belly and a host of health problems. After he left, a neighbor of mine told me that he had been carrying on an affair with an underage girl from the building across the street, which given Armando’s looks, the state of his health and his overall demeanor came as quite a surprise to me. One day I sat on the floor outside my apartment and wept while Armando stood crouched with his bad back and tried out various tools from his toolbox to figure out how to fix the lock in my front door, which mysteriously refused to open. Things happen, he told me as he fiddled around with his screwdrivers and pliers. It’s not the door, I told him. It’s my life. He stopped working and looked at me sympathetically and said, Everyone has problems. It wasn’t Armando’s words that comforted me; it was the kind and gentle way he spoke them.
When Armando’s health made it impossible for him to continue to work, he moved to Florida, and his brother Pucco took over for him. Pucco and I were in love. One day in the basement when I was doing the laundry I asked him how he was feeling—he had twisted his ankle three weeks before when he tripped over a ladder he was setting up to clean the awning that now adorned the front of our building—one of the many cheap embellishments the new landlord has added to the building in order to justify raising the rents to market value, which every year soar to new heights.
Pucco’s response to my concern for his ankle was to look at me soulfully and slowly eke out in his broken English, "You are a beauuuteeeful person." I don't think I have ever experienced such a heartfelt compliment, or one that meant more to me than that and sometimes when I'm feeling bad about myself—when, for example, I run into the woman from the apartment below mine who has never forgiven me for the two times my son let the bathtub overflow, causing part of the ceiling of her bathroom to cave in--his words come echoing back in my ears and I don’t feel quite so bad.
My experience with the super from my first apartment in Washington Heights had taught me to give Christmas bonuses to my supers, but Pucco always refused my attempts to give him one. You are my friend, he told me in his heavy Cuban accent one day when he came to change the valve in the radiator. Billie Holiday was singing in the background and he said he liked the music and I responded, I’m so happy! Now I know what to give you for Christmas! In response to which he told me, No, that wasn't what he wanted for Christmas; what he wanted for Christmas was to kiss my foot. Although I had long suspected that Pucco was a foot fetishist, I didn't see the harm in letting him kiss my foot, so I complied. I laughed nervously and politely pulled my foot away when his kisses became shockingly ardent.
Pucco told me several times that he wanted to take me out for a nice meal at a nice restaurant and I always found a judicious way to decline his invitations. Mi marido es muy celoso, I would tell him. The fact is Phil never gets jealous, although he didn’t like it when I told him about Pucco and my foot, which he declared for Pucco was the equivalent of having sex.
One day Pucco found me crying in the elevator. When he asked me what was wrong, I told him Es mi hijo. He responded by flexing his muscles and telling me Tienes que ser fuerte.
I felt sad when Pucco left to move to Florida. Before he left, he knocked on my door to say good-bye and he presented me with his laundry card, on which sixty-five dollars still remained. We hugged, and I told him I would miss him. I still miss him.
The super with whom I have felt the closest bond is my current super Lorenzo, a friend of Pucco’s. He is a very tall, very skinny man, now in his sixties, who took over after Pucco left for Florida. When Lorenzo first started the job he was relatively cheerful and he would always smile kind of slyly whenever I asked about Pucco. He hardly spoke any English, but there was a compelling sweetness about him, and we formed a warm attachment to each other.
One day when he came to my apartment to fix the doorknob on my bedroom door, which for some reason is always falling apart, he admired the wooden bench in my hallway—one of the many treasures I have picked off the streets of the city. We had a conversation about that, him in his broken English and me in my broken Spanish, and that was how I found out he used to earn a living as an artisan and that refinishing antiques was what he used to love doing. When I asked him how he happened to become a super, he explained that he had taken the job in order to get health insurance.
Another time when he came to install a carbon monoxide detector in the ceiling, he noticed that the doors of one of my kitchen cabinets was falling apart and that one of the drawers of another cabinet was broken (the landlord had told me that if I wanted a new kitchen cabinet and a new drawer they would cost me an extra $35 a month each forever). A week later, Lorenzo showed up at my apartment with a drawer he had made for me with his skillful artisan hands and the next week he rebuilt my kitchen cabinet as well.
About a year after he took the job Lorenzo fell into a conspicuous depression. Instead of greeting me with his sweet smile, whenever I said Buenos dias, Lorenzo. Como estas? he would hardly acknowledge me. I would try to cheer him up. Affecting a light-hearted tone, sometimes I would tell him that what we both needed was a vacation. Let’s go to the Bahamas, I would say, to which he would sometimes respond with a pained smile.
I avoid asking Lorenzo for help as much as possible, one, because I feel sorry for him, and two, because whenever I ask him to fix anything he either says that there is nothing wrong or that it is my fault. The reason the doorknob in my bedroom is always getting stuck is because someone is slamming the door, and on the rare occasions that I manage to gather up the courage to complain that mi apartamento está muy frio he touches the lukewarm radiator and tells me plaintively, “Maxine, the boiler it is working perrr-fectly,” although I know from his previous helper that he is under strict orders from the landlord to never let the thermometer go above the minimum 68 degrees mandated by New York City Housing law.
I have occasionally commented to the other tenants that I feel sorry for Lorenzo. One of my neighbors, Hector, who works as a doorman in Castle Village, the fancy complex of buildings up the block, told me that I shouldn’t feel sorry for Lorenzo. He said he is a nasty man and that he never even bothers to thank him for passing on freelance jobs from the tenants of Castle Village. And those people pay top dollar, he exclaimed.
Lorenzo’s depressions always make me feel guilty—as though I am somehow responsible--except for two months ago, when I was going through a depression of my own. I wondered if the incapacitating sadness I felt was the way Lorenzo feels all the time. The three times I dragged myself out of my apartment during that bleak period, twice to go to a psychiatrist, and once to a meeting with my son’s social worker, I ran into Lorenzo. Instead of trying to cheer him up as I typically do, I just looked at him sadly, and he looked sadly back at me. For that brief moment I felt that we understood each other.
I am a lot closer in age now to those lovely old German women I used to see walking down the streets of Washington Heights when I moved here almost forty years ago than I am to the confused young woman I once was. Most of the old German Jews have died off, and as far as I can see the drug dealers are mostly gone, too. The neighborhood has seen an endless influx of young white middle-class couples with young children, who with every year that passes keep driving the rents up higher and higher.
Catering to this new demographic of homeowners and tenants are a host of overpriced not-very good restaurants, occupying spots once inhabited by candy stores and expensive clothing stores that were really drug fronts. Before gentrification came to Washington Heights all the restaurants were Spanish, including the now defunct La Perla (Cuban-Chinese) which used to be my favorite restaurant in the neighborhood until the time a roach crawled out of my rice and beans. Now restaurants of every sort line the streets: Italian, Indian, Mexican, Japanese, Thai, vegetarian, organic and nouvelle cuisine, and there is a Pilates studio and an organic food store across the street from my building as well.
There is an Irish pub across the street where there used to be a candy store that ran a numbers racket. The bodega on the opposite corner has been replaced by a stylish café, where in spite of the owner’s glares, I will sometimes go with my laptop to write. A 99-cent store (where nothing is 99 cents anymore) has replaced the kosher deli on 181st Street. Joseph’s Orthopedic Shoe Store, outside of which a gigantic shoe used to dangle, is now a dental spa.
Ten years ago a Starbucks arrived on the corner of 181st Street and Ft. Washington Avenue. I have lived here long enough to see Starbucks change as well. When it first opened up it became a haven for writers who were happy to no longer have to be schlepping laptops downtown to work outside their cramped apartments, but three years ago the tables that could comfortably accommodate two laptops were replaced with tiny café tables that can barely accommodate one, the plugs are all gone and most of the writers have relocated–except for Phil, who, ever a creature of habit, has remained a loyal customer.
The new wave of immigrants and their realtors, desperate to disassociate themselves from Washington Height’s reputation for drugs and crime, have gone so far as to rename our neighborhood “Hudson Heights,” after the lovely views of the Hudson River that can be seen from here.
I don’t know what else I have to say on the subject of my life through the years with my supers except that I’m happy I didn’t end up like Georgia, old and alone in a dump in midtown Manhattan. And I might as well add that my sink has been stuffed up for days and I got locked out of my bedroom last week because the doorknob broke again. Phil had to rescue me by kicking open the door. To deal with the door problem I stuffed rags into the opening of the strike plate. And the other day, when my sink got stuffed up I placed a metal bowl beneath the faucet to catch the water. I know that one of these days I’m going to have to ask Lorenzo to unclog the drain in the bathroom and fix the door in my bedroom. Using Google Translate I have already translated into Spanish: Creo que el problema es que la puerta es muy antiguo y las nuevas esclusas no encajan ella. Nunca me golpeo la puerta , te lo prometo. (I think the problem is that the door is very old and the new locks don’t fit it. I never slam the door, I promise.) I’m also trying to talk myself into not feeling responsible for Lorenzo’s unhappiness or for fixing it, and to stop being so squeamish about asking for his help. He is, after all, my super, and supers are supposed to fix things.
