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20 May, 1996 1:10:07 AM Thursday morning, May 16th, 1996, I had an experience. It was about 8:15 a.m., and I opened the door to leave for work. Standing right there in the doorway was Alice, the unbelievably elderly woman who lives upstairs. Seeing a human standing right outside my door was such a shock I almost shit in my pants, but it was a matter of seconds before she explained that something was wrong with her freezer, and that she had been to the management office but no one was there, and could I please come look at it. Something about the icetray in the freezer. So I said I'd go look at it. She turned around and then yelled "What floor is this? The 3rd?" I said no, it was the 2nd floor. She muttered something about living on the 4th floor, and proceeded to lead me up the stairs.
One step at a time, Alice. I didn't want to pass her, I mean what was my goddam hurry anyway? So I paced myself behind her, really feeling for once the epic slowness of her routine trips up and down the stairs. I remembered all those times I bounded past elderly people in the subway stations and at shopping centers, distantly thinking of the frieze I saw at the 92nd Street Y. It says " We made it up to the 4th floor. She was shaking hard, and could not get the key into the lock. She stopped trying for a moment, and gestured toward me, but before I could take the keys from her she was trying again to get the key into the door. I know that it was Alice that was shaking, and not the door, but somewhere between wanting to take the key from her and wishing she would just plunge the damn key into the door I started thinking that the door was moving around and screwing her over. Watching her stab at the lock like that made me think of a woman I was with once, and a pornographic movie I saw somewhere in the Village last year. Then she handed me the key. I slid the key into the lock, discovering then that the door was not even locked. It freely swung open with just a slight push. Inside her apartment, I first saw her mattress, which rested on the floor and was not a part of any bed. She led me into the kitchen area, and I can honestly say that I have never seen so many cockroaches in one place in my entire life. The counter was a blanket of roaches, and underneath the roaches (though invisible to me) was the icetray I had come to replace. To my horror, she reached into the thicket of roaches and produced that icetray. She shook off a good percentage of the roaches off the icetray, then handed it to me. I wondered if she didn't have some kind of formula, or words of wisdom in her mind, where she decided that "Listen here, Sonny, once you get about 90% of the roaches off of whatever it is you're trying to get those thousands of roaches off of, you can just forget the other 10%." I pounded the icetray against the counter, slapping the rest of the roaches against the counter and into the sink (narrowly avoiding the discomfort of having several hundred itty-bitty cockroaches crawl all over my arm). Alice opened the refrigerator and started talking about something, pointing her fingers and shaking like hell. Every time I've ever talked to Alice she has said "The police are gonna getcha," and she said it again on Thursday. She said she'd tried to slide the icetray into the rack right beneath the freezer, but she couldn't figure it out, and "The goddam police are gonna getcha if you don't do it!" I looked into the refrigerator and saw a tidal wave of more roaches. It was nothing short of a swarm. In these few short moments, my revulsion at seeing thousands and thousands of roaches clawing all over and burrowing amongst each other was already neutralized, and I was indifferent to them. Come and get me, old age with your vermin, I don't fucking care. A dead man is dead, just gimme a room with a view to die in. There was nothing wrong with the freezer. I took the icetray and slid it onto the rack beneath the freezer. Alice asked "How'd you do that?" I took out the icetray and showed her again, trying real hard to explain the act of placing a tray into a rack. I repeated the action about 4 times, and she acted as if she understood. I wanted her to say "Very true, Plato," but barring that I decided to get the hell outta there. Before leaving I said "What's your name?" She said "I'm Alice." I stopped short of asking her birthday, and who the president of the United States was (the standard questions of lucidity), and said "My name's Mark." I looked past her shivering, spotted face and out the window, through which the morning sun reached its desultory tendrils of generic hope and lukewarm light. I remember an episode of "The Rockford Files," where Tom Selleck was the guest, and he talked about how the morning sunlight had travelled millions of miles to warm our day. Alice and I shook hands. I picked up my gigantic black-and-yellow striped umbrella and she said "It's raining like a summbitch out there today." I clutched my big umbrella with both hands, once again thinking of that woman I was with, and that pornographic movie I saw in the village last year, and I said "I know. WCBS." In the flow of that morning inertia I almost set about explaining that WCBS does traffic and weather on the 8's (8:08, 8:18, 8:28, 8:38, 8:48, and 8:58), but I didn't. I opened the door (over a completely ineffectual lock) and bounded down the stairs, rejoicing (young man) in mine youth. I butted my right shoulder against the wall, thinking I was Thor, and that I could tear down the wall or at least shake the roots of this apartment building. I stopped bounding when I reached a turn in the stairwell, and bolted both my arms up over my head, just like Rocky Balboa, suddenly inspired to conquer the day, and then thought to myself "Let's see, it's usually only one flight downstairs, but today I'm starting from the 4th floor..." Another gratuitous memory floats by, this time of another woman I was with, and then off I'm to work, no later than ever, and I'm just smiling the whole rest of the day.
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