Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

LaVonne jumped back. Surprised.

Then things in front of me began toppling over and falling; my own cup and saucer, the salt and pepper shakers, a napkin holder. They appeared to be self-propelled, upending themselves and plunging from the counter to the floor. The last thing down was a stainless steel cream container, exploding against the linoleum, soaking LaVonne’s legs and waitress shoes, dispersing a wave of milk on top of the lagoon of steaming coffee and broken glass.

Then she slipped.

Things got bad after that.

I wanted only to help, to steady her. One of my hands came to rest on her firm right titty. There was screaming.

The women customers at the table had me wrong too.

Mister Dave came out from the kitchen as LaVonne was pulling herself away from me. Dave was Israeli. In his sixties but still healthy and well over two hundred pounds. He had a low tolerance for anyone who would put their hands on his female help.

The wind-up was that I was pulled and dragged out the door of the restaurant.

THAT MONDAY I reported back to work. Broke. Hung over and shaking, but sober.

Me and Ben Flash had moved on to another smaller state job on Park Avenue South. The offices of Building & Safety Administration. One floor in a tall building.

Even though it was a flat-fee assignment, I was in training so Murphy decreed through my supervisor that I’d be paid by the window only, less the fifty dollars I had borrowed from Flash.

My second day of work I washed twenty-eight panes. Both sides. In and out.

At the end of the job, after we’d packed up and were ready to leave and move on to our next assignment, Flash decided to let me in on a ritual he practiced. I got on the elevator with him and we took the car up to the top of the building. The fifty-sixth floor. Flash knew where the roof access was located, so we climbed out.

I followed him as he crossed to the edge. It was bitter cold. We looked down. Then he spit over the side. A big glob of phlegm and saliva. After he’d spit he leered at me. ‘Okay, Dante,’ Flash said. ‘Your turn. Go ahead.’

I spit too.

‘How’s it feel?’ he asked. We’d watched my stream disappear out of sight. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It feels okay.’

‘You bet your ass! It feels great!’

The weather improved and the temperature went above freezing. Mid-thirties. By Friday of that week we were on a semi-annual contract apartment house uptown off Madison Avenue; an old high-rise relic built during Prohibition, complete with mean-faced concrete gargoyles poised to leap from the cornice of every floor.

It was a massive structure; seventy-seven stories. Fat Murphy assigned three teams of two men to the job. We picked numbers in the office for the section assignments. Flash and me drew the top twenty-five floors.

But the weather was warm enough to snow, so it snowed. We lost half of the first day. The group of us, all six, sat in the basement with the building security guy playing nickel poker and drinking coffee with wine from styrofoam cups. We had reported at 5 a.m. so by 6 the coffee was gone and we were at the wine straight from the bottle – Boone’s Farm and Triple Jack.

Around nine o’clock the temperature warmed some more and the snow stopped, so we went up. Flash was okay because he was always okay but I was drunk. So were most of the other guys.

I started on seventy-six and Flash took seventy-seven. We’d decided to alternate floors as we worked our way down.

I did my first few panes, moving along. I was much better with the squeegee and pole now. More confident. But this was an old, privately owned apartment house rather than a state office building, which made a difference in how it got maintained. Everything was rickety. The exterior paint was chipped and slippery and there was dry rot in the window frames. Some of the glass panes rattled as I swiped across them with my squeegee.

I’d done about a dozen panes and I was flipping over from the last sill when I swung out and hooked my right harness strap to the far right hook of the next window. That went okay and I completed the maneuver by bouncing onto the sill. If I’d been sober I probably would have noticed that the spike I had attached my strap to was loose and wobbling.

But I didn’t notice.

Clamped in on both sides of the window I steadied my bucket and leaned back with my full weight.

Later on, after falling off the ledge and being suspended seven hundred and fifty feet in the air for several minutes until Flash could pull me up, I realized that this was the closest I’d ever been to accidentally killing myself.

At first I was too scared to yell so I just dangled. I’d let go of my cleaning pole with the brass squeegee and the half-full bucket of cleaning solution. The stuff caromed off the ledge of the floor below then plunged the rest of the way to the street.

(When you’re at that distance from ground level you won’t hear the noise when falling objects slam down against the sidewalk below or collide with the roofs of parked cars. The sound doesn’t travel back).

Just beneath me, Flash heard my stuff as it clattered and bounced off his floor. He looked up and saw I was in trouble, then forced open an apartment window and rushed up the service stairs in time to haul me to safety.

Half an hour later, after I’d calmed down a bit, the two of us took the elevator to the ground floor and left the building. Flash helped me search the street and sidewalk until we located my mangled bucket, my broken pole and the rest of the window-cleaning gear.

Red Ball’s storefront is located on Eighty-sixth between Lexington and Third. We walked the three avenue blocks cross-town on Eighty-sixth. I didn’t talk and Flash didn’t talk.

When we crossed Lex Flash stopped at the liquor store on the corner. It was close to the Red Ball office and he knew the counter guy, Perry. He paid for two short dogs for himself and two for me, then we stood in a doorway on the avenue, out of the cold, smoking and sucking down the Triple Jack until it was gone.

By the time we entered Johnny Murphy’s office I was okay. Better. I set my deformed window-cleaning gear down on his desk. Murphy glanced at the stuff but didn’t react. ‘What’s up?’ he said, eyeballing Flash, then me. ‘You guys workin’ some kinda new half-day schedule?’

‘I quit,’ I said. ‘As of today. Immediately.’

There was no reply from Murphy. Instead, he began piling my harness, the mangled bucket, squeegee and other stuff on the floor beside his desk, counting each rubber blade and sponge as he set it down.

When he was done he rocked back in his chair. ‘There’s damage to this equipment. Red Ball company property.’

Flash stepped forward. ‘Ya, well, ya know, fuck the company property!’

My partner and Murphy locked eyes. Murphy smirked. ‘You men been drinkin’ this morning? Starting your weekend early?’

‘Fuck you too Murphy,’ Flash snarled. ‘How’s that! I’m hot about this. Fuck it, ya know. Maybe I’ll quit too.’

The fat man got up, still calm, walked the distance to his open office door, swung it closed, then returned to the desk and sat down. ‘Okay, Flash, what’s your problem?’

‘My problem?’ Flash shot back. ‘Not my problem, Johnny Murphy; your problem. This man just now fucking-near fell seventy fuckin’ floors! That building – that fucking Stuyvesant Apartments antique rattletrap piece-a-shit cocksucker on Eighty-fifth – that fucker is unsafe! That’s your problem. Dante was hooking on and one of those rusty spike cocksuckers came completely out of the concrete, and this man, a new man, almost got himself dead. Ya know? I mean, that’s bullshit! You know it and I know it. Every harness monkey in this company ever worked up the side of that cocksucker knows its a bum ride. And don’t grease me, for chrissake. I don’t want to hear that I’m crazy or any of that shit.’