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digging into the roof of this brownstone cave
Tuesday, August 20 2002
In the aftermath of necessary plumbing repairs above our bathroom, I had a plan to fix the holes in our bathroom ceiling and then bill the co-op for the work, thereby earning some money in the process. As with all jobs, though, I'd been putting it off, and today Gretchen nudged me into action.
So I went and fetched a stepladder from the basement and got to work. I'd already stocked up on necessary supplies, though certain aspects of the repair seemed difficult. I had some scrap drywall to work with, but it was a little thicker than the drywall it was replacing. Then there was the matter of the existing conditions in the aftermath of the plumbing work. The plumbers had stapled and screwed some plywood to our ceiling to keep debris from pouring in from their work upstairs, and removing that piece of plywood wasn't an especially pleasant experience. I did so without sufficient preparation (I hadn't put away the tooth brushes), and when it began to come loose, I suddenly realized it was rather heavy with crumbling brownstone debris: disintegrating wood, disintegrating plaster, broken tile, crumbled pipes, massive nodules of melted solder, and a strange mix of round river pebbles and rotten brick. This material was so chaotic and random that it reminded me more of some sort of natural river-borne sedimentation than 100 years of matter accumulation between floors. Up above the tidy drywall of our bathroom, the eighteen inches of inter-floor void resembled the roof of a cave. I had to have Gretchen run in and fetch me a garbage bag to contain the landslide of detritus as I pulled the retaining plywood away. After dealing with that, I found it prudent to scoop more of this material from where it had accumulated above the drywall around the holes. There was so much of it that I was concerned it might one day precipitate a ceiling collapse. No wonder it's impossible to send 2.4 GHz signals through these floors.
Once exposed to my probing fingertips, the internal structure of the brownstone seemed, well, marginal. The wooden joists designed to support the ceiling were so weak and semi-rotten that they could barely hold a nail, and the ancient joists above them designed to hold up our psychotic neighbor's floor seemed even worse. But what do I know? A real estate agent had just appraised Gretchen's eighth of the co-op as being worth 409 thousand dollars.
Hours later, I was mostly done with all I could do while waiting for spackle to dry. My only major fuckup had been sealing up a jar of bath salts irretrievably above the bathtub (I'd used it as a weight while some glue was drying). Other than that, I'd completely forgotten to insert a time capsule into the interfloor void.
Later on, Gretchen, David the Rabbi and I watched two different WNBA basketball games, and both turned out the way we wanted them to. In the first the New York Liberty decisively beat the Indiana Fever, and in the second the Utah Starzz narrowly defeated the Houston Comets, an apparently historic achievement. When it comes to non-New York teams, I'm always on the side of the city I prefer. While normally I don't harbor much fondness for Utah, land of Mormons, Orin Hatch, and sacramental white bread and Cool Aid, it's still not a tenth as evil as Houston, home of Enron and the most contemptible city in the most contemptible state in the nation. In tonight's game, I even found myself enjoying the awkward treelike playing style of Utah's seven foot two inch tall Margo Dydek, whom I normally loathe nearly as much as Summer Erb.
At some point Gretchen's friend Debra called. She lives a few blocks away in Prospect Heights, and since she doesn't have a teevee, she wanted to know if we'd learned anything about the "race riots" that were happening in her neighborhood. Debra had talked to someone on the street and learned that tonight a Ford minivan driven by a Hasidic Jew had hit and a killed a little black girl, and that the driver had been pulled from the van and beaten so badly that he'd required hospitalization. Now there were rioters in the street, damaging cars, throwing bottles, etc. So we checked out a sleazy local eyewitness news channels to see what was up. It turned out that the story was rather different from the one Debra had heard on the street. The Hasidic man had indeed hit a little black girl who had darted out between cars, but the girl was still alive and in critical condition. The driver had stopped and been hustled by some people into an apartment lobby to protect him from potential mob violence. It turned out that most of the unrest in Prospect Heights tonight was actually the result of cops trying to break up an unrelated domestic disturbance.
It was a great relief to hear the real story; David had been concerned that it was "Crown Heights all over again." The population of Crown Heights (just east of Prospect Heights) is a mix of Hasidic Jews and African Americans, and, though they mostly get along, there is enough tension beneath the surface for a random accident to set off interracial violence. The fact that residents had protected the Hasidic driver from mob justice until the cops came was just what David needed for renewed "faith in the goodness of mankind," something he seems to have in irrationally optimistic quantities.
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