Today: Zito Madu, a journalist and author of The Minotaur at Calle Lanza.
Issue No. 266The Elevators
Zito Madu
The ElevatorsBefore I moved to New York City, I didn't think about elevators much. When I first started looking at apartments I began with three requirements: the apartment must be next to the park, be quiet, and have a garage (though I wasn't even sure I would be bringing my car from Detroit to Brooklyn). After seeing the few apartments that fit those requirements—and didn’t cost $3000 for a one-bedroom—I soon realized there was another, something that seems essential to proper living here, but is effectively a luxury: working elevators. Several times when I met up with an agent/broker to take a tour, I’d naturally move toward the elevator before being signaled toward the stairs, with the explanation that the elevator was broken. Sometimes there would be a sign on the elevator door declaring that it was down, with no indication of when it would be back in working order. Luckily the building I ended up in has two functioning elevators. They do break from time to time, but not for long. The longest I’ve seen an elevator down was two days. I’m still someone who would be considered able-bodied, in the sense that in ordinary circumstances I can go up and down stairs pretty easily. But that condition of able-bodiedness is in fact very precarious. As someone who plays soccer often and works out by running stairs and hills, all it takes is a small injury to the hamstrings, or an ankle or a knee, for the nature of one’s experience with the built environment to change dramatically. My first year in NYC, I hurt my knee pretty badly and spent most of that year cursing the hostility of the city’s design for old and disabled people. Sometimes, too, I just like having the option of taking the elevator instead of the stairs. Our building is rent-stabilized and when I first moved in, I was introduced to a bunch of tenants who were much older and had been in the building for decades. A few had walkers and some were in wheelchairs. One of my neighbors was an old woman who had a caretaker who was usually with her in the mornings—a mysterious middle-aged woman whom I would see outside smoking a cigarette when I came back from getting coffee. While the caretaker smoked, my neighbor would be in the large lobby area of the apartment looking out at the street with a few others, in the way that old people traditionally like to sit around with their friends doing nothing. I’d greet them as I walked past and like a true Midwestern boy, sometimes I’d stay a few minutes to talk about the weather. For these tenants, having reliably functioning elevators is particularly wonderful. At least so they can sit around in the lobby talking to young people about the weather. Still, the elevators do break and when they do, the frustrations are pretty clear: outages make it almost impossible for the older people to move around. Last time there was a sign near the broken elevator letting us know that we could now pay rent digitally, and someone had written over that announcement with the request to fix the fucking elevator. This kind of impatience and frustration is a feature I’ve come to understand is endemic to New York. Everything feels more annoying than it would anywhere else. You have places to be, things to do, people to see. Your time is very valuable and you’re on schedule so anything that infringes on that feels like a personal attack. Even when you don’t really have anything to do or a need to be at a place at a particular time, just being here still feels like constantly being short on time, like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. It didn’t take long for my laid-back Midwestern attitude to change to that of a perpetually irritable and harried New Yorker. I hate people who walk slowly on the sidewalks. I damn near push past tourists who have no idea where they’re going. The trains are always too late and too slow to get me where I need to be. Everything is too loud and smells bad and everyone is annoying. I get just as frustrated when the elevator takes too long to come down, and so do my fellow tenants. Even though it only takes a minute or so for the elevator to descend from the 5th or 6th floor, you would think that minute was actually thirty from the way we huff and puff and indignantly demand to know what could possibly be taking so long. This huffing and puffing is necessary for no other reason than to signal that you are a New Yorker with no time to waste. About a year after moving in, I was doing the performance of waiting for the elevator. And this time it really was taking a very long time. The elevator seemed to be stuck on one floor. In the time that I waited, I could have gone up and down the stairs several times, but I felt too invested, after having waited so long, to take the alternate route. I deserved to take the elevator and to side-eye whoever had been keeping it from coming down. Eventually the elevator came down and as it opened, I was fully prepared to kiss my teeth or roll my eyes at the person who came out. But I never got the chance, because when it opened what I saw were two paramedics with a stretcher trolley. There was someone on the trolley but they were covered with a white sheet. I was so struck by the image of the two paramedics and this sudden closeness with the universal signal of death that one of them had to ask me several times to move out of the way as they pulled the trolley out of the elevator. I had seen the ambulance outside but hadn’t connected the dots with the seriousness of its presence. After the paramedics left the building I had the elevator all to myself, but I no longer felt comfortable getting into it. Not only because of the feeling that death was still lingering around and inside it, but also my previous anger felt so childish and small. The shame at the egotism of thinking that everything should have been for my convenience and that the wait had been caused by someone trying to annoy me personally. I took the stairs up, and as I neared my apartment I saw a small medical bag that the paramedics had accidentally left behind on the floor beside my neighbor’s door. For the next few days, for some reason, I kept thinking that I would maybe see her on my way to get coffee in the morning, or that I would see her caretaker outside smoking a cigarette when I returned. Of course this never happened. I never saw the caretaker or my neighbor again. But the ambulance comes every now and then and even when I have to limp down slowly, I take the stairs whenever I see it outside.
AVE ATQUE VALE Bruce H. Cox, L.A. Times [CC BY 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons The mad world paused in sadness today at the passing of Gene Hackman, an actor much loved by the Flaming Hydra community. Please take a moment to enjoy a noble appreciation of this great artist by John Saward.
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