Twenty-three years across the hall

The crate's fine. Everybody in this building wants to give me a chair.

Osorio in 5B brought one down with arms on it and a cushion, and I said thank you, mami, and I walked it right back downstairs with the other two. You put a chair in a lobby, people sit. They get comfortable, they start telling you about their daughter's boyfriend. You put a milk crate, they say oh papi, how's the back, and they keep walking.

Everybody's got a theory about the back. 2A swears it was the boiler in '09, when four of us walked the new one down the cellar steps on a moving blanket. Osorio tells people I carried a washer up to the Batistas, which I did do, but that was years before that and I was fine. The kid on four's been telling girls I fell off the roof.

I sneezed. March of 2014, at the mailboxes, nothing in my hands, and something back there went plook. That's the actual sound it made. Twenty-two years old I'm throwing oil burners off a truck in Hunts Point and never a problem, and then I sneezed at my own mailboxes.

Twenty-six years I got here in June. Guy before me was Feeney's husband, did the job forty years, taught me about nine minutes of it before he died, and the rest I got off the pipes. He had a dog too, this thing with one ear. Forget the dog.

Vic moved into 3C that same summer. August. Hangs a Mets pennant on his door, in this building, in the Bronx, and two weeks later he's knocking on the basement door because his radiator's knocking. I told him that's the building's opinion of the flag. He didn't laugh then. He laughs at it now, tells that one himself at a barbecue like he wrote it.

Then October comes and it's the Yankees and the Mets in the World Series, five games, and I'm up on three doing his valve with the door open so we can both hear the TV. That's twenty-six years ago and we have not stopped since. Not one week. He says at least we didn't buy ours. I say you didn't buy anything, papa, that's the whole point, look at the shelf, there's nothing on it.

I was in the basement apartment those first years, next to the boiler, which is a hot little box in January. Then in '03 Feeney's daughter came and took her out to Pearl River, and the board said take 3D, and I took 3D. Door's right there. You stand in mine with it open, you're looking at his.

He drove a bus out of Gun Hill, nights, so he'd come up the stairs at six in the morning when I'm already dragging cans out, and we'd stand in the hall by the window and go at it about the bullpen while the whole floor's asleep. There's a folding chair up there by that window he takes his coffee in. Twenty-three years of that. Mrs. Pabón in 3B complained exactly one time, in 2011, and she was right, and we got quieter. Sort of.

My ex is in 4B. We split in '11 and she kept the apartment, which is a funny thing when you're the super, and now she's the one telling me my kitchen's a disgrace. We're fine. She sends food down for two because she's seen my refrigerator. She calls him tu amigo. Everybody calls him that.

My son's out at Stony Brook. First one in my family, either side, going back to the campo. My grandmother used to say a cada puerco le llega su sábado, which is every pig gets his Saturday off. That's not what it means. She meant it nice anyway.

Vic drove him out there with the mattress in the truck bed tied down with clothesline, because I can't sit in a truck that long anymore, and he came back and told me the kid never looked back at us once.

My mother used to say el que nace pa' maceta no pasa del corredor. He who is born a flowerpot don't get past the hallway. That's for Julio in 1A, who's been moving to Kissimmee since Giuliani. Every March. Fifteen boxes in his living room with tape on them and he's still voting in this building.

November of '05 his mother died down in Ponce and I went over there to sit with him. We ended up in his bed. I was still there when the trucks came for the cans.

That was the year the Angels put us out in five and Torre wouldn't take the ball off Randy Johnson, and I'm still not over it, and neither is anybody who was in this lobby that October. Ask 2A. He'll give you forty minutes on it.

Board's got an offer on the building, a real one, with a number in it, from people who own nine of these already out by Westchester Ave and they put the same new lobby in every one of them, white tile, like a dentist. Meeting was in the church basement on Randall, the one where they had the, I don't know what they do in there Tuesdays, tables out, coffee. I stood in the back because I can't sit in those chairs, and they read the number out loud.

Their engineer comes Thursday with a flashlight to look at my boiler and put a price on what I already fixed.

The apartment is the job. My name is not on a lease anywhere in this world. New owner brings his own guy, and that guy gets 3D, because 3D is the super's.

There's a number on the back of a Chino menu on my refrigerator. Building on Watson, two-bedroom in the basement, they want somebody by December, guy's a friend of my cousin's husband. It's a good building, better boiler than mine. I've been looking at that menu for eleven days.

I told Vic the number from the meeting. He said Cohen ought to spend that on a bullpen instead of whatever it is he's doing over there, and then he said something about Alonso I'm not repeating because it was stupid. He didn't ask me where I'd go. I didn't bring it up.

His daughter thinks we watch the game.

I got the hall light on three fixed last week, the one that's been going since the spring. Six minutes and a bulb. Got the loose tread screwed down too. I'm not having some engineer write on a clipboard that my treads are loose.