Read Online I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nora Ephron
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would leave the Apthorp voluntarily. I was never going to leave. They will take me out feet first, I said.
Every so often an ambulance pulled into the courtyard and in fact took a tenant away feet first, and within minutes the landlord would be deluged with inquiries about a possible vacancy, most of them from tenants who had seen the ambulance come in or out (or had heard about it from George) and wanted to upgrade to a larger space.
At the time I moved in, the Apthorp was owned by three elderly persons—although, come to think of it, they were not much older than I am now. One of them was a charming, courtly gentleman, active in all sorts of charities involving Holocaust survivors. He lived long enough to be taken to court for a number of things, none of them including the crime I happen to know he was guilty of, which was lining his pockets with cash payoffs made by people who were either moving in or out of the building. I was very fond of him and his sporty red Porsche, which he drove right up to the day he was taken to the hospital. There he took his last kickback, from neighbors of mine, and died. The kickback, incidentally, was $50,000—part of the $285,000 in key money my neighbors had charged a new tenant for the right to take over their lease. That’s right. Someone paid $285,000 in key money to move into the Apthorp. How was this possible? What was the thinking? Actually I could guess: The thinking was that over fifty-six years, the $285,000 would amortize out to four cappuccinos a day. Grande cappuccinos. Mucho grande cappuccinos.
I lived in the Apthorp in a state of giddy delirium for about ten years. The tap water in the bathtub often ran brown, there was probably asbestos in the radiators, and the exterior of the building was encrusted with soot. Also, there were mice. Who cared? My rent slowly inched up—the rent-stabilization law gave landlords the right to raise the rent approximately 8 percent every two years—but the apartment was still a bargain. By this time the real estate boom had begun in New York, and the newspapers were full of shocking articles about escalating rents; there were one-room apartments in Manhattan renting for two thousand dollars a month. I was paying the same amount for eight rooms. I felt like a genius.
Meanwhile, there were unhappy tenants in the building, suing the landlord over various grievances; I couldn’t imagine why. What did they want? Service? A paint job every so often? The willing replacement of a broken appliance? There were residents who even complained about the fact that the building didn’t allow your Chinese food to be brought up to your apartment. So what? Every time I walked into the courtyard at the end of a day, I fell in love all over again.
My feelings were summed up perfectly by a policeman who turned up one night to handle an altercation on my floor. My next-door neighbor was a kind and pleasant professor, the sort of man who would not hurt a flea; his son often left his bicycle in the vestibule outside our apartment. Our neighbor down the hall, an accountant, became angry about the professor’s son’s bicycle, which he apparently thought was an eyesore, which it probably was. One afternoon he decided to put it directly in front of the professor’s door, blocking it. The professor found the bike there and returned it to its spot in the hallway. The accountant put it back, once again blocking the professor’s door. There was quite a lot of noisy crashing about while all this was going on, and it got my attention; as a result, I was lurking at my front door peeking out into the vestibule when the final chapter of the drama occurred.
The professor had just put the bicycle back out in the hall, and he too was waiting inside his front door hoping to catch the accountant in the act of once again moving it. Both of us stood there idiotically looking through the sheer curtains on our glass-paneled front doors. Sure enough, the
Every so often an ambulance pulled into the courtyard and in fact took a tenant away feet first, and within minutes the landlord would be deluged with inquiries about a possible vacancy, most of them from tenants who had seen the ambulance come in or out (or had heard about it from George) and wanted to upgrade to a larger space.
At the time I moved in, the Apthorp was owned by three elderly persons—although, come to think of it, they were not much older than I am now. One of them was a charming, courtly gentleman, active in all sorts of charities involving Holocaust survivors. He lived long enough to be taken to court for a number of things, none of them including the crime I happen to know he was guilty of, which was lining his pockets with cash payoffs made by people who were either moving in or out of the building. I was very fond of him and his sporty red Porsche, which he drove right up to the day he was taken to the hospital. There he took his last kickback, from neighbors of mine, and died. The kickback, incidentally, was $50,000—part of the $285,000 in key money my neighbors had charged a new tenant for the right to take over their lease. That’s right. Someone paid $285,000 in key money to move into the Apthorp. How was this possible? What was the thinking? Actually I could guess: The thinking was that over fifty-six years, the $285,000 would amortize out to four cappuccinos a day. Grande cappuccinos. Mucho grande cappuccinos.
I lived in the Apthorp in a state of giddy delirium for about ten years. The tap water in the bathtub often ran brown, there was probably asbestos in the radiators, and the exterior of the building was encrusted with soot. Also, there were mice. Who cared? My rent slowly inched up—the rent-stabilization law gave landlords the right to raise the rent approximately 8 percent every two years—but the apartment was still a bargain. By this time the real estate boom had begun in New York, and the newspapers were full of shocking articles about escalating rents; there were one-room apartments in Manhattan renting for two thousand dollars a month. I was paying the same amount for eight rooms. I felt like a genius.
Meanwhile, there were unhappy tenants in the building, suing the landlord over various grievances; I couldn’t imagine why. What did they want? Service? A paint job every so often? The willing replacement of a broken appliance? There were residents who even complained about the fact that the building didn’t allow your Chinese food to be brought up to your apartment. So what? Every time I walked into the courtyard at the end of a day, I fell in love all over again.
My feelings were summed up perfectly by a policeman who turned up one night to handle an altercation on my floor. My next-door neighbor was a kind and pleasant professor, the sort of man who would not hurt a flea; his son often left his bicycle in the vestibule outside our apartment. Our neighbor down the hall, an accountant, became angry about the professor’s son’s bicycle, which he apparently thought was an eyesore, which it probably was. One afternoon he decided to put it directly in front of the professor’s door, blocking it. The professor found the bike there and returned it to its spot in the hallway. The accountant put it back, once again blocking the professor’s door. There was quite a lot of noisy crashing about while all this was going on, and it got my attention; as a result, I was lurking at my front door peeking out into the vestibule when the final chapter of the drama occurred.
The professor had just put the bicycle back out in the hall, and he too was waiting inside his front door hoping to catch the accountant in the act of once again moving it. Both of us stood there idiotically looking through the sheer curtains on our glass-paneled front doors. Sure enough, the
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