Dreadful Dwelling

I was living on the 79th floor of one of the so-called "pencil" buildings in Manhattan.  In fact, I shared the entire floor with my two older siblings, Mary and Charles.

I hated it.  I hated everything about it.  What I hated most was opening one eye in the middle of the night and seeing the dimly lit roof of a building that I knew from the ground to be a formidable structure in its own right, an Art Deco knock-off from the late 1930s.  There was a rusty water tank on the roof, probably no longer in use.

I also hated the incessant swaying we experienced whenever the winds aloft exceeded 25 knots or so.  Likewise a faint, peculiar smell that came in the late fall and stayed for the winter, a telltale sign, I thought, of some fundamental glitch in the heating system that might turn towards catastrophe at a most inopportune time.

And the awkward elevator rides, filled either with silence or meaningless chit chat.  In the chit chat, the building itself substituted for the weather as the safe default topic of choice.

And the reaction I got from casual acquaintances, friends of friends and such, when they learned where I lived.  There was an assumption that I was filthy rich, but also a conviction that I must have had more money than taste.

In fact, my father bought the unit for us.  He paid for everything thereafter, including Christmas gratuities for the people at ground level.  He did it, of course, to exercise control; you won't be surprised to learn that he still exercises control from beyond the grave, via a complex series of trusts.

I thought of the arrangement at first as a kind of dystopian experiment that I could share with two of my very best friends, two people who understood me on a deep level and who were, and are, inherently interesting and companionable.  The artist and the bond trader (and no, you have them backwards as to which is which).

The COVID years were particularly difficult.  The common American isolation was made locally worse by a little handbook of rules that the building association must have copied from Xi Jinping.  I ignored it when I could get away with it.

I finally left in the late summer of 2023, for a teaching job in Missoula.  I live there now in a small house with a ground floor and only a ground floor.  From my back porch I can see the Clark Fork River, but just barely, wending its way through a waterfront park.  There is a very friendly tavern within walking distance of my house and, at the other end of the street, a modest church, of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that I have seen only from the outside.

I sleep soundly for the most part, but from time to time a dream recurs in which I am floating motionless above the city, like the Goodyear Blimp hovering against a gentle breeze.  It's bad because it's vertiginous, but to make matters worse, in due course a peregrine falcon decides to practice his bombing runs against my head.  At that point I wake up in a sweat.

My daily driver is a vintage International Scout in British Racing Green with a transfer case and a heater that still is able to fend off the winter cold.  My students think that it's cool.

There, you asked me how it was, and I told you.  Straight up and God's honest to the extent that I am able.