Hell's Kitchen

  

 

    I really need to at least start on dad’s apartment before my surgery so I got up early today and headed over there hoping to get the key. This time when I rang the office buzzer someone answered and let me in.  She came out into the hall with the keys in her hand, not just the front door but the apartment door, too, which I was worried they might not have. 

     “I don’t have the mailbox key,” she said apologetically. “All his mail has been forwarded anyway,” I told her. “But when you sell the apartment you will have to change the lock,” she reminded me. 

    “We’ll get started soon,” I said, assuring myself as much as her. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “Yes, we’ve been in court for a long time, all because I am not his blood daughter.” “I always tell people to write down exactly what you want,” she said. “He did,” I said, “he named me as beneficiary.” “Oh I thought he died intestate.” “No,” I explained. “Our laws are so archaic they prioritize bloodlines over everything else so no matter what the will says you have to notify the next of kin and his were so distant I had to hire a genealogist to identify them and then we had to locate these people all over the country and get them to sign off and some of them were 97 yrs old. What you have to do is what my grandfather did, put your assets in a trust and then it dissolves when you die. But how are people l supposed to know that?”

     Coming up the steep hill from dad‘s apartment I missed the bus by just minutes.  Another woman with long braids, who was right behind me, said “Oh, man,” as we sat down on the benches to wait for the next one. I said, “I know. I can’t run anymore like I used to.” “If they see you running, they peel off usually anyway,” she said.  

    A few minutes passed and then she asked me if I lived around there, so I said “my dad did and I have to pack up his apartment.” She nodded sympathetically. “If he lived here for a long time and he was alive you could’ve asked him about when the Hare Krishnas used to live here.”  “I remember that,” I said “they used to serve vegetarian food.”  “My husband who passed away, took me there,” she said. He said, ‘We’re gonna live here.’ Then on the first day, they put them in the office and they told him, ‘you have to give up your bank account and all your worldly possessions. Anything you own and you have to get up at 4:30am every day and if you’re not legally married to her, you can’t sleep in the same room’ so then he said ‘we’re not moving in there’ so we were just not devotees but…” she trailed off uncertainly.  “Supporters?” I asked. 

     “Yeah,” she said, “and I got very, very skinny.” “That sounds like it was too much,” I said.  “My thighs were like parentheses. No fish, no meat no eggs.”  Just then an older Latino man came walking up the block and she greeted him and then said to me, “this is the man that took me out of vegetarianism. Now I eat burgers and everything.” And then they headed off together.

 

    Crossing 42nd St., two older gay men behind me were discussing the Port Authority reconstruction. “Is this whole building coming down?” asked one. The other one clearly had either been to one of the meetings or had studied the plans online, starts in on a long explanation about how they’re starting with the deck plates where the road was below ground level and the new ramps between 11th and 12th. “Yes, but is this building coming down?” asked the other guy again.  “They’re going to build a tower,” the first guy said and as I pulled further ahead of them, it was clear he was about to go into a lot of detail again.

    When I got to the corner of Ninth Avenue by my office, a black man lingering in the area where the squeegee men and various other dispossessed people hang out said he liked my rainbow shoes. I was intent on getting to the office and trying to make a dent in the pile of backed up work so I just said thanks and kept going. Behind me, the man said “is that your community?” “Yep,” I told him over my shoulder. “Me too,” he said. while “Cool,” I yelled back from several feet down the street.

     At work I was working on getting one grant proposal ready to go out, writing another, and trying to get through the labyrinth of our NYC contract.  I was stopping periodically to help clients as they stopped by.  

    The theme of the day was housing problems.  The first client wanted to report the conditions at his shelter, so I put him in touch with the DHS ombudsman.  Another, a trans woman with severe PTSD, called me in a panic because her shelter wanted her to move out of her single room so they could deal with some water damage but all they had to offer in the meantime was a shared room with another client she doesn’t feel comfortable with.  The third was in mental health housing and has been dealing with threats and harassment from another resident for months.  He needs a safety transfer and his building is refusing to act on that, so I contacted an advocate who works with supportive housing residents.

    The last client brought the day full circle, back to the end of life.  He wanted to know about health care proxies and advance directives.  I explained the kinds of things you can specify in an advance directive, and when health care proxies go into effect, and he headed out lost in thought.