Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Acknowledgments

  About Timothy Brandoff

  Copyright & Credits

  About Kaylie Jones Books

  About Akashic Books

  to Walis

  Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

  —James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  But we aren't a glum lot.

  —Anonymous

  Chapter one

  "Cops again, that what you want?" His wife was inside their apartment. Connie was outside. He was trying to get inside.

  Key in hand, he attempted to enter for who knows how long. Intoxication sometimes induced a palsy, coordination slipped, while the minutes blended into weeks and months. A rest period seemed in order. He closed his eyes and paused for a moment, like an old draft horse on its legs.

  "When are you going to get it?" she said.

  Slowly, with drunken deliberation, Connie glided his face toward the lock's cylinder, and the recognition of its gleaming new luster hit him where he lived. "Son of a." He considered removing his jacket, to show somebody, anybody, he meant business, but he ultimately couldn't be bothered.

  "The cops, you hear me—"

  Connie started his assault, but if closely studied, it was an assault tapered by self-consciousness. He witnessed his own behavior, watched himself attack the door like a second-rate actor of the presentational variety.

  "Off the fucking hinges," he roared, pounding the door with the flat of his hand. But just beneath the surface of the scene he thought, Look at me go. What a fake, what a phony. I don't even want to be in there.

  "Scaring the kids, you bastard. On their way the cops, think I'm kidding?"

  Connie let the door have it. "Off the hinges." He was still slapping and hammering with the flat of his hand when his neighbor Willie appeared with farce-like speed at the door of 3-B: tank top, gold cross, a stingy brim of straw at rest above a gentle Puerto Rican face.

  "Connie, Con-Con, what's happening?" Willie's tone nothing if not a sweet attempt to distract and diffuse.

  "Believe this, Will?"

  The elevator's outer door pushed open onto the landing to the sound of crackling walkie-talkies. Two New York City Housing Authority cops, Walsh and Pacheco, poised to dispose of one more midnight shift, joined Connie in front of 3-A, hitting their marks just so.

  "Cornelius," Walsh said.

  "Déjà vu," Pacheco said.

  Through his stupor Connie felt a degree of mortification, not for the cops' presence, which was in fact an encore performance, but the new element.

  "Changed the lock," Connie said.

  "That'll happen," Pacheco said.

  "Could be she's trying to suggest something," said Walsh, who then lit a beautiful Marlboro, because there was still time, back here in the spring of 1974, to excuse yourself from the world for a brief respite, just you and your best friend nicotine.

  Connie produced his own crumpled pack of Camels. Walsh helped him pinch one out and fire it up. Pacheco glanced away with mild disdain.

  They wandered into the shiny red interior of the elevator and Pacheco pressed a button on the panel. The inner door and its square foot of scratched, mesh-wired window slid closed, and they descended through a silo of graffiti.

  "Connie," Walsh said once outside the building, "let's talk a minute. What's this, the second—"

  "Third," Pacheco said.

  "She gets the restraint order, we got no choice. You, this routine of yours, waking everybody up."

  "My home," Connie bellowed. "I live here."

  "Not anymore," Pacheco said. "You're done. Get that through your head."

  "Remember now, Con," Walsh said, "up to you."

  In the predawn stillness Connie looked like he'd strayed from a parade of damaged people, the doorman's cap cocked at an angle on his head. He watched the cops return to their double-parked squad car on 25th Street.

  The front yard with its playground artifacts looked so mournful at this hour. The miniature ceramic horse on a spring, its chipped paint and missing left eye. The tarnished aluminum sculpture of planet Saturn leaning precariously on its axis. Had he ever played with his kids in this yard? Did he love his children? He did love them, in a sentimental fashion, they were his boys, he loved them completely, his entire heart, he'd do anything, damn near very close to almost anything for them.

  He found his way to a bench in the yard for forty-five minutes of something like sleep.

  If a camera were pushed up close to Connie's face where dry white saliva collected at the corners of his mouth and tiny bubbles burst on his lips, it would find him mumbling indecipherably, a few phrases to unravel: —shot his father's head clean off. The mother on all fours chasing chunks of skull across the chassis. Humpty Dumpty and such. Talk about a status reduction. Whereas my father put his head in the oven. Common style back then. Two dead fathers, two heads, one by suicide, one by—

  A bench slat's rivet grinding at his hip bullied him back to consciousness. He winced, uncurled himself, sat up. Night had broken. The birds in the trees of the projects cried out with abandonment. The overcast sky made sense, given his life, and Connie acknowledged the cloud cover as subtle tribute. Blue skies would have added to the campaign of mockery waged not just against him—he wasn't that solipsistic—but against all sentient beings, birds included. A tenderness welled up in Connie, his chest went soft, before he patted himself down for a smoke.

  He looked up to the bedroom window of his children.

  His older son, Arthur, a long-haired twelve-year-old fired by rage, stood framed by the building's burnished brick facade. The apparition pierced Connie's drunkenness and hangover, he felt the kid's hatred beaming down at him.

  Or wait, could it be—not malice, but care and concern? Arthur kept vigil so Connie would not get rolled or otherwise beat to death, that was a thought.

  It crossed his mind to offer a sign, some gesture, to let the boy know, Yes, I see you, my son, you are recognized in my eyes, when Arthur, as if sensing his father's intentions, reached in a sudden flurry for the window shade and vanished.

  * * *

  "Come in, sit down here." The windowless office, a cubbyhole off the lobby's back hall, a few paces down from Superintendent Walter Mezzola's apartment, contained wooden furniture that could have come from the Board of Education. A black rotary phone sat there like a prop, while a spindle captured work orders on its spike.

  "Good morning, Walter," Connie said.

  "Mr. Mezzola," Walter said. "Call me Mr. Mezzola."

  "Even when it's just the two of us?"

  "Make it easy on yourself, please, Con." Walter sniffed softly, once, twice. "Okay, an example: have you been drinking let's say?"

  "Me?" Connie said. "What, like today already have I been drinking?"

  "Because this—alcohol, drugs, whatnot, you name it—just cause, immediate dismissal, follow me now?"

  Certain supers walked around in suits and ties and jobbed all the work out. Walter wore dungarees and flannel shirts and even suspenders when not too desperate to hide the joy that lived in his heart. He did all the paint jobs in the house, he was a first-rate painter. He had learned the trade in the army. "All in the prep," Walter would say, "the paint forget about." He was a perfectly decent electrician and plu
mber as well. He'd break a wall in a minute. "You cannot be afraid to break," he'd say. Carpentry, for unknown reasons, he stayed away from.

  "Tell you go downstairs, clean out your locker—one two three, boom, you're gone, that's it. They call it immediate dismissal. Like you don't know what hit you, follow me?"

  "I hear you, Walter."

  "Hope so. I hate to fire a man."

  "I know you do."

  "How's that, that you know that?"

  "Every other word."

  "And why? Because it's true . . . Believe me, Con, clear blue sky. And you got, what, two write-ups already in your file. I lost count. Main point being, I don't want to fire you, last thing believe me that I want."

  "I know you don't, Walter, you're a good man."

  "You sure?" Walter said, and brought a match to a cigarillo. Walter smoked cigarillos and regular cigarettes and a variety of cigars—everything but a pipe. "Got another complaint and I don't want to say from who."

  "Who?"

  "That woman on eight."

  "Saxton?"

  "Pain in the ass. She, I don't know, something about you got fresh with somebody, a friend of hers, the elevator."

  "I'm not perfect."

  "Who is?" Walter said. "These people, they lose track."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Of the fact we are human beings."

  "Glad you said it."

  "Bottom line," Walter said, "try not to get too fresh, all right? I know you're a good person. People like you."

  "Certain people."

  "The right people," Walter said. "Couple those tenants on the board think you're sliced bread. Some kind of saint they got you pegged for. Ever since the big buff job! I'll get fired before you get fired."

  "Nah, they appreciate you."

  "They do?" Walter fished.

  "Plus, I always put in a good word."

  "That right?" Walter said, then the phone jangled just once. "Hello. Tell her I'll be there. Right. Now. No. Right, right," and he hung up. "So we straight?"

  "Thank you, Walter."

  "Let me get back to work."

  Connie lit a cigarette and they sat there smoking and neither of them moved.

  And with a sad smile Walter said, "It's true."

  "What's that?"

  Swiveling in his chair, Walter stopped and looked up into a corner of the room, fully exposing his throat to Connie, as if to say, Go ahead and cut it if you must, before declaring, "I will miss you when you're gone!" and Connie could not help but laugh.

  * * *

  Connie worked a swing shift. A few evenings in the front of the house, a few days in the back, and one midnight. He had a mental block regarding his schedule, which he kept on a piece of folded paper in his wallet, but the wallet had found its way into the active cycle of a washer and the schedule became torn and brittle, and it never crossed his mind to grab a pen and write it out again on a fresh page. Or maybe he honored the raggedy copy out of vague superstition. In any case, every time he doubted whether he had to be in, he removed the schedule from his wallet like a cautious archeologist on a dig. Forceps would have come in handy but fingertips did the trick.

  He didn't mind the back of the house and in some ways preferred it. He mopped the stairwells top to bottom, collected the garbage on the service car, and at shift's end stacked it in a smart pile on the sidewalk outside the service entrance. He polished all the brass of the house, the elevator panels, canopy poles, and standpipes. He changed a bulb here and there and did some light dusting. He cased the mail into a wooden cart on wheels a legendary handyman named Horace had built for the house twenty-five years ago, a slot for each tenant, the cart's wood having accrued a gorgeous patina. He enjoyed casing the mail and became proficient at it. He rolled the cart onto the service car and left each day's delivery at a preordained spot, or handed it to a maid or houseman. He looked in on the animals of tenants, no problem, and walked a dog or two with pleasure. He thought the dogs of the rich lived particularly lonely lives.

  He enjoyed the buffing machine when he worked midnights. Connie had guided such instruments across many a lobby floor. To do it right took patience. You could not force the machine to do your bidding, it would buck you like a wild horse, going on to crack the handcrafted molding at the base of the lobby wall, and to your super you would have to deny any knowledge of the divot created by a machine that in your demanding willfulness got away from you.

  A good buff job required a pace and momentum all its own, the work fostering a meditative state, helping Connie to slow his mind down. He knew how to strip a floor to its essence, then raise it back up to perfection.

  He offered to teach buffing workshops to his Local 32B union brothers, making official announcements in the locker room at its most crowded changeover hour. He let the guys know his availability for buffing tutorials should they be so inclined, and oh how his coworkers laughed. Connie laughed too. His sense of humor was a lifesaver.

  He kept the machine's pads in good shape, letting them air out on hooks down in the slop-sink room. Doing a floor right brought Connie peace in the middle of the night and carried him through some rough psychic spots. The toxins would escape him as he worked, the lobby reeking of a low-rent gin mill for a period of time. He'd open the front doors wide and let the breeze sail in off the street. To work the buffer on a midnight shift, to do a good job in peace. He knew it wasn't some special skill to write home about, but like anybody else he enjoyed doing a thing well.

  Whenever he started at a new house (he'd worked in half a dozen buildings the last ten years), he'd do the lobby floor to make a good first impression. He'd get those backless benches, wing-backed chairs, and side tables out of the way, furniture collectively purchased by the house's board after great stylistic wrangling and contention, and he'd strip the floor of all previous half-baked attempts, to that point when he could relish the floor's vulnerability, its nakedness exposed, its flat matte look devoid of shine. He'd stop and look out over the lobby, the unvarnished marble now exhibiting a profound frailty in Connie's eyes. He'd smoke a cigarette beneath the canopy, then start the rebuilding process, slowly throughout the night, one layer at a time, coat after coat, letting the toxins escape his pores.

  After the bundles of New York Times and Wall Street Journal got dumped onto the sidewalk with a thwap-thwap from the back of a news truck, and the sky's last star went out, whatever super he worked for would appear from the back hall to question how his new man held up overnight, and upon seeing the floor could not hide his astonishment. And Connie with his tour de force buff job would be in like Flynn for a time, getting looked upon as the house's second coming, as one by one the tenants inquired as to the artisan's identity. They sought out Connie to offer deep appreciation, having had no idea how beautiful their lobby truly was before his talents revealed it to them.

  "Thank you so much, Connie, you're a godsend."

  "Pleasure," he'd say, which wasn't untrue.

  Connie would ride that introductory buff job for as long as he could, while the rest of the staff walked around with stiff shorts, stiff with envy and paranoia, the unspoken threat of termination looming over them now, their building-maintenance fraud having come to light.

  Imagine, all this time, the tenants mused, having to accept such lackluster results prior to Connie's arrival. What other mediocre efforts lurk and linger? Tenants would start to examine their residence with sharper eyes, coming and going, walking their manicured poodles and schnauzers, trying to make peace with all the power and wealth implied by their house's limestone edifice.

  Connie's buff job confused them. Is that the actual color of our canopy—or is it filthy? Perhaps we should petition Connie to investigate and have him perform one of his deep-scale transformations.

  And the staff's long-timers would think, Who the hell does that son of a bitch think he is, to come in here and pull a buff job like that? Son of a no-good so-and-so.

  Then, sure enough, and sooner than later, Con
nie's shadow would start to stretch itself across the job, revealing the gaps in his character, allowing his coworkers to exhale. Thank God, they privately reflected, he's human after all.

  He would start to show up late, or not at all, unable to perform his duties, citing an adverse reaction to medication. Most supers were decent. They wanted to believe Connie. He had kind eyes, which the shock of black hair exploding from his head helped frame like two mismatched stones of crazy lace agate set into his face. They'd have a little talk, then quietly send him home. They saw a good man beneath the bullshit and wanted to save his job. But what can you do with a guy who not only doesn't show up but doesn't call, or shows up half in the bag smelling like the kind of alcoholism no amount of Listerine will camouflage, or, maybe most perplexing, shows up sober and clean-shaven, dressed in a freshly pressed uniform and ready to work, only to discover it's his scheduled day off.

  Eventually Connie would test the waters verbally with tenants and their guests, working himself into a proletarian huff. He would think people were starting to look at him funny, and would find himself embarrassed by his uniform, the embroidered bands of gold or silver on the cuffs of his jacket, and the piping down his pants. I'm not a jockey outside some restaurant! he would self-declare. He would begin to challenge the job's boundaries. Most tenants went out of their way to be respectful, yet it was true some could not help look down their nose, and Connie bit and snapped at those tenants. He would start cracking wise, a statement here or there concerning Tricky Dick, or the SLA, or some such, statements carrying currents of dark innuendo. And who needs that? From staff? Coming and going from your own home, having to run the meager gauntlet of an opinionated, inappropriately acerbic doorman? At one house he wasn't long for, Connie mistook a mother-in-law for a nanny, and as the lady waited to be picked up with her grandchild, Connie took the opportunity to present one of his working-class soliloquies. "See this, all this here?" he said, indicating the expansive lobby with a sweep of his arm. "Rubble, nothing but rubble, six to eight years, mark my words," he said, chuckling at his own pomposity, just as the mother-in-law, behind a tight smile, started to mentally orchestrate the steps required for Connie's departure.