Windows

A couple of weeks ago while moving all of my possessions from the basement where I had slept for the past two years up a narrow staircase to the living room where I had lived with room mates, a television, and multiple animals I managed to break a window. The window was small and most likely original to the hundred year old house. The window did not open, and only looked out to the dank underside of my upstairs neighbor's staircase. A mint plant had managed to forge a few of its branches into the house along its top. I broke it, and the panes just sat in place - busted - like a large scale model of a clean bullet hole. I had been trying to fit a box spring upstairs through the steep and narrow staircase with no success. I had the box spring angled half way up the stairs with the weight rested on a washer which was in front of the drab grey stuccoed utility sink which was in front of the window. I tried a lot of different angles to get the bed up the stairs, one of them had one of the corners of the bed against the window. I hear the ephemeral crinkle of glass and I feel defeated. I continued to move my things but did so through the back door and around the garden on the side of the house and up the porch steps, through the front door and back to the living room. Eventually my room had few clues left of my time there and I felt accomplished. I decided to walk up the stairs and confess to one of my room mates.

I had never broken a window before. It's a unique feeling, very permanent, very consequential. So I made it up the steep and narrow staircase, with its steps covered in brown shag carpet, cat hair, dust and tracked in kitty litter. I bent over the last steep step to form a posture similar to being on all fours. I walked into the living room and casually inserted the broken window into conversation. It barely elicited a reaction. I felt relieved.

Windows were always being broken in the house I grew up in. One time one of my brothers threw one of my sisters out a bedroom window out onto a thorny dwarfed lemon tree, (it was a ranch style house, so it was only a 1/2 story drop), but I guess I was too young to take note of how involved the replacement was.

Then there's the story of how I ended up renting a room in the house to begin with. I had been living a couple of blocks around the corner on the other side of Alberta street with a few people who put an ad on craigslist but people were moving out of town and the whole thing fell apart. So I repeat myself and answer ads off craigslist. I get a response to show a place on the 30th of December with only two days left before the end of my rental agreement. I took the five minute walk over to the other side of Alberta and walk up the porch steps. I knock after drilling my thumb into the derelict doorbell with no success. A woman I met at a craft fair some months back answers the door. We're both a little surprised and I had a good feeling that it could work. Another woman and a man introduce themselves, a couple, and the craft fair woman shows me around the house. A few minutes in the coupled woman yells to the craft fair woman from the basement, she asks her to bring a baseball bat (on this point i'm not completely clear). The craft fair woman excuses herself politely and runs down the steep and narrow stair case without bringing down any sort of improvised weapon. I just stood at the top of the stairs awkwardly for some sort of indication for me to walk downstairs. It came a few minutes later and I walked down the stairs and met them halfway. We walked down to a doorway into a converted basement bedroom. The coupled woman laughed nervously as she opened the door to reveal a frigidly cold room, (it snowed the next day), with fire engine red shag carpeting, a wall comprised of cork strips and artificial wood paneling, an absent closet and a broken window. They stood there awkwardly and asked, "so, what do you think?". I look around pretending to take stock of its few amenities and responded, "i'll take it." The next day I moved in. The window remained broken for about a week. I had some friends from out of town come in on the greyhound and we put up a black hefty bag over the window but snow still managed to drift in overnight.

It turned out the guy who lived in the room before had broken the window while trying to move a giant keyboard out of the room. So my act of breaking a window in the basement could be viewed as an act of continuity I guess.

I had anxious dreams the night before reenacting the window breaking, each one having slight variations from the one it proceeded. I woke up knowing that it was not a dream and I had indeed broken the window. I told my other roomate, (the craft fair woman mentioned earlier), over the phone about the window. She told me that we fixed the window ourselves last time and that it wasn't very difficult.

The next day I loaded up of my things stacked in boxes on the living room floor onto an old primer grey toyota pick-up my room mate had borrowed from a friend and we headed off to the train station in old town to freight my things down to Los Angeles. The service was prompt and it only cost me a little over one hundred dollars to send just about everything i own down the coast.

The following day, a sunday, two weeks ago. I went down the steep and narrow staircase and picked up a measuring tape and set out measuring the window pane I had broken so that I could set everything right before I left town. First I measured the pane horizontal, I did so with some difficulty as I had to lean my body over the utility sink to get near enough to the window, which threw off my center of gravity somewhat. I managed to get a close reading, and continued to measure horizontally without too much effort. I then tried to measure diagonally as an extra control to make sure the measurements were correct. As I was measuring my I placed my weight a little on the hand that was measuring the upper limit of the glass. All at once my hand went through and the shards which had previously been assembled like a delicate jigsaw puzzle fell apart. I yanked my hand back and it was covered in blood, I shouted nervously and walked briskly up the steep and narrow steps up to the main floor and walked into the kitchen and turned the sink on and placed my left hand underneath the water. The blood washed away and a 1/2 inch thick v shaped flap of flesh wriggled underneath the stream of water revealing what looked like, (and actually turned out to be), bone. I went into the bathroom and my room mate and room mate's friends from out of town crowded in to see. I sat on the toilet with my arm in the air laughing nervously. One of the friends turned out to be a med student and told me to go to the ER. After a few minutes of resisting on financial grounds I decided to give in.

My room mate that didn't have friends in town drove me to the ER and we sat there for a hour until they saw me. I ended up going into another room where a middle aged woman dressed in a white lab coat with curly red hair and glasses came in to see me. She gave me four shots along the base of my pinky finger, which made it swell up to the size of a small pale purple hotdog. She put seven stitches in and dressed the wound and I was on my way. The next couple of days I couldn't stop replaying the cut in my mind. Stewing over the permanence of the reaction.

A couple of days later I took a flight down with my cat aboard. My parents picked me up and we spent the day getting lost, in traffic and at the Target in Culver City. I moved into an apartment that was tiny and barren and I slept in a towel on the carpet for a couple of days until the freight came down, (it was delayed due to a derailment).

I went on a couple of job interviews barely able to write and managed to find a job. The day before my first day I took a pair of manicure scissors and tweezers I had purchased from the Long's up the street and took out the stitches on my living room floor. Although the hanging lip of flesh managed to adhere itself back onto my finger while it was stitched, it still looks as if a small gale could have it detached. Even after I will continue to buy bandaids from the Beverly Hills Rite Aid down the street from my work because the scar would doubtlessly disgust the patrons.

My new apartment doesn't really have windows, instead it has fiberglass shudders that operate like venetian blinds.