I like to think that not many people have lost a bag of Allen bolts in East Harlem, but New York being New York, it’s probably happened at least twice before and I’m only the latest of the Allen bolt casualties.
The bolts I lost were for assembling a pair of used iron chairs donated to me today by my friend Kelly, the author of the play about Ménière’s disease. Recently, she was moved by my plight of having little furniture. It’s a shame I’m getting furniture out of that line, because I like repeating it, repeating that the only furniture I have is a love seat and a bed. I don’t actually want to receive furniture; I usually bring it up at bars when I can’t think of anything else to say, which is often.
My reasoning is, and I think you will agree, that it’s uninteresting for someone to say to you, “Hey, I have a kitchen table with four chairs, a couch, a recliner, two end tables, a halogen lamp, an entertainment center that has my television, Tivo and Xbox in it, a desk with a chair, a computer stand, a bed, a dresser, a nightstand, and a hamper.” But you hear that all someone has is a love seat—unloved, apparently—and a bed—well, what’s with that guy? Tell me more, you would say. And I will. Sometimes, I add that I have constructed an end table out of three cardboard boxes, one stacked upon the other. The top box is the one my Calphalon came in. People want to hear that story. Or at least people in bars do, or pretend they do.
Perhaps that was the clincher for Kelly, who agreed to give me her unused chairs after hearing my sad tale. They had co-starring roles as props in her play and they’ve been lounging around her apartment ever since, disassembled in boxes that are taking up valuable space. The catch was that I had to go get ’em, which was fine by me.
Uninterested in taking the weekend-unreliable A train or performing the obnoxious backtrack-then-transfer business on the 1 that I’ll spare you the details of, I instead got off the 1 at West 125th Street and crossed all the way over to Kelly’s, which is a haul. It’s like, say, walking from my previous apartment on the Upper West Side through Central Park to the East Side. I haven’t done much walking in Harlem, and I can report that it still adheres closely to its trait of having a lot of black people in it. I can also tell you that Harlem smells like coconut and incense, particularly around the Apollo, although I’m unsure why. In addition, there is a Jimmy Jazz store.
Kelly’s building is a few blocks north off Lenox Avenue and there was a gentleman standing on the stoop as I arrived, casually smoking a joint. After getting buzzed in, I took the stairs up and noticed a hand-lettered sign taped to a wall of the top-floor landing that read, “Don’t Throw No Garbage In The Stairwell,” on which some William Safire-type had scribbled out the “No” with a ballpoint pen. It must have done the trick because the stairwell was litter-free.
Kelly has at least two roommates and Paddington, a friendly black cat with an eye infection. The chairs were boxed up near the door and ready to go, bound in twine and lashed to one of those collapsible metal wheelie-cart contraptions that the elderly and the obese use for hauling groceries. I insisted on just taking the boxes, grasping them by the bound twine and telling Kelly it would not be a problem. It wasn’t much of a problem, except that I skinned my fingers where they rubbed up against the cardboard and nearly blew out my flimsy arm muscles. Plus it started raining on the way back to the subway, which is when I noticed the bag of Allen bolts must have fallen out. At a crosswalk, I happened to glance down at one of the boxes and saw a suspicious bag-of-bolts sized hole as well as a pictogram of a crossed-out umbrella suggesting that I shouldn’t be getting the boxes wet.
When I arrived home, I opened the boxes and inventoried their contents, realizing that the bag of bolts I lost was for just one of the chairs. The other box included a full bag of bolts, so I have one potential chair to add to my love seat/bed/end table family. I don’t, however, have an Allen wrench, so after a trip to Home Depot for that and more bolts, I can get cracking on my chair assembly.