The 13th Floor
Yesterday I went into an office building in the Garment district. Its a grey neighborhood, dirty and dusty from so many carts full of threads and buttons and hot dogs being pushed around all day. I was on one of those perfectly square and banal little errands to pick up a thing I needed from a place. I suppose the mix of feelings upon entering the building were:
1-a soft little happiness, due to the fact that I was finally getting this little errand done, and also because I was picking up the thing from a very nice person I hadn’t seen in a long while and that’s always good.
2-an equally soft but equally present little case of nerves, because no matter how many times I look at the piece of paper which has a building address and the accompanying suite number, I am always convinced I will end up completely lost in a rabbit warren of grey, soulless, identical doors.
Anypoop-
I get on the elevator. And its me, and a normal looking woman about 30, and a normal looking man maybe about 38. We each go to press our respective little number buttons. It seems like we are going to have a mega normal ride together.
Then:
The girl, as she presses her button, says in a slightly exasperated, but not too loud voice, “Oh, this is so annoying.”
Because she’s holding her lunch, I assume she works in the building and that there’s some little glitch with her floor button or something. Something pet peevey she knows about and she’s having a bad day and she just had to mutter out loud to herself about it. I get it. I’ve been saying things out loud to myself a lot lately. Like I was in Rite Aid in LA a few months ago and this douchebag was yelling to his douchebag friend from across the aisle:
“SO GET A KEGLET! AND SOME HEINEKEN”
and then, without meaning to, I said softly, and completely involuntarily, but still audibly, “oh holy fuck.”
So I know what it is to say annoyed things through your mouth hole even if you’re not supposed to.
But then she turns to me and the man, and very deliberately goes off.
“WHY do they still make the 13th floor the 14th floor? Its STILL the 13th floor! Its so RIDICULOUS! What’s the POINT???” She gestures aggressively with her hand, which is holding a brown paper bag with a bagel in it. (I don’t know how I know, but I just know there’s a bagel in it. She seems like the kind of person who on her lunch hour, even when she doesn’t want a bagel, just thinks, ”oh it’s the easiest thing to do. I guess I’ll just go to the place down the block and get a bagel, a-gain.”) Anyway she continues: “Everyone KNOWS its the 13th floor. I HATE THAT. Why are we still doing that? I mean, RIGHT?”
She looks at us. The man looks at her and sympathetically says, “Society.” Then she gets off with a final har-ummph. Me and the man continue upwards in silence, but I really feel like I need to talk about what just happened. I mean, maybe he agrees with her, and I’m not totally sure I disagree with her, but it felt like it needed to be discussed. So I say, “Wow. She really wants it to just be called the 13th floor, huh?” He turns and looks at me, and it was like I could feel his relief flooding all over the floor. “Yeah, right?”, he says, looking at me in the electrically connected way only two people on an elevator who have the same feeling about a recently departed third party can look at each other. “Weird. Its just a superstition.” I smile and shrug. “Yeah, I know.” Then it’s his floor and he turns to go with a final friendly nod. I say, “Have a good one,” which is a really satisfying thing to say to a stranger.
I continue the ride up alone, weighing the debate about the elimination of the 13th floor. Of course she is right. It’s completely stupid. But then there’s the part of me that thinks: Its nice. Its a nice thing. The missing 13 button still puffs a sprinkle of magical childishness, a secret finger crossing as the answer to an old time jinx, into these dull old buildings, which otherwise can feel so tired and out of breath.
And if nothing else, it made three people who don’t know each other talk to each other. And that feels lucky.
January 29th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Well, now that you brought it up – what is it with that “_____, right?” business!!! Am I just an old fart? If you are the one that brought up the topic, you can say – right? When you are responding you can’t! Right? Or, you can say – yes, right! Right on! Not Right???? A response to a question cannot be a question! Right??? Now I’ve whipped myself into a frenzy not unlike your elevator-mate there. Geez. You touched a nerve. Right?
February 1st, 2008 at 10:38 pm
1. that’s a really good story. i really like your writing and have even linked to it on my blog
2. also, my understanding is that newer designed buildings don’t skip the 13th floor anymore, it’s just inefficient so i agree with her
March 6th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I love that there is still enough stupid magic left in us that we don’t fuck with the thirteenth floor. I don’t care much about strangers in elevators, as my own personality defects swell my heart and throat in finely drawn tense expectation of whether I will have to speak and whether there is a shit stain on the seat of my pants, or worse, on the back of my neck–neither has happened yet, but I wait–but I do love heavy brass water fountains and ashtrays forgotten in waiting rooms, deep bellied and shining, faintly humming with grandfatherly radiation. What do we want in the powdered napes and wildroot-oiled, silver pates? Why is there something perversely comforting about sliding into an enormous American car of old tobacco and leather and gas fumes? I miss the innocence of cigars and cigarettes, even bound as they are with green oxygen tanks and early funerals. So, if I’m getting at anything, it just that how comforting and sweet it is to still have some connection to a not-smugness where you could trust the idiotic things people said in elevators and count it as knowledge. Maybe you don’t know what I mean, but imagine yourself at five, trying hard to fit it even if these people were taller. You’re listening close, right, you think, “Make a note, tell strangers to ‘Have a good one,’ when you part, but what’s this business about thirteenth floors, Is this something I should be worried about? Now I know, I didn’t before, but now I know something tall, something in highheels and suits and carrying bagels, I know something the bagel-carriers know–Don’t fuck with the thirteenth floor.” Or something like that. Now, it’s nostalgia, but what is the thing you’re missing?
Anyway, here’s what I’m thinking, not so much about your garment district errands–and what the hell was the small errand–what was the banal little thing, who was the friend you hadn’t seen in a long time? I was waiting for the payoff. But that’s not what I’m thinking. Now the writer’s strike is over so I hope you’re busy, but even if you are, you should write a book.
I’m sure you’ve never heard that before, blah blah, but seriously, if you write one, I’ll buy it. You’ll have to remind me, let me know when it’s coming out, pester, nag maybe, but I want to buy your book, the one you will write. I will get a copy for my mother, maybe one for my brother–well, of course that’s bullshit, it will be Christmas and I’ll probably buy one copy, read it on the plane and then give it to whichever one of them I can’t think of what for to get–but I’ll definitely tell others to read it. Something like Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tuscon, but funnier. Not as funny as David Sedaris maybe, but not as gay either, a little bit younger and more unviersal, in a middle-class, well-educated and white, but global, kind of way. I would love to read it, your book. Seriously. It bothers me that you’re speaking for me, in a lost generation sense, especially since I’m older, male, married and haven’t been to New York since I was like 9, but still, somehow, in your voice I hear my life. And you’re funny–imagine italics. The most sacred commission.
Besides, if I haven’t convinced you, think of how much fun having your own, hot jacket photo will be. If you’ve already written like thirteen books and won a pulitzer prize for your reporting on the Tamil rebels, then, fuck, do I feel stupid. Guess I should have checked Amazon. But anyway, I just saw your red carpet bit on William Shatner’s roast, and thought, “Hey, who the hell is that?” So now I know. Thanks for the laughs. Write a book.