The Soho Loft
by Albert Russo
Apparently, uncle Luke
stays hours in front of his bedroom mirror and
has long conversations with himself, reminiscing
the good old days. He still lives in that caca
d’oie-colored townhouse in Brooklyn
where Unky Berky spent some of his worst student
years. His wife died ages ago and his two
daughters, Gloria and Carlotta live in Florida
with their fourth or fifth husbands. Whenever
they ask him why he doesn’t move to the
Sunshine State, he says: “I don’t want
to roast and get skin cancer like all the gagagenarians
you have down there and listen to their
otherworldly bullshit. You can keep your
mosquitoes and your scorpions, thank you very
much, I’d rather have my roaches and my rats,
I’m used to them. And besides, no one will
ever convince me to trade Flatbush Avenue for all
the glitter of Miami Beach, what with the
occasional shootouts and the racket that goes on
at night there.”
It was cool of him to lend
us Nick’s loft, coz the hotels here are
twice as expensive as the ones in Paris and if
you want to pay less, you get such dingy rooms
you’d think you were in some bombed out
place after the apocalypse, with skinheads
loitering in the hotel corridors and playing with
their Swiss knives, and poker-faced nerds
offering you crack or even worse. How do I know
all that? Through the warnings of my uncle who’s
turned into a walking encyclopedia of doomsday.
He even insisted that we go to the Bowery - there,
he almost chained me to his arm, like I was a dog
or something - so that I should see what he was
talking about. And you wouldn’t believe it,
Mr was terribly disappointed, on account that the
hobos and the drunks (I had to guess who he had
in mind) looked much tamer than when he lived
here, because of Mayor’s Giuliani’s
zero tolerance policy. He finally said in a pussy
mousey tone something the French would never
admit: that Paris is nowadays more dangerous than
New York.
Let me now describe that
loft we’re staying at. It’s mastroiannic,
I mean, it’s so big you need rollerblades to
go from one end to the other, coz it used to be a
warehouse. And it is in such a state of disrepair
that when we got in the first time I yelped like
a puppy someone had just kicked in the behind.
Actually the place has probably never been
renovated, let alone painted. You should have
seen the elevator, a huge creaking cage from the
times of Methane & Gorilla which moves like
it is burping and stops for several minutes
before it gives out another burp, in the meantime
you can get a heart attack. And you wouldn’t
believe the smell: a mixture of molten tar,
rotten wood and cod liver oil.
Unky Berky didn’t dare
look at me, coz he too was shocked, but we had no
choice.
Excerpt
3 from ZAPINETTE GOES TO NEW YORK by Albert Russo
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