The Blue Green Carpet

The Blue Green Carpet

Harry Buschman

It wasn’t a bad job, I had two free rooms on the ground floor of a mid-town Manhattan rooming house all to myself. How many successful people in this city can boast of that? I collected rents from thirty-two men and I made a little spare change by letting the street angels in the back door.

I was the super at the Eltinge Hotel, an 8-story red brick apartment house between 35th and 36th Street just west of Eighth Avenue. The Shamrock Bar was across the street, along with an off track betting parlor and a pawnshop. It was a neighborhood of beaten up men who couldn’t help drinking and gambling, and to pay for their bad habits they pawned what little was left of their past life. Life ain’t worth a damn if you have to give up your bad habits – losers think that way.

If you walked by the Eltinge after dark and looked up at the pulled down shades in the lighted windows you’d notice the similarity of the lonely silhouettes. They rarely had visitors, and if they did, they wouldn’t want you to see or hear what was going on up there in their room.

It was a hotel for men only. Most of them had done time – most were on parole, out on bail or waiting for trial. They shared the ex-con’s mentality. Things would get better. Something good would happen – a miracle maybe, a fire or an earthquake. They felt that way as their lives went downhill and picked up speed the way a car does when there’s no driver behind the wheel and it’s parked on a hill. Their mood picked up when they got an offer to help pull another job, a heist, a shakedown ... whatever. They’d try to get in shape before the action. That’s why I thought Tacoma was about to go bad again. He was jogging! I looked out my first floor sitting room window before the sun was up, and in the half light I saw him jogging by – head tilted back – showing the whites of his eyes, gasping for breath and with no one chasing him and no goal in view that I could see, except maybe making it to the corner.

It wasn’t too easy to get to know Tacoma. He was afflicted with some kind of nervous disorder and I never knew if I was getting through to him, and God knows what the hell he was trying to tell me. Whatever it was, it was accompanied by groans and twitches of his body. At the same time his eyes would bug out as if he couldn’t breathe. I’d try to help him along by nodding my head or making revolving motions with my hands in a futile attempt to smooth the turbulence that boiled inside him.

My afternoons were quiet along 35th Street, Ira the pawn shopkeeper and I occasionally sat in the Shamrock Bar and talked baseball. When it was real quiet, Ernie, the bartender would come over and sit down with us. After baseball the talk invariably turned to women. Ernie, being a barman from the day he got out of Erasmus High, had women in the bar day and night. Pawnbrokers like Ernie know very little about women and supers in men’s rooming houses only know how to keep the hookers out of his building. But bartenders know all there is to know about women ... bar women that is ... particularly the effect they have on male drinkers.

“When a hooker and her John settle on a price, off they go – the two of them. That’s it for the night – the John ain’t spendin’ any more of his money on booze.” That’s how Ernie felt about women.

Ira looked at women from another angle, “A watch they’ll bring in. It don’t work. They’ll bring in a setting for a stone – no stone. They’ll want top dollar. For what, I’ll ask. They’ll look at me like I am Shylock Holmes. Women I have no need for.” That’s how Ira felt about doing business with women in his pawnshop.

So it was with somewhat mixed feelings when the one-armed swarthy man who sold newspapers in the kiosk on 35th Street, (whom everyone called Captain Hook), brought the news that Tacoma was engaged.

“Engaged to what,” Ernie asked.

“No shit,” said Ira, more practical than either of us, and probably wondering why Tacoma hadn’t come to the pawnshop for a ring.

Hook, hardly a romantic, said ... “It’s like a disease, you think they’d have shots for something like that.”

Ernie, the bartender told Captain Hook to sit down, he wanted to hear more “She’s a looker, she is. Blind black lady,” Captain Hook told us. He pulled up a chair, sat down and filled us in. “The two of them work the bus terminal together in the morning. Then they come back late afternoon and catch the same commuters on their way back home.”

“I can’t believe it,” Ernie said. “How can two people like that get married. It ain’t right – I mean, the city’ll never give them a license.”

I knew Tacoma better than any one there and I couldn’t understand it either. “I doubt he can hold still long enough to write his name, if he can write. What’s the woman like?” I asked him.

“A looker, like I said. But she don’t know it ... ain’t that somethin’? I swear it makes you stop and think, don’t it?

“So think,” Ira said. “The world’s not to think ... it’s to live in. Let them get married ... let them live a little.”

But Tacoma had a room in my hotel, a back room in the basement I’ll admit ... with a window high up. He could see out of it only by standing on a chair and since his nervous condition prevented him from doing something like that, he had covered the window with burlap sacks for curtains. Would I make an exception in his case and let them stay there? I was inclined to do so for Tacoma’s sake ... “What’s the woman’s name?” I asked Captain Hook.

“Ebony, like the black keys on a piano. Yesterday afternoon they came by the newsstand, and he told me. ‘This here’s Ebony’, he says. He’s a lot less jittery when he’s with her. Well, she pointed a smile in my general direction and held up her hand to show me her engagement ring.”

That brought Ira to his feet. “What ring! Where did a ring come from? If a ring he had, he would have pawned it ... everything else he pawned. Why not the ring?”

“It could have been hers,” I said. “Or her mother’s ... women do things like that.”

“Nothing good will come of it,” Ira insisted. “You watch ... he will want to move her into your hotel. The only woman in there with 30 men ... you watch, you will have trouble.”

I am not a stranger to trouble. I don’t think a day goes by at Eltinge House that some one doesn’t exit horizontally. Police cars, ambulances and fire engines seem to make the front door a regular stop. It seemed to me that Tacoma and Ebony might improve the environment. To some extent I have never really lost my sentimental underpinnings.

Ira’s prediction didn’t have long to fester. Within a week I discovered Ebony had taken up residence in Tacoma’s back room flat ... without benefit of clergy – or my permission. This was a strictly forbidden arrangement at the chez Eltinge. No women allowed ... unless I arrange it ... the place would be a madhouse if women ran around loose in it.

But to throw a blind woman out in the street after she’s gone to the trouble of hanging curtains and laid out a 9x12 blue and green carpet on the floor – that was my problem.

It was a Monday morning. I waited for them to leave for Grand Central. They had staked out a spot on the east side in the corridor leading to the Lexington Avenue subway. They paid rent to the panhandler’s syndicate for that spot. It was a good one – a lot of Park Avenue execs used it as a short-cut from Tudor City. They were doing well, and by Eltinge House standards, (as well as my own) they were our most well-to-do tenants.

After watching them go, I got out my master key and let myself into their apartment. It didn’t look much like Tacoma. There was the subtle touch of a woman. That blue-green rug. The curtains. The dishes were done and the bed was made. A casual glance at the other rooms, (even mine) in the Eltinge would make a man think he was in a poorhouse.

It wasn’t Tacoma ... couldn’t be. It had to be Ebony; she must be a fraud. She wasn’t blind. She couldn’t choose a rug or curtains or a bedspread if she was blind. Like every other panhandler in the bus and train stations in Manhattan, she was a fraud!

So I told myself, That’s it – they’re not going to pull the wool over my eyes – living two for one!” I kicked up the corner of the blue rug and left the room. I locked the door again behind me and went across the street to the Shamrock to talk to Ernie.

“She’s as blind as I am,” I told him. “I don’t mind her using a gimmick like that to panhandle in Grand Central, but she doesn’t have any right to pull the wool over my eyes.”

“Cheap trick,” Ernie agreed. “Wanna beer? You’re all worked up.”

I took my beer to a corner table and sat down. Ernie finished up behind the bar, then he came over and wiped off the table with his bar rag. “You gonna kick them out?”

“I have to. First I’m gonna give them a piece of my mind, then I’ll kick them out.”

“Do it on a full stomach,” he said. I looked up at him blankly. “It gives the acid somethin’ to eat at ... always have somethin’ in your stomach when you kick somebody in the ass.”

I got myself a cup of coffee and a pastrami on rye at the German deli on the corner. I took them back to the Eltinge and sat in the lobby waiting for Tacoma and Ebony to get back from Grand Central Station.

They blew in about 7:30. A cab pulled up outside and the two of them, in a laughing mood, walked in talking together as though they were entering the Park Sheraton. I put my pastrami down and held up my left hand “Tacoma,” I said firmly. “This is a rooming house for men. You know what’ll happen to a woman in here ... especially a blind woman.” I took a deep breath. “If you love this lady, Tacoma, get her the hell out of here.”

Tacoma stepped in front of Ebony and said, “It’s the super, Sweetie.”

I couldn’t get over the change in Tacoma. He was in charge of himself, not the shivering wreck of a man I was accustomed to. But, as if to confirm my suspicions about Ebony, she was fully aware of my presence before Tacoma stepped between us.

“No need to hurry us along,” Ebony said. “Tac and I are plannin’ to cut loose in a week or two.”

“The neighborhood’s gone t’hell,” Tacoma said.

“It was never any good to begin with,” Ebony reminded him. Then she turned to me and said. “You can have our two rooms, just as they are ... no charge. How’d’ja like the new decorations ... you’ve been in there to check it out, right?”

“Pretty slick,” I smiled. “You’ve got nice taste for someone who can’t see.”

“My left eye does. I’m blind as a bat in my right.”

Holy smoke! Who’da thought it? She was on the up and up after all.

True to her word, they were gone the last Friday of the month. I found a note on their kitchen table signed by the two of them ... “The place is yours,” it said. “... hope you like the place as much as we did. I know you’ll like the blue-green carpet, it’s from Bloomingdales.” It was signed, “Eb and Tac”