My living room window faces an old hostess factory that has been renovated and now is home to a CVS and a New York Sports Club. When we moved in to the apartment back in ’03, the building was a boarded-up, bricked-over mess. Living through the construction was annoying, but the minor disturbance was well worth the wealth of entertainment and convenience this building provides us.
When Rocco Simmons has a rare weekday evening at home, he never gets tired of taunting the Yuppies plugging away on the treadmills. His favorite activity is to eat a carton of Ben & Jerry’s while standing in the window in profile, shirt hiked up to his nipples and sticking his belly out farther than you’d think humanly possible. Sometimes he’ll substitute a bag of chips if we’re out of ice cream. If he’s had too much caffeine over the course of the day, he’ll even throw in a little Guffman Dance for the ladies.
This morning I was absentmindedly staring out the window while doing my morning pages. I was busily berating myself for letting the windows get so filthy, when a bizarre repetitive motion grabbed my attention in a window where I’ve never seen movement before. I always assumed it was an office or closet or some such under-utilized room. The window sill is stacked full of books more vibrantly colored than a gay pride flag. This morning, a dark shape kept bouncing up above the line of books, then just as quickly disappearing again. Over and over again, the bouncing continued. Maybe it was a weird piece of machinery or something.
Then the shape took off in a new direction, sideways. It zoomed past, just above the line of books, every seven seconds or so. I got up in search of my glasses. Gravity spoke to my bladder and decided we needed a pee break.
Looking in the mirror I was briefly distracted by my incredibly attractive mouth full of yeast. Apparently all my pork plague prescriptions have given me thrush. Between the gobs of phlegm I keep coughing up and the plethora of white fur coating my mouth, it looks like I blew a Yeti.
Anyway, glasses in hand I turned my attention back to the window and the drama within. Apparently it’s a window into the daycare for the members that don’t have anything else to do with their kids on a Sunday morning. The dark shape was some poor little boy with a Dorothy Hamill haircut who’d clearly ingested far too much sugar. The kid was literally bouncing off the walls, floor, and ceiling. After watching him in continuous motion for over twenty minutes, I was exhausted. So was the only slightly taller adult that had started chasing him about ten minutes in to the show. She was wearing the NYSC blue polo and was clearly of no relation to the child. The lack of affection in her gaze also implied no maternal connection to the kid. The show ended abruptly when his forehead suddenly disappeared from my sight. Short lady careened into view, bent over, and picked up the screaming, crying mess of a kid.
Who knew the birth control was at the gym, not at the drugstore downstairs. All this entertainment AND they sell ice cream.