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Man Under
- University of Georgia Press
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88 In mid-July, our landlady removed the front door to the house to get it repaired, and the next day, when I came back from my shift at Café D’Oro, the failing sandwiches-and-dessert place I’d managed to get hired at as a waiter, I discovered that we’d been robbed. The thieves had taken our black-and-white television and about two hundred dollars worth of stereo equipment. They’d also taken our instruments and amps. Ed called Renata to yell at her. “How are we supposed to live with no door?” he asked. I sat at our tiny kitchen table and stared out over the clothes wires strung across the back yards. The wind was picking up and shaking the leaves and my skin felt clammy; a storm was coming in. After a while, he came out of his bedroom and joined me. “What a bitch.” “I think she owes us money here,” I said. “You can’t take the door off a house in the middle of the city and not expect it to get robbed.” “She didn’t want to talk about it. She says we have a door.” This was true; the missing door was downstairs. The door to our apartment was still in place, though the wood in the frame around the strike plate was all busted out where the thieves had kicked their way through. Ed took out a Viceroy from his shirt pocket and went into the kitchen to light it off a burner. He’d recently cut his long hair and grown a goatee, hung up photos of Charles Mingus and Ron Carter on his bedroom wall. He’d been wearing the same suit jacket over a series of white T-shirts now for more than a month. “She said she was disappointed in us.” “She’s going to be a lot more disappointed now that we have no M A N U N D E R M A N U N D E R 89 equipment.” I looked around. Husks of dirty paint curled down from the ceiling near the windows. A narrow hall led to the front bedroom, which served as Ed’s room and our rehearsal area. We’d hung up one of those Indian drug-curtain things on a clothesline to separate the entrance to my tiny room off his, in which I barely had space for a single bed, a dresser, and a chair. We had this place at a below-market rate because we’d promised to make a lot of noise. The landlady wanted the old man downstairs to move out of his rent-controlled unit, and she figured we might do the trick. “I’m reporting to you what she said.” “Maybe she ought to just give us a couple of thousand to kill him,” I said. “It’s simpler.” “I’ll suggest it. She says if something doesn’t happen relatively soon, she’s raising the rent.” “Relatively?” “Her word.” “She was going to raise it anyway, right? I mean, eventually?” “I guess.” He flexed his hands, picked at a bit of callus that was flaking off. “So let’s not worry too much about her. We’ve got a lease.” Something about the way he didn’t look at me obviated the next question, but I asked anyway. “We do have a lease, right?” “Not exactly. More like an understanding.” For all his competence —as a musician, a world-class partier, a guy who had rebuilt a tr-6 when he was only sixteen—Ed still often displayed a certain inability to peer around the sides of things to see what else might be there. “An understanding?” “We shook hands and all.” “So she could put us out tomorrow?” “Oh, I don’t think so. There are laws about such things. Look at the guy downstairs.” [44.200.101.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:47 GMT) 90 M A N U N D E R “But she can take our front door off.” “It’s her door.” He got more of the skin. “Maybe the police will find those fucks.” “You think?” I’d asked the officer who responded to our 911 call what the likelihood of our getting our stuff back was, and he’d looked at me like I’d asked if I might borrow his gun for a day or two. “Those amplifiers were heavy. It had to be more than one...