Tuesday, April 27

The Missing Masciandaro

I am trying to find a man called Alfonzo Masciandaro. Mr Masciandaro is deaf in one ear because he was shot in the head when he was fighting in the Korean War. The Chinese-fired bullet hit him in the head and he lost his hearing, but some came back. Then Mr Masciandaro became an elevator inspector. One night, when he was high up in a building looking at lift machinery, Masciandaro lost his footing and fell, breaking his ribs on a beam. The night caretaker found him and carried him all the way down, the caretaker was 72.

Alfonzo Masciandaro is 75 or 76. He went to jail for three years because he was a corrupt. In 1996, when 45 other elevator inspectors were suspended from their jobs for taking bribes, they all pleaded guilty. Not Masciandaro. He went to trial, and he went to prison for longer than anybody else.

Alfonzo has taken his name out of the phonebook, so has his wife, who I believe is called Phyllis. But there are only 10 or so other Masciandaro’s in New York State, so last night I called them, one by one.

Masciandaro’s, let me tell you if you didn’t already know, are good people, with the possible exception of Alfonzo, but even that’s up for grabs. In writing this story I have had to call many people at their homes, out of the proverbial, normally at around 6 or 7 in the evening. Many dismiss me as a salesman, “Hello,” I say, English accent front and centre, “No thank you” they say, sharply, and hang up. I normally ring back and squeeze out, “I’m not trying to sell anything,” sometimes that gives me another thirty seconds, though one woman the other day just sounded even more determined to get rid of me, “NO THANK YOU!” She fairly bawled.

The Masciandaro’s will not do this to you. “I hope you can help me,” was my opening line this time around, and it got me in the door every time. “I am looking for a man called Alfonzo Masciandaro,” I said. And they replied, nearly all very perkily, “You got a Masciandaro, but not Alfonzo” or some such. Then they normally asked me who I was and who he was, showing an interest in the name, before offering the Masciandaro’s they do know, “Well I know Victor, did you talk to Victor? And then there’s Chiara, and did you talk to my father? He’s in Yonkers.” I did, I spoke to Joseph Jr's father, Joseph Sr. Intriguingly, one of the Masciandaro’s used to be a detective in the city, and had seen Alfonzo's signature on an elevator inspection certificate and had “always wondered about that guy…” He suggested I try and find Alfonzo’s probation officer, a good tip. Joseph Sr., the father of Joseph Jr., with little prompting told me about his first day at Fordham University, when they read out the names of the rooms and room-mates. “They said the name Ron Masciandaro and I thought they must have made a mistake, it’s not a common name, so I went up, and there was another guy, another Masciandaro.” I spoke to Ron as well.

So all the Masciandaro’s were charming, and many of them knew each other, and knew about each other. But apart from the oblique memory of Alfonzo’s signature on an inspection card, there was nothing to get me closer to the lost sheep, the missing Masciandaro.

Friday, April 23

Seeing the President Come By

It was Tuesday, a very warm and blue day. It is unseasonal here, this April, not that I’ve been here in April before, but over the last few days we’ve had strange hot air, smells of summer, people in sandals. It powerfully recalls my first days here last summer and my first days here the year before. Fruit smearing and sweating, wanting water all the time. I don’t know how they do it, but some people, at the first gasps of summer, step into their pastels and pinks and sunnies as if they hadn’t for a moment slung them to the back of the cupboard and forgotten where they were. The West Village last weekend was a summer party of conversation and friendliness, with suntans and footlessness from I don’t know where. I take longer to get into the swing of spring, you know? I hold on to the colder months. This week I have been carrying a jumper rolled up in my bag, daring it all to end.

It was Tuesday. On the Sunday I had realised that I was scampering towards the deadlines for extending my paperwork and visas and some such. I don’t really know what I’m doing for the next stretch but there was no way it was going to be decided by some desk-slave immigration sergeant who didn’t like the look of my uncrossed i’s and t’s. So on Monday I knocked up some paperwork and had the Dean sign it as we sat in his office with the Boston marathon on the telly in the corner. It was hot in Boston too, and you could see the runners didn’t like it. Or could you see that? Maybe it was the marathon they weren’t enjoying. It was hard to tell. The Dean used to live very near the route and told me stories about it, he was grimly pleased to see that the leaders were starting the series of rolling hills and flats and declines and up-climbs that carry the last few miles of the race back into the city. People on the TV stood under trees in suburbia in comfortable clothes, as the spindly hot racers came by, the runners sweeping their hands along white tables to grab plastic cups of water and sugar, dousing themselves in it, slavering at their cheeks and then dropping the cups on the pale concrete. The Dean was enjoying it and occasionally turned the channel back to the baseball, so I left him to it.

The next day, at about two o’clock, I climbed out of Grand Central subway station and pushed open the heavy brass doors to Forty Second Street. I normally get disorientated when I come out of Grand Central, I can’t remember whether the Met Life building, which zooms up above the station, is north of me or south of me. Usually I stagger for a few steps, head upwards, trying to find the Chrysler building which I know is nearby, then, painfully, I do my points of the compass and find east, look along, see the monstrousness of Tudor City and the shoulder of the enormous cassette box shape of the United Nations, and then start walking towards the river. This time, I don’t know why, it was easier. And I clipped along outside the boring shops – the Duane Reades, the Staples, the Starbucks – and the forgettable diplomat hotels. I stopped at the lights which have lost their Walks and Don’t Walks in favour of a happy white walker and grim red hand staying do not come. When I got to UN plaza, the road that runs along outside the headquarters, I saw the blue blockades and the many policemen. The road was empty, five lanes or so very still under the warm sun. Along the sides of the road were barriers to hold back crowds, although there were no crowds, just dawdling people like me and suits and suits of people, with badges and passes around their necks. It is a peculiar corner of Manhattan, the streets around the UN. It is very serviced: all restaurants and carparks and hotels and United Nation’s dentists and travel agents. The businesses have grown up around this itinerant community of serious looking world-deciders who are too busy to cook or lay down roots in any one place on the planet. They must rush out for a tooth capping before rushing back in to vote or condemn something.

I stood and talked to a smiley cop whose canine teeth were just a little higher than the rest of the teeth along his upper jaw. I asked him who was coming, not expecting much, or at least, not much soon, and he said The President, and in a minute or so, any minute, this minute.

With the warmth, the early face of summer and the empty road, the air was a little milky above the concrete and so I was looking at that when I saw the silver forms of the motorcycle outriders swing round the corner and start heading down. Gunning, cruising on their slack-bellied dead stylish NYPD bikes, the outriders were mainly uncompromising-looking men, unafraid to have moustaches, slouched on their machines, old school helmets low on their brows, obviously reining in their bikes, full of power. There were probably about thirty of them, in two groups: the front group made a large arrow and the second group, of about seven or so, a smaller little pyramid behind.

Then the motorcade, a succession of black vehicles growing larger. Lincolns at the front then to something a little grander, with flags, and then a clutch of shiny SUV’s, full of men talking on phones, with fingers in their ears. Then, squashed in the middle, the raised limousine, its chassis surprisingly high above the surface of the street, and a glimpse, for me, through not so tinted windows, of profiles of men, bunched in facing each other, sheafs and papers making sharp silhouettes. My mind tells me I saw the beaky shape of Dubya’s face, and frames of Rummy’s glasses, but later that day I saw that Rumsfeld had been in the Pentagon all day, so maybe I was imagining a little too happily. After the limo, which looked more tough than swizzy, was another blitz of large black jeeps, whose passengers looked a little more focused and heavily armed than the ones who had come before. These men wore black, big helmets and large rifles diagonally across their laps. No false moves from me, I can tell you. And then the military style gave way to more cell phone chatterers and, finally, to a squad car and a relaxed pair talking to each other about lunch I suppose.

The policemen started taking down the barriers and more usual, unelected traffic started to creep out onto the empty road. From their little paused groups, the diplomats turned away from each other and headed off to read and write their briefings. I got my paperwork signed and went back to Grand Central by a different route.

Friday, April 16

You must read this and look at the pictures. Startling. I had a dim idea, but no idea like this.

Tuesday, April 13

Just to say -- notice the new couple of links on the right hand side. Couple from the school, couple of blogs I've seen around. The Brummie Mother is funny -- she has no sense of smell, and the Girl and Tools is about doing wiring, rebuilding Iraq. It's nifty and fresh.

Sunday, April 11

News

Not to brag, to totally brag. Have a look at this. You may have to register, but it's free and it's worth it.

Friday, April 9

Alla Nostra

The blog has been quiet but I promise you great things.

I’ve been saving talking about Alla Nostra until now, because last night was when it really happened. It’s hard separating out the causes of Alla Nostra, how it came to take hold of our apartment, how it has driven us to have cleaning ladies in the place this morning, how it has brought out love and closed the gaps between countries. Perhaps it started with Barbara, perhaps it started earlier, I think it did. I think it started when Matt took a job as a maintenance man at a string of high-end down-town restaurants.

Matt leaves for work early, at five thirty or six thirty, it’s too dark to tell. Then he works in the kitchens, fixing fans, helping dress new floors, a little bit of circuitry, the odd bit of painting and flood prevention. By 11:30 he is hungry and he eats in the restaurant with the rest of the staff before the places open up. He eats shark steaks and spinach and salmon and lamb and rosemary, he has jus, bliny, carafes and chata-mon-foi-touille. The experience has changed him. He can no longer, at the end of the day, be content to buy a big box with “CAKE” written on it, and suffuse himself with chocolate and light heady sponge in front of the TV. He can no longer get a slab of pizza three inches thick and dressed with slippery salami whose secretions gloss in puddles under the lights in the kitchen. No. Not only must he now buy fresh marinated mozzarella and burgeoning salads, one-day-dead meat, sirloin, bacon heaved before his eyes, right from the strung up belly of a bright pig corpse. Not only must he buy flagons of wine and exotic brown breads, he must share them. The first rumblings of his new tastes came in his cooking himself and I delicious steaks, but it was clear he was hungering for a wider audience, a people to indulge.

And that’s where Christian comes in. Christian is the Chief Operating Officer of Sublet in the City, by all means a slip-ship-shady set up which rents out apartments to innocent visitors to New York, who come for a month or two. Matt did some work for them and became close friends with Christian, a former sergeant in the marines and forlorn rock star, who has broken his back, lived for a while in a hostel in San Francisco, been in love and swapped it for a guitar and came to New York with 25 cents in the bottom of his shoe. The thing, or maybe a thing, about Christian is that maybe before, maybe after, maybe on a troop ship in the Mediterranean he took on a thrill of learning. He only reads the classics, mainly Greeks and Romans but he’s getting into Russian stuff now. Matt, by contrast, was stuck in a rut on Elizabethan drama but I sent him modern classical with “I Claudius.” Last weekend after Matt had bought a hoard of books from a dead woman’s apartment and filled our kitchen with them. You should of, I wish you had, seen the blazing, bickering, snitch-rag row that blew up between Matt and Christian over who got to keep Dostoevsky's Idiot. So there it is, the roots of Alla Nostra: the openness, the tastes, the will to entertain, to invite, to learn. And, in the combination of Matt and Christian, the action, the eagerness to throw open the doors and do it, and to do it the right way.

I mentioned Barbara because she started it. Barbara is small and Italian, a wind up blaze of “figissimo” and “haur-wesome”. She is a nanny to two poor defenceless children in upstate NY as part of some aupair-America shenanigans by which she gets to take English classes and see the city. So last Thursday, Barbara was on her day off, nosing through Soho, breathing some fumes and she took a break for a coffee in a café. Matt and Christian, recently endowed, you remember, with delicate tastebuds and a thirst for the right things, went into the same café just as Barbara, from Milan, was deciding that she needed to get to know some people in this part of town because clearly this was where some of the action was. “Please, what is the nightlife like around here?” She brazenly, Barbarily asked the two of them.

That night I got home around eleven or twelve and the collapsible table was in the living room, the lights were dimmed, the carpet glowed red on the floorboards, there were candles and Adam, another of Matt’s close friends and a recording studio engineer, was playing a guitar as Matt and Christian and a bright nosed Italian nodded and smiled, glazing dazing drinking wine and fingering the last food on their plates. “Alla Nostra,” they said when I came in. To Us.

That was Thursday, then the same on Friday, on Saturday Coco came over and we sat with Alla Nostra for the first time. The first time you dine you have to make a toast in your native or another language. I gave English, Coco gave us Japanese. Then Sunday, again, more steak, more meat, more red wine and candles and classic show tunes coming from the stereo under the TV which was tuned to some endless broadcast of Ole Blue Eyes. Barbara came back and brought Fay, a tall Brazilian who is also an American-Aupair. Christian rustled up some girls who are renting apartments from Sublet in the City. But really, what it was all building to was to last night: a great night, twelve expected, more invited, Alla Nostra.

And so it was. Dan the intense limousine driver with crackling eyes was there, he brought his friend Jerrod who said, as far as I can remember, nothing at all. There was another Dan as well, a graffiti artist who had drifted, selling homemade candles, into another café where Christian happened to be, and was invited. Dan, the second Dan, was twitchy and high-wired, his life I think a mini series of things going wrong right now. His sister was in the hospital around the corner so he popped out at one stage of the evening to see her, he was due in court this morning on some charge or probation hearing or other. Dan had a nervous way and straggly tattoo on a shadowy forearm. But he made the pasta sauce and did a lovely job of it. Louise came and was from Epsom and studying at the fashion college in Chelsea – I was, of course, strongly territorial as England in the apartment. After Fay and Barbara there was Fred the Frenchman, god knows where he came from but I’ve met him a few times now, a nice bloke trying to set up a flashy bureau de change. Coco came and so did Jacob Goldstein (him again) and so did Steven Chen, later.

So we sat, 11 or 12 at the new plastic table bought for the occasion, toasting endlessly from great glasses of fruity wine, letting the food get cold, the pasta congeal ever so slightly in the gloom, serving each other snacks and salads because the rule of Alla Nostra is that you should never serve yourself, your fellow guests should be attentive to your needs. The toasts, the toasts. Heart felt – people tried to remember the last time they’d gathered this way. Christmas, family, love, if it wasn’t for, creative, welcome, never seen, these were things that people said. We heard in Spanish and Italian and French and Mandarin. I’m not afraid. It was emotional. And with trips on to the balcony to look up at the clouds and with guitars: Dan the limousine man sang some very questionable gospel numbers before Christian gave us his country song, Adam sang some of his favourites, Jacob made us howl “Alla Nostra” like it was Oasis homecoming concert and Steven Chen, black-laced bar-shoe tapping at the rug, closed his eyes and sang about San Francisco and New York City with a Blur-ish / Pulp-ish “oh-OH-oh” chorus. The friends we made that night. Alla Nostra.