Henry Kissinger's Light Fixture

I wish I had taken a photo of it to show you.  Unfortunately, the day after I took it off the ceiling it was the ‘bulk pick up day’ and I threw it out before I thought of documenting it.   Regardless, I am sure you have seen a dozen just like it.  Oak frame, with an oak ‘egg crate’ patterned lens cover.  It took four fluorescent lamps and had a milky white Lexan lens.  Very popular in the 70’s and 80’s.  It matched the finish of the kitchen cabinets perfectly and if it was strictly up to me it would have been there for ever, but the kitchen belongs to the ‘little woman’ (in fact everything belongs to the ‘little woman’ while we ‘men’ fool ourselves into thinking we have possession, or control of anything at all!) and she has been on me about how ‘dated’ that fixture looks for so long that she finally wore me down.  It was easier to take it out, pay for new recessed lighting, open the sheet rock and rewire the ceiling, install the lighting, close the sheet rock, tape it, and repaint the entire ceiling than it was to listen to it any more!  I will admit-but please don’t tell her I said so-that the kitchen looks wonderful now.  But if I admit that I will end up replacing the countertops and all the appliances as well and I would rather die…

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes, the light fixture.  I got it out of a demolition job at 1345 Avenue of the Americas.  It had been the offices of a large law firm and was soon to be the latest in a series of floors taken over by Sanwa Bank.  The bank was eating up space as soon as it became available in that building.   The competition for the space was keen and as fast as the old school American companies were going belly up the Japanese were taking up the slack. 

Right wingers across the continent were predicting the enslavement of the American working class and world domination by the Yellow Tide.  Japanese Trading companies, banks, automobile manufacturing companies, design/construction firms, you name it.  They were in the U.S. to do business and business in the U.S. meant a headquarters in New York City.  My life in construction was fifty per-cent trading floors for the U.S. stock traders (Smith Barney, Donaldson-Lufkin, First Boston, Alliance Capital…etc) and fifty per-cent Japanese banks.  Didn’t make any difference to me so long as the pay check was on time and I could keep on churning out the spaces.   I learned to bow to the architects at Takishimia and argue with the architects from Gensler.  Made no never mind.  Just keep on building.

So I was ripping out this law firm and in one of the offices I noticed the light fixture.  I had been spray painting the walls with a can of red paint to indicate which walls had to be taken out and which ones had to be left alone.  The demolition crew would be in the building in a few hours and I had to have it marked before they could start destroying.  If you didn’t have it properly marked it could be a disaster! You would not believe the mayhem once they started.  There were pipes in some of those walls.  There were live wires and telephone lines in some of them.  You had to read the plans carefully and mark the walls properly in order to literally avoid fire and flood.  These were the rules.

First you would identify the wall on the plan.  If it was slated for demo you would mark a red line all the way across it and in the middle of the wall paint the word “OUT”.   If it was supposed to be saved you would just write the word “STAY”… Nothing else!!!!  Very important!!!!  The laborers who did the demolition were all foreigners.  They worked for Italian Americans (for the most part) but they were usually little guys from Yucatan or Ecuador.   They didn’t speak any English and the only thing they understood was if it was 3 letters they had to destroy it.  If it had 4 they had to leave it alone.   You could have sprayed “YES” and that wall would be history.  If you painted “CRAP” they wouldn’t touch it.  That was the plan.  “OUT” or “STAY”.  Nothing else.   And when they started they were all ‘assholes and elbows’.  Sledgehammers, snips, an occasional Sawzall or a cutting torch-Simple tools and simple minds but man could they work!  I learned to appreciate the economy of motion and the systematic way they could dismantle two months of construction work in an evening.  Forty thousand square feet of office space in three or four nights.  Dirty, noisy, horrible work but they were wonderful at it. 

After spraying up the job I went back into the office and took the fixture out of the hung ceiling.  The Electricians had been through the space during the day and “safe’d off” both the  120 volt and the 277 volt power to the ceiling lights so I easily and safely disconnected the light.  I dragged it over to the freight elevator vestibule and thought to myself that I was lucky to find a fixture like this.  It was a perfect match for the cabinets I was hanging in the new house I was putting up for my family.  I would store it in my ‘shanty’ until I could find a way to get it home.  I had brought all kinds of things home on the subway but this was too big for that.  I would have to wait until I could drive in and pick it up.  While I was waiting for the freight elevator to get to the floor I noticed a tag glued to the fixture.  It said “H. Kissinger”.  I became curious.  After I dropped the fixture off in my little room in the basement I went back up to the floor and searched the office for any other indication that this might have been the office of Henry Kissinger.  Maybe I would find some memos alluding to the bombing of Cambodia or a note from Richard Nixon or a ping pong paddle signed by Chairman Mao Zedong.  If I was really lucky I might find a naked photo of him and Angie Dickenson or Bridget Bardot.  I once found the income tax filing for Raul Julia…so why not something cool on Henry Kissinger?  But, alas I never did find anything else of interest that night. 

The laborers came and by twelve midnight they were finished for the shift.  Piles of rubble were left where there had been offices only six hours before.  The next night they would finish the demo and the clean up and in eight weeks there would be a new batch of offices or an employee cafeteria serving sushi and pea soup.  I would pick up the fixture and eventually put it on my kitchen ceiling.  When the ‘little woman’ would complain about how dated it was and how wonderful it would be to have modern recessed lighting I would say, “but that was Henry Kissinger’s light fixture…It looks great” and we would both laugh and I knew I’d bought a little bit of time before I had to bite the bullet and give her what she wanted. 

Spaz-R.I.P.

Talked to Richie  yesterday.  If I hadn’t asked about him I don’t know if he would have told me, but when I did he told me-Spaz had died.  Spaz was a real friend and I don’t think it foolish at all feeling real grief over the passing of my friend.  

Spaz lived most of the time (and most of his life) in the offices of Richie's construction company.  The offices are in the lower level (read “basement”) of a strip shopping center in the South Bronx at the corner of Randall Avenue and Castle Hill Avenue.  Around the back of the stores and under a bodega, a Laundromat, and a dental clinic there is a roll-up door and a glass storefront door and that is the entrance to the construction office.  The offices consist of several rooms including a hallway off the entrance, a receiving room with a sliding glass window where the UPS guy drops off boxes, Richie’s office, the plan room and the conference room.  Each room is successively recessed further back into the bowels of the basement and progressively darker and less ventilated.  There is also a small pantry and a restroom just outside Richie's office.  The other ‘spaces’ are storage closets and water closets that are too gruesome to describe.  One such is the closet with the main building house trap buried in the floor.  When the door of this space is opened sewer gases and their smells invade the plan room and make working there impossible. 

Spaz’s food and water bowl were in the hallway just inside the vestibule door.  His bed was a pad in the conference room but I don’t think he slept on it, preferring to sleep most of the time in the front of the building where he could hear the sounds from the parking lot or the subsidized housing projects close by.  His food was (a huge bag of kibble) stored in a heavy duty trash can with a lid-also in the hall.  Every day he got fresh water and kibble but that was not what Spaz subsisted on.  He was a not a ‘kibble’ kind of dog.

Down the way from the main entrance to the office was a basement workspace or shop where tools and material were stored.  The crew also used the space to put together parts of the job and work in when it was raining or when they needed to do work on one of the company vehicles.  During break time they would crank up the radio (Spanish of course) and sit around drinking coffee and eating cake, cookies, chips, sandwiches, rice and beans, chicken, pizza…you name it.  If there were any way in the world that Spaz could get down there for the meal he would.  He was slick.  There was almost no way to keep him inside if he wanted to get loose.  He’d sneak out with the delivery guys or anyone else coming and going from the office.  And the men got a kick out of seeing him drink a cup of coffee, crunch a bunch of chicken bones or devour a couple of slices of leftover pizza.  He would sit patiently waiting for his turn at the food…sipping his coffee from a paper cup (the men regularly bought him his own cup).  I believe that if he’d been given a chance he would have smoked cigars or cigarettes as well.  And when the eating was done, and break time was over Spaz would take off in the South Bronx looking for adventure. 

When he got loose he would roam the ‘projects’ and as scary as he looked almost no one was afraid of him.  Everyone in the neighborhood knew Spaz.  He was the neighborhood dog.  When I walked him on a leash everyone-Abuelas (grandmothers), little children, junkies, hookers, the toughest looking bangers on the block-all knew Spaz.  All the pit bulls, poodles, and other miscellaneous pouches knew he was cool.  All the cats knew he was not.  Spaz hated cats.  But everyone else was Spaz’s friend.  Oh, except the cops.

There are stories about Spaz and the cops that still circulate and are mostly true.  It is not that they didn’t like Spaz, it is just that they had to enforce the law and Spaz was an outlaw! 

I personally got a ticket because Spaz was not on a leash one day.  I hadn’t even been walking him-he’d just slipped out of the offices and was roaming the parking lot.  When I saw the patrol car coming I tried to get Spaz back into the office but the cops said I was walking him without a leash, and gave me a court appearance ticket.  It cost me a fine and a day in the Bronx courtroom.  Spaz was the reason Richie spent a night in jail and who knows how many other tales could be told if all his adventures were known?  I’ve been told Spaz was once personally given a ticket by the cops-the ticket was attached to the dog’s collar and he was sent on his way.  He brought the ticket back to Richie.  True story.  It has also been said that a woman once came to the office and demanded support payments because Spaz had ‘knocked-up’ her dog.  Paternity was never proven, or so I have been told. 

Richie tried to bring Spaz home with him on some weekends but Richie lives in an apartment and most of the time the dog had to spend seven days a week living in the office.  One of the men who lived nearby in the ‘projects’ was supposed to come to the office and walk him.  Sometimes on Monday morning there would be a pile of dog shit and a puddle on the floor when I would come in.  Obviously no one came to take him out and he’d been locked up all weekend long.  When I could I used to bring Spaz home with me on the weekend.  He would stand in the back seat of my car-never sat or laid down-and he’d bark at everyone he saw, as if to say “Hey! Look at me!  I’m goin’ to the country!”  Of course I have to assume he was saying it in Spanish.  And once we got to my house he loved to lie on the porch and bake in the sun or walk with me down the shaded street.  New smells.  New sights.  On Monday morning he was happy to get back in the car-standing up, of course-and go back to his home in the Bronx, his friends and his cup of coffee.

Good luck my friend.  Hope you are happy and free, where ever you are now.