I have resumed the shredding of evidence that I existed. I had been saving certain records thinking I might scan them. Now I might just not bother. I will scan phone records, I think, and maybe the credit card transaction. But the bank records? I don’t know. I am interested in anything containing a record of a purchase or telephone communication. I don’t have a thought out explanation for any of this except that it might be interesting to somebody at some point in the continuum that existed before I did and will continue to hum along after I am gone.
Shredding feels very productive when it could not be more the opposite. It is destructive, crematory, incinerational. And lucky for me it is not especially noisy, so when I get up at in the middle of the night for an hour or two (as I am wont to do these days) I can shred to the sunrise without annoying anybody.
Talk about evidence, though, I found a scrap of paper which reminds me of the time I had an affair with a married woman. It is probably the worst thing I ever did in the realm of women but if I can catch any kind of a break on the matter it comes from the fact that she was 100% the instigator and her husband knew full well what she was up to, as she was shamelessly promiscuous with other men besides me. I went into it with youthful hubris, thinking it would be fun and that no harm could come of it if all assumptions about morality and faithfulness were out the window. I had heard of these type of situations and I guess I just thought a fuck was a fuck. The mere thought of entering into that situation makes me feel a little nausea now.
Years later this woman found me on Facebook. We had a long conversation, just chit chat as far as I can recall. I honestly think she does not even remember our little affair, or if she does it’s just part of a cloud of memories, so plentiful were her extramarital pursuits. I think she thought I was somebody else the whole time we were talking.
The evidence I found is a printout of an email where she invited me to an Irish music night at Kate Kearney’s in midtown, a place I don’t think exists anymore. It ends with her saying “No hubby attached, I hope! Haha” Yuck. It ended when her I told I couldn’t do this anymore. I never felt good about it, but she was damned aggressive in her pursuit. I expected her to take it in stride that it had to end. She did not. That’s how naive I was.
The last time I saw her in person was on a bus to lower Manhattan, where she lives. She was with her husband. I guess it had been 5 or 6 years since we last met. She did not see me on the bus, and I said nothing. This happened to be the Labor Day before 9/11, and I did think about her and her husband on that day the following week. They lived pretty much across the street from the Twin Towers. But I never contacted her.
Another odd find from storage today is a letter from someone who used to live upstairs, in 3C. The letter, copies of which were slipped under the door of every apartment, claims the owner of this building threatened him with physical violence on account of a financial dispute. It is signed but I cannot read the person’s name. I have only a foggy memory of this letter, which I remember at first instilled a bit of fear in me. My encounters with the building owner have often been enough to make me cry but I never saw anything to suggest he would go the route of physical force. The letter from a disgruntled tenant, I decided, was borderline loony and best ignored.
Still, the owner has recently said he intends to sell the building and it makes me think back on how little I know about that guy and his lengthy history here. It also reminds me how little I know about the neighbors. I talk to a few people once or twice a year but I could be living next to lunacy incarnate. I don’t think I am but it’s intriguing to consider the silence of not knowing who anybody here is.
The person who wrote this letter encourages one and all residents to report this person to the police or housing authorities, but that kind of thing can get you blacklisted from other buildings should you decide to move. It would take a lot for me to take the owner of this or any building in which I live to court. In fact I can hardly imagine going that route under almost any circumstance short of he or his contractors robbing me or some equally unlikely situation. Who wants to live in a hostile environment like that?
