Having someone tug at your shoulder unexpectedly is startling at any time. Having it happen when you’re hanging in a safety harness ninety odd stories up is something else again. Be introduced to a stranger and the first thing they’ll ask is, “What do you do for a living?” It seems that we are no more and no less than what we do. When I was still in uniform they had no need to ask but Vietnam took the shine off that. I am still ashamed of what we did there. Now I clean windows. At first, I used to fudge and say that I was an aerialist: that I performed death-defying feats on Fifth Avenue. Window cleaning is hardly up there with brain surgery. But then I came to realise that where I clean, and the sheer height, puts the job in a special class. The where is the Empire State Building, one hundred and two stories and the whole thing built in less than two years. There are now buildings elsewhere that are higher but the Empire State is the grandaddy of them all, the patriarch. Think skyscraper and you think Empire State. My family has been closely involved with it for three generations. My grandfather, an electrical engineer, was the first of our family to come to this country. He it was who changed our family name from Leuwenstein to Lewison thinking it more American. Rachel Adler, who in time became my grandmother, came over with her family two years later. My grandparents set up house in the Lower East Side at that time the largest Jewish enclave anywhere, over 500 synagogues and religious schools. They had two sons and one daughter, my mother. I know the whole area well. Momma and I moved in with them while my father was out in the Pacific and later with the occupation forces. Things have changed since then. These days, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and Chinese just about outnumber us. After a number of years in menial jobs where his qualifications could not be used
grandfather, through a friend, found real work at last on the installation of the Empire State elevators. It was not exactly his field. Much of the technology was new to him. The express elevators that swooped passengers upward at that time in a series of multi-floor leaps were probably new to everyone. Those elevators were the salvation of the Empire State. It was completed at the worst possible time, 1931. It was, for a while, the world’s biggest white elephant with no more than 30 percent of the office space occupied. It was only the tourists that kept in viable. The elevators took streams of them up to the observation deck. Five thousands on the first day. They had to pay a dollar each for the panoramic view and a dollar was a dollar in those days. In the first month over 100,000 took the ride up to the 86th floor. Numbers have hardly dropped since then. My grandfather stayed on in maintenance. Times were hard. There was nothing else on offer. He stayed even after things picked up. But on July 26 1945, that’s just two days before that Boeing crashed into the building, he fell down a lift shaft and was killed. To come nearer to the present. After my father’s demob, we moved to Peter Cooper Village just north of 14th St. and to the east of 5th Avenue. Along with nearby Stuyvesant Town, It was designed to provide housing for returning servicemen. Complicated rent laws continue to keep apartment rents there cheaper that in other parts. They are actually passed on as heirlooms. Both of my parents are now dead and I inherited which allows me to walk to and from my work. My father worked in electrical maintenance at Empire State before his call-up in early ‘43 in a sort of apprenticeship. It was nepotism I suppose, my grandfather had gained a certain amount of seniority and influence by then. Dad moved back into maintenance there after the war. In my younger days, I gave no thought to what I might eventually do. Except that I remember, about the time of my Bar Mitzvah, when I was pumped up with piety and tradition, I did have dreams of becoming a Rabbi, expert on the Talmud. To my regret now, it didn’t last. After my school years, I bummed around for a few years, taking odd jobs here and there. Several good positions were actually offered to me, we look after our own, but I was not ready to settle down. Finally I enlisted. I wasn’t drafted, I enlisted! I can hardly believe now that I was actually busting to go to Vietnam to show those Commie bastards that they couldn’t mess with Uncle Sam. I woke up fast. We all did. To get to the window cleaning….Like so many others, I came out of ‘Nam badly shaken and with no saleable skills. The ability to kill Gooks adds nothing to a C.V. The window cleaning job was there. Nobody wanted it. Due to the apparent danger I suppose. So I took it. Perhaps I should explain how cleaning on the Empire State differs from elsewhere. Modern buildings have platform lifts which can place the cleaners on any part of a building’s surface. The Empire State is not so high-tech, maybe in future . We have exit hatches on the faces at each level and one wears a safety harness and works ones way around the building from anchor point to anchor point , hatch to hatch. You work attached to two anchors and ,naturally, one is always left attached during a move. It’s primitive but at least one can never be stranded by equipment failure which I notice is all too common in some other places. I started rather tentatively at lower levels but it is surprising just how quickly one can become blase about working at heights. One is always careful, testing each new anchor point, it is after all an old building, but it is possible to be, at the same time, relaxed, unconcerned.
To most people, it seems a mind-numbing and repetitive pursuit. They wonder, aloud, how I could stick it for twenty four years but I have enjoyed it. There is none of the pressure that one finds in most other jobs. On a fine day it can be quite pleasant. I become a Greek god on Mount Olympus. Puny humans scurry far below. Dangerous? I’ve always believed it safer than down on the streets. Dirty weather, I clean inside. But this tug on my shoulder. With it went a panic-stricken, “Help me! I’m falling!” I was in the process of transferring to another anchor and I froze as you can imagine. My heart almost hammered its way out of my chest. There was no-one there, of course. How could there be?…Angels apart…It was maybe twenty minutes before I could find the courage to make my way back to the hatch and report sick. Somehow, the voice had been familiar, the voice of someone close to me, but try as I might I could not place it. My late grandfather had fallen but it was not his voice although— in a way—a little like it. I have never told anyone of this, not my wife, not anyone. Not even though it has happened several times more over the past few months and always when I was changing anchors and most vulnerable. Could it be my mind playing me false? Was it an unconscious death wish? I could not believe it so but then no-one likes to admit the possibility of madness. Not even to oneself. And my wife is a worrier. She has never liked what I do. She would do anything to have me stop and no way was I prepared to give her the ammunition. Reports have surfaced from time to time of the difficulties that Vietnam vets are having, both physical and emotional. There is the obvious culprit, delayed stress, but fingers are pointed at the defoliants that were widely used. For a start, I assumed that this must be the source of my problem too but when no other difficulties appeared, no other strange quirks, I
thought maybe not. I then asked myself if it could be an omen. Did it mean that someone was going to fall and die? But if so why? If only I could put a name to that voice so frustratingly familiar, I might be able to stop it. That is how things stood up until yesterday. I am not working today. It is the Sabbath. I have always been most scrupulous in Sabbath observance, to not attend the synagogue has normally been unthinkable. Not today though. The world is upside down. I need time to think. More than anything, I need someone understanding to talk things over with. My wife is away in Boston with our eldest daughter who is expecting any day now. And for that I am thankful. She would not understand and she would talk it around. She cannot help herself. Yesterday, shortly after I had started work on the windows of the 81st, I heard the cry, those words again, but for the first time not from behind me. There was no clutch at my shoulder. About thirty feet away, between myself and an exit hatch, there was a second window cleaner, someone that I recognised with shock. One of his anchors had pulled out. He had lost his footing and he was now hanging with his full weight on the remaining one. I knew what would happen as if it were written in advance. In an instant, the other anchor pulled out and he was gone. It was a long time before I could move. Height was now something to be feared. I could not now go to that hatch although it was so close. The two anchors that I had seen pulled out now seemed as intact as ever saying that what I saw and heard was a delusion but I could no longer trust them. They were lying in wait for me. My confidence was completely gone. I could not look down. I made my way to a hatch in the other direction, so shaky that I’m surprised that I made it. I came home. I did not report
off. I cannot go back. I can’t go out there again. It was a warning not to be ignored. My family’s seventy three year association is at an end. Having seen that drama, which I am sure is prescient, I know who makes that desperate plea. I know the owner of that voice, the voice at once so familiar and yet so hard to place. IT’S ME!…MY OWN VOICE!…AS OTHERS HEAR IT!