A week or two after we moved into our loft, I hired a handyman to help me lift a few of the things that I couldn’t lift on my own and to hang pictures and shelves in our new place.
His name was “Skip,” and he was a young kid who had dreams of moving to LA to become a set designer. He and Marlin, our doorman, were both from Barbados, and the two of them treated me like a Caribbean queen. (It’s amazing how plain old kindness can impact people!)
Skip worked for a few other people in the building, and he was always full of stories that blew my mind about the people who shared my new address. For example, there was an exotic Brazilian woman living in one of the four penthouses who was a wealthy British man’s “secret wife.”
I would see this glamorous woman at the pool all of the time. She was so beautiful and tan, but she often seemed very angry. She always had a little boy with her — who I assume was the British man’s baby? It wasn’t clear. But she mostly just yelled at the little boy in Spanish and rubbed oil on her dark brown skin.
Skip told me that he had recently installed a conveyor belt in Brazilian lady’s closet (that he said was twice as big as mine) just so she could keep her designer handbags organized. He estimated she had around 100 bags — which kind of blew my mind! Skip said he worked for this woman’s “husband” all the time because when she got angry at him, she’d threaten to out herself to the wife in England. That’s when Skip would get the call, and suddenly, he’d be installing mirrored walls with built-in up-lights in her dressing room, or retrofitting the whirlpool jets on her bathtub with the latest high-tech features.
One time Skip said, “Evah pig got a Saturday,” which he explained is how people in Barbados say everyone pays for their misdeeds somehow.
Skip also told me about the French lady who owned our unit.
She and her nephew lived in one of the other penthouses, and between the two of them, they owned most of the units in the building. Skip said that he had a very complicated relationship with them, and in fact, he was surprised when he got the call from Marlin about doing some work in my unit. He thought he had been “blackballed” from doing any work whatsoever for any of the tenants in the “French units.”
Apparently, Skip had openly discussed the bad wiring in all of the French units with a power company worker who came to deal with an issue, and large fines were issued. Skip said that all of the French units were very beautiful, but he was pretty sure the French lady just paid off the building inspector to overlook the shoddy electrical work her nephew did.
Hmm.
But Skip’s comment about the wiring helped to explain a few odd things that I’d already noticed about our new place. For one thing, the toilet water in our master bathroom was always steaming hot! One flush and scalding water would start pouring into the toilet, and I could actually see the steam rising out of the bowl!
And there were light switches all over the house that would only work if the light switch across the room was also flipped on, too. Then one day, when I was cleaning the bathroom, I turned on the light in the water closet. All of a sudden, a small blue and yellow flame sparked out of the light switch! Then I heard a sizzling sound, and all of the lights in the bathroom went dead.
The smell of a smoldering electrical fire overwhelmed the room.
I immediately called Marlin, and he came up right away. He had a strange look on his face; he said we needed to call the French lady’s nephew — even though I felt like the fire department might be a better call! But a few hours later, the crabby nephew finally arrived with Marlin in tow.
The Frenchman was not happy. After he scolded me for calling Marlin, he took off the switch plate, and then fiddled around with a few wires in the socket. Twenty minutes later, all of the lights flickered back to life.
The Frenchman sternly said to me in a very thick accent, “Only call me for ze lights — do you understand?”
