New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 1

He heard the word “Fuck” being said repeatedly in the street below his window. It was said an improbable amount of times, and Robert could not imagine how a sentence could be constructed almost entirely out of that one word. He wished he could hear better or not at all. The sound of the man saying “Fuck” had awakened him.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” The man in the street below really did seem to be constructing entire sentences using only that word: “Fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck. Fuck—fuck fuck, fuck fuck, fuck fuck.”

He was the first of the cable installers to arrive for work. Others would arrive soon. They were like foul-mouthed morning birds that gathered at the beginning of every workday to begin their vulgar one-note morning song.

It was a hard thing to sleep through.

Robert got out of bed. He dressed himself from the pile of clothes he had left on the floor. He brushed his teeth at the sink.

Robert’s home was very small. It was one room, with a perpetually unmade bed in the corner, a sink along one wall and a window overlooking the street. He had a chair by the window where he sat for his morning cigarette.

There was no shower or bathroom of any kind in Robert’s apartment. For that he had to use the room at the end of the hall that he shared with the other tenants on the floor. The lock did not work very well, and the room itself was unpleasant, with strange and colorful growths crawling along the walls beneath the sink and toilet. Consequently Robert bathed and used the bathroom less frequently than was the prescribed amount and had suffered through several kidney infections in his time living in the building. During a particularly bad case last winter he had resorted to the embarrassingly seedy practice of urinating in a two-liter bottle and then emptying the bottle in the sink. He would have urinated in the sink directly, but it would have required him to stand on the chair and would have put him in view of the window, which had no curtains.

There was also the fear, with the bathroom down the hall, of walking in on someone else. The people in his building were generally aged or fat or drunk, and in no way the sort of people you would want to walk in on as they clambered out of the shower with a towel tucked into their various folds, or as they sat with their pants around their ankles, groaning violently as they gave a difficult birth to the alchemic results of their most recent unwise meal. Their hearing was not good and often they did not notice his repeated knocking.

Lately Robert had taken to growing a beard, not for fashion but convenience.

Robert smoked his morning cigarette and watched the cable installers arriving to work.

The came in loud cars with tinted windows. They were usually dropped off and then the cars would roar away, honking several times as part of some morning ritual of farewells. Sometimes, one of the cable installers drove his own car to work and would struggle and swear and honk his way into one of the narrow parking spots still left at the side of street, where the street itself seemed to devolve into a gravel lot of concrete barriers, bales of rusting barbed wire, and other bits of construction detritus.

Most of the parking spots at the side of the road were taken up by the cable installer trucks, which were red and had two ladders on the top and an orange siren for what Robert imagined to be the infrequent occasion of emergency cable installation work.

As they arrived the cable installers gathered in the street, around their trucks or in groups of six or seven on the sidewalk beneath his window. These groupings of men swearing and smoking reminded Robert of the prison yards he had seen in movies, where large men gathered into mysterious alliances and plots were discussed for tunneling out or knifing one of their fellow inmates while he slept or showered.

Sometimes, as he smoked by the window, Robert feared that the men would look up and see him there. They looked like the sort of men who would take offense easily and who might say things like: “Hey you fuck! What the fuck are you fucking looking at?”

And then they would storm up the stairs to his apartment and beat him to death.

And it would not be difficult. The door to his apartment did not lock and Robert was not a large man.