Tosho & The 6th Floor Walkup

Friends say the East Village is dangerous and tell stories of muggings and break-ins. It’s 1967.

The Electric Circus, disco, drugs, lava lights, and kiosks selling handmade drop earrings on St

Mark’s Place, are steps from the Gem Spa, home of ‘real’ egg creams.

We find cheap, safe digs further south in Little Italy. Our ‘find’ is a $90/month sixth floor walkup

at 274 Mott Street New York, New York,10012. Shiny black doorsteps lead up to the front unse-

cured door. Once inside the tenement, there’s an eerie feel of a ‘fun house’ as we wend our way

along the dark brown walls to the dilapidated staircase. No lobby. Old Italian ladies in formless

dark cotton house dresses sit in front of their doors at each landing surveying our journey to the

sixth floor. Judging. Or, so we think. They whisper to each other in Italian as we walk quickly at

each turning, eyes down. We’re the only ‘foreigners’ in the building. Toskovic (aka Tosho) with a

Balkan rough hewn face, and me, sunny naive native with an unguarded air. We pretend propriety:

a $2 gold bamboo tourist shop ring encircles my left finger. Thus married, for the sake of the

crones guarding the halls.

Our two room unfurnished apartment includes a kitchen cum bathroom. A bathtub sits adjacent

to the sink; its wooden cover becomes our kitchen counter, common to 19th century tenements on

the Lower East Side.

Tosho helps furnish the rooms with a discarded mattress and chair. The imposing chair, eighty

pounds of oak, swivels on rollers that do not roll under its impressive weight. Seat carved to fit

your bum; a CEO’s chair from the New York Central Railroad president’s office or Zero Mostel’s

chair in the Producers. How does he get it up six flights of worn stone stairs?

Ten days earlier, on the Black Swan freighter, our late winter North Atlantic crossing from Le

Havre to New York felt grand with a well-appointed stateroom and copious dinners with the cap-

tain accompanied by aquavit and beer. A cohort of ten passengers shared the lounge, as unsus-

pecting models posing for Tosho when not bracing from the rough sea against the iron sides of the

steel deck outside.

Now, an ocean away from fresh, crisp baguettes and the Beaux Arts atmosphere of our Left

Bank studio, we awaken, scratching, to find tiny round red bugs in the pre-owned off-the-street

mattress. We order a brand new mattress. It costs $100 delivered from Bloomingdales; a week’s

salary.

That’s our furniture unless you can call Tosho’s collection of broken porcelain dolls piled up

against one wall, furniture. Their cracked heads and ripped outfits are surreal reminders of soldiers’

bodies strewn onto his Montenegrin mountain drawings. The broken dolls become a design ele-

ment of our aerie.

And airy it is. High up in the sky, the tenement’s top floor ‘penthouse’. In this knocked down

neighborhood past the crummy, littered lots to the North we have an unobstructed view of the Em-

pire State Building from our kitchen window. To the East sun streams through the windows, past

our ‘balcony,’ that is, a black iron fire escape. Tosho shoots my favorite photo as my head tilts into

those rays of sunshine from our south facing window with a fresh rose glow to my early morning

face, relaxed, even in our stiff wooden swivel armchair. Our iron fire escape leads to the roof,

where banded pigeons lodge. They are homing pigeons, messenger pigeons, racing pigeons -

prize pigeons - in a bakeshop wood and wire coop beyond the pipes and chimney sticking up

through the tar roof. The precious carrier pigeons caged and ready to fly messages near and far.

Much as Tosho and I think we are the focus of the dark dressed ladies of the landings, the

crones are in truth ‘lookouts’ for intruders intending to make it to the rooftop and steal these pi-

geons. These extended families watch all comings and goings, observing who heads towards the

roof. No robber of extreme cleverness can pass an apartment to the roof unnoticed. But once! We

hear a clatter and a clanking, screaming and the rattle of loose fire escape steps...yelling through-

out the neighborhood, deafening above our heads... a thief reached the roof and was chased by

our Italian neighbors all through the Bowery and Little Italy. We, though, are snugly, smugly safe in

the midst of the unpatrolled streets in the 1960’s. The pigeons protect us!

That we are ‘watched over’ means we have no privacy behind particle board walls and pine

slats. When we fight they hear, when we make love they hear. Surprisingly, these older Italian folks

are discreet neighbors who smile and greet us now as if they don’t hear a thing through the rattling

floor boards. Little Italy’s Mott Street south of Houston, soon to become “SoHo” for its artists’ lofts

and galleries, is now a neighborhood of stoney lots punctuated by a few remaining sooty red brick

six story 19th century tenements, occupied by protective paisanos.

To the West, our door faces the dark hallway. Across the street a shorter tenement housed

Russell and Roni, she-maiden of the longest legs and hair, and shortest mini-skirts, from a Jewish

paper mill family in Newburgh, New York. Russell, brawny and toothless, makes an unlikely match

with Roni; perhaps, as Tosho and I do. We never ask Roni and Russell how they found their way to

Mott Street before it’s SoHo, before it’s known that Red Grooms and Rauschenberg have lofts

here. We never wonder how any of this happened to get us here; we know each other as fellow

travelers. We recognize each other as ‘tuned in, turned on’ and trustworthy users to share a joint or

two, a line or two - and always friends of our friends.

Inside Roni and Russell’s flat, folks are always bustling in and out. “Thanks for the brownies,

Linda. The coke is on the table in other room,” Roni offers. “Drinks, too.” We never know who will

be around the table with the powdered lines and extra dollar bills rolled up. We socialize, in a man-

ner of speaking.

When Tosho, enters the apartment chest-thumping “Moi, je suis Tošković grand artiste!”

The Two meet each other. Tošković enters every scene pounding his chest: “Moi, je suis Toskovic,

grand artiste!” He faces Neal Cassady, of On the Road fame, inspiration for Kerouac’s famed

‘Dean Moriarty’ and Ken Kesey’s wildest character on the ‘Magic Trip’. Neal never rises. He is

speed talking from Roni and Russell’s deep cushioned couch. In a coked out English stream of

consciousness monologue... he spouts his life...an embodiment of ‘be-ing here now’. Cassady’s

patter fast chatter of atoms is incomprehensible to Tosho who is simultaneously speaking at him in

fast French. Tosho is naturally speed talking especially when he’s uncomfortable, as now when

he’s the only French speaker in that room.

Does Cassady know French? Never mind. He and Tosho are each speaking at 3 times normal

speed. An iconic image of two potent personalities rapping at one another for an hour? or two? or,

maybe, 10 minutes? Uber performance artists, pre-Marina Abramovic.

We never know where it will go. Two macho men communicating on different planes. Finally, the

speeding comets burn out. Time and space is lost to us at least until morning. A surreal scene

worthy of Fellini or Bunuel.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Morning scene: Roni and I don our proper blouses, boots and mini-skirts and walk South to

our day jobs, as social workers in training at the Bureau of Child Welfare. We walk through Little

Italy, past the green grocers and classic cannoli bakeries, past Chinatown to City Center. Roni and

I support our guys by working at the New York Bureau of Child Welfare protecting families by get-

ting drug addicted parents to rehab and their children to foster care.

©Linda Tobin