River

"And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China!" [1]

I forget the context but once, in the suite kitchen in River, I said that as a foreigner I was accustomed to brick ovens. John turned to Nick and said, "What did she say?" Nick answered, "She made a joke."

Another time, Nick asked me, "What do you keep in that?" He was referring to my blue tray. "You mean on it?" I was upset that he couldn't choose the right preposition.

In short, if I couldn't open a jar, I would not ask those dopes for help.

And yet River was a decent building. I was lucky to get a room there when my neighbor's bass and Columbia's fiasco mediation office drove me out of Broadway in late December. Hobbs said, "Who killed themselves so you could move in?" The ROLM phone blinked furiously to indicate a score of messages appealing to someone named Buchanan. "I'm Nixon," I reminded her, disconnecting the phone.

[1] Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne"