Locked Out

So I just locked myself out of my apartment. I knew this would happen sooner or later—it's inevitable, I guess. The creepy thing is that for the last week I've been overly paranoid about it, slapping my pockets in momentary and unintentionally comic panic each time the door swings shut to MAKE SURE I HAVE MY KEYS, etc. And then today, without any fanfare, I strolled coolly into the hallway with absolutely nothing in my pockets, not giving it a second thought until the tiny, final click of the lock pointed out that I'd just royally screwed myself. Sigh.

It's not that my brain wasn't turned on. I was ready to walk out the door. I had outgoing mail in hand. An umbrella. I'd even put my damn galoshes on (I'm sorry, but I maintain some misguided sense of nostalgia about calling rubberized rain boots galoshes... some sort of fucked up fictional connection to a childhood I never had that involved eating chowder in lighthouses. Wellies? Pah. Boots? No. Galoshes, baby. Galoshes.) and taken care to tuck in the cuffs of my pants so that I wouldn't get wet during my brief excursion to the mailbox on the corner. I had brushed my hair, for chrissake (gotta look presentable for the Orthodox Jews, exhausted Dominican mamas and poor gay male musicians who live in my hood, after all. Sheesh.).

I went immediately to the basement to try to find my super, assuming he'd be able to let me back into my apartment. The basement is dark and creepy and painted red, with several strategically placed survellaince mirrors and lots of moulding boxes lining the hallway. Fairly typical, I assume. The super lives down here with his family, and seems to enjoy himself—once, coming out of the laundry room, I overheard he and his wife singing karaoke in spanish with a passion that was so heartfelt it made me choke up and flee to the upper floors. Of course, you can never find the super when you need him—ringing his apartment doorbell only results in the uncomfortable feeling that he is standing silently on the other side of the door peering at you through the peephole and taking grim pleasure in leaving you hanging.

So I gave up and went to the damn mailbox. I passed two people—one of the aforementioned poor gay male musicans and a high school girl in a pink Juicy hoodie who curled her lip/raised one eyebrow at me in judgement (yes, the galoshes are ridiculous). So I was totally invisible to the guy and a source of cynical teen amusement to the girl. Always a nice midday rush.

Coming back into the building, I finally roused my super (who is Dominican and barely speaks english, but is improbably named Dudley) from his basement hole by obnoxiously pressing the building buzzer. He cheerfully opened his door to me this time, only to tell me (after dubiously eyeing my footwear) that he had no keys. This doesn't quite make sense to me... no skeleton key? Has he really always done maintenance only when myself or my roommate has been there to let him in? He said, "I am super-tendent. Not super-man!" and tried just as cheerfully to shut the door in my face. But, this being New York and all, I have never once seen any of my neighbors, much less made their acquaintance, and I needed a phone to call a locksmith. My phone was behind a locked apartment door, remember, along with my wallet, so calling and then paying a locksmith seemed a bit beyond my immediate reach.

Dudley was horrified that I would consider bringing in a professional. Wouldn't my roommate be back soon? No (again, this being New York, I barely know my roommate and she certainly doesn't bother to keep me abreast of her comings and goings). Couldn't I just wait? Er, no. "What choice do I have, if you can't let me in?" I asked, still unconvinced that he didn't have a full ring of keys somewhere (perhaps behind the HUGE BOOKCASE FULL OF LIQUOR! The passionate karaoke makes a little more sense now). Dudley, suddenly sympathetic to my plight, scrounged around in his toolbox for a second and then, with an odd conspiratorial pride, presented me with the solution to my predicament:

A metrocard.

Yes, Dudley broke into my apartment using only a simple flimsy piece of yellow plastic. Initially he turned me loose to do it myself, but after about five minutes I heard the elevator lurch to life and he materialized to check up on me. "You a terrible thief!" he chuckled, taking the metrocard out of my useless hands and sinking to his knees before my apartment door. A few grunts later, the door swung open (revealing the horrified cat, who I'm sure had been shitting himself at the idea of strangers breaking in and interrupting his main pastimes of eating and sleeping). Relief washed over me like a wave. Suddenly my phone, my computer, my wallet... all these things were back at my fingertips (not to mention I could change my shoes).

Dudley pointed out that he had really saved my ass and that a locksmith would have run me at least eighty bones. I do not consider myself generally tip-savvy, but even my clueless self gets it when the super hits me over the head with suggestive sledgehammer. I gave him twenty bucks. He seemed pleased.

After playing such a charged role in this small drama, I'm afraid the metrocard was a little the worse for wear. Andrew Jackson in one hand, the metrocard in the other, Dudley pushed his luck by winking at me and then suggesting that I buy him a new metrocard as well. "That's what the twenty is for," I winked back, feeling that things had suddenly taken a very awkward turn. (Though irrelevant, it didn't help that Dudley is about half my size. He is a man that manages to be impossibly small yet impossibly round at the same time. Not sure how he pulls this off, but I tower over him like a crazy giant... a crazy giant in galoshes, no less).

Dudley made his exit and I locked myself IN. Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I had a brief sit-down to collect my scattered thoughts before heading back to my desk. The cat, who had remained visibly "hidden" under the coffee table while Dudley was in the apartment, emerged and hopped into my lap. Mistakenly thinking that this small creature companion of mine was going to offer up some comfort, I pulled my head out of my hands and faced the feline.

"Well, that was something, eh, Rust?"

Rusty responded by looking me in the eyes and then slapping me in the face with one pathetic clawless paw. Having made his point (which, I assume was, "How dare you bring such trauma into my life, you bitch!"), he ran into the kitchen to "hide" under the table. He is now audibly snoring on my bed, his routine restored. Sheesh.

Moral of the story: Keep your keys close. Consider installing a system of locks that can't be conquered by a $2 metrocard. Cats are lazy neurotic bastards who have a false sense of invisibility.