SPRING CLEANING
by Mike DeCapite

On Saturday morning, the first day of March, I stood below two peeling elm trees and a yellow wall. The wall was cinder block with plywood for shopwindows, all of it painted over in a flat golden yellow of differing opacities and textures where brick and plywood and underlying colors and thousands of old staples had variously accepted the paint. About six feet up was a massive rectangular wooden frame, like a marquee, rounded at the top corners, painted brown. Centered there was a white Masonite sign, much too small for the frame, attached by rusted nailheads, with the word LIQUORS skillfully painted in a dull faded green with a visible drag of the brush.
Down the avenue was a mist of green buds in grey branches.

The bus came.

COMMON TRASH LUMBERMAN No Parking Rainbo DO NOT ENTER COMPLETE AUTOMOTIVE SERVICE Grubb & Ellis FOR SALE RENT-A-CAR Thai Cuisine INTERNATIONAL PLUMBING SUPPLY SHOWROOM CROCKER’S LOCKERS SELF-STORAGE ACE VIDEO DRUM SHOP The Shadow Lounge FURNITURE Since 1895 FOLSOM SASH AND DOOR Gold and Brass Plating OPEN TO THE PUBLIC FULLER O’BRIEN PAINTS GOLDEN AUTO MUFFLER & BRAKE Apex Hand Car Wash Smog Check FOREIGN DOMESTIC PUBLIC PARKING $8.00 TANNER WELDING White Dragon Kung Fu Academy LuLu Hawthorne Mehfil Indian Cuisine Krispy Kreme COURTYARD Marriott NOVOGRADAC & COMPANY PARK HERE SPECIAL MONTHLY RATE ONE WAY SPEED LIMIT 30 LEFT LANE MUST TURN LEFT.

The bus let me off at the bay. I stood near a fresh deposit of green-and-white seagull droppings for a look out over the greenblack waters. Then I crossed to the YMCA, where I rode the bike for an hour.

I made my way back to a restaurant at 23rd and Valencia. I ate white bean and radicchio soup and a dish of broccoli rabe and read a New Yorker piece about Joseph Cornell.

On Sunday morning I bundled the covers into the closet and folded the futon into a couch. My room, ten-by-eleven, hadn’t been swept or dusted in months.

From the back room off the kitchen I retrieved a broom and dustpan.

I put on a Fairport Convention CD and wheeled my desk into the room, trailing a tangle of electrical cords. Two bar napkins had fallen behind. I read them, threw them away, and swept out the corner. I sprayed a t-shirt with Endust. Kneeling behind the desk, I wiped down its metal supports, base and wheels. I wiped off the scanner, a manuscript, Caesar And Christ, and the shelf underneath them. I ran the electrical cords through the rag, wheeled the desk into position, and took the dustpan to the kitchen garbage.

Back in the room, I cleared the desk of CDs, tapes, clock, cigarettes, matches, candle, and notepad. I cleaned the laptop keyboard key by key with 409 and a fresh t-shirt, wiped the screen, and dusted the boombox. In the kitchen, I washed and dried the glass ashtray. I put the mousepad on my floor, sprayed it, and wiped it off. I sprayed the blond desktop and wiped it clean of dust, ashes, coffee stains and the residue of spilled whiskey. I dusted the salt lamp and clip light, and then arranged everything just so.

I got to work in another corner. I dusted the television antenna, the television, a Fat City video, and the triangular pine stand which Tommy built for me. I dusted the spines of the reference books on its middle shelf and squeezing into the corner I dusted stacks of books, and the heavy nude-woman bottle opener from Russell, and shoehorn, and Walkman tape recorder, and the shelf. I removed everything from the bottom shelf to the floor, wiped the shelf, and, as I put them back, wiped off the following items: sunglasses, tin of shoe polish, Hide Food, two shoebrushes, hairbrush, a comb which I took to the bathroom and washed in hot water, a slim bottle of grappa, a bottle of Red Label, Angostura bitters, a flask from Guy, assorted vitamin bottles—some of which I used and some which were optimistic fads (lutein? DMAE? ornithine?—I tossed them out), talc, a tube of arnica gel, a can of compressed air, a pack of lightbulbs, the weights from the handles of a jumprope, lighter fluid, two rings of never-used keys, and a small wooden box made and inscribed for me by Sheelagh in the Payne-Whitney Clinic and containing my wedding band, an old lighter, and other rings.
I set four pairs of black boots and shoes on the pine trunk and swept the floor.

I pushed aside Delight’s autumn-leaf curtain and sprayed the alley window. Paper napkins came away wet with the brownish-red residue of cigarette smoke.

I sprayed and wiped the glass of the two framed pictures on the blue walls: a collage given me by George Schneeman for a book cover and an Albrecht Dürer cowslip plant.

In the back room was a mop. I opened the door on a morning of nearly blinding brightness.
The light became the deck and backyard, the backs of houses and wooden stairways under a blue sky. It glared as yellow flowers in long grass.

Under the kitchen sink I found a bottle of cleaning fluid, Maestro Limpio, and poured some into a grey plastic bucket. I filled the bucket with hot water and carried it down the hall. I mopped the painted blue floor and left its clean thin shine to dry.

I went for a walk, feeling like I’d been shot from a rifle into sunlight. I passed a spray of the same yellow flowers leaning toward the sun, and a construction site where a butterfly’s shadow floated across the sidewalk...

That night I was on the couch reading a book. Lamplight lay in the painted grain of the floorboards. The window was open on the night, where things were alive again.

I quote Adam Gopnik quoting Joseph Cornell’s journal. “...as usual a significant kind of happiness is difficult to get into this ‘cataloguing’ but there it was none the less——‘this on-the-edgeness’ of something apocalyptic, something really satisfying.”

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