I laughed. You don’t usually see that, a parrot struggle up to a high-rise window and land there and then stare at you.
The bird didn’t know what to do next. From the way it had landed there, it was apparent its wings had been clipped. It wasn’t going anywhere.
I was ten years old. My parents had people over. My dad had made friends with some of the salesmen where he worked. It was Ben and his wife Chris. Two Brits, very dignified, transplanted to casual California. My parents didn’t entertain much, so it was unusual. We had eaten dinner and we were sitting at the table. We were playing cards after dinner. We had a toy set of small plastic poker chips that were stacked in a rotating chip-holder. The chips were red, white and blue.
“I can get it,” I told my parents after the parrot made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere. “Let’s get a box and we’ll put him in it.” I had a parakeet, a small blue bird I had named Fluff when I got her five years before that. I didn’t think handling a parrot would be any different than putting a knuckle on little Fluff’s breast to get her to climb onto my finger.
“No, don’t try,” Ben warned me. “If that bird sinks its beak into your hand, he could rip your thumb off.”
It was still light outside.
We decided that the parrot belonged to someone who lived in the building, probably in the apartment right below ours, or maybe next door. So my dad called the apartment’s security service.
A guard came. He brought a box and carried a pair of heavy gloves. He was older. He had probably fought in World War II twenty years before.
He looked at the parrot. He didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smile.
“Yeah, its wings are clipped,” he said in response to our speculation. “Let’s try to save it.”
The guards held the box and opened our living room window, slowly, as the last blue light of the sky was turning black. The parrot was about a foot away from where the window opened. The guard popped out the screen, gently. He was trying not to make any sudden moves that would spook the bird.
Then he put on his gloves. He seemed worried.
“Here goes,” he said.
He stuck his arm, shoulder and head out the window and reached slowly toward the bird.
The parrot could’ve tried to fly with his clipped wings and risk falling twelve floors, or let this guy grab him, which is what happened. The bird’s instincts kicked in, though, and he squawked, shook, clawed and bit as the guard grabbed him. In an instant, the angry bird was in our apartment, held up in the security guard’s black leather glove.
“Hey! Gotcha!” the guard told the bird. Then he put him into the box. He said he would try to return the parrot to his home. We thanked him and he left.
My parents and their friends wrapped up their socializing. Sometimes when they had people over, I would bring out my accordion and play a simple version of “Lady of Spain.” I don’t remember if I had performed the night the parrot appeared.
One afternoon the next week, I was at the recreation center, a huge playground that served only about two dozen kids who lived in the apartment complex. Up until a few years before that, the complex was for adults only, and the center had some tennis facilities for tennis, handball, ping pong and even shuffleboard: retiree games. When they started allowing kids, they put in some tetherball poles and stocked a storeroom with footballs, basketballs and baseball gear we could check out for the afternoon.
The supervisor was named Carol and she was a pretty redhead. Once we had a talent show, where kids would lip-sync pop tunes and act out the stories. She came in a mini-skirted go-go dancers’ costume.
“You missed it,” my friend Tony said to another friend, John, a few days later and described what she wore.
“What happened when she bent over?” John asked.
“You saw,” Tony answered.
That afternoon, the week after the green parrot appeared on my window, Carol was playing jump-rope with Jessica and some of the other girls. Jessica was older, a year or two older than me, the other girls were younger. Jump-rope and jacks were what the girls did while the boys were playing football or basketball.
There were a couple of younger boys hanging around. One of them was Jessica’s brother, Louie. He was kind of fat. We didn’t play together much and we weren’t playing that day. I think I might’ve been watching the girls jump rope. Louie and the younger boys were having a water fight. They were filling their mouths from the fountain, and spitting at each other. Louie decided I’d be a good target too, and took a good shot at the back of my shirt.
“Don’t do that again,” I told him.
He ran back to the fountain and took another mouthful, then ran toward me.
“Don’t,” I warned him. He spit all over the front of my shirt.
“If you do that again, I’m going to clock you.”
He waited a few minutes, then came back alongside me, then stepped in front of me and spat a stream of water into my face.
I swung with a right hook and hit him in the ear. My arms were scrawny and I wasn’t a fighter. It was maybe the first time in my life I’d hit anyone. I didn’t think it would hurt him; I thought it would show him I was serious about getting him to stop spitting on me.
But he let out a wail, started crying and ran to his sister. She asked what happened. Between sobs, he managed to explain, and Carol heard.
“You know he’s got ear problems,” Carol told me. “You should never have hit him in the ear. Go home. Don’t come back for the rest of the week.”
Other kids had been banned from the rec center for fighting. I never thought I’d be one of them. Did I know he had ear problems? I don’t think I did. I would’ve stayed away from his ear. I wouldn’t hit him in the chest. I wasn’t thinking about it, though. I just wanted to get him to stop spitting that water at me.
“That was awful,” Jessica said to me. “I would expect that of some of the other kids, but not you.”
I think she meant I shouldn’t have done it because I was older and smarter than the other boys. Jessica was pretty and had long black hair. She was a little stocky, not really fat like Louis was. She didn’t say a lot and she didn’t laugh or smile as much as the other girls. I liked her. It was the first time she’d said anything that gave me an indication she approved of me. I think it was the first thing she ever said to me.
I went home and stayed in my room and thought it wasn’t fair. I really didn’t mean to hurt him.
Later that night my parents had people over again. That was really unusual. We really did not have company that often. They must’ve had such a good time that night the parrot landed on the windowsill that they decided to do it again.
It was Tom, a tall, thin guy with acne scars, and his girlfriend. I brought out my accordion after dinner and played “Lady of Spain.” Then we took out the cards and the poker chips again. We were playing cards after the sky outside turned to night.
A siren sounded, approaching. Rotating red lights flashed down below. Another siren approached, more lights swept across our window. We all got up to look down.
A fire truck and an ambulance stopped in the street between our building and the one facing ours, another pink 12-story like ours and the twenty other towers in the complex. The red lights flashed across the building façades. Firefighters and paramedics hurried up the stairs that led to the apartment entrance. It didn’t look like there was a fire, though.
There were a lot of old people in that complex. Every now and then one of them would have a stroke or a heart attack.
Sometimes it happened to people who lived in our building, sometimes even to someone who lived on our floor. They’d get taken away in an ambulance and I’d never see them again.
Mr. Lynch had moved in next door to us that year. He gave me a set of magnets. They were really interesting: Some of the magnets would stick together; others would repel each other. I liked to try to push the ones with opposite charges together, feeling for that invisible point of resistance. One day not too long after he gave me the magnets, I noticed his name wasn’t on the slot above his brass doorbell anymore.
“What happened to Mr. Lynch?” I asked my mom.
She told me she’d heard he had been walking down the street and collapsed. A stroke, maybe.
So I thought the ambulance and the fire truck were there for some old person.
Every now and then, late at night as I’d be falling asleep or early in the morning as I’d be waking up, I’d have some vague notion of activity outside one of the buildings in the complex.
“What was going on?” I asked my dad once. He explained:
Sometimes, an elderly person who lived in one of the buildings would get tired of being alone, get tired of being sick, get tired of being old. He would leave his apartment for the last time and walk down to the far end of the hallway. Each hallway had a door marked with the word Exit and the door led to the stairs. On the other side of the Exit door was a small balcony with a railing. Every now and then an old person would jump over the railing from one of the upper floors.
The temptation of those Exit doors, the old people looking at them every day when they’d come home to another night of illness, loneliness and despair … you can see how it could get to be too much.
As we watched the red lights flashing below, a car pulled up to the front of the apartment. A nicely dressed woman jumped out of the car and ran up the stairs, as the paramedics and firefighters had done, only faster.
“That’s not good,” my father said.
“No, that doesn’t look good,” my mother agreed.
There was dread in their voices.
I went to bed that night not knowing what had happened. I thought about the fire truck and the ambulance, though, and the others that came when people died. I thought about Pete.
When we first moved in, my mother brought me down to the rec center to introduce me to the director, a big Italian named Mike, so he could show me around and tell me what I could do there if I came after school: play caroms, tetherball, football, baseball or basketball or just hang around with the other kids. Mike was talking to an old guy named Pete. Pete was seventy, maybe eighty. He was full of energy, though. He bounced when he spoke. He work a cap, glasses, a Hawaiian shirt and shorts.
“First day here?” Pete asked. I nodded yes.
“I remember the day I got here. I was your age. I rode into town on a stage.” Then he pointed to a billboard out beyond the handball courts. “And they were hangin’ a guy right there!”
I started going to the rec center most afternoons and hanging around with the other kids who were about by age, including Jessica and Louie. Pete was there, too, most days, talking to Mike.
One day some of the kids found an injured gray dove.
“What should we do with it?” one of them asked me.
“Let me see,” I said.
They brought me over to the edge of the baseball diamond, to where the dove was immobile and cooing in distress. It couldn’t fly. I cupped my hands and picked it up. It was warm. I could feel its heart racing. It was heavier than I thought it would be.
“It’s dying,” I said. “Let’s put it in the bushes so it can die in peace.”
It felt it die in my hands. I put it in the bushes.
Then about the time the parrot landed on our windowsill, I told my mom I hadn’t seen Pete around the rec center recently.
“He killed himself,” she told me. “He jumped off the balcony one night.”
Three or four days after the night the ambulance and the fire truck came, my mom asked me if I’d heard about Louie. I hadn’t. She had bumped into Carol at the store and Carol told her she'd see Jessica arrive at the rec center alone on Tuesday morning.
“Where’s your brother?” Carol asked.
“My brother’s dead.”
At first Carol thought Jessica was joking. But then Jessica told her what happened.
Jessica and Louie stayed home that night while their parents went out to dinner. She filled the tub for Louie’s bath and gave him a battery-powered toy boat to play with. When she checked on him later he was dead. The toy boat electrocuted him when he put it in the water. She called the ambulance and then called the restaurant and had the manager send her parents home.
That was Louie’s mom running up the stairs that night. I saw her in her fur coat, rushing to the apartment where her son had just died.
I had punched him in the ear that afternoon. I really didn’t mean to hurt him. I’d be sorry even if it wasn’t one of the last moments of his short life.
My parents didn’t invite people over any more and we moved away the next year.
Every now and then I’d take friends from my new neighborhood back to see the apartments where I grew up. We’d go up to the twelfth floor and walk out through the Exit door at the end of the hallway and I’d tell them how the old people used to climb over that rail and let themselves fall to the ground below.
If you were a green parrot with clipped wings, would you flutter up to my twelfth-floor windowsill and sit there and stare at me? Of course not.
Unless you had something important you wanted to tell me, right? Something you really wanted me to know.
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