Stuff That I Have Noticed #51: Getting High (Not what you think)

My Dad was a climber. As a “hot-wire Lineman” he climbed power poles and steel towers and several times the very tall, very slender radio antenna towers around Bristol, Tennessee to replace the blinking red bulb at the tip top. He loved getting high.

During the war he biked to work.

Aa a kid at church I always sat in the balcony when I could. I loved to climb trees and built a tree house in our back yard maple when I was eight or nine … with a rope ladder.

Growing up in Bristol, then Hollywood I never saw a skyscraper except in movies. The tallest building in LA was city hall at a measly thirteen stories.

My friend, Scott Catlett was a 10 Meter platform diver and was training for the Olympic Games in LA one summer and I often went with him to the swim stadium and stood on the platform with him and other world class divers. I had been merely a spectator and received much kidding and many negative comments about my manhood due to my reluctance to risk life and limb bu flinging my body into space from the daunting height. Not possessing the skills of these superior athletes my greatest fear was that I couldn’t control my body position in the air and would thus hit the water flat on my back or belly. I figured that the safest thing would be to do a handstand and just “step” off thereby minimizing my spin. So that’s what I did and I had a straight, if imperfect, entry. I emerged from the water to cheers from the divers and when I mounted the platform once again Gary Tobian (Gold Medalist) told me that was the hardest thing I could have done. The easiest, I was told by all, was a standing, front, open pike one and a half. So I did that next and it was easy except for the part about hitting the water which, for me, never got any easier. So I got High and flew (for 1.5 seconds) before the painful SPLAT.

On my first trip to The City, only about fifty-two hours, the first thing I wanted to do was go to the top of the Empire State building. Wow! I seemingly could see the earth’s curvature. Thrilling! I was High.

When, ten months later, I finally moved here I lived for the first seven years in a ground floor apartment in Chelsea. Occasionally I visited people who had garden apartments and upper story pads (as we called apartments then) and was envious; especially the really high ones.

In a harbinger of our apartment to be, our wedding reception was on the top floor of the St. Moritz hotel. It had a terrace overlooking Central Park. It was high!

Once married we moved Elizabeth’s stuff from her 86th street place to my apartment and lived there mainly because of its proximity to my typography business. After four years in our tiny, cave-like apartment it was beginning to close in on her and one day in August (1971) she sat up in bed and said, “We gotta get out of here.” The next day we signed up with an apartment rental agent.

During September we saw eighteen apartments that more or less fit our specs. One day we went to a building on West End Avenue to see a two bedroom on the eleventh floor for $300. It was okay but seemed a bit cramped, the rooms were small. The Super mentioned that there was a penthouse available for $325. We had seen several penthouses for upwards of $500 but none were very nice. So not expecting much we had a look.

We were astonished, delighted, thrilled, overwhelmed. Only one bedroom but the apartment was spacious, filled with light it had a full bathroom with tub and shower, a small toilet off the kitchen and a walk-in closet. But the best part was about 1,200 square feet of terrace on three sides with amazing views. It was high!

We wanted it. Sweating bullets for two weeks we waited for our application to be accepted and late in September it was. And on October first, with the generous assistance of our friend Lowell Harris, we moved in.

We got high!

That was fifty years and four months ago ago as of today, 5 February 2022. And we have stayed high, never becoming inured to our lofty perch. To this day the last thing I do before going to bed is to walk out onto our terrace, inhale the 180 degree vista and silently thank the Universe for blessing us with this rent-stabilized penthouse.

Across the Hudson

The view west across the Hudson comprises several towns in New Jersey with multiple tall apartment houses and straight ahead, looking south and east, I won’t hazard a guess about how many residential buildings I can see with their legion of inhabitants. When I gaze out at our panorama I consider the fact that I can see the dwellings of more people than live in both Dakotas, Vermont and Wyoming combined. My mind boggles.

I get High!

R. Buckminster Portrait

Twenty-two years ago Elizabeth and I with our canine pal, Bucky drove across the country in our dear departed Saab visiting friends in New Mexico, Arizona, California and Colorado. A sub-text of the trip was to discern if there was another place that called out to us as a possible new home. We loved New York and yet we rarely took advantage of the many attractions that draw throngs to our City, museums, theatre and that sort of stuff that makes The City so great; so maybe there was another place for us. But the more we saw of distant locales the more we realized that this is our place in the Universe; right here in our private aerie overlooking one of the greatest cities in the world (and part of New Jersey).

Just thinking about it… I get High.