In which Our Hero makes a new friend
“Is this your pillow?” The well-groomed man from Galveston Texas holds out my pillow in offering.
“Yes,” I say and take it. He sits down beside me, to my right, and immediately plugs his charger into our shared outlet.
Three minutes later, I ask my father, “is that your light that’s pointing down at me?”
My father says no. I illuminate my screen. The screen shows an advertisement, then another. The clock in the corner counts down from nearly 3 minutes.
“Three minutes worth of ads?” I say to no one in particular.
The light switches off. “It was my light,” says the well-groomed man from Galveston Texas.
“You heading to Paris for business or vacation?” I ask.
“Neither. My wife’s father died.”
“Recently?”
“Today.”
“Was it sudden?”
“Very sudden. Heart attack.”
You ever talk to someone and it’s especially smooth, like the caramel inside of a Lindt chocolate truffle oozing slowly out of its shell. If I liked men and he weren’t married and I weren’t engaged…
Harrison is an interior designer. Not an architect (that’s the requirement to be a floor plan submitter in New York), but he works with a lot of architects. He draws the plans for them to submit.
I check the specifics. “If I showed you a bathroom and said ‘is that a prototype?’, you’d be able to spot it in your sleep?”
“Pretty much.”
“Feel free to say no. Can I ask you a couple questions?”
He agrees. I pull up my floorplan. “I got these three bathrooms. This left one is accessible. And the right ones: one of the doorways is 28 inches, the other 24 inches, and one of them opens up off the kitchen.”
“You’ll be fine,” Harrison says. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“But bathrooms need to have doorways 32 inches clear.”
“It’ll probably get through. You have the accessible one over there.”
“That’s not code.”
“I know. But they’re [the examiners are] reasonable. And the bathroom off the kitchen: I’ve never seen it enforced.”
“That’s one thing I’ve loved about New York City: the rules are only rules if you’re also bothering other people. If you aren’t affecting anyone, people generally let you alone.”
Harrison laughs. “And even if they don’t, you can always draw 32 inch doors and then just install smaller ones. We’ve been working for five years with a building that requires 34 inch doors. We’ve never installed a single one.”
Thank you, Harrison.
Yes, that is my pillow.
Thank you for helping me sleep easier.
Julian Wise 