There was a man who was called by everyone who knew him, and some of those who didn't, the Man with the Ladder. From time to time, he was called other things but he paid no attention to them. I did hear someone call him Rong Chiu Shi once, to his face, and someone else called him Nicholas Strayte, behind his back, but if he had a name besides the Man with the Ladder he never acknowledged it.
He said of someone else by way of excusing some idiosyncrasy "which of us who first reaches for the world with the top of our heads and our shoulders, is not sour faced and mean spirited." He was not sour faced and mean spirited. But like many people who were born in strange places, like cabs, or the waiting rooms of rail road stations, or the backs of envelops, he felt deprived by the circumstances of his birth, and, like many of us, he also felt misunderstood. In fact, he was not widely misunderstood. His wife understood him very well, and the man who sold him cigars understood him perfectly. There was only one person who really misunderstood him, misunderstood him through and through, thoroughly and completely, and that was himself.
Slander was anathema to him, but gossip always rang true, no matter how bizarre. He tried to be economical about his egoism and unless he burned his finger, or had a toothache, or was cut off at a stoplight, or was buying a shirt, he did not place undo importance on himself. He could not fathom how the people of other countries tolerated their government's inhuman oppression and casual persecution of innocents, and he thanked God that his country did such things only when they were necessary to preserve freedom in the world. He was moved to tears by cruelty to animals and children, but he believed that cruelty, when it was applied to adults, was probably, in some measure, always deserved.
He was not particularly witty, nor was he especially clever. Like most of us, he was moved by contradictory impulses: conflicting winds blew him in opposite directions. He craved justice, but found himself perpetuating injustice, because those who required justice did not seem to deserve it. He championed charity, but found himself being uncharitable, because, at the moment it was required, it was inconvenient or embarrassing. He compromised, because he could not imagine how he could preserve his integrity without compromising, but he compromised unwillingly. He found himself wishing things were different, so that he could be different, but he acquiesced in the way things were, because he felt that nothing could be done given the way things were.
He longed for romance, but suspected passion. He had faith in science, but distrusted scientists, whom he felt were charlatans, foisting elaborate fantasies on an unsuspecting public, in order to keep their nests well feathered. Wealth and success filled him with awe and envy, but he was convinced that all that was required to achieve them was a narrowness of purpose and bad manners.
He sought wisdom much as we do, in the columns of newspapers and in articles in magazines. When he found it, he circled the relevant section and clipped it out, and pinned it to a bulletin board, or stuck it under a magnet on the door of the refrigerator. But he found, as we do, that most of the wisdom of the world is inconvenient, contradicts common sense, and is hard to make serve some useful purpose; so he made a special place in his mind for wisdom, separate from the ideas by which he regulated his life.
He felt that television was the only mirror that showed him and his life as it really was, yet he deplored the silliness and baseness that he saw on the tube. He felt that privacy was the only valuable collective good. But he also believed that public scrutiny was the only guarantee of virtue and honesty. He felt the need for more discipline and control over himself; yet he was convinced that he depended in some way upon incontinence and the exploitation of his own impulses. He believed that his strength derived from his virtues. He was certain that he was reasonable because of his strength. But he was sure that others were strong because of their vices, and were reasonable out of weakness. He lamented what he took to be the only indisputable truth about the world; that his security depended on the insecurity of others, whose tenuous position made them vicious.
He was a very ordinary looking man, 5 feet 11, medium build, brown hair and eyes. He wore shoes when shoes were required, but liked to go barefoot when he could. He kept his fly zipped and his shirt buttoned. He wore an overcoat in the winter, and a bathing suit when he went swimming. All in all you would recognize him anywhere, although you would probably no more notice him than you would notice the woman who sells you newspapers, or the man who sells you fruit in the Korean grocery, or the cop on the corner.
He was born and grew up in the Bronx. He stayed in the neighborhood in which he grew up long after everyone else he knew moved to Queens. He fell in love with a dancer and pledged to follow her anywhere. He made good on his promise by following her halfway around the world, ending up in a loft in Soho, before lofts were fashionable, and before Soho was Soho. When she died suddenly, he postponed redeeming his pledge. He stayed where he was while the neighborhood moved around him. He married and divorced, and married again. He had two and a half children and mourned the half, all the time his full size, full term children were growing up.
In any conflict he usually knew which side the truth was on, but he always hesitated a moment before he chose which side to support, until it was clearer which side was likely to win. He struggled against his limitations and lost. He was defeated in his fight with his baser impulses. He tried to nurture his unique virtues, but failed. His only victory was against the desire to give up and surrender, to stop losing so consistently.
He was a working man, that is a man who worked. He carried a ladder around during the day, because he needed it for his work. He did whatever a man with a ladder can do that is useful, and people will pay for. He cleaned and painted ceilings. He rescued animals from trees. He installed fixtures. But mostly he changed light bulbs.
Except for one or two unessential details, he was very much like you or me. One thing that set him apart from us is that he was a good listener. He listened to the world around him, not only with his ears but with all of his body. Because he was an accomplished listener, he heard things between the words that people spoke, between the sounds that animals made, and between the noises that came out of mechanisms and devices that most of us miss. Someone said of him that he insisted on keeping his door open, even in the winter, even when the snow blew in, and in the summer, even when the air was filled with dust.
He was different from us also, because odd and strange things happened to him. I am not sure that these two characteristics were not two aspects of the same thing. I believe that unusual things might as frequently happen to any of us, if we did not keep our eyes closed, and our head turned, until the unfamiliar and uninvited got bored, and went away.
People called him the MWL, not because he carried his Ladder around when he was working, but because he carried it around almost all of the time. When he wasn't working, he carried it around to sit on and listen to the world from. On it, he thought about the world, and made up stories. If making up fairy tales and fables qualifies anyone after Aesop as a writer, you could call him a writer. They were quaint little pieces full of misshapen humor, and somewhat incomprehensible characters; he baited them with morals.
At some point he started to write down the things that happened to him and tell them to his friends. But as usual, a strange thing happened to him. People began to tell stories about him. He would hear these stories second or third hand, and he would write them down too; pretty soon what happened to him, and what happened to the MWL in stories that people told became confused. For a while he became convinced that he had a double in the world to whom more interesting things happened than happened to him. His writings became laced with jealousy and envy. As time went on, the characters became confused and, in his own mind, he started to become a character in a story that people told about him, or about the other MWL. He finally decided that, while he would continue to tell his friends stories about things that happened to him, he would stop writing MWL stories down, and let his memory sift, and sort, and forget, so that he could keep his life in order.
I never read any of the stories he wrote before he abandoned pencil and paper, but I have collected some of the stories people told about him. These tales are not about him, or, they are about him only as they are about each of us, who is a point at which many lines intersect, all of them wavy and crooked. I hope you read them with pleasure and remember.