Читать книгу Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults) - Michael N Marcus - Страница 17

My wife’s cousin’s late husband, Artie Stepanian (who was also my best friend during many important years), was a Navy-trained electrician with an unusual innate understanding of architecture.

He could build anything, fix anything, and seemed to have X-ray vision. Artie could look at a wall or a building and instantly sense the path of least resistance for slithering a wire through it from point A to point B. Some of Artie’s admirers, especially me, called him the “Super Snake.”

In the 1980s, Artie frequently helped me to install phone systems in Manhattan. One night we had a rendezvous in a parking lot on East 30th Street that gained valuable space by using individual mini-elevators to raise cars up in the air, so other cars could park beneath them.

We left our vehicles around 8 p.m., and went into a nearby building to do our work. We came out around 2 a.m. and learned to our horror that the office had closed at midnight. Our keys were locked in the office, our transportation was eight feet up in the air, and no one answered the emergency phone number shown on the sign in the office window.

Artie was not one to panic, and there was some good news: in his wallet, he had a spare key to his van.

All we had to do was drive his van off the elevator, or build a ramp up to the van, and then drive to my house, get my spare key, and come back and rescue my car. Unfortunately, the chance of Artie’s aging van’s surviving an eight-foot drop was not very good, and we could not find any suitable ramp-building supplies.

Artie had been a “Seabee” in the Navy. The term comes from the abbreviation for “Construction Battalion.” Their motto is “We Build, We Fight,” and a mere lack of lumber would not stop Artie from defeating the parking lot.

Super Seabee Artie analyzed the Manhattan battlefield. He saw that the elevators were operated with an electric-hydraulic pump, controlled by a master power switch inside the office, with individual controls at each elevator. The obvious solution was to go into the office and flip the pump switch, but the office was locked.

Artie was unable to pick the lock, and smashing the window would have been noisy and messy. Lots of people were walking nearby. Some of those people were cops.

Artie analyzed more, and spotted an electrical panel on the outside back wall of the office. He opened his tool bag, opened the panel, traced the circuits, bypassed the master switch, and soon a motor hummed and lights came on.

He went to “his” elevator and brought down and liberated the van, and then he put the elevator back up. Next we drove to my house in Westchester, got my spare key, went back to Manhattan, rescued my car, restored the second elevator, and closed up the electrical panel.

While closing the panel, Artie was wounded in battle.

He got a bad cut on his finger, and closed the wound with black electrical tape. Then we went for hotdogs at Gray’s Papaya at 72nd and Broadway, and drove home.

I would have loved to have been at the parking lot at 7 a.m. when the manager came in, and opened the office, and saw two sets of keys hanging on the wall and two empty elevators up in the air.