This afternoon I went to G.L.’s apartment to clean his venetian blinds, which had been soiled during a fire. I first met this man last week when I was sent to unpack his books and arrange them on the shelves in alphabetical order. He’s got quite a library: leather-bound editions of Jane Austen and Emile Zola sandwiching several cookbooks and countless manuals devoted to the study of sadomasochistic sex. This morning G.L. answered the door in his bathrobe, drinking black coffee from a mug shaped to resemble a boot. He is not a pleasant man but seems to get along fine in the world as long as he has his way. He led me to the nearest window and suggested I use Formula 409 and paper towel, but that would have taken me weeks. Having experience with blinds I thought it might be quicker and more productive if I took them down and washed them in the tub. I thought he would argue with me but instead he took off his bathrobe saying, “Sure, whatever.” He stood for a moment in his underpants before walking into the bathroom, where he ran water into the sink, preparing to shave something. G.L.’s bathroom is tiny and I thought he might need some privacy, so I just sort of stood around the living room until he called out, “Hey, are you going to clean those blinds or not? I’m not made of money.”

I took down one of the blinds, slowly and carefully as if I were removing a tumor from a sensitive area of the brain. I stood with the blinds in my hands and counted to twenty. Then to thirty. He called out again and I had no choice but to press against him as I entered the bathroom. I passed him at the sink and made my way to the tub, where I knelt down and commenced to bathe the venetian blinds in water and ammonia. G.L. had a television propped beside the sink, a portable TV the size of a car battery, which he would constantly curse and re-channel. I couldn’t see the screen but listened as he groused his way from one Saturday-afternoon program to another before settling on an infomercial devoted to something called “The Oxygen Cocktail.” From what I could hear I gathered that The Oxygen Cocktail is some sort of a pick-me-up made from clarified air. The commercial suggested that early cavemen enjoyed a highly satisfying oxygen content, which afforded them the stamina to produce magnificent cave paintings and still find the energy to hunt mastodons. Participants in the recent Olympic Games testified to the virtues of The Oxygen Cocktail, and I listened while bending over the bathtub, scrubbing a sadist’s blinds with ammonia. I wanted to part the shower curtain, curious to see this Oxygen Cocktail. Does it come in a can, a bottle, a nasal spray? Were the Olympians in swimsuits or street clothes?