Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Alex Littlefield

“Have you seen my legs?”

Francisco, the superintendent of our building, is sitting on the footstool outside of our bathroom, not fixing our leaking faucet. He is wearing his usual: saucer-sized eyeglasses, a yellow tank top, camo shorts, and construction boots. His hair is ash-grey, and evokes Beetlejuice or a Troll doll with its electrocution-victim frizz. His shins, which he is gingerly massaging, are covered with Spandex sheathes.

“I ran into a fire,” he says, as he peels off the protective skin.

Francisco’s legs are ravaged, plastic-looking things. He massages his left thigh just below the knee, and I see all the skin down to his ankle slide around in one solid sheet. I’ve heard that Francisco was a marathon runner, and also that he once got his son arrested for using drugs, and suddenly I wonder what sort of fire he was compelled to run through.

That information doesn’t seem to be forthcoming; Francisco is absently running his fingertips over his calf and scanning our kitchen thirstily. “Is there gonna be a glass of water?”

I’m amazed that we are having this conversation, though not for the obvious reason. We’ve never really been able to understand Francisco before. Whenever a problem crops up in our building (and they crop up frequently—the hot water is a repeat offender) and we have to call his cell, his side of the conversation is definitely not in any human language. Our neighbor thinks he conducts his phone calls in gobbledygook to avoid dealing with tenants’ work requests.

Now, though, he is perfectly intelligible. My roommate brings a glass of water from the tap, and Francisco takes a long, audible drink. He clinks the glass down on the counter top and goes back to working his legs, but one hand now stretches up to his forehead.

“Last night I fell down the stairs and hit my head real bad. Real hard. I had to go to the hospital.” Francisco looks up at us through lenses so thick they’re practically opaque. “I don’t know if I can do this job.”

“Yep,” my roommate says, moving past him. “It’s right over here, in the bathroom.”