Nick Who Fell

The house at the center of this shot is one that I painted about a dozen years ago, and in which I lived for several months as well. The reason I was hired to do the job was that the previous painter & handyman could not. Nick was his name, and one day he was high on a ladder in the alley, attempting to fasten a long board along the roof's edge, where he and the homeowner --his friend who was on another ladder, holding the other end of the board. Nick reached too far from the ladder, the ladder slid sideways, and Nick fell to the ground. He was 29 years old, and some of my friends knew him. A gregarious fellow, he had done a locally noteworthy act of Peace activism during the first Gulf War. All over Center City Philadelphia and many times during the war simple, anonymous leaflets would appear wheat-pasted to walls and poles for morning commuters to read. "60,000 Iraqis dead," and then some days later the number would be higher: "90,000 Iraqis dead," and nothing else. The local press was as puzzled as everyone else, and I had no idea who had done this until about fifteen years later. The leaflets were effective in that they had thousands of people talking about them, and the messages were just too stark to misunderstand or to side-step without thinking of dead bodies.

I was to hear about Nick fairly often during my stay in the house. The fall left him quadriplegic and almost without any ability to communicate, and he stayed in a nursing home for five years, then he died. His sweetheart visited his bedside five days every week until the end, and the couple whose house he had been fixing stopped in on weekends. Once when I was painting the front of the house, the wind blew my ladder down as I stood on the porch roof, and a neighbor set it back up for me. Without thinking, I mentioned this later to my customers, and they went silent and looked at each other. The original ladder from which Nick had fallen was, by the way, cut into pieces about six feet long and made into a shelving system in the basement, as a way to cope with the tragedy.

For years when I was a freelance house painter, I would tell each new helper about "Nick who fell," and it was pretty effective in making them understand that ladders --even short ones --are not to be used carelessly.