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paid form of exercise, I guess. And if I had to empty office garbage cans for a meager living, 505 Richmond was a comparatively pleasant place to do it. In fact, 505 Richmond was a thing of beauty—an old warehouse that had been thoughtfully transformed into a funky, four-story office building. Many of the original features remained: tastefully worn pine plank flooring, huge casement windows that actually opened, sandblasted brick walls, twelve-foot-high ceilings with exposed rafters, and snaking ductwork that had been painted in rich Farrow & Ball colors.
    It was an impressive building that attracted well-heeled, artsy tenants. There were all kinds of design firms—industrial, fashion, furniture, graphic. There was an animation company, an ad agency, several entertainment lawyers and PR firms. There were photographers, film producers, and loads of multimedia types.
WUT Up
magazine was headquartered here. As was IZ Talent Management, one of the country’s most prestigious modeling agencies. On the main floor there was a groovy little café (just closing for the day by the time we got there) and a progressive day-care center (that looked like Keith Haring had a happy hand in the design). The whole joint just reeked of young, edgy success. And the fact that it was located in the middle of the club district—most of the surrounding warehouse buildings had been turned into ultra-groovy nightspots—further enhanced its hip factor.
    One of my favorite features of the building was its abundant plant life. On every floor, between the large industrialservice elevator and the passenger lift, the owner had installed a growing station. Long shelves of African violets, cyclamens, gloxinia, star jasmine, creeping fig, golden pothos, grape ivy, and emerald ripple glowing happy and healthy under fluorescent tube lights. There was also a lovely display of rock, cacti, and other succulents on the main floor by the front doors. And then there was the crowning glory, a rooftop patio, brimming with tangled vines and bursting with flowers, where people could go to eat their lunch or take a smoke break.
    I should point out that the only reason I know the names of all those plants is because Nathan taught them to me. Nathan had a part-time job taking care of them. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when he was done with his day shift at the video store, Nathan would come down to water, feed, and prune the plants. He was good with them, but he wasn’t into them. Nathan was into movies. Big time. I’d never met anyone so obsessed with cinema. Virginie and Fraser put on airs, but they didn’t know what they were talking about. They just adopted and parroted popular opinion (i.e., Indie film: good, Hollywood film: bad; Jean Seberg: good, Doris Day: bad). Nathan formed his own opinions, and really knew what was what. Plus he wasn’t snobby about it. It wasn’t like he saw only foreign art films featuring endless close-ups of sad-looking actresses with adorable overbites. He saw
everything
. He seemed to have seen every film ever made, from every country on the globe. His typical evening viewing might include a South African documentary, a Hong Kong action pic, and Julia Roberts’s latest romantic comedy. He was shocked that I had never seen or even heard of the original version of
The In-Laws
, one of his fave comedies. And he laughed his ass off when I said Antonioni sounded like something Chef Boyardee would make. Antonioni-os.
    Nathan gave me lists of “must-see” movies, most of which I’d never even heard of, all of which I enjoyed when I was able to hunt them down and view them (the truly obscure titles he would occasionally lend me from his personal collection). Helaid the titles on me in groupings that had a logic known only to him. This was one list:
Charade, Carnal Knowledge, Crumb, Cat Ballou
, and
The Conversation
. Semi-alphabetical, right? All C titles. But the list before the C list was not a B list, it was a Y list:
You