The lock on the front door of the tenement was the first lie the building told you. The lock said you are safe. The lock was wrong. The lock had been picked so many times that the lock had stopped being a lock and had become a suggestion. The suggestion was that this door was meant to be closed and the suggestion was ignored by everybody who needed to ignore it.

The lock had a key and the key had been copied so many times that the original key no longer existed. The key was a copy of a copy of a copy and each copy was slightly less accurate than the copy before it and by the tenth copy the key was an approximation of a key that fit an approximation of a lock on a door that was an approximation of security. The whole system was approximate. The whole system worked well enough. Well enough was the engineering standard of the Lower East Side.

The lock made a sound when it turned. A click. The click was the sound of a decision. The click said I am home or the click said I am leaving and the click did not care which. The click was the same in both directions. Coming and going sounded identical. The lock did not have an opinion about your direction. The lock only knew that the cylinder had turned and the bolt had moved and the door was either open or closed and either way the lock had done its job which was to click.

Every tenant had a ritual with the lock. Turn the key. Jiggle the handle. Push the door with your hip. The ritual was different for every tenant because the lock was different every day. The cold made the lock tight. The heat made the lock loose. The rain made the lock sticky. The lock was a weather instrument that nobody consulted but everybody experienced. You could tell the temperature by how hard you had to push the door.

I lost my key once a year. Every year. The key fell out of my pocket or fell behind the radiator or fell into the guitar case and disappeared into the felt lining where it lived until I found it three months later. Every time I lost the key I sat on the stoop and waited for a neighbor to come home and the neighbor let me in and the neighbor did not ask why I did not have my key because on the Lower East Side the question why do you not have your key was answered by the fact that you were sitting on the stoop. The stoop was the answer. The stoop said I live here and I cannot get in and I am waiting. The stoop was the waiting room of the locked out.