This Floor: The Coen Brothers. That Floor: Nude Therapy.

Icould see, as I stood out on the ledge looking in, that they wanted to escape their cubicles. They’d watch me as I mopped down the windowpane, wiped with my squeegee, checked for streaks. And as I detached myself and came back inside, the workers looked at me not with awe or a sense of longing but with a sense of leaving. They’d pepper me with questions, and, I admit, I sort of played up the derring-do, highlighting the risk and the voyeurism without dwelling on just how dangerous, dirty, and exhausting the job could be. I’d tell them about accidentally dropping an air conditioner onto Park Avenue or nearly falling to my death on Fifth. But I also made sure to tell them about my band since I wanted to make clear that cleaning windows was my day job, that I was really a drummer; I was doing this in order to make music.

I used to clean the Coen brothers’ windows. Their office was as cool as you’d think it would be, full of pictures and props from their films. Once, a delivery guy arrived with reels and reels of footage of their latest feature—some project called Fargo. Cleaning offices, you could visit different worlds just by going down the hall and knocking on the next door. 500 Greenwich Street—six stories of 1890s brickwork with heavy, oversize metal tilt-in windows that were a total drag to clean—had an amazing range of tenants. A German Neo-Expressionist artist named Rainer Fetting; the Jose Hess diamond-cutting shop; the Cucaracha Theatre; Fred Newman’s social-therapy practice, where patients would talk in the nude; a service organization for the blind; a financial-investigations firm. Once, an investigator left his pistol on the windowsill and I had to ask if he’d please remove it. Now 500 Greenwich is condos.