I woke up in the hospital. I was afraid to look at the place where my hand had been before. Eventually, I looked, and I was very happy because it turned out that it was still there, sewn up. I had neither legal residency nor insurance, I was working illegally, but at the hospital, they didn’t investigate. They saw that there was a man going by with his arm next to him, and they sewed it up. In Poland, they would not have sewn it up.

When I first came to Greenpoint, eight of us lived on mattresses in the apartment on Leonard Street, in two rooms with a kitchen. No ventilation. You could cut the air with a knife, especially when they started to smoke cigarettes and drink vodka. Only cockroaches felt good there; I had never seen them in Poland.

I wanted to build a house in Poland, so I got a fake invitation to the US. Feel free to say it: The dead man invited me. When I first came to New York in 1987, I thought the city was dirty and more messy than Poland. And this needs to be talked about more.

In the beginning, I used to say: I’ll stay a few more months and then come back. I started working in a landfill, a sorting facility for house demolition waste. Separating wood, paper, and metals. Hard work on the Greenpoint coast. Here the manager was a very nice black man. We made a connection right away, although I was still not speaking English. I made a good impression on the manager, and he allowed me to work on a bulldozer.

Working in a cab was almost like working in an office. I waved the grapple bucket, the one with the jaws,   and the workers put on whatever they had to put on. We worked from seven in the morning, sometimes until 10 PM. Before we were to leave, the square was supposed to be empty, and everything had to be sorted.

We had a lunch break between noon and 1 pm in two rounds: one from twelve to twelve-thirty
and the second to 1 PM. It is important because, thanks to this hour, we could think about the additional income, which was illegal sales of non-ferrous metals, such as copper, zinc, and aluminum, which we got from the landfill. They were precious.

The Spanish driver invited me into this venture. We put these metals aside and drove to the metal collection point during the break. When a boss, a Jew, came to count us before twelve thirty and he was missing someone, they were saying, for example, Roman is at an earlier lunch today. And when he came to count after twelve-thirty, they said that I was on a later lunch. There was such a mess that the boss didn’t realize what was happening, and we were earning a hundred dollars per head.

Once we went to the metal collection point, it took us a long time to hand over the goods. We came back after one o’clock. And unfortunately, the boss was also already there and counting employees. And we were in the company truck. Shock.

We park the car, run to the landfill, and everyone goes to do any job, so the boss can see that we are there and doing something. I went to the bulldozer and saw garbage, so I pulled it out. At the same time, a colleague went to the cabin. A friend closed the bucket when I put my hand in to take out the trash. I also saw my severed hand disappear in the bucket, and I fainted.

I woke up in the hospital. I was afraid to look at the place where my hand had been before. Eventually, I looked, and I was very happy because it turned out that it was still there, sewn up I was in America. I had neither legal residency nor insurance, I was working illegally, but at the hospital, they didn’t investigate. They saw that there was a man going by with his arm next to him, and they sewed it up. In Poland, they would not have sewn it up.

They said it would take two years at least to be fit. They immediately found a Polish lawyer who said that now I would become a millionaire. He calculated that such a hand would be eight million in damages. And I believed him, although when the police came to the hospital, I could guess that something was wrong. In the end, it turned out that not only was I in the States illegally, but the dump was also illegal, the boss was illegal, and the company I was working for was not on the records. I lost all the court cases, and after two years, I was awarded a pension, a working compensation, of $200.

What was there to do? I got myself some fake documents again and went to work at the cemetery. Unfortunately, I had a second accident at the cemetery. Once, we were lifting tombstone slabs, and this sewn-in hand couldn’t handle the load.

I dropped it, and the slab fell on my leg. And it happened again that my fingers were cut off, this time from my leg. Again the lawyers promised millions. More, because

I was working legally, albeit on a fake Social Security number, which I piled on for fifty dollars.

The papers went to court, but the lawyer, an old geezer, couldn’t cope, the papers flew out of his hands at the trial. We lost.

Let me tell you, I was sorry, even though the case ended up in an increase in my pension. That’s what I’m living on at the moment. I have a city flat for a couple of hundred dollars a month, I make some extra from time to time, I can’t complain.