The Universe Understood At Long Last …

The Universe Understood At Long Last

as Indifferent Caretaker of Human Debris

written by: Joseph Amendolare

 

“Two teas both with sugar please, in the back of an alley” – Elton John

 

Hot asphalt, stale humid air, and Herb Alpert’s “Rise” on the radio.
That was the vibe of the city.
That summer.

On the streets of Williamsburg, a Spanish man with a pushcart poured coconut syrup over a ball of shaved ice. Handed it to you in a paper cone. If you walked into a bodega, you found raw chicken melting on plates behind glass counters.

Tommy Sullivan came out of that area. Shot in the eye with a BB gun as a kid, he went through life permanently cockeyed. They called him Tinkerbell or Tommy Tink, but if you said it to his face, he was quick to raise his fists. He became a dispatcher for a gypsy cab company and would one day vanish, later to be found shot dead somewhere in the East New York section of Brooklyn.

The flophouse. Maybe near Hewes St., maybe closer to Marcy; on Broadway under the el before the bridge. A set of narrow stairs to the 2nd floor; thick plexiglass cut with an opening and a counter behind a wire cage for the duty shift. A crude sign taped to the wall: two dollars a night.

If you looked ok you were buzzed in.
Often those not ok were buzzed in.
It was that kind of place.

Had a latrine with gang showers like you’d find in prisons; shared by all.

I pitched in here and there; clean the sinks, mop the floor, get the garbage out.
Somehow, if it was straightened up, it seemed more tolerable.

One of the toilets was permanently stained the color, perhaps, of an old enema, the porcelain itself streaked coffee-brown. Likely the result of someone suffering a bleeding ulcer years ago.

That one could not be cleaned. No amount of Clorox could purify it.

Somehow we belonged to each other.
Poverty was common; yet there was also a shared philanthropy.
None of us were particularly skilled at loneliness.

My own salary was $2.50 an hour. Minimum wage. Working part-time in one of the last functioning pharmacies in the area. Fill up a tray with plastic vials; regulate the supply of amber-colored bottles; take out the garbage. We sold the usual things: shaving cream, deodorant, Pepto-Bismol. Once in a while someone asked for Oil of Cloves, and God forbid we didn’t have it. The owner threw a fit.

Michael was a white guy with a missing front tooth and slicked-back hair from somewhere down south. One day he stopped with a flat tire on the shoulder of the old West Side highway. When he went back later, both doors were wide open, and the trunk was popped. The only remaining tire was the flat. So he left it. Could talk a mile a minute and kept going for hours. He’d run errands; go out in all weather to get cigarettes or a cup of coffee.

If he got something for me, I’d always tip him 50 cents or a buck.
He drank, but he was trustworthy.
Given the situation, you needed someone you could trust.

Nap had a promising fastball at one time. A few big-league teams looked him over. Now in his 60s, he’d sit in a bathrobe sipping malt liquor out of cans wrapped in paper bags and fall asleep in front of the black-and-white TV set in the lobby. Frequently slamming his hand against the side of the cabinet when the picture went bad. Claimed he saw cryptic messages in the cracked ceramic floor tiles.

“Look here,” he told me one day, straightening up,
“I done seen her with an older man. I do believe she is pregnant.”

When Nap spoke, he often said things only he himself understood.

Chappie, the kindly black gentleman who ran the place.
Whenever there was an issue, an overdose, a bloody fistfight, or life in general, his favorite phrase was:

“Whaddaya gonna do.”

There was an old Bunn-o-Matic always with hot coffee and a stack of Newport 100s he kept on the desk. He appreciated that I cleaned the latrine and would let me sit in the cage with him where he’d speak of train travel, biscuits and gravy, Mickey Mantle, Arnold Palmer, and an America that no longer existed. He was on Medicaid and suffering from cancer at that time. I called him Pop. When he died a year or so later, I truly felt loss. I grieved for this man, who’d served in the Army years before I was born, married and had two children of his own (adults themselves by that time), and I pondered over the universal cruelty of his last years alone in a place such as this.

His replacement was not so nice.

Yes;
‘Whaddaya gonna do.’

In the meantime I took civil service exams; did my laundry in a coin-op on a corner known for not very good things. Frequent gunshots, for example.

At times I thought God himself might show up with a revolver and pull the trigger.

Huddled together, seeking a sense of dignity and shelter in a world which offered little of either, I fell asleep one night dreaming of people I went through high school with. Asking me if I’d been down the basement. Hold up, I told them, there is no basement. Then a beautiful girl I once knew appeared in expensive sunglasses, asking me for a quarter. I handed her my wallet stuffed with 50-dollar bills.

As I woke up, I heard the new manager yelling at Nap for something downstairs in the lobby.