Monday, December 18, 2017

A Hero of the People

It was surreal. The complacent and generally anonynmous bourgeois yellow brick of 679 Ocean Parkway with the iron gate in front appeared suddenly and frighteningly on the news last night. This, apparently, according to the news, was where the parents of the Port Authority bomber resided and where I suspect, (long before the news announced it)  the bomb was but together.--a short two block walk to the 'F' Train. It is really two buildings in one. 679 is the mirror image of 665 and they are joined together like Siamese twins by a nondescript cantilever that overlooked a comparatively unkempt garden where I had my first, "show me yours and I'll show you mine" sexual experience when I was eight or nine years old with my next door neighbor--a degree of privacy sufficient to a nine-year old (she was actually eleven) being afforded by unkempt bushes and dead trees. My parents lived in 665 on the sixth floor until 2007 when my father went into the nursing home,  forty some-odd years. This is what I then and still call home though I (much) later moved into a studio in the adjacent 679 after I returned from the Merchant Marine where I lived in a studio apartment on the second floor up until I got married. 

The major difference between the two buildings that I recall, (besides their propensity to harbor terrorists), was that 665 always seemed bathed in the odor of somehow European friend onions and some meat, probably beef, coming from some apartment on every floor except the 4th floor for some reason. 679 was by comparison far less 'ethnic' far more antiseptic particularly when it came to communal odors and smelled only of the acrid fluid that they used to clean the granite floors. What I most remember most about that latter was the constant warfare between my blond, heavy-set office-manager neighbor, Renee, and her red-haired (as I recall) upstairs neighbor that lasted several years until Renee contracted Bell's Palsey. A truce ensued. The banging on the ceiling and pounding on the floor, (depending on your perspective), finally ceased,-- or at least abated.

The windows of my bachelor studio overlooked the side of a the red private house on Webster Avenue where one, Arthur Smith lived. Arthur was somewhat an oddball and lived there with his mother well into his fifties until she died around 1983. I sometimes had glimpsed her thru my window, a corpse of Whistler's mother, sitting in a rocker. I had known Arthur from around the neighborhood growing up but had never been really friendly with him. He seemed somehow indefinably aloof probably because he had gone to St. Rose of Lima and I had gone to public school. He was not athletic, never participated in any of the street games we as kids played almost unceasingly growing up. He had no other perceptible interests except model trains. He was not the kind of person anyone seemed to seek out for company and he seemed to like it that way. Pale and heavyset, with  black curly hair as well as perpetually untied shoes and a half tucked shirt which would have driven my father crazy. My father had a thing about half-tucked shirts. In his Yoda-like way he would tell me 'tucked or untucked--there is no half-tucked." Arthur had this way of looking at you sideways with a look of frightened contempt which seemed to imply he thought you might be considering taking a swing at him. This accented all the least attractive elements of his face and implied, 'yeah, well, I may be a freak but I'm still better than you.' I don't know what had happened to his father. He must have died awhile back.  To add to his unappealing demeanor he a very high voice and this stutter that completed the implicate portrait of a cornered rat. We knew each other only by sight and neither of us had ever made any effort to engage the other as children.

 After I got married, my wife and I moved into a one bedroom apartment on Kings Hiway across from the cemetery near Flatbush Avenue, around the corner from an Israeli nightclub. After she had the children we moved into the first floor of 256 Webster Arthur's house. It was far more spacious and I put in an extra bedroom in the basement for  my wife's children from her former marriage who at the time were five and eight and who had been living in Poland with their grandmother in Lodz in Poland until they all three joined us in Brooklyn. I think I was in shock at the time. In the space of two years I had gone from being a bachelor in a studio to the father of five (but there were other reasons for me to go into a perpetual state of shock which I won't go into). In any case our neighbor at 258 Webster were Sal and Irene, Sal was a short, balding Italian who kept a fig tree and a grape arbor in his back yard. He was married to the solidly heavyset, red-headed Irish woman named Eileen who like Bermuda shorts and who, like Arthur, had some kind of speech impediment that rendered social interaction difficult but her was much more severe. Eileen who always had her hair pulled back in a bun loved the triplets and she cooed over them constantly. My theory was that the speech impediment was partly a result of her pulling her hair back so severely that it deformed her lip muscles but I could not prove that nor could I ever understand what she was saying to me or to them for that matter but I loved to watch her fuss over them and the fact that it was unintelligible made it more endearing much more-so than people who would intentionally engage in baby talk which always seems to me to be pretentious and a harbinger or worse things to come once actual meaning was introduced into the infant's life.

So, we lived there on Webster until the fall of 1989 until we moved to Monroe in Orange County. By then Arthur had fallen in with a bad crowd and also there were also drug dealers cruising the back alley between 256 and the yellow apartment house on Ocean Parkway. I don't blame Arthur for that particularly but you know as the saying goes--familiarity often breeds contempt and the tide of fear that had seemed to keep these elements at bay seemed to be receding. Since the back stairway to the second floor communicated with Arthur's apartment and the rear door from the kitchen was without the benefit of a lockable door, I didn't feel it was safe there anymore for us so I packed us up, lock stock and crack barrel and moved upstate.

Four or five months after we moved upstate I got a call from the cops saying that they wanted me to come down so they could ask me some questions. Whoever was on the phone asked me if I had lived in 256 Webster and I asked why but he wouldn't tell me--just that I had to come down. Though they hadn't said anything specific, I was sure it was about Arthur.By the time we had left, he had a girlfriend. He was like me by then close to forty and I was sure that this was the first girlfriend he had ever had and I had a bad feeling about it. I drove down to Brooklyn and met the cops who escorted me upstairs. As soon as I opened the front door I knew what had happened. Even from the street the smell had been horrific. When I got to the top of the stair I gagged and almost puked. I saw that what had apparently been Arthur was now a puddle of blackish, greyish, lumpy goop spread over the dining room floor. I had never seen or smelled anything so penetratingly vile in my life and I cannot convey the repulsiveness of that enveloping odor. I don't know why but I didn't puke. Or maybe I did. I don't know. I think someone must have given me a handkerchief doused with Lysol to hold over my face because i distinctly remember the Lysol smell which did nothing to mitigate the underlying odor and so just made things worse. I don't know why the cops brought me up there. I guess just to see my reaction. I had been in Arthur's apartment only once before and it seemed it had been kept exactly in the same condition as when his mother was alive down to the doilies on the dining room table. I had the sense that perhaps she was still seated in a rocking chair near the window--a dessicated corpse a la Hitchcock's psycho. Anyway, when we went back out into the street the detective asked me if I knew anything about what happened and if I knew any of Arthur's associates and I said not really but that I thought he had recently got a girlfriend in the neighborhood and had seen her and a few suspicious characters traipsing up and down the back stair at odd hours before we moved out but that I hadn't been back since. And that was four or five months ago--as I mentioned, I thought Arthur maybe had gotten into drugs and as for the characters traipsing up and down the back stair, I was sure that one of them had killed him and robbed him but I didn't say anything about that to the detective. I figured they could draw their own conclusions and I really didn't have any concrete information other than that Arthur had had a girlfriend and some new friends.

I was so badly shaken by the time I left that I couldn't drive. Also, I couldn't get that odor out of my nose and didn't relish the prospect of a two hour drive with that odor as my constant companion. I went around the corner and took a shower in my parent's house and threw the clothes in the garbage and put on some of my father's old clothes. I didn't need my (now ex) wife to tell me I stunk when I got home to Monroe and I took another shower which had as little effect as the first one. That smell seemed like it was glued on me and it remained there like an unwanted guest for several days or maybe I just imagine this to be the case now but like the Welsh cakes I had once eaten on a trip to England and Wales it seemed impossible to rid of the after effects. A year or so later I went back and saw that the house had been bought by some Hasidim who had made into some kind of school for mentally disabled kids. I just now, before putting all this down, google-earthed it and the house and Tony and Eileen's house are both now a vacant lot. No more fig tree. No more doilies. No more smell and definitely no more Arthur.

Anyway, seeing the reporter standing in front of 679 yesterday on the TV, I guess brought back all this back to mind and there's a lot more I could tell you but I really don't have the heart right now for it. I'm just glad that after the events of yesterday there were no more bodies that would be eventually turning into black goo because of some moron who got it in his head that he was a hero of the people. The only other thing remotely exciting in a related manner that happened in the neighborhood was when the FBI raided a terrorist cell over on Coney Island avenue (in what is now little Pakistan) above the candy store we used to go to. Morty and Eddie's. I think this was in 1995. I remember one of the terrorists jumped out the window which seemed to me particularly funny, like he was the cartoon Wile E Coyote. Anyway, as you can see I don't really know how to end this story except to note that if Renee could have blown up her upstairs neighbor and got away with it I am sure she would have,-- even though she had no desire herself to be a hero of the people. There are several people that fall into that category, me among them, if I am being honest but, as I said,--that's another story.

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