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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781546242338 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 268 |
| File size: | 854 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Red Hook, Brooklyn, 2004
"May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh remember them kindly in their time of trouble and in their hour of taking away ... who quietly treat me as one familiar and well-beloved in that home, but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am."
— James Agee, A Death in the Family
It was early November of the year the Sarge was to freeze to death. An ordinary Saturday morning to be exact, one week and four days after John Kerry's baffling refusal to demand a vote recount in Ohio, when Preston Stoner, returning home from the corner bodega with a dozen eggs, six bagels, and a box of Kleenex, paused to watch a muscular, slightly paunchy black man wrestle a washing machine secured to his back by a single webbed strap into a rental U-Haul truck, with seemingly as little effort as the bodega clerk had used to fill Preston's bag with his sundry things.
"So, they're leaving today?" Preston said to this towering exemplar of manliness.
"Yes, suh," was the man's carefully enunciated reply.
"You the son?" Preston then asked — which was an easy guess since his friend Ritchie had just informed him in the bodega that the old couple who lived in this house were moving back to their roots in South Carolina, leaving the house to their son.
"Yes, suh."
"You going to be moving onto the block?" Preston then said, not only in a gesture of neighborly interest but also because he worked in advertising, and therefore, always on the lookout for camera-friendly talent his firm might use in future ad campaigns. A single gold earring, a shaved bald head gleaming in the brisk autumn air, arms the approximate girth of Preston's puny, fifty-eight-year-old thighs, had him thinking Sinbad, an ebon Mr. Clean, who honeyed his words in the Southern manner.
"No, suh."
"You up from South Carolina then?"
"No, suh. Ah lives in New Jersey."
"Well sir, I'll have you know I'm going to miss your father. He's one of my best friends on the block, you know. A very fine man," Preston enthused, only to become somewhat bemused at the son's reaction to what he had just said, which was body language 101: head held cocked slightly to the side as if someone were jerking his leg.
Ordinarily, Preston would have taken this as a hint to excuse himself and continue home. But then again, he was definitely not jerking this man's leg. The intent of his words had been innocent enough. He did hold this man's father in the highest regard — even though he didn't know his father's name. But then this was New York City, was it not, where people lived together in close proximity for years upon years, traded small talk zillions of times, and knew all kinds of stuff about each other without knowing each other's name?
A muffled crash came from within the house. The son's loopy grin was an exact copy of the father's. "Thank you, suh, for your kind words," he said, carefully wiping his hand on his hooded sweatshirt before offering to Preston in friendship. "Mah name's Winston. Ah'd like to stand and talk, but you'll have to excuse me. That racket inside was muh brother, Clarence. Ah better go check the damage."
Preston watched Winston ease his broad frame through the open doorway of a row house identical in facade and interior design to all the other houses on Pioneer Street. Built to house dockworkers in the 1850s and '60s. The narrow hallway inside was presently lined with packing boxes. Preston shifted uncomfortably. The very sight of packing boxes reawakened painful childhood memories that never failed to have him in a funk. His father's rocker, his mother's wingback chair, her beloved piano, their dining room china cabinet and oriental rug arrayed on their lawn, along with hundreds of people waiting for an auction to start.
Then, Winston had reappeared in the doorway, this time with a large TV cradled easily in his massive arms. Bobbing at his heels was a small girl dressed in jeans and a pink windbreaker, hair beaded and braided into cornrows, the old man's dog following close behind her.
"Your father here?" he asked Winston as he stood aside to let him pass. "I wouldn't hear of leaving without telling him goodbye," he added once the TV had been safely stowed inside the truck.
"Ah do believe he's downstairs packing," Winston said.
"Think you could get him to come out?"
Winston signaled to the little girl who stood lingering in the doorway. "Doreen, you tell Grandpa there's a man out here that wants tuh say goodbye. Now, if you'll excuse me, suh. Clarence and I got to rassle us out a mattress."
While he waited for the old man to appear, Preston couldn't resist inspecting the interior of the van. After all, he was, was he not — as his wife, Joellen, was so fond of reminding him — the packing maven for whom the proper arranging of things in the trunks of automobiles was an underappreciated art. Therefore, why should he not avail himself of this opportunity to check out the brothers' expertise at the craft?
What he beheld gave him great satisfaction. The brothers could very well have been professionals — the truck not yet half full and what was there, closely fitted in like the Inca build stone walls. But the odd thing was, while moments before he'd been misty-eyed at the sight of packing boxes stacked in that hallway, yet those same boxes, now loaded in a truck, seemingly had zero effect on him. He was pondering this oddity when he heard the door open under the stoop. The old man appeared first head and shoulders in the stairwell, then the rest of him.
"You didn't think I'd let my best neighbor sneak out of here without saying goodbye to him, did you?" Preston called, resolved not to waste the man's time and keep it short and sweet. Unfortunately, as was his wont, when he made the mistake of trying to embellish a handshake with what amounted to a very clumsy attempt at an embrace, the old man artfully sloughed it aside, leaving Preston sufficiently embarrassed to blurt out the first stupid thing that came to mind: "The old block is certainly changing, isn't it? I've been here close to twenty years. People moving out and people moving in and fixing up their houses."
The old man's dusty face formed into a wrinkled smile. "Yes, suh," he nodded sagely, an undeniable twinkle in his eyes. "Yes, indeed. Things hereabouts certainly are a-changing."
"And once you and your wife move out, that'll leave me and Ritchie as the old-timers on the block, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that," Preston said, wishing he was less a klutz at small talk.
"Yes, suh. You and Ritchie gonna be the old-timers now," the old man parroted in return. "You already been here longer than me."
Funny, Preston didn't remember it that way. It seemed forever that the old man and his dog had been making their twice daily trips to Coffey Park — sticking to the middle of the street, his dog mincing along beside him, tail between its legs. The old man always with a telescoped-out, old-time car aerial clutched in his hand. And what the heck was that aerial for anyway? To discipline the dog, for protection — and if so from whom or what?
"You best be keeping a close eye on that dog of yours down there in Carolina," Preston joked, "else it's libel to lose itself out in the woods chasing down rabbits."
"No, suh, that dog a mine, it don't like tuh travel. Winston and Little Doreen gonna take it. That little girl sure do luv that dog," the old man said, touching Preston's arm to urge him out of the way of his sons coming down the steps with a mattress.
Preston figured this was as good a time as any to say goodbye. A final handshake, a few common farewell clichés, and he was stepping for home full of goodwill for his fellow man. He smiled when he was forced to detour around three little girls chalking a hopscotch board on the sidewalk. He groaned oh no, not again when he noticed for the first time someone had dropped off a dumpster across the street during the night, which meant another parking space lost for months to another house undergoing renovation.
Not that he was against change or gentrification, that most certainly had brought many sorely needed improvements to Van Brunt Street: a drugstore, a pizzeria, a Chinese takeout, a quasi-spiffy Laundromat, even a couple of real sit-down restaurants where a guy and his wife could enjoy a decent meal. Still, he couldn't help but miss the early days when Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition had been alive and well on Pioneer Street. Granted, the block had been undoubtedly poorer and shabbier then, but what it lacked in glitz it made up for in character and cohesion. The main problem with gentrification, Preston mused, was that for every house renovated into some newbie householder's little pot of gold, the multitude of colors in old Jesse's rainbow faded a little more. Nevertheless, onward and upward. Out with the old, in with the new. Someday, in the not so distant future, a dumpster would arrive at their house to cart off the unwanted junk he and Joellen would leave behind. He'd be forgotten. Joellen'd be forgotten. Just like that old man, as well as Ritchie and the Sarge, they'd all be forgotten. The Sarge, who'd lived his whole life in the house where he'd been born, that was until recently, when his family, finally having had it with his unpredictably violent mood swings, kicked him out, leaving him with no other choice but to take up abode, according to Ritchie, in an abandoned vehicle in the alley out behind Ritchie's house.
* * *
Preston held off mentioning the old man's leaving until later that night when he and Joellen would have finished watching the late-night Seinfeld rerun and would be lying on their backs, holding hands, eyes open in the dark — a custom they'd adopted recently at her suggestion because it was reputed to enhance intimacy, or so it said in one of her women's magazines. Once she gave up droning on and on about the new book she was working on and came up for, he gave her hand a gentle squeeze to let her know that he, too, had something to share.
"Hon, you know the old black guy down the block who walks his dog to the park every day?" he said.
"Sure," was her somewhat disinterested reply. "Didn't I see a moving truck parked in front of their house today?"
"So you know, then."
"Know what?" she said. "That they're moving? Why else a moving van? People on this block lately are always moving in and out." A pause, then: "Preston, is that what's bothering you tonight? I could have gathered as much. Another case of the old moving in and out blues?"
"Maybe," he said. "But I wouldn't go so far as to call it the blues so much as a pang of regret over losing a friend."
"A friend?" she said with a laugh. "A friend like that old black guy who walks his dog to the park every day? Honey, ten to one says you don't even know his name." She paused. When he failed to reply, she added: "I'm right, aren't I? Come on, fess up. You don't know his name, do you?"
"Not really," he said.
"Well, my love, I don't know about you. But when I don't know someone's name, I sure as hell don't presume to call them my friend," she said in that sassy, no-nonsense, bantering mode of hers that kind of turned him on.
"Not really my friend? And who, pray tell, has vested you with the authority to determine who is and is not my friend?" he said.
"In case you haven't noticed it, buster, nature has gifted me with all kinds of authoritative powers," she said in mock reproach, "but since you choose to press the issue, friends, as I understand the word, are the people one cares enough about to invite into one's home, to whom one refers to by first name or a nickname, instead of that old black guy. It seems to me that if this man were your friend, you wouldn't have been surprised to learn he was moving. You'd have been Johnny-on-the-spot, with your sleeves rolled up, helping him load that truck. Or, at the very least, offering to do so, like the way Ritchie is always over here helping you out."
"Okay, okay, enough already," he said, in hasty retreat. "Okay, so I overstated our relationship a little bit. But the man is leaving and I stopped to say goodbye. Granted, I don't know his name. Nevertheless, I still maintain the right to refer to him as my friend. Certainly, he's not my enemy. How else would you have me refer to him? Acquaintance, perhaps?
Or maybe that elderly black gentleman down the street?" By now, she had risen on her elbow, her face close enough for him to rejoice in the ebb and flow of minty toothpaste breath, close enough for a nose upon nose Eskimo kiss, close enough for a man to entertain the thought that what was happening here just might be a prelude to having sex, close enough to set him to wondering if maybe he ought to go re-brush his teeth and sweeten his breath.
"But, honey," she said in an offhanded way that made it plain that making love was not what she had in mind. "You're breaking my heart here. You're like the proverbial overly friendly puppy who considers every stranger a friend. How can this be, I used to ask myself, that a man who considers himself Mr. Light and Lively, insists on presenting himself to the outside world much as he bamboozles it into buying products it really doesn't want to buy? Preston, the fact that you are otherwise very precise in thought and speech, and rarely given to hyperbole, is one of the things I most admire about you. Yet I'm finding it kind of scary when you insist on telling me that people you barely know are your friends. Have you been in advertising so long that truth and illusion are now melded into one?" He didn't bother to reply. Truth and illusion melded into one? He'd been down this road with her too many times. No doubt about it, when it came to exercising the fundamentals of bantering logic, she always cut him to shreds. Besides, she'd dropped her head back onto her pillow. He felt her hand squeeze his.
"Hon?" she said.
"Ummm," he said.
"When you were little, did you have imaginary friends?"
"No, certainly not. Did you?"
"Sure. Betty. Betty Goldberg."
He laughed. "Yeah, Betty Goldberg. But wasn't she one of your dollies when you were a kid?"
"Yeah, but before her baby doll incarnation, Betty G. was my imaginary friend."
"Weird," he said. "And what's up with that. A little shiksa like you coming up with a name like Goldberg?"
And now they were laughing. Laughing together. And maybe that magazine was right. It felt good lying close together, not sparring, jousting, or bantering. One could almost say that sharing a laugh in bed together with your mate was almost as much fun as actual sex — and given nearly thirty years of marriage, ever so much more spontaneous.
"I have no idea where," she said, pausing to take in a deep breath. "I must have picked the name up somewhere. But the point is, Preston, I outgrew my dolls. There are no phantom Betty Goldbergs clamoring to be a part of my life anymore."
"Meaning?" he said.
"Meaning, you big lox, you should get out more. Your social life, such as it is, consists mostly of the little interior dialogues you carry on within yourself. If you're not at work, you're moping around here. Why not hang out one of these nights with Ritchie at the Bait and Tackle? A little male bonding, as it were, might be just the thing. You know, whoop it up, trade dirty jokes with the boys, play pool, ogle women, and smoke smelly cigars. Then, when one of your buddies moves away, you'll have earned your tears."
"Aw, you know how I hate that barroom stuff," he said. "All reformed drunks hate bars. And in case you don't know, watching others consume alcohol's not my idea of a spectator sport. If anything, my dear, I should think you'd be counting your lucky stars your teetotaler husband prefers being home with his wife."
"Well, honey, what I think is that you have a wife who wants you to be a better person than you are, who wishes you'd stop obsessing about the minutiae of the goddamned universe and get out and enjoy yourself." Then, having maneuvered herself into sleeping position, the evening slid to a close with her muttering "gudnigh" from the depths of her pillow.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Pioneer Street"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Thomas Lisenbee.
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