The apartment was located in a high-rise building on Lake Shore Drive. I knocked and the door was answered by a trim, energetic woman holding a tennis racket. Her hair was white, but except for a few spidery lines beneath her eyes, her face was smooth and unwrinkled. I asked to speak to her mother, and she chuckled, poking me in the ribs with the handle of her racket.
“Oh, I am just so happy to see a young person.” She grabbed my hand. “Look what we’ve got here, Abe: a young fella. Why, he’s practically a toddler!”
Her husband bounded into the room. Muscular and tanned, he wore a nylon fitness suit complete with a head-band and sparkling sneakers. “Ahh, a youngster!”
“He’s a graduate,” the woman said, squatting to perform a knee bend. “A kid, thinks he’s ready to paint our sarcophagus. He’s looking at us thinking he’s discovered a pair of fossils he can maybe sell to the museum. Oh, we’re old all right. Out to pasture. Long in the tooth.”
“Built the great Pyramids with my own two hands,” the husband added. “Used to swap ideas with Plato and ride a chariot through the cobbled streets of Rome.”
“Face it, baby,” his wife said. “We’re ancient. A couple of has-beens.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You’re not old. Why, neither one of you looks a day over fifty. Look at you, so trim and fit, you’re in much better shape than I am. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of time left.”
“Yeah, right.” The woman hopped onto an exercycle. “Time to forget our own names, time to lose control of our bowels, time to stoop and blather and drool onto our bibs. We’ve got all the time in the world. Days were when I’d throw on a rucksack and head out for a good two-, three-week hike, but now, forget it. I’m too old.”
“She’s older than the hills she used to climb,” her husband said.
“Oh, look who’s talking, Father Time himself.”
“I’m an old geezer and I’ll admit it,” the man said. “Still, though, I’m what you call an ‘up person.’”
“That’s right,” she cackled. “Washed up and used up!”
I understood then that this was their act: the Squabbling Old Folks, appearing interminably.
“I guess if you’re going to be painting the place, I might as well scrape these tired old bones together and give you a tour,” the woman said. She guided me through their home, where every room was furnished with a piece of exercise equipment. A NordicTrack stood parked beside a rowing machine, both facing the living-room television. In the bedroom they kept a set of barbells and colorful mats upon which to practice aerobics. Swimsuits hung drip-drying in the bath-room, and athletic shoes neatly lined the floors of every closet. Except for a few smudges near the guest-room punching bag, the walls were spotless. The doors and baseboards were in fine shape, not a chip or scratch on them. They led me beneath the chin-up bar and into the study, which was decorated floor to ceiling with photographs documenting their various adventures. Here they were riding a tandem bicycle through the streets of Peking or trading beads in a dusty Peruvian marketplace. The pictures spanned the course of forty years spent kneeling in kayaks and pitching tents on the peaks of snow-covered mountains, hiking muddy trails and taking the waters of frigid streams.
“Look what we’ve got here,” the woman said. “There’s old Methuselah staggering up Mount Rainier. First one to make it all the way to the top with a walker.”
“And here’s the missus in Egypt,” her husband said, pointing to a framed photograph of a mummy.
I tried to turn the subject back to painting, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
“Stay for lunch, why don’t you,” the woman said. “I’ll just hook Old Crusty up to his feeding tubes and throw us together a couple of sandwiches.”
“A sandwich!” the man cried. “How are you planning to manage the bread? Those chops of yours can’t take on anything harder than applesauce.”
“Well, I can still chew you out,” she said. “And they don’t come any harder than that.”
I drew up an estimate and phoned the next day, knowing in my heart that it was a waste of time.
“It’s our young person,” I heard her yell to her husband in the background. “Listen, doll, it seems we’ve decided not to have the place painted after all. Not much point in it, seeing as we’ll probably be packed off to the nursing home before you get your ladder set up.”
It was my role to contradict her. Instead, I said, “You’re probably right. As feebleminded as you are, I guess it’s about time to make plans for a structured environment.”
“Hey now,” she snapped. “No need to get ugly.”
During episodes of unemployment I find it rewarding to sleep as much as possible — anywhere from twelve to fourteen hours a day is a good starting point. Sleep spares you humiliation and saves money at the same time: nothing to eat, nothing to buy, just lie back and dream your life away. I’d wake up in the afternoon, watch my stories on TV, and then head over to the sofa for a few more hours of shut-eye. It became my habit to pick up a newspaper just after five o’clock and spend some time searching the want ads, wondering who might qualify for any of the advertised positions: vault verifier, pre-press salesman, audit technical reviewer. Show me the child who dreams of being a sausage-casing inspector. What sort of person is going to raise his clenched fist in victory after reading “New Concept=Big $! High energy= Return + Comm. Fax résumé.” Fax résumé for what?
I called responding to a quadriplegic looking for a parttime aide. He answered on the fifteenth ring shouting, “For the love of God, Mother, can’t a man have five minutes of privacy?”
At the supermarket I dropped a five-dollar bill and turned around just in time to watch someone stuff it in his pocket. My luck was reversing itself.
“Why the hell don’t you go back to school and take some real classes?” my father said. “Learn to program computers, that’s what the Stravides boy did. He’d gone to college and studied show tunes or folklore, some damned thing — went back to school for programming, and now he’s heading up the shipping department over at Flexy-Wygaart, whole damned department! Computers, that’s where the action is!”
Aside from the fact I had no interest in computers, it seemed a betrayal to graduate from one school only to enter another. That would be admitting I’d borrowed ten thousand dollars and learned absolutely nothing of value, and I was not ready to face that fact.
I found the ad in a community booster paper. “Sharp, experienced go-getter wanted to strip/refinish woodwork. Enthusiasm a must.” I had spent years refinishing, first in Raleigh and then again in Chicago. I always vowed I’d never do it again, but that’s the problem with having a skill: once you swear off it, you know you’re stuck with it forever. All work seems designed to kill you, but refinishing is tailor-made to provide a long and painful death. The chemical strippers are sold in metal cans picturing a skull and crossbones, and the list of ingredients reads like a who’s who in the world of cancer-causing agents. These strippers will eat through plastic buckets, rubber gloves, and nylon brushes. One is advised to wear a respirator but I rejected it, as the cumbersome mask tended to interfere with my smoking. As a result, I found it no longer mattered what I ate. Everything tasted like benzene: scrambled eggs or barbequed pork, when I closed my eyes the only difference was the texture. After a day’s work my vision was blurred and my hands were left so stained that cashiers would lay the change upon the counter rather than risk touching my nasty outstretched palm. In Raleigh my friend and I had all the work we could get since the town’s foremost furniture refinisher had recently retired. Dean and I would occasionally visit him with a technical question and watch as his wife wheeled him into the parlor, fussing with the tubes that ran from his nose and swabbing the nicotine-stained hole at the base of his throat. His watery eyes would move from one of us to the other. “You boys play your cards right and you’ve got a fine career ahead of you,” he’d wheeze.
My first couple of years in Chicago I’d worked for a man refinish
ing woodwork. It was much more dangerous than furniture, as it often involved brushing the chemicals onto overhead beams while at the same time attempting to follow the proceedings of All My Children and One Life to Live. No sooner would Victoria Buchanan wake from her coma than I’d discover a wad of stripper eating a quarter-sized patch of hair from the back of my head. It rained from the ceiling, destroying sofas and carpets, and we followed in its wake, pathetically attempting to restore the discolored fabric with Magic Marker. Our clients would return home to find the knobs eaten off their television sets and the handle of the refrigerator looking as though someone had taken to it with a blowtorch. We practiced our campaign of destruction until, after accidentally setting his van on fire with a smoldering jah stick, my boss was forced to declare bankruptcy. Once more, I swore never to refinish again.
I responded to the ad, phoning to speak to a woman who identified herself as Uta. “Wouldn’t you know,” she said. “I just hired myself a colored guy not more than ten minutes ago. You say you have experience? Well, that’s a plus, isn’t it?”
She paused, and I took the opportunity to practice the only promotional skill at my disposal: fluttering my fingers over the telephone’s mouthpiece, I attempted to cast a spell, silently chanting, It’s me who you want. Me, me, me.
“Come to think of it,” she said, “it is an awful lot of work. Maybe I’d be better off using two people instead of one. Would that be a problem for you? Because he seemed pretty sharp, the colored guy did.”
“Great,” I said. “I love… sharp people.”
“You a pretty sharp guy?” she asked.
“I guess so, sure.” I felt the top of my head.
She asked me my last name and I told her.
“What kind of a name is that,” she asked. “It’s not Jewish, is it? Greek? Well, that’s fine by me. There are a lot of sharp Greeks out there. So, listen, my Greek friend, the colored guy can’t start until Monday, so how about you come in tomorrow morning and give Uta a chance to see how sharp you are, sharp guy.”
I took down the address and agreed to meet her on Saturday morning at 9 A.M. “Sharp.”
She met me in front of the building, a three-story six-flat not far from Wrigley Field. Uta was a stout, muscular woman with a boxy face, heavily caked with putty-colored foundation that ended at the borders of her formidable jawline. Her hair was dyed a dirty blond, cut short in the back and long up front, the bangs falling to the bridge of her nose. Brushing it off her face gave her something to do with her hands since she had quit smoking several months earlier. “You like that?” she asked. “I thought it was pretty clever.” When speaking, she tended to hold her arms close to the body, her fists balled and head cocked, as if she were a boxer scoping out her next punch. “You ready to roll up your shirtsleeves and show Uta what you can do, sharp guy?”
I followed her up the back porch to one of the third-floor apartments and waited as she emptied the contents of her pocketbook, sorting through a knot of keys. She and her sister had recently bought this building, the fourth in what they hoped to be their empire. The family had fled Lithuania in the midforties and settled on the South Side of Chicago, where their father had taken a job in the stockyards.
“We all worked,” she said. “Worked our little fannies off. Nobody ever handed Uta anything, I’ll tell you that right now. Unlike some people I could mention, I had to start at the bottom and work my way up.” She stared off toward the baseball stadium and shook her head in thought, her eyes assuming that haunted, faraway quality sought after by therapists and documentary filmmakers. “It all started with an innocent, pigtailed girl standing on the bow of a ship headed for the new world. The child watched as the beautiful fields of her homeland gave way to the stinking chaos of the stock-yards. And she cried, oh, how she cried. She and her family had nothing but gumption and a few loaves of hard, stale bread, but they didn’t let that stop them. You see, that little pigtailed girl was me. People ask how I got to where I am today, and I tell them that it took a lot of work. Umpteen and a half years of backbreaking hard work.”
It is always a bad sign when an employer offers an image of themselves doing anything other than getting drunk and throwing money around. Uta gave me the creeps that way. It was fine for her to slave and scrimp, just so long as she didn’t expect that sort of behavior from me. I preferred to put in my time, go home, and spend my money as soon as possible. My father’s story involved selling newspapers on the snow-covered streets in order to create a better life for himself. It was my destiny to cast off everything he had worked so hard to achieve and mire myself in the very activities that were bringing this country to its knees.
I understood that working for Uta would be an exercise in nodding my head. “Yes, it’s a shame the government instituted those crippling child labor laws.” “No, these chemical burns don’t bother me in the least bit, why would they?” At the end of the day it wasn’t my arms that were sore. It was my neck.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Uta said, entering the kitchen. “What sort of mess did our little Jewess leave behind?”
I was thrown by her use of that expression. Like the term Negress, it had a musty, clinical ring to it. She spat the word out of her mouth as if it were a worm she had discovered nesting beneath her tongue. “You buy a building but until the old tenants move out, your hands are basically tied. Lucky for me our fat little Jewess was the first to go. She was a little short thing with an ass the size of a beanbag chair, and Christ Almighty, was she ever a slob. I had the place sprayed yesterday afternoon so we could get started with a clean slate.” She spotted a roach shuddering in the sink and smacked it flat with her palm. “Huge ass on that girl, enormous. Then again, that’s what happens when you sit on your duff expecting the world to do you a favor.”
Jews and Jewesses were a big thorn in Uta’s side. She tried explaining it to me once, but I found the story difficult to follow after hearing the date 1527. According to Uta, Adolf Hitler was completely misunderstood, “as most great thinkers frequently are.” She spoke at length of a conspiracy between the Jews and Stalin, who had their sights set upon her native Lithuania for a variety of reasons. The communists wanted the country in order to enslave the independent, hardworking population. The Jews wanted it for the many forests they hoped to use as paper with which to wipe their fat asses. Uta despised these Jews and blamed them for everything from traffic snarls to the high cost of cable TV.
She walked me through the apartment, which was large and bright, equipped with nice little touches such as built-in cabinets and two wood-burning fireplaces. The woodwork had been painted beyond recognition by sixty years’ worth of tenants who seemed to have sloshed their preferences straight from the can without benefit of a brush. This spelled more work, but unfortunately, a great deal of it would involve a heat gun, a high-powered blow-dryer that melts paint and tends to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. It is slow and tedious work, aiming the gun until the paint blisters and then scraping it away with a blade. On a good day you walk away with a pounding headache. On a bad day you set fires.
“You get this paint off and then the fun starts,” Uta said. “You, me, and the colored guy are going to work some magic, get this place looking sharp. What do you say? Are you up for that, you pint-sized Greek, you? Uta’s up for it. The colored guy is up for it. How about it, you ready to join the team?”
She left to run a few errands, and I started bubbling the paint off the kitchen door. While working I listened to the radio, a local AM station that broadcast old serials and comedy programs every Saturday. I enjoyed both Suspense and The Shadow but when The Life of Riley began, I found my mind beginning to wander. William Bendix plays the sort of predictable, good-natured idiot guaranteed to get his finger stuck in a bowling ball the night of the big fellowship dinner. He’s a garden-variety doofus who seemed to set some sort of standard for generations of succeeding television programs featuring overstuffed closets and family dogs who snatch the holiday
turkey off the table while everyone’s eyes are closed in prayer. In real life you’d beat a dog senseless for pulling a stunt like that, instead, these are the sort of characters who sit down to a meal of frankfurters and stuffing, pretending they’ve learned the true meaning of Thanksgiving. This was a world where people were enlightened by a single word or deed. Lessons were learned and lives were changed over the course of twenty-three minutes. Even as a child I had trouble accepting the concept of such rapid spiritual growth. If it were that easy to change people, surely I would be sitting upon a padded velvet throne before a nation of willing servants. Who didn’t want to change people? When Uta spoke of the Jews, I’d done nothing more than stare down at my feet. I could have named countless Jews who didn’t fit her bill, but that wouldn’t have changed her opinion, as her mind had been made up a long time ago. The most you could do with a woman like Uta was to change the subject to a medical mishap, hoping that a good turn to the stomach might shut her up for a while.
I once worked as a runner on a construction site and lost my job when the head carpenter, a fully grown man with a Sir Lancelot haircut, discovered I was a homosexual. We’d gotten along fine all summer, but the moment I questioned his thirst for beating up transsexual prostitutes, he came at me with a hammer. The foreman had let me go as gently as possible, explaining that if he ever hired an all-girl crew, I’d be the first person he called. For a long time afterward I thought of this head carpenter, always placing him in a position of grave, physical danger. The walls of his cell were closing in. A train was headed for his bound-and-gagged body. A bomb was set to go off and only one person could save him. “But first you have to take it all back,” I imagined myself saying. “And this time you have to say it like you really, really mean it.” I fantasized about it for a few months and then moved on to something else. My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you for what you are and you’re likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven’t got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.