When we lived at 30 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights Virgil was two floors below us. He was over seventy, had a full head of combed-back white hair, a strong nose, his own teeth and hardly a scrap of flesh on his bones. I visited him regularly because an hour with him was better than movies, television and most books.
His apartment was one room with a kitchenette and a bathroom. His bed was a cot against the wall and beyond that a desk and a window with an air conditioner. Opposite the bed was a bookcase filled with volumes on flowers, trees and birds which, he said, he’d get around to some day as soon as he bought a pair of binoculars. You have to be careful about buying binoculars because you go into a store and how are you gonna test them? Salesmen in the store say, Oh, they’re okay, they’re strong, and how can you tell? They won’t let you take them outside to look up and down Fulton Street in case you make a run for it with the binoculars and that’s dumb. How the hell you gonna make a run for it when you’re seventy? In the meantime he’d like to be able to see birds out his window but all you can see from this apartment is pigeons fornicating on top of his air conditioner and that pisses him off.
He watches them, oh yeah, he watches them, bangs on the window with a fly swatter, tells them, Get outa here, goddam pigeons. Go fornicate on someone else’s air conditioner. He tells me they’re just rats with wings, all they do is eat and fornicate and when they’re finished with fornicating they drop a load on the air conditioner, one load after another, like that crap the boids, I mean the birds, damn, I’m talkin’ Brooklyn again and that ain’t good when you’re selling watercoolers, like that bird crap in South America where the mountains are covered with it, what is it? guano, yeah, which is good for growing things but not for air conditioners.
Besides the books on outdoor life he had a three-volume set of The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas and when I opened a volume he said, I didn’t know you liked that stuff. Wouldn’t you prefer the birds? I told him you can always get bird books but his Summa was rare and he said I could have it except I’d have to wait till he died. But don’t worry, Frank, I’ll put it in my will.
He also promised to leave me his collection of ties which dazzled me whenever he opened his closet door, the loudest, most colorful ties I had ever seen.
You like ’em, eh? Some of these ties go all the way back to the twenties and on down to the thirties and forties. Men knew how to dress then. They didn’t go around tippy-toe like the man in the gray flannel suit afraid of a little color. I always said never stint on the tie and the hat because you have to look good when you’re selling watercoolers which I did for forty-five years. I’d go into an office and I’d say, What? What? You telling me you still drinking tap water from these old cups and glasses. Do you know the danger to your health?
And Virgil would stand between bed and bookcase rocking like a preacher and delivering his sales spiel on watercoolers.
Yes, sir, I sell watercoolers and I wanna tell you there’s five things you can do with water. You can clean it, you can pollute it, you can heat it, you can cool it and, ha ha, you can sell it. You know and I don’t have to tell you, Mr. Office Manager, you can drink it and you can swim in it though there isn’t much call for swimming water in the average American office. I wanna tell you my company has made a study of offices that drink our water and offices that don’t drink our water and, you’re right, you’re right, Mr. Office Manager, the people who drink our water are healthier and more productive. Our water drives away the flu and improves digestion. We’re not saying, no we’re not saying, Mr. Office Manager, that our water is solely responsible for great productivity and the prosperity of America but we are saying that our studies show offices without our water are barely hanging on, desperate and wondering why. A copy of our study is available when you sign our yearly contract. At no extra charge we’ll survey your staff and give you an estimate of water consumption. I am happy to observe you don’t have air-conditioning because that means you’ll need extra water for your fine staff. And we know, Mr. Office Manager, that our watercoolers bring people together. Problems are settled over a paper cup of water. Eyes meet. Romances flourish. Everybody happy, everybody eager to come to work every day. Increased productivity. We get no complaints. Sign right here. A copy for you, a copy for me and we’re in business.
A knock on the door interrupted him.
Who is it?
A faint old voice. Virgil, it’s Harry.
Can’t talk to you now, Harry. I got the doctor here and I’m naked getting examined.
All right, Virgil. I’ll come back later.
Tomorrow, Harry, tomorrow.
Okay, Virgil.
He told me that was Harry Ball, eighty-five years old, so old you can’t hear his voice over a clothesline, who drives Virgil crazy with his parking problems. He’s got this big car, a Hudson that they don’t make no more, is that right, no more or anymore? You’re an English teacher. I dunno. Never went beyond the seventh grade. Ran away from the Sisters of St. Joseph Orphanage even if I’m leaving them money in my will. Anyway, Harry’s got this car and he goes nowhere with it. Says some day he’s gonna drive it to Florida to see his sister but he’s going nowhere because that car is so old it wouldn’t make it across the Brooklyn Bridge and that goddam Hudson is his life. He moves it from one side of the street to the other, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes he brings the little aluminum beach chair and sits near his car looking for a parking spot to open for next day. Or he walks around the neighborhood looking for a spot and if he finds one he gets excited and gives himself a heart attack rushing to his car to drive it to the new spot which is now gone and so is the one he was in and there he is driving around with no spot, cursing the government. I was with him once and he nearly ran down a rabbi and two old women and I said, Christ, Harry, lemme out, and he wouldn’t, but I jumped out at the first red light and he yelled after me I was the type that flashed lights so the Japs could find Pearl Harbor till I told him he was a dumb bastard that didn’t know Pearl Harbor was bombed in broad daylight and he sat there contradicting me with the light turning green and people honking and yelling who gives a shit about Pearl Harbor, buddy, move your goddam Hudson. He could park that car in a garage for eighty-five bucks a month but that’s more than he pays for rent and that’ll be the day Harry Ball ever wastes a penny. I’m frugal myself, I admit that, but he could make Scrooge look like a spendthrift. Is that the right word, spendthrift? I ran away from the orphanage in seventh grade.
He asked me to go with him to a hardware store on Court Street so that he could get an egg timer for the telephone just installed.
An egg timer?
Yeah, this is a kind of hourglass with sand that runs for three minutes and that’s the way I like my egg and when I use the telephone I’ll know when the three minutes is up because that’s how they charge you at the phone company, the bastards. I’ll have the egg timer on my desk and I’ll hang up at the last grain of sand.
On Court Street I asked him if he’d like a beer and a sandwich at the Blarney Rose. He never went to bars and was shocked at the prices of beer and whiskey. Ninety cents for a little shot of whiskey. Never.
I went with him to a liquor store where he ordered cases of Irish whiskey and told the salesman his friend Frank liked it, and cases of wine, vodka and bourbon because he liked it himself. He told the man he wouldn’t pay the lousy taxes on his purchase. I’m giving you a big order here and you want me to support the goddam government on top of it. No, sir. Pay it yourself.
The man agreed and said he’d deliver the twenty-five cases.