For instance: “This sorry little TV movie is one of Myrna Loy’s last-ever appearances. You know, Myrna Loy, The Thin Man? She was in loads of silent movies in the twenties, too.” My silence permitted him to assume I followed these depth soundings. “Also in Lonelyhearts, in 1958, with Montgomery Clift and Robert Ryan.”
“Ah.”
“Based on the Nathanael West novel.” “Ah.”
“Of course it isn’t really any good.”
“Mmm.” I gazed at the old lady in the scene with Falk, waiting to feel what Perkus felt.
“Montgomery Clift is buried in the Quaker cemetery in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. Very few people realize he’s there, or that there even is a cemetery in Prospect Park. When I was a teenager a friend and I snuck in there at night, scaled the fence, and looked around, but we couldn’t find his grave, just a whole bunch of voodoo chicken heads and other burnt offerings.”
“Wow.”
Only half listening to Perkus, I went on staring at my childhood self, a ghost disguised as a twelve-year-old, haunting the corridors of the mansion owned by Cassavetes’s character, the villainous conductor. It seemed Perkus’s collection was a place one might turn a corner and unexpectedly find oneself, a conspiracy that was also a mirror.
Perkus went on expounding: “Peter Falk was in The Gnuppet Movie, too, right around this time.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. So was Marlon Brando.”
Zing! Another dot connected in the Perkusphere!
I was at first disconcerted, perhaps jealous, when I learned other beings could breach the sanctum on Eighty-fourth Street. First was Perkus’s dealer, he who provided the tiny Lucite boxes of Chronic. His name was Foster Watt. Watt, young and suspicious, hair brushed forward into spikes, wearing a red vinyl jacket and black jeans, carried a beeper, and only returned calls to established customers-to join his roster you’d have to meet in person, or he’d shun your number. Perkus assured him I was “cool,” explained that I only happened to be visiting, wasn’t a candidate to join Watt’s rolls. There, businesslike Watt’s interest in me died. Chronic was just one of his wares: Watt showed off a whole menu of marijuana brand names, each fertile sprig behind its Lucite pane labeled SILVER HAZE, FUNKY MONKEY, BLUEBERRY KUSH, MACK DADDY, or, eerily I thought, ICE. There might have been a dozen more. Perkus shopped among the brands with random eagerness, refreshing his supply of Chronic but adding several others. (These I’d go on to smoke with Perkus, and I could never tell the least difference: every one of Watt’s brands got me devastatingly high.) Deal done, Watt scrammed.
More important, though he never actually entered the apartment, was Biller. I learned of his existence by a rattling at Perkus’s window, the window onto the airshaft at the building’s rear. I heard the intruding sound first-I’d just come up, and Perkus was beginning to expound, to spread his wings-and ignored it. Then Perkus, without explaining, shifted his attention, became silent. He didn’t go to the window immediately, instead scooping together items from his linoleum table, items I now saw had been arrayed, made ready. A bagel, fixed with cream cheese and smoked salmon, in wax paper-an overlooked breakfast, I’d thought, wrongly. An antique Raymond Chandler paperback with a gorgeous cover, like those Perkus shelved in little glassine pockets, Farewell, My Lovely. A joint Perkus had rolled and set aside, and which he now ziplocked into a tiny baggie. And a wad of dollars, fives and ones, bunched as if withdrawn from a pocket and tossed aside. All went into a white paper sack, recycled, perhaps, from the original bagel purchase. Then Perkus opened his window and waved at someone standing below. The threshold’s height, from the bare cement courtyard, meant Biller must have tapped the window with a tossed pebble, or reached for it with a stick or wire coat hanger. Straining up, he was just able to accept the white sack as Perkus lowered it. Leaning from my seat to see, I first saw his fingers, brown and dusty-dry, groping for the gifts. Then I stood and saw the whole of him.
This was early October, six or seven in the evening, barely dusk, barely chill. Yet Biller was forested in jackets and coats. Some seemed turned inside out. Before I registered his dark face I saw a golem of cloth, all rumpled plaid linings and stained down-filled tubular sections. His large, crabbed hands thrust the white sack Perkus had given him under a layer, into a canvas shoulder bag, silk-screened BARNES & NOBLE, that swung beneath the outermost coat. Now I resolved Biller’s face in the gloom. Though his cheeks and neck were aggravated with ingrown beard hairs, impossible to shave, and his Afro looked both patchy and greasy, knitting into proto-dreadlocks, within that frame handsome eyes showed a gentle reluctance. I felt I’d betrayed them both, rubbernecking Perkus’s charity. I sat again and waited.
“Who’s that?” The man’s voice was soft and sane.
“Don’t worry,” said Perkus. “He’s a friend.”
“I’ve seen him. I thought he might be from the building.”
“He’s not from the building. You might recognize him from somewhere else.”
I fiddled with a small plate of Italian cookies Perkus had laid out, while they discussed me and I listened. Coffee percolated, an irregular gurgle-Perkus had just put it on before the window tap.
“I didn’t mean to surprise you with a visitor,” continued Perkus. “I thought you’d be here earlier.”
“It was the tiger,” said Biller. “They practically had to close down Second Avenue. I couldn’t get across.”
This was the first I’d heard of the gargantuan escaped tiger that was ravaging sections of the East Side. Or if I’d heard, I’d forgotten. Either way, I didn’t have any reason not to credit it as some fancy of Biller’s. A tiger could be a homeless man’s emblem, I thought, of the terrors that pursued him. No wonder he needed all those coats.
Perkus responded neutrally. “It doesn’t matter. Can you get back?”
“I’m going downtown.” For someone glomming bagels at a back window, Biller sounded peculiarly intent. Second Avenue, downtown-how broad was his orbit?
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
“I thought he’d be gone before you came,” Perkus told me after he lowered his window and told me the apparition’s name. “He prefers not to be seen. He used to wait for me in front, then some assholes from my building called the police three times in a row. So I showed him how to come around the back, where Brandy’s puts out their garbage.”
“Where does he live?”
Perkus shrugged. “I don’t know that he particularly lives anywhere, Chase. He sometimes sleeps under a pool on Orchard Street, he says it’s a block run by Mafia, so no one would ever suspect or bother him. I believe he often simply sleeps on the subway trains when he goes down there.”
“But why… does he go… down there? Or come… up here?”
“I never asked.” Perkus poured two cups of coffee. He rolled another joint out of the loose dope scattered on the linoleum, to replace what he’d added to Biller’s care package. The brand was Silver Haze. Sharing it with Biller seemed at once a kind of communion, lowered from above to those supplicant hands, and a gesture of egalitarian comradeship: I self-medicate, why shouldn’t you? And the Chandler novel with the vintage cover art-did Perkus have two copies of that, or was he gradually feeding his precious collection out onto the street to Biller? For Perkus, books were sandwiches, apparently, to be devoured.
Perkus was alert to my fascination. “I’ll introduce you,” he said. “He’s just shy at first.”
Marijuana might have been a constant, but coffee was Perkus Tooth’s muse. With his discombobulated eye Perkus seemed to be watching his precious cup while he watched you. It might not be a defect so much as a security system, an evolutionary defense against having his java heisted. Once, left alone briefly in his place, among his scattered papers I found a shred of lyric, the only writing I ever saw from Perkus that wasn’t some type of critical exegesis. An incomplete, second-guessed ode, it read: “Oh caffeine!/you contemporary fiend screen/into your face I’ve seen/into my face/through my face-” And yes, the sheet of paper was multiply imprinted with rings by his coffee mug.