I think I played it pretty well, thinks Bernie Kahn as he’s leaving the Roundhouse. I answered Ryman and Smith’s questions about my last meeting with Myron and they let me go. Of course, their investigation is just starting. If they run into anything else that connects me with dear Myron’s demise I’m sure to be hauled in again for a less friendly grilling.
Life’s like that at the bottom. You’re free as a bird because you have no real connections to the system. Until the day when the system notices you for some reason and decides you’re a minor irritant, at which point you commence to be shat upon without any institutional umbrella to fend off the deluge.
I’m not the kind to whine. Well, all right, maybe I am the kind to whine. But this time I really am just a victim of circumstance. I didn’t ask Myron to call me after all those years. Just getting together with the guy was a favor, not a hustle for a free feed or a few bucks. Though it’s true that Libby was genuinely impressed when I used Myron’s retainer to take her out to her own first rate dinner. At least she seemed to be impressed. With Libby you never know for sure.
Now there’s just enough time for a quick shower to rid my cloths and hair of
Ryman’s cigarette smoke and then its off to see Jay. We’ll talk about poetry for awhile. Jay will grumble about the current state of the arts in America and how his own creations are going unread because of various conspiracies. Then we’ll get down to business, and I can pump him for anything he can tell me about Myron’s work and why it might have led to his death.
Jay’s a crazy polymath who knows a lot about almost everything The kind of guy you sometimes see in public libraries, totally dishevelled, face hidden behind a pile of books, doing research and feverishly scribbing notes on the War of the Roses or the seasonal reproductive habits of Greenland penguins.
I
’ve known Jay for a long time and his ability to fail at whatever he tries, in spite of his undeniable smarts, is nothing short of miraculous. He’s even managed to turn his recent fascination with financial markets into just another non-paying intellectual and artistic exercise. I’m hoping his deep well of unrequited knowledge in this realm can be tapped to help me out of my own present difficulties.
At the front door of my house on Irving Street I encounter MarySue Lamont, my next door neighbor. She’s taken time from her home-based business to jog around the neighborhood. She does this every morning and almost every afternoon because she honestly believes flashing her well-toned body to neighbors and others in the area is an act of charity. It also lets her show off her high-priced jogging outfit, which displays more designer names than a Nascar has lube oil logos.
“You got a problem Bernie,” she wheezes as she comes to a breathless halt on the invisible border where our row houses connect. This proximity, together with the thinness of the separating wall, allows me to identify the men she’s bonking on any given night. “Oh Jesus, John, John, John. Yes, yes...” tells me she’s in delecto with two guys named Jesus and John. When she cries “Oh Jesus, Manny, Many, Manny. Yes, yes...” I figure she’s getting it on with Jesus and Manny.
Strangely, all this shared intimacy hasn’t brought MarySue and me closer together. Our class preferences are simply too great. She’s angry because she thinks I’m destroying the neighborhood. I’m angry because she seems so intent on improving it. This situation is so like the one I had with upscale neighbors in Boston that I sometimes thinks irritating these people may be my primary reason for existence.
“What’s my problem, MarySue?”
“Think someone tried to break into your place.” Her breathing is slowly returning to normal after the run. “Your door. Looks like the lock’s screwed up.”
I’d been staring at MarySue’s canary yellow headband, wondering if the designer name emblazoned on it in raised black letters might be raised on the band’s inside as well, in which case it could get permanently tattooed on her forehead. Now my attention turns to my front door. The lock has indeed been messed with. I see this clearly before even trying to insert my key.
“
Did you happen to notice who did this?”
“Sorry. Busy all day. Work. Running. Hope you haven’t been ripped off.”
In truth, she hopes I have not only been ripped off but fire-bombed and fumigated. The asking price for her house skyrockets the day I move out. But I will never move out. I would have to be crazy to do so. I’ve got the housing deal of the century.
“Thanks for the good wishes,” I say. “How’s business?”
MarySue’s home-based business is head hunting. There’s a jobless recovery going on. So I know her business has to be terrible.
“Great,” she says. “Couldn’t be better. Toodle.”
And toodle to you. She disappears into her house after favoring him with what might have been either a wave or a finger.
I walk around to the back of our connected row houses. There’s a narrow walkway here that runs between eight foot high walls. These walls are supposed to protect the back of houses on either side of the walkway from burglars. But someone has left a wooden crate beside one of the walls, a crate that allows me and any burgler with a mind to do so to scale the wall with no great effort. One foot on this crate, the other swinging over the wall, a quick jump, and I’m in my own tiny garden.
This pathetic plot of urban dirt has shown itself unwilling to support anything that one might want to eat, wear, or smoke. Its only value is that it gives prowlers or a locked out homeowner like myself a relatively soft landing after scaling an unsecure security wall.
I walk across this plantless wonder to a sliding glass door that leads into my first floor living room. Protecting this portal is a metal gate to which I carry a key. I open the gate, give a secret turn to the knob on the sliding glass door, and enter the house, thereby outmaneuvering the person who played the dirty trick on my front door that was supposed to keep him out.
I walk through my ground floor living room to the front door. Here, working from the inside, it’s no big problem getting the door open. A quick examination reveals what’s been done to the lock and mail slot. I understand this trick immediately because I played it himself a few times while working the old gentrification scam in Boston for Myron. It will take only a few hammer strokes to free up the mail slot. It will take just a few additional minutes to change the front door’s lock cylinder with one of the spares I keep in an upstairs drawer.
Give a point to my old adversaries at the mortgage company. The ones who
keep trying to make my life here so unpleasant I’ll finally move away and let them legally repossess this property. A point for the inconvenience they’ve caused me, yes, but far, far from the match point they keep hoping to score.
After showering and changing clothes, I’m about to leave for Jay’s place when Libby drops by. She often pays a visit on her way home from nearby Jefferson hospital where she works as a nurse. Seated on the second floor of my trinity row house, sipping coffee, Libby compliments me on my foresight in having a spare lock cylinder and the skill to install it.
I shrug modestly. “And how was your day?” I ask.
“Oh, the usual. One of the doctors came in stoned and I had to do the operation and remove his patient’s gall bladder. At least I think it was a gall bladder.”
“The operation went well?”
“Like a dream. Though we’re missing some scalpels. Not sure where they went. Could have fallen on the floor. How did things go with you and Philly’s finest?”
She listens sympathetically as the situation is explained. Then: “You know, you were foolish to get involved with Myron again. From everything you’ve told me, he caused you nothing but grief in Boston.”
“You didn’t bring that up when I used some of his retainer to buy you dinner.”
She sweeps past this with a swatting flies motion. Her hands perform this movement beautifully. Libby has beautiful hands, wrists that remind you of swan necks, exceptionally long fingers. I would feel quite confident having her take out my gall bladder.
“Why am I still hanging out with you, Bernie?” she asks when the conversation flags. “Could you remind me?”
I’m happy for the chance to do so. “Because Big Tony drives you into
paroxysms of pleasure such as few women have even known,” I suggest.
She swats more flies. “No. That’s not it.”
“Because you feel a surge of pride walking down the street with a man who is not only physically imposing but intellectually gifted.”
“Spare me the jokes.” She pauses. “Wait a minute. Yes. The jokes. I remember now. It’s because you make me laugh.”
Libby once confessed she’s a laugh slut. Ever since her late teens, any guy who can get her laughing hard enough could land her in the sack.
I found this confession troubling at first. The male ego recoils at the thought of getting laid by virtue of being a clown. But I quickly came around to the realization that it’s better to be a clown who’s getting sex regularly with a women who’s clearly too good for him, than a strong and noble dude who tries to get through the weekend renting J.Lo movies. I also realized that a guy of around fifty with no money and a deep-seated curmudgonly nature should be pathetically grateful to find an intelligent and loving professional woman in her fortyish prime who actually still finds his shit amusing.
For no apparent reason other than the fact that a well orchestrated effort is obviously underway to get me out of my present digs, Libby shifts the conversation to housing.
“
So how long are you and Big Tony going to be able to stay here?”
She has put her coffee mug down and is leaning back on the grungy sofa that is this second floor’s main seating. We’re about ten feet apart, which is as far apart as you can get in a trinity row house, so called because it only has three rooms, stacked one atop the other, Father, Son and Holy Ghost-style, the floors joined by a spiral metal staircase.
The first floor of my own trinity is a walk-in living room. The second floor has a TV, a sofa and some exercise equipment, along with a partitioned area that hides a toilet, sink and shower. The third floor’s low-ceilinged attic space is where I store my books and music. There’s a basement, too, where I cook and eat most of my meals.
Imagine three trailers, twelve feet wide by twenty-eight feet long, that a tornado has piled up vertically atop a tiny basement. That’s trinity living. Local real estate sellers refer to these structures as charming starters.
“I can stay here as long as I want.,” I assure Libby. “No problem.”
A day’s end failing sun is now altering the lighting in the room where we sit. It reveals a very tired looking Libby, more than a little depressed. There are dark patches under her eyes. Her face is drawn and pale the way it sometimes gets when she’s had an especially hard day. Jefferson works its nurses hard, and Libby works harder than most.
This woman is eight stages up from being simply beautiful. She’s the ultimate class act. I marvel for the thousandth time that I continue to enjoy her company.
“Tell me again about your house deal,” she says.
The tone of her question reminds me of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice And Men.” Of Lenny asking George to tell him again about those wonderful pigs and chickens that they’re going to have one day when they finally buy their own farm. Libby has heard my equivalent tale many times, but it always seems to cheer her.
“You remember my real estate bonanza in Boston.”
“A triumph, Bernie. Not something a woman forgets.”
“When I came to Philly I bought another house with the proceeds of that deal. This one. Then, what with one thing and another...”
“Sloth? Incompetence?”
“...one thing and another, I fell behind in my mortgage payments here, too. Just like I did in Boston. You know what these bastards are like when they don’t get their money every month.”
“I know,” says Libby. “I know. The bastards stick it to me the same way.” Some of her weary facial lines appear to be softening. I continue my recital.
“Well, I’m not the kind of guy who’s a prisoner of his possessions. I’m not about to be house poor just to keep a house.”
“The worst possible reason to be house poor,” Libby interjects.
I continue. Unflustered. “This isn’t the old Kahn family ponderosa, after all. It’s just a row house I bought with money I got from another house sale in another city. So when I run out of cash here, I just stopped making mortgage payments. I figure three months will go by, I’ll get an eviction notice from the bank. Then another three months will pass before they actually get the sheriff to throw me out. I’ll end up with six months free rent.”
“That’ll show ‘em.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Not realizing things would turn out the way they did. After three months I do get a letter from the bank. But instead of telling me to depart from these premises, it tells me I should consider applying for the Pennsylvania Home Owners Protection Program. Sure, I figure. Why not? It’s gotta give me at least another month or two of free housing.
“This program, however, turns out to be something far, far better. In fact, it turns out to be the goofiest government subsidy program ever invented. Everything that would disqualify someone from getting regular house refinancing...”
“A regular job, stocks, money in the bank,” suggests Libby.
“Yeah. That stuff. Everything that would usually disqualify someone like me from traditional refinancing turns out to qualify me perfectly for this program. The reason for this, I find out later, is because the program was originally a bailout for Pennsylvania coal miners who lost their jobs when the old mines closed down and had nothing left of value but their homes. That, and a hell of ot of union political clout in the state capital where this program was concocted.”
Libby is clearly enjoying herself now. She’s begun rocking back and fourth slowly like a drowsy granny on a summer porch, a sure sign her inner laugh slut is awakening.
“So you lived here free for three years while the state made your mortgage
payments,” she says. “Using the money you saved to romance me.”
“Worth every penny of it, too,” I assure her.
The tempo of her rocking increases. “What then, Bernie? What happened then?”
“Well, you remember Jake the house painter?”
“Jake the house painter. How could I forget Jake? A truly upstanding citizen.”
I’ve always thought Libby underestimated Jake. Sure, Jake was the guy in Nam who was always smoking a six-inch bomber while driving a fully loaded ammo truck. The guy who in recent years drank a six-pack of Sam Adams before ascending a shaky forty-foot ladder in a dry gale to put the finishing paint touches under a roof gutter. The guy with a collection of automatic rifles rivaling in size and lethality the weaponry stored in local National Guard armories.
“Jake has his eccentricities,” I admit. “But he helped me keep this place out of the hands of the blood sucking lenders and state officials who thought they had a right to seize it when my three years of mortgage-free living were up.”
Libby is now in full rocking mode. “Good old Jake,” she manages.
“Boy, you can say that again. If he hadn’t put a mechanics lien on this place I would have lost it. Now they can’t evict me until the lien is satisfied because a mechanics lien takes precedence in court over first and second mortgage liens. And since Jake has pretty much disappeared...”
“Because of those credit cards he took out in his dog’s name.”
“That dog, Libby, is a very smart animal. It even has its own social security number. Several social security numbers, in fact. And I’m not altogether convinced it didn’t take out those credit cards itself. The real injustice here is that a human is as responsible for credit card purchases made by a pet as by a spouse. So when little Dingo exceeded the limit on all her cards, Jake had to move to that fortified camouflaged compound he’s been preparing in Upper Michigan.”
Libby is now rocking back and forth to beat the band. “If you can’t trust your own doberman,” she manages.
“Of course, my VA benefits help, too. It’s not just the house deal that let’s me maintain my present lifestyle.”
“Your war wounds,” says Libby.
“Well, not wounds, exactly. Definitely service connected though.”
“My hero. My brute.”
“When that bench collapsed when we were getting our mustering out speech it hurt like hell.”
“Your back, Bernie. Dear God. Those back pains.”
“Damn straight, my back. It still hurts whenever I see reruns of ‘Mash.’ I deserve those benefits.”
“
“You could even qualify for food stamps. But you never applied.”
“Shit, no. I got my pride.”
Libby’s suddenly rises from the sofa and starts stripping off her clothes. “You keep me alive, you wonderful nutcake. You know that?” She’s on me now. Pressing against me. One hand pulling my head down toward her own, the other fiddling with my crotch.
“Big Tony. Can you hear me big guy? Come to mama.”
“Jay’s waiting,” I say in a last, futile effort to follow my professional game plan.
“Jay can wait. Mama needs her Big Tony.”
Jay waits. Big Tony doesn’t.
