by G. Jack Urso
I pulled my PT Cruiser alongside
the curb with a pile of garbage that occupied most of the grassy patch of earth
between the sidewalk and the street. It was not garbage as such, but Ron’s
belongings. Ron had lived above my friend Benny in a converted one-family home in
an older section of Albany. All physical evidence of Ron’s life was gathered in
front like so much debris pushed up on the beach by the tide after a storm.
Ron had already been a long-time
resident before Benny moved in about a decade ago. Carl, the owner’s son who
occasionally did repairs, and then only after complaints and withholding rent,
said Ron had lived there almost thirty years before he died March 8, 2013. One day the previous fall, Ron was
so sick he called an ambulance and never returned home. Six months later he was
dead and pretty much all evidence of his life was sitting on the curb and waiting to be hauled off to
the landfill.
I looked over the pile. It
reminded me of the belongings of a dead Viking king gathered about his corpse
in a boat before being set out to sea and burned.
Lone Wolves and Lost Boys
Among the more
social of mammals, besides humans, are wolves. Wolves live in a pack with a
strict hierarchy. Every wolf has a place in the hierarchy and the punishment
for stepping out of place can be severe. Nevertheless, even among this
highly social group there are some wolves just unable
to adapt themselves to the social hierarchy. Having neither the ambition to be
an alpha male or alpha female, nor the willingness to be an omega (last in the
pecking order), they slink off to live on the periphery of wolf society —
contributing little except some genetic diversity on the rare occasions they
are able to lure a female from the pack.
Human society is no less
hierarchical. Preference is naturally afforded to those members engaged in the
propagation, feeding, and protection of the tribe, such as parents, teachers,
producers, hunters, gatherers, police officers, soldiers, etc. Yet, within even
the most social of species, wolf or human, there are certain individuals who —
either by design, nature, or ill-fortune — contribute little to the overall
survival of the species, or who are cast aside when their usefulness to family
and society is over.
Benny's apartment was a sort of clubhouse for a small group of men, including myself, who couldn't seem to find much of a place in the human hierarchy. Some, like my friend Benny, had been
married and had kids, later to flee a toxic relationship. Others were married
because frankly they’d be lost in the world without someone to wipe their ass.
There were victims of life-changing accidents or verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Some experienced what can only be described
as horrific tragedies, losing spouses or children. A few women whose lives
charted a similar course hung out on the periphery, but it was largely a male
group. Some of us were as close as brothers, some of us couldn’t really stand
each other, but there we were — a gathering of lone wolves and lost boys.
Ronny, I Hardly Knew Ye
Ron was an older guy with a slim
build, of average height, with a mop of brown hair and a bushy mustache flecked
with gray. Jerry Seinfeld has a bit where he says people continue to dress and
cut their hair in the style of the last year they were good looking, and Ron’s
look was stuck somewhere in the mid-late 1970s. He looked younger than his age
and we were surprised to find out he was 61 when he died in 2013.
Benny had a near-constant stream
of friends in and out of his apartment. While they could pound back the beers (I seldom drank), we were all astonished by Ron’s capacity. It was
often we would see him come home with an 18-pack of beer and find the entire
thing in the trash the next day. It was a prodigious amount. Ron occasionally
clashed with Benny, usually over Benny’s love of loud music. Meanwhile, we had
no problem hearing whatever games were on in Ron’s apartment, and it seemed as
though sports were all he ever watched.
One day while we were hanging
out, Ron began banging on the floor. This was his way of telling Benny to turn down the music. Usually, Benny would
comply, but since this became nearly a daily occurrence, it grinded on Benny’s nerves.
Benny went up to confront Ron and had a few sharp words. When he returned, his anger was defused, but more by what he saw than by the opportunity to
blow off steam. Gathered on shelves all around Ron’s apartment, were boxes and boxes of model trains. Benny ran some the names by me. I had a sideline selling old board games online for a
local book and game store and had some knowledge. Ron had items going back to
the 50s and 60s, the golden era of model trains. There must have been thousands
of dollars sitting on the shelves. Ron sat there every night, getting drunk,
watching sports, and looking at his collection of old model trains.
Ron’s obituary was brief — a mere
five sentences that revealed little except he was born in 1952, grew up in
Guilderland, graduated from Syracuse University, and was predeceased by his
mother and a brother. As a
reporter/editor, I used to write obituaries for a local weekly newspaper. It
was the most depressing task I ever had as a writer, though, in a way, I am
writing one now. Obituaries are the last chance for people to tell the world
someone mattered. The longer the obituary, the more involved was the person in
the world, the more they contributed to it, the more they were loved and
needed. Short obituaries, unless the expressed wish of the deceased, revealed
exactly what it implied — a marginal life lived on the frayed, paper-thin edges of society.
After finding his obituary, I also looked through old city directories and discovered Ron moved into the last home he would ever know in 1988; ironically, the same year I graduated college. Twenty-five years in that small place — I felt claustrophobic just thinking about it.
Under the short obituary were a
total of eleven comments who noted Ron’s kind and “grandfatherly” way about
him. He enjoyed classic Jazz, was a Yankees fan, and in his younger days played
softball and enjoyed picnics with friends and family. As Ron was a public employee, I was able to
find out he worked at the General Soils Lab for the New York State Department
of Transportation, Building 7, at the State Office Building Campus about two
miles from his apartment. His position was listed as an “Engrg Tech” (probably
an administrative staff support position), earning $38,294 a year in 2012, according
to public records. A two-room apartment in a 112-year-old building and $38,294 a year was not a lot to show for sixty-one years.
In some ways, Ron reminded me of
my friend John. John died about ten years before Ron, and, like Ron, it was quick.
One day he woke up sick and six months later he was dead of pancreatic cancer.
We called John “Cruiser” because, in addition to Kruse being his last name, he cruised through life with little an apparent
care in the world, despite his circumstances. Something of an overgrown frat
boy, John’s hobbies largely concerned beer and sports. When he lost
his driver’s license for five years due to repeated DWIs, John was unfazed. He
simply got himself an apartment in a tenement downtown two blocks from work and
right across the street from the court building where he reported to his
probation officer, after which John would promptly head to his favorite bar.
John’s nonchalance was deep. He
never complained, seldom bitched, and never spoke about anything serious. If
John had any fears or regrets in life, he never mentioned them, including his
current legal situation. It was an almost Zen-like state of living in the Now,
except I wasn’t sure if one were to cut John if we would get beer more than blood.
Yet, John was a Vietnam War vet. He kept about a half dozen, or so, medals in a
shadow box that for the six years I knew him sat on the floor behind a chair
gathering dust. One of them was the Vietnam Service Medal with two stars. It hinted that there was something underneath John’s well-practiced
cool exterior; nevertheless, he never talked about the war except for fond memories
of the bar girls. Then, the summer John came off probation, got his license
back, and got a steady girlfriend, he got cancer and died six months later, like Ron.
Just as John
was rejoining the pack, rejoining the hierarchy, life pushed him back out again.
I wondered if Ron ever had his
chance or if he just let it pass by. There's a certain security in stagnation — the same apartment, the same job, year after year. Now, a decade after Ron passed, my life is little different than it was twenty or thirty years ago, and I wonder the same about myself.
En Passant
John Steinbeck wrote about the
kinds of lost souls who operate on the periphery of society in Of Mice and Men, the timeless tale of
migrant farm workers and men crippled by life or nature and living a transient
life, if not physically, then at least emotionally. In a way, Ron, John, myself,
Benny, and the others who gathered at Benny’s, reminded me of characters in Steinbeck's novel — an ad hoc collection of souls thrown together by fate and misfortune. Lost Boys
in a Never-Never Land stuck in an eternal childhood, outside society and family.
Carl, the landlady’s son and with
whom Benny and Ron usually dealt with, had been chaffing the past six months of
Ron’s illness. The rent stopped coming pretty soon after Ron was hospitalized,
and while Carl chaffed at the loss of income (because it usually went straight
into his pocket), his mother didn’t have the heart to evict a tenant dying of
cancer after twenty-five years of on-time rent payments. Besides, it would
take months to evict him anyway and it was clear Ron didn’t have long to live.
After Ron died, no family members or friends came to clear out his belongings. Carl offered to pay Benny to clean out Ron’s apartment. Everything had to get piled out on the sidewalk for the city to haul away
on garbage day. Benny asked me to come over the next morning and help him move some of the heavy
stuff out to the curb. I had to work, but I said I
would drop by around noon. Benny said
Carl was going to rifle through the apartment first and grab those model
trains to try and recoup some of the six month's lost rent.
When I got there the next day, I saw
everything piled up curbside and went in. I found Benny sitting down in his
apartment smoking a joint. He said he didn’t need me after all. Carl helped him with a few of the big items and he carried the rest out to the curb. All he had left to do is give the place a good scrubbing to get rid of the dusty remains.
I asked Benny if Carl snagged the
model trains. Benny took a slow drag off the joint and exhaled, replying that that there were no model trains. All the boxes were
empty, all of them. They were just a collection of empty boxes.
“Carl was pissed,” Benny said
with a smile on his face.
So, apparently Ron spent the last twenty-five years getting drunk, watching sports, and looking at empty boxes
that once held model trains, now long gone. My life is essentially no less stagnated than Ron's was. I’ve had nearly as many jobs in as many years since his passing, I've lived in the same house for twenty years, and instead of model toy trains, I sell old board games. Am I feeling
empathy for Ron or just feeling sorry for myself?
The sun was setting by the time I
left Benny’s. Scavengers had picked through Ron’s belongings, but little had
been taken. Even the TV, a large, heavy, now obsolete, cathode-ray model that would
have been the envy of most people not so long ago now sat forlorn and rejected.
Time passed quickly and moved on without Ron catching up, though in the end
it finally caught up to him. I paused for a moment and looked over the
totality of Ron’s life waiting to be hauled away as so much garbage the next
morning. I kicked at the trash bag full of crushed toy train boxes.
Opening up the door of my retro-style PT Cruiser, I slide behind the wheel and drove off into the growing twilight, going home.
● ● ●
Moving, full of empathy, self-revelation, and universal meaning. Every life has universal meaning. The time has come for some of that universal meaning in our lives. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading!
DeleteSteinbeck is definitely the one to go to for the literary reality of the lone wolves and lost boys. Made a career of it, and a nobel prize I believe. Good story!
ReplyDeleteMany thanks!
DeleteThe part about John, "Cruiser" rejoining the wolf pack in good form, then cancer knocking on tbe door, made me think of the Aztec sport (what we call hiyaleah, I believe) where the winner of the game - now at the topmost position of tne social hierarchy - would willingly offer himself up for execution. The idea being when life is at its best, so to speak , it's time to exit, make room for the next, and have anotner go rou d on the rebound.
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading. This story means a lot to me. Yes, the Aztec ball game might be a good analogy for John. He was a good man and a loyal friend who paid his dues and deserved a long life with woman he loved.
Delete