Part 1d. In Which George Is On His Way to Meet Herman and I For Dinner with the Basement People
The whistle stops. Everything starts to go. Rattle of brass. Bird in the air.
George stopped to wait out the rain at the yellow newsstand under the Kings Highway subway stairs.
The little balding newsstand owner, too big to be a midget but small enough to be sensitive to remarks about it, poked his combed over head up from the counter, looked in George's general direction, and then climbed back down from his footstool perch after ashing his cigar on the floor below.
The owner didn't recognize George even though he's been stopping there every week for the last 2 years.
George was barely anywhere at any given moment. An incidental character, he lived in the space between the interactions of others, and left only a half beat of memory with those who he made natural contact.
There were people who might recognize him as a background character in a scene, but even if pressed, it would be difficult to choose him from a lineup of similarly shaped people in a neutral setting.
There were several people who knew him of course. People in the building, myself, Herman. Martuni had stated several times he doesn't believe in George, which personally I think requires Martuni to be aware of George's existence in the first place. But in the sense of public interaction, George could move through a party packed room without leaving a single impression on its residents or their guests.
This wasn't his intent, though neither did he consider this condition to be worth the attention it might require to correct.
The little newsstand owner stopped making notes on his checkpad with a pencil stub. He looked up, then he looked at his watch, and with a vacant sweep he removed his coffee from the counter, put out his cigar, and placed both items in a metal framed money box nailed to the plywood inner wall.
He climbed back up on the footstool to reach a set of rubber clip- ropes from the wall, then back down again, and then he proceeded to wrap and tie himself to the post in the middle of the floor.
After the little man finished tying the last half knot in the rubber rope, the rumble of the approaching train started to bounce and sway the newsstand, rattling the strings of pill packets stapled to hanging cards and knocking gum and fruitrolls from their shelves.
The newsstand owner remained expressionless while he bounced around like a springboarded children's toy.
Crack crack the train whooshes in with the staccato snapping of its wheels across the space between each set of rails, and then a disjointed flam of squeal brakes, and then three bursts of the bell at the station to slide the doors open down the line. The train unloaded and the lunch hour drugstore crowd poured through the open turnstiles and toward the exit stairs.
First the gong of a single foot hopping down the iron trestle stairs, then a second, then several, and finally a banging rush of feet in a constant flow swelling out into a single reverberating tone with muffled definition, until the crowd thinned back into a single pair of little old lady feet hopping down each stair using the arm rail acting as a lever.
This new group of landed passengers was my reason for having George wait at the newsstand. Done in order to get him into the drug store for his supplies, and back to the building.
It's not as if he had anything better to do anyway, and that gave him the liability of freedom to linger in the flush dynamics of the lunch hour drug store crowd's arrival.
When they all got to the bottom of the stairs, the crowd silently accounted for each other and grouped uneasily. Moving like a school of confused fish being suddenly dumped into a tank, they relied on blind perspective to slowly orient themselves into a pod with the intentional direction of a singular purpose.
Once the nonverbal consensus is reached, the group jerks forward, moving in disjointed unison and fanning out once they push through the open market drug store's invisible barrier.
The sickly sweet smell of 100 years of subway fruitstand news market dissipated into the drug store's air-conditioned atmosphere of perfume samples in glass cases with chrome fixtures and soft gold lighting.
I guided George through the crowd and into the store without even touching him once. I've been guiding George through my here and there since 1991 at least, and a bat-like intuition has developed between us over the years.
Most people in the store were in line at the dispensary. An old lady was at the front of the line arguing with the attendant.
Once the Benevolent Committee's agitated lawyers repealed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, they nationalized the drug markets and turned them into citizen run dispensaries.
Once the new distribution structure was in place, the Benevolent Committee then went on to replace immediately any doctors and pharmacists who through the social decay of the previous decade, began to think they were somehow charged into the role of enforcement agent.
The old lady in the front of the line was giving the attendant behind the counter the 'I lost my bottle' routine, and instinctively started talking louder every time the attendant tried to tell her he'll just give her a new bottle if she would just please pull out her dispensary card.
After the Benevolent Committee cut the straps of certain regulations which the pharmaceutical industry and doctors were being held down under, there was no longer any reason for this type of fight or deception.
There were no more pain contracts with random sample drug testing, emergency room doctors didn't have to add a dependence
variable into their treatment decisions, and pharmacists were no longer charged with the task of checking if someone was presenting duplicates at another store.
On one level this put the industry in a better position. Black market drug sales no longer existed, so the Benevolent Committee basically handed the entire split of profit over to them. After all, this wasn't communism.
On another level the industry was hurt by the change however. Treatment became more blunted. There was no longer an incentive for doctors to push over-complicated and ridiculously priced treatments for simple problems.
Of course some people were unable to self regulate, and wound up dead or otherwise permanently disengaged, and certainly this new structure created addicts of various types. But like any new government, the committee needed to test policy and make changes where needed. The benevolent establishments were set up for that reason.
For the moment I'm going to leave these details alone so I can get George back to the building and down to dinner at Wo Hop with the basement people, Herman and myself. No Martuni.
So eventually the citizen behind the old lady tapped her on the shoulder to diffuse the situation, and after being smacked with a pocketbook was able to get her to pull out the dispensary card.
She was given the bottle, no questions or hassle, and after some mumbling and hat pinning she stumbled through the store, swinging and knocking things over as one of the store attendants moved smoothly behind her, picking things up like an octopus with wings on the side of its head.
The line moved quickly. George paid the attendant behind the counter and put his supplies for the week into a paper sack. 2 packs of paper plates, 1 boxed assortment of plastic forks, knives and spoons, bag of tobacco, vial of dilaudid, food, and a small pallet of chocolate for Herman. He headed down Kings Highway toward the building on Ocean Parkway.
George used to live next to the subway above the old Russian lady bakery. He didn't mind the noise of the trains so much being he never really slept, or did anything more than go to his job most of the time. This condition, I would eventually decide, was by his own free will.
When I originally became aware of George in Boston, we were living next to a set of commuter rails just above the T station in Chinatown.
I never really thought to ask him if it was intentional or coincidence that in the two cities he lived in, both times I had him living on top of or below subway tracks.
When the city originally decided to start running subway tracks directly through low income residential areas, the debate over the noise level residents would be subjected to ended with the single argument, voiced by a city manager on the take: "These aren't the symphony crowd that's going to be living in these places," the pineapple shaped bureaucrat poured ice water into his cup from a sweating metal jug, "it's not like they need to worry about hearing much above a punch-clock bell or assembly line buzzer... or when I ask for more butter on my plate. Heh... heh..." He looked around to see if that last joke landed. It didn't.
When everything changed after the collapse, and the Benevolent Committee took over all aspects of demographics and residential planning, the first civilian instinct was a call for revenge against the
regular people, and anyone responsible for creating, or benefiting from, the previous systems.
The option of this angle was immediately denied by the committee of course.
Not only would this kind of action have put a tainted context around any future policy introduced by the committee, but also the enormity of the task in identifying and sorting the population wasn't something the committee was interested in pointing resources toward.
The policy the Benevolent Committee had on this issue was to create structures in which the people sorted themselves for the benefits attached to doing so, not to force an identity, or even signify an individual as part of a predetermined group.
Presupposing someone is one type or another is a form of aggression. Allowing them to do so for you, that is an asset.
This is not a metaphor.
So George went out from the store, everything in a bag, and started down the street and into the crowds.
George had an ability I was to envy at times, even enough to repeat myself at least once about it, which was his freedom of movement. This freedom had consequences however, and one of them was walking up to George right now.
"Hey George who do you like?" Manny was a bookie turned state since the collapse, an unfortunate carryover from the underground trades turned 'profit pending' after the restructuring of previously illicit leisure activities.
He used to work for the Imbecile, a mildly retarded drug dealer slash profit based rumor monger. Even after the change, the Imbecile continued spreading rumors, partially simply because he was too stupid to break a habit, and partially on some idiot scheme for profit on spec; convinced they would have some sort of payoff which never arrived. There was a reason he was called the imbecile.
His father was so disgusted with this family he created by mistake, he ran off immediately after the imbecile was born, leaving his mother to raise him with barely a word of English in the middle of Idaho.
This gave the imbecile that special angry sort of crazy unsuccessfully blunted with alcohol, making him appear even more stupid than he actually was.
Manny gave off the impression of an upright greasy stuttering rat with a hip disorder. He wore square glasses with nothing in the holes as if they made him look like something other than what he was.
His hair was straight and brittle and it stuck together in sticky rows from the constant combing through it he did with hair oil.
He recently lost almost half of his mustache in a shaving accident and decided to grow it out to match rather than shaving the other side off.
His skin was pockmarked and stubble grew in the depressions from where the razor didn't reach all the way in. He was wearing a clean suit, which meant he must have found himself a new mark.
Manny's walk swayed far to the left and back again with each step after breaking his hip in a snow related accident, which of course he tried unsuccessfully to sue the city over. For some reason he didn't use a cane, maybe it would make him seem like too much of a sympathetic character. Which he wasn't.
This swaying caused him to develop a sharp eye movement sensitivity because otherwise the world would be lobbing sideways and back again with each step at nauseating angles.
Even when standing still his eyes darted around, landing everywhere but on the eyes of whoever he was talking to.
Manny lived off favors from others when he could get them. He was one of those types that defined people by their assets and how they could be exploited to fill a deficit in his own planning or skills. And although this character is extreme, you probably know the kind of incapable person I'm talking about in this part, because they are everywhere, and they will find you.
With George, what Manny wanted was as odd as it was specific; access to Herman.
After the collapse and the building on Ocean Parkway became available, Herman and I moved in. About a year later rumors somehow got started about Herman. It was another one of those rumors that get started by a cycle of validation in repetition. Regardless of the absurdity of the rumor, it gets repeated and angled until an entire story is fleshed out by unknowing collaborators who corroborate the story, which at its core is based on a false assumption. However those repeating the story are unaware of its initial angle, and therefore it's assumed into truth.
Herman was unable to stop the rumors, and decided it would simply be easier to stop going outside. Which by his absence fueled the rumors with a lack of counterpoint.
George continued walking. "Hello Manny what do you need?"
Manny trailed George hopping slightly forward and stuttering intentionally in an attempt to use his physical abnormality to punctuate each obviously pending request with some sort of sympathetic angle. "N-n-n-need? Why do I have to neeeed something? Can't a guy say heh-hello to his friend without n-needing something?" He nearly knocked into George accidentally while concentrating on sounding incredulous. He decided to give up the stutter so he would have less fake amplified mannerisms to keep track of.
George rolled his eyes and continued walking. "Ok, then what don't you need?"
"Well George I was just thinking maybe we could go over to your place and hang out for a while, got something to share with you, maybe we could go over to your place is all." Manny pulled a half empty bottle of blackberry brandy out of his jacket pocket and and jiggled it at George. "See I was just thinking we could go over to your place, over to your place and we could share this and hang out." Manny was talking in a quick paced desperation. "So what do you think? We could go there now, right now we could go there."
George stopped at the corner in front of the locking grate to a closed office building. "Maybe that would be a good idea, except instead of my place let's go over to yours, it's closer."
"My place? No my place stinks my place is a mess it should be your place we go, my place is a mess it stinks." Manny was starting to sweat visibly.
George looked at Manny, Manny held up the bottle and jiggled it again with a big smile showing gray yellowing teeth.
George stopped looking at Manny. "When have I ever given off the impression my place wouldn't be a mess?"
Manny stopped jiggling the bottle and made a thinking face. "Um...My place is being fumigated?" He didn't mean for it to sound like a question but it came out as one because he couldn't convince even himself with it.
George shook his head. "Look. Manny. I'm not bringing you over to the building. You're never getting into the building, forget about the building, and forget about Herman, and the basement, and any of it. Nobody over there is going to let you in."
"Herman?" Manny slipped the brandy bottle back in his pocket and forced a set of pleading worry lines on his forehead. "Herman? You think I want to go to your place to see Herman? Wha, I mean, you know, no, dude. Herman? Why would I want to go see that fucked up retard..." Manny's words were cut off as he was lifted off the ground and slammed into the locking grate.
George bristled "First of all, he's not a retard. He's a person, who's trying, and it's not working out so well. Second, I see you near the building, talking to anyone who might not know you well enough, or might be too stupid, to let you near him, and I personally will put your head in a printer vise and permanently emboss a warning sign on your face."
Manny nervously grinned and started sweating all over George's hands around his neck, so George dropped him to the ground and picked up his packages.
"Stay the fuck away from Herman." George cocked his leg back into a ready to kick position. Manny put up his hands in anticipation and started to whine. "Ok ok no problem. No problem." George put his foot back on the ground and started walking away. Manny yelled "What I want with that retard anyway?"
George turned around. Manny had already slithered around the corner.
George was, as is probably by now very obvious, as protective of Herman as I was.
George stopped at the te amo cigar shop to pick up a pack of cigarette papers and paused to casually glance at the newspapers held down with rocks and wires.
Some of them were as much as a month old. Since the collapse, all news and notifications were distributed freely by the Benevolent Committee for anyone to use as a reference, the papers and informational posters laid out at the doorways of citizen establishments.
This in a strange sense was a momentary boom of virtual profit for the subway entrance newsstand owners, because suddenly the old papers they had laying around collecting water and foot dirt on the sidewalk were out of print collectables.
After this all came down the newsstand owners started marking the remaining and by then out of date papers up to ridiculous prices. Sometimes 3-400 each in the case of Sunday editions.
Problem with that kind of strategy is something can be valued as anything on paper, but if there's nobody willing to pay what you're asking for your this and that, it's as worthless as an out of date newspaper that had little factual value when it was still current.
Now the old papers just sit in front of various establishments for the look of it, and the occasional citizen doing a period piece that needs the paper for the effect of authenticity.
George never was much for reading newspapers when they were being written, and he enjoyed seeing them dead on the stand for the simple irony of their overconfidence from years of distributing assumptive propaganda.