Settling In
A red Carthusian squatted on the sidewalk– I stopped to gawk and the hairy lunk turned from poking through the wire mesh at the trash and put out his grubby paw.
I used to ramble down to Seniors pretty much every afternoon. So I was surprised to see this character hanging around the trash basket outside as I was leaving. I’d’ve seen him if he was ever there before, you follow me? Big hairy ape is a pretty good description. Everybody’s seen them on tv, of course. Everybody’s seen fire and flood on tv, too. But still, you stop for a look when they pop up in your face. That’s where I made my mistake, my first mistake, anyways.
They come all the way from wherever it is in those big ships you see pictures of, and what’s the fist thing you catch them up to? Mooching off honest citizens. The immigration people ought to pack up the lot of them. I voted for Roskalnakov in the last election just because he promised to protect the common Joe from alien peril. I should’ve known better. I don’t say that he isn’t a cut above the general run of political leeches. But they won’t let him do anything.
So I put this lit cigar stub I had in his mitt. An orangutan is military academy material next to this un-mowed out-field. A reddish shag carpet left out in the rain all summer is the first thing most people probably think of before they glance away in embarrassment. I was hoping he’d catch fire and half-way sterilize his hand. But nimble as a liar’s tongue (which he is, too), he sticks the last inch of my stogie in his mouth and makes a slide on his bottom to nestle against my leg.
I don’t even let them take my inside seam and here this smelly thing’s got his arm wrapped around my leg above the knee. Before I could catch my breath. So, naturally, I just pinched his ear; they’re amazingly similar to some lower relative of the monkey, when you consider how far off they come from. He gave a piteous yipe and scuttled off, not before burning a hole in my blue, wool trousers with my own stogie.
It had to be just then. I swear hairy britches saw her coming, because I hadn’t really hurt him that much. But just at that moment Vivien Glass pushed through the door of the Seniors and catches sight of how I’m being practically mugged on the doorstep by a predatory alien.
"Oh, you poor dear!" she cries, all high and horrified. "Howard Keiser, what have you done to him?"
"Who? What? I didn’t do a damn thing to the creature. It attacked me." I set her straight. "I ought to call the dog-catcher on it before it bites somebody." And there he was stuck to my leg again, making his naturally beady eyes big.
Now, Vivian is a fine woman– heck of a looker – erect carriage and she don’t need to touch up her hair, she looks just fine in pepper and salt. I didn’t like to make a scene in front of her.
"It’s a Carthusian, isn’t it?" she said. "I’ve seen their pictures, but this is the first ever to come around here. How did you meet?"
"Found it going through the trash," I told her while trying to step away, but he scooted along with me. I was going to say more, not to the thing’s credit, but Vivian interrupted.
"The poor dear, it looks hungry. Are you hungry? How long has it been since you ate? Would you like something?" She bent over him and showed more decency and concern than the creature himself probably ever mustered in his whole life. He made some little crawling motions, as if he was going to attach himself to Vivien. She don’t deserve that. Fine woman.
"I’ll take care of getting it something." I said this pretty loud, and took him by the scruff, so as to get the message across that Bozo wasn’t to go laying his unwashed paws on Vivien Glass.
That’s so kind," she said, looking real pleased. Bending over it again, she coo-ed, "The nice man is going to take you to get something to fill your tummy." It made some squirming motions to get loose, sensing that it was not attached to the softest touch here. But I raised enough dogs and children that it wasn’t so easy to wiggle off. Days the arthritis lets up, I still got a grip.
"Well, come on then," I hitched him along, "we better be getting on towards that sandwich."
It was a block-and-a-half frog-march down Vine to this little steak shop called Louie’s. After the bum saw I wasn’t about to slack off, he straightened up and turned out to be taller than me, shorter in the leg, and not so good posture.
Outside the shop I pushed him up against a pole and said, "I wish I had a leash for you, but stay right here, you understand me? Right here. Don’t move and I’ll go in there and get you something to eat. Which you don’t deserve and I wouldn’t do, if I thought Vivien Glass would never find out about it.
"You understand me? You speak anything? English? Something? Your kind talk, don’t they?"
Nothing.
"STAY HERE!" He slid down against the pole, which I took for a sort of answer, so I went into Louie’s.
The kind of help they get these days. That stuff’s too greasy for me anymore, so I’m not usually exposed.
"What’s the cheapest thing on the menu?" I asked the acne demonstration plot behind the counter. There wasn’t another customer, so I guess he thought he’d get a rest, which I was disturbing.
"Fish sandwich."
"I’ll take one. You don’t have to bother to cook it. It’s for that parasite out on the curb."
He didn’t bother to look.
"Don’t cook it?" This was a hard one and nobody had trained him for it.
"Nah, just throw it in a bun and let me have it"
He looked at me from under his paper service-cap. "Is that here or to go?"
"It’s for the bum on the sidewalk out there."
"Here or to go?"
"It isn’t going to go far, seventeen feet, so don’t bother with wrapping."
He looked again. "That’s outside. It’s to go."
"You want to waste a bag? Go ahead," I told him.
"Pickle?"
"Hell, no. Why waste a pickle. Just throw it in a bun and let me get out of here. How much is it?"
"Comes with."
"What did you ask for, then?" I had him there. So he fell back to the previous position.
"They’re fried. I got to fry it."
"Why bother? I’d buy dog food if you sold that. Don’t bother to cook it."
"They come fried. They don’t come without," he said as if this was going to be important to somebody far up some chain of command.
"I don’t want it fried," I said. This was getting under my skin. "I like it raw. I’m paying for it. What do you care? Maybe I want to feed it to my pet seagull."
The kid looked hard and you could tell he was thinking. Probably the first time since school kicked him out.
"They’re froze up. I got to cook it or you can’t eat it. Seagulls eat fried."
This was taking all day. I could’ve made it myself by this time. "All right. Gimme fried. I got to get out of here." The kid turned and stated on the project. Next thing I see, he opens a door and puts it in the microwave.
"Sixty-nine cent." The greasy bag slid across the counter.
"That’s a microwave. I thought you said you were going to fry it." I was a little ticked.
"Fried in the microwave."
"I ought to tell Louie how to fry a fish sandwich," I said, a little sarcastically.
"Who’s Louie?"
"Owns the shop," I tried to clear up his face. "Big friend of mine."
"Never heard of him," the kid said, turning his back and doing nothing.
I got out of there, but out on the sidewalk there was no sign of the orangutan panhandler.
I was afraid he had lit off to bother Vivien, so I had kind of a pang. Last one of them I bothered to have.
Louie’s is on a corner. That accounts for the way business is booming. So, down the little side street you could see their back door and a dumpster set up against it. Seemed a natural to me. Sure enough, when I got close, there was a rattling around inside.
"Hey, I got you a fish sandwich. You think it’s worth leaving your natural environment for some honest but greasy food?" That wasn’t Lucille Ball sticking her red head over the top. "No, don’t bother to climb out. It’s perfectly right you should eat this sandwich in that dumpster. Here you go." I handed up the dark-stained bag and he took it with interest. "See you around. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do."
I took off for home, thinking how the space age and old age weren’t neither of them what they looked like being when I was a boy. So, when I pushed in the front door of the building, I headed for the elevator under the impression I was alone with my conscience. You don’t live downtown without keying in to the little things, though. You learn in order to survive. So I turned around when the outside door stopped sighing shut for a brief moment. I brought it up a lot of times at building meetings, management ought to put a lock on that door.
"What do you think you’re doing? Get on out of here before I call the cops. This is private property."
There he was, a little greasier, but none the less lovely than when I left him. He made a sick kind of smile. He doesn’t have teeth, exactly, though he can eat well enough to starve rats out of the house. Kind of a melon-slice smile, too smooth in a lot of ways. I didn’t take to him before and I didn’t take to him again.
"Beat it," I said, but he just slumped to the floor, that way they have with the big crease in their middle.
I’m not so young as I used to be. But I’m not so dumb as I look, neither. The elevator came and, sure as shooting, he climbed right in with me. It figured. If I was younger, I’d of slung him the whole way across the lobby and out the door. Ought to have a lock on that door.
But I have to make do. I pushed the button for the sixteenth, that’s our top floor, and stepped out between the closing doors. Electric eye in the doors don’t work neither. Timing is everything.
I wasn’t about to wait for hm in the lobby. Up the stairs I go. Good thing I only live on the fifth. By the time I got there I was tuckered right on out. I used to run up stairs two at a time and never even breathe hard. I remember racing my brother up the Washington Monument. Old age is like the Vice-Presidency – ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit. The Veep said that, if I remember. It’s like being run over by a train and living through it, I told him – consider the alternative. Ha! I turned on the tube and napped the rest of the afternoon.
Around six I was fixing something in the oven when I heard the bell. I looked through the security peep-hole and there’s Edith Patterson, from up the hall. She thinks I need someone to run my life. The only difference from my daughter, Rita – she thinks it’s her. But I opened up.
I wouldn’t’ve if I’d known. The peep-hole won’t let you see down very far. I heard about robbers, who get in by crouching down so you think there’s nobody there and you open the door to see who knocked.
"Howard, is this creature trying to get in to see you?" she asked. Like it was a question. Down on the floor was that orange dust-mop. I’d thought I took care of it pretty well earlier.
"Must’ve tracked me like a dog. Get!" I tried to block him with my knee, but he was too fast and greasy. "By all that’s holy, get out of this house." I grabbed a handful of pelt and tried to yank the hairy housebreaker back toward the door. He yelled some.
"Stop! Howard Keiser, what are you doing? That’s a being from another world." She clutched at her face with one hand, waving the other one at me. "We must treat it with respect. We each are ambassadors for the human race."
"Amb..." I got to say that stopped me. "Edith, this is the biggest mooch I ever saw. Too lazy even to take a bath."
"Howard, this is a Carthusian." Like I didn’t know that. "Sir, we are honored to make your acquaintance."
By this time, the thing had scuttled way in, behind the coffee table. I decided to ignore him and concentrate on getting the other pest out the door.
"Edith, look, I’m just getting some dinner together and I don’t have time for being a diplomat. Why don’t you take the thing home with you? Make a nice pet. Get it dipped first thing and clipped."
"Well," she said, stepping around so she could see better, "he seems to want to be your guest. You should feel honored. What have you got in the oven? What are you going to feed it?"
"Feed it!" I was getting fed up. "I’m not going to serve it a meal. This isn’t a soup kitchen. I’m trying to feed myself and that’s just abut as much as I can handle. If it thinks it wants to eat, let it go to a restaurant."
Even in Louie’s he would have raised eyebrows.
I marched over and grabbed at him, getting ahold of a paw on his hinder, after some scuffling about. I tried to drag him back out into the hall, but he has long arms and first it looked like the coffee table was going over, then he fastened to the leg of the easy chair. There was some noise, too.
The widow woman was dancing about the whole time.
"You’ll hurt him," she hollered. I’d like to’ve, but I wasn’t. "You’ll insult him," she
wailed. I’d like to’ve that too.
"You can’t insult mud by calling it dirt," I gasped, giving up, puffed. I don’t get younger. I dropped into the easy chair. This was getting to be a long day. To show how it was as civilized as an un-house-broke dog, the thing slid up onto the sofa.
"It was crying."
"That’s just it’s cry," I told her. "Ululating, that’s all. I think they do that. You don’t want me to keep the thing in the apartment if it’s in heat or anything, do you? It probably spritzes."
Edith had to think on that one. "You just sit still and keep him company. Look how he’s all crouched down; I think you frightened him." She fastened a piece of her perm back up behind her ear. "Now, I have a casserole in the freezer. Let me pop round and get it and you can offer the poor thing something proper." She knows I never claimed to be a cook.
"What?" I asked.
She put her finger to her cheek, thoughtful. "Beef-tips Burgundian and I think there’s a container of spaetzele." She thinks it never occurs to me to wonder why an eighty-five pound widow woman keeps a freezer stocked with four-quart casseroles. Generally, I dodge, but this looked like it might be in fair play. The woman can so cook.
When Edith closed the door behind her, the mooch squirmed into a more comfortable position on his stomach.
"Don’t get comfortable," I told him. I was pretty sure he could understand every word. "After dinner, you’re out of here." We watched the tube for a while, then Edith was back with the food.
She’d’ve liked to watch. "It’s shy. Won’t eat in front of strangers," I told her.
She looked doubtful. "How do you know?"
"They had it on tv couple of weeks ago, how they’re very private eaters and you have to leave them alone when they dine."
"Are you going to be here?" she asked.
"It’s my house. It might ransack the place. I’ve got valuables here."
Still looking like a little voice was talking to her, she left, and I pulled the foil off the steaming dish. As I took a lung-full of the fragrant steam, I noticed another smell.
"Aw, heck!" I said, snatching at the oven door. The tv dinner had changed color and was shrunk away from the edges of its little aluminum tray. They’re not as good that way, I don’t think. Mooch was right at my back. He’s got a nose on him most hound dogs would be proud to show off.
"Here," I said, sliding the tray across the floor toward him. I reached for a plate and served up some of that beef. I don’t know any other place to get spaetzele anymore.
He cleaned up the tray real nice, fingering all the gravy out of the corners, even the burned parts. But did he think to pick it up and put it in the trash? He did not.
I don’t know if she listens at doors or what, but Edith was back right on schedule as I put the last of the food in the fridge. She perched on a seat and stared at the mooch and me half the evening. I’d had kind of a big day and a big diner, so the idea of wrastling a hundred-and-sixty pound shag carpet out the door never really came up. Like a damn fool I went to bed, intending to put a dolly under the thing and wheel him out to the curb in the morning, bright and early. That’s how he spent his first night in my apartment. It’s been more of the same ever since. When I woke up, he had finished off the entire casserole.
So anyway, I was taking my ease on the sofa with, as it happened, my hand hanging down over the back, when a certain hairy butt caterpillared around behind me toward a bowl of chilli, which I had set on the shag – with every right and intention of eating it myself...in a while, when it got cool enough... maybe September. I don’t usually like chilli. Beans give me gas...give a lot of people gas. Ever hear the expression, "old fart"? True. The last three days, though, I’d had a real appetite for chilli. Not that I’d got much though. No, siree! Put a bowl on the table and turn my back to unlock the fridge for a bottle of beer... Wham! Shedder there would have it in three mouthfuls. I guess he figured I couldn’t see him this time. Kidney beans take the boy even worse than they do me, though. He really ought to lay off them. Ought to go out and get a job and pay for his own damn food somewheres else, is what he ought to do. But that’s another storey, isn’t it?
He never shows any sign of embarrassment about the thing, but I knew he was having a hard time snaking around behind the davenport. Any sudden exertion or twist was likely to let off balloon noises in picket fence sections and long sighs. I don’t think I smell as well as I used. I don’t believe dandruff-pants does either. Yesterday, when the Starving Widow from down the hall dropped by to assert Women’s Right, she made it a short visit and left with her hand to her pacemaker
Now, in my hand, I had one of those cigarette lighters people use to start barbecues. The
flame shoots out in a little jet at the end of six inches of flimsy, three-sixteenths tubing. Picked it up while I was buying a hasp and padlock for the refrigerator. Happened I was thinking of getting a barbecue to put on the balcony. So, I happened to be testing the lighter just then. As I say, my arm chanced to hang down behind the sofa, but I was considerate enough that I made sure the little flame did not scorch his fat, filthy rear end, which he was rude enough to have stuck up in the air right there, thinking I wouldn’t notice. It was quite a twist for him to squeeze around the end of the sofa, between it and the wall, to reach that bowl of chilli. I couldn’t’ve done it. I wouldn’t even have tried, being full of lots of beans already. My thought was that it don’t matter if you are an immigrant from some other star and the sorry product of a different evolution. Beans break down into the same old methane gas that the tube says fills clouds on Jupiter.
Stinky has good control. But he happened to break wind just then, in the stretch. Methane met propane and, with speed of dark, the flare took a patch right out of the seat of his pants, if he’d of been wearing any. All that fur saves a lot on clothes. He shot part-way up the wall, making one of his charming native sounds.
The door popped open and there was the widow, without even knocking. "What have you done?" she cried.
"Oh, he was just chittering. They do that when they’re in heat," I reassured her. The mooch lay clutching his seat with his long arms. He added some rolling about and soft mewing as Edith came around the end of the sofa for a look. I have to say, the black patch on his seat made a good impression.
Her eye lit on the barbecue lighter. "Howard," she actually screeched, "you burnt it with
that...thing."
"I didn’t ," I stood up for myself. I hadn’t, not really. "It was a sort of industrial accident, the order of a chemical reaction. You know how chemical plants blow up once in the while."
The widow was having none of it. "This is awful. Howard, I didn’t think you could be so cruel." She turned her eyes on me. "But I should have known." And out she went.
That last crack had me wondering, though.
Next morning I said, "I don’t believe you did this. Edith Patterson, who do you think you are, throwing your weight around?" She dodged behind the cop. Well, I was ticked. She’d called the police and they sent a patrolman...with a social worker. My cousin, Anthony’s boy, had the police once. Nobody in my family ever had a social worker. It wasn’t edifying to the neighbors to stand in the door, and I still hoped they’d come to take Chewbacca away to an orphanage or something, so I had them all in.
"Brown, sir, Patrolman Brown. This is Mr. Beister."
"With Aging and Adult," he chirped.
"There he is, the perp. Take him away. You got handcuffs?" I asked. "He’s a slippery one."
Edith was ducking around in the back, trying to see and not be seen doing it.
"Breaking and entering, assault, panhandling, loitering, littering, pain and suffering. I"ll press all charges." The mooch hung back against the wall. He’d had some experience with uniforms, that much was clear. I didn’t doubt he had a record somewhere.
"Mr. Keiser," the social worker spoke up, "we didn’t come to arrest anybody. Not as long as the Carthusian is all right. We came to investigate a report of abuse."
"Well, he abused me. I admit it. An old man like me, getting taken advantage of. Sin and a shame." I turned to the officer, who was altogether too quiet. "Go ahead, pull your gun. Fire a warning round. That’ll get his attention."
"Sir, just listen to Mr. Beister," said the cop.
"What, then? What?" I demanded.
"We are very glad to locate this Carthusian. Excuse me." Beister turned and addressed the lost sheep.
"Sir, you embassy has been very distressed at your disappearance."
His hairy eminence made some not too meaningful blinks. Beister went on in deadpan earnest. "My agency has been in contact with an officer of your embassy. I’m sure they will be down to see you shortly. I’m here to assure that you receive all routine and appropriate civil rights and social services. Speaking for the Commonwealth, as a representative of the Office of Aging and Adult Services, I would like to express my consciousness of the honor in serving you."
"What’re you here for, Brown?" I turned to the patrolman. "To protect the longhairs in case I riot?"
"Just to see that everything goes smoothly, sir," he said, looking bored.
It was three days before Rita even bothered to come around. When you want them they aren’t there – kids! When you do want some privacy, just the opposite.
She has her own key. I thought that was right. I don’t get younger; did I say that? We were watching the weather report when she let herself in. Usually she comes around right after letting the kids off at school. They live way out, past the big mall, where you have to drive everywhere. Rita halloo-ed that she was there, still with her back to the living room, trying to get her key out of the lock. It had been a busy couple of days for me, and I was over the shock value of having a pet parasite. So I didn’t think to say anything.
"A scream like that, " I shouted, "and you just watch, nobody even comes to check, if maybe there’s a murder going on here."
"Father," she made clutching with the one hand while sweeping the air with the other, "Father, what is that? That’s one of those space aliens. My God, is it safe? My God, what’s it doing on the furniture? My God!"
"Look," I said, "just shut the door. The neighbors."
Rita had to lean on the furniture in order to cross the room for a better look. Rusty-pants sat up in his chair, on the chance he might get something out of it. "This is Rufus; Rufus, my eldest, Rita. She has two boys in the suburbs."
"How do you do. Oh, my God!" she wailed.
"Rufus is staying here a while. He’s from the space embassy, I think." I didn’t want to let on he was such a freeloader. Rita already thinks I can’t take care of myself. "So, please, make him feel at home." Saying this made my teeth hurt, and most of them are dentures.
Rita sank down on the edge of a chair. "Daddy, you got to come home with me. You
can’t be alone here with...with...aliens from space. Anything could happen. Anything." Now, she’s hoping I’ll get so sick of this flaky flea-farm that I’ll let her move me into some gerri-ville, where she can keep me under her thumb. But this was then.
"I don’t need taking care of. I do okay. This is a case of...we’re all ambassadors of the human race. Don’t worry. He’s been here, what, since Tuesday...three days. He eats a lot, but..."
"Oh, my God!" Rita jumped up and ran for the door.
"What?" I tried to turn. When she’s moving that fast, there’s no bothering to get up.
"I left my handbag in the hall, on the floor when I was getting the door open."
She brought in a brown grocery bag, too. This she plunked down on the end of the sofa to start going through her credit cards and chapsticks, so I told her, "As if the local class of junkey-thief would leave your purse there at all."
She could hardly do the usual tub scouring and so forth, that she does, for all the wailing. "Oh, my God, Daddy, there’s hairs on all your carpets and the sink in the bathroom is clogged half up. I’m going to put lye down the drain; don’t use it. Where’s the bowl brush? I left it in the little closet last time. It doesn’t use your bathroom, does it? Where does it go? I mean you could get a disease from space. Does it know about, well, you know..., how to?"
"I’m an old man," I told her. "Things like that, I don’t want to know."
Rita vacuums her own house twice daily, morning after breakfast and evening before bed. She can’t do in the afternoon because of her soaps. "I got to put the tube on," she said, sliding around the wall with one eye on Red Willy, the Peril from Space. Himself sat with his feet up on the upholstery and tried to look safe.
"My DVD is on the fritz," she mentioned, waving at the flickering screen with a cloth.. "I think one of the boys did something. Maybe it’s just wearing out. It’s been three years since Jerry got it. And I told him the remote was broken months ago. So I couldn’t put it on to record General Psych. I don’t want to miss the episode, you mind?"
If I minded, would she ever know? Myself, I can’t stand the things – a bunch of old people going senile and a bunch of young people taking turns screwing each other in both meanings of the word. If I want to see that, I just go down to the Seniors. So I got up and went back to the bedroom. But Rita was in and out, pushing the vacuum over the carpet and running water. She didn’t do the outside of the window.
"I am not going out there with," she made a toss of the head in his direction, "sitting there watching me. Who knows what he might do?"
All afternoon I was mostly in the back; only once in a while I’d come out to get something or other. Rita was moving about, doing her Thing. I told her one time she ought to get another Thing, instead of all this cleaning. But she thought I was telling her to leave Jerry. It didn’t go so well, so I never brought it up again, much. But towards the middle of the afternoon what did I find but Rita, standing wither hip propped against the end of the couch, while one of the juicier scenes dragged itself across the screen.
"She’s going to wind up just like her mother, if she doesn’t wise up," I hear her say. The big couch potato craned forward in his seat to check it out.
I hid the remote, but he’s a clever enough devil, when it suits. Now, every afternoon, I have to put up with melodrama from the tv, too.
A few days later, the social worker called. The kid was all in earnest and his voice in my ear heated up over the phone.
"I’ve been assigned to assist the Carthusian embassy in all contact with the general public on this case. Their consulate just wants to send a representative down to meet with the Carthusian who is staying with you."
"Any hope they’ll take him home with them?" I asked. "I mean, he doesn’t work. He doesn’t clean. He doesn’t pay anything to help out with the bills around here and he eats more than I do. He don’t even take out the trash."
"It’s just a general purpose contact," the social worker said. "But there maybe something we can do to help out with some of the things you mentioned." The line hummed while he thought, or maybe that was the sound of bureaucracy.
"There ought to be funds available to help with his support," he said.
"About time the spacers started paying their bills," I told him. I thought there ought to be some money attached to a bunch that was well off enough to go banging around outer space. They say the main ship down by the Washington Monument is near as tall as the Monument itself.
"Anyway, when do you want to bring this fellow down from the embassy?"
"Consulate, actually. How about three o’clock on Thursday? Day after tomorrow. I’ll try to have a fix on some funding and I’ll talk with the consulate people about the other things you mentioned."
So I told him, "Fine." And I waited for them to show.
Mr. Keiser," the social worker said, after I opened the door and let them in, "this is the Third Bureau Director from the Carthusian Consulate. It’s proper to address him as Director.
"Director, Mr. Howard Keiser, who has been hosting your colleague."
"Esteemed sir." His voice was soft and high. I stuck out my mitt and shook the Director’s hairy hand, despite it looking a lot like Shaggy Sam’s unwashed one. At least, I had to admit, this one was a lot more presentable. His fur was combed all over his body and he looked to have had a bath recently. It was a lot like being introduced to an Irish setter ready for a show.
Then Beister piped up. "The Director would like to speak to his countryman." This here countryman was cowering on the sofa, trying to look non-nonchalant, but really looking like another Irish setter, who had messed in the bedroom and knew he was about to have a session with a rolled up newspaper.
"Hey, help yourself," I told him. Beister pulled me into the kitchen. My kitchen is six by ten, just off the living room, so I could hear the two Carthusians start to talk in faint, little-girl voices.
Beister lowered his voice and said, "The Director is here primarily to see if he can get your guest to return to the consulate with him. It turns out, he’s one of the chief scientists responsible for theoretical development of the drive that powers their ship. He disappeared on them kind of suddenly, and they would be glad to have him back. "
"Not just them," I said.
Beister looked more confidential and said, "It’s kind of an embarrassment to both sides.
As you know, the government is bending over backwards to make a good impression on the Carthusians. The benefits in possible trade and technological exchange are immense."
"This is going to give the Buy American nuts distemper," was all I could think to say, so I told him. And, "Just what do they intend to do with their long lost sheep, now that they found him?" I asked.
In the lull, I could hear this Director fellow’s little voice, sharp and demanding. Every so often, the Blight from Outer Space would utter something soft. I knew stubborn when I heard it.
I went on into the living room without waiting for Beister to think up an answer.
They both had their feet up on the sofa. Breeding shows. But I let it pass.
"Listen," I said to the Director guy, "can’t you make your countryman here go back with you? He wasn’t exactly invited and I’m an old man. I can’t throw him out."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Beister chewing on his upper lip. But, hey, if you got something to say, I don’t know what to do better than just say it.
The Director’s eyes blinked and slowly widened, which I bet means something where they come from.
"Esteemed Sir," you could tell he wrote a lot of letters, "it is unfortunate that here on your beautiful world I lack authority beyond the confines of the vessel in which we arrived from Grand Carthusia. Your government has been gracious to extend all rights, privileges and its protection to us. My colleague chooses to avail himself of the hospitality so generously offered by your government, though not by yourself." His high voice stopped and he gave another of those slow blinks, this time making his eyes smaller.
"That’s right," Beister put in, just so he didn’t look useless.
"Yeah, well, that don’t pay the bills, that don’t take out the trash. What about the rent, for that matter? He ought to pay something, if he’s been living here all this time. But if he goes now, I won’t charge anything at all. Think of the money he’ll save."
"It is the thought of the Council of Carthusia on Earth that you may evict our representative member from your premises without casting aspersions on Grand Carthusia. In this matter you have the Council’s fullest support." Again he did with the eyes.
I rolled my own eyes. It seemed like the thing to do and the Director took it in stride.
He turned to Shedder and spoke a couple of pretty hard sounding sentences in their lingo. The Boy Wonder just gave out a single squeak, but it seemed to be all the answer needed. The Director rose.
"If I can be of assistance in the future..." Held out the paw again.
"Doesn’t your paisan even have a name?" I asked. "I didn’t know he could talk. This is the first peep I’ve had out of him."
The Director turned and spoke sharp-like. The Rug From The Stars worked his mouth and a soft, child’s voice came out.
"Gawilliar." Something like.
The Director turned at the door to add, "He is adequate in your language as well." And with a bow of his slouching form, he was out, heading for the elevator. A bunch of other Carthusians and guys in new suits were waiting in the hall to push the button for him. I didn’t even know they were there.
Beister, the social worker, stayed in the doorway, though. "I’ll be by tomorrow to take him to apply for Public Assistance benefits and Medicaid. I think he qualifies for Food Stamps, as well." And he left, too.
I didn’t like to leave the Galactic Pest in the place without me there to supervise. The cost in groceries alone would be astronomical. Astronomical, get it? So I dragged him along with me next day to Seniors. There was always the chance that he wouldn’t come back.
"This is Gwilski, he’s staying with me. Call him Red." Heaven forbid, but I introduced him like he was my brother-in-law.
Down at Seniors we play for points. Pinochle, poker, parchesi, even bocce. Some of us could afford to put up a few dollars, but at our age, nobody wants to take a chance.
Gonzarelli being the exception, naturally. "Hearts! What are you killing me?"
"That’s talking across the table," my partner, little Irish Jimmy, complained. Gonzo couldn’t admit it, of course.
"That’s not talking across the table," he insisted, taking the cigar out of his mouth to manage a look of astonishment. "I didn’t say nothin’."
"On purpose, you don’t say nothin’," I told him. "Accidentally..."
"Whazzat, personalities? You wanna talk personalities?"
"Just play," Jimmy groaned.
"Here," I offered, "you got no hearts, I’ll give you some." So I threw down a card. Gonzo holds his cards all together and right up against his stomach, so he had to shut up to look what he had.
He threw something and said, "Where I come from, you don’t talk the talk unless you can walk the walk." He lost all his hair, so you could see the top of his head turn red between liver spots.
"Yeah," I agreed, "See Naples and die." He’s always going on about how his family’s Zizijillyaan, as he says.
"My family’s Zizijillyaan," he said.
"What’s that supposed to mean?" I asked.
"What that means is," he shifted the cigar to the other side and leaned over the table a couple of inches until his stomach stopped him, "what that means is, is anybody steps outa line in Palermo, they don’t see him no more." He fell back under his eyebrows.
It was my turn again and I reached for a likely looking heart, when I felt this tugging on my trouser. The Mooch had been squatting on a chair he’d dragged up beside me with his toes poking off the edge. I figured it was just so’s he could reach the pretzel bowl, which he had pretty well cleaned out. He’d been watching us play the way he watched soaps, so I figured maybe he didn’t really understand the soaps either, because where was he going to have learned to play cards? But he used his toes to pull at my pants pocket and I didn’t throw the card. Instead I went in clubs and when it came around to my partner, he beat Gonzo’s king with the ace, so that was all right.
I wasn’t going to be impressed by some retired dry-cleaner. His sons took over the business and maybe they think all those spots on his dome are bad for the trade, because he doesn’t go down there much any more.
"That’s Palermo," I told him. "This is America, or what’s left of it."
Gonzo made that noise in his chest, which I think he learned from watching too many Mafia movies.
"That’s here!" he grunted out.
"What’s here?" I said. "Nuthin’s here. I got a couple guys could use disappearing. If you’re so hot, come around and make me a price." He gave the look, but that’s all. "Unless you’re getting too near the Social Security limit on how much you can make this year. I don’t want to get a senior citizen in trouble with the tax man."
"That’s how they nailed Capone," Jimmy volunteered, "taxes.
Gonzo leaned back and chewed the cigar. "You ain’t got the balls. What’re you talking? This ain’t Murder Incorporated. I’m just saying, nobody pushes Gonzarelli around."
"And vise versa," I said. It took him a while to figure it out. "Anyways, you want a job, I got a freeloader in my place I’ll pay you to scare off or get carried off." I wasn’t about to let the Weed Patch off just on the basis of one hand of pinochle. All that proved anyway was that he was every bit as crooked as he looked.
Gonzarelli snorted around his stogie. "You couldn’t afford me. I come high."
"Yeah? Well, how bout we make a little bet on this game?" I told him. Hell, I never figured Gonzo for the real thing.
The next morning – I always get up at the same time; it’s a habit from the job – next morning I was in the bathroom when I heard knocking from the door. I got a perfectly good door bell installed, at my own expense, too. I was in my pajamas still and it takes a while to finish peeing when you get my age. I don’t get younger. So by the time I got out to the living room, there’s the Scarlet Pimpernel sitting on the sofa eating a raw, uncooked fish. I gave the sight a hard look and go to the door, but nobody’s there.
I skipped the Seniors that day, since Rita was due over. She brought some brushes and a vacuum attachment she thought Big Red ought to try out on his ginger locks. He never used the dry-cleaner foam she bought the other time, so why she thought he was going to use this thing, I don’t know. But she fussed with his fur for him a while and did the unholstery with the same attachment.
The next morning, I was in the bathroom again when there’s another knock on the door. Nobody ever knocks; they use the doorbell. Now, I have told the big dust bunny not to open the door without me there. I wouldn’t mind if they broke in and stole him, but I got to protect my stuff.
Sure enough, by the time I got myself out to the living room, he was sitting in the chair, inspecting a whole chicken, the kind with feet and a head and without the feathers. I looked out the door, but it was like I thought, nobody there in the hallway. I was almost ready to think that the hair-ball was ordering groceries, but after all this time, I was getting a feel for his expressions, such as they are, and even the Wild Carrot looked sort of surprised at the chicken. His first bite was kind of tentative.
"Sit at the table and get a plate under that thing, for crying out loud," I shouted at him. He moved across to the kitchen like a sulky teenager. I headed back into the bathroom for my shower. It was my day to go to Seniors.
When the Three-color Shag and me stepped out of the elevator into our lobby on the ground floor, there was a crowd like I never saw. That hour of day there’s a few people, but this time an ambulance crew was working on somebody. Everyone who happened to come by stayed to see what was up. Mostly they wanted to check to be sure it wasn’t them. None of us get any younger and while you don’t wish anybody bad luck, it’s always a relief to think it’s not you.
"What happened?" I asked a stooped-over guy, who was still tall. He was holding his golf cap in both hands, like it was church.
He gave me and my unusual companion a glance, but mostly kept his eyes on the medics. "Somebody found a man collapsed in the fire stairs. They just brought him down on a stretcher and they’re working on him," he told me.
"Poor son of a gun," I said. "They ought to be ashamed, how slow this elevator is. It makes people run up and down those stairs at our age."
"I use them once a day for my health," he said, turning toward me. "You got to get your bowels moving."
"I don’t use them and that’s for my health," I told him. "Only when I have to. I don’t get younger, you know."
"Right," the tall guy said, looking at the medics again, "none of us do. I used to run up the Washington Monument."
There was a space that opened up and I inched in closer to the medics, working on the floor. They had they guy on a low stretcher with tubes and wires everywhere. What with the oxygen thing coming across under his nose and his face the color of putty, it took me a couple of seconds to recognize him.
"Gonzo!"
"You know him?" one of the ambulance people stepped up to me. "Can you identify him? He doesn’t have a wallet on him or anything."
"Yeah," I said, "sure." They let me get close enough and Gonzarelli’s eyes open just in time to catch mine.
"Gonzo," I said, "what’re you doing here?"
He grunted out a sort of laugh. "My last job. You owe me, Keiser."
It suddenly hit me about the fish and the chicken.
"Jeez, Gonzo, you’re the real thing, ain’tcha? I guess I do owe you."
His eyes lost their look and one of the medics called out, "Coding!" They give him a jolt with two electric pads, that curled poor Gonzo up like a shrimp. But he passed without ever finding out what happened to his fish and chicken.
So we went to Seniors. What’re you going to do?
"Gonzo, my God!" was what they all said.
"Poker, it don’t matter how many you got, but who’s going to make a fourth for pinochle?" said little Irish Jimmy. "We could play with a dummy," he went on to say.
I ought to learn to keep my mouth shut. "You want a dummy, I brought a dummy."
And so we sat down after a while and started slinging the cards and the stories, like we usually do. Usually more stories than cards. But twenty minutes into the game, you could of heard a pin drop its hankie.
"Jaysus, Red," Jimmy groaned, throwing in his hand, "if we was playing strip poker, I woulda been arrested for indecency two hands ago."
The Hair Ball was mopping us up. That don’t sound like such a big thing, maybe, a bunch of old geezers down at the Seniors, but some of these gentlemen were around when they first put corners on the cards, and we usually know how to hold them and when to fold them.
"Well," says Jimmy, "that’s it for me. I got to go on back to the house and earn some more points."
"Eight hundred, ninety-three, you owe," says Eddie, who keeps the tab for us. He used to drive cab, so he’s good with the numbers.
You cleaned me out," Jimmy says, and everybody groans to agree. Red just looked poker-faced. Poker-faced, get it?
In the morning, we were supposed to go down to the Welfare for Rocket Boy to get himself an honest source of income, so I put on my tie and we waited in front of the TV until Beister knocked on the door.
"Hi, Mr. Keiser," he said, "I really appreciate your coming down to the Assistance office with me on this. Ready to go?"
"Me, I’m ready. Mr. Wonderful, there, he’s never going to be ready, so we might as well go."
"I parked right outside," he said.
"Good, I’m sick of that van they send. It smells from carsick."
"The Welfare office is in a place I wouldn’t go," I said to Beister after we got seated in the big hall. I was leaning over Reds, so as not to be heard by the rest of the riff-raff. "Of course, I get a check every month from retirement. And I have my savings."
"Of course," Beister said, not too worried about who could hear. Other than a little boy just learning to walk, none of the hoodlums, deadbeats and con-artists in the big room even shifted on their plastic chairs to take in the presence of a red Carthusian deadbeat.
I turned to Beister again, "Over there’s a couple of alte crockers who risked their lives and got here on their own. The old people you have to feel sorry for, but the young, healthy kids, you just want to tell to go out and earn a living like you did. Getting fat off of handouts from the state, it’s disgusting as a taxpayer." There was a girl there with a baby, probably either borrowed or illegitimate, or both.
Beister had a packet of papers in his lap. He meant to tell the Kennel Club Dropout who was sitting between us, but since I look like I’m paying more attention, he sort of told me loud enough for the bum to hear, "I made an appointment for ten. We shouldn’t wait long."
After a while, somebody came out the scuffed up door and shouted a name. A fat lady, younger than me, got up and shuffled out of sight after the guy. From the way she walked, it was even money as to her chances of making it wherever they were headed. I wondered what they did to make that door look so beat up, too. But I didn’t’ say anything.
The Welfare people would come out and shout another name once in a while, not too often, like they were understudies for drill sergeant in some tv series. I don’t know what they were all mad about, but maybe they didn’t like working with deadbeats. Beister’s appointment at ten came and went. "Good thing we have an appointment," I told him, "or we might never get seen at all."
"Nobody hurries the Welfare," the social worker said, philosophical-like.
At one I leaned over Gwilski, asleep in his bucket seat, and asked Beister, "So what do we do for lunch, come back or what?"
Beister had been up to the little glass window a number of times, I have to give him credit, but he looked resigned. "We wait," he said.
"I’m an old man," I told him. "I don’t have it to wait." He just shrugged, but I pushed onto my feet and strolled up to the window.
"Hey, listen," I said to the female wrestler on the other side of the glass, who was putting fresh staples in a stapler, "what’s up with our ten o’clock appointment? I’m down with this Carthusian on a tight schedule." I don’t put on the tie every day, and I figured I might as well get full use out of it.
She finished the difficult piece of government work she was engaged in before she raised her eyes. When she did look up, she recognized me for an old enemy of her family, who had foolishly been forgiven by her senile grandfather. She wasn’t going to start anything, so as to go against her grandfather, but she wasn’t going to risk hurting herself by leaping into action to help me any either. "Your worker’s at lunch. He’ll be back at one." she said in a flat voice.
"So?" I said, "It’s one."
She consulted the time piece on the wall and then a list on her counter. "One thirty," she said and swivelled her chair away to type something.
"Okay," I went on, as if she just told me she was sorry we didn’t meet when we were younger. "Is there a phone?"
"Over there," she waved. "Personal calls on the pay phone."
"Right, but this is official. I got to report back to Councilman Norazelski’s office that I’m going to be a little late. He wanted me to be back to the office by two and it don’t look like we’re going to make it."
So that was what she looked like before she died. "You’re from the Councilman’s office?"
"What do you think, I’m here for my health?" I asked her. "Believe me, if the Councilman wasn’t interested in doing a little favor for somebody in Washington, you wouldn’t see me here. The Councilman had his office staff set up this appointment, didn’t he?"
"Uh!" she said, the most intelligent thing out of her mouth so far. She got up and disappeared. I didn’t mean to scare her away all together.
I turned to rest my elbows on the edge of the counter, as my back was getting tired. I don’t get younger. Off to the side, the scuffed-up door opened and a tall man wearing a suit stepped out, with some papers in his hand. He took a deep breath and glanced at the papers. He let the breath out, stared some more and took the breath again. He opened his mouth but the name he was going to shout wouldn’t come out. I went over to him.
"You looking for Gwilski? The Carthusian?"
The fellow glanced down at me and said, "You together?"
"Mr. Beister," I called, "you want to come over here a minute?"
Beister came out of his coma and hurried over. He knew what to say and in we went, following the wrinkled tail-flap of the tall guy’s suit-coat. He sent us down a long narrow channel. We took the left he recommended and went in to the third cubicle. There was only room for one chair, but there were two anyway. I sat.
"I don’t get younger." I said. Beister, like a true social worker, pushed Gwilski into the other chair, half hidden behind the computer they had on the desk there, and stood between us. In a minute, which we had come to understand was the same thing as right away, a woman showed up and sat down at the desk.
"I am Mrs. Palmer," she admitted. "I’m a supervisor and I understand that one of you is a Carthusian"
"It’s him," I pointed. She looked.
She looked like a dentist about to pull a tooth. "We received a directive," she dragged out a sheet of paper from the pile she had, "about Carthusians, but it doesn’t give much detail. Let’s just get started and see where we end up."
"The Councilman didn’t send me down here to argue," I told her. I could feel Beister’s eyes on me, but he didn’t break. The lady smiled, a dentist discovering the patient had good coverage.
"Going over the application you submitted, I see some blanks. This is your name, your complete name? Just this?" Though she glanced at the red deadbeat, she looked up at Beister for an answer.
"Gawilliar, that’s it," he said.
"No last name? Or is that a last name?" It was a stumper. We all looked at Red, but he just made big eyes and squirmed in his chair.
Beister said, "Carthusians just use the one name, I’m pretty sure."
The lady looked pretty disappointed in us. "It’s for the computer. I have to fill in the field."
‘His last name’s, "Carthusian",’ I said. "With a "C."’
"Middle initial?"
"None," Beister said. She could accept that.
"Now, as to birth date...?"
"Okay," Beister leaped into the hole that left in conversation, "I asked about that and what they told me was that because of time dilation it isn’t possible to assign a local date." Me and the lady both looked at him. "They’re working on it." he added.
"I need a Social," she said after a couple of seconds. "You can’t make an application unless you have a Social Security number."
"I asked about that and they said I wouldn’t need one for this," Beister told her.
The lady knew better. "The computer won’t handle the application unless there’s something in the field. I don’t know who you talked to, but the computers won’t accept it without. I know that much for sure."
"What does your directive say?" Beister asked.
"It says that Carthusians are automatically eligible, like everyone else, but it don’t say they have any special freedom from the normal requirements. For example, you have to put something in here," she flipped a page on the application. "Race Code. You have to choose one."
We all leaned forward to look. The choices were White, White-Hispanic, Black-Hispanic, African-American, Native American, African and Asian-Pacific Islander.
"What, no Jewish?" I was shocked..., at my age.
"I guess it’s not a race," she said. "I can’t tell you what to put, but you have to put something."
‘How about, "Other,"’ Beister suggested.
"And how about identification," the lady asked. "Birth certificate, baptismal record, driver’s license, photo ID...."
"Not really any of that," Beister told her.
"No problem. We’ll use collateral identification. You verify this person’s identity? Okay." She shuffled everything together. "Now, we have to make a plan for you to get off of Welfare, Mr....er...Carthusian. You’ll have to come in to meet with our employment counselor when your application is complete."
"Isn’t it complete?" Beister asked, offended. I guess he filled it out.
"No birth date, no Social," she told him. "You’ll have to apply for a Social Security number and bring back a verification from them before I can do anything with this."
Beister got all charged up. "He can’t apply for a Social Security number. He never worked under Social Security. He’s from outer space."
"Newborn children can apply for a Social Security number," the lady said.
"Babies have birth certificates," Beister mumbled.
"I’ll hold the application for thirty days. Anytime you bring me the verification from Social Security, I’ll put it through and you ought to have your benefits in seven to ten working days."
"Wait a minute," I said, "he don’t get anything now?"
"I can hold the application for thirty days," she said, as if it was a real favor. "Now, I can’t say until the application’s been processed, but if he gets full benefits, he would qualify for Medical Assistance, Cash and maybe even expedited Food Stamps."
"So how much does he get?" I asked.
"Full Cash Assistance, if he qualifies for it, is two fifteen a month...,"
"We’re sitting here for maybe two hundred and fifteen dollars a month? This I don’t believe."
"And expedited Food Stamps, which could be fifty, even eighty dollars more. A determination will have to be made."
"You mean people live on this? I heard there were people driving Cadillacs on Welfare. Even if they did dishonestly get two or three checks at the same time, it don’t add up to bus fare. Are you serious?" I was asking because I really didn’t believe it.
"The state legislature sets the limits on benefits," the lady said, as if I accused her of it.
"You add eighty to two fifteen and you get, what’s it – two ninety-five a month?" I
figured. "Out of that he’s supposed to pay rent; buy food; it’s five dollars a trip for Paratransit. He ate a week’s rent for breakfast. What do people do who wear clothes?"
"I couldn’t say," the lady behind the desk told me.
"Drop us at Seniors," I told the downcast social worker when we were all seated in his sedan again. "We’ll send out for sandwiches."
He did, promising that he would look into this business like anything.
"Mr. Beister," I told him, through the window after we got out, "it’s all right. You did your best. But you know, it’s the old people you gotta feel sorry for."
Anyways, the deli in the next street has it’s take-out menu up in the lobby as you go into Seniors. I stopped to take a look. Red, he looks too, though what he thinks calzoni and pastrami might be, I don’t even want to know.
"So how is our Carthusian, then?" I heard the voice and turned. It was Vivien Glass. I said my hi.
"Are you thinking of going on the Casino trip?" she asked.
"Oh, I don’t know," I said, being truthful. I turned again and noticed the announcement right next to the deli menu. "Tomorrow, huh?"
"We can ride together and share the fun with your Carthusian friend," she said.
"Yeah," I agreed, "well, maybe we could. I haven’t been to the casinos yet."
"You haven’t? It’s loads of fun," Vivien laughed. She has a real pleasant laugh. She could’ve been an opera singer. "They give you ten dollars in quarters, and you loose it, of course, but the glitz and the glitter more than make up for it. And they have a really nice buffet."
When she left, I went on into the office and said to the girl at the desk, "Trish, you still got tickets for the bus trip tomorrow to the casino?"
"Sure, Mr. Beister. You wanna go? It’s thirteen dollars, but you get ten in quarters back, so, if you don’t gamble, it’s really only three dollars and you get a free lunch."
"Tanstaafl, kid," I told her.
She got little lines between her plucked and penciled eye brows. "You got me on that one, Mr. Beister," she said, finally. "Between the Yiddish, Italian, Polish, Irish and Russian I hear all the time, I can’t tell one from another."
"It’s Lunatic," I told her. "I read it somewhere. It means There Ain’t No Such a Thing As A Free Lunch. Especially not at the casino."
"Is that so?" Trish looked impressed. "Well, maybe you’ll get lucky and hit it big. My mother hit the number last week for forty dollars. I’ll put you down for a seat."
"Two seats," I told her. "Gwilski here wants to go too."
The bus ride down was nice, real nice. But who wants to hear about a bus ride? I sat next to the aisle and Vivian sat right across and we talked. Fine woman, and she knows her way around, too. The driver unloaded us right at the entrance and we were in the lobby, headed for the rest rooms in nothing flat. As they go, they were nothing special. I seen plenty just as nice and some a lot better. I wasn’t impressed.
The big thing, if you want to go to the casinos, is the slots.
"Sure, if you’re one of those green-eyeshade boys and you want to play for the gold in your teeth, they got other games,"I told Gwilski, as I followed Vivian into the slots-room along with most of our crowd. It’s a big room with aisles of machines. "You can put your quarter in and just pull the handle and like magic, you lost your quarter," I explained to the big Space-Faring Hick. "Lookit here, if you want, they have machines that take four quarters from you at one time. And then they have the dollar machines." Once in a while a machine goes off with bells and whistles and feeds out a few coins with as much noise as possible, like bolts into a bucket. Everybody looks.
We strolled around. "Let’s take it in and try to look like we’re going to start feeding gold coins into the machines, so as to kill the time until we can head for the buffet table," I said to Vivian, when we crossed paths again. Gwilski tagged along behind me, probably dazzled by all the lights and glitter. I had a system for playing the slots. When they gave me my roll of quarters, I stuck it in my pocket and quit. I figured that was a close as I was going to get to being ahead. If I could eat more than three dollars worth at the buffet, I might even go home a winner. Vivian and some of her girl-friends wandered around, sticking coins in here and there. I was glad to see Space Boy showing some sense. He just mooched along, looking and keeping his dough warm in his hot, little mitt.
You ever see a thing that’s too good to be true?
I turned around when the machine behind me went off and the coins clattered into the little catcher. Naturally, the lady who had won moved off, looking for another machine that might be ready to spill its guts. This one was played out. But up steps the Red-headed Space Cadet and sticks a quarter in the slot.
"You’re wasting your time and money both," I told him, not really expecting that he would listen. He didn’t.
Coin after coin, like an idiot, he feeds into this played-out machine. "Look Space-Sport, half your roll’s gone," I tried to get his attention. "I don’t know why I even bother to watch, except that there’s something about watching a person make a perfect fool of himself that’s very entertaining," I said to his back. He dropped the empty coin wrapper on the carpet, always the slob, and was down to a handful of quarters.
"K’Ching!" The slot machine laid a basket of change in it’s little metal catcher. Everybody turned around to look and an employee handed the gambler from outer space a paper bucket to put his loot in. It must’ve been nearly twenty dollars.
Vivian came up just then. "He won!" she cried out to her friends down the aisle.
"Cross beginners luck with fools luck," I told her, " and you ought to get something pretty fierce, is what I figure." But when he started to feed the bucket of coins right back into the self-same machine that just paid out, I couldn’t stand it. "I’m going for a little walk," I said, but nobody was paying any attention to me.
Up and down the aisles there were all sorts of people – lots of senior types, such as us, but young women in tight clothes, fat men in wheel chairs, nervous types jumping from machine to machine and guys with prison-pallor, who looked like they might have been sitting on the same high stool, in front of the same machine since the Nixon administration. I walked the long way up one row of blinking machines and down the next one, up and down for a while, till I came back to the lane that cuts up the middle, crossways. I’d left Red losing his shirt, if only he had one, right on this cross aisle, so I dodged back to check whether he was broke enough that we might go look for the buffet table. That was one game I knew he could play at and win.
At first I couldn’t find him. But then I recognized some of the people in the crowd from the bus on the way down and, sure enough, there was his dusty mop sticking up out of the mob. As I elbowed my way in to the center, the machine kicked out another handful of change, but not so much as before. He had three of those paper buckets filled with coins, one stacked on top of the other. I took one and Vivian took another and Red set off, down the aisles and up until he spotted another likely machine. This one paid on his third pull and he worked it for an extra bucket of specie. Then off to another machine.
"I’m beginning to see how he picks his winners," I whispered to Vivian. "The machines are always either right on the aisle, where everybody in the place can notice when they pay off, or near to it."
"Well, that’s right, isn’t it?" she asked, looking around.
"And they always just paid someone right before Red takes over. So go figure, they didn’t put up these casinos to make you and me rich. It stands to reason that most of these machines were set to take your money. So why would anyone ever put a coin in one?" I asked her. "Because they noticed one of them jingling and flashing and making a pay-off, that’s why," I said. " People are such suckers that they figure if one machine is paying off, then another one might, too. So out of a room-full, there has to be a couple of slot machines that pay more than the others." It was clear, once you got the right angle on the thing. "The only other choices the gangsters who run the place have is to have a room filled with machines that hardly ever pay off or a room-full of machines that pay off all the time." Vivian was looking impressed. But I told her, "What kind of a mind do you have to have to figure this out as soon as you visit the place? I’ll tell you what kind, a dishonest kind, that’s what."
"It’s lucky Shyster, here, only found three slot-machines he liked, or we wouldn’t of been able to make it to the table with the loot," I said, pretending it was heavy for me. "Those paper buckets can get heavy and I don’t get younger, maybe I mentioned."
"So, loaded down with eighty-five dollars worth of buffet and enough loose change to snap a pair of new, red suspenders, we come back on the bus," I was telling the guys at Seniors the next day. We couldn’t pay attention to the cards hardly, and Gwilski was racking up the points.
"Like a fat lady just coming off her diet." little Irish Jimmy said, shaking his head. "I mean a fat person. It don’t have to be a lady, anybody fat."
"It could be a fat lady," I told him. They got fat ladies."
"Yeah, but here in modern you don’t say the ladies," Jimmy said. "I keep forgetting. It ain’t like in our day, Keiser. Things’re modern everywhere you look." Who could argue?
"You know," Jimmy said, rolling his eyes, "I been thinking. If you can work this scam once, why not twice, every week, every day, for the sake of giving a good lad a steady, honest income?"
Now, when we got back to the apartment, the night before, I put it to Shylocks, "So, you going to pay some rent around here, or what?" And he just shrugged and rolled his eyes and went off to sleep on the sofa. "I’m taking something for groceries, then," I shouted and counted out the quarters. "I’m taking eighty-five. I have to get some coin rolls from the bank," I said, so he could hear.
Edith came over in the morning and saw the buckets of quarters on the coffee table. "To tell the truth," I said, "he don’t care about having the money any more than he cared about not having it."
"He is probably too highly evolved for such earthy concerns,"she said. "But don’t leave it out where it can be seen, Howard."
Next day, back at Seniors, I told them, "Sure, why not? But me I’m not up for taking him down to the casinos every day, even if Gwilski did pay the bus fare, as he ought. It’s a long bus ride and who really knows if he could work it again. These things are tricky. I hear that if you win a lot, they ban you from the casino."
"There’s other casinos," Jimmy said. "And I wouldn’t mind making a run now and again, in the interest of keeping another mother off the Welfare."
"Not me neither, I wouldn’t mind, if he’s paying the bus," said Eddie. "My son’s boy goes down all the time."
"Sure," Jimmy said, "we could try different establishments, so as to spread the load on the body impolitic. We might get back to the same place once every so often, but who’s to remember?"
And so, it started. Every Thursday I’d see him off at Seniors with either Jimmy, Eddie, Vivian or one of the others. Every Saturday, he’d go on the bus from Our Lady’s with another of the crew. I even took a turn as escort and hod-carrier. We settled on a fair enough rent and I made a joint account at the bank to put his extra into. I have to say, other than the food (and don’t try to keep a beer in the fridge), he was not a big spender. Rita was even getting fond of him, treating the hairball like one of her own kids. They both liked the same soaps. In fact, I ought to have been charging him extra just for the wear and tear on the sofa from all the time he sat like a big, hairy zombie in front of the tube. It was getting pretty relaxed around the place. Lots of times I’d just go out and leave him. If he emptied the Frigidaire, I only had to take some of his dough, of which there was always a bucket around the living room somewheres, and call out for sandwiches. Or he’d call himself for a take-out in his whispery little voice. Edith would come over and stay for dinner every so often, if she felt like cooking. It was almost too good to be true.
In fact, I had a bag of groceries in my arms when I stepped out of the elevator and bumped into Edith in the corridor. She didn’t look her normal self, so I invited her, "Hey, you want to drop in for a cup of something?"
"Well," she said, "I wouldn’t..."
"So come on." I opened the door with my latch-key and stepped inside ahead of her, on account of the groceries getting heavy. I don’t get younger.
Sticking up over the back of the davenport was not one untidy, red head, but two. I must’ve choked or something, because they turned from the program they were watching, General Psych. Like a slice of green melon, a sheepish smile slowly got wider on the Space Bimbo’s face. The nearly identical face right next to his was blank, like a used car salesman when he first spots a dummy. Then, Poof! a smile flashed across it, the way a cigarette suddenly brightens when somebody drags on it.
"Aw, no," I couldn’t help saying, "it’s a girl!"
I used to ramble down to Seniors pretty much every afternoon. So I was surprised to see this character hanging around the trash basket outside as I was leaving. I’d’ve seen him if he was ever there before, you follow me? Big hairy ape is a pretty good description. Everybody’s seen them on tv, of course. Everybody’s seen fire and flood on tv, too. But still, you stop for a look when they pop up in your face. That’s where I made my mistake, my first mistake, anyways.
They come all the way from wherever it is in those big ships you see pictures of, and what’s the fist thing you catch them up to? Mooching off honest citizens. The immigration people ought to pack up the lot of them. I voted for Roskalnakov in the last election just because he promised to protect the common Joe from alien peril. I should’ve known better. I don’t say that he isn’t a cut above the general run of political leeches. But they won’t let him do anything.
So I put this lit cigar stub I had in his mitt. An orangutan is military academy material next to this un-mowed out-field. A reddish shag carpet left out in the rain all summer is the first thing most people probably think of before they glance away in embarrassment. I was hoping he’d catch fire and half-way sterilize his hand. But nimble as a liar’s tongue (which he is, too), he sticks the last inch of my stogie in his mouth and makes a slide on his bottom to nestle against my leg.
I don’t even let them take my inside seam and here this smelly thing’s got his arm wrapped around my leg above the knee. Before I could catch my breath. So, naturally, I just pinched his ear; they’re amazingly similar to some lower relative of the monkey, when you consider how far off they come from. He gave a piteous yipe and scuttled off, not before burning a hole in my blue, wool trousers with my own stogie.
It had to be just then. I swear hairy britches saw her coming, because I hadn’t really hurt him that much. But just at that moment Vivien Glass pushed through the door of the Seniors and catches sight of how I’m being practically mugged on the doorstep by a predatory alien.
"Oh, you poor dear!" she cries, all high and horrified. "Howard Keiser, what have you done to him?"
"Who? What? I didn’t do a damn thing to the creature. It attacked me." I set her straight. "I ought to call the dog-catcher on it before it bites somebody." And there he was stuck to my leg again, making his naturally beady eyes big.
Now, Vivian is a fine woman– heck of a looker – erect carriage and she don’t need to touch up her hair, she looks just fine in pepper and salt. I didn’t like to make a scene in front of her.
"It’s a Carthusian, isn’t it?" she said. "I’ve seen their pictures, but this is the first ever to come around here. How did you meet?"
"Found it going through the trash," I told her while trying to step away, but he scooted along with me. I was going to say more, not to the thing’s credit, but Vivian interrupted.
"The poor dear, it looks hungry. Are you hungry? How long has it been since you ate? Would you like something?" She bent over him and showed more decency and concern than the creature himself probably ever mustered in his whole life. He made some little crawling motions, as if he was going to attach himself to Vivien. She don’t deserve that. Fine woman.
"I’ll take care of getting it something." I said this pretty loud, and took him by the scruff, so as to get the message across that Bozo wasn’t to go laying his unwashed paws on Vivien Glass.
That’s so kind," she said, looking real pleased. Bending over it again, she coo-ed, "The nice man is going to take you to get something to fill your tummy." It made some squirming motions to get loose, sensing that it was not attached to the softest touch here. But I raised enough dogs and children that it wasn’t so easy to wiggle off. Days the arthritis lets up, I still got a grip.
"Well, come on then," I hitched him along, "we better be getting on towards that sandwich."
It was a block-and-a-half frog-march down Vine to this little steak shop called Louie’s. After the bum saw I wasn’t about to slack off, he straightened up and turned out to be taller than me, shorter in the leg, and not so good posture.
Outside the shop I pushed him up against a pole and said, "I wish I had a leash for you, but stay right here, you understand me? Right here. Don’t move and I’ll go in there and get you something to eat. Which you don’t deserve and I wouldn’t do, if I thought Vivien Glass would never find out about it.
"You understand me? You speak anything? English? Something? Your kind talk, don’t they?"
Nothing.
"STAY HERE!" He slid down against the pole, which I took for a sort of answer, so I went into Louie’s.
The kind of help they get these days. That stuff’s too greasy for me anymore, so I’m not usually exposed.
"What’s the cheapest thing on the menu?" I asked the acne demonstration plot behind the counter. There wasn’t another customer, so I guess he thought he’d get a rest, which I was disturbing.
"Fish sandwich."
"I’ll take one. You don’t have to bother to cook it. It’s for that parasite out on the curb."
He didn’t bother to look.
"Don’t cook it?" This was a hard one and nobody had trained him for it.
"Nah, just throw it in a bun and let me have it"
He looked at me from under his paper service-cap. "Is that here or to go?"
"It’s for the bum on the sidewalk out there."
"Here or to go?"
"It isn’t going to go far, seventeen feet, so don’t bother with wrapping."
He looked again. "That’s outside. It’s to go."
"You want to waste a bag? Go ahead," I told him.
"Pickle?"
"Hell, no. Why waste a pickle. Just throw it in a bun and let me get out of here. How much is it?"
"Comes with."
"What did you ask for, then?" I had him there. So he fell back to the previous position.
"They’re fried. I got to fry it."
"Why bother? I’d buy dog food if you sold that. Don’t bother to cook it."
"They come fried. They don’t come without," he said as if this was going to be important to somebody far up some chain of command.
"I don’t want it fried," I said. This was getting under my skin. "I like it raw. I’m paying for it. What do you care? Maybe I want to feed it to my pet seagull."
The kid looked hard and you could tell he was thinking. Probably the first time since school kicked him out.
"They’re froze up. I got to cook it or you can’t eat it. Seagulls eat fried."
This was taking all day. I could’ve made it myself by this time. "All right. Gimme fried. I got to get out of here." The kid turned and stated on the project. Next thing I see, he opens a door and puts it in the microwave.
"Sixty-nine cent." The greasy bag slid across the counter.
"That’s a microwave. I thought you said you were going to fry it." I was a little ticked.
"Fried in the microwave."
"I ought to tell Louie how to fry a fish sandwich," I said, a little sarcastically.
"Who’s Louie?"
"Owns the shop," I tried to clear up his face. "Big friend of mine."
"Never heard of him," the kid said, turning his back and doing nothing.
I got out of there, but out on the sidewalk there was no sign of the orangutan panhandler.
I was afraid he had lit off to bother Vivien, so I had kind of a pang. Last one of them I bothered to have.
Louie’s is on a corner. That accounts for the way business is booming. So, down the little side street you could see their back door and a dumpster set up against it. Seemed a natural to me. Sure enough, when I got close, there was a rattling around inside.
"Hey, I got you a fish sandwich. You think it’s worth leaving your natural environment for some honest but greasy food?" That wasn’t Lucille Ball sticking her red head over the top. "No, don’t bother to climb out. It’s perfectly right you should eat this sandwich in that dumpster. Here you go." I handed up the dark-stained bag and he took it with interest. "See you around. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do."
I took off for home, thinking how the space age and old age weren’t neither of them what they looked like being when I was a boy. So, when I pushed in the front door of the building, I headed for the elevator under the impression I was alone with my conscience. You don’t live downtown without keying in to the little things, though. You learn in order to survive. So I turned around when the outside door stopped sighing shut for a brief moment. I brought it up a lot of times at building meetings, management ought to put a lock on that door.
"What do you think you’re doing? Get on out of here before I call the cops. This is private property."
There he was, a little greasier, but none the less lovely than when I left him. He made a sick kind of smile. He doesn’t have teeth, exactly, though he can eat well enough to starve rats out of the house. Kind of a melon-slice smile, too smooth in a lot of ways. I didn’t take to him before and I didn’t take to him again.
"Beat it," I said, but he just slumped to the floor, that way they have with the big crease in their middle.
I’m not so young as I used to be. But I’m not so dumb as I look, neither. The elevator came and, sure as shooting, he climbed right in with me. It figured. If I was younger, I’d of slung him the whole way across the lobby and out the door. Ought to have a lock on that door.
But I have to make do. I pushed the button for the sixteenth, that’s our top floor, and stepped out between the closing doors. Electric eye in the doors don’t work neither. Timing is everything.
I wasn’t about to wait for hm in the lobby. Up the stairs I go. Good thing I only live on the fifth. By the time I got there I was tuckered right on out. I used to run up stairs two at a time and never even breathe hard. I remember racing my brother up the Washington Monument. Old age is like the Vice-Presidency – ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit. The Veep said that, if I remember. It’s like being run over by a train and living through it, I told him – consider the alternative. Ha! I turned on the tube and napped the rest of the afternoon.
Around six I was fixing something in the oven when I heard the bell. I looked through the security peep-hole and there’s Edith Patterson, from up the hall. She thinks I need someone to run my life. The only difference from my daughter, Rita – she thinks it’s her. But I opened up.
I wouldn’t’ve if I’d known. The peep-hole won’t let you see down very far. I heard about robbers, who get in by crouching down so you think there’s nobody there and you open the door to see who knocked.
"Howard, is this creature trying to get in to see you?" she asked. Like it was a question. Down on the floor was that orange dust-mop. I’d thought I took care of it pretty well earlier.
"Must’ve tracked me like a dog. Get!" I tried to block him with my knee, but he was too fast and greasy. "By all that’s holy, get out of this house." I grabbed a handful of pelt and tried to yank the hairy housebreaker back toward the door. He yelled some.
"Stop! Howard Keiser, what are you doing? That’s a being from another world." She clutched at her face with one hand, waving the other one at me. "We must treat it with respect. We each are ambassadors for the human race."
"Amb..." I got to say that stopped me. "Edith, this is the biggest mooch I ever saw. Too lazy even to take a bath."
"Howard, this is a Carthusian." Like I didn’t know that. "Sir, we are honored to make your acquaintance."
By this time, the thing had scuttled way in, behind the coffee table. I decided to ignore him and concentrate on getting the other pest out the door.
"Edith, look, I’m just getting some dinner together and I don’t have time for being a diplomat. Why don’t you take the thing home with you? Make a nice pet. Get it dipped first thing and clipped."
"Well," she said, stepping around so she could see better, "he seems to want to be your guest. You should feel honored. What have you got in the oven? What are you going to feed it?"
"Feed it!" I was getting fed up. "I’m not going to serve it a meal. This isn’t a soup kitchen. I’m trying to feed myself and that’s just abut as much as I can handle. If it thinks it wants to eat, let it go to a restaurant."
Even in Louie’s he would have raised eyebrows.
I marched over and grabbed at him, getting ahold of a paw on his hinder, after some scuffling about. I tried to drag him back out into the hall, but he has long arms and first it looked like the coffee table was going over, then he fastened to the leg of the easy chair. There was some noise, too.
The widow woman was dancing about the whole time.
"You’ll hurt him," she hollered. I’d like to’ve, but I wasn’t. "You’ll insult him," she
wailed. I’d like to’ve that too.
"You can’t insult mud by calling it dirt," I gasped, giving up, puffed. I don’t get younger. I dropped into the easy chair. This was getting to be a long day. To show how it was as civilized as an un-house-broke dog, the thing slid up onto the sofa.
"It was crying."
"That’s just it’s cry," I told her. "Ululating, that’s all. I think they do that. You don’t want me to keep the thing in the apartment if it’s in heat or anything, do you? It probably spritzes."
Edith had to think on that one. "You just sit still and keep him company. Look how he’s all crouched down; I think you frightened him." She fastened a piece of her perm back up behind her ear. "Now, I have a casserole in the freezer. Let me pop round and get it and you can offer the poor thing something proper." She knows I never claimed to be a cook.
"What?" I asked.
She put her finger to her cheek, thoughtful. "Beef-tips Burgundian and I think there’s a container of spaetzele." She thinks it never occurs to me to wonder why an eighty-five pound widow woman keeps a freezer stocked with four-quart casseroles. Generally, I dodge, but this looked like it might be in fair play. The woman can so cook.
When Edith closed the door behind her, the mooch squirmed into a more comfortable position on his stomach.
"Don’t get comfortable," I told him. I was pretty sure he could understand every word. "After dinner, you’re out of here." We watched the tube for a while, then Edith was back with the food.
She’d’ve liked to watch. "It’s shy. Won’t eat in front of strangers," I told her.
She looked doubtful. "How do you know?"
"They had it on tv couple of weeks ago, how they’re very private eaters and you have to leave them alone when they dine."
"Are you going to be here?" she asked.
"It’s my house. It might ransack the place. I’ve got valuables here."
Still looking like a little voice was talking to her, she left, and I pulled the foil off the steaming dish. As I took a lung-full of the fragrant steam, I noticed another smell.
"Aw, heck!" I said, snatching at the oven door. The tv dinner had changed color and was shrunk away from the edges of its little aluminum tray. They’re not as good that way, I don’t think. Mooch was right at my back. He’s got a nose on him most hound dogs would be proud to show off.
"Here," I said, sliding the tray across the floor toward him. I reached for a plate and served up some of that beef. I don’t know any other place to get spaetzele anymore.
He cleaned up the tray real nice, fingering all the gravy out of the corners, even the burned parts. But did he think to pick it up and put it in the trash? He did not.
I don’t know if she listens at doors or what, but Edith was back right on schedule as I put the last of the food in the fridge. She perched on a seat and stared at the mooch and me half the evening. I’d had kind of a big day and a big diner, so the idea of wrastling a hundred-and-sixty pound shag carpet out the door never really came up. Like a damn fool I went to bed, intending to put a dolly under the thing and wheel him out to the curb in the morning, bright and early. That’s how he spent his first night in my apartment. It’s been more of the same ever since. When I woke up, he had finished off the entire casserole.
So anyway, I was taking my ease on the sofa with, as it happened, my hand hanging down over the back, when a certain hairy butt caterpillared around behind me toward a bowl of chilli, which I had set on the shag – with every right and intention of eating it myself...in a while, when it got cool enough... maybe September. I don’t usually like chilli. Beans give me gas...give a lot of people gas. Ever hear the expression, "old fart"? True. The last three days, though, I’d had a real appetite for chilli. Not that I’d got much though. No, siree! Put a bowl on the table and turn my back to unlock the fridge for a bottle of beer... Wham! Shedder there would have it in three mouthfuls. I guess he figured I couldn’t see him this time. Kidney beans take the boy even worse than they do me, though. He really ought to lay off them. Ought to go out and get a job and pay for his own damn food somewheres else, is what he ought to do. But that’s another storey, isn’t it?
He never shows any sign of embarrassment about the thing, but I knew he was having a hard time snaking around behind the davenport. Any sudden exertion or twist was likely to let off balloon noises in picket fence sections and long sighs. I don’t think I smell as well as I used. I don’t believe dandruff-pants does either. Yesterday, when the Starving Widow from down the hall dropped by to assert Women’s Right, she made it a short visit and left with her hand to her pacemaker
Now, in my hand, I had one of those cigarette lighters people use to start barbecues. The
flame shoots out in a little jet at the end of six inches of flimsy, three-sixteenths tubing. Picked it up while I was buying a hasp and padlock for the refrigerator. Happened I was thinking of getting a barbecue to put on the balcony. So, I happened to be testing the lighter just then. As I say, my arm chanced to hang down behind the sofa, but I was considerate enough that I made sure the little flame did not scorch his fat, filthy rear end, which he was rude enough to have stuck up in the air right there, thinking I wouldn’t notice. It was quite a twist for him to squeeze around the end of the sofa, between it and the wall, to reach that bowl of chilli. I couldn’t’ve done it. I wouldn’t even have tried, being full of lots of beans already. My thought was that it don’t matter if you are an immigrant from some other star and the sorry product of a different evolution. Beans break down into the same old methane gas that the tube says fills clouds on Jupiter.
Stinky has good control. But he happened to break wind just then, in the stretch. Methane met propane and, with speed of dark, the flare took a patch right out of the seat of his pants, if he’d of been wearing any. All that fur saves a lot on clothes. He shot part-way up the wall, making one of his charming native sounds.
The door popped open and there was the widow, without even knocking. "What have you done?" she cried.
"Oh, he was just chittering. They do that when they’re in heat," I reassured her. The mooch lay clutching his seat with his long arms. He added some rolling about and soft mewing as Edith came around the end of the sofa for a look. I have to say, the black patch on his seat made a good impression.
Her eye lit on the barbecue lighter. "Howard," she actually screeched, "you burnt it with
that...thing."
"I didn’t ," I stood up for myself. I hadn’t, not really. "It was a sort of industrial accident, the order of a chemical reaction. You know how chemical plants blow up once in the while."
The widow was having none of it. "This is awful. Howard, I didn’t think you could be so cruel." She turned her eyes on me. "But I should have known." And out she went.
That last crack had me wondering, though.
Next morning I said, "I don’t believe you did this. Edith Patterson, who do you think you are, throwing your weight around?" She dodged behind the cop. Well, I was ticked. She’d called the police and they sent a patrolman...with a social worker. My cousin, Anthony’s boy, had the police once. Nobody in my family ever had a social worker. It wasn’t edifying to the neighbors to stand in the door, and I still hoped they’d come to take Chewbacca away to an orphanage or something, so I had them all in.
"Brown, sir, Patrolman Brown. This is Mr. Beister."
"With Aging and Adult," he chirped.
"There he is, the perp. Take him away. You got handcuffs?" I asked. "He’s a slippery one."
Edith was ducking around in the back, trying to see and not be seen doing it.
"Breaking and entering, assault, panhandling, loitering, littering, pain and suffering. I"ll press all charges." The mooch hung back against the wall. He’d had some experience with uniforms, that much was clear. I didn’t doubt he had a record somewhere.
"Mr. Keiser," the social worker spoke up, "we didn’t come to arrest anybody. Not as long as the Carthusian is all right. We came to investigate a report of abuse."
"Well, he abused me. I admit it. An old man like me, getting taken advantage of. Sin and a shame." I turned to the officer, who was altogether too quiet. "Go ahead, pull your gun. Fire a warning round. That’ll get his attention."
"Sir, just listen to Mr. Beister," said the cop.
"What, then? What?" I demanded.
"We are very glad to locate this Carthusian. Excuse me." Beister turned and addressed the lost sheep.
"Sir, you embassy has been very distressed at your disappearance."
His hairy eminence made some not too meaningful blinks. Beister went on in deadpan earnest. "My agency has been in contact with an officer of your embassy. I’m sure they will be down to see you shortly. I’m here to assure that you receive all routine and appropriate civil rights and social services. Speaking for the Commonwealth, as a representative of the Office of Aging and Adult Services, I would like to express my consciousness of the honor in serving you."
"What’re you here for, Brown?" I turned to the patrolman. "To protect the longhairs in case I riot?"
"Just to see that everything goes smoothly, sir," he said, looking bored.
It was three days before Rita even bothered to come around. When you want them they aren’t there – kids! When you do want some privacy, just the opposite.
She has her own key. I thought that was right. I don’t get younger; did I say that? We were watching the weather report when she let herself in. Usually she comes around right after letting the kids off at school. They live way out, past the big mall, where you have to drive everywhere. Rita halloo-ed that she was there, still with her back to the living room, trying to get her key out of the lock. It had been a busy couple of days for me, and I was over the shock value of having a pet parasite. So I didn’t think to say anything.
"A scream like that, " I shouted, "and you just watch, nobody even comes to check, if maybe there’s a murder going on here."
"Father," she made clutching with the one hand while sweeping the air with the other, "Father, what is that? That’s one of those space aliens. My God, is it safe? My God, what’s it doing on the furniture? My God!"
"Look," I said, "just shut the door. The neighbors."
Rita had to lean on the furniture in order to cross the room for a better look. Rusty-pants sat up in his chair, on the chance he might get something out of it. "This is Rufus; Rufus, my eldest, Rita. She has two boys in the suburbs."
"How do you do. Oh, my God!" she wailed.
"Rufus is staying here a while. He’s from the space embassy, I think." I didn’t want to let on he was such a freeloader. Rita already thinks I can’t take care of myself. "So, please, make him feel at home." Saying this made my teeth hurt, and most of them are dentures.
Rita sank down on the edge of a chair. "Daddy, you got to come home with me. You
can’t be alone here with...with...aliens from space. Anything could happen. Anything." Now, she’s hoping I’ll get so sick of this flaky flea-farm that I’ll let her move me into some gerri-ville, where she can keep me under her thumb. But this was then.
"I don’t need taking care of. I do okay. This is a case of...we’re all ambassadors of the human race. Don’t worry. He’s been here, what, since Tuesday...three days. He eats a lot, but..."
"Oh, my God!" Rita jumped up and ran for the door.
"What?" I tried to turn. When she’s moving that fast, there’s no bothering to get up.
"I left my handbag in the hall, on the floor when I was getting the door open."
She brought in a brown grocery bag, too. This she plunked down on the end of the sofa to start going through her credit cards and chapsticks, so I told her, "As if the local class of junkey-thief would leave your purse there at all."
She could hardly do the usual tub scouring and so forth, that she does, for all the wailing. "Oh, my God, Daddy, there’s hairs on all your carpets and the sink in the bathroom is clogged half up. I’m going to put lye down the drain; don’t use it. Where’s the bowl brush? I left it in the little closet last time. It doesn’t use your bathroom, does it? Where does it go? I mean you could get a disease from space. Does it know about, well, you know..., how to?"
"I’m an old man," I told her. "Things like that, I don’t want to know."
Rita vacuums her own house twice daily, morning after breakfast and evening before bed. She can’t do in the afternoon because of her soaps. "I got to put the tube on," she said, sliding around the wall with one eye on Red Willy, the Peril from Space. Himself sat with his feet up on the upholstery and tried to look safe.
"My DVD is on the fritz," she mentioned, waving at the flickering screen with a cloth.. "I think one of the boys did something. Maybe it’s just wearing out. It’s been three years since Jerry got it. And I told him the remote was broken months ago. So I couldn’t put it on to record General Psych. I don’t want to miss the episode, you mind?"
If I minded, would she ever know? Myself, I can’t stand the things – a bunch of old people going senile and a bunch of young people taking turns screwing each other in both meanings of the word. If I want to see that, I just go down to the Seniors. So I got up and went back to the bedroom. But Rita was in and out, pushing the vacuum over the carpet and running water. She didn’t do the outside of the window.
"I am not going out there with," she made a toss of the head in his direction, "sitting there watching me. Who knows what he might do?"
All afternoon I was mostly in the back; only once in a while I’d come out to get something or other. Rita was moving about, doing her Thing. I told her one time she ought to get another Thing, instead of all this cleaning. But she thought I was telling her to leave Jerry. It didn’t go so well, so I never brought it up again, much. But towards the middle of the afternoon what did I find but Rita, standing wither hip propped against the end of the couch, while one of the juicier scenes dragged itself across the screen.
"She’s going to wind up just like her mother, if she doesn’t wise up," I hear her say. The big couch potato craned forward in his seat to check it out.
I hid the remote, but he’s a clever enough devil, when it suits. Now, every afternoon, I have to put up with melodrama from the tv, too.
A few days later, the social worker called. The kid was all in earnest and his voice in my ear heated up over the phone.
"I’ve been assigned to assist the Carthusian embassy in all contact with the general public on this case. Their consulate just wants to send a representative down to meet with the Carthusian who is staying with you."
"Any hope they’ll take him home with them?" I asked. "I mean, he doesn’t work. He doesn’t clean. He doesn’t pay anything to help out with the bills around here and he eats more than I do. He don’t even take out the trash."
"It’s just a general purpose contact," the social worker said. "But there maybe something we can do to help out with some of the things you mentioned." The line hummed while he thought, or maybe that was the sound of bureaucracy.
"There ought to be funds available to help with his support," he said.
"About time the spacers started paying their bills," I told him. I thought there ought to be some money attached to a bunch that was well off enough to go banging around outer space. They say the main ship down by the Washington Monument is near as tall as the Monument itself.
"Anyway, when do you want to bring this fellow down from the embassy?"
"Consulate, actually. How about three o’clock on Thursday? Day after tomorrow. I’ll try to have a fix on some funding and I’ll talk with the consulate people about the other things you mentioned."
So I told him, "Fine." And I waited for them to show.
Mr. Keiser," the social worker said, after I opened the door and let them in, "this is the Third Bureau Director from the Carthusian Consulate. It’s proper to address him as Director.
"Director, Mr. Howard Keiser, who has been hosting your colleague."
"Esteemed sir." His voice was soft and high. I stuck out my mitt and shook the Director’s hairy hand, despite it looking a lot like Shaggy Sam’s unwashed one. At least, I had to admit, this one was a lot more presentable. His fur was combed all over his body and he looked to have had a bath recently. It was a lot like being introduced to an Irish setter ready for a show.
Then Beister piped up. "The Director would like to speak to his countryman." This here countryman was cowering on the sofa, trying to look non-nonchalant, but really looking like another Irish setter, who had messed in the bedroom and knew he was about to have a session with a rolled up newspaper.
"Hey, help yourself," I told him. Beister pulled me into the kitchen. My kitchen is six by ten, just off the living room, so I could hear the two Carthusians start to talk in faint, little-girl voices.
Beister lowered his voice and said, "The Director is here primarily to see if he can get your guest to return to the consulate with him. It turns out, he’s one of the chief scientists responsible for theoretical development of the drive that powers their ship. He disappeared on them kind of suddenly, and they would be glad to have him back. "
"Not just them," I said.
Beister looked more confidential and said, "It’s kind of an embarrassment to both sides.
As you know, the government is bending over backwards to make a good impression on the Carthusians. The benefits in possible trade and technological exchange are immense."
"This is going to give the Buy American nuts distemper," was all I could think to say, so I told him. And, "Just what do they intend to do with their long lost sheep, now that they found him?" I asked.
In the lull, I could hear this Director fellow’s little voice, sharp and demanding. Every so often, the Blight from Outer Space would utter something soft. I knew stubborn when I heard it.
I went on into the living room without waiting for Beister to think up an answer.
They both had their feet up on the sofa. Breeding shows. But I let it pass.
"Listen," I said to the Director guy, "can’t you make your countryman here go back with you? He wasn’t exactly invited and I’m an old man. I can’t throw him out."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Beister chewing on his upper lip. But, hey, if you got something to say, I don’t know what to do better than just say it.
The Director’s eyes blinked and slowly widened, which I bet means something where they come from.
"Esteemed Sir," you could tell he wrote a lot of letters, "it is unfortunate that here on your beautiful world I lack authority beyond the confines of the vessel in which we arrived from Grand Carthusia. Your government has been gracious to extend all rights, privileges and its protection to us. My colleague chooses to avail himself of the hospitality so generously offered by your government, though not by yourself." His high voice stopped and he gave another of those slow blinks, this time making his eyes smaller.
"That’s right," Beister put in, just so he didn’t look useless.
"Yeah, well, that don’t pay the bills, that don’t take out the trash. What about the rent, for that matter? He ought to pay something, if he’s been living here all this time. But if he goes now, I won’t charge anything at all. Think of the money he’ll save."
"It is the thought of the Council of Carthusia on Earth that you may evict our representative member from your premises without casting aspersions on Grand Carthusia. In this matter you have the Council’s fullest support." Again he did with the eyes.
I rolled my own eyes. It seemed like the thing to do and the Director took it in stride.
He turned to Shedder and spoke a couple of pretty hard sounding sentences in their lingo. The Boy Wonder just gave out a single squeak, but it seemed to be all the answer needed. The Director rose.
"If I can be of assistance in the future..." Held out the paw again.
"Doesn’t your paisan even have a name?" I asked. "I didn’t know he could talk. This is the first peep I’ve had out of him."
The Director turned and spoke sharp-like. The Rug From The Stars worked his mouth and a soft, child’s voice came out.
"Gawilliar." Something like.
The Director turned at the door to add, "He is adequate in your language as well." And with a bow of his slouching form, he was out, heading for the elevator. A bunch of other Carthusians and guys in new suits were waiting in the hall to push the button for him. I didn’t even know they were there.
Beister, the social worker, stayed in the doorway, though. "I’ll be by tomorrow to take him to apply for Public Assistance benefits and Medicaid. I think he qualifies for Food Stamps, as well." And he left, too.
I didn’t like to leave the Galactic Pest in the place without me there to supervise. The cost in groceries alone would be astronomical. Astronomical, get it? So I dragged him along with me next day to Seniors. There was always the chance that he wouldn’t come back.
"This is Gwilski, he’s staying with me. Call him Red." Heaven forbid, but I introduced him like he was my brother-in-law.
Down at Seniors we play for points. Pinochle, poker, parchesi, even bocce. Some of us could afford to put up a few dollars, but at our age, nobody wants to take a chance.
Gonzarelli being the exception, naturally. "Hearts! What are you killing me?"
"That’s talking across the table," my partner, little Irish Jimmy, complained. Gonzo couldn’t admit it, of course.
"That’s not talking across the table," he insisted, taking the cigar out of his mouth to manage a look of astonishment. "I didn’t say nothin’."
"On purpose, you don’t say nothin’," I told him. "Accidentally..."
"Whazzat, personalities? You wanna talk personalities?"
"Just play," Jimmy groaned.
"Here," I offered, "you got no hearts, I’ll give you some." So I threw down a card. Gonzo holds his cards all together and right up against his stomach, so he had to shut up to look what he had.
He threw something and said, "Where I come from, you don’t talk the talk unless you can walk the walk." He lost all his hair, so you could see the top of his head turn red between liver spots.
"Yeah," I agreed, "See Naples and die." He’s always going on about how his family’s Zizijillyaan, as he says.
"My family’s Zizijillyaan," he said.
"What’s that supposed to mean?" I asked.
"What that means is," he shifted the cigar to the other side and leaned over the table a couple of inches until his stomach stopped him, "what that means is, is anybody steps outa line in Palermo, they don’t see him no more." He fell back under his eyebrows.
It was my turn again and I reached for a likely looking heart, when I felt this tugging on my trouser. The Mooch had been squatting on a chair he’d dragged up beside me with his toes poking off the edge. I figured it was just so’s he could reach the pretzel bowl, which he had pretty well cleaned out. He’d been watching us play the way he watched soaps, so I figured maybe he didn’t really understand the soaps either, because where was he going to have learned to play cards? But he used his toes to pull at my pants pocket and I didn’t throw the card. Instead I went in clubs and when it came around to my partner, he beat Gonzo’s king with the ace, so that was all right.
I wasn’t going to be impressed by some retired dry-cleaner. His sons took over the business and maybe they think all those spots on his dome are bad for the trade, because he doesn’t go down there much any more.
"That’s Palermo," I told him. "This is America, or what’s left of it."
Gonzo made that noise in his chest, which I think he learned from watching too many Mafia movies.
"That’s here!" he grunted out.
"What’s here?" I said. "Nuthin’s here. I got a couple guys could use disappearing. If you’re so hot, come around and make me a price." He gave the look, but that’s all. "Unless you’re getting too near the Social Security limit on how much you can make this year. I don’t want to get a senior citizen in trouble with the tax man."
"That’s how they nailed Capone," Jimmy volunteered, "taxes.
Gonzo leaned back and chewed the cigar. "You ain’t got the balls. What’re you talking? This ain’t Murder Incorporated. I’m just saying, nobody pushes Gonzarelli around."
"And vise versa," I said. It took him a while to figure it out. "Anyways, you want a job, I got a freeloader in my place I’ll pay you to scare off or get carried off." I wasn’t about to let the Weed Patch off just on the basis of one hand of pinochle. All that proved anyway was that he was every bit as crooked as he looked.
Gonzarelli snorted around his stogie. "You couldn’t afford me. I come high."
"Yeah? Well, how bout we make a little bet on this game?" I told him. Hell, I never figured Gonzo for the real thing.
The next morning – I always get up at the same time; it’s a habit from the job – next morning I was in the bathroom when I heard knocking from the door. I got a perfectly good door bell installed, at my own expense, too. I was in my pajamas still and it takes a while to finish peeing when you get my age. I don’t get younger. So by the time I got out to the living room, there’s the Scarlet Pimpernel sitting on the sofa eating a raw, uncooked fish. I gave the sight a hard look and go to the door, but nobody’s there.
I skipped the Seniors that day, since Rita was due over. She brought some brushes and a vacuum attachment she thought Big Red ought to try out on his ginger locks. He never used the dry-cleaner foam she bought the other time, so why she thought he was going to use this thing, I don’t know. But she fussed with his fur for him a while and did the unholstery with the same attachment.
The next morning, I was in the bathroom again when there’s another knock on the door. Nobody ever knocks; they use the doorbell. Now, I have told the big dust bunny not to open the door without me there. I wouldn’t mind if they broke in and stole him, but I got to protect my stuff.
Sure enough, by the time I got myself out to the living room, he was sitting in the chair, inspecting a whole chicken, the kind with feet and a head and without the feathers. I looked out the door, but it was like I thought, nobody there in the hallway. I was almost ready to think that the hair-ball was ordering groceries, but after all this time, I was getting a feel for his expressions, such as they are, and even the Wild Carrot looked sort of surprised at the chicken. His first bite was kind of tentative.
"Sit at the table and get a plate under that thing, for crying out loud," I shouted at him. He moved across to the kitchen like a sulky teenager. I headed back into the bathroom for my shower. It was my day to go to Seniors.
When the Three-color Shag and me stepped out of the elevator into our lobby on the ground floor, there was a crowd like I never saw. That hour of day there’s a few people, but this time an ambulance crew was working on somebody. Everyone who happened to come by stayed to see what was up. Mostly they wanted to check to be sure it wasn’t them. None of us get any younger and while you don’t wish anybody bad luck, it’s always a relief to think it’s not you.
"What happened?" I asked a stooped-over guy, who was still tall. He was holding his golf cap in both hands, like it was church.
He gave me and my unusual companion a glance, but mostly kept his eyes on the medics. "Somebody found a man collapsed in the fire stairs. They just brought him down on a stretcher and they’re working on him," he told me.
"Poor son of a gun," I said. "They ought to be ashamed, how slow this elevator is. It makes people run up and down those stairs at our age."
"I use them once a day for my health," he said, turning toward me. "You got to get your bowels moving."
"I don’t use them and that’s for my health," I told him. "Only when I have to. I don’t get younger, you know."
"Right," the tall guy said, looking at the medics again, "none of us do. I used to run up the Washington Monument."
There was a space that opened up and I inched in closer to the medics, working on the floor. They had they guy on a low stretcher with tubes and wires everywhere. What with the oxygen thing coming across under his nose and his face the color of putty, it took me a couple of seconds to recognize him.
"Gonzo!"
"You know him?" one of the ambulance people stepped up to me. "Can you identify him? He doesn’t have a wallet on him or anything."
"Yeah," I said, "sure." They let me get close enough and Gonzarelli’s eyes open just in time to catch mine.
"Gonzo," I said, "what’re you doing here?"
He grunted out a sort of laugh. "My last job. You owe me, Keiser."
It suddenly hit me about the fish and the chicken.
"Jeez, Gonzo, you’re the real thing, ain’tcha? I guess I do owe you."
His eyes lost their look and one of the medics called out, "Coding!" They give him a jolt with two electric pads, that curled poor Gonzo up like a shrimp. But he passed without ever finding out what happened to his fish and chicken.
So we went to Seniors. What’re you going to do?
"Gonzo, my God!" was what they all said.
"Poker, it don’t matter how many you got, but who’s going to make a fourth for pinochle?" said little Irish Jimmy. "We could play with a dummy," he went on to say.
I ought to learn to keep my mouth shut. "You want a dummy, I brought a dummy."
And so we sat down after a while and started slinging the cards and the stories, like we usually do. Usually more stories than cards. But twenty minutes into the game, you could of heard a pin drop its hankie.
"Jaysus, Red," Jimmy groaned, throwing in his hand, "if we was playing strip poker, I woulda been arrested for indecency two hands ago."
The Hair Ball was mopping us up. That don’t sound like such a big thing, maybe, a bunch of old geezers down at the Seniors, but some of these gentlemen were around when they first put corners on the cards, and we usually know how to hold them and when to fold them.
"Well," says Jimmy, "that’s it for me. I got to go on back to the house and earn some more points."
"Eight hundred, ninety-three, you owe," says Eddie, who keeps the tab for us. He used to drive cab, so he’s good with the numbers.
You cleaned me out," Jimmy says, and everybody groans to agree. Red just looked poker-faced. Poker-faced, get it?
In the morning, we were supposed to go down to the Welfare for Rocket Boy to get himself an honest source of income, so I put on my tie and we waited in front of the TV until Beister knocked on the door.
"Hi, Mr. Keiser," he said, "I really appreciate your coming down to the Assistance office with me on this. Ready to go?"
"Me, I’m ready. Mr. Wonderful, there, he’s never going to be ready, so we might as well go."
"I parked right outside," he said.
"Good, I’m sick of that van they send. It smells from carsick."
"The Welfare office is in a place I wouldn’t go," I said to Beister after we got seated in the big hall. I was leaning over Reds, so as not to be heard by the rest of the riff-raff. "Of course, I get a check every month from retirement. And I have my savings."
"Of course," Beister said, not too worried about who could hear. Other than a little boy just learning to walk, none of the hoodlums, deadbeats and con-artists in the big room even shifted on their plastic chairs to take in the presence of a red Carthusian deadbeat.
I turned to Beister again, "Over there’s a couple of alte crockers who risked their lives and got here on their own. The old people you have to feel sorry for, but the young, healthy kids, you just want to tell to go out and earn a living like you did. Getting fat off of handouts from the state, it’s disgusting as a taxpayer." There was a girl there with a baby, probably either borrowed or illegitimate, or both.
Beister had a packet of papers in his lap. He meant to tell the Kennel Club Dropout who was sitting between us, but since I look like I’m paying more attention, he sort of told me loud enough for the bum to hear, "I made an appointment for ten. We shouldn’t wait long."
After a while, somebody came out the scuffed up door and shouted a name. A fat lady, younger than me, got up and shuffled out of sight after the guy. From the way she walked, it was even money as to her chances of making it wherever they were headed. I wondered what they did to make that door look so beat up, too. But I didn’t’ say anything.
The Welfare people would come out and shout another name once in a while, not too often, like they were understudies for drill sergeant in some tv series. I don’t know what they were all mad about, but maybe they didn’t like working with deadbeats. Beister’s appointment at ten came and went. "Good thing we have an appointment," I told him, "or we might never get seen at all."
"Nobody hurries the Welfare," the social worker said, philosophical-like.
At one I leaned over Gwilski, asleep in his bucket seat, and asked Beister, "So what do we do for lunch, come back or what?"
Beister had been up to the little glass window a number of times, I have to give him credit, but he looked resigned. "We wait," he said.
"I’m an old man," I told him. "I don’t have it to wait." He just shrugged, but I pushed onto my feet and strolled up to the window.
"Hey, listen," I said to the female wrestler on the other side of the glass, who was putting fresh staples in a stapler, "what’s up with our ten o’clock appointment? I’m down with this Carthusian on a tight schedule." I don’t put on the tie every day, and I figured I might as well get full use out of it.
She finished the difficult piece of government work she was engaged in before she raised her eyes. When she did look up, she recognized me for an old enemy of her family, who had foolishly been forgiven by her senile grandfather. She wasn’t going to start anything, so as to go against her grandfather, but she wasn’t going to risk hurting herself by leaping into action to help me any either. "Your worker’s at lunch. He’ll be back at one." she said in a flat voice.
"So?" I said, "It’s one."
She consulted the time piece on the wall and then a list on her counter. "One thirty," she said and swivelled her chair away to type something.
"Okay," I went on, as if she just told me she was sorry we didn’t meet when we were younger. "Is there a phone?"
"Over there," she waved. "Personal calls on the pay phone."
"Right, but this is official. I got to report back to Councilman Norazelski’s office that I’m going to be a little late. He wanted me to be back to the office by two and it don’t look like we’re going to make it."
So that was what she looked like before she died. "You’re from the Councilman’s office?"
"What do you think, I’m here for my health?" I asked her. "Believe me, if the Councilman wasn’t interested in doing a little favor for somebody in Washington, you wouldn’t see me here. The Councilman had his office staff set up this appointment, didn’t he?"
"Uh!" she said, the most intelligent thing out of her mouth so far. She got up and disappeared. I didn’t mean to scare her away all together.
I turned to rest my elbows on the edge of the counter, as my back was getting tired. I don’t get younger. Off to the side, the scuffed-up door opened and a tall man wearing a suit stepped out, with some papers in his hand. He took a deep breath and glanced at the papers. He let the breath out, stared some more and took the breath again. He opened his mouth but the name he was going to shout wouldn’t come out. I went over to him.
"You looking for Gwilski? The Carthusian?"
The fellow glanced down at me and said, "You together?"
"Mr. Beister," I called, "you want to come over here a minute?"
Beister came out of his coma and hurried over. He knew what to say and in we went, following the wrinkled tail-flap of the tall guy’s suit-coat. He sent us down a long narrow channel. We took the left he recommended and went in to the third cubicle. There was only room for one chair, but there were two anyway. I sat.
"I don’t get younger." I said. Beister, like a true social worker, pushed Gwilski into the other chair, half hidden behind the computer they had on the desk there, and stood between us. In a minute, which we had come to understand was the same thing as right away, a woman showed up and sat down at the desk.
"I am Mrs. Palmer," she admitted. "I’m a supervisor and I understand that one of you is a Carthusian"
"It’s him," I pointed. She looked.
She looked like a dentist about to pull a tooth. "We received a directive," she dragged out a sheet of paper from the pile she had, "about Carthusians, but it doesn’t give much detail. Let’s just get started and see where we end up."
"The Councilman didn’t send me down here to argue," I told her. I could feel Beister’s eyes on me, but he didn’t break. The lady smiled, a dentist discovering the patient had good coverage.
"Going over the application you submitted, I see some blanks. This is your name, your complete name? Just this?" Though she glanced at the red deadbeat, she looked up at Beister for an answer.
"Gawilliar, that’s it," he said.
"No last name? Or is that a last name?" It was a stumper. We all looked at Red, but he just made big eyes and squirmed in his chair.
Beister said, "Carthusians just use the one name, I’m pretty sure."
The lady looked pretty disappointed in us. "It’s for the computer. I have to fill in the field."
‘His last name’s, "Carthusian",’ I said. "With a "C."’
"Middle initial?"
"None," Beister said. She could accept that.
"Now, as to birth date...?"
"Okay," Beister leaped into the hole that left in conversation, "I asked about that and what they told me was that because of time dilation it isn’t possible to assign a local date." Me and the lady both looked at him. "They’re working on it." he added.
"I need a Social," she said after a couple of seconds. "You can’t make an application unless you have a Social Security number."
"I asked about that and they said I wouldn’t need one for this," Beister told her.
The lady knew better. "The computer won’t handle the application unless there’s something in the field. I don’t know who you talked to, but the computers won’t accept it without. I know that much for sure."
"What does your directive say?" Beister asked.
"It says that Carthusians are automatically eligible, like everyone else, but it don’t say they have any special freedom from the normal requirements. For example, you have to put something in here," she flipped a page on the application. "Race Code. You have to choose one."
We all leaned forward to look. The choices were White, White-Hispanic, Black-Hispanic, African-American, Native American, African and Asian-Pacific Islander.
"What, no Jewish?" I was shocked..., at my age.
"I guess it’s not a race," she said. "I can’t tell you what to put, but you have to put something."
‘How about, "Other,"’ Beister suggested.
"And how about identification," the lady asked. "Birth certificate, baptismal record, driver’s license, photo ID...."
"Not really any of that," Beister told her.
"No problem. We’ll use collateral identification. You verify this person’s identity? Okay." She shuffled everything together. "Now, we have to make a plan for you to get off of Welfare, Mr....er...Carthusian. You’ll have to come in to meet with our employment counselor when your application is complete."
"Isn’t it complete?" Beister asked, offended. I guess he filled it out.
"No birth date, no Social," she told him. "You’ll have to apply for a Social Security number and bring back a verification from them before I can do anything with this."
Beister got all charged up. "He can’t apply for a Social Security number. He never worked under Social Security. He’s from outer space."
"Newborn children can apply for a Social Security number," the lady said.
"Babies have birth certificates," Beister mumbled.
"I’ll hold the application for thirty days. Anytime you bring me the verification from Social Security, I’ll put it through and you ought to have your benefits in seven to ten working days."
"Wait a minute," I said, "he don’t get anything now?"
"I can hold the application for thirty days," she said, as if it was a real favor. "Now, I can’t say until the application’s been processed, but if he gets full benefits, he would qualify for Medical Assistance, Cash and maybe even expedited Food Stamps."
"So how much does he get?" I asked.
"Full Cash Assistance, if he qualifies for it, is two fifteen a month...,"
"We’re sitting here for maybe two hundred and fifteen dollars a month? This I don’t believe."
"And expedited Food Stamps, which could be fifty, even eighty dollars more. A determination will have to be made."
"You mean people live on this? I heard there were people driving Cadillacs on Welfare. Even if they did dishonestly get two or three checks at the same time, it don’t add up to bus fare. Are you serious?" I was asking because I really didn’t believe it.
"The state legislature sets the limits on benefits," the lady said, as if I accused her of it.
"You add eighty to two fifteen and you get, what’s it – two ninety-five a month?" I
figured. "Out of that he’s supposed to pay rent; buy food; it’s five dollars a trip for Paratransit. He ate a week’s rent for breakfast. What do people do who wear clothes?"
"I couldn’t say," the lady behind the desk told me.
"Drop us at Seniors," I told the downcast social worker when we were all seated in his sedan again. "We’ll send out for sandwiches."
He did, promising that he would look into this business like anything.
"Mr. Beister," I told him, through the window after we got out, "it’s all right. You did your best. But you know, it’s the old people you gotta feel sorry for."
Anyways, the deli in the next street has it’s take-out menu up in the lobby as you go into Seniors. I stopped to take a look. Red, he looks too, though what he thinks calzoni and pastrami might be, I don’t even want to know.
"So how is our Carthusian, then?" I heard the voice and turned. It was Vivien Glass. I said my hi.
"Are you thinking of going on the Casino trip?" she asked.
"Oh, I don’t know," I said, being truthful. I turned again and noticed the announcement right next to the deli menu. "Tomorrow, huh?"
"We can ride together and share the fun with your Carthusian friend," she said.
"Yeah," I agreed, "well, maybe we could. I haven’t been to the casinos yet."
"You haven’t? It’s loads of fun," Vivien laughed. She has a real pleasant laugh. She could’ve been an opera singer. "They give you ten dollars in quarters, and you loose it, of course, but the glitz and the glitter more than make up for it. And they have a really nice buffet."
When she left, I went on into the office and said to the girl at the desk, "Trish, you still got tickets for the bus trip tomorrow to the casino?"
"Sure, Mr. Beister. You wanna go? It’s thirteen dollars, but you get ten in quarters back, so, if you don’t gamble, it’s really only three dollars and you get a free lunch."
"Tanstaafl, kid," I told her.
She got little lines between her plucked and penciled eye brows. "You got me on that one, Mr. Beister," she said, finally. "Between the Yiddish, Italian, Polish, Irish and Russian I hear all the time, I can’t tell one from another."
"It’s Lunatic," I told her. "I read it somewhere. It means There Ain’t No Such a Thing As A Free Lunch. Especially not at the casino."
"Is that so?" Trish looked impressed. "Well, maybe you’ll get lucky and hit it big. My mother hit the number last week for forty dollars. I’ll put you down for a seat."
"Two seats," I told her. "Gwilski here wants to go too."
The bus ride down was nice, real nice. But who wants to hear about a bus ride? I sat next to the aisle and Vivian sat right across and we talked. Fine woman, and she knows her way around, too. The driver unloaded us right at the entrance and we were in the lobby, headed for the rest rooms in nothing flat. As they go, they were nothing special. I seen plenty just as nice and some a lot better. I wasn’t impressed.
The big thing, if you want to go to the casinos, is the slots.
"Sure, if you’re one of those green-eyeshade boys and you want to play for the gold in your teeth, they got other games,"I told Gwilski, as I followed Vivian into the slots-room along with most of our crowd. It’s a big room with aisles of machines. "You can put your quarter in and just pull the handle and like magic, you lost your quarter," I explained to the big Space-Faring Hick. "Lookit here, if you want, they have machines that take four quarters from you at one time. And then they have the dollar machines." Once in a while a machine goes off with bells and whistles and feeds out a few coins with as much noise as possible, like bolts into a bucket. Everybody looks.
We strolled around. "Let’s take it in and try to look like we’re going to start feeding gold coins into the machines, so as to kill the time until we can head for the buffet table," I said to Vivian, when we crossed paths again. Gwilski tagged along behind me, probably dazzled by all the lights and glitter. I had a system for playing the slots. When they gave me my roll of quarters, I stuck it in my pocket and quit. I figured that was a close as I was going to get to being ahead. If I could eat more than three dollars worth at the buffet, I might even go home a winner. Vivian and some of her girl-friends wandered around, sticking coins in here and there. I was glad to see Space Boy showing some sense. He just mooched along, looking and keeping his dough warm in his hot, little mitt.
You ever see a thing that’s too good to be true?
I turned around when the machine behind me went off and the coins clattered into the little catcher. Naturally, the lady who had won moved off, looking for another machine that might be ready to spill its guts. This one was played out. But up steps the Red-headed Space Cadet and sticks a quarter in the slot.
"You’re wasting your time and money both," I told him, not really expecting that he would listen. He didn’t.
Coin after coin, like an idiot, he feeds into this played-out machine. "Look Space-Sport, half your roll’s gone," I tried to get his attention. "I don’t know why I even bother to watch, except that there’s something about watching a person make a perfect fool of himself that’s very entertaining," I said to his back. He dropped the empty coin wrapper on the carpet, always the slob, and was down to a handful of quarters.
"K’Ching!" The slot machine laid a basket of change in it’s little metal catcher. Everybody turned around to look and an employee handed the gambler from outer space a paper bucket to put his loot in. It must’ve been nearly twenty dollars.
Vivian came up just then. "He won!" she cried out to her friends down the aisle.
"Cross beginners luck with fools luck," I told her, " and you ought to get something pretty fierce, is what I figure." But when he started to feed the bucket of coins right back into the self-same machine that just paid out, I couldn’t stand it. "I’m going for a little walk," I said, but nobody was paying any attention to me.
Up and down the aisles there were all sorts of people – lots of senior types, such as us, but young women in tight clothes, fat men in wheel chairs, nervous types jumping from machine to machine and guys with prison-pallor, who looked like they might have been sitting on the same high stool, in front of the same machine since the Nixon administration. I walked the long way up one row of blinking machines and down the next one, up and down for a while, till I came back to the lane that cuts up the middle, crossways. I’d left Red losing his shirt, if only he had one, right on this cross aisle, so I dodged back to check whether he was broke enough that we might go look for the buffet table. That was one game I knew he could play at and win.
At first I couldn’t find him. But then I recognized some of the people in the crowd from the bus on the way down and, sure enough, there was his dusty mop sticking up out of the mob. As I elbowed my way in to the center, the machine kicked out another handful of change, but not so much as before. He had three of those paper buckets filled with coins, one stacked on top of the other. I took one and Vivian took another and Red set off, down the aisles and up until he spotted another likely machine. This one paid on his third pull and he worked it for an extra bucket of specie. Then off to another machine.
"I’m beginning to see how he picks his winners," I whispered to Vivian. "The machines are always either right on the aisle, where everybody in the place can notice when they pay off, or near to it."
"Well, that’s right, isn’t it?" she asked, looking around.
"And they always just paid someone right before Red takes over. So go figure, they didn’t put up these casinos to make you and me rich. It stands to reason that most of these machines were set to take your money. So why would anyone ever put a coin in one?" I asked her. "Because they noticed one of them jingling and flashing and making a pay-off, that’s why," I said. " People are such suckers that they figure if one machine is paying off, then another one might, too. So out of a room-full, there has to be a couple of slot machines that pay more than the others." It was clear, once you got the right angle on the thing. "The only other choices the gangsters who run the place have is to have a room filled with machines that hardly ever pay off or a room-full of machines that pay off all the time." Vivian was looking impressed. But I told her, "What kind of a mind do you have to have to figure this out as soon as you visit the place? I’ll tell you what kind, a dishonest kind, that’s what."
"It’s lucky Shyster, here, only found three slot-machines he liked, or we wouldn’t of been able to make it to the table with the loot," I said, pretending it was heavy for me. "Those paper buckets can get heavy and I don’t get younger, maybe I mentioned."
"So, loaded down with eighty-five dollars worth of buffet and enough loose change to snap a pair of new, red suspenders, we come back on the bus," I was telling the guys at Seniors the next day. We couldn’t pay attention to the cards hardly, and Gwilski was racking up the points.
"Like a fat lady just coming off her diet." little Irish Jimmy said, shaking his head. "I mean a fat person. It don’t have to be a lady, anybody fat."
"It could be a fat lady," I told him. They got fat ladies."
"Yeah, but here in modern you don’t say the ladies," Jimmy said. "I keep forgetting. It ain’t like in our day, Keiser. Things’re modern everywhere you look." Who could argue?
"You know," Jimmy said, rolling his eyes, "I been thinking. If you can work this scam once, why not twice, every week, every day, for the sake of giving a good lad a steady, honest income?"
Now, when we got back to the apartment, the night before, I put it to Shylocks, "So, you going to pay some rent around here, or what?" And he just shrugged and rolled his eyes and went off to sleep on the sofa. "I’m taking something for groceries, then," I shouted and counted out the quarters. "I’m taking eighty-five. I have to get some coin rolls from the bank," I said, so he could hear.
Edith came over in the morning and saw the buckets of quarters on the coffee table. "To tell the truth," I said, "he don’t care about having the money any more than he cared about not having it."
"He is probably too highly evolved for such earthy concerns,"she said. "But don’t leave it out where it can be seen, Howard."
Next day, back at Seniors, I told them, "Sure, why not? But me I’m not up for taking him down to the casinos every day, even if Gwilski did pay the bus fare, as he ought. It’s a long bus ride and who really knows if he could work it again. These things are tricky. I hear that if you win a lot, they ban you from the casino."
"There’s other casinos," Jimmy said. "And I wouldn’t mind making a run now and again, in the interest of keeping another mother off the Welfare."
"Not me neither, I wouldn’t mind, if he’s paying the bus," said Eddie. "My son’s boy goes down all the time."
"Sure," Jimmy said, "we could try different establishments, so as to spread the load on the body impolitic. We might get back to the same place once every so often, but who’s to remember?"
And so, it started. Every Thursday I’d see him off at Seniors with either Jimmy, Eddie, Vivian or one of the others. Every Saturday, he’d go on the bus from Our Lady’s with another of the crew. I even took a turn as escort and hod-carrier. We settled on a fair enough rent and I made a joint account at the bank to put his extra into. I have to say, other than the food (and don’t try to keep a beer in the fridge), he was not a big spender. Rita was even getting fond of him, treating the hairball like one of her own kids. They both liked the same soaps. In fact, I ought to have been charging him extra just for the wear and tear on the sofa from all the time he sat like a big, hairy zombie in front of the tube. It was getting pretty relaxed around the place. Lots of times I’d just go out and leave him. If he emptied the Frigidaire, I only had to take some of his dough, of which there was always a bucket around the living room somewheres, and call out for sandwiches. Or he’d call himself for a take-out in his whispery little voice. Edith would come over and stay for dinner every so often, if she felt like cooking. It was almost too good to be true.
In fact, I had a bag of groceries in my arms when I stepped out of the elevator and bumped into Edith in the corridor. She didn’t look her normal self, so I invited her, "Hey, you want to drop in for a cup of something?"
"Well," she said, "I wouldn’t..."
"So come on." I opened the door with my latch-key and stepped inside ahead of her, on account of the groceries getting heavy. I don’t get younger.
Sticking up over the back of the davenport was not one untidy, red head, but two. I must’ve choked or something, because they turned from the program they were watching, General Psych. Like a slice of green melon, a sheepish smile slowly got wider on the Space Bimbo’s face. The nearly identical face right next to his was blank, like a used car salesman when he first spots a dummy. Then, Poof! a smile flashed across it, the way a cigarette suddenly brightens when somebody drags on it.
"Aw, no," I couldn’t help saying, "it’s a girl!"