The Very Good Whisperer

(Reprise from 4/14/2016)

I spotted this man on the street recently who reminded me of someone—someone from the distant past. The words “very good” immediately formed on the tip of my tongue, and I whispered it twice under my breath. “Very Good,” you see, was a nickname that we employees—some three decades ago at a place called Pet Nosh—dubbed a certain customer of ours. Behind the scenes of this very busy retail milieu, we did an awful lot of that sort of thing. It somehow kept us sane.

As it turned out, it wasn’t Very Good after all—in fact, based on his chronological age back in the 1980s, he might very well be on a very good cloud in the heavens right now—but the guy I spied nonetheless sported the same ill-fitting toupee and hangdog look. Very Good, you see, would repeat the phrase “very good” over and over and over as you packed his cans of cat food, took his money, and returned his change with a “thank you.” The response to each one of these acts was the very same: “very good,” “very good,” and “very good.”

The sighting of this Very Good mirror image inevitably commenced a stroll down memory lane to further former customers who were branded with comparable monikers. Most of the nicknames doled out by us were benign, like “Very Good,” but some were justifiably toxic. Privately always, we christened two siblings who regularly shopped together the “Grotesque Sisters” because—as you may have guessed— they were grotesque. They were involved, if memory serves, in raising Australian Cattle Dogs. They attended all kinds of dog shows and were, without fail, self-absorbed and insufferable. So, no, their nickname had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they also had mustaches.

Long before it was fashionable, I branded a patron “The Fifties Guy.” He was an affable bloke who wore his hair and dressed like he was auditioning for a part in Grease. Perhaps he’s "The Seventies Guy" now, I don’t know. Then there was this fellow whom we called “Beautiful, Wonderful Man,” and not because he was a "Beautiful, Wonderful Man." He was pleasant enough, I guess, but received this unusual sobriquet because—week after week after week—he would tell us what a “beautiful, wonderful man,” platonically speaking, our sexagenarian sidekick was.

Then there was this college-aged customer of ours—who ended up working for the business at some later date—known as “Mr. Mellow.” It seemed that Mr. Mellow was in a cannabis-induced state of perpetual bliss. From the mellow-minded to the frenetic “Zorro,” a woman unceasingly masked and shrouded from head to toe courtesy of an allergic condition to—if I remember correctly—just about everything. Certain odors, including fresh air, would take her down in a heartbeat. As we kindly catered to her every whim, she was always demanding, distracted, and disagreeable. But in retrospect: Who could blame her?

In stark contrast to Zorro, “John Gotti” was a widely liked patron of ours affectionately known by his handle. Sure, he resembled you know whom. I once asked him if he knew how to crack open a safe. Our antiquated store safe just wouldn’t open, and I desperately needed change on a busy Saturday. He feigned total ignorance. Subsequently, he landed in prison—with no bail—awaiting trial on a series of racketeering charges. I can’t say if safe cracking was among them. Sadly, he dropped dead of a heart attack before ever getting his day in court. All who knew him at Pet Nosh felt bad when we heard the news, because he was a one of the good ones...I think.

Cream Sam Summers

(A summer reprise from 2011. Wow, I've been doing this blog for quite a while now. By the way, my e-novel, Cream Sam Summer, based in part on real characters from a very real and exceedingly colorful snapshot in time, the 1970s, is free along with its short-story prequel, The DeTestables.)

As a Bronx kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I’d say that, generally speaking, parents were less concerned about their kids talking with strangers—and strange people as well—than are contemporary moms and dads. They didn’t automatically presume that every area oddball was a potential predator or axe murderer. So, we youngsters sometimes kibitzed with a few folks that were—in retrospect—not quite right in the head.

A family lived up the street from me that had been there for decades. Their home had considerably deteriorated with the passage of time. In fact, its ramshackle state was the nearest thing we had to a haunted house in the neighborhood. And the residents’ sorry backstory added to the allure, beginning with an alcoholic mother and father who physically and psychologically abused their two sons. While in a booze-induced stupor, the family patriarch got run over by a subway train, and the matriarch became a recluse, venturing out thereafter only under the cloak of darkness for a daily beer run.

It was the youngest son whom the local kids got to know when he was a man in his early- to mid-thirties, I’d guess. His given name was Mike, but most people called him “Red,” homage to his hair color and heavily freckled face. He also had a peculiar sub-nickname that endured for a spell, particularly among the younger set: “Cream Sam.” Red himself had coined the term, along with another, “Furter Sam,” which he claimed were real things. Rather innocently, we imagined them as variations of ice cream sandwiches and frankfurters, but—looking back with an adult pair of wary eyes—Red likely had something else in mind.

Red, a.k.a. Cream Sam, was regarded as “simple,” but largely harmless by older neighbors familiar with his tragic family history. During the Cream Sam Summers of my youth, we would often ride our bicycles past his place and, if he was outside, stop by for a chat, knowing all the while that this mysterious, rarely seen spooky lady lurked in the nearby recesses. I spotted her once out on the front porch. She was dressed in all black and was ghostly pale with a long shock of white hair styled like Grandmama Addams. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old at the time and, I must admit, the visual unnerved me. By then, Red's mom was a complete shut-in.

One warm summer's eve, Red summoned a bunch of us into his garage, which he had fixed up as a personal bedroom of sorts, while the living quarters above it fell into increasing disrepair along with his aging mother. Red said he had something really big to show us that night. It turned out to be a one-hundred-dollar bill, which was worth something back then, and not a piece of currency we laid eyes on very often. How he came to have this bill in his possession is in the unsolved mystery file alongside the true meanings of "Cream Sam" and "Furter Sam."

Sitting on the seat of his gold-colored, three-speed stingray bicycle with a speedometer, my friend Frank snatched the bill from Red’s hand—an uncharacteristic act for him—and rode off into the night. With the bill raised high in the air, Frank pedaled furiously down the block and let out a few whoops and hollers for good measure. He returned it to Red after this brief exhibition, but the ordinarily genial Red was not amused and let us all know in no uncertain terms. Perhaps entering Cream Sam’s garage under the cover of night was unwise after all. Today’s more discerning parents might really be on to something.

With the help of a sympathetic neighbor, Red's dilapidated domicile was sold and he and his mother moved into an apartment not too far away. Upon the sale, considerable pieces of the roof were missing, and the place had no working plumbing and hadn't for some time. For sure, it was a hardscrabble life for Red. An older kid on the block once suggested that we never again refer to Red as Red, but other colors instead like Blue, Yellow, and Green when we encountered him on the street. If memory serves, I said, “Hi, Purple” to him on one occasion. Still, Red will always be Cream Sam to me, regardless of what game the man was playing all those years ago.

A Bohack's Injection

(Originally published 7/22/10)

While combing through a box load of miscellaneous relics from the past, I came upon a Bohack's supermarket matchbook. Bohack's stores were a New York City chain that went the way of the dodo bird sometime in the mid-1970s. In fact, there was a Bohack's a block away from where I grew up. It operated for many years on the southeast corner of Tibbett Avenue and West 231st Street in the Bronx. And after the Bohack's brand fell by the wayside, a Sloan’s supermarket took over the spot, then a C-Town, and then a Sloan’s again. Today, a health and fitness club conducts business on this formerly hallowed ground.

The Bohack's matchbook find lit a fire in my memory bank. Bohack's is where a sixteen-year-old friend and neighbor, my fifteen-year-old brother, and yours truly, not yet thirteen, shopped for our August 1975 camping trip to Harriman State Park, which is an hour or so north of New York City.

My brother, a Boy Scout at the time, purportedly knew the park's terrain and various nooks and crannies from past scouting trips. He was, for all intents and purposes, our fearless leader. We had the Boy Scout's handbook with us, too. And since this adventure of ours wasn't choreographed as a survival mission, we brought along a box of Bohack's matches, just in case the rubbing of two sticks together didn't do the trick.

To make a long story short: Dad dropped us off in an undisclosed location—an obscure, dead-end road somewhere on the periphery of a picturesque village called Sloatsburg. This spot admirably functioned as our portal into the forestland, where we had every intention of spending three full days and nights camped out under the stars on some off-the-beaten trail in the woods, and not some sissy campground. Unfortunately, we neglected to consult the weather bureau before our excursion, and day two in the great outdoors featured the heaviest rainstorm of the entire summer. Luckily, we had our Bohack's bounty with us: hot dogs, bread for peanut butter sandwiches, and Milky Way bars for snacks. While drowning in a flash flood or mudslide was always a possibility, we weren't about to starve to death.

We also brought along a radio, so we knew what was happening in the outside world. Yogi Berra was fired as the New York Mets manager on August 6th while we were one with nature. Rumors were that Brooklyn Dodgers great, Hall of Famer Roy Campanella, was his imminent replacement, despite being confined to a wheelchair. We had no cell phones. These devices were still a quarter of a century away from being in the hands, ears, and pockets of the multitudes. So, if anything, God forbid, happened to one of us, a long and meandering haul to find help would have been required. And, worse still, if a Jeffrey Dahmer-guy materialized, we were toast and could have effortlessly been disposed of sans a trace that we lived and breathed, except perhaps for a few Milky Way wrappers.

It was unquestionably a simpler time to be both alive and a kid. Nowadays, it's hard to conceive of parents permitting their teens to experience such a walk on the wild side—with or without a means of communication. Anyway, the footnote to this tale is that our respective fathers rescued us a day earlier than the scheduled pick up, surmising that the monsoonal rains had put a serious damper on things. Fathers knew best in this instance. And no social workers showed up at our doors, either, to place us in foster homes. 

Thirty-five years have now passed since this camping trip of a lifetime. It was the one and only time that I bedded down on roots and tubers, slept under both stars and rain clouds, and employed a decomposing log—home to a colony of ants and community of roly-poly bugs—as a toilet seat.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)