There is something unique in the least of us. However insignificant we may be, each of us contributes to the human equation.
Lotte wasn't much to look at, and too much of her at any one time made you wish she'd go away. Her raucous voice and foul tongue and breath, alternately tainted with gin or onions, were more than many of us could stand. But now she's gone, forever gone, and I'd gladly forgive those failings if I could have her back with us in Westlake Village again.
As if to balance the see-saw of life, Ardsley, too, has been taken away. He stares out the steel barred windows of the King's Park mental institution wondering, no doubt, how he got there. There's always the chance, however slim, that Ardsley may return ... but not Lotte. The belle of Clancy's Hollow Leg saloon is one with eternity, and somehow you feel as though a page has been ripped from the history book of Westlake Village. The ragged edge left behind is all we have to remind us of the giants who walked among us.
It's time to walk again. Our first robin arrived yesterday and stood ankle deep in the dirty gray snow that's piled beside my driveway. Walking helps to sharpen my senses, and I see things I hadn't noticed before. In doing so, my mind stops rewinding the silent movies of yesterday and moves forward again.
I have given up walking alone. Parents grow antsy when old men walk about unescorted through the schoolyard. Dogs, sensing our impotency, will stare us down and lift their legs in disdain. So it's best to convoy. Seymour Slansky is a natural choice ... a man who has graciously accepted the dry crumbs God offered him, and moreover, someone I can keep abreast of on the uphill walk to the Dairy Barn. Tony Sargassa is another. While Seymour is older than I, Tony is younger. Tony, in fact, still has a shop on Westwood Avenue not far from Lotte's old apartment.
Seymour made men's pants on 36th Street and Sixth Avenue in his younger days. They are made behind the bamboo curtain today. Tony repairs household utensils, lawn mowers, and electric motors. They are both victims of changing times...people prefer new things to repaired things, and even Latin-Americans with green cards cannot compete with Indonesian children in the clothing game. I was made redundant by a computer that will work seven days a week and can be upgraded at the touch of a button. All three of us, though superannuated, are content to live the life that's left for us in Westlake Village. We harbor no grudge against the changing times, but we often wonder just what the hell happened.
We have one wife between us, Tony's Rita, a formidable woman and much as it pains me to say it, I believe Tony envies Seymour and me. Tony and Rita were married as adolescents and whatever magic bloomed in their togetherness has turned to wormwood. Seymour and I stand outside the Sargassa house at 7 a.m. on our walking days and watch Tony emerge shaking his head and holding up his middle finger.
"You'll be sorry for that, Tony," I tell him. "Even your wife is better than no wife at all."
"Too long, too long," he grumbles. "We know each other too long. Too many kids ... I never seen a day go by when one of them don't have a fight. Now what! They're all married ... they still fight. Trouble is, the boys...they all married a woman like their mother."
"You have too many children," Seymour says. "What is it with you people?"
Tony falls into step with us. The three of us have to huddle by the side of the road as a school bus roars by, crowding us into the ditch. Its driver, a female gorgon driving with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a coffee container, stares belligerently at us and ignores the stop sign at the corner.
"You ever have a school bus pick you up at your door, Tony? You, Seymour? Bet your ass you didn't! I walked four miles to school." I'm incensed, and furthermore, in the panic to get away from the bus, I've stepped in dog shit. "Look at that! You can see the school from here. It's three goddamn blocks...what kind of kid can't walk three blocks to school?"
Tony says, "Kid walks three blocks to school in this neighborhood, he's run over by a school bus."
We walked quickly past the school. Seven empty yellow school buses idle at the curb; their diesel exhausts fill the early spring morning with deadly fumes. In the driver's seat of each sits a clone of the female gorgon who only a moment before drove us into the ditch. Each of them is smoking, and each of them glare at us as we hurry by. It is sobering to think that parents put their children's lives in the hands of such people.
"I suppose you guys know it's exactly three months today that Lotte passed on?" I pose it more as a statement than a question. I know neither of them knew her as well as I. Her death has had a curious effect on me, and I find it hard to face the fact that she can no longer be seen careening like a rudderless frigate along Westwood Avenue.
"Poor shlemazel," Seymour sighs.
"She used to come sit in my store while I worked in the back. Pain in the ass...she'd bend my ear all day if I let her."
That's the difference between Tony and Seymour. Tony has few kind words to say about anyone but can be counted on to give you a place to sit and talk. Seymour empathizes with everyone. He feels your pain far more acutely than Tony, but he is a tattered remnant of the tribe of Abraham who exist only because they saved themselves. At this point in my life I need them both, one for understanding and one for when the going gets tough.
At the Dairy Barn we buy our papers...a Jewish daily for Seymour, the news of the Middle East. Sand and strife and new settlements on the west bank...or is it the east bank? I can never remember. It is so far away from all the things that matter to me. But to Seymour it is the Promised Land of Canaan. Promises made so many years ago that only he and his tribe remember them. There is an Italian paper there too, but Tony will have none of it. He is a died-in-the-wool New York Daily News man. Sex, scandal, and sports, those are the things that matter most to him. They are the extension of the nightly TV news of yesterday. I buy the New York Times...the bloodless paper that everyone quotes and no one reads. It gives me a leg up on Lucas Crosby and the Westlake Village Guardian.
We three have little in common, yet we are so bonded by time and similar physical infirmities that we cannot break away from each other. We stand there with our newspapers, knowing full well they were written for people with a stake in life far greater than ours. There are no newspapers written for Seymour, Tony, and me.
"What now?" I say. I have nowhere to go until Lucas opens the doors of the Guardian and kicks out the cat. That might be ten or eleven; it's a bi-weekly after all. Tony opens his repair shop when the spirit moves him. There are days when he doesn't open it at all...a toaster oven can wait, life can go on without a hair dryer. Seymour is not anchored in Westlake Village. He is a passenger on a drifting ship in a dead sea with a cargo of God's chosen people, looking for a place to land. In other words, none of us has anything to do.
I suggest the park. The teenagers on half-school days practice baseball there in the morning. We can watch them and play chess after we clean the pigeon shit from the pre-cast concrete tables that have been set up on the third base line. We agree...each for a different reason...each with a different agenda. No one helps us; we must make a life for ourselves.
I have never beaten Seymour at chess. I've come close, but when I get him on the hook I panic, and my attack is blunted, thwarted, and finally turned against me. Tony's easy; he storms across the board blindly from the opening gun, and with his unprotected pieces picked off one by one, he soon finds his king abandoned and cowering in a corner.
"Go ahead, you two play...I'll play the winner, then I gotta get to work." Tony really doesn't want to play, but he'd rather play than go home to Rita.
While I mop the pigeon shit from the table, Seymour gets the chess pieces from the field house. The sleepy-eyed high school baseball team is loosening up on the infield, and Tony is the lone spectator sitting in the wooden bleachers on the first base side. Tony knows as much about baseball as he does about chess, but he is a very vocal spectator.
"Get that glove down, don't let the ball get under your glove...block it with your body...keep your feet under you...be ready to pivot and throw...pivot and throw!!" The kids on the field pay absolutely no attention to the elderly Italian man shouting at them from the bleachers.
Seymour picks the black knight. Hah! A slight edge for me...I love playing white and going first. In six moves, Seymour has penetrated my center and bottled up my bishops. I try to throw him off with conversation as he concentrates.
"How's your daughter, Yehuda?" I ask, knowing full well she's living with a Christian boy in California.
"I go to visit her at Pesach; she tells me she is pregnant. Your queen is in check." He looks up at me and realizes I have no idea what Pesach is. "Pesach is a high holy day. I advise you to resign, my friend...while you can do so with honor."
To those of you in the summer of your lives, such a morning would predict a dismal day. Neither Tony, Seymour, nor I will try to convince you otherwise. We, too, were young once, and in the summer of our lives we could not see the value of December until December came. We look at each other on this fair spring morning, each of us with his own agenda, each for a different reason, and we pray for the soul of Lotte.
(Copyright 1998 by Harry Buschman - No reproduction without express permission from the author)