style="font-size:15px;"> “Well, we don’t need no acrobats.” I didn’t realize she was making a joke and thought she had somehow misunderstood me. But as I stammered and searched for a reply, she yelled toward the kitchen: “Hey, Ciro, do we still need another delivery guy?”
The owner, a squat man who always looked as if he had just received some sort of bad news, came through the swinging doors wiping his hands on his apron. His eyes were immediately upon me, sizing me up and down. Then he jutted his chin in my direction and said with a European accent: “Do you have any experience?”
“Yes.”
I guess he believed me because his next question was: “Do you go to school? . . . Where do you go to school?”
“Hobart.”
“Hunter?”
Hunter was a college a few blocks up the road. I was confused. There was no way I could pass for a college student at that point in time and he didn’t look like he was teasing me. So I told him the truth: “It’s a private high school.”
“Oh yes, that’s a very good school . . . you must be a very smart boy.” He seemed genuinely impressed. If only he could see some of the morons who were my classmates. “When can you work?”
“Weekends and after school . . .”
“Can you work after school and do all the homework?”
“I don’t get much homework.” That was the truth. We didn’t get much and you had to be really dumb not to do well. (Plus, the grades were inflated to make the school look better than it really was, but that’s another story.)
“Your father, he lets you work?” said Ciro.
“My father’s in California. I live with my mother. It was her idea that I get a job.” I wasn’t telling many people the truth about my father at that point.
“California dreamer . . . and such a winner say . . .” Ciro raised an arm in victory as he sang the chorus. “You know the song?”
I nodded.
“I want to go to California. If I live in California maybe I have ten restaurants by now.”
The woman behind the register who hadn’t seemed to be paying attention to us rolled her eyes and muttered a derisive “Hmmmph.”
Ciro turned to her, the news he wore on his face going from bad to worse. “You don’t think so but then you complain! Lots of complain, complain, complain!”
She bore no resemblance to him so I assumed they were married.
“Who complains? I’m too busy to complain!”
Ciro dismissed this last comment with a wave and turned back to me. He agreed to hire me on a trial basis. The trial being that if he didn’t like the way I worked, he would fire me. Made sense to me.
I was to start that Saturday at seven in the morning. He told me that weekends were busy with breakfast deliveries and the tips were pretty good because it was working people enjoying their days off after payday. Weekend customers were in better moods than weekday customers, and they tipped better. The weekend shifts were eight hours each, seven am till three in the afternoon. He also offered me three weekday shifts after school from four till eight in the evening. I could have a free meal for every shift I worked—any sandwich, an omelet, a hamburger, eggs, pancakes, or waffles. I thought this was a very fair arrangement and was eager to get to work. On this we shook hands and he gave me a Coke to go.
ten
Right away, I loved my job. The people I delivered food to fascinated me; their personalities, their families, their lovers, their pets . . . every customer was different. Some wouldn’t allow you so much as a glimpse inside their apartment, preferring to a make the transaction in the hallway, lobby, even the street. But more often I’d be invited into the apartment and would stand in the doorway, the kitchen, or the living room while my customer went searching for cash.
Ciro was right: the weekend customers and the weekday customers were a different species. Weekenders were likely to be family people sleeping in on Saturday or Sunday; lots of coffee, pancakes, waffles, muffins, bacon, hot chocolate, and donuts for the kids. They were in good spirits, rarely in a hurry, and yes, they tipped well. Weekdays, at least the hours I worked, were mostly single people or couples without kids; soups, burgers, chili, goulash if we had it, London broil, flounder, and salmon. These weekday folks tended to be lonelier and wanted to talk a bit and ask me questions. This could easily cross the line into creep territory, as it did with Mr. Gebberts of 301 East 66th Street, apartment 6D. The D for deranged, demented, and degenerate.
Mr. Gebberts lived in a small and sparse flat that was cleaner than any home or institution I’d ever been in. It smelled of bleach, like some kind of industrial cleaning fluid. There was a strange sterility to both the place and the man. Something was off. Like the hypercleanliness was an effort to compensate for things twisted, filthy, and perhaps diabolic.
When I would deliver his food (always a BLT on toast, extra mayo, but all the mayo on the side and a Coke with no ice and two lemons), he would have me stand on paper towels which he would spread into a large rectangle by the door. This was a tedious ritual that always took far longer than it should have. The unrolling of the paper, the slow tearing along the perforations, the exact parallels and perpendiculars he sought as he put the pieces of Bounty in place.
“If you want to come in and sit down you have to take your shoes off.”
I didn’t want to come in. I didn’t want to sit down. And I definitely wasn’t taking anything off.
Gebberts was well into his sixties but his hair, eyebrows, and mustache were all dyed way too black. His face was pink and shiny, greasy shiny, and his head was tilted strangely off-axis. He always wore these tight red-and-black exercise-type clothes. His fingernails were as shiny as his face and were lacquered to a mirror glaze. He wore buckets of cologne—clouds of it fogged the room and I would smell like him for hours after leaving his pad. It revolted me. He revolted me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was some twelve-year-old girl gagged and hog-tied in a spotless bedroom closet.
The man never knew where his wallet was despite the lack of clutter in the antiseptic apartment he called home. It always took like fifteen minutes of shuffling around, clearing his throat every five seconds, disappearing and reappearing in and out of the few rooms he occupied. He would attempt conversation while the search was on:
“Are you Ciro’s son?” I don’t know how many times he asked me this.
“No.”
“Well, you must be a relation. I can see the resemblance.”
I looked nothing like the man.
“I’ve known Ciro for fifteen years. Did he tell you that?”
Yes, of course, we have nothing better to do down at the diner than discuss you, our dear Mr. Gebberts.
“I was his first customer when he took over from Mr. Edelman.”
Everybody claimed to be Ciro’s first customer.
“We’re
