...and Fall Back.
Right now, I’m in a weird stage of my life (never fear: I will not trouble you with the gory details), but it hasn’t stopped me from writing. That’s something.
Anyway, it’s Autumn—a time that lends itself to recollection and reevaluation. It’s no accident that Rosh Hashanah—with its acknowledgment of human imperfections— happens during these slowly darkening days. I’m not Jewish—but as Lenny Bruce is alleged to have said: anyone from NY is Jewish, no matter what their religion; anyone not from NY is not Jewish, no matter what their religion.
Recollection and reevaluation (not to mention wallowing in human imperfections) are a large part of what I do, as a writer—and never more so than while working on Meetings with Remarkable Men ...and a Few Others. During this very Autumnal week, I reworked several passages, and added this new one:
Sporting Life
At the end of the summer, in 1968, I was a pony-tailed college student about to lease a cellar apartment. I’d been crashing there for a few weeks with a couple of girls who were moving out, giving me the chance to grab it for myself. I strode up the hill to the landlord’s house, as if I’d done this a thousand times, and knocked on the door.
When Pappy opened it, all I could see—through eyes burning from a miasma of human funk and the foulest pipe tobacco smoke imaginable—was darkness. The market has always offered a fair share of sweet-smelling pipe tobaccos (for smokers who care about such things)…
…but this was not one of them.
The wizened landlord was, as far as I could tell, incinerating a mixture of urine-soaked cat hair and semi-dried camel dung. That might have explained his wheezing breath, but not the horrible gurgling sound emitted by his saliva-filled pipestem.
We went into a house with all blinds drawn tightly, and sat together in the dark. The furniture had been cured—presumably for centuries—in his unique blend of smokable toxic waste. I didn’t touch anything, for fear that—if I had—I’d find every surface sticky with ancient tar and nicotine.
And possibly worse.
We agreed on terms (very cheap), and I reluctantly shook his hand. When he stood, stiffly, I could see that he was held together by some kind of truss. As I left, respectfully averting my eyes, he called out to me.
“I only have one rule…”
“What’s that, Pappy?”
“No hippos. I won’t have any hippos in my apartments.” I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have any hippos over. Hippies, yes, hippos, no.
Over time, Pappy and I had many conversations—mostly about hunting and fishing. He had many ideas that game wardens might find questionable.
I was, at the time, a fly fisherman, a dry-fly purist, even tying my own flies. Fly fishing was, for me, a subtle and hyper-conscious—almost holy—art form. It meant studying the insect life of my favorite streams, monitoring water temperatures, and carefully matching my fly patterns to whatever mayfly or caddisfly happened to be emerging at the time, and logging all the details for future study.
His method for trout fishing was something else.
He told me that, once he found a suitable pool, one that held many trout, he’d crawl up to the pool’s head, and dump a bushel of wood ashes into the stream. “It burns their gills,” he explained, his rheumy eyes sparkling with glee, “and they just float to the surface!”
He was obviously proud, and I was (less-obviously) horrified.
He told me that, when he was young, there was a stretch of Esopus Creek that he loved. He found the owner, and asked about buying it. The man was willing to sell, but the price was too high. A month or so later, Pappy showed up with cash in hand. The deal was made, and as Pappy started to walk away with the deed, the man asked him how he had been able to come up with the money so quickly. “Easy,” replied Pappy, “I just sold all the ash trees on the property to the baseball bat factory.” Not only had he sold timber that didn’t belong to him, he probably ruined the land along the stream’s banks, accelerating their erosion.
When I decided that I wanted to graduate from small game to deer hunting, Pappy loaned me his bolt-action 30.06. He shared his secret for that, too. He shoved the barrel of his rifle “up a doe’s ass” to mask his own scent and attract bucks. He didn’t tell me how he got access to that “doe’s ass,” which was clearly a relief.
I was careful to wash my hands after handling that gun.
Most landlords understand that their apartments belong to the renters, that paying rent entitles them to a measure of privacy—and that landlords need permission to enter.
Pappy was not one of them.
Every Sunday morning, during the warm months, he’s hobble into my kitchen to plug in his electric lawn mower. Then he’d mow the narrow strip of grass next to my windows. It always woke me up, but I never acknowledged the intrusions. On one of these mornings, I heard him shuffling around in the kitchen and heard—and smelled—that foul pipe.
Had he opened the door to my bedroom, he would have been scandalized by the sight of four naked hippos in the bed.
Portrait of the artist as a young hippo (photo by Robin Berger).
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