Midtown Messenger

by Carl Schiffman

By early January of 1952 I had a new after school job, this time for the Composing Room, a print shop on West 46^th Street. The High School of Performing Arts was just next door. I worked picking up and delivering layouts, proofs, and revised proofs of advertisements composed by printers working at giant linotype machines and from wooden boxes of hand‑set type in a bright noisy space on the far side of a counter to which we messengers would be called to be assigned our trips.

I was generally given three or four good‑sized manila envelopes to deliver and about as many pick‑ups to make, written out on separate slips of paper. Deliveries were usually made to a receptionist and pick‑ups too, would often be waiting for me at her desk. I wouldn't have to say a word. Other times I would be sent beyond the reception area to contact a specific individual or department. I took particular pleasure in those occasions, especially once I had begun to learn my way through the frequently labyrinthine interior offices.

My job would have been much the same, I suppose, if I had been delivering proofs for grocery chains or department stores. Being a messenger just meant finding a sequence of addresses after all, working out the most efficient or most enjoyable route linking them. But the Composing Room had interesting clients. I once had to deliver a set of proofs of book ads to Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History. I hadn't read the second line on the envelope, so instead of delivering the proofs to whatever office in the museum they were addressed to, I asked for Dr. Mead and was sent up to her eyrie in one of the stone towers of the Museum.

Dr. Mead was unhappy at the interruption, she said something nasty to the secretary who had let me in, then her blue eyes blazed at me. "Can't you read? It says—" And she told me what street entrance was written on the envelope. "I would expect," she said, "a messenger to know something about geography."

I was furious at her tone and at that little bit of urban anthropology that characterized me—now and forever presumably—as a messenger. "I might," I snapped back in anger, "have other interests!" She stared at me in wonder. An anthropoid had talked back. Her face lit in a brief and wonderful smile.

The prime activity of the Composing Room was printing advertisements for books. My job was special, different, important, because of that. Because it brought me, day after day, into the revered places whose names appeared on the cover and title page of every book I read. The book connection was instrumental in getting me the job. My friend Herman, who lived in my apartment house, had been working as a part‑time messenger at Composing Room since fall. He had gotten the job through his family's multiple connections with publishing; his step‑father, Albert H. Gross, was a well-known Yiddish to English translator, who had translated Isaac Bashevis Singer's first novel, The Family Moscat, for Knopf. Herman's step‑sister, Nancy, was an editor at Scientific American, which published book ads.

If I found romance in visiting famous publishing houses, even if I got no further than the reception desk, it was because books were privileged objects for me. My family, it must be admitted, unlike Herman's, paid chiefly lip service to literature. My father may have, as he claimed, read everything that mattered in European literature before he came to the United States at age twenty-eight; what I actually saw him reading as I grew up were Perry Mason and Ellery Queen mysteries, and other detective novels that came three to a volume from the Mystery Book Club. He also read historical romances by Dumas, some H.G. Wells, and occasionally, but always with sovereign contempt, American best‑sellers.

My mother's reading habits were a mystery to me. I recall well-worn volumes of Keats or Shelley on her bedside table. My aunt Norma, who had her own bedroom and bath in our apartment, had built-in bookcases filled with publications by or about Marx and Lenin, primers on dialectical materialism, the collected works of Jack London, but never to my knowledge read anything more demanding than the Daily Worker or some propaganda booklet telling her what Party line to toe; perhaps she read a few novels by the left-wing author, Howard Fast.

Out of this inauspicious brew, perhaps more out of what my family talked about over dinner than what it actually read, my own delight in reading emerged. What was most remarkable was the intensity I was able to bring to whatever I read. I read Modern Library Giants, long long books like the Studs Lonigan trilogy or Of Human Bondage, in a single day. I think my impulse was purely escapist. I had a science fiction collection of hundreds of magazines that included a complete run of Astounding back to 1940 or 41, and many copies before that; I owned every issue of Galaxy and many copies of the large format pulps with the lurid front covers, Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories, dating back to the 1930s. I haunted used book stores—especially Stephen's Fantasy Book Service—for back-issues to fill the gaps in my collections.

There would come a time when the content of my reading would deeply affect my life; for now though, the books I read so avidly on the messengers' bench were books I entered like a movie theatre, leaving my own daily life outside. Perhaps that was why I was able to concentrate so well.

The cachet of the publishing houses did not exist only in my head, and was not just the glorification of familiar names like Random House (which published Modern Library) or Scribner's (for Hemingway) or Doubleday (which had recently begun publishing science fiction in hard cover). What mattered as much to me was the physical impression these houses made, their decor and their location in the city. I took great pleasure, for instance, in visiting Macmillan Company in its own building—now occupied by Forbes Magazine—on lower Fifth Avenue or visiting McGraw Hill in its green skyscraper on West 42^nd Street, even though I had small or no idea what authors they published. Simon and Schuster and Pocket Books occupied either adjacent floors or opposite ends of the same floor in the RCA Building. I loved riding the sleek elevators, admired the sepia murals in the lobby.

Doubleday and Harcourt Brace, both in rather ordinary office buildings on Madison Avenue, impressed me with their modernity, open floor plans with indirect lighting and mazes of cubicles that seemed like a foretaste of the future. Knopf, by contrast, in a staid office building at Madison and 52^nd, had thick carpets and wood paneling, seemed to deny the reality Doubleday and Harcourt Brace were so eagerly embracing. Best of all, most romantic and rewarding, were the offices of Harper Bros., not yet Harper & Row, in a fine 19^th century brownstone off Madison Avenue in Murray Hill; and the offices of Random House in the north wing of the Italian Renaissance style Villard Houses on Madison between 50^th and 51^st Streets; most of the Villard Houses, now a shell behind which a giant hotel looms, were then occupied by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York and I was captivated by the juxtaposition. Just to enter Random House though, to climb the narrow winding flight of stairs to an upper floor, was to leave my daily self behind as effectively as though I had opened a book and vanished between its covers.

The freedom I had to move through the city streets when I was out on a "run" or to read on the bench while I was waiting to be sent out, the kindness and good humor of the dispatchers, the absence of close or nagging supervision, were not sufficient to insulate me from a feeling of humiliation at being a messenger. The feeling grew much more intense once the school year ended and I began to work full time. Part of the problem was that the other full-time messengers were—how do I make myself sound like less of a snob than I probably was?—enough to inspire disdain in the most open‑hearted receptionist. They were uneducated, scruffy, surly, sometimes elderly, sometimes alcoholic, sometimes partly deranged. Like myself, they were minimum wage workers, a thin cut above daily laborers. And in their eyes, and the eyes of the public who saw me moving through the streets with my armloads of proofs, and above all in the eyes of those young and beautifully groomed, inevitably haughty receptionists, I was one of them. My friend Herman was away working as a counselor in the Poconos. I missed him a lot.

It was only during the summer that I began to cheat my employers. Not that I ever dumped proofs in a trash basket the way I had political pamphlets I had been paid to distribute years before. We messengers were supposed to take busses for any distance over eight or ten blocks. I walked everything up to twenty blocks or more and filed a petty cash slip for my five-cent fare. Very occasionally, I was required to deliver a block of actual set type rather than a proof. The first time was a joke. The dispatcher gestured casually at a small paper‑wrapped parcel on top of the counter and told me to make it my first stop. I slid my fingers under the string that tied the parcel, and then stood there transfixed, as though my hand had been nailed to the counter, while the dispatcher and a few of the nearby printers laughed. The parcel must have weighed thirty or forty pounds. I began by taking cabs as I was supposed to, but by summer I was either walking or taking busses with the lead weight, billing petty cash for imaginary cab fare.

I don't believe that the job itself, whatever occasional humiliation I may have felt, prompted my dishonesty. I did not feel exploited or taken advantage of in any way. Outside factors had weight. I had been accepted at the University of Chicago, but I had not won a scholarship and my family could not afford to send me there without one. I don't know whether I was angrier at myself for failing the scholarship exam or at my father, who had always managed to send himself to Florida for a couple of months every winter, with plenty of money in his pockets for the race tracks and the card games, for not having the money to send me to Chicago. Writing sixty-five years later, I am struck by how angry at my father I must have been. He had all the answers, had read all the books, was chock full of innate ability, but he hadn't been able to pay for what I cared about most, which was getting away from him.

Carl Schiffman’s stories and essays have appeared in Missouri Review, New England Review, Antioch Review, Southern Review, Transatlantic Review, and elsewhere since he first began publishing in 1972. A native New Yorker, Carl studied playwriting with Paul Goodman at the Living Theatre and with John Gassner at Yale Drama School. Retired for over twenty years, he made his living—after a shaky start—as a case worker with neglected or delinquent children, as a state and federal civil rights investigator, and finally as a writer for non-profit organizations and fundraising consulting firms, including work for the Legal Defense Fund, Memorial-Sloan Cancer Center, the NAACP, and the New York Public Library.

Eulogy for The Bomb

by Paul Perilli

The appearance of an email in my Inbox on the morning of January 9^th brought news of the death of Thomas M, a.k.a. The Bomb. Reading it, the flood of images of him playing hoop on the asphalt court in our eastern Massachusetts hometown was immediate. I smiled at the thought of the five-ten floppy-haired Bomb dribbling in a kind of sideways crouch, his butt leading the way and his torso protecting the ball from hands that might desire it for themselves. I felt the heat of a blazing July sun and saw The Bomb lift off the ground in his white Cons with the pumpkin cocked over his right shoulder in a demonstration of perfect athletic balance and control. I silently applauded the quick flick of the wrist, the high arc, and the ho-hum look in The Bomb’s steely eyes after another sweet sfooshing snap of the net.

Then I remembered something The Bomb said one sultry summer afternoon when a few thousand games later it seemed we blinked our eyes to discover we were twenty-one. I have no idea what had preceded it, or if it was extemporaneous input, but he sent it out there and it stuck: “You’re only allowed so many baskets in a lifetime.”

It was a prescient and profound declarative statement and I wondered about The Bomb’s last basket. If it came during a winter league game when he was forty-one or forty-two and long past his best days. The Bomb now relegated to one of those hack leagues we used to ridicule, leagues with bad refs played in ratty junior high school gyms; a strained shot he just managed to get off over a younger defender that clunked the front of the rim and barely had enough forward spin on it to roll over the iron and fall through. Maybe those were his only points of the game and later, changing into his civvies in a locker room that stank of stale sweat, he decided his time might be better spent on the Treadmill or Stairmaster.

I saw him raise his eyes and give his head a little shake at the almost unbearable memory of the magic ease he used to pop in five or six baskets in a row just a few years earlier, long jumpers from deep in the corner or out beyond the top of the key, soft little hooks down low over taller defenders. Free throws were a reach for the coffee cup. Packing his sneakers and shorts into his gym bag that night I believe he knew there was no avoiding it. In The Bomb’s view of the world, even he was only allowed so many baskets, and after them that was it, he was all done.

Back in those early days The Bomb was known for having certain idiosyncrasies. He’d never play a game on a hoop without a net. He’d never be a skin in a game of shirts against skins. He also had an aversion for formal leagues. The Bomb never played for our high school. He understood his game was incompatible with the control-freak program implemented by the coach, who never warmed up to The Bomb’s hectic, run-and-gun style. The hours and hours of drills that were intended to set up a “good” shot in a game situation were a huge snore to The Bomb. When he had the ball he’d look to shoot, and it went in plenty often. And The Bomb knew as well as the rest of us that when it came time to pick sides out on the blacktop you wouldn’t choose the lettered boys over him. And if you did, The Bomb would pay you back with a succession of facials while at the same time illuminating the severity of your sin in a mocking voice.

But was that the real Bomb who would try to break you by draining basket after basket while uttering a string of personal insults? I swear that was a contradiction in him because off the court he was quiet. He never bragged, he never offended, he didn’t act like a tough guy. He was a kid from a poor family. He was a bad student with a limited vocabulary and range of knowledge. He had an inferiority complex that made him feel out of place in most social activities. But on the court, with the rock in his hands, some substitute personality came off the bench and overtook him. A rush of blood that induced an almost unstoppable onslaught and had him pounding the ball on the asphalt as if he feared it might stick to it and deny him a move to the basket.

I was a teammate on the one organized team The Bomb played on for the Boys Club. We were fourteen and fifteen traveling once or twice a week to Worcester, New Bedford, Lowell, Boston, and other places. Our coach, a twenty-five-year-old grad student who also drove the team van, named me captain, but in the games I deferred to The Bomb, and he applied his dazzling freestyle playground skills with an inexhaustible drive to score points. The result was an average of twenty-plus per in games that might end up 51 to 42 or 44 to 38. If assists had been kept, I’ve no doubt I would have led the league on The Bomb’s production alone.

I recall one game, a home game in the small gym on Exchange Street, when he filled it up for forty-three points. It was one of the few times I didn’t give a second thought to dish and deal the pill to The Bomb on almost every offensive set and suppress my own desire to score. I watched with awe as, without the slightest change of demeanor, The Bomb bobbed and spun and bumped and sprung in a delirious frenzy that overwhelmed the skinny white boys trying to defend him. Forty-three points seemed like a million to us in those days, a performance worthy of a mention on Sports Center. But at that time there was no Sports Center. Not even a headline to be read on the sports page of The News Tribune that might have raved THE BOMB GOES FOR FORTY-THREE, BOYS CLUB ROMPS. After the game, in the locker room that smelled of chlorine, The Bomb was cool about it. We slapped him on the back, impressed and giddy by what we’d witnessed. He smiled, but not a word came out of him that might be described as conceit. It was as if he too was surprised by his effort even though we all knew better. He’d had a good night. He’d have others.

And yet in all of that in all those years I don’t ever remember dialing The Bomb’s number to find out how he was and what he might want to do that night. Off the court I didn’t hang out with him much, if ever. When we were eighteen I went to college and The Bomb went to work lumping rubbish barrels for the Department of Public Works. It was a job, I understood without condescension, that suited The Bomb, that he didn’t mind going to nor being seen around town hanging off the back of a scarred-gray packer.

One of the last times I saw The Bomb remains quite clear in my memory. I was home for summer vacation before my senior year and went to the court that first afternoon. Sure as the round-ball’s a sphere, The Bomb was there with a questioning look in his eyes that wondered if this was the time I’d come back with a self-important air that would exclude him and compel a defensive response. It wasn’t. The hoops had nets on them and there were still some games to play together. Not a lot, but some, before I moved on from South Street for good. But by then The Bomb was a legend and I wasn’t and when I thought of him again I was struck frozen by his prophetic words, “You’re only allowed so many baskets in a lifetime,” knowing all of mine, like his, were already in the past.

Paul Perilli's words of the day appear in Volume 3 of The Transnational and The Satirist. “Trumped!” is forthcoming in The Transnational.

Fear

by John Guzlowski

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the near northwest side of Chicago, an area sometimes called Humboldt Park and sometimes called the Polish Triangle. A lot of my neighbors were Holocaust survivors, World War II refugees, and Displaced Persons. There were hardware-store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead comrades, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russian Gulag. They were our moms and dads. Some of us kids had been born here in the States, but most of us had come over to America in the late 40s and early 50s on US troop ships. 

As kids, we knew a lot about fear. We heard about it from our parents. They had seen their mothers and fathers shot, their brothers and sisters put on trains and sent to concentration camps, their childhood friends left behind crying on the side of a road. Most of our parents didn’t tell us about this fear directly. How could they?

But we felt their fear anyway.

We overheard their stories late at night when they thought we were watching TV in another room or sleeping in bed, and that’s when they’d gather around the kitchen table and start remembering the past and all the things that made them fearful. My mom would tell about what happened to her mom and her sister and her sister’s baby when the Germans came to her house in the woods, the rapes and murders.

You could hear the fear in my mom’s voice. She feared everything, the sky in the morning, a drink of water, a sparrow singing in a dream, me whistling some stupid Mickey Mouse Club tune I picked up on TV. Sometimes when I was a kid, if I started to whistle, she would ask me to stop because she was afraid that that kind of simple act of joy would bring the devil into the house. Really.

My dad was the same way. If he walked into a room where my sister and I were watching a TV show about World War II—even something as innocuous as the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes—and there were some German soldiers on the screen, his hands would clench up into fists, his face would redden in anger, and he would tell us to turn the show off, immediately. Normally the sweetest guy in the world, his fear would turn him toward anger, and he would start telling us about the terrible things the Germans did, the women he saw bayoneted, the friends he saw castrated and beaten to death, the men he saw frozen to death during a simple roll call.

This was what it was like at home for most of my friends and me. To escape our parents’ fear, however, we just had to go outside and be around other kids. We could forget the war and our parents’ fear. We’d laugh, play tag and hide-and-go-seek, climb on fences, play softball in the nearby park, go to the corner story for an ice cream cone or a chocolate soda. You name it. This was in the mid 50s at the height of the baby boom, and there were millions of us kids outside living large and—as my dad liked to say—running around like wild goats!

In the streets with our friends, we didn’t know a thing about fear, didn’t have to think about it.

That is until Suitcase Charlie showed up one day.

It happened in the fall of 1955, October, a Sunday afternoon.

Three young Chicago boys, thirteen-year old John Schuessler, his eleven-year old brother Anton, and their fourteen-year old friend Bobby Peterson, went to Downtown Chicago, the area called the Loop, to see a matinee of a Disney nature documentary called The African Lion. Today, the parents of the boys probably would take them to the Loop, but back then it was a different story. Their parents knew where they were going, and the mother of the Schuessler boys in fact had picked out the film they would see. At the time, it wasn’t unusual for kids to do this kind of roaming around on their own. We were “free-range” kids before the term was even invented. Our parents figured that we could pretty much stay out of trouble no matter where we went. We’d take buses to museums, beaches, movies, swimming pools, amusement parks without any kind of parental guidance. There were times we’d even just walk a mile to a movie to save the ten cents on the bus ride. We’d seldom do this alone, however. Kids had brothers and sisters and pals, so we’d do what the Schuessler brothers and their friend Bobby Peterson did.

We’d get on a bus, go downtown, see a movie and hang out there afterward. There was plenty to do, and most of it didn’t cost a penny: there were free museums, enormous department stories filled with toy departments where you could play for hours with all the toys your parents could never afford to buy you, libraries filled with books and civil war artifacts (real ones), a Greyhound bus depot packed with arcade-style games, a dazzling lakefront full of yachts and sailboats, comic book stores, dime stores where barkers would try to sell you impossible non-stick pans and sponges that would clean anything, and skyscrapers like the Prudential Building where you could ride non-stop, lickety-split elevators from the first floor to the forty-first floor for free. And if you got tired of all that, you could always stop and look at the wild people in the streets! It was easy for a bunch of parent-free kids to spend an afternoon down in the Loop.

Just like the Schuessler Brothers and their friend Bobby Peterson did.

But the brothers and Bobby never made it home from the Loop that Sunday in October of 1955.

Two days later, their bodies were found in a shallow ditch east of the Des Plaines River. The boys were bound and naked. Their eyes were shut with adhesive tape. Bobby Peterson had been beaten, and the bodies of all three had been thrown out of a vehicle. The coroner pronounced the cause of death to be “asphyxiation by suffocation.”

The city was thrown into panic.

For the first time, we felt the kind of fear outside the house we had overheard inside the house. It shook us up. Where before we hung out on the street corners and played games until late in the evening, now we ran home when the first street lights came on. We started spending more time at home or at the homes of our friends, and we stopped doing as many things on our own out on the street: fewer trips to the supermarket or the corner store or the two local movie theaters, The Crystal and The Vision.  The street wasn’t the safe place it once had been. Everything changed. Now we were conscious of threat, of danger, of the type of terrible thing that could happen without notice.

We started watching for the killer of the Schuessler Brothers and Bobby Peterson. We didn’t know his name or what he looked like, nobody did, but we gave him a name and we imagined how he might look. We called him Charlie, and we were sure he hauled around a suitcase, one that he carried dead children in. Just about every evening, as it started getting dark, some kid would look down the street toward the shadows at the end of the block and see something in those shadows. The kid would point and ask in a whisper, “Suitcase Charlie?”

We’d follow his gaze and a second later we’d be heading for home.

Fast as we could.

Home again, we’d catch our breath and sit down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and a sandwich. Our moms and dads would come from the living room or the basement and sit down across from us. They’d want to talk. They’d smile and ask us why we were home so early. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, time for the nightly news.

We’d tell them about how we were playing outside, joking about stuff, making up stories about Suitcase Charlie, trying to scare each other, nothing but joking around.

They’d nod and say, “It’s good to laugh, good to joke around.”

We wouldn’t tell them about the fear we felt, the fear they knew in ways we never would.

John Guzlowski’s writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ontario Review, North American Review, Salon.com, Rattle, Atticus Review, and many other print and online journals here and abroad. His first novel Suitcase Charlie, a mystery set among Holocaust survivors in Chicago, is available from Amazon. His poems and personal essays about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany appear in his forthcoming book Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica Press, March 2016). Of Guzlowski’s writing, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz said, “He has an astonishing ability for grasping reality.”

Hacker

by Paul Perilli

“You take a job you become the job,” Wizard said in Martin Scorcese’s cult classic Taxi Driver.

I felt much like Wizard the summer I was twenty and drove a taxi for Red Cab, a Waltham, MA company owned by my older cousin, Joey. Joey was a wise-cracking, street smart, tough guy, who at the same time was incredibly generous and also ambitious. At an early age he turned an interest in cars and a job as a gas station grease monkey into a business that would grow from owning a few cabs to having a fleet of them and eventually include school buses as well as vans for people with special needs and senior citizens, making make him millions of dollars.

Of course, I made a bit less than that working for him those months, an amount that fluctuated depending on how many hours I was willing to put in. And that was a lot. I was hired to drive weekdays but if there was a no-show or someone was late or quit, and that happened often enough, I’d volunteer to stay on. I could drive long hours, 12 or 16 of them with only a few breaks: a to-go breakfast from Wilson’s Diner, a couple of takeout slices from Piece o’ Pizza, a large afternoon coffee from Tony’s Spa. I liked the money and it was there to make if I wanted it, and there were times I’d be home with my family or shooting hoop with friends thinking I could, and probably should, be on the road making some cash instead. I took the job. I became the job.

It wasn’t more than a few days after I started that my friends began calling me Hacker, as in “Hey, Hacker, you coming out with us tonight?” It was a moniker I couldn’t dissuade them from using. The identifier, I was sure, would turn off the girls we ran into at parties or bars or the beach and would doom me to a long dry summer. But, to my surprise, it actually turned out to be a good conversation starter, and I recall more than a few wide-eyed female faces exclaim, “Wow, are you really doing that?” My answer in the affirmative would lead to the usual follow-up questions. “Is it interesting?” “It can be.” “Are the people weird?” “Mostly.” “Do they give you great tips?” “Not especially.”

In truth, I picked up the whole gamut of local humanity and folks passing through Waltham for whatever reason. I transported executives to and from the technology companies out on Fourth Ave, Bear Hill Road, and Winter Street to the airport. I took bossy old ladies who gave me ten cent tips to Super Market to do their grocery shopping. An hour later I might pick them up again and for another ten cents carry half a dozen bags to their door and maybe even respond to a command issued with the authority of a drill sergeant: “Don’t just leave them there, take them inside.” I drove men to their jobs in the morning and picked up others outside bars in the evening and at night, and who, shitfaced and disoriented, might be overcome with a swell of generosity that could yield a 50 percent tip I’d have no problem pocketing. I took people of all ages to Waltham Hospital for tests or admission or to visit an ill spouse or child. Some would go into great detail about their plight, and the fear I heard resonating in their voices might depress me until my next pickup occupied the back seat and a new conversation started up. There were times, once a day maybe, when I’d turn the meter off early to keep the fare low for an elderly person I thought might be down to his or her last few dollars. In a few instances one of them might look so sad and destitute I’d open the back door and say the ride was on me and end up eating the cost myself for a few kind words in return.

My car was a Checker, one of those big, extra-roomy four door vehicles manufactured in Michigan. The model that, three years later, Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle was seen driving in Taxi Driver. Not long after the movie came out I sat in an old, worn seat in Harvard Square Cinema awed at the skill and imagination of Bickle’s creator. He, Scorcese, was talking to me and I assumed lots of other buzzed-up drivers spending long, lonely nights taking strange folks to places they might not feel comfortable being in very long. To this day I still feel an unreasonable identification with Bickle (“You make the move. It’s your move.”) and wonder whatever happened to the draft of the story about a cab driver titled “Time and Distance” I’d written around then?

Time and distance. Those were the two settings on the old meters with the iron flag that was dropped at the start of each new fare: set to distance it ticked off the ten or so cents for each eighth mile traveled; set to time it ticked off a similar amount for each minute that went by as you were stalled in traffic or waiting for your fare to run an errand. Setting the meter to time and distance while the taxi was moving was illegal, though unscrupulous drivers might take advantage of unsuspecting riders. I admit I did it often as I could, though never to someone I was sure was on a fixed income or that I knew or knew of. I did have a penchant to stiff demanding out-of-town businessmen I assumed were on company expense accounts and in a hurry to get to the commuter rail station or back to their hotel up along Route 128 or in downtown Boston. I did it to others whom I decided deserved it or I just didn’t like. Only a few times did someone mention they knew I was overcharging them. Only once did someone call the office to report me to Chuck, the dispatcher.

Presumably because I was the owner’s cousin, a cousin he liked and favored, you would think that might have guaranteed me one or two extra better paying fares a day. Nah uh. Not while Chuck was taking the calls and doling them out.

A grouchy ex high school offensive lineman, Chuck had worked for Joey for years, maybe even from the start, and no way he was going to give the summer help, not even Joey’s blood relative, special treatment. Not when there were men riding the streets with families to support (and at that time all of Red Cab’s drivers were men). Not when Big Mike, a feared and uncommunicative man who’d been driving a taxi since he was old enough to have a license, might be out there waiting for his number to be called.

Big Mike was on the streets twelve hours a day six days a week. I don’t know what kind of life he had outside of that, and it’s likely I never let my imagination wander too deeply into it, but his stature at Red Cab was such that he wasn’t afraid to key the mic and snap something at Chuck if he felt he was getting slighted in the distribution of good-paying fares. Big Mike always looked like he was getting slighted and that made him a little scary to be around. I don’t think I had a single conversation with him. In fact, I don’t think we ever exchanged any words at all, not even hellos at the garage where we picked up and dropped off our cabs.

The taxi business attracted a lot of those types, loners, social misfits, those in transition from job to job or place to place or life to life, people like me who needed some quick money, or those others who, for whatever reasons, thought spending a good chunk of the day alone in a car and sitting in stalled traffic and waiting for lights to change would be an all right job. (“All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go,” was how Bickle put it.) While the seeming freedom of being your own boss and making your own hours, as many or few as you wanted, of hearing the meter click and imagining a steady flow of greenbacks coming your way, might be seductive, its reality was anything but freedom and riches. The constant hustle to make decent cash, the meager tips, whiney people and empty, frustrating downtime, wasn’t for everyone. Joey had a core group of steady drivers, but otherwise the turnover rate was quite high, and he was constantly looking for people he thought might stay with him a while.

84 was my handle, the number Chuck used to communicate with me over the two-way radio, as in “84 there’s a pickup waiting on the corner of Crescent and Moody.” Everyone had a number (Big Mike’s was 1) but Chuck never used it to address them as he did me when I was in the office or on those occasions I went out with them for beers and some pool playing. It was as if I didn’t have a first or last name or that we’d entered a time when the use of birth names was unnecessary. Truth was, I think he was intimidated by a college kid. Sports and women were the two dominant topics among the drivers, and ones I wasn’t averse to delving into great detail about, but books, academic knowledge, those were for the Brandesians, as we townies referred to the Brandeis University students who lived up on the hill on South Street and had long hair and went to protests and who also, we were certain, screwed each other like bunnies on amphetamines. Chuck knew I read books during those dead zones in the mid-mornings and mid-afternoons when business was slow. I’d locate a shady spot to park my Checker and take out the volume I’d brought along, and when Chuck was in a joking mood, or a frustrated one, and there were plenty more of those, he might tell me to put it down and head to such and such a number on Upland Road or Weston Street or over to the main entrance of Polaroid: “I hate to interrupt study period 84, but you need to get right on that.” I’d finish the paragraph I was on and key the mic and repeat the address for him. In the office at end of one day I remember Chuck looking at the big, thick book in my hand and wondering just why the fuck would I (I as 84) want to read something that was titled Cancer Ward?

I still don’t think it’s an unreasonable question.

Paul Perilli's writing has appeared in The European, Baltimore Magazine, New Observations Magazine, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and others. "Hacker" is from a group of non-fiction pieces titled Tracking Back.

The Last Seltzer Man

by Shayla Love

        A Dodge Man with a Mercedes Grill

        Pia Lindstrom had a great pair of legs, but that wasn’t what Walter Backerman remembers about her.

        After an interview with Walter’s father, Al, she looked into the Channel 4 WCBC-TV camera and said, “It’s a shame that after 55 years of continuous service, that Mr. Backerman senior will be the last seltzer man in the family. His young son Walter is enrolled to start law school in the fall.” She flashed a smile. “It’s a shame. There are too many lawyers out there and too few good seltzer men.”

        That was 40 years ago. Turns out, the world was spared another lawyer.

        I met Walter on the corner of 7th Avenue and 22nd street after he dropped off his son, Joey, at school a couple blocks away. His seltzer truck is an advertisement, photo album and scrapbook, all at the same time. The sliding doors are printed with images of seltzer bottles from television, 19th century France, and recycling bins.

        Like other aspects of his life, this truck started one way and became another. This is a 1995 Dodge Sprinter, but you’d never know it, since Walter fixed a Mercedes grill to the front. Walter is good at adding a little glamour to everyday things. Like a Dodge, or a blue collar delivery service job.

        The front seat of his truck is filthy. It looks like a space where coffee has been spilled and a lot of life has been lived. The wall behind the driver’s seat is covered with pictures of celebrities. There are autographed head shots and faded news clippings. Like all good photos, they carry a thousand words per picture, per star, of where and when Walter met them, and how they became his friend. A poster from “The View,” is signed by the whole cast.

        “Barbara Walters is like a faucet,” Walter said, as he stirred sugar into his coffee. “You know what the faucet does? It runs hot and cold, you follow me? My wife said to me, let’s be real. This woman could pick up the phone and call the president. How important is Walter the Seltzer Man in the scheme of things?”

        Pretty important. Walter might be the most connected man this side of Hudson Street. His stories jump from news anchors, to movie stars, to investment bankers, to that time he tried to give Mayor Bloomberg an antique seltzer bottle—the kind he delivers everyday—and almost got arrested. When detectives showed up at his Queens home later that day he said, “You guys came all the way from city hall, you’re lookin’ for a big story and all you found was Walter the Seltzer Man. Are you relieved or disappointed?”

        He gave bottles to Whoopi Goldberg and to Alec Baldwin. He knows where any movie star lives in Manhattan because he’s been inside their homes. He’s enamored by the stars, and pins their names on his stories like award ribbons. We were driving south on 6th Avenue, past the old Air America station, when Walter blurted, “Rachel Maddow, I’m mad at her. I still like her, but I’m mad at her.”

        After Air America went out of business and Maddow moved to MSNBC, Walter never got his bottles back from her. This is one of the few things you can do to get on his bad side.

         Walter is protective over his bottles. They are his livelihood, his passion and his personal collectibles. Most of them are as old as he his, 60. Some are older. Still, he doesn’t charge deposits; he operates on trust.  When a bottle comes into your home, it’s a loan of faith directly from the seltzer man, to you. This big man with big stories, has a big heart.

        “From time to time, a bottle breaks,” Walter said. “I got a kid, last stop on 23rd. One time, he took all my bottles and threw them down the incinerator. A case of blue bottles. He said it was fun. I told the old guy who takes care of him, 30 dollars,”—when the real value was hundreds. “I did it because I felt for the guy.”

        Walter’s green eyes are tired from fatigue, but they light up a little each time he begins a new anecdote. I ask him about other difficult clients he’s had, partly because I’m curious, partly because I see how much joy it brings him. Walter tells me he delivered to Calvin Klein’s mother.

        “At the beginning, Flo Klein was nasty,” Walter said. “I turned her on a dime.” Soon she was giving him a bottle of cologne for every holiday, be it birthday, Christmas or Chanukah. It isn’t his style, but he valued the gesture. Mostly, he thinks it’s important to be able to make a friend out of an enemy. 

        We reached our first stop; Peter Cooper village on 1st Avenue and 20th street.       

        “What’s up baby? I’m delivering seltzer.”

        A guard walked out of a gatehouse. “To who?”

        “What do you mean to who? I’m the seltzer man, you never heard of me?”

        Walter had been to Peter Cooper Village that morning. But he was coming back for an older woman.

        “She’s a nice old lady, she wanted to sleep,” Walter said. We had come from the west side, and Walter had made an unnecessary loop in morning rush hour to return.

        We parked on a service road. Walter pushed down on the tops of the bottles in short jabs, to test the pressure. He was listening and looking for the spurts of seltzer that come out and the sounds of the hiss. He won’t give out a bottle he isn’t happy with.

        Walter delivers in a modern vehicle that runs on gasoline. His radio plays top 40 hits and he had a coffee that morning from 7/11. But when he slides open that door and puts that wooden crate on his shoulder, he may as well be climbing out of a horse and buggy. There’s something beautiful about an anachronism walking down 1st Avenue; he takes the whole street along with him.

        The Fountain’s Head

        A seltzer delivery man used to be as common as a milk delivery man. Each seltzer man had his own route that he inherited from a father or an uncle. They got their seltzer from seltzer fillers in Brooklyn, Long Island, or the Bronx. There used to be hundreds of fillers, and even more seltzer men. Now, the number of seltzer men can be counted on one hand. Only one finger is needed for the fillers. Gomberg Seltzer, run by Kenny Gomberg, third-generation seltzer man, is the only place to fill an old, pressurized bottle in New York City.

        It’s hard to imagine a time when these antiquated bottles were as present in every home as a stick of butter or a frying pan. Soda water was invented in 1802 in Dublin, and made its way into restaurants and businesses, eventually being mixed with syrups and liquor. The individual “soda siphon,” a version of which Walter sells today, brought seltzer into personal residences. A Harper’s magazine article from 1872 recommends that the summer seltzer drinker enjoy it ice cold, and speaks favorably of adding lemon. Hot seltzer, usually chocolate or coffee flavored, was not as popular, and has not stood the taste test of time.

        The production of bottled sparkling water, busier professional lifestyles, and large soda corporations caused this business to lose its fizz over the last 50 years. I asked Kenny what his grandfather would think, if he knew that he was the last seltzer filler. Kenny couldn’t come up with an answer, it was that unfathomable. Like Walter and Al, his is a family affair. His son, Alex, just joined the legacy.

         Compared to the loud trucks and bustle of the city, the nondescript factory building is a kind of oasis. The bottles are filled with New York City tap water and carbon dioxide. The valve is sealed immediately, so that no pressure leaks out. A bottle can retain it’s carbonation for years. But these are active bottles, and they all visit the Gombergs on a weekly basis. It’s a cycle that’s been happening at Gomberg Seltzer since 1953.

        After another hiss and the spray of overflowing carbonation, a hard working bottle gets a little rest before it’s sent out again with Walter.

        We left Peter Cooper and drove west, along 9th street and stopped in front of a brownstone right before 3rd Avenue. Walter and I walked into a beautiful townhouse with a Japanese style garden in the back. An elderly woman came to the door.

        “I’m glad you’re here, glad you’re in town,” Walter said. “Where are the kids? School?”

        “No, they’re at a museum today,” she said.

        “That’s nice. You got beautiful grandkids, both of them.” Walter put the seltzer down and admired renovations that had been done in the kitchen. “Myles is getting real handsome. It’s nice that they’ve got you to come visit. I’m real glad you’re here today, don’t worry about paying. I’ll catch up, I always catch up.”

        “Don’t work too hard!”

         We left. He didn’t get paid for that delivery. He said he’s not worried.

        “The seltzer man always gets paid.”

        Kryptonite

        “In the South Bronx in the 1980s, a black man fired a shot gun into the air.”

        I am riveted, and so is the deli man making our sandwiches. Walter continues his story.

        “I is Sweet George,” the man yelled, in front of a seltzer filling factory. “Now I runs this shop!”  This show of power would help protect Sweet George’s property, money and delivery men. One of those men was a young Walter Backerman. They had to fill at odd hours to have enough time to make all their stops. Walter, and his assistant Frankie, would carry two loaded guns with them at all times to ward off thugs and robbers.

        When Walter made his route in tough neighborhoods, he would call a meeting of all his helpers. He said, “Anybody comes to stick you up, just call my name. I’ll shoot em in the back, I’ll flip ‘em over to make it legal, and I’ll pull my money outta there.”

        It’s hard for me to believe these stories, as I watch Walter chat at the register and tell the cashier to have a nice day. He’s never hurt anyone in his life. He told every old lady we’d seen on the route how nice they looked. He will buy anyone a coffee. When his assistant, Frankie, got old and senile, Walter couldn’t bear to fire him. Frankie was so run-down that when he stood on the corner holding a coffee cup, a passerby threw a quarter in, thinking he was homeless.

        “You don’t understand, I didn’t want him,” Walter said. “I pay him good money. I just can’t cut him loose. When someone gives you that devotion, I can’t cut ‘em loose.”

        Walter showed me a stack of wooden crates an 80 year old customer used to make, six a week. At that time, Walter didn’t need them. But he kept buying them because he didn’t want to discourage an old man who needed the money.

        “I’d rather give the guy 30 dollars for the boxes and keep him working,” he said. “Cause I want someone to keep me working.”

        That’s what it comes down to these days. Kenny, Alex and Walter just keep going. And by doing so, they support each other.

        “Looks like I’m not working today, cause I’m just bullshitting with you,” he said. We were parked in the West Village and had delivered to two more apartments and a restaurant. “I’m tired. Some days you get up and you’re all perky, and some, the week just gets to you.”

        We ate our sandwiches and Walter took the opportunity to show me around the memorabilia-laden truck. He pointed to a photo of a young man with long curly hair and white bell bottoms.

        “That’s me when I was my son’s age.” Walter said. “I was there helping my father. I was going to start law school, going to go that summer. Then, my father got emphysema and he almost died. So I started helping him. I was supposed to help for six months. Take a leave, go back. It just was never the time.”

        When Walter talks about his father, all the celebrities and name-dropping disappears. Al Backerman becomes the only famous man in the world. I wondered earlier how a young man could give up law school and the promise of a comfortable life. It was for the chance to be with the biggest star of all. Al died in 1998 from lung cancer.

        I picked up a bottle at random. It was heavy and the glass was thick all around. The top said, “Al Backerman 1952.”

        “That’s the most beautiful bottle in my whole route,” Walter boomed. “Al Backerman, that’s my father. And the date, 1952. You know what’s important about that bottle? That’s when I was born. So I was in diapers and that bottle was making money for the family.”

        I’m starting to realize that the seltzer route, at every stage, is an homage to heritage. An homage to the past, from the present. To fathers, from their sons. The reusing of the bottles, and the repetition of the route, echoes its respect to tradition.

         We drove up to our last delivery, in Alphabet City. It was my last stop too.

        Walter gives me some things to take with me, before I go. He gives me a worn tour guide of Manhattan based on film shoots and celebrity homes, an open invitation to knock anytime on the door of his truck, and a photo of him and an old woman wearing a Superman shirt. It’s his favorite celebrity he’s met.

        “That’s Noel Neil,” he said. “In the original adventures of Superman that I used to watch when I came home from school, she was Lois Lane. She’s 92 years old. And I still like her.”

        I looked at the photo, which was carefully labelled with a name and date in blue ink.

         Noel Neil is not the superhero in this photo, I thought.

         Walter has no cape, no a body suit. He is a just man with trouble paying the bills, two kids and wife on disability. He is a man who has an injured shoulder, a long delivery route, 70 pound crates of seltzer to carry up three floor walk ups, and no heir to his throne. You could say that he has super strength.

        Walter has no regrets about giving up law school to work with his dad. He didn’t lose much, he only gained. He became tied to a lineage that goes back to his grandfather, who drove a horse-driven seltzer buggy in 1919. It’s a place for men to teach lessons, and Walter received a full share of them.

        “They used to say if bullshit was electricity, Al Backerman would put Con Edison out of business,” Walter said.

Our sandwiches were eaten, the seltzer was delivered, and all that was left was for Walter to teach me one of his father’s lessons. “People don’t always need hear the truth. When my Aunt Stella at 65 was dying of stomach cancer, my father went down, took a week off from the routes and he went down to say goodbye to his sister. At the end, she was frail, falling apart, nothing to her, she put lipstick on. She had a couple days more to live and my father said, ‘You know Stella, I have a crazy feeling you’re gonna get better cause you look great.’ And she said, ‘Oh Al, I just put some lipstick on. But do you think? Maybe you’re right. Oh, thank you.’ And that’s the last time my father saw his sister. She died right after that.

        “In 1998, my son Jonathan was three months old and Joey was a year and four months old. My father had lung cancer. I remember looking out the window of the hospital and knowing that my father was never going to make it down to the street. So I took my sons, Jonathan in my hand and Joey in my arms. And I wanted—even though they would never remember—I wanted them to see their grandfather.

        “My father had a morphine drip, but for some reason he got up. He took the mask off and he saw the kids and he said, ‘Walter, what are you crazy? What are you bringing kids to a hospital for? All they got here is sick people, you’re crazy, you shouldn’t have brought them here.’ And I said, ‘You know Al, I think you’re getting your energy back. I think you’re gonna be perfect, and you’re gonna be all right, and I miss you on the route. I want you outta here.’ My father looked at me and he said, ‘All I do is dream about the route. I wish I could rest already.’”

        I hopped out of Walter the Seltzer Man’s truck, looking up at him from the sidewalk. I wonder if he will ever get to rest. Walter took my hand in his and couldn’t resist giving me one more piece of advice. “The most important thing is just being a human being, and saying the right thing for a person who needs it at the time. And that is my last story for today.”

       

       

       

Shayla Love is a journalist and storyteller living in New York. She is a reporter for the Norwood News and has been published at BKLYNR.com, Gothamist, and iMediaEthics.