There was no use searching for explanations, though. That was the way he was; he played by his own rules. And over the course of my apprenticeship, I would come to realize that Len viewed shopkeeping almost exclusively from a recreational perspective. He ran his operation along the lines of a rural general store, where windbags and curmudgeons would gather on the front porch to fret about the weather or taxes or expound their dopey theories about the revival of the gold standard. It didn’t matter to him whether they bought anything. The regulars knew, without being able to access the precise terminology, that Len thought of his store as an agora, a gathering place for schemers, social climbers, con artists, dreamers, ne’er-do-wells, tarts, and screwups. Len loved to hear about their latest adventures; he reveled in the human comedy. From his point of view, and probably theirs, his goof ball clientele were a pack of naughty scamps who trooped in once a week to report on their latest scrapes, and to describe the latest pickles they had gotten themselves into, seeking his advice, his input, his commiseration, and, if possible, his approval. He had a special soft spot in his heart for crackpots.
The vagabond crew of regulars was a rich and variegated lot. There were the Ferrante brothers, a pair of humongous siblings who ran a fuel company fifty yards up the road. All day long, all week long, they would be out on the road, pumping heating oil into people’s homes, tending to their business. Then the weekend came, and with it, a desire to relax, socialize, spread their cash around. Because they smelled to high heaven, they were allowed onto our premises only on Saturday night shortly before closing time, because even after such a brief visit, we’d still have to keep the windows open all day Sunday to allow the stench from their stink-bomb bodies and putrid clothes to dissipate, making it possible for commerce with the nonmephitic to resume on Monday. The younger of the two was a live wire with a bawdy juvenile sense of humor; he had a forty-eight-inch waist, fairly ample for that era, fairly ample for his height: about five-seven. His older, taller brother, a Brobdingnagian sourpuss, logged in with a sixty-two-inch waist, perhaps more. He bore a striking resemblance to Stalin’s trusty old hatchet man Nikita Khrushchev, though in those days people thought that anyone fat and unpleasant-looking resembled Khrushchev. Because Len had a contact inside a firm that made industrial uniforms for porcine men—he referred to him as Omar the Tent Maker—the
fatso fratelli
would waddle in roughly once every four to five weeks to purchase new duds.
The younger brother was fond of me, perhaps because I laughed at his jokes, which were not especially funny but were delivered with foundation-rattling Sicilian gusto. He was the kind of man who would gleefully array a bunch of matchsticks on the counter, with three matches representing the missionaries and three representing the cannibals, and then ask me to figure out how to safely ferry all six of them across the river without ever leaving a single missionary on the shore with any two cannibals, who would, of course, immediately eat him. Fully aware that I was preparing for a career as a missionary, he probably thought this exercise might come in handy at some point down the road when I crossed paths with man-eating infidels. But the fatter, older brother never stopped scowling at me, as if my antiseptic eighty-five pounds were a calculated rebuke to his miasmic flab, when in fact I was skinny only because I never got enough to eat.
It was especially endearing that the younger brother could not remember the punch lines to his own jokes; a few weeks after he showed us how to ferry the missionaries and cannibals across the river without getting any of the missionaries eaten, he returned to the store and sheepishly begged us to explain the solution to him. The brothers constantly talked about bailing out of the oil business and getting into something more dignified, but this was clearly not in the cards, as people who could not remember the answers to their own riddles were lucky to be employed in the first place. Despite the fact that it was impossible for the Ferrantes to expunge the rank scent of oil from their clothing, hair, skin, and car upholstery, both of them were married. Len and I always wondered what their wives smelled like.
Another regular visitor was a man named Horrie, short for Horace, who lived with his mother a few yards up the street in a darling little row home. By the looks of things, nobody had ever explained to Horrie that underwear was reusable, so every Saturday afternoon he would sally forth and purchase six new pairs of jockey shorts, six athletic tee shirts later known as wife beaters but in those innocent times still referred to as dago dining jackets, and six pairs of black nylon socks. We never knew what he did with the underwear after he wore it—we sometimes speculated that a forest of soiled skivvies was slowly accumulating in his backyard—but Len was grateful for the business.
Horrie, who had no visible means of support, would spend hours and hours outside his mother’s house painstakingly, almost amorously, polishing his radiant, midnight blue Cadillac. On Saturdays he would come in and talk to Len about the car, which was undeniably a thing of beauty. Oddly, for a man who lived and died for his automobile, he seemed to spend very little time behind the wheel; in fact, no one ever saw him driving it. One day when I inquired about this, Len explained that the magnificent but entirely stationary vehicle did not have an engine, at least not a working one, but that Horrie had vowed to buy one just as soon as he got a job. This event would occur at some unspecified point later in the millennium. Years after I left Len’s employ, I heard that Horrie got into a fight with the dreaded highway patrol the very night he finally got the Caddy up and running, that the coppers beat him senseless, and that they then impounded the car. But I refused to believe this story, as it was too sad.
Yet another regular visitor was a man who would disappear for months at a time, shipping out to Greenland, where he was supposedly assembling a war chest large enough to move his family to Sarasota, Florida, the land of dreams. He worked as a night watchman, though what he was watching by night during those interminable Greenland winters was never disclosed. It may have been cod, perhaps thermonuclear weapons. This was in the early sixties, before the Citrus State had been overrun by developers. Every so often the man would come into the store and show Len brochures depicting parcels of land that could be scooped up dirt-cheap way down yonder in this tropical paradise. His family, left behind while he flitted off on his frosty expeditions, had no desire to leave Philadelphia, but each time he came back from a winter in the glacial north, he seemed even more determined to relocate to the Sun Belt. It was very unusual to meet Philadelphians who worked in Greenland in those days; Pennsylvanians have long been the least migratory of Americans, and people from Philadelphia never go anywhere, convinced that they have everything anyone could possibly want right there in the bounteous Delaware Valley. Now that I think back on it and reflect on the man’s boundless optimism, awesome reservoirs of pep, and determination to get the hell out of town, it seems less and less likely that he was a native of the City of Brotherly Love.
At least once a week, Len received a social call from a thirtyish chap who lived a few blocks north of the store, where he nursed grandiose dreams of a political career. John was five-feet-eight, good-looking in that jowly, indeterminate way so many Irish Americans are, and blessed with the gift of gab. Philadelphia politics were dominated by tough, ethically suspect Irish Catholics, men who knew where the money was and how to steal it, and who knew that tough, ethically suspect Italians were warming up on the sidelines, waiting to steal whatever the Micks left behind. If you were going to steal, so their credo stipulated, you’d better steal fast. John, who was by no means a bruiser, dreamed of displacing these scoundrels or, if this proved impossible, swelling their ranks. Periodically, he would run for insignificant local offices to which he had no chance of being elected. After his most recent drubbing, he would hunker down with Len in our makeshift situation room, and the pair would conduct a point-by-point postmortem, diagnosing John’s latest failure to win the plaudits of the hoi polloi. Mostly, he ran for the school board. He did not have a rigid, much less a well-thought-out, political philosophy; he was from the classic throw-the-bums-out segment of the electorate that honestly believed that the devil you didn’t know was better than the devil you did, though not even they were sure why. Such a constituency, no matter how vocal, no matter how stroppy, was rarely numerous enough to ensure their champion’s electoral victory.
Flabbergastingly vapid but quite full of himself, John would rattle on and on about his big plans while Len listened patiently with an amused expression on his face, every so often interjecting one of the many pearls of wisdom he had gleaned from Dale Carnegie: “Can’t means won’t,” “Fortune favors the brave”—then occasionally tossing in “If a bricklayer can lay bricks, why can’t a plumber lay plums?” for comic effect.
I am not sure if Len ever resorted to the expression “Big hat, no cattle” to describe his visitor, but he did use phrases like “You’ve got champagne taste with a beer pocketbook” and “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” I was jealous of the way Len used the English language like a gun rack from which he could select the weapon best suited to incapacitating the prey at hand. There we’d be, with John gasbagging about his latest cockamamie scheme to vault to the top of the political world and depose the scum who dwelled there, and Len would send him crashing back to earth with an “All talk, no action” or a “Crap or get off the pot” or a “Sure, you and how many marines?”
I did not get the feeling that John took any of this criticism personally; he loved to bask in Len’s man-of-the-world aura, perhaps in the misguided hope that if he hung around this Solon-by-the-Schuylkill long enough, he might acquire Len’s wit, his acumen, and perhaps even his barrel chest. John, who was astonishingly grandiloquent for a man who still lived with his mother, tended to speak as if I were not even there, as if a real fireball like him was too important to palaver with a callow youth, a wee nipper, a nobody. I never paid attention to anything he had to say, as he was bombastic and flatulent and had a weak chin and was obviously going nowhere fast. But I always kept my eyes on Len, who seemed to find John’s improbable tales of derring-do and high electoral adventure inexhaustibly amusing. John was one of those unfortunate individuals who had trouble reading body language, who did not grasp that when Len uncrossed his arms, donned his reading glasses, and went back to scrutinizing that week’s edition of
U.S. News & World Report,
it meant that the consultation was over. What could be more humiliating, then or now, than being told that one’s Svengali would rather read
U.S. News &World Report
than talk to you?
One day when his paperweight protégé was vacating the premises, Len told me to go outside and take a gander at his car. From the top of the steps, the two-door sedan, a late-fifties Rambler, looked ordinary enough, but then, moseying around to port side, I realized that it had no door on the driver’s side, that a gigantic strip of thick plastic had been attached to the space where the door should have been. One thing I must say on John’s behalf, though: As he was pulling away from the curb, heading back to man the hustings of his mind, he briefly caught my eye, and not for a second did his expression betray even the slightest embarrassment that he was driving a car that was missing a door. For in the cosmos he inhabited, no matter what the external evidence might suggest, he was a man on the move, a cat on the make, a diamond in the rough, a pearl among swine, a young man to keep your eye on. He was in his own world, and probably still is.
Skintight slacks came into fashion in the early 1960s, and not a moment too soon for a woman Len referred to as Kaye Sera, who had the most pugnacious, territorially acquisitive backside I have ever encountered. Universally viewed as a tramp, Kaye had a husband no one ever saw, two children no one liked, and two buttocks no one ever stopped talking about. Never much of a shopper, she was forever hauling her tarty derriere into Len’s establishment on Saturday afternoons, propping it up against a table laden with our competitively priced men’s dress shirts, and engaging Len in mildly suggestive banter. Not a pretty woman, though by no means hideous, Kaye had by this point transformed her visage into a puffy clown face after decades of applying mounds of pancake makeup to its neutral surface.
Quite a different matter was her pampered, capacious rear end—a veritable force of nature, a genetic miracle, a neighborhood legend by virtue of its prodigious girth, Jello-O-like suppleness, gratifying ubiquity, and willingness to duke it out with all comers. Local opinion was divided on whether her skintight white slacks had been spray-painted directly onto her cheeks by person or persons unknown, or whether she gained posterioral purchase via an oversized, ingeniously crafted shoehorn and the adroit use of hard-to-obtain Sumatran unguents that helped ease her stupendous glutes into the flimsy trousers that always seemed nine sizes too small to handle the thankless assignment they had been handed by the pitiless gods of the netherworld. My personal theory was that she probably squatted down on the ground and started wiggling into her slacks early Wednesday morning; put in a long, hard day of squirming and wriggling both Thursday and Friday; and, through sheer willpower and ferocious dieting, finally managed to negotiate the airtight garment’s passage over the summit of her buttocks by late Saturday afternoon, by which point she was sufficiently presentable to waddle out of her house for her gay weekend promenade. Though a compulsive giggler and a first-class nitwit, she meant no harm and in her own squalid little way exuded an ineffable floozie charm. She was best known in the neighborhood as the woman least like any of our mothers. This included the mothers who were drunken sluts.