21st Century Bogatyr: 2020

Saturday, December 26, 2020

On the Jersey Shore

"On the Boardwalk in Atlantic city, We will walk in a dream, On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City Life will be peaches and cream."

Joseph Myrow/Mack Gordon

[This is a fictional work in progress. Links to the rest are at the bottom of this page.]

by Zvi Baranoff

So, we were in a holding pattern. The remaining books were out on a front and there was nothing for us to do but wait. I couldn't head homeward until at least most of the currency came in and there was nothing we could do that would speed up that return.

For a couple of days we hung around the apartment fussing and fretting, getting on each other's nerves and pacing. Bob and I really needed a break and we decided on a day trip to the Jersey Shore.

We took the Skyway, the high speed high rise highway which in Philly most people call the Zip Line. We barreled through the low hanging clouds and the Skyscrapers of Center City. We crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey via the Ben Franklin Bridge. Then, we jumped onto the Lenni Lenape Causeway heading towards Atlantic City.

About halfway to the coast we took a short detour to the cemetery where my parents and my old running partner Greg are buried. It's a nice place, as far as cemeteries go. I used the GPS to locate the graves.

I put a small stone on each of the headstones of both Mom and Dad and muttered something that would have to pass for a berakhah, or as close as I could get. Bob stood a few feet away, reciting some sort of Latin incantation that he vaguely remembered from his childhood. We both somehow finished with "Amen" somewhat simultaneously.

At Greg's internment spot I cracked opened a fifth of whiskey. I poured off some on the ground - respect - and we each had a snort. Bob crossed himself. I recapped the bottle and placed it on the grave, leaving it leaning against his modest marker. I figured that Greg would appreciate that.

We got back on the Lenni Lenape Causeway and cruised the rest of the way to the shabby remains of the once mythic shore town of Atlantic City.

The Boardwalk once ran for miles and miles with a wide stretch of beach between the Boardwalk and the ocean on one side and it ran north and south along Atlantic City as well as Ventnor and Margate. All the beaches had been lost to erosion and all but a tiny bit of Atlantic City had long since been destroyed by one catastrophe or another. All that really remained was the infrastructure to support the fishing fleet and the Coast Guard base.

We found our way to the remnants of the Boardwalk which now was mostly a pier, sticking out into the ocean. A few fishing boats now use the Boardwalk as a dock. We found a shabby takeout joint, one of the few remaining restaurants where local seafood is still served. The food was dispensed through a window by an actual human server, a pimply teenager, and we carried the food to a beat-up table on the boardwalk with an ocean view.

We sat there and snacked on calamari and fries and nursed some cold but otherwise unimpressive and weak beer while watching the fishing boats floating about and the waves pounding and the Coast Guard helicopters patrolling the Eastern Seaboard.

Visiting Atlantic City is an inherently nostalgic experience. The Boardwalk had always been the heart and soul of Atlantic City and everything about the Boardwalk was always illusory manifestations of cheap trickery. And now, all the former magic is gone.

My parents and their contemporaries would reflect on the Golden Era of an earlier and long gone Atlantic City that only really existed in their own distorted memories. The Atlantic City that I knew growing up was the shadow of their illusions. The Atlantic City that we were visiting was barely a wisp of a reflection of that shadow of my childhood memories. Mostly it has all been washed away. Literally, washed away.

My earliest conscious recollections concerning Atlantic City were the long trips on the White Horse Pike in the back of my parents' Studebaker. The car had an AM radio with tinny sound and we could tune in to Philly stations for about half of the trip and pick up a couple of Atlantic City stations for some of the rest of the trip.

It was a long trip in those days. Arrival in Atlantic City was announced with the sighting of the Copertone billboard, the image of a small dog pulling at the bathing suit of a young, suntanned girl, exposing where her bottom was still white.

The Studebaker was equipped with what my Dad called "Two and Forty air conditioning". That is, if we opened two windows and drove forty miles an hour we could somewhat cool the inside of that car. Mostly this just let in the hot and muggy summer air and road dirt of South Jersey.

Atlantic City, when I was young, was defined by the "Season" by which everyone understood to be the time sandwiched between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The rest of the year it was a gritty town with little to offer of interest to anyone, even those that lived there year round.

Just before Memorial Day, the city woke up, put on a fresh coat of paint and replaced burnt out lightbulbs. The town doled itself up - like putting lipstick on a pig - and presented itself as the place to be. For those of us of modest means living in South Jersey or Greater Philadelphia, Atlantic City was the cat's pajamas, the shiznit, the pinnacle of excitement. Atlantic City was the best summertime escape we could possibly imagine on our tight budgets and with our limited imaginations.

My grandparents owned a small hotel just off the Boardwalk near the Steel Pier. Of course, that was a very long time ago. And then, there were the riots and the fires. And then the real estate manipulators and the mobsters and the plans for casinos and revitalization, followed by more fires and insurance payouts. This was before the hurricanes and the floods and the tidal waves, the attempts to build seawalls and the washing away of most of the barrier islands of the Jersey Shore.

Summer in Atlantic City was what I lived for when I was growing up. Atlantic City was my turf from the time that I transcended being an ankle biter in diapers. As soon as I was stable enough on my own legs, the beaches and Boardwalk was where I ran feral and unsupervised all summer long and ran with other feral youth. We soaked up the sun and got gritty in the sand.

Everything about Atlantic City involved some process of shaking money loose from the tourists. Everything was entertaining with flashing lights and various degrees of sleight of hand. It wasn't all Three Card Monty but neither was any of it quite up and up.

Up and down the Boardwalk, there was one spectacle after another. The show never stopped and up and down the Boardwalk I found ways to be entertained.

There were the rolling chairs, the diving horse, the dancing chickens, Mr Peanut. There was the Woolworth's Five & Dime full of knicknacks. There was tri-colored ice cream waffle sandwiches. American Bandstand broadcast live from the Steel Pier. The Miss America contest paraded young women in bathing suits riding in Cadillac convertibles to wave at the crowds standing along the Boardwalk. There was Lucy the Elephant which doubled as a gaudy hotel. There were the amusement rides and the House of Mirrors.

Nothing about Atlantic City was quite real. Us kids had a blast and we learned a lot from top to bottom, on the beaches, on the piers and both on and under the Boardwalk.

It was my tween years when I worked at the family hotel pushing a broom and making beds and such when I met Susie who was a year or two older than me. Her family had rented a studio apartment for the season. I was infatuated with her and we walked and talked and swam and joked together all that summer.

The day before her family was set to leave, we ran along the beach until we were out of breath. Then, she took me by the hand and led me to a spot under the Boardwalk and we laid about in the sand and told each other knock knock jokes, one joke dumber than the next.

The beach is gone. The Boardwalk is gone. The city is gone. Susie is gone and pretty much everyone and everything I have ever known in my life is also gone. All my reasons to come to Atlantic City by that point had totally evaporated.

I was sitting there, watching the waves and feeling washed away by time. Bob was enjoying the fish and the beer. I was feeling melancholy, nostalgic and lost. It seems that I keep going back to look for what's no longer there. Whatever. I was tired of being on the broken remains of the Boardwalk and was in no mood to be crying in my beer. If fact, by that point I was tired of the beer as well and I was ready to roll out of there.

We piled back in the car but for some reason beyond logic I was not quite ready to head back to Philly yet so we tooled around a bit aimlessly and ended up in Egg Harbor.

It would not be an unreasonable assumption to believe that Egg Harbor derived the name from the sulfur-like odors similar to rotten eggs that are so prevalent, particularly during low tides.

It is swampy and mucky and had always been so, even long before the increased flooding. The pungent odor that we encountered that afternoon, however, made us nostalgic for the far less disturbing scent of rotten eggs or decaying seaweed.

The stench emanated from the wreckage of a go-fast hydrofoil speed boat, washed up and partially submerged against the shoreline.

Above the boat were hundreds, perhaps thousands of seagulls squawking, circling and diving. In addition to that cacophony was the intense buzzing of flies. Between the flies and the seagulls, we could not immediately see what was below, but we knew that it could not be pleasant.

As we approached, we saw dozens of crabs scurrying about. The submerged part of the boat was filled with a myriad of fish. All of these were feasting on what remained of what was once two human beings.

None of the wildlife was bothered in the least by the stench. Speaking strictly for myself, my stomach was most seriously disturbed by the odor and the sight was quite ghastly as well.

The bodies, or what was left of bodies, had been shredded by high-powered, large munitions, as was the boat as well as some of the cargo.

A reasonable assumption is that the Coast Guard took out these runners somewhere further out at sea at least several days prior, and the Federales had assumed that the boat had sunk. The wreckage came in on the tide. The remains of the wreckage jammed up on the rocks and it sat there when the tide went out again. That's where we found it.

Bob crossed himself and I spit, each of us hoping to ward off bad luck and evil spirits. Then, we covered our faces with bandanas to minimize the stench. We pulled our hats down to try to keep the flies off us. We came in closer to get a better look at the situation.

The faces were a mess. The features had been destroyed by birds and flies and crabs. The lower extremities were submerged and being nibbled away by fish.

If these two had friends or families, there was no way to know. The corpses were flailed out on the cargo, as were much of their blood and, I suppose, some of their guts. We rolled the half-eaten bodies into the water and waved off gulls and flies.

As quickly as two old men could, we unloaded the cargo, stacking crates on the water edge. When we had that boat unloaded, we shoved the wreckage off of the rocks and back into the water. Hopefully the receding tide would take all of that far away. It was certainly not useful for us any more, and we sure as hell were not interested in being found in the vicinity of a smuggler's boat.

Some of the crates were damaged and water had seeped in, significantly damaging the product. Other crates were mostly or completely intact and undamaged. We began by grabbing the boxes that seemed to be in the best shape and we loaded my vehicle. We dragged the rest of the crates to a less visible spot, covered them with a tarp and covered the tarp with branches and rocks.

Back up the road a bit, I found a No Tell Motel and we rented a bungalow for a couple of nights. We unloaded the crates from the car into the bungalow and went back to where we had stashed the rest of that cargo. We worked like that into the night and towards morning we had salvaged the whole of it and had the whole kaboodle at that No Tell Motel bungalow.

This was, perhaps, a score of a lifetime. The load was European. These were well printed volumes from professional print houses, not crappy replications from fly by night operations in the Mexican borderlands. They were nearly all in pristine condition. There was a wide variety. It looked like a little over half the books were in English.

We were, perhaps out of our league and over our heads, to mix metaphors. We needed to find the right markets for all of them, and we needed to get them sold or moved to a more secure location in very short order. The No Tell Motel was a most temporary transit point.

We were going to need some help to break down and move this load. Finding trustworthy and reliable criminals is not such an easy thing. It takes a lifetime to build those sorts of relationships. We were a couple of old men. Most everyone that we trusted is already dead.

This was going to need talent and stamina and brass balls. I called Frank, gave him the coordinates of the No Tell Motel. I asked him to scoop up Spider, rustle up a truck and some muscle, slide on out and meet us at the Motel.

It was already morning. We bought some nondescript sandwiches from a vending machine in the "courtyard" of that dump of a motel. We couldn't decide if the food was fish or fowl or some other sort of meat or quasi-meat, no matter how much we sniffed and poked at it and the labelling was so worn that it didn't even offer us a clue to answer that riddle.

We ate that crap anyway and then we crawled off to get some sleep while we had a chance. We knew it would be several hours before Frank, Spider and the crew would make it and one sleeps when one can.

Links to the other posted parts of this story, Chapters 1 - 26.

Part 1: Grace and Mercy If Luck Holds

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/05/grace-and-mercy-if-luck-holds.html?m=1

Part 2: Everything Was Fine Until It All Went Sideways

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/everything-was-fine-until-it-all-went.html

Part 3: I Blink In & Out and Awakened In the Zone

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/i-blink-in-out-and-awakened-in-zone.html

Part 4: Out Of Time

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/out-of-time.html

Part 5: Even Without Clocks

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/even-without-clocks.html

Part 6: Cerveza & Barbecue Before I Go

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/08/cerveza-barbecue-before-i-go.html?m=1

Part 7: Heading Towards the Exit

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/08/heading-towards-exit.html?m=1

Part 8: A Sign, Divine Guidance & Moxie

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-sign-divine-guidance-moxie.html?m=1

Part 9: Somehow We Kept Breathing

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/08/somehow-we-kept-breathing.html?m=1

Part 10: I Squinted and Stared Through it All

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/08/i-squinted-and-stared-through-it-all.html?m=1

Part 11: Riding a Wave

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/08/riding-wave.html?m=1

Part 12: Some Relief Amongst the Chaos at Woodpecker Flats

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/08/some-relief-amongst-chaos-at-woodpecker.html?m=1

Part 13: A "Classy" Operation in the District of Columbia

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-classy-operation-in-district-of.html?m=1

Part 14: In the Shadow of the Dome

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/09/in-shadow-of-dome.html?m=1

Part 15: Hidden Places and Dark Corners

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/11/hidden-places-and-dark-corners.html?m=1

Part 16: On the Jersey Shore

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/12/on-jersey-shore.html?m=1

Part 17: Dreaming at the No Tell Motel

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2021/01/dreaming-at-no-tell-motel.html?m=1

Part 18: The Coffee Didn't Help

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-coffee-didnt-help.html?m=1

Part 19: Like Two Drops of Rain

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2021/02/like-two-drops-of-rain.html?m=1

Part 20 : Chased by the Devil

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2021/03/chased-by-devil.html?m=1

Part 21: An Arcade and a Penny for Your Thoughts

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2021/11/an-arcade-and-penny-for-your-thoughts.html?m=1

Part 22: We Have to Talk, She Said

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2021/11/we-have-to-talk-she-said.html

Part 23: She Climbed Out of the Water

http://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2021/12/she-climbed-out-of-water.html

Part 24: Passions, Fires and Unfinished Business

http://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/04/unfinished-business.html

Part 25: The Book Trade Hasn't Killed Me Yet

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-book-trade-hasnt-killed-me-yet.html?m=1

Part 26: A Detour Through the Fire

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-detour-through-fire.html?m=1

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Hidden Places and Dark Corners

"On average we live pretty well. Worse than last year, but definitely better than next year."

Russian proverb

This is the fifteenth part of a work of fiction in progress. Links to the rest can be found at the bottom of this page.

by Zvi Baranoff

As far as age is concerned, Frank was a clear outlier. As the "boys" entered the apartment, the aged aspects of this particular branch of this conspiratorial cabal could hardly be ignored.

They wheezed and groaned. They walked slowly, some with canes or walkers. A couple had brought assistants to lean on. What little hair they had between them was grey. They all wore thick glasses. As old as Bob and I were on that day, all the "boys" were older.

Each of these fellows had a long history in the book business, but likely a fairly short future in the biz. Some of them were involved way back when books were still legal. They each understand the trade inside and out. They each had their own network of "clients" and, even if their aging eyes were bordering on blindness, they still had an inner eye and intuitive feel for what would turn a buck.

The old men, as tired and as creaky and as cranky as they may have been when they came through the door, each perked up a bit as they began to move about the merchandise. They picked up books and brought them close to their eyes for examination. They ran their fingers up and down the spines. They checked for printing dates and publishing information. Methodically, they each piled up the books that they would be willing to cut loose hard currencies to acquire.

The evening dragged on. The dealers consolidated their piles. Payments were made in various contraband currencies and with the exertion of way too much mathematics.

We had made significant progress, but we still had quite a bit of product left over. Buyers were needed for the rest of this lot, and the best of it had already been sold. I had to put the best face on this situation, although I was silently cursing out Marcel for dumping this load of shit on me.

As the last of those ancient ones shuffled out, Frank handed me an opened book, James Joyce's The Dubliners. Before I even looked down at the page, I sensed and perceived what Frank had seen. Perhaps Joyce had envisioned in some sort of time warping way the last couple of hours we had transpired in Bob's apartment, in the shadow of West Philly's Great Mosque.

The words jumped from the page. "One by one they were all becoming shades. Better to pass boldly into the other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

I shook my head and handed that book back to the young man. I don't know. Probably best to take it all as it is, including old age and aches and pains and all the shadows and the shades. I don't know. I don't know. I just don't know.

Frank was the last to exit and he had only bought a few books for cash. That, however, was what I had expected. He assured me that he would get back with me in the morning to work on Phase Two, which is exactly what I hoped.

Bob and I gave the mess a final look. We each grimaced and shook or scratched our heads as was our individual nature. We then each trailed to opposite ends of that apartment for the night.

I didn't waste much time counting sheep. It had been a long day that had stretched into a long night of a particularly long trip. What doesn't kill you just makes you very, very tired, I suppose. I slept like the dead.

I was awake fairly early and Frank showed up while the coffee was still hot but before I had quite got my head around the idea of breakfast.

I pulled together some huevos reminiscent of rancheros or something like that. Tortillas are about as close as I could get to injera or pizza or pita or something relating to Frank's heritage. Nonetheless, we each recognized what I pulled together as food - and not bad, at that - and I was glad to eat breakfast with this intelligent young man.

We dumped our dishes into the sink, adding them to the preexisting mess. A few cockroaches scattered out of the way.

We selected a few books as samples, stashing them in a shoulder bag. Frank took a couple of pictures of the piles and stacks. We headed out together into those West Philly streets, to see what we could do with the hand we were dealt.

We crossed West Philly by walking some, we took the sliding sidewalks a bit and rode on one of the city's electric trams part of the way as well. We crossed through a park and down some alleyways and back on the sliding sidewalks. Frank had an associate that he thought could help us with the project so I let Frank lead the way through these still familiar neighborhoods.

Along the way, Frank would greet people, shifting language or dialect to fit the need most seamlessly. Of course, Italian, Eritrean, Spanglish and English were the dominant languages, but Frank was as comfortable in African Pidgin and the heavily Portuguese-influenced Papiamentu and was more than passable in Korean as well. Impressive. Possibly useful. Certainly interesting and entertaining.

The chitchat and glad-handing and schmoozing along the way somewhat distracted me from my inner brooding.

The old neighborhood, as much as it had altered over the years, brought on a flood of memories. Here I was again running through familiar patterns of being trapped in a maze and wondering how to break the pattern and being in the old neighborhood with this uncomfortable sense of déjà vu got me thinking about being blocked in or locked out and all that thinking about how to get out of this mess reminded me of my old friend, Spider.

Spider was a second story man. He climbed in and out of windows and knew more about locks than anyone alive. He always knew how to get in and then out again.

He had a very long streak of luck before he caught a bullet in his leg one night. No one - except perhaps Spider - could say if the shooter was a jealous husband or an enraged property owner.

Spider made it back to his Mom's house. She greeted him with wailing and crying. She cursed and she prayed. His cousin removed the bullet and his sister bandaged the wound. His mother screamed and hit him with her shoe between crying and calling out to Jesus to save her baby. The rest of the family looked on with varying degrees of interest and concern. No one considered taking him to the ER, which would have brought the police into the mix. This was a family matter.

It all must have been cathartic for Spider. The limp and the cane certainly were a discouragement to climbing up and down the sides of buildings, but something more fundamental had been altered. Spider lost his interest in thievery, began to speak of his personal relationship with Jesus, and he started selling pot. Spider went through a metamorphosis that was profound. He had been somewhat notorious at his old trade but in the underground weed market he developed a shining reputation for honesty and responsibility. This was around the time that I met the man.

So, while Spider had given up a career steeped in moral relativism, he never lost the skills or knowledge that he had gained during that phase of his work life. If locked out of the house or the car keys were inside the locked car, resolving such problems was just child's play for Spider.

Spider had a knack for reverse engineering, so he could take apart and put together anything. He could fix gadgets, open safes, untangle knots.

One time, one of my drivers thought that it would be a good idea to hide cash in the air filter of a pickup truck. This was back in the days of gas-burning internal combustion engines. Needless to say, all the cash was sucked into the engine. Spider took the sucker apart, recovered all the cash and put it all back together, without tripping up and voiding the truck's warranty.

Many people will call upon their Patron Saints to help them out of a tight squeeze. Whenever I find myself in a situation that requires bypassing locks to get in or get out, I would ask myself "What Would Spider Do?" and try to channel the depth and wisdom of that most unlikely of Patron Saints.

As we moved across West Philly I couldn't help but wonder how Spider would get himself out of the mess I had gotten myself into. Spider, however, was never much of a reader so he probably never would have gotten himself into the deep shit that I found myself in at that moment. I hadn't seen him in a forever plus a few years more but I often wondered about him and this was his old hood, for sure.

These were my musings while Frank led the way to the rendezvous. So, I was a bit distracted when Frank tapped my shoulder and indicated that we had arrived at our destination.

From the outside, the place was non descriptive. It looked pretty much like all of the other dwellings on that block which was made up of row houses with steps up to very similar doors. This one was roughly in the middle of a block in the middle of a part of town and blended with obscurity. It was, indeed, an ideal criminal hideout. Frank rang the doorbell.

At the door, there was an exchange in Papiamentu with a dreadlocked Caribbean Islander. Once formalities including all the necessary shibboleths had been finalized, the door was opened for us.

A barefoot, curly headed moppet with the sweetness and color of dark chocolate and the brightest, broadest smile of spectacularly white teeth offered to show us the way to her dad's den.

The youngin performed a pirouette, trilled like a bird, and skipped down the hallway. We followed her, somewhat less enthusiastically, but gladly. It has been an awful long time since I have last skipped or trilled.

The place was clean and well kept. An Arabic melody and the exotic fragrances of herbs that I couldn't quite recognize drifted our way from a kitchen somewhere in the building.

The elfin one darted through a doorway and a moment later we followed, finding ourselves in a comfortable room of bookshelves full of books. On the wall hung a quilt with an artistic depiction of the African continent. Rising from a chair at an old-fashioned desk was the man we came to see.

On his head, Haj wore a colorful embroidered taqiyah with intricate patterns and a flowing white robe covered his torso. When he came out from behind the desk, we could see that he wore matching white pants as well as tie-dye socks that fit the toes like gloves. Each toe was a different color, comfortably wiggling in sandals. He kissed his daughter on the top of her head, whispered something in her ear and shooed her out of his study before greeting us.

We spent quite a bit of time going through the formalities as we Salaam Alaikumed and Alaikum Salaamed each other. We were just about finishing this stage as Haj's impish daughter returned pushing a rolling cart with a samovar and a platter of pastries. She performed one more pirouette, winked at her dad and skipped out of the room.

So, we sat and drank tea and nibble pastries for a while and then we sat and smoked a hookah for a while and then we drank some more tea.

Eventually we got down to discussing business. Haj had a good thing going, selling books out of his place and a network of other joints around town. He spoke about the network he ran with evident pride but without boasting.

We haggled a bit over prices, but only enough for appearances with no real sticking points between us. Haj agreed to pay 10% upfront with a promise of the balance in three weeks. That stretched things out further than I hoped, but, any timeline I had started out this trip with had already been shot to hell and I guess that three more weeks to cash out was better than I had really expected by that point.

Frank had vouched for Haj, which would have been enough for me, but Haj won me over with his Brooklyn accent and the Yiddishisms he sprinkled into the conversation. Haj told me that he liked to read, that he was a bit of a zamler and that he started selling a few books on the side to make ends meet. When he told me that everyone has to macht a leben, well...who was I to disagree?

We arranged the transfer of product for mid morning the next day and headed back out into the West Philly streets. It was already getting dark. We had burned through another day. We headed back in the direction we had started out from.

We were passing one of those corner stores that dot that part of the city. There was a knot of Black men standing on that corner, each with a can of beer in hand. Only a dim light emitted from the store. The street light on that corner was not functioning, permanently disabled as per the very localized esthetics.

Well, as we passed in the darkness, I felt a thud in my chest. I looked down and saw the bottom end of a cane. My eyes followed the length of the stick to the black hand holding the handle, extending from a black long sleeve shirt and then to the black face that was barely distinguishable from the black cloth. And out of all that darkness I heard a familiar voice say "Aren't you gonna say boo to the Spider?"

Spider had always been the darkest man I had known and he still was. Most of his hair was still black although there was a touch of grey. Other than that, on a dark corner Spider was nearly invisible.

Spider lowered his cane and I dropped all my apprehensions. We wrapped our arms around each other right there on that dark corner.

Spider pulled a couple of beer cans, with black labels of course, from some hidden pocket and handed one to Frank and the other beer to me.

After a couple of beers, we exchanged digits and promised to get back to each other before long. Frank and I headed home.