21st Century Bogatyr

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.

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

Friday, September 25, 2020

In the Shadow of the Dome

"Cento di questi giorni.” (May you have a hundred of these days.) A toast.

This is the fourteenth part of a work of fiction in progress. Links to all of the other parts can be found at the bottom of this page.

by Zvi Baranoff

Long distance travel in North America is dominated by the hyperloop. It is very fast but not incredibly accurate or direct.

Trying to get from the District of Columbia to Philly via the hyperloop is pretty much a crap shoot. The hyperloop might toss you out closer to Pittsburgh or in the Poconos or near Albany or on the banks of Lake Champlain.

If you are going anywhere between Richmond and Boston - essentially a huge overlapping megalopolis - there are other choices. The region was made up of more obviously distinct cities at one time, but now the distinctions are less clearly defined. It is more akin to different neighborhoods perhaps than different cities as it was understood a century ago.

I hate everything about the hyperloop anyway, so I always choose to travel otherwise, if there are options. Rather than doubling backwards and jumping down the hyperloop to end up who knows where, I simply pointed my car north.

I traveled on ancient, though updated and modernized, routes. The new roads displaced the Interstate system which displaced the old US Route 1 which displaced the old Kings Highway which the British Colonialists built on the bones of the original trade routes of the true original people of the region.

If you look closely and listen carefully, underneath it all you can still perceive how it once was and know that it is the Great Turtle. Maybe. Something like that.

Anyway, I headed north via roads and bridges and tunnels and skyways significantly faster than folks traveled by horseback on the old Kings Highway and considerably faster than the days of the Interstate, yet slower and less disorienting than the hyperloop. I arrived in Philly a short time later without having my guts or brains scrambled by that beastly modern curse.

Arriving in Philly always feels like coming home, even after such a long time of living in other places and mostly on the opposite side of the continent.

The West Philly skyline is marked by the beautiful golden dome of the Great Philadelphia Mosque, which is, I believe, the twelfth largest mosque in the world. The Golden Dome is always a comforting sight. Within the shadow of that dome is my old stomping grounds and where I would mostly be, at least until I can cash out this haul.

Bob has been living in the same building, in the very same apartment, nearly forever. He was there before the Great Mosque was built. I have known him most of that time and we have worked and hustled together, off and on, for a very long time.

I parked in the apartment building's garage and hauled the rest of that contraband into the apartment. I let myself in through the combination of biometric and retinal recognition security locks that serve as the first defensive line for Bob's place.

I looked around the place a bit to gauge the situation before I started looking around for Bob. I checked for the telltale signs. The place was a helluva mess. I was relieved to find it that way.

Bob has always been naturally slothful and messy. Occasionally, he would feel inspired or compelled to straighten up. He would turn to methamphetamines to fuel the cleaning process. After two or three days of compulsive drug taking, the apartment would sparkle.

Then, he would do some more meth to celebrate. Then, he would perceive himself to be insightful and creative and he would begin an art project. Of course, that would require more stimulants.

Of course, after multiple days of powders up the nose and no sleep, Bob would be seeing multi-dimensional beings that no one else could perceive, speaking incessantly and incoherently to himself, anyone that he stumbled into and those other dimension creatures.

Bob would get increasingly weird and difficult until either he ran out of drugs or someone intervened. Then he would crash hard and be nearly comatose.

Eventually some equilibrium returned. Bob would be his own mellow and somewhat lazy self for three or four or even six months.

His normal messes would pile up. Bob would resume his natural slothfulness. When the place was a mess, Bob wasn't a mess. I was very glad to see the apartment in disarray and I went looking for my friend.

We cleared out part of the living room and began to spread the rest of the stock into relatively neat piles of books, somewhat separated by genre or topics or styles. As we did this, we each carefully went through all the product and gleaned what we each thought we might need personally for the next six months or so. This would be our only chance to get our fix before the dealers showed up.

After an hour or so, we were almost ready to open shop. Before the clampdown there were vibrant universities, huge libraries and dozens of bookstores just in this neighborhood. That's ancient history and shit ain't like that now.

Bob got on the horn and ran down the list. We had a tight network of book dealers that we have been working with and Bob needed to let them know that the load had arrived and now was the time to act.

It had been close to eight months since the last time I had been through here. Chances are that not everyone was still available, and that turned out to be the case. There were only a dozen or so that we got hold of on the last go around and it seems that every trip our numbers are whittled by fate and circumstances.

The operation really needed some fresh blood. There were too many alter kockers.

One more had died. Three had been busted. Two of those were now on house arrest with electronic monitoring. The third had been declared a career criminal beyond rehabilitation and had been sent to what we call Siberia and what the Government calls Montana. Another old fart had been stuffed into a Senior Citizen "Care" Center by his ungrateful children, so he was out of the game as well.

All told, Bob could only get hold of six or eight of the boys, but they were all glad to hear from him and were all quite anxious to get the first shot at the shipment. They were all on their way.

I stepped out to get my haircut by my regular barber and dinner at my favorite restaurant on that side of the continent.

I have been going to Frank's forever. When I lived in the neighborhood, and had enough hair to justify it, I would get a haircut every two or three weeks. Frank was an old man with a thick Italian accent. The place had three chairs.

Frank's brother, Anthony, owned a pizzeria nearby, called Tony's, of course. It was a big family and they made a big impression on that part of town. There were lots of kids and lots of yelling in Italian and there were icons of Mary in front of houses and a big Catholic church that was the glue that held the Italian community together.

Later, when I moved out of the area, I still made it into town every couple of months and I always went to the old barbershop. I was in often enough that Frank still assumed that I lived nearby.

By then, his son, whom most everyone called Junior, did most of the work. The old man was tired a lot and his eyesight wasn't what it used to be, but he was always in the shop, playing checkers or backgammon and talking with the other old men. He always cut my hair. I liked the old man. He would dispense mostly useless advice while he snapped his scissors above my mostly illusory hair.

The neighborhood had also begun to evolve. There was an influx of Ethiopian refugees into the area. A small grocery was opened by an Ethiopian family and an Ethiopian restaurant called the Red Sea opened on the corner across from Tony's place. An Ethiopian Orthodox Church stood catty corner from the Roman Catholic Church.

One day, while I was sitting in the chair, wrapped in a sheet, with Frank chatting and snapping his scissors, an elderly Ethiopian fellow entered the shop.

Junior addressed the Ethiopian in English, but the old Black man didn't seem to understand a word, or maybe he just chose to ignore the "kid" and preferred talking to another old man. Frank muttered something in Italian and the Ethiopian responded in kind, and while I sat in the barbershop chair the two old men conversed in fluent Italian.

So, the conversation was going on literally and figuratively over my head for a while. I don't understand much Italian and Frank continued to clip his scissors over my thinning, mostly illusory hair. I did pick up that the Ethiopian fellow's name was Aman Adunga and he was something of a patriarch in the neighborhood within the growing Ethiopian community.

At some point, Junior stepped in to finish me up and the two old men went off to discuss old times and compare their take on what was going on in the neighborhood.

The friendship between these two old men was the beginning of ties between the two distinct communities that were to turn into an unbreakable knot.

As time flowed and relationships flourished, the Italian and Ethiopian communities shared more and more in common. Their holidays and celebrations merged. They adopted aspects of each other's languages and cultures. The kids played in the streets together, ate at each other's homes and the adults all watched out for all the children and each other. The Ethiopian Orthodox and the Italian Catholic churches combined. Lovely blended children grew up turning Italian and Amharic and English into the very localized dialect that this new extended family spoke amongst themselves.

The Barber Pole still stood in front of Frank's Barber Shop and the antique chairs are still where they stood for over a century. Old men still gather there to play checkers and backgammon and discuss neighborhood matters. There is still a barber named Frank cutting hair.

I arrived just before closing time, which was how I planned it. The place was empty except for a young man named Frank Adunga. This young barber inherited the shop and ran it with all of the traditional flare of his predecessors.

He was glad to see me and welcomed me with all sorts of formalities, leaning heavily on the Amharic side of the local tongue, and then sliding into Italian before finally settling into a fairly understandable English for my benefit. He did all this while turning off the advertising lights and flipping the closed sign and pulling down the metal bullet-resistant security shades.

Frank gave the place a quick electronic sweep to assure that no bugs had been left in the shop. He set his defense drone in action to protect us from unwanted intruders. Then Frank "cut" my hair, which mostly was a theatrical performance of imitation snippets above my head. He worked much like his great grandfather. And we talked about the underground book trade.

We exited the barber shop via the back door and walked over to the much expanded eatery which is now called Tony's Red Sea Ethiopian/Italian Bar and Grill. We ate wat and injera with a side of spaghetti and meatballs and drank Dago Red wine. The staff refused payment and treated us like family, which included a lot of yelling and pinching.

We ate until we couldn't any longer. Then Frank and I wandered back to Bob's place together, arriving just moments before the rest of the "boys" showed up.