[click here to begin at chapter 1]
[click here for table of contents]
Chapter 2
One of these porches was not like the others.
The Williams’ front porch featured two discreet wicker chairs painted white, and a Revolutionary American flag with a circle of 13 stars, mounted proudly on one of the porch columns in honor of the Bicentennial.
The Vanderbeck’s front porch also had two places to sit, metal lawn chairs, the kind with a slight bounce when you leaned back. Between them was a milk canister with painted flowers on it, the top just big enough for two glasses of lemonade.
Most other porches on Warren Street were much the same.
Then, there was Timothy’s porch.
To begin with, there was the couch. It had lived on the sidewalk for a few days shortly after Cathryn moved in. When no one picked it up, it found its way back onto the porch and was soon draped with a batik cover from an Indian import store. It actually didn’t smell too bad, considering Oscar the cat could be found there most days.
The columns were in need of paint, house plants straggled in all directions, and alongside the front door was a faded, tie-dyed peace sign that Timothy’s mother had actually carried in a rally when she’d marched on Washington a few years back.
But the biggest challenge to Timothy’s sense of dignity wasn’t on the porch but parked right in front of it.
The 68 Chrysler had probably been a single color when it left the factory. But it had since been painted so many different shades of Rustoleum that it was impossible to say what color the car now actually was.
Timothy called their car the Calico Chrysler, in honor of his cat, who actually had a better paint job. Thankfully, their neighbor Mr. O’Connor was a long-distance trucker. When he wasn’t out on the road, he parked the massive cab of his rig directly across the street, which tended to draw attention away from whatever was parked in its shadow.
This morning, Timothy didn’t pay much attention to car, truck, or porch. He was running late for school, as usual.
Bounding out the front door, he soon slowed to a manageable trot. Dating back three centuries, his uptown Kingston neighborhood had once been a colonial village, its uneven bluestone sidewalks excellent for popping wheelies on his banana saddle, but a notorious tripping hazard.
Halfway down the block, he slowed further and, despite the ticking clock, came to a full stop when something curious caught his attention. An invitation, of sorts, from the universe.
As different as Timothy’s house may have been from the other houses, the building he paused before was in a whole other realm.
Everyone called it The Green Apartment Building. Basically, because it was painted green, and it was an apartment building.
Unlike the other houses on the street, with slanting roofs and gables, the Green Apartment Building was big and boxy. It housed a whole cast of wayward characters. Overall, it felt like it was from another world, and maybe this was why it had an air of mystery in general.
Timothy had never been inside, or even peered within, the Green Apartment Building. The front door was usually closed tight, probably locked, though Timothy had never dared try it.
But today, the front door was wide open.
Timothy stood out on the sidewalk, looking in.
It appeared kind of dim inside. From where he was standing in the brilliant morning sunlight, he couldn’t see much at all. He probably should have just kept running and gotten to school.
But then he remembered the line he’d read in the The Real Men’s Guidebook, a motto he was trying to make his own:
“When that little voice in your head says No, you say YES and double it!”
Timothy meant to challenge himself to do something that scared him every day. Would the door to the Green Apartment Building ever be sitting wide open again?
Cautiously, he made his way up the stairs. He walked through the open door.
The outside may have been bright green, but the inside hallway was a sickly gray. There was a very old smell. Old coffee, old cigarettes, old dust, all mixed together so you couldn’t tell what was what, just old. It didn’t smell like a home.
The floor was a dingy linoleum, worn enough in places you could see the creaky wooden floorboards underneath. The wainscoted walls were painted the same shade of gray as the chipping tin ceiling, all barely illuminated by a single bare lightbulb hanging overhead.
On one wall, a bank of mailboxes. Timothy counted them.
“Eight apartments,” he said to himself, as if this in itself were a revelation.
As he was staring at the boxes, a door at the end of the hallway creaked open slightly and startled him. He wanted to run out, but the woman peering out through the door beckoned him.
“Don’t run away, c’mere a sec.”
Frozen as if in a dream, it took him a minute to register what she was saying and then get his feet to walk in her direction.
“Here,” she said, handing him a dollar bill, “run to the store and get me some milk.”
He could see through the slender opening that the woman was wearing some kind of dressing gown, her hair up in rollers. He tried not to look too directly.
“Take it,” she said, waving the dollar again.
“I have to go to school,” Timothy said.
“It’ll only take a minute, I need milk for my coffee. Get me a paper while you’re at it.”
She didn’t seem to be asking him so much as telling him. That didn’t mean he had to do it, but what if she asked what he was doing creeping around outside her door? This seemed like it could lead to trouble, which led him to conclude that he should just do what she said and get it over with.
He took the dollar, and ran out the front door. Terri’s Deli was only a block away, he got stuff there for his mom all the time, so there’d be nothing unusual about him being in there, except perhaps the time of day.
As he ran, he thought about the woman, who he’d seen walk down the street many times, but always in a dress, always in make-up.
About two years ago, his mother had told him something strange about this woman: she’d said she was what was called a prostitute. When Timothy had asked what a prostitute was, his mother had told him:
“A prostitute is a woman who sells her body for money.”
This had perplexed Timothy completely.
“How can she sell her body, doesn’t she need it?”
Timothy couldn’t remember if his mother had offered any further explanation on that particular day, but he was ten now. He more or less had the gist of what selling your body for money meant, even if he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do it.
“Hey Tim,” said Lynn the cashier, sliding the quart of milk he’d plonked on the counter toward the register.
“Hey Lynn,” Timothy said, hoping Lynn didn’t notice it was 8:05.
It seemed to take her longer to punch the numbers into the cash register than it took for him to run all the way here. She started popping open a paper bag for the milk, but Timothy didn’t wait, he just took the milk and paper and ran back as fast as he could, uneven sidewalk or not.
The woman at the end of the hall must’ve heard him running back in, she again opened the door a crack and was waiting for him. As she reached for the milk and paper, the door opened a bit more and Timothy caught a brief glimpse of the wall paper, which had some kind of fake velvet stripes. The woman tightened her dressing gown, which was likewise starting to fall open, then began closing the door.
“Your change,” Timothy said.
“Keep it,” she said, “you’re a doll,” then she closed the door all the way.
The milk had been 50 cents, the paper was a quarter. Since his allowance was a quarter, he’d basically just doubled his income this week. Not a windfall, exactly, but not bad.
He looked at the number six on the woman’s door. On his way out, he checked the mailboxes again. The name on the mailbox with the number six was L. Collins.
So, the Prostitute’s name was L. Collins.
Looking at the other seven mailboxes, each with its own strange surname, he wondered if any other kid on his block had ever made it this far into the Green Apartment Building to access this information.
He really needed to bolt to get to school, he was later than he’d ever been by this point, but he lingered at the mailboxes just a few seconds longer. It seemed, at this moment, like he was on the verge of understanding a mystery that none of the other kids had even thought to investigate.
# # #
Coming into George Washington Elementary School 15 minutes after the bell meant having to stop at the office first to get a late pass.
Damn, he was even later than the kid who came to school dirty and was the school’s most notorious truant. This kid was ahead of Timothy at the front desk where Mrs. Hagen, the school secretary, had just forced him to call his mother from the office phone. You could hear the kid’s mother screaming at him over the phone from ten feet away.
Timothy didn’t want to have to call his mother on that phone, especially after the dirty kid was just holding it up to the side of his greasy head.
“Go straight to class,” Mrs. Hagen said to the kid after his mother finished chewing him out.
When it was Timothy’s turn to approach the front desk, Mrs. Hagen looked at him over her reading glasses.
“A little late today, Timothy.”
“I was helping my mom with something,” Timothy offered.
Not that he was convinced that this excuse would work, he nonetheless figured he could say this without completely lying. He did do a lot of work around the house in general, just not on this particular morning.
Strangely, the incredulous glare Mrs. Hagen had given the greasy headed boy moments before softened somewhat as she looked at Timothy.
While the specifics of Timothy’s current home situation weren’t entirely known, the basic story that Timothy’s father had abandoned the family a year or two back had filtered its way to the office staff.
“Is everything okay at home, Timothy?”
“Yeah, fine, just...you know, helping out with stuff.”
She nodded her head sympathetically, as if she understood.
Without so much as a finger wag, she reached for her pad, wrote out a late pass, and handed it to Timothy.
“Have a nice day, Timothy.”
Timothy thanked her, feeling a little guilty for having sort of gotten one over on her but, considering how challenging things had become at home, he was ready to take whatever breaks the world was prepared to give him.
He might’ve felt additionally a little bad about having gotten better treatment than the dirty kid, but the dirty kid had actually been mean to him in the past, so he wasn’t going to feel too bad about it.
As he walked along the highly polished floor toward his classroom, he noticed that the late pass felt kind of thicker than it should between his fingers. Looking more closely, he realized that there were, in fact, two late passes, the one Mrs. Hagen had filled out, and a blank one that had accidentally gotten stuck underneath.
The honest thing to do would be to hand them both over to Mrs. Brenner, his teacher, when he got to class, but this was just too much of a little trophy to pass up. Plus, it was a potentially valuable resource.
Carefully separating the two passes, he looked both ways in the hallway, took a book from his knapsack and pressed the blank one inside the front cover for safe keeping.
Today was show-n-tell. His friend Brandon was standing in front of the room when Timothy entered. Usually show-n-tell meant a model plane, a bug collection, or something to that effect. Today, Brandon was standing in front of the classroom holding a strange black tube.
Whatever it was that Brandon was holding, Mrs. Brenner was so enthralled with the presentation, she simply waved for Timothy to leave his pass on her desk and take his seat.
“Continue,” Mrs. Brenner said to Brandon.
“So,” Brandon said, “this drum is from an actual copy machine, manufactured by IPM, right here in Kingston.”
IPM stood for International Photocopy Machines, but everybody just called it IPM.
“And what does the drum do, Brandon?” asked Mrs. Brenner.
“It’s kind of hard to explain, but after the machine takes a picture of what you want to copy, these little bits of ink get stuck to the drum, then it rolls over a new piece of paper and that’s how you get your copy.”
“And how is this different from, say, the mimeograph machine here at school?”
“Well, I don’t really know how a mimeograph machine works,” Brandon said, “but you know how the copies you get at school come out all blue and smelly? These copies are, like, black and white, just like the original ones. And they don’t smell so bad.”
“Fascinating.”
Come lunchtime, Brandon continued to hold court. Pulling the long cylinder from his knapsack, he held it aloft so all could behold. When another kid dared reach for it, he said:
“Don’t touch it, only I can touch it,” which made the black cylinder seem all the more to be filled with some kind of magic power.
Brandon was perceived as one of the cooler boys in a group of six or seven boys who regularly ate together in the cafeteria at lunchtime, Timothy among them. Of the lunch groupings of 4th grade boys, this was probably the coolest. It wasn’t just Timothy’s long hair that earned him a seat at the table, he’d simply had been eating with these same boys more or less since first grade.
“So, did your dad really take you into the manufacturing plant at IPM?” a kid named Drew asked.
“Yeah, you should’ve seen it,” said Brandon, and he proceeded to describe the fantastic machines, conveyor belts, as well as the sterilized white uniforms and other wonders witnessed behind the scenes at the IPM plant.
Despite being at the cool guys’ table, the table itself had a two-tiered hierarchy based on whether or not your dad worked at IPM. It wasn’t just that dads at IPM tended to earn more money, which they did. And it wasn’t just that the IPM families got to go to the IPM Rec Center, which was the cool place to be over the summer.
There was also something almost futuristic about the IPM plant itself, majestically spread out over hundreds of acres at the edge of town. And there was a certain civic pride about the plant producing a type of technology that the world was clamoring for, even though most people in Kingston in 1976 did not yet have access to a photocopier themselves.
Timothy’s dad had worked in a department store uptown, so even before his dad split, Timothy was on the wrong side of the IPM hierarchy. Brandon’s tales of IPM glory seemed to reveal there was even a hierarchy within the hierarchy.
“I got to wear a hard hat and a name badge,” Brandon continued, the other IPM kids listening intently, wishing their dads could somehow get them behind the scenes to see how these copy machines of the future were being manufactured.
For a brief moment, Timothy considered muscling into this exclusive backstage conversation, inserting something like:
“Well, this morning, I got to see inside an actual prostitute’s living room.”
There was no doubt in his mind that this juicy little tidbit would generate immediate interest. But, on second thought, this was probably the type of disclosure that could easily lead to trouble, particularly if word got back to people’s parents.
Seemed like the better plan, long-term, was to keep quiet about this.
Like so many other things Timothy was learning to keep quiet about.
The quality of your prose, story and dry wit are taking over, so as I read I’m thinking less, “what an excellent story by my brother-in-law,” and more like, “what an excellent story.”
especially senior. citizens!!!