sd gross
03-25-2008, 06:12 PM
Schechter's Squirrel (From "Twilight Tales of Washington Heights")
by Stephen D. Gross
Schechter focused on the bushy tail of the squirrel sitting on his
mahogany credenza. Without the tail it looked like a rat. The bushy
tail transformed it into a movie star.
He saw it in a supporting role in "Bambi"; a walk-on in "Song of the
South". He'd come home from a raw, wintry afternoon at the Bronx Zoo
last Wednesday and taking off his coat, he'd found a few peanuts in his
pocket. Whenever he went to the zoo, Schechter purchased little bags of
roasted peanuts in the shell to feed to the animals. There were vending
machines that sold tiny bags of pellets meant for those wishing to
experience the thrill of feeding a "wild" animal, but Schechter
preferred what he called the Real McCoy:
Small, compressed, nutritionally-correct pellets packaged in a factory
in Newark. Schecter needed to dole out the fruit of the vine.
His ground floor apartment looked out over a tangle of ragged cans and
shredded plastic, other-worldly growth, broken glass and dappled shadows. Fifty feet from the six-story apartment house's rear wall stood the rear wall
of another building built in the same year. He peeled off his Navy blue
T-shirt and pulled on a clean one. We never guessed Schechter had nine
identical blue shirts. We'd come to know it as his "uniform" and a few
of us believed he owned only one Navy blue T which he washed daily.
He stared out at the crumpled packs of Pall Malls, Devil Dogs wrappers,
and strange weeds. There were two or three scrawny sun-starved sycamore trees, the shade of which camouflaged an equally bony cat. The cat was studiously ignoring a pair of finches jabbering out of reach on the
Fabinski's third-floor fire escape. Its one functional eye was instead
trained on a nervous squirrel twitching atop an ancient stone wall. The
cat had its own ideas about God, and one of the things God did was
occasionally cause squirrels to misjudge leaps and fall within the reach
of cats. Of course, the squirrel's God permitted no hungry, agile cats
to enter the Squirrel World but there were so many squirrels to look
after...
Schechter enjoyed feeding the elephants at the zoo, marveling at the
dexterity with which the big beasts fondled their tiny peanuts. He
wondered, too, how many peanuts it would take to fill the belly of an
African elephant bull. One leaden October afternoon, Schechter bought a
32-oz. bag of fresh-roasted-in-the-shell Virginias, and happy to escape
the icy Bronx chill, he walked into the steamy, seedy zoo cafeteria,
poured the bag out onto a tray and counted them. He knew a good-sized
bull elephant could weigh 6 tons but about peanuts he didn't have a
clue. Some two-thirds of the way through his nut pile, the wisdom of
buying a one pound bag began to elude him.
By the time he reached his 139th peanut Schechter felt the
hot nuclear moths in his belly which signaled the onset of The
Blues. Staring gloomily at the nut pile, he recalled seeing elephants
shuck the shells and spit them out, which meant he'd have to deduct the
weight of the shells when estimating each peanuts' tare weight. The
burdensome thought levered Schechter into one of his famous Sunday-night
depressions and he began to lose interest in his project.
But he wasn't at the zoo hefting peanuts. He was home in Washington
Heights watching scarred, anemic cats slinking around bean cans, broken
Yoo-Hoo bottles and what the neighborhood snots called Coney Island
Whitefish - used condoms. He remembered the squirrel on the credenza and turned away from the window. Bright beady eyes bored into him from
beneath his Lincoln Green naugahyde Barcalounger. The Barney's label
winked up at him from inside his herringbone jacket as he shifted his
elbow backward and reached into his pocket for a peanut. Squatting, he
extended it toward the dark space beneath the Barcalounger but the
squirrel wasn't buying it. Perhaps it had seen too many other squirrels
fail to resist temptation. Schechter laid the peanut on the floor and
backed off. The tiny black pearls drilled with exploratory caution and
then the squirrel rushed out, grabbed the peanut and ducked under the
Barcalounger all in one blurred motion. Schechter was stunned. He'd
never seen anything move that fast.
He heard a guttural shout followed by a splintery crash. He turned
toward the window and saw wraith-like cats spattering like icy rain in
hot oil. Mrs. Bramley, a desiccated, shrunken woman weighing almost 75
lbs was chucking cactus-laden flowerpots at Mr. Bramley. An easy target
at 6'5" and 330 lbs, Louis Bramley suffered from polio, gout and
elephantiasis, and couldn't move fast enough to get out of the way. One
of the clay pots had ricocheted off his left elbow, flying out the
Bramley's third-story window and shattering throughout the stony
courtyard below. Roaring in pain and barely-suppressed anger, Louis
Bramley had whacked his cane against a free-standing dresser dislodging
a small, sad pile of semi-pornographic magazines and yellowing Police
Gazettes he'd hidden up there in the 30's. Poor Clarice Bramley was so
frail the neighborhood kids wouldn't get into the elevator with her for
fear she'd shrivel up like a ghostly, brown leaf and crumble into dust
before the ancient Otis reached the third floor. She tried to sob but her
passageways were constricted and tightly corded and no longer resonated.
She attempted a scream but it sounded like a baby sparrow who had fallen
out of her nest. The flowerpot's raggedy shards stinging the brickwork
did her shrieking for her.
To Schechter, it was like listening to a familiar tune on Top 40
radio. Martin Block's Make-Believe Ballroom comes to Washington Heights.
He slowly realized the starved, startled cats had been stalking his
windowsill. It reeked of squirrel. Whirling back toward the Barcalounger
he spotted Mr. Squirrel back atop the credenza near a delicate vase
with an intricate Oriental motif and the words "Made in Occupied Japan"
printed on the bottom. Before he'd reached his eighth birthday, Schechter
had won it for his mother playing ski-ball on the Coney Island boardwalk.
It had taken two entire summers collecting coupons at Harold and Min's
Fascination and Ski-ball Emporium. Each evening he'd walk the mile from Sea Gate where his folks rented a two-room in an apartmentalized summer house.
He'd saved up 848 coupons, each representing hard-earned nickels pumped
purposefully into the alleys' slots, night after night rolling up 280's
and 320's, banking those wooden balls into that little 40 point circle
with the consistency of a "much older guy", a 15-year-old had once told
him.
And do you think it was easy not to cash in on any of those delicious
little prizes?. Very respectable ski-ball for a little kid, and now Mr.
Squirrel was two inches away from bumping this vase, this priceless heirloom, onto the hardwood floor. The silver-gray body twitched, as if on cue, and the squirrel braced his puffy, brush-like tail snugly along the vertical length of the
vase as he made ready to push off. But the precious vase
didn't move. With bright B.B. eyes, the squirrel watched as Schechter held his breath. The fading, late afternoon light shot the vase through with hazy rays illuminating the beaded dragons, the gracefully arched bridges spanning tiny creeks and wise-looking fat men sporting neat, pointed mustaches. The pearlescent glint triggered a welling-up rooted deep within Schechter's substrata. It struck a magically harmonious and unifying chord. He saw his Mother's eyes shining from the skin of the vase and became transfixed. Head filling with a thousand hummingbirds, he felt himself begin to levitate. His mother's eyes
shifted, softly watching him - and as he watched them move a single tear rolled down his cheek.
Little argylite lances shot from the rodent's bead-like eyes. It slowly dawned on Schechter that his mother's eyes were moving because the squirrel's
tail was rocking the vase. But not very much. It was mostly smoke and mirrors and
the tail was of little substance. But there was enough of it to move
his mother's eyes - like one of those cornball pictures where Jesus' eyes
followed you, thought Schechter, now feeling ridiculous. He worried that
Mr. Squirrel would pick up on his agitation and become frightened
himself. If he panicked and pushed off, that was it for the bridges and
dragons. Schechter exhaled and tried to calm himself. Tiring of being
out-stared by the Squirrel, he closed his eyes and thought of Myrna
Horowitz, his baby-sitter when he was five or seven - maybe a little
older. She was the first woman he ever loved. When he became terrified at the cackling of the witches who lived in the closet and under the bed, Myrna would come into his room and rub his back and shoulders, and it would calm him down - and relax him so completely that he'd drift back into his dreamworld.
Taking a few deep, slow breaths with his eyes closed, he waited for the
horrid sound of chubby Oriental men shattering against oak hardwood. But the crash didn't come.
He forced himself to take one more deep breath, exhaled with much control
and opened his eyes. The little beast was gone. The vase remained intact. Seven hundred thousand peanuts, thought Schechter once again redfaced and feeling ridiculous. That's what it would take to fill an elephant.
Schechter didn't see his squirrel for almost a week. He looked out into
the shadowy courtyard and saw the usual mangy cats, dismembered pigeons,
wormy pork chops and cautious squirrels, but none of them looked or acted
especially familiar.
He spent most of Tuesday at the zoo having taken the cross-town bus
from Broadway through Fordham Road to Southern Boulevard, the same bus route he'd traveled when he journeyed to the zoo as a kid. He thought
about the changes he saw - no more Jewish Delicatessens, no Jahn's Ice
Cream Parlor with its bubbling fountains, "Rainbow Mountains" and "Kitchen Sinks." The menu said the Kitchen Sink came with a dozen scoops of ice cream, walnuts, bananas, maraschino cherries in real whipped cream - and would feed at least ten people. "As well it should", thought Schechter, "it cost six dollars - and besides, Jahn's had a real nickelodeon!" All the Chinese restaurants were gone too. He saw the odd Laotian-Vietnamese and Cambodian eatery, but the familiar Cantonese joints had long ago moved to Westchester and Glen Cove and switched to Szechwan and Hunan cuisine.
Now there were Jamaican and Dominican joints serving rice and goat stew.
Schechter recalled the stories the neighborhood kids had told about
Chinese restaurants and stray cats. He'd never believed the tales about
escaped alligators proliferating in New York's sewers, but the cat
stories he wasn't sure about. They were very clever with their sauces,
those insidious Chinese, and when they diced up the meat into really
small pieces you really couldn't be sure what you were eating. He
thought about the sparrows and finches trying to survive despite the
army of slinky, Nosferatu-like cats skinny enough to hide behind a
Butterfingers wrapper snagged in the jungle outside his window. He
wondered how his squirrel was doing and resolved to bring a few peanuts
home.
Schechter had a fine day at the zoo. The gorilla babies were adorable,
having a great time using the big silverback male as a trampoline. One
of the babies looked, to Schechter, like she could have been Clarice
Bramley's sister. He stood on line at the Platypus House and envied
their aquatic agility as they swam about slurping up little worms. He
informed a woman who said she was a receptionist at a garage on
University Avenue that the platypus was one of the world's two
egg-laying mammals. As if this news was the biggest charge she'd gotten
all month, she shook her head and its attached yellow mountain of stiff,
sculpted hair and walked away. Schechter was elated by the feeling that
she was very impressed with this information and thought briefly about
going after her and telling her more. He tried to think of what he might
say next, but the bears waited down the road and no one could compete with the bears.
Thinking now about Miles Davis and Doc Severinsen, Schechter strolled
over to the camels. His cousin Sammy once remarked that camels had
terrific lips perfect for playing the trumpet. They looked so incredibly
cool and detached that Schechter and Sammy thought of hipsters and jazz
whenever they saw a camel. Two women were standing before the camel
enclosure talking about fatty brisket. The one in the sequined white
cashmere sweater complained bitterly about how Shmul the Butcher was
taking advantage now that Old Man Lipschitz had died, leaving Shmul with
no competition. The one in the Persian Lamb coat was nodding her cue-tip
of a head rapidly in agreement.
The big dromedary looked down his nose at them. He was shaggy, stately and gorgeous. He'd lived in the Bronx for more than 20 years, during which time he'd been surrounded by harems of various sizes. He always had plenty of food to eat - the subordinate camels all deferring to him because of his status. He was a prince among camels, a photographer's dream and he knew it. Schechter could almost feel the camel's annoyance
at the ladies before him failing to give him his proper due. In fact,
they weren't paying the least bit of attention to him. He spit on the
one in the cashmere stopping her in mid-sentence. Mouth agape, she
looked down first at the greenish-brown glob spreading above her breast,
and then up into the soft, bedroom eyes of the camel. He was working on
a chaw and thinking about a second shpritz at the sweater. Reeling from
this personal insult, the woman screamed for one of the guards.
Schechter tossed the camel a handful of peanuts and put the rest of the
bag back in his pocket. As he turned to head home, he heard the woman
scream again.
It was very chilly and almost dark as he made his way up the 6-story's
gritty stairway and into the lobby. The seventy-year-old radiator in the
corner clanked and hissed steam. Generations of feral tomcats had been
using it as a marking post since the early 1920's, causing Schechter
(and most of the other tenants) to gag and forego inhaling through the
nostrils during the colder months. Just as the elevator arrived,
Schechter saw Sib O'Brien wheezing and chugging up the outer stairs.
Apple cheeked and sixty pounds overweight, Sib also had asthma and
climbing those six stone steps left her so breathless, by the time she
could thank him for holding the door for her, Schechter had walked down
the hallway to his first floor apartment and disappeared inside.
His first thought upon awakening the next morning was of the peanuts
nestled in the pocket of the jacket draped over his John F.
Kennedy-model rocking chair. He parked the nuts on the sill and raised
the warped window frame. Two floors above him the morning sun glinted
off the clothespin springs stabilizing Fabinski's faded jeans. A
splintered seltzer bottle sparkled with a blue glacial light. Two cats
were fighting over a naked chicken bone. Mr. Bramley hocked gutturally
and let something stringy fly out his window. "Life is good", mused
Schechter, putting the kettle on to boil.
He sat down in the rocker to wait for the kettle and watched. No
squirrels visited his sill. The kettle began to wail. Schechter's aunt
Tessie had "schlepped" it back from Spain for him. She'd visited the
Seville flea market during Holy Week and unable to find anything Jewish,
she'd instead picked out a teapot molded in the shape of the Virgin
Mary. She'd explained to Schechter that it was unbecoming for the Virgin
to whistle, so they'd cleverly designed the pot so it would wail. At
least that was the story they told her. He poured the water, dropping in
a bag of Constant Comment, and again sat in his Kennedy rocker and
stared at the window sill. One of the peanuts was missing. He'd
carefully arranged them so they wouldn't accidentally roll off, so he
knew one must have been taken. He tip-toed over to the window when he
heard a noise behind him which curdled his bile. It was as if a one-ton
baby had gotten its balls caught in a vise. It was the sound of jagged
metal shrieking in twisted, ionized dissonance. It was a hungry alley
cat which had Schechter's squirrel trapped under his Lincoln Green
Barcalounger. Screaming in shock and surprise, Schechter adrenalized the
confused cat who desperately sought refuge under the lounger wherein
cringed the squirrel. Convinced the cat was attempting to move in for an
imminent kill, Schechter acted impulsively as would a true hero -
without thinking. He felt around behind him searching for an object to
hurl at the cat, and grabbing the handiest missile he could reach, he
hurled his mother's Oriental Vase in the leprous feline's direction.
There aren't many who come to visit Schechter these days and it's just
as well. They always ask questions about the stuffed squirrel on the top
of his credenza and he has to lie and tell them something like, "it
slipped in some bird shit and fell to its death.", or "a potted plant fell
on it". One or two people have run their fingers over the faded rectangle on the mantle where, for years, the vase stood.
Almost no one ever asks what became of the Oriental Vase.
by Stephen D. Gross
Schechter focused on the bushy tail of the squirrel sitting on his
mahogany credenza. Without the tail it looked like a rat. The bushy
tail transformed it into a movie star.
He saw it in a supporting role in "Bambi"; a walk-on in "Song of the
South". He'd come home from a raw, wintry afternoon at the Bronx Zoo
last Wednesday and taking off his coat, he'd found a few peanuts in his
pocket. Whenever he went to the zoo, Schechter purchased little bags of
roasted peanuts in the shell to feed to the animals. There were vending
machines that sold tiny bags of pellets meant for those wishing to
experience the thrill of feeding a "wild" animal, but Schechter
preferred what he called the Real McCoy:
Small, compressed, nutritionally-correct pellets packaged in a factory
in Newark. Schecter needed to dole out the fruit of the vine.
His ground floor apartment looked out over a tangle of ragged cans and
shredded plastic, other-worldly growth, broken glass and dappled shadows. Fifty feet from the six-story apartment house's rear wall stood the rear wall
of another building built in the same year. He peeled off his Navy blue
T-shirt and pulled on a clean one. We never guessed Schechter had nine
identical blue shirts. We'd come to know it as his "uniform" and a few
of us believed he owned only one Navy blue T which he washed daily.
He stared out at the crumpled packs of Pall Malls, Devil Dogs wrappers,
and strange weeds. There were two or three scrawny sun-starved sycamore trees, the shade of which camouflaged an equally bony cat. The cat was studiously ignoring a pair of finches jabbering out of reach on the
Fabinski's third-floor fire escape. Its one functional eye was instead
trained on a nervous squirrel twitching atop an ancient stone wall. The
cat had its own ideas about God, and one of the things God did was
occasionally cause squirrels to misjudge leaps and fall within the reach
of cats. Of course, the squirrel's God permitted no hungry, agile cats
to enter the Squirrel World but there were so many squirrels to look
after...
Schechter enjoyed feeding the elephants at the zoo, marveling at the
dexterity with which the big beasts fondled their tiny peanuts. He
wondered, too, how many peanuts it would take to fill the belly of an
African elephant bull. One leaden October afternoon, Schechter bought a
32-oz. bag of fresh-roasted-in-the-shell Virginias, and happy to escape
the icy Bronx chill, he walked into the steamy, seedy zoo cafeteria,
poured the bag out onto a tray and counted them. He knew a good-sized
bull elephant could weigh 6 tons but about peanuts he didn't have a
clue. Some two-thirds of the way through his nut pile, the wisdom of
buying a one pound bag began to elude him.
By the time he reached his 139th peanut Schechter felt the
hot nuclear moths in his belly which signaled the onset of The
Blues. Staring gloomily at the nut pile, he recalled seeing elephants
shuck the shells and spit them out, which meant he'd have to deduct the
weight of the shells when estimating each peanuts' tare weight. The
burdensome thought levered Schechter into one of his famous Sunday-night
depressions and he began to lose interest in his project.
But he wasn't at the zoo hefting peanuts. He was home in Washington
Heights watching scarred, anemic cats slinking around bean cans, broken
Yoo-Hoo bottles and what the neighborhood snots called Coney Island
Whitefish - used condoms. He remembered the squirrel on the credenza and turned away from the window. Bright beady eyes bored into him from
beneath his Lincoln Green naugahyde Barcalounger. The Barney's label
winked up at him from inside his herringbone jacket as he shifted his
elbow backward and reached into his pocket for a peanut. Squatting, he
extended it toward the dark space beneath the Barcalounger but the
squirrel wasn't buying it. Perhaps it had seen too many other squirrels
fail to resist temptation. Schechter laid the peanut on the floor and
backed off. The tiny black pearls drilled with exploratory caution and
then the squirrel rushed out, grabbed the peanut and ducked under the
Barcalounger all in one blurred motion. Schechter was stunned. He'd
never seen anything move that fast.
He heard a guttural shout followed by a splintery crash. He turned
toward the window and saw wraith-like cats spattering like icy rain in
hot oil. Mrs. Bramley, a desiccated, shrunken woman weighing almost 75
lbs was chucking cactus-laden flowerpots at Mr. Bramley. An easy target
at 6'5" and 330 lbs, Louis Bramley suffered from polio, gout and
elephantiasis, and couldn't move fast enough to get out of the way. One
of the clay pots had ricocheted off his left elbow, flying out the
Bramley's third-story window and shattering throughout the stony
courtyard below. Roaring in pain and barely-suppressed anger, Louis
Bramley had whacked his cane against a free-standing dresser dislodging
a small, sad pile of semi-pornographic magazines and yellowing Police
Gazettes he'd hidden up there in the 30's. Poor Clarice Bramley was so
frail the neighborhood kids wouldn't get into the elevator with her for
fear she'd shrivel up like a ghostly, brown leaf and crumble into dust
before the ancient Otis reached the third floor. She tried to sob but her
passageways were constricted and tightly corded and no longer resonated.
She attempted a scream but it sounded like a baby sparrow who had fallen
out of her nest. The flowerpot's raggedy shards stinging the brickwork
did her shrieking for her.
To Schechter, it was like listening to a familiar tune on Top 40
radio. Martin Block's Make-Believe Ballroom comes to Washington Heights.
He slowly realized the starved, startled cats had been stalking his
windowsill. It reeked of squirrel. Whirling back toward the Barcalounger
he spotted Mr. Squirrel back atop the credenza near a delicate vase
with an intricate Oriental motif and the words "Made in Occupied Japan"
printed on the bottom. Before he'd reached his eighth birthday, Schechter
had won it for his mother playing ski-ball on the Coney Island boardwalk.
It had taken two entire summers collecting coupons at Harold and Min's
Fascination and Ski-ball Emporium. Each evening he'd walk the mile from Sea Gate where his folks rented a two-room in an apartmentalized summer house.
He'd saved up 848 coupons, each representing hard-earned nickels pumped
purposefully into the alleys' slots, night after night rolling up 280's
and 320's, banking those wooden balls into that little 40 point circle
with the consistency of a "much older guy", a 15-year-old had once told
him.
And do you think it was easy not to cash in on any of those delicious
little prizes?. Very respectable ski-ball for a little kid, and now Mr.
Squirrel was two inches away from bumping this vase, this priceless heirloom, onto the hardwood floor. The silver-gray body twitched, as if on cue, and the squirrel braced his puffy, brush-like tail snugly along the vertical length of the
vase as he made ready to push off. But the precious vase
didn't move. With bright B.B. eyes, the squirrel watched as Schechter held his breath. The fading, late afternoon light shot the vase through with hazy rays illuminating the beaded dragons, the gracefully arched bridges spanning tiny creeks and wise-looking fat men sporting neat, pointed mustaches. The pearlescent glint triggered a welling-up rooted deep within Schechter's substrata. It struck a magically harmonious and unifying chord. He saw his Mother's eyes shining from the skin of the vase and became transfixed. Head filling with a thousand hummingbirds, he felt himself begin to levitate. His mother's eyes
shifted, softly watching him - and as he watched them move a single tear rolled down his cheek.
Little argylite lances shot from the rodent's bead-like eyes. It slowly dawned on Schechter that his mother's eyes were moving because the squirrel's
tail was rocking the vase. But not very much. It was mostly smoke and mirrors and
the tail was of little substance. But there was enough of it to move
his mother's eyes - like one of those cornball pictures where Jesus' eyes
followed you, thought Schechter, now feeling ridiculous. He worried that
Mr. Squirrel would pick up on his agitation and become frightened
himself. If he panicked and pushed off, that was it for the bridges and
dragons. Schechter exhaled and tried to calm himself. Tiring of being
out-stared by the Squirrel, he closed his eyes and thought of Myrna
Horowitz, his baby-sitter when he was five or seven - maybe a little
older. She was the first woman he ever loved. When he became terrified at the cackling of the witches who lived in the closet and under the bed, Myrna would come into his room and rub his back and shoulders, and it would calm him down - and relax him so completely that he'd drift back into his dreamworld.
Taking a few deep, slow breaths with his eyes closed, he waited for the
horrid sound of chubby Oriental men shattering against oak hardwood. But the crash didn't come.
He forced himself to take one more deep breath, exhaled with much control
and opened his eyes. The little beast was gone. The vase remained intact. Seven hundred thousand peanuts, thought Schechter once again redfaced and feeling ridiculous. That's what it would take to fill an elephant.
Schechter didn't see his squirrel for almost a week. He looked out into
the shadowy courtyard and saw the usual mangy cats, dismembered pigeons,
wormy pork chops and cautious squirrels, but none of them looked or acted
especially familiar.
He spent most of Tuesday at the zoo having taken the cross-town bus
from Broadway through Fordham Road to Southern Boulevard, the same bus route he'd traveled when he journeyed to the zoo as a kid. He thought
about the changes he saw - no more Jewish Delicatessens, no Jahn's Ice
Cream Parlor with its bubbling fountains, "Rainbow Mountains" and "Kitchen Sinks." The menu said the Kitchen Sink came with a dozen scoops of ice cream, walnuts, bananas, maraschino cherries in real whipped cream - and would feed at least ten people. "As well it should", thought Schechter, "it cost six dollars - and besides, Jahn's had a real nickelodeon!" All the Chinese restaurants were gone too. He saw the odd Laotian-Vietnamese and Cambodian eatery, but the familiar Cantonese joints had long ago moved to Westchester and Glen Cove and switched to Szechwan and Hunan cuisine.
Now there were Jamaican and Dominican joints serving rice and goat stew.
Schechter recalled the stories the neighborhood kids had told about
Chinese restaurants and stray cats. He'd never believed the tales about
escaped alligators proliferating in New York's sewers, but the cat
stories he wasn't sure about. They were very clever with their sauces,
those insidious Chinese, and when they diced up the meat into really
small pieces you really couldn't be sure what you were eating. He
thought about the sparrows and finches trying to survive despite the
army of slinky, Nosferatu-like cats skinny enough to hide behind a
Butterfingers wrapper snagged in the jungle outside his window. He
wondered how his squirrel was doing and resolved to bring a few peanuts
home.
Schechter had a fine day at the zoo. The gorilla babies were adorable,
having a great time using the big silverback male as a trampoline. One
of the babies looked, to Schechter, like she could have been Clarice
Bramley's sister. He stood on line at the Platypus House and envied
their aquatic agility as they swam about slurping up little worms. He
informed a woman who said she was a receptionist at a garage on
University Avenue that the platypus was one of the world's two
egg-laying mammals. As if this news was the biggest charge she'd gotten
all month, she shook her head and its attached yellow mountain of stiff,
sculpted hair and walked away. Schechter was elated by the feeling that
she was very impressed with this information and thought briefly about
going after her and telling her more. He tried to think of what he might
say next, but the bears waited down the road and no one could compete with the bears.
Thinking now about Miles Davis and Doc Severinsen, Schechter strolled
over to the camels. His cousin Sammy once remarked that camels had
terrific lips perfect for playing the trumpet. They looked so incredibly
cool and detached that Schechter and Sammy thought of hipsters and jazz
whenever they saw a camel. Two women were standing before the camel
enclosure talking about fatty brisket. The one in the sequined white
cashmere sweater complained bitterly about how Shmul the Butcher was
taking advantage now that Old Man Lipschitz had died, leaving Shmul with
no competition. The one in the Persian Lamb coat was nodding her cue-tip
of a head rapidly in agreement.
The big dromedary looked down his nose at them. He was shaggy, stately and gorgeous. He'd lived in the Bronx for more than 20 years, during which time he'd been surrounded by harems of various sizes. He always had plenty of food to eat - the subordinate camels all deferring to him because of his status. He was a prince among camels, a photographer's dream and he knew it. Schechter could almost feel the camel's annoyance
at the ladies before him failing to give him his proper due. In fact,
they weren't paying the least bit of attention to him. He spit on the
one in the cashmere stopping her in mid-sentence. Mouth agape, she
looked down first at the greenish-brown glob spreading above her breast,
and then up into the soft, bedroom eyes of the camel. He was working on
a chaw and thinking about a second shpritz at the sweater. Reeling from
this personal insult, the woman screamed for one of the guards.
Schechter tossed the camel a handful of peanuts and put the rest of the
bag back in his pocket. As he turned to head home, he heard the woman
scream again.
It was very chilly and almost dark as he made his way up the 6-story's
gritty stairway and into the lobby. The seventy-year-old radiator in the
corner clanked and hissed steam. Generations of feral tomcats had been
using it as a marking post since the early 1920's, causing Schechter
(and most of the other tenants) to gag and forego inhaling through the
nostrils during the colder months. Just as the elevator arrived,
Schechter saw Sib O'Brien wheezing and chugging up the outer stairs.
Apple cheeked and sixty pounds overweight, Sib also had asthma and
climbing those six stone steps left her so breathless, by the time she
could thank him for holding the door for her, Schechter had walked down
the hallway to his first floor apartment and disappeared inside.
His first thought upon awakening the next morning was of the peanuts
nestled in the pocket of the jacket draped over his John F.
Kennedy-model rocking chair. He parked the nuts on the sill and raised
the warped window frame. Two floors above him the morning sun glinted
off the clothespin springs stabilizing Fabinski's faded jeans. A
splintered seltzer bottle sparkled with a blue glacial light. Two cats
were fighting over a naked chicken bone. Mr. Bramley hocked gutturally
and let something stringy fly out his window. "Life is good", mused
Schechter, putting the kettle on to boil.
He sat down in the rocker to wait for the kettle and watched. No
squirrels visited his sill. The kettle began to wail. Schechter's aunt
Tessie had "schlepped" it back from Spain for him. She'd visited the
Seville flea market during Holy Week and unable to find anything Jewish,
she'd instead picked out a teapot molded in the shape of the Virgin
Mary. She'd explained to Schechter that it was unbecoming for the Virgin
to whistle, so they'd cleverly designed the pot so it would wail. At
least that was the story they told her. He poured the water, dropping in
a bag of Constant Comment, and again sat in his Kennedy rocker and
stared at the window sill. One of the peanuts was missing. He'd
carefully arranged them so they wouldn't accidentally roll off, so he
knew one must have been taken. He tip-toed over to the window when he
heard a noise behind him which curdled his bile. It was as if a one-ton
baby had gotten its balls caught in a vise. It was the sound of jagged
metal shrieking in twisted, ionized dissonance. It was a hungry alley
cat which had Schechter's squirrel trapped under his Lincoln Green
Barcalounger. Screaming in shock and surprise, Schechter adrenalized the
confused cat who desperately sought refuge under the lounger wherein
cringed the squirrel. Convinced the cat was attempting to move in for an
imminent kill, Schechter acted impulsively as would a true hero -
without thinking. He felt around behind him searching for an object to
hurl at the cat, and grabbing the handiest missile he could reach, he
hurled his mother's Oriental Vase in the leprous feline's direction.
There aren't many who come to visit Schechter these days and it's just
as well. They always ask questions about the stuffed squirrel on the top
of his credenza and he has to lie and tell them something like, "it
slipped in some bird shit and fell to its death.", or "a potted plant fell
on it". One or two people have run their fingers over the faded rectangle on the mantle where, for years, the vase stood.
Almost no one ever asks what became of the Oriental Vase.