Neighbors and Other Strangers

I went to college in New York City in the 1980s and worked nights for a big law firm in midtown. I’d show up at 5:30 p.m. and leave when the nightly assignments were done, usually around 1 a.m., but sometimes we pulled all-nighters. We did word processing, fact-checking, phone-calling around the world, whatever was needed.

Once in 1983 or ’84 I crawled into a cab around 5 a.m. and remember crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn, barely awake on a clear morning, headed to the rowhouse I shared with five other people to sleep for a while before going back to school.

I lived a few doors down from the corner bodega. The owner was a short Puerto Rican guy in his sixties who sported a big potbelly and a snubnosed .38 revolver on his hip. But on this morning he was standing out in front of his store, wearing a robe, with a cigar in one hand and a can of beer in the other.

He pointed his cigar at me and waved me over.

“Mira! Ven aqui!”

We knew each other by sight since I routinely bought beer from him, but there was nothing else in his shop that interested me, including him.

“What are you doing?” he said, scowling.

“Coming home from work.”

“You work?”

“Yeah, I work. I go to school, and I work.”

He paused to absorb this revelation, then pulled a can of beer from his robe pocket.

“You drink?”

I was 19 or maybe 20 at the time and certainly drank beer, much of which I bought from him, but not usually at that hour.

 “Sure.”

“Cigar?” he said, offering me a demitasse from his other pocket.

“Yeah,” I said, though I didn’t smoke. He had an elegant silver lighter of a kind I’d never seen that he snapped open for me.

“You’re here early,” I said.

“No. Sometimes I sleep here. There are problems, chico,” he said, discreetly pulling the .38 out of his robe for a moment like I’d never seen it before or didn’t know anything about the problems on my street.

“How long have you been here?”

“Tiempo, tiempo,” he said. He smoked his cigar and swallowed some beer. “Y usted?”

I’d been there for a few months and expected to stay for a couple years, to graduate from college, get a career going, and move on. None of that happened, of course, in the way I had planned.

He smoked, shifting his weight, and rubbing his left leg.

I looked at him and his leg long enough for him to say, “Bayonet.”

“What happened?”

He tapped some ash off the end of his cigar and grunted. I thought that an odd response until, years later, I had enough sense to fill in the blanks.

“You’re a hard worker,” he said. I shrugged.

“Mira! The sun is rising and you’re drinking on the street after your work, and the birds are singing their songs.” He grinned, which I realized then was something I’d never seen him do. I also hadn’t noticed the birds, but he was right. The side streets around us were lined with old maples full of birds determined to wake up everyone in Brooklyn.

My cigar had gone out and he produced the lighter again.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked.

“Saigon,” he said, snapped it closed, and put it in his robe.

He finished his cigar, tossed it into the gutter, and drained his beer.

“Take good care, chico.” He put his hand on my shoulder for a moment and then stooped under the steel security shutter to crawl back into his shop.

I saw him a few more times but we never talked like that again. Then one day some young guy was behind his counter when I showed up to buy beer.

I asked about the man and the guy said, “He’s dead. Cancer or something. You 21?”

I am 61 now and have lived on the Key Peninsula for over 20 years, somehow, not pursuing the career I wanted but one that pursued me instead. I was sitting on my deck the other morning before dawn, listening to the birds waking up. I’d just made it home after a dreadful night and was drinking a large breakfast whisky and smoking a demitasse cigar before going to bed.

One of my neighbors stomped up our shared dirt road howling profanities into the towering firs around us.

I called out to her. She stopped, embarrassed I think. I waved her over with my cigar.

She had been in the neighborhood for a year or two, but we knew each other only by sight. She was in her 30s or 40s, and she was shaking. I offered her a blanket, which she refused. I handed her a glass of whisky, which she accepted. We smoked a cigar. We watched the sun come up over the towering firs. I invited her inside with a cup of tea and she stood by the hot wood stove while I made her a piece of toast with blackberry jam from another neighbor. She put her arms around me and wept, and wept, and wept. That woke up my wife, still wearing yesterday’s clothes, like me. Our neighbor hugged her too and walked back down the road, back to her home.

My wife squinted at what remained in the whisky bottle, poured a cup of tea, and lit a cigar for herself.

“What was that all about?” she said, not unreasonably.

“I didn’t ask,” I said.

Associate Editor Ted Olinger steps in this month. Lisa Bryan will return in October.