in his good graces, so I could interview him about his experience on Enchantment. Sometimes I don’t know what I am thinking or why or even when. My mind travels a thousand miles an hour, careening wildly from topic to topic. It is a thing I must work on, stilling this monkey mind, as the Buddhists call my mind, even though its monkey-ness is a by-product of my intelligence. But due to this intellect, I am a monkey on a string, the butt of some constant cosmic joke of the gods.
“Go away,” he says.
I GIVE UP FOR now. Back in my apartment, I find I cannot focus on work. I write a poem for my blog Poems and Curios:
Home.
Finally home.
Suddenly home.
Never home.
Always home.
Without home.
Going home.
Goodbye home.
Broken home.
Leaving home.
O, Home, where did you go?
O, Homo.
Oh.
Conclusion: Home is a word of great power.
Research: Is this so in other languages? Is there a language in which there is no word for home? How might a person from such a culture think? Where would they say they live? Reread Whorf!!! This could be important!!!
I watch the screen for several hours, constantly refreshing, waiting for the comments to appear. They do not.
I knock on his door again, prepared to make my case. It opens. Now without makeup, I see he is ancient and African American. Oh, the lessons I could learn from him, the places we’ll go. But he is odd and distant minus his makeup, even odder and distanter. I attempt to show him I mean him no harm. Oh, the things he must have seen as an African American. The places he must’ve gone in his long and relentlessly African American lifetime. He was born in 1908. Perhaps his parents had even been slaves. Certainly his grandparents. He is a frail, hunched giant. He wears those new beige orthopedic Nikes everybody is going on about. Air Garry Marshalls. Several elderly people have been killed by several other elderly people down here in Florida for these shoes.
“I mean you no harm,” I explain.
He says nothing. Perhaps he didn’t hear me.
“I mean you no harm,” I tell him again, this time louder.
He bares his gums at me.
“Perhaps I could have you over for tea,” I say.
No response.
“I have written a monograph on William Greaves. The great avant-garde African American filmmaker.”
I’m grasping at straws. It is not fair to me that he is suspicious of all white people. I understand from whence that instinct comes, but still. I am not that guy, as the kids say, and I am making every effort.
“I have an African American girlfriend,” I tell him as the door closes.
I spend hours at my peephole. It is not healthy. He never leaves his apartment. I hatch and discard plan after plan. Might I borrow some ingredient or other for a pie? I’m going to the grocery store, does he need anything? Does he know a good barber? When is trash day again? Do you smell that?
Then his door opens. He peeks out into the hall, looks directly at my door. Is he trying to avoid me? It seems almost cruel at this point. But I remain hidden, watching. I don’t want to step out until he is well into the hall, until he has closed his door behind him and cannot get back into his apartment in time if I happen to appear. He emerges, closes his door. I do as well.
“Oh, hello,” I say. “I’m B. We’ve met. When you were wearing your costume. We even chatted.”
He doesn’t respond.
“I’m the fellow with the African American girlfriend. Perhaps you recall me.”
He shuffles slowly toward the staircase in his beige boat-like orthopedic kicks.
“Anyway, I was thinking since we are neighbors, we should exchange keys. In case of emergency.”
I fear this is too much too soon. I attempt to backpedal.
“Or just tea. Not saying we should exchange tea, but rather enjoy a cup together.”
Nothing.
Then something miraculous happens. He falls down the stairs. It’s a brutal tumble as if he has been pushed, and I worry someone will think he was pushed and then think that I pushed him. Which I did not and would never. I would never do that. I make a mad dash back into my apartment and close the door, waiting for another tenant, alerted by the noise of his tumble, his moans, to come to the old man’s aid. I will arrive second. That’s my alibi. Then I realize the other tenants in the building are either deaf or blind or some combination of the two. It is my great good fortune that the sad man with no car (deaf) happens to enter the building at this very moment.
“I’ll take him to the hospital!” I scream from my doorway. “I have a car!”
He doesn’t hear me of course and begins dragging Ingo toward what I assume is the nearest bus stop. I run down the stairs and roughly shake the neighbor by the arm to get his attention. He looks up at me.
“I’ll take him to the hospital. I have a car,” I mouth (using my now-perfected nose-breathing technique). He nods. I worry that this carless sad man will in the future ask for car favors now that he has been made aware of my carfulness, but this is my only opportunity and I must seize it, as Saul Bellow (Jewish and wonderful!) teaches us in his book Seize Today.
On the road to urgent care, I try to engage again.
“I am B.,” I tell him. “Perhaps you recall we chatted.”
I explain that B. is my first initial, which I use professionally as well as personally so as not to clutter my film writings with the gender assumptions of my multitudinous readers, or of those in my personal life, either.
He says nothing.
“I didn’t push you,” I say, almost shrieking it. In case there is some confusion about that.
I need him to know.
“My girlfriend is African American,” I fully shriek.
I need him to know that as well.
He glances over at me, then looks straight ahead and speaks:
“And he went up from thence unto Beth-el; and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him: ‘Go up, thou baldhead; go up, thou baldhead.’ And he looked behind him and saw them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she-bears out of the wood, and tore forty and two children of them. 2 Kings 2:23–24.”
“Jesus. That’s the Bible?” I say. “Jesus. What the hell?”
I wonder if he is mocking my baldness. Or threatening me with bears.
AT THE DESK I watch as he fills out the forms. He is 119! Wasn’t he just 116? No matter, a fall at either of those ages is understandable, and not anyone’s fault, certainly not mine. I did not push him. Truly, the miracle is that he is at his age still ambulatory. It is remarkable, and he should be grateful I saved him, rather than pointing fingers.
I put myself down as his emergency contact while he is distracted searching for his Medicare