When Philly was ten he had only heard about the Nepco man, never even seen him, except in bad dreams in the dead of night. Mornings there was something of him in the kitchen as well. It hovered over the battlefield, the table where Herschel and Bertha bombarded each other like opposing armies.
“What kind of a father are you? The kid and you never play catch, never have dinner. You wake up at three in the afternoon and you’re gone by four.”
“He has breakfast with me, for Christ’s sake. “When I come home he’s getting ready for school.”
“He has orange juice and you have a quart of Miller High Life. You stink of brown mustard. Besides, he doesn’t go to school in the summer. Did you forget?”“I work like a dog, for Christ’s sake. I work twelve hours a night, every night.”
“With slimeballs and shitbags you work. What an example you set.”
“You take the money pretty good. You take it and you run with it to Filene’s Basement. You got a closet as big as my walk-in refrigerator. Who’s the whore here?”
“I didn’t ask for this. You used to work days and come home. You’re the owner. Then all of sudden you … you just went into the night.”
The old man drained the Miller High Life, looked at Philly and rolled his eyes. This was a sign that he wanted to shut things up – so he could drag his legs out of his mustard-stained whites and throw his sore feet into some boiling Epsom Salts. So he could slam a door, grab a little sleep and get ready to go behind the counter again from late afternoon until dawn.
But the bombardment wasn’t over.
“You know why I work all night every night, rain or shine?”
“Here we go. Want a shovel?”“If I’m not there at four thirty every morning you can kiss the whole place goodbye. That’s when he comes in.”“He?”
“He.”
“He my ass.”
*******
Other fights were wordier, harder to understand, although the subject was always the same.
“Nobody but me talks to the Nepco man, because if they did, you wouldn’t even have a hanger, let alone a closet.”
Herschel would then launch into a raving treatise on deli economics. He would hammer the table with the empty beer quart and declaim that the core profit item was cured and pickled meats. Not just corned beef and pastrami, but tricky specialty items like rolled beef and spiced beef. The key to making money was to avoid overstocks of these perishables by calibrating deliveries with the distributor, Nepco, The New England Provision Company, and haggling price with their rep, who showed up in a truck every day, pre-dawn.
Their rep. What was a rep? Philly had once heard the old man talk about a cousin who was a state rep. He had an office under the golden dome of the State House. He was the one you called to fix tickets. But this rep, the Nepco man, had a four-wheeled office. It rolled along in the dark carrying barrels of soaking briskets and an arsenal of smoked meats shaped like fat and thin bombs.
Who was he?
“I have a partner, Sherman,” Herschel screamed at Bertha. “He can stuff a cabbage with newspapers and it will taste good, but he can’t even read the English on a can of beans. That’s why he does breakfast and lunch only. You think I can let Sherman the dunce talk to the Nepco man? You think I can let him sign invoices?”
Bertha picked up the empty quart and threw it, shattering, into the other brown beer bottles clumped in the trash. Then she let out a sound, one primal vowel, her voice rising in pitch so it slashed the air much like the exploding bottle. Afterwards, she let the stillness sink in, and she turned and left the kitchen with a hiss:
“He my ass.”
*******
Herschel, Bertha and Philly lived in an apartment so close to the Franklin Park zoo Philly had heard lions roar every day of his life. He knew lions like a Masai warrior. He could tell how the roaring changed tone and ferocity in response to when and how the captives were being fed. Usually their breakfast was huge hunks of horsemeat the keepers would bring around on jitneys. At age fourteen Philly still had this recurring dream, in which the keeper throwing horsemeat into the cage of a huge male lion was really the Nepco man. In the dream the skin of this man was the greenish grey-pink of bad bologna and he wore the uniform of a jail guard. The lion jaws would open and clamp shut on the arm that fed them - except at that point in the dream the limb being mauled wasn’t the Nepco man’s – it was Philly’s, and he would wake up thinking he was covered with blood and crushed bone. He touched his arm and it was wet with blood – until he realized the wet was only sweat.
He had just been through another bout with the dream the day the old man told Philly it was time he earned the price of the orange juice he was drinking. It was seven a.m., the building hot as a jungle, and Bertha had spread newspapers on the kitchen table so it wouldn’t reek like a brewery from Miller High Life spills.
“You really want me to work?”
“With me – tonight. You might as well learn from the best.”
“How late do I have to stay?”
“I’m your ride,” the old man said. “You stay until I go.”
*******
A drive in the old man’s fat Nash took them down the pretzel of roads twisting through the park and the zoo. They burst past the hulking lion house, whose granite blocks sweated such an acrid piss-steam into the sweltering haze it outstank the fumes from the old man’s half-chewed cigar. Right next door came the chain-linked sandlots of wildebeests and antelopes. The denizens stumbled here and there in an endless terror-funk, the old man explained, because every quiver of their snouts brought warning of imminent lion attack.
No lover of animal smells, Herschel floored it past the leering giraffes and sneering camels. The Kohns’ apartment sat on one side of Franklin Park, the deli on the other, and Herschel railed it took a trip through half of Africa to travel between the two.
They parked the Nash out in the back alley, careful not to block a rancid bin of grease barrels. The barrels were hauled off every few days, Herschel explained, by a pig farmer who claimed there was nothing like a few shovels of pastrami lard to make his porkers salivate and gobble up their feed.
Herschel wrestled a rusty latch and a thick metal door swung open, changing the air from humid, hazy and open to torrid, smoky and dense. A great dark stove filled one wall, above it a hanging forest of black, grunge-crusted pans and tentacles of yellow-brown flypaper. Roughly in the center of the sooty floor was a square boulder of butcher block, its top surface worn into a bowl shape like a dugout canoe. This was the meeting table where Herschel and Sherman snarled at each other over a trough of unsold bread pudding. After several moments Sherman shrugged, stubbed out a cigarette, fired up another, and walked out without a word, officially ending the day shift.
“Bread pudding he leaves me,” Herschel said, shaking his head. “After dark, even Santa Claus couldn’t give it away.” He handed off the trough to a red-eyed minion toiling over a sinkful of dirty water and led Philly through a swinging door, out to the counter and a cafeteria setup of fissured formica tables. “This is your battle station.”
*******
For the next two hours, Philly was affixed to a manual slicing machine, rocking back and forth as the circular blade spat mountains of slippery pink and white pastrami slices. “More?” Philly kept asking the old man, as he filled bucket after bucket. “More,” said Herschel. “This is Friday night. Every boozehound and hophead in the city will be staggering in here with the midnight pastrami fits. You’ll see. You think these animals will want bread pudding?”
Herschel took his pastrami and dumped several bucket-loads into a vat sunk into the steamtable. He prepared a brew – it was brown mustard and hot water from the boiler-sized coffee urn – and poured it over the mass of meat. “Wait till that gets going,” Herschel said, pushing the submerged pastrami around with tongs. “With the front door open they’ll be salivating in the streets. Even the goddamn lions will wake up.”
Then he sentenced Philly to donkey work in the cellar.
His assignment was to drag beverage cases and sacks of onions, cabbages and potatoes up the steep, dank, wooden cellar stairs. Haul up a couple of crates of sweet pickle chips, giant mayo jars and cherry peppers too. Then swab at the geologic layers of stair gunk with a mop and pail that smelled like two parts vinegar, one part sewer gas. Turning a corner in the cellar, Philly bumped into a large item that seemed out of character with everything else. It was a couch, and a rose-colored couch at that. Its pillows were frayed, grayed and sagging with flour sacks. But because it was rose-colored and a couch, it stuck out like a birthday balloon in a coal bin.
As the evening pushed toward midnight, Philly leaned on his mop, cocked his ears and followed the swelling influx of customers through the sounds of feet and the trembling of rafters. The gathering turmoil grew from sporadic scrapes and shuffles to a thunderous pounding that shook the bare bulbs dangling around his head.
Then the door at the top of the steps squealed open and Herschel appeared in the rectangle of light, hollering down. “Get up here and clean off some tables, for Christ’s sake. They’re starting to take their trays into the crapper.”
*******
Philly was still clearing and lugging when the round Nehi clock over the coffee urns swung its hands past three a.m. He began to fixate on the clock. Every tick was like a step: the Nepco man leaving some dark warehouse and marching closer.
But the old man was off his feet, reveling in a record-breaking night at the cash register. While the lesser countermen toweled the glass showcases with ammonia, Herschel had set up camp in a distant corner table, off alone in an alcove that housed the cigarette machine. He had a heel of black bread, a heel of hard salami, a freshly lit cigar simmering in an ashtray, a couple of glasses and a fifth of Canadian Club. The old man blew a cigar cloud as Philly plodded towards the kitchen with yet another trayful of dirty plates. At the counter he passed a puffy-eyed cabdriver, the only customer left. The cabdriver ordered prune juice and wanted to know if the men’s room had been cleaned yet from the night before.
After the cabbie had come and gone, the place went into a dead zone. A good ten minutes without a single walk-in. Tables mostly empty, one or two drunk or dismal faces scattered here and there, staring into empty coffee mugs.
Philly emerged from the sink area scouting for more dishes. But on this round the old man stuck his head out from the alcove, extended his arm past the corner and waved the cigar. “Take a load off,” he said. “Get over here.”
Philly set the tray down on an empty table and approached the corner of the alcove. Two steps before he saw them, he smelled them. Herschel had been joined by two women, one nearly as old as Philly’s mother and the other not twenty. From one of them, or both, came a fog of perfume and sweat. It was dense and delicious and nauseating, and it mingled with the old man’s cigar smoke and the gagging reek of Canadian Club. Philly felt he was entering not just an alcove but a separate atmosphere, a tiny tropical island rotting in the sun.
Both women had plump, nun-like faces that reminded him of his fourth grade teacher, Miss McCluskey. But Miss McCluskey had worn no makeup and dressed in dark outfits as concealing as a habit, while these women – Sheila the older and Shannon the younger – were as gaudy as huge, fat parrots.
After they had been seated a while, Sheila stood up and tottered towards “the little girl’s room.” When she returned she bent and clasped her heavy, red-freckled arms around Philly’s head, burying his face, nose and mouth in too-fragrant skin and top-heavy green satin. “I’ll just have to take you under my wing,” she said, in a bubbly voice that made him see she was winking at the old man - even though her pillow-arms and breasts had squeezed his eyes totally shut.
“I think she needs some coffee,” the old man said to Philly, but his look said something else – get out of my face. As Philly stood up and headed for the counter, he heard the old man again, booming around the corner from the alcove. “The coffee’s stale. Dump it and make a fresh urn. It’s good practice for you.”
The stainless steel urn was big as a torpedo, and Philly had worked it only once before, with the old man watching his every move. This time he was on his own with the valves and spigots and the steam, sweating over every step. But finally he saw it – the dark liquid filling up the glass indicator tube. As he turned around to grab a mug and saucer, he had the sense that something about the dining area had shifted radically. It was as though the floor had tilted to a different angle. And, somehow, the clock had tilted too – whole minutes dropping out of the circle and marching on without him. His eyes were nowhere near the round face. Yet he felt the hand kick forward and click sharply, hitting its next mark on the dial. He looked up and saw it was four thirty five. He stared idiotically at the face of the clock, as if it were an oracle that might speak.
But Philly had the answer himself, he had it the instant he emerged from behind the counter with the mug of fresh coffee. He had it because he could smell it - a mass of perfume and cigar smoke that swirled outside the cellar door, huge as a swamp. It left no doubt about where they all had gone.
The very thought of the three of them on the rose-colored couch made the cellar doorknob seem untouchable, as though it had turned to molten metal. Philly backed away from it, fled into the kitchen, and threw the mug into the swill. He shuffled towards a row of crates in the darkest corner of the room, kicked away a mousetrap and sat down – so heavily it was as through he had been thrown down by a wind he couldn’t feel, a force he couldn’t see.
Now he knew everything about the Nepco man. He even knew his name – except it was two names, Sheila and Shannon.
He, Philly thought. The word burst into his mind with a hissing sound. Part of it steam from the dishwashing machine, part of it his mother’s voice.
He my ass.