4th
Stoop
Handsome, the man next door, grew Elephant Ears. “The biggest leaf you can grow at this latitude,” I heard him say, over and over again.
He didn’t say this to me, but to the dozens of passersby who asked about the Elephant Ears, every day, as they made their way from Washington Avenue to the Grand Army Plaza subway station. A sample conversation:
“What is that plant?”
“Elephant Ear.”
“Well, look at that.”
“Biggest leaf you can grow at this latitude. Theyey grow from bulbs. You should see the ones in the back. These are in pots, so they’re runts. The ones in back—oh brotha!”
And this, of course, is why Handsome grew Elephant Ears. He spent a lot of time on his stoop. Up to six hours a day. Handsome was retired. He would not have looked out of place in a cop bar. But Handsome was ex-school system, not ex-police. And there were no ex-school system bars. Handsome had been a maintenance man-turned-manager of maintenance men turned house-rich retiree. He’d bought his brownstone at the peak of crack for shells and beads. “Eighty thousand,” I heard him say, “And the roof was in the basement.” He’d been restoring it, little by little, for almost thirty years. For fifteen of those thirty years, the place had been livable. Now he was slowing down, he said. He had nothing but stoop time now.
I never asked Handsome about the Elephant Ears, because I’d already overheard everything there is to know about Elephant Ears. I’d also overheard most of what there was to know about Handsome. I knew his name was Handsome, for example, because once a day, usually around 5:45pm, a young thickset woman with a pretty dollbaby face and a mahagony finish and an Island lilt and an afternoon sashay that fit her thickset but but unheavy frame walked by and said
“Hey, Handsome.”
And he answered, “Hey, Gorgeous.”
And Gorgeous would stay a while, sometimes for a glass of wine, sometimes just for the conversation, which was plentiful.
Here’s what I learned, sitting ten feet away, behind my open window, at my desk, where I did the bulk of my not-working in those days.
Gorgeous: “They gonna bury my uncle. What they chahge for just the coffin—oh!”
Handsome: “That’s why I buried my mother out back.”
Gorgeous: “Go on with your silly self!”
Handsome: “It’s true! This is the truth! She died in Boca. And she’d chosen cremation, I don’t know, years back. So I go down to Florida to get it done, and the funeral parlor shows me the bill. I say, no way. Five thousand for a box? A box you’re gonna burn? Five thousand? I can get a box for zero thousand. And they say, what are you talking about? and I say, I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. I’m going to go down to that supermarket, that Publix or whatnot, on the corner, and I’m going to go in the back and ask for one of those six by three cardboard boxes they deliver the toilet paper in. And I’m gonna bring it back here and we’re gonna put my mother in it and we’re gonna burn her. And they say, what’s wrong with you? And I say, nothing, what’s wrong with you—trying to sell people five thousand dollar boxes you’re gonna burn? And I go to the Publix and I get them to give me a six by three cardboard toilet paper warehouse box, and I bring it back and say, put my mother in that. They say OK, and I say, and one more thing: I want to watch. And they say, what’s wrong with you, are you crazy? Are you sick? And I say, no I’m not crazy, I’m not sick. I used to operate an incinerator for the school system. I know how it works, and I want to watch. Because I want to make sure it’s her in there, you know? So they had to let me watch.”
