Feb 1st, 2002
Rodrick
Rodrick wears his white socks pulled up like an old-school basketball player. There is about five inches of pasty flesh between the tips of his socks and the bottom edge of his shorts, which had once been white, but had since evolved into more of a cream color. A long black Pittsburgh Steelers t-shirt is draped over his withered torso and the neckline has been stretched out enough that it reveals a thin white patch of his chest hair.
His skin hue is only a shade darker than his creamy white shorts and the only element of color on his entire body that echoes of life is his faded blue eyes. He is a hunchback not in the question-mark/45 degree angle/”I’m sort-of a hunchback” meaning of the word, but rather in the perpendicular to the Earth/Sphinx riddle three legged creature/”I’m a full blown hunchback” manner.
As far as I can tell, Rodrick’s hobbies include walking to and from the 7-11 down the block and breathing. Being the shirker that I am, I often find myself lounging on the floor of my living room, by the large window that opens onto Sixth Avenue, which allows me an unfettered view of pedestrians.
In a self-serving effort to increase my karma, I sometimes notice when Rodrick walks by my window and I pause my game of Madden ‘97 and walk outside to open the door for him. Three legged creatures have a hard time opening doors sometimes. I also make an effort to greet him whenever I see him, and he responds softly in a child-like voice.
One day as I am opening the door for him, he looks up at me with his faded blue eyes and asks whether or not I am Jewish.
“No,” I answer. “I’m not Jewish.”
“You look Jewish,” says Rodrick, which is strange because being half-Korean and half-Iranian, I look anything but Jewish. I quickly add that to the list of various races I’ve been mistaTim for (which includes Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Italian, Chilean, Filipino, amongst others) and politely smile at him.
“I’m not Jewish.”
“Is Tim Jewish?” He asks while cocking his head to the side.
“No, Tim’s not Jewish either.”
“What is Tim?”
“Tim is Italian and Polish,” I answer. I silently wonder if Rodrick, thinking neither of us are Jewish, is going to just walk by and into his apartment without every speaking to either of us again.
“I’m sorry,” he begins. “It’s just that you are so polite, I thought you were Jewish.”
“Nope, not Jewish,” I answer.
“I would like to get to know you guys,” Rodrick proclaims boldly.
“That sounds great,” I respond.
“Well, okay,” Rodrick says as he lurches by. “What is your name?”
“My name is John, and yours?”
“My name is Rodrick, nice to meet you Jamie.”
A few days later, I hear my doorbell ring and it is Rodrick in his black Steelers t-shirt with the low-hanging neckline and pulled up white socks.
“Hello Rodrick, how are you doing,” I ask.
“Hi Jeremy,” he begins, and then looks to the side nervously. “I have a favor to ask, but maybe I won’t ask it.”
“What is it?” I answer, hoping that he isn’t about to ask me to knock somebody off for him or something crazy like that.
“Well,” he begins as he looks in my direction, still not making eye contact with me, “I need to go to the bank on 5th and University and it’s really cold outside and it’s just that my back starts to ache when it’s cold. And the bus comes every twenty minutes,” looking up at me, he concludes: “I was hoping you might give me a ride?” Then, thinking for a moment he adds, “Do you even have a car?”
I let out a quiet snort of amusement at his question and answer, “No, I don’t have a car.” An image of me jogging to the store, carrying Rodrick on my back, appears and then disappears quickly.
“But Tim has a car. When Tim comes back a bit later, we’ll take you to the bank.”
“No, it’s all right,” Rodrick says with a slight tinge of resignation, “I can just take the bus, it’s not a problem.”
“No, we will take you. Really.”
“No, I don’t want to trouble you.”
I resist the urge to grab him and shake him while shouting “We’ll give you a ride god damnit, now stop being ridiculous!” and instead say, “Let me get your phone number so I can call you when Tim gets back.”
His smile breaks into a genuine smile of relief as I walk inside to get a pen. “Thanks Jeremy,” he says.
“Actually, it’s John.”
“How do you spell that?”
“Let me write it down for you,” I say as I reach for another yellow stick-it.
I hand him my phone number and he turns to leave. Abruptly, his eyes widen and he asks, “Do you want to see my house?”
I look at him and say “Sure.”
While we were walking down the hall, Rodrick asked if I knew anyone who needed a room to rent. Although I did have a friend, Jamie, who needed a room, but the image of Jamie stumbling in drunk at 3:00 in the morning and mistaking Rodrick for a futon prevented me from mentioning his name.
When I lived in Washington, DC, I had a similar experience in which I walked into an elderly couple’s house and all of a sudden felt as though I was going to drown in an overwhelmingly large cache of junk. Newspapers and furniture were scattered around in a chaotic mess that made me feel a bit lightheaded. It was a slight shock therefore, when I walked into Rodrick’s apartment and saw that it was pristine. There were jade Buddha statues surrounded by a tasteful array of plants in one corner of the room and a home theatre entertainment system in another. The room was furnished with a rouge-colored matching living room set, adorned with intricate wood patterning.
“Your house is very nice Rodrick,” I commented while walking in.
“Thank you,” he answered. “I used to be an interior decorator,” he said as he walked towards the extra room that he wanted to rent out.
It was an extension of the dining room, which had a flimsy sliding-door partition. Like the rest of his house, it was immaculate. It contained a bathroom, which I noted with interest, was substantially larger than the one that Tim and I shared.
“Looks really nice Rodrick,” I stated while enviously scrutinizing the bathroom. Rodrick pulled a chair out of from underneath his sparkling glass dining room table and sat down with a sigh of relief.
“After I got out of the army, I studied interior design at the University of Austin, Texas,” he began. “I did some interior design in Texas before coming here, but everyone out here wanted oak and that really turned me off of it. So I decided to go into the jewelry and pawnshop business.”
Realizing that it was quite rude to stand up while he talked, I quickly glanced around the room. Looking down at a chair, I realized that this could turn into a long-affair if I sat down, so I instead opted to lean against the wall.
“Okay,” I said.
“I made a lot of money in the business but I started taking black angels, do you know what black angels are?”
“No.”
“Amphetamines, black angels? You wouldn’t know, that was before your time. You’ve probably heard of white spiders then.”
“No,” I answered curiously. What the hell was he gabbing on about, I wondered.
“Speed, I spent all of my money on speed.”
I noticed that all of a sudden my attention became completely focused. Rodrick proceeded to explain how he had once had as many as twenty-nine doctors, all selling him prescription amphetamines. He was a self-proclaimed “workaholic, who was addicted to speed.”
I glanced at his barren ring finger and resisted asking him about his family life.
“I go to these meetings at Stepping-Stone,” he said. “Do you know stepping stone?”
I did, as a matter of fact, know stepping-stone. When I had worked at the restaurant up the street, I had always passed by Stepping-stone and seen a group of people outside, smoking up a storm.
“Yes, I know Stepping-stone,” I responded.
“I go to Stepping-Stone every day. It is for people who are on drugs or alcohol. Sometimes people come up with stories that blow your mind. Do you remember that woman who drowned her children a while back?”
“Yes.”
“There are people who have stories like that, wives killing their husbands or their children.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “What?”
“Oh yeah, people will come up and say how they killed their wife or their husband, but it is all anonymous you know. What you say in there stays in there.”
“I think there is some law about people admitting to felonies breaking codes of confidentiality,” I responded, hoping that there was actually such a rule.
“Yeah, but you have to make a judgment call, you know. If you admit something like that, you might be doing a social justice, but then you’ll have all that hanging over your head.”
Not wanting to get into a debate, I simply stated, “Yeah, that sounds interesting. Maybe Tim and I should check that out sometime.”
“You’re straight. You can meet a lot of girls there,” Rodrick said and a slight snicker passed through my head at the concept of picking up girls at Stepping-Stone.
“Yeah, there are a lot of younger people there,” he continued, “and they are always exchanging phone numbers.”
“Tim might be interested in that,” I answered. “I have a girlfriend,” I said, which was a lie.
“Yeah, well, there are all kinds of stories there, just crazy stories that will blow your mind away.”
“Yeah, that sounds really interesting Rodrick, I think the three of us should go there at some point, listen, I have some work to do now, but I’ll call you when Tim gets back and we can go to the bank.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “I can just take the bus.”
Internally sighing, I used the most baritone voice I could muster, and responded, “Rodrick, we will take you to the bank, okay?”
“Thank you.”
As I walked out the door, he asked me if I had seen his cat and I noticed for the first time that there was a white lump in the corner of my room.
“He has won many awards,” Rodrick told me.
The cat, as if acknowledging that he was the object of attention, rolled over and looked at me. It was a white Persian cat with eyes that looked as if they were stained with blood. The fur around its eyes was pink. It looked sickly. “How old is it?” I asked.
“She’s about twelve years old.”
“She’s getting up there, huh?” I answered as I walked out the door.
