Honey, The Movers Are Here

NINE Nesting Places Pompano Ron At night if I thought about my business properties at all—trucks, building—I’d see them in my mind’s eye as empty, inert, waiting for the next day’s activities to animate them. Never did I think they might have a life separate from the life I gave them. At least that’s the way it was for the first six months, till my first spring, till my first middle-of-the-night phone call from the police. A prowler had been discovered on my truck lot. The police were unable to go in and get him because the gate was locked. Would I come down and open it? Karyn (often referred to as Pumpkin) rode with me on a fast trip through dark, deserted city streets. “So far we’ve been lucky,” she said, “but naïve to think the crime in that neighborhood would pass us by.” The business had been growing so fast that I was looking at the world through rose-colored safety glasses. Now it seemed those rosy goggles were about to come off. “We were living in a fool’s paradise,” I said. “Sooner or later some crack head was bound to break into the truck compound looking for something he can sell to subsidize his self-destructive behavior." “Let’s just hope he didn’t do damage to the trucks,” she said. Suddenly my imagination was aflame with broken windshields, smashed headlights and slashed tires. Not to mention sugar in the gas tanks. Swirling cruiser dome lights bathed my building and trucks in an eerie crimson glow, a surrealistic landscape populated with red-faced policemen with nightsticks and flashlights. “He’s behind that truck,” an officer said, indicating with his flashlight beam my recently acquired cube van. (I had added to my fleet a sixteen-foot van, built low to the ground for easy access, perfect for small apartments, large pianos and AT&T work other than scrap tear outs.) As I fiddled with the padlock on the gate chain, an officer hollered, “There he is!” I looked up to see a dark figure emerging from the deep shadow between trucks. The officer shined his light on the man’s face. “It’s Pompano Ron,” I said with a sigh of relief. “You know him?” the in-charge cop said. “Yes, but I didn’t know he was back from Florida.” “Florida?” the cop snorted. Pompano Ron’s weather-beaten appearance didn’t fit the snowbird stereotype of a senior citizen with deep pockets and a white vinyl belt. “He winters there,” I said, finally getting the padlock open. “To be near the dog tracks.” Pompano stood on the other side of the gate, licking at his walrus mustache. “I like the dogs,” he explained to the cop. “What’re you doing on a truck lot at night?” the officer demanded. “Looking for a place to rest my weary bones,” Pompano said. “And your weary bones mistook these trucks for motel units?” I sensed the policeman becoming testy so I stepped in. “Thanks for your help, officer, but I can handle it from here.” After the police scattered, I asked Ron how he’d gotten onto the lot. “That barbed wire cost me plenty,” I said, “and it didn’t do the job.” “A hobo’s life is not an easy one,” he said. “You learn certain skills.” He showed me how to slip like a snake between the gate and fence post. Like he had rubber ribs. The barbed wire was a non-issue because he didn’t climb over the top. “Well,” I said, “so much for security. Two thousand bucks wasted on a fence. Why were you in there anyway?” “To sleep in the cube van,” he said. “So I’d be here for work in the morning. Assuming you can use me, of course.” “There’s always a place for Pompano Ron.” I walked him to the building and unlocked the office door. “There’s furniture pads in the backroom to sleep on,” I told him. I met Pompano Ron while The Sheik and I were partnering at Lerch’s. Pampano Ron was just plain Ron in those days. The Sheik and I ran two trucks at the time, Sheik drove and packed one and I the other. We each needed two helpers. Sheik was in charge of manpower and I’d spend my dreary days with crews he chose for me, mostly his relatives and friends whose conversation, as indicated earlier, was limited to sexploits. Occasionally an auslander would slip in to bring me news of the wider world. I’d enjoy the change of face and request that person for the following day. Such was the case with Ron. But Ron, trembling on the threshold of his career as a hobo after his marriage had crumbled, was unreliable, often a no-show, and Sheik would have to go to the phone at eight a.m. for a frenzied round of calls to try to find me another helper. One morning after an exhausting telephone ordeal, Sheik angrily announced, “I know you like working with that guy, but he don’t work here anymore. He’s finished. Period.” Period. After The Sheik shit-canned him, Ron and I still kept in touch, “touch” being the operative word. Ron knew I was a soft touch, always good for a ten and didn’t expect to be paid back. He’d phone for a meet at Livio’s, a corner bar and restaurant about fifty feet from my house—Livio’s was a center of civility and decorum in contrast to the extravagances of the Zig Zag or Dirty Demmies—where Ron would regale me with hobo stories, worth ten bucks anytime, better value for my money than going to the movies. Pumpkin, also a Pompano Ron fan, often accompanied me, although she, while conceding that his peculiarities afforded a rich mine of entertainment, once jokingly offered the assessment that “The man should be fitted with a cap and bells.”