time thinking of this crazy old game show I used to watch, Beat the Clock.
I can remember how my mother touched my flushed cheek when I got downstairs,
and the thoughtful concern in her eyes. “Maybe you’re getting sick, too,” she said.
“Maybe I am,” I said, and gladly enough. It was half an hour before I discovered I’d
forgotten to zip my fly. Luckily, neither Peg nor my mother noticed, although on any
other occasion one or both of them would have asked me if I had a license to sell hot
dogs (this was what passed for wit in the house where I grew up). That day one of
them was too sick and the other was too worried to be witty. So I got a total pass.
Lucky me.
What followed the first emotional wave that August day in my apartment was much
simpler: I thought I was going out of my mind. Because those glasses couldn’t be
there. Absolutely could not. No way.
Then I raised my eyes and saw something else that had most certainly not been in my
apartment when I left for Staples half an hour before (locking the door behind me, as I
always did). Leaning in the corner between the kitchenette and the living room was a
baseball bat. Hillerich & Bradsby, according to the label. And while I couldn’t see the
other side, I knew what was printed there well enough: CLAIMS ADJUSTOR, the
words burned into the ash with the tip of a soldering iron and then colored deep blue.
Another sensation rushed through me: a third wave. This was a species of surreal
dismay. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m sure that at that moment I looked as though
I had just seen one.
I felt that way, too. Yes indeed. Because those sunglasses had to be gone—long-time
gone, as the Dixie Chicks say. Ditto Cleve Farrell’s Claims Adjustor. (“Besboll been
bery-bery good to mee,” Cleve would sometimes say, waving the bat over his head as
he sat at his desk. “In-SHOO-rance been bery-bery bad.”)
I did the only thing I could think of, which was to grab up Sonja D’Amico’s shades
and trot back down to the elevator with them, holding them out in front of me the way
you might hold out something nasty you found on your apartment floor after a week
away on vacation—a piece of decaying food, or the body of a poisoned mouse. I
found myself remembering a conversation I’d had about Sonja with a fellow named
Warren Anderson. She must have looked like she thought she was going to pop back
up and ask somebody for a Coca-Cola, I had thought when he told me what he’d seen.
Over drinks in the Blarney Stone Pub on Third Avenue, this had been, about six
weeks after the sky fell down. After we’d toasted each other on not being dead.
Things like that have a way of sticking, whether you want them to or not. Like a
musical phrase or the nonsense chorus to a pop song that you just can’t get out of your
head. You wake up at three in the morning, needing to take a leak, and as you stand
there in front of the bowl, your cock in your hand and your mind about ten percent
awake, it comes back to you: Like she thought she was going to pop back up. Pop
back up and ask for a Coke. At some point during that conversation Warren had asked
me if I remembered her funny sunglasses, and I said I did. Sure I did.
Four floors down, Pedro the doorman was standing in the shade of the awning and
talking with Rafe the FedEx man. Pedro was a serious hardboy when it came to letting
deliverymen stand in front of the building—he had a seven-minute rule, a pocket
watch with which to enforce it, and all the beat cops were his buddies—but he got on
with Rafe, and sometimes the two of them would stand there for twenty minutes or
more with their heads together, doing the old New York Yak. Politics? Besboll? The
Gospel According to Henry David Thoreau? I didn’t know and never cared less than