Hot Dog

So I spent what felt like an hour on the phone arguing with a producer about a client of mine,
she had a kind of small part in a film he had done and now he was all, oh, she was so difficult
to work with, and I took a deep breath and said, she told me that she had to do a couple of
scenes a couple of times because one of your stars had flubbed some lines. And he said, yes,
but, and I said, so it wasn't her fault, and he said, but she was difficult and I said, I heard that
your star tried to blame her for him missing his lines... and long story short, he said, oh... ok, she
was all right, and I said so give her another chance, and he said, oh... ok, ok tell her to come
by tomorrow, she can pick up her script...

So I called her three or four times before she answered the phone, she said she was out
doing laundry, and I told her, good luck, I got you the part, just make sure you stop by the
same place tomorrow and pick up your script, and for God's sake just smile and say thank
you, say thank you and leave. No remarks or BS or faces, okay?

And she said, ok, thank, I love you.

She loves me. Hurray for me. It pays my bills.

And... one of my best clients calls as I am about to leave and says, hey, I just got back into
town, I'll be there in twenty minutes.

So I had 20 minutes to grab some lunch and bring it back to the office, grab an extra bag of
chips or something in case he wanted something to pick at. So I closed the door to the office
and stuck the "be back in 20 minutes" note on the door and headed off to the deli: and today I
was feeling like my idea of a chicken salad special, chicken salad on rye with some chopped
swiss and some chopped corned beef mixed in. To each his own.

"Hey"

"Hey?" I looked to my left and saw some schlep smiling at me. "Got a quarter to spare, pal?"
he said and I said, "no, didn't bring any change with me but if you catch me on the way back, I
might have a quarter to spare."

Just another of of those guys you see shuffling around the area, shabby and usually broke and
looking for either change that would add up to a cheap bottle at the nearest liquor store or --

"Hey?"

"So what do you need a quarter for? Trying to get back to Astoria?" I said and he said, "I got
15 cents, another 25 cents and I can get a hot dog, come on, gimme a little help, pal, I need
something to eat."

"I don't have any change with me, I told you. Catch me on the way back and maybe," and he
said, "ok, anything you say."

He proceeded to alternately ask other passerbys if they had any spare change and then
hurried to catch up to me.

"Yeah, I need something to eat," he said. "I just need like another 20 cents to get a hot dog,
the guy up the corner charges extra for kraut, but there's a guy the next block down gives it for
free," he said, and I finally said...

Nothing, because he was one of those many locals schleps and characters you'd see around,
and you knew he could get a meal at the Salvation Army or one of those places so it was a
good guess that he mostly wanted to get himself a bottle of Thunderbird or something like
that.

He almost stopped and pulled a newspaper from the nearly full trash can. "Look at that," he
said, "I always knew he was no good." He tossed the paper back in the trash and caught up
with me.

"You see this?" he said to me and he pulled up a kind of grimy cuff to show me that he had a
cheap watch on his wrist. "Belonged to my father, but it doesn' work anymore."

No doubt. Probably found it in the trash somewhere.

"When it worked I coulda hocked it and gotten a room for a few weeks, but it doesn' work
anymore. He's dead a long time. Momma, too. We didn' have much even then." He looked at
the wristwatch, shook his wrist a few times as if that would make anything happen, he held it to
his ear for a few seconds, then shrugged. "Yeah, belonged to my granfather, and he left it to
my father, and he left it to me. A classic timepiece."

So I said, "Look, let me go in here and get my lunch, you want a hot dog, I'll get you a hot dog,
ok?"

I remember a cartoon, two dogs chasing Sylvester the cat, and the small dog was all "Hey Alf,
Hey Alf, Hey Alf" and that was this guy, not drunk, not stoned, but very hey Hey HEY, kind of a
rapid time talking, almost too fast, you could almost see him bobbing up and down with
excitement as he spoke.

So I went in the deli, my dirty lovely old deli, owner had been there at least 25 years, had a few
autographed pictures of some celebrities behind him when he stood at the cash register.
Cash register only went up to two dollars, that's how old it was. "So you gotta bring a bum to
hang around my store?" the owner said. He was in his usual mood. I told him what I wanted,
then added, "and give me a hot dog with some kraut on it." Yeah, sure, anything for you, he
said without a word.

I glanced at the paper on the counter for a few moments. Yep, crooked politician got caught. Could
get jail, too, if he wasn't making deals with the right people.

I took my order and paid for it, went out side. The schlep was about ten feet away, trying to
grub up change off an occasion passerby. He followed me as I walked back to the office for a
few blocks until I finally said, "look here." I showed him a quarter in one hand and the hot dog
in the other and said, "pick one."

He suddenly shook his head, more of a twitch at being giving an unexpected decision to
make.  He moved his hands about in front of his chest for a moment, but he finally reached for
the hot dog.

He ate the hot dog as he followed me, noisy as it was I could almost hear him eating between "thank you" and "thank you."

About a block and a half before I got back to the office, he'd finished, and he put his hand on
my arm and said, "thank you, pal, you're a prince," and I said, "so leave me alone, I have to get
back to work." He said "thank you" again and was about to walk away when I said, "here," and
gave him the quarter. "So go get your liquor."

He smiled and walked away. Meanwhile, upstairs, my client was stinking up the hallway outside
my office with a cigar when I got off the elevator. You ignore it if it's worth it.

Luncheon

SO I had the time for a real sit-down lunch, you know, actually sitting at a table in a deli instead of just going into the deli and saying "give me a pastrami on rye" and you grab a bag of chips and a bottle of seltzer and run back to your office.

And anyway I was dining with a client, a hot young lady who I though had real potential for, you know, like slasher movies, but she was really good looking and sexy and could actually remember lines, and fifteen percent is still fifteen percent, and maybe you get lucky, you know?

So I took her to this deli near my office, a kind of old crappy place with the sign outside that hadn't been painted in probably twenty years and where you could tell the floors under the tables rarely get a good cleaning, but the food was really good for the price and the prices were decent, so we took a booth that was just big enough to fit four people, and we'd just started eating after talking for a while, me a chicken salad sandwich on rye and her a tuna salad on white, and a plate of fries between us, the usual pickle wedges and cole slaw coming with the meal, when I see this kind of shabby looking old fella comes in, and the owner behind the counter had a look on his face of 'get out of here, you bum', as the old fella was pulling his hand from his pocket and he said, "look, I got fifty cents, how about you give me fifty cents worth of cole slaw, maybe a piece of bread so I can have a little something to eat..."

And the owner was looking like, ok, fifty cents it is, and then the look was like, and then get out.

 So I waved a hand and said, "Hey, it's ok, he can sit with us."

And I said to my client, "Honey, come sit next to me," and I waved the old guy over and motioned for him to sit on the other side of the table. As the old schlep was sitting himself down, I asked him, "You want a bagel or something like that?" And he, looking like he was touched at my bit of generosity, said, "thank you, yes, with some butter, that would be very nice of you."

So the girl came around to my side of he table and the old guy eased himself into the other side of the booth. "Famous people used to sit here, people from before your time, show business people" the old guy was saying before he took a look over his shoulder to see what the owner was doing, then he carefully took a pickle wedge and pushed it into his mouth. He nodded his head as he chewed, after swallowing he said, "they have very good pickles here, real old fashioned quality."

Kat, she liked to call herself, Katherine or Mary Katherine, something like that, who was never going out without her cross and probably didn't believe any of it, rubbed my knee. "I'll tell you later," she said with a wink. I know what you're thinking and you shouldn't be thinking that, you know, I am her agent, and mixing business and pleasure is only for those with an expensive lawyer.

The busboy brought over a bagel cut in half and with butter oozing out the edges. I took the half of my sandwich I hadn't gotten to and used a knife to push some of the filling on to the plate next to the bagel. "Here, make it a little more filling." Again he was looking like he would get tears in his eyes.

He took a bite of the bagel, and after chewing and swallowing, he said, "I am descended from Eric the Red, the great Norwegian conquerer."

"Really? I would have thought you were Jewish", and Kat said, "me, too, aren't people like that, you know, like warriors?"

"Oh, hush," I said into her ear, "hush."

The old fellow was a real schlep, you know, looking like he wore clothes from a poor box, not trash you'd find in the street but second or maybe third hand stuff, but looking at him you could see he had that certain dignity and style of someone who was a failed someone.

"My father was a rabbi, and his father, and his father, but they had so many children that they didn't know what to do. I was the last of nine, and I could have been a shamas, but I..."

His face fell. "Oy," I hollered, "bring my friend a cup of coffee here," I said.

"Too many sons, and too many cousins, and so many sisters who needed for their dowries..." He fell silent, not looking up or down or at anything, just staring at whatever he saw looking between my right ear and Kat's left ear. Kat nudged me and then whispered in my ear, "he's had a terrible life, if he's telling the truth."

If. Could be.

"But it still could have been good for us, if we'd had any luck, but then the shul burned down and we had to leave. A small wooden shul in the town... papa wept for days before we left."

Kat seemed touched and almost put her hand on his. "I remember my grandmother telling me how her grandparents left Ireland when they were children because of the famine. That was a long time ago, and there was nothing to eat, but they had a little money and they managed to come to America."

"It's all too sad to talk about, long gone friends also told me about that... real entertainers they were, some of them," he said. "Anyway, the story that was handed down from parents to children was that hundreds of years ago, the Vikings raided a city in the east, someplace near Russia, near the schtetl my family came from, and one of the vikings was badly hurt and was left to die. My ancestors had made a trip to sell some chickens or ducks -- no one is sure if it was chickens or ducks -- and they found the viking by the road and took him back with them. And over some time he was able to recover some of his health and he married into the family.

He even let them, you know, like all Jewish boys have done. And that is hundreds of years ago, but you can see how I inherited my red hair and blue eyes and that is why my family name is from Eric of the Red Shield, grandson of Eric the Red, Rothschild..."

And we sat and finished our lunch without anything being said, then he pulled a coin from his pocket and let us look at it. "See this? It's a coin from my viking ancestor. I don't want to ask anyone how much I could sell it for, because I would never sell it, but it means the world to me, that I had an ancestor who was a warrior king."

Kat and I looked at the coin for a long few seconds, he let us see both sides of the coin before he put it back in his pocket. I will admit that his fingernails looked cleaner than you would think.

And he got up and said, "You have been very kind to me, I appreciate your kindness, but I must be going now, it is time for me to go and say Kaddish for my mother." As he left, I watched the owner watch him leave, he turned giving me a half dirty look for inviting such a person to sit in his fine establishment. Another fella who admires himself too much.

"I kind of thought a guy like that would be like those people you see sleeping on the subway, you know, dirty and stuff, but he was okay," she said.

"He used to be a small time actor, " I said, "the kind of guy you'd see in old movies selling newspapers, delivering mail, bit parts, things like that. Lives in a little room in one of those SROs, probably gets a check or two every month, but it's the end of the month so he's probably down to his last dollar or two. Probably made that whole thing up, bought the coin in a hock shop. Harmless."

"But what was that word he said about his mother? Cattish..?" she asked, "what does that mean?" and I said "Kaddish - it's the Jewish prayer for the dead. All about praising God."

And she said, "I remember when my mother died a couple of years ago. She smoked like two packs a day, and I asked her to stop and she smiled and shrugged it off. And I cried at the funeral mass and others said it was the will of God, and I think I told them 'fuck you.' But you were very nice to him, that's what I wanted to tell you when I rubbed your knee. "

Poor girl. Nice girl. I think I have another slasher movie for her, I gotta get back to my office.