Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [61]
While I poured coffee into cups at the gate-legged table, Omar Baradinsky, his hairy fingers clasped behind his back, studied the poem on the wall. He must have read it three or four times, but if he moved his lips when he read, I wouldn't have known about it. Omar's pale face, which no amount of exposure to the Florida sun could tan, was almost completely covered by a thick, black, unmanageable beard. This ragged hirsute growth, wild and tangled, began immediately below his circular, heavily pouched brown eyes, and ended in tattered shreds halfway down his chest. A thick, untrimmed moustache, intermingled with his beard, covered his mouth completely. When he talked, and Omar liked to talk, his mouth was only a slightly darker hole in the center of the jet-black tangle of face hair. Out of curiosity, I had asked Omar once why he wore the beard, and his answer had been typical of his new way of life.
“I'll tell you, Frank,” he had boomed. “Did you ever eat baked ham with a slice of glazed pineapple decorating the platter?”
When I admitted that I had, he had pulled his fingers through his beard fondly and continued. “Well, that's what my face looked like when I went to the office every day in New York. Like a slab of glazed, fried, reddish pineapple! For me, shaving once a day wasn't enough. The whiskers grew too fast. I shaved before leaving home in the morning, again at noon, and if I went out again at night, I had to scrape my jowls again. For as long as I can remember, my face was sore, raw in fact, and even after a fresh shave people told me I needed another. So, I no longer have to shave and I no longer shave, and I'll never shave again!”
To see Omar Baradinsky now, standing in my one-and-a-half-room shack near Ocala, wearing a pair of faded blue denim bib overalls, a khaki work shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, scuffed, acid-eaten, high-topped work shoes, and that awe-inspiring growth of black hair covering his face—no one in his right mind would have taken him for a once successful advertising executive in New York City. A closer look at his clothes, however, would reveal that Omar's bib overalls and shirt were expensive and tailored— which they were. He ordered his clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch up in New York, and they would wash and dry without needing to be ironed. In the beginning, I suspect that he had probably started to wear bib overalls as a kind of uniform, to fit some imaginary role he had made up in the back of his mind. But now they had become a part of him, and I couldn't picture Omar wearing anything else.
But Omar had been an advertising man, four years before. Not only had he been a successful executive with a salary of thirty-five thousand dollars a year, he had also owned a twenty-unit luxury apartment house in Brooklyn. He was now a breeder and handler of gamecocks in Florida, keeping Claret crosses and Allen Roundheads, and after four experimental years, slowly beginning to pull ahead. The one remaining tie Omar had with New York was his wife. She visited him annually, for one week, when she passed through central Florida on her way to Miami Beach for the winter season. So far, she had been unable to make him change his mind and return to New York. Omar's wife wasn't the type to bury herself on