My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [9]
GEORGE PLIMPTON IS seventy-five years old, as tall as an NBA small forward, as pale as New England fog, and usually covered with gashes and scrapes, as if he’s just emerged from a rosebush. Some of the wounds result from being old and having unfortunate Wasp skin, which I share, but beyond that George lives in a tall man’s goofy world and is constantly crashing into things, tripping over them, or causing them to fall on him simply by being in their presence. Once, after those of us who work for him thought we had seen all of him there was to be seen (I wasn’t kidding when I said he liked to walk around the office in his boxers, although usually only after hours), he took the opportunity to show the office an MRI of his testicles, which had been injured at a writers’ conference in a late-night collision with a golden retriever.
Lest I create the image of a clown, however, let me be clear in saying that George is anything but. Funny, yes. Refreshingly juvenile for a seventy-five-year-old—that too. But George also has a formidable side. You don’t become a bestselling author, friend to numerous presidents, real-life action hero (it was George who tackled Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel after the assassination of Robert Kennedy), and remain in the public eye for fifty years without a certain amount of gravitas. George can be goofy, but you never know if the tree branches in his hair and the giant rip in the seat of his pants are the result of an accident or a ploy to put people at ease. He’s wily—plus, he can drink anyone under the solid mahogany pool table in his living room. He still plays tennis to the death with men one-third his age.
After letting myself into the Plimpton townhouse I go upstairs and knock on the door.
“George?” I call out. The door is open, but the Plimpton apartment seems empty. “Anybody home?” No answer. I check the kitchen and living room and, finding no one, decide to rest a moment on the couch. Jesus, what do they put in the Men’s 4-Pac? I am feeling strangely … handsome, which doesn’t seem at all appropriate to the occasion.
I take a moment to savor being in the Plimpton apartment, with its astounding 180-degree panoramic view of the East River (seen from the same distance and height as a passenger on a luxury liner), its de Kooning and Warhol posters, its trophy kills from safaris in Kenya. Many times since Gab and I moved to Staten Island and our year of sharing bathrooms and eating in front of the television began, I have come up here to remind myself how it’s possible to live. Not to be a jerk, but it’s a nice change every once in a while to be in a house where food isn’t stored on the front porch. Coming to George’s from Kay’s is like going from the set of a Korean Married with Children to one of those three-page foldout magazine advertisements for Ralph Lauren.
Suddenly I hear a noise from the far end of the apartment—a snort or a roar, like a wild animal coming out of the bush.
“Hello, George?” I get up from the couch in a hurry, not wanting to be seen taking my leisure as an uninvited guest in the home. It’s bad enough that if I ever come back here it’s likely to be as a delivery boy with a sandwich order.
“Snuphuluphuluph!!” The beast erupts again, sounding this time more like a sleeping bear. I creep (it’s hard to creep in the Plimpton apartment because it has old oak floorboards that groan underfoot like the mast of an ancient schooner) through the second living room, around the pool table, under the glare of a mounted African water buffalo, past the temptation of a quick shot of Tanqueray from the open bar, and into George’s office, where I find the old man dead asleep, passed out in