The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [185]
of his claws aloft, and the neon lights are programmed to scroll back and forth, in order to suggest, at an unhurried but invariant rhythm, the perpetual opening and closing of a single ominous pincer. (Five) Get off the bus. Your nostrils should immediately detect a strong odor: a curious mixture of fried shrimp and garbage. This is City Island. It’s a pleasant enough place, and I called it home while I lived with Leon in New York and worked as an actor and magician’s assistant. It may perhaps occur to you that the neighborhood strives after the aesthetic of a quaint waterfront community, in that if you are standing on City Island you can scarcely throw a rock without hitting some sort of decorative nautical paraphernalia: ship’s wheels, fishing nets, and wooden caryatids ornament the edifices of nearly every storefront, moldy antique shop, and seafood restaurant, strategically placed so as to absolutely prohibit you from forgetting even for one second that this is indeed a quaint waterfront community, although the effect is not achieved in full because all this maritime poseury is reined in by an ambiance of sleaze that lets you know that although this waterfront community may be quaint, you are still in the Bronx, albeit an obscure pocket of it. The high poison content in any aqueous creature you might happen to catch in that part of Long Island Sound makes it illegal to consume; hence the cuisine at all of the many seafood restaurants that line the main street is by law imported entirely from elsewhere. You may also notice a good number of large men in glossy tracksuits, jewelry, and exquisitely coiffed silver hair. There are also a lot of people walking around talking to themselves. For once, even if you are a shaved chimp, you might not be the weirdest-looking person around. The smell of fried shrimp pervades pretty much everywhere. It is a relatively safe neighborhood, and the houses are simple, decidedly blue-collar, and squat. The delicate clinking of rigging against the masts of docked boats is constantly audible. This is where I lived for one year.
We got off the bus in front of a grocery store and crossed the street. Leon lived in a small basement apartment in a white vinyl-sided house behind a restaurant called Artie’s Shrimp Shanty. The door was located at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the alley behind the restaurant, where there were a couple of dumpsters just outside the back door to the kitchen. Whatever refuse Artie stored in those voluminous green metal tanks sure smelled strongly: of shrimp. In fact, the dumpsters in the alley behind Artie’s Shrimp Shanty were perhaps ground zero for the all-pervasive fried shrimp smell on the island. Fried shrimp and marinara, mingled maybe with the saltiness of the nearby sea and the lingering aromata of the waitresses’ cigarette breaks, plus other miscellaneous garbage. The flat gray metal door to Leon’s apartment was without any extraneous ornament to suggest someone might live there: it could have been a door to a boiler room. Leon removed his keys from the pocket of his Elizabethan fur robe and let us in.
The apartment was small and dark. It featured only two small windows that offered views of the corrugated aluminum walls of window wells. One wall of the apartment was exposed red brick. There was one bedroom and a small bathroom, the floor of which was sticky and peppered with pubic hairs, and the rest of the apartment was a combined kitchen/living room. The place had long ago taken on the odor of shrimp that blew in from the dumpsters behind the seafood restaurant. There was a TV perched precariously on the edge of a coffee table. The room, though sparsely furnished in terms of actual furniture, was densely cluttered with wide-ranging and erratic miscellany. Books, magazines, a dust-coated electric typewriter, a metal twin-bed frame pushed upright against a wall. A heavy plaster bust of Shakespeare and a broken record player rested on top of an upright piano that had four black keys and two white keys missing, all the remaining keys out of tune, and no