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By Root 2458 0

bench. All kinds of devices, bric-a-brac, and curiosities littered the floor and every flat surface, accumulated in the corners, and erupted forth from drawers too stuffed to shut properly. Boxes of sheet music, broken toys, wind-up ballerinas. The walls were covered with posters and other kinds of memorabilia from Broadway and Golden Age Hollywood. A flabby futon faced the TV. The futon could be collapsed to a horizontal position to become a bed with a slight valley in the hinge of it, and that night Leon covered it with a bedsheet and punched some fluff into a flabby spare pillow for me. The books stood in precarious vertical stacks that reached the ceilings. In particular Leon adored the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was a complete set of all twenty-four Tarzan novels, leatherbound with gilt lettering on the spines, snugly set in orderly rows in a custom-built bookcase. I slid one out and flipped through its Bible-thin pages.

“It is appallingly obvious,” said Leon, “that of all writers who have ever dared to commit the English language to paper, Edgar Rice Burroughs remains second only to Shakespeare.” He suggested we visit Artie’s Shrimp Shanty for a nightcap. I was tired, but I acquiesced, so we went next door for shrimp and beer. The interior of the restaurant was cluttered with nautical paraphernalia—ships’ wheels, fishing nets, dried starfish, etc.—and lit with winking Christmas lights tacked up in a drooping contiguous string along the perimeter of the room where the wall molding met the ceiling, and the lights pulsed blobs of red and green and blue light, giving the room an undersea feeling. A giant rubber shark, its jaws gaping to show its fearsome rubber teeth, dangled on scarcely visible wires from the ceiling, looming monstrously above the curving rosewood counter of the bar. The bar was in a smaller room that adjoined the main room of the restaurant. The shark was reflected, as if it were swimming past a glass window in an aquarium, in a smudgy mirror behind the bar, which also illusively doubled the number of liquor and wine bottles arranged in three rows along the back of the bar, which was underlit with bluish lights. Leon was clearly a regular at this place: he waved to the two old men sitting at the other end of the bar and sank his body onto a bar stool as comfortably as the king he was dressed as would have sat upon his throne. I climbed onto the stool beside Leon’s, and soon the young woman behind the glossy rosewood counter placed before us two glasses of beer and a shrimp appetizer, their breaded tails fanned around a cup of red sauce. Leon began at once to greedily devour the shrimp.

“Audrey,” said Leon, “allow me to introduce you to Bruno, my acting pupil. Bruno, this is my lovely daughter, Audrey. Bruno has expressed a desire to learn my craft. Under my strenuous and unsparing tutelage, Bruno shall become a great and famous thespian.”

“Hey,” said Audrey flatly, giving me a half wave. “Where’d you meet my dad?”

“He was performing Shakespeare on the subway.”

“Dad,” she said to Leon, who was slurping the squishy wet meat out of a shrimp tail with his teeth. “Mom called earlier.”

“What could that wanton fustilug possibly want of me?”

“She’s pissed that you borrowed her car and returned it with no gas.”

“Pish! Has she no pity for a poor man?”

“Just saying. She said she called your place and didn’t get the answering machine so she called here.”

“It is currently impossible to contact me by telephone because I have been refusing to render my pound of flesh to the AT&T company,” said Leon, gravely shaking his head and brushing his hair back with his fingertips. “In any event I shan’t return her call. What could she possibly want? Financial reparations? To squeeze blood from a stone? The only sane response is to ignore her utterly. Should she call again, you must inform her that I have at long last died of starvation. Come now, Bruno. Eat shrimp.”

Leon delicately licked the beer froth from his mustaches, made a series of nipping noises with his tongue and lips and ordered another round,