ten

Right away, I loved my job. The people I delivered food to fascinated me; their personalities, their families, their lovers, their pets . . . every customer was different. Some wouldn’t allow you so much as a glimpse inside their apartment, preferring to a make the transaction in the hallway, lobby, even the street. But more often I’d be invited into the apartment and would stand in the doorway, the kitchen, or the living room while my customer went searching for cash.

Ciro was right: the weekend customers and the weekday customers were a different species. Weekenders were likely to be family people sleeping in on Saturday or Sunday; lots of coffee, pancakes, waffles, muffins, bacon, hot chocolate, and donuts for the kids. They were in good spirits, rarely in a hurry, and yes, they tipped well. Weekdays, at least the hours I worked, were mostly single people or couples without kids; soups, burgers, chili, goulash if we had it, London broil, flounder, and salmon. These weekday folks tended to be lonelier and wanted to talk a bit and ask me questions. This could easily cross the line into creep territory, as it did with Mr. Gebberts of 301 East 66th Street, apartment 6D. The D for deranged, demented, and degenerate.

Mr. Gebberts lived in a small and sparse flat that was cleaner than any home or institution I’d ever been in. It smelled of bleach, like some kind of industrial cleaning fluid. There was a strange sterility to both the place and the man. Something was off. Like the hypercleanliness was an effort to compensate for things twisted, filthy, and perhaps diabolic.

When I would deliver his food (always a BLT on toast, extra mayo, but all the mayo on the side and a Coke with no ice and two lemons), he would have me stand on paper towels which he would spread into a large rectangle by the door. This was a tedious ritual that always took far longer than it should have. The unrolling of the paper, the slow tearing along the perforations, the exact parallels and perpendiculars he sought as he put the pieces of Bounty in place.

“If you want to come in and sit down you have to take your shoes off.”

I didn’t want to come in. I didn’t want to sit down. And I definitely wasn’t taking anything off.

Gebberts was well into his sixties but his hair, eyebrows, and mustache were all dyed way too black. His face was pink and shiny, greasy shiny, and his head was tilted strangely off-axis. He always wore these tight red-and-black exercise-type clothes. His fingernails were as shiny as his face and were lacquered to a mirror glaze. He wore buckets of cologne—clouds of it fogged the room and I would smell like him for hours after leaving his pad. It revolted me. He revolted me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was some twelve-year-old girl gagged and hog-tied in a spotless bedroom closet.

The man never knew where his wallet was despite the lack of clutter in the antiseptic apartment he called home. It always took like fifteen minutes of shuffling around, clearing his throat every five seconds, disappearing and reappearing in and out of the few rooms he occupied. He would attempt conversation while the search was on:

“Are you Ciro’s son?” I don’t know how many times he asked me this.

“No.”

“Well, you must be a relation. I can see the resemblance.”

I looked nothing like the man.

“I’ve known Ciro for fifteen years. Did he tell you that?”

Yes, of course, we have nothing better to do down at the diner than discuss you, our dear Mr. Gebberts.

“I was his first customer when he took over from Mr. Edelman.”

Everybody claimed to be Ciro’s first customer.

“We’re not related. I just work for him.”

“Which parish do you belong to?”

What? Was this guy fucking serious?

“I don’t belong to any.”

“No? Are you new to the neighborhood?”

“We just moved here from Queens.”

“A Queens boy! You must be a Met fan like me. I’m obsessed with them! Haven’t missed a televised game in over ten years.”

“I like the Yankees,” I lied; the notion of having anything in common with this deviant was unbearable.

“A Queens boy who likes the Yankees? What’s wrong with you?”

What’s wrong with me?

“My father liked the Yankees.” Another lie. My father was a Dodger fan before, during, and after the defection. Maybe that’s what lured him to California and his fiery demise.

“Well, I won’t hold it against you.”

Please do. Hold it against me. That was the point of the lies.

“Where do you go to school?”

“Hobart.”

“Very chic.” He raised his eyebrows to sharp jack-o’-lantern points. “Do you have a girlfriend?” He handed me the cash finally.

“No,” I mumbled as I started making change.

“Keep it.” A dime. A thin lousy dime, but from the way he said it, you’d think he was sponsoring my college fund. I didn’t say thank you. I just turned, stepped off the paper towel island, and went out the door.

“Stop by for coffee when you feel like it.”

I wouldn’t stop by for coffee if the apocalypse was imminent and his apartment was the only safe haven in the galaxy. I shut the door behind me and was at the elevator when he followed me into the hallway.

“Let’s go Mets!”

What a fucking freak.

Walking back to the diner after my first Gebberts encounter, I toyed with the idea that the guy was in fact a ghost and that in reality I had been standing in an empty, abandoned apartment. Perhaps the limboed spirit of Gebberts had created the illusion that I was interacting with a living, breathing human in an actual home. Maybe the sanitary extremis was needed to combat the constant excretion of unholy astral ectoplasm bubbling and erupting out of various ghastly orifices.

I was terrified every time his name appeared on a delivery ticket. And to this day my ghost theory remains a legitimate possibility. Perhaps Gebberts the Cleanly Ghost will forever haunt 301 East 66th Street, eternally ordering BLT on toast, looking at some hapless delivery boy from a sidelong, stiff-necked angle that made his head appear abnormally small.

. . . Let’s go Mets!