My next book will be about lives briefly glimpsed
[Philadelphia’s Kensington on 7/25/15]
It has no title yet. I’m still sorting out what to include. The piece below is newly composed from old notes. It’s 2015 in Bentley’s Place, a lovely Philly dump I used to frequent. It has died.
Another Evening in Kensington’s Bentley’s Place
Last night, I took the L to Kensington. Even locals avoid that fearful and wretched neighborhood. Though the home of that fairy tale beef carcass banging palooka, it’s actually swarming with a lurching, nodding or slumped army of zombies. I doubt there’s one intact muscle in that waste land of devastated bodies.
I had to go to Bentley’s Place to give a printout of my last Postcard to the bartender. She’s mentioned in it. Half Japanese, Melissa has a round, smiling face with the most soothing eyes.
Plopped into that Boschian nightmare was this Melissa reigned oasis where I could space out. When some hustler wandered in to sell CDs, a DVD player and calendars, Melissa bought a KISS one for $1. Told she could take another for free, Melissa chose “Awkward Family Photos.”
The guy was a 47-year-old South Philadelphian. J gets by going from bar to bar in the crappiest neighborhoods. He also does construction and, in the past, washed windows, something I've also done. When I asked where he got his stuff, J said he dumpster dived.
“But what about the DVD player? You didn't find that in no dumpster!”
“Hey, man, you're asking me too many questions. In South Philly, we know how to take care of people like you! Ever heard of omerta?”
“Hey, man, I'm just curious. Maybe I want to do what you do.”
“You’ll have to figure it out yourself. Do I ask you how your teeth got that way?”
“I was born this way.”
“So I'm born this way too.”
“That was a low blow, talking about my teeth. Fuck you!”
“My teeth ain’t perfect either,” and he opened his mouth to show a bunch of missing molars on his lower left jaw.
“Yeah, but your missing teeth are hidden. Fuck you!”
J confessed, “I’m just barely getting by. Some days I even have to ask, like, ‘Can you spare a buck so I can have something to eat?’ But I’m still here, and you’re still here, right?”
After J left, I turned to Melissa, “J said he got his shit from dumpster diving.”
“My dick!” she snorted while making a jerking motion. “He steals them.”
“I ask stupid questions because I want to hear people say it. I don’t assume nothing, and you know what? People tend to tell me everything. People have told me they’ve killed someone. I hear all kinds of shit.”
“Working in bars, I hear all kinds of shit too. The other day, a guy told me he lets another guy suck his dick because a mouth is a mouth. Can you believe that?! A mouth is a mouth!”
“That's pretty funny. He should just spread peanut butter on his dick and let a dog lick it.”
“Did I tell you that story?!”
“What story?”
“The peanut butter and dog story. Remember I told you I had dated a cop? I broke up with him when I saw him spread peanut butter on his dick for the dog to lick. I was like, what the fuck? I was walking downstairs when I saw it.”
“Did you think it was funny?” I should have asked her if it was a dachshund, Rottweiler or Saint Bernard? Details always matter.
“No! I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t. It was like I was looking at this animal! Now I know why he always wanted the dog in the house when we had sex. The guy’s married now. I wonder if he still does that.”
“It was like a threesome with a dog!”
“Something like that.”
Even those closest to us, we know next to nothing. As Joyce says in “The Dead,” “While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another.” Reread that story.
“Isn’t it weird as hell, Melissa, that I brought that up when it actually happened to you?”
“Yeah, it is very odd.”
“I mean, the coincidence. Somebody told me about it once, but I’ve never talked about it. It's not something I think about.”
“It’s still on my mind, because it was so weird.”
“Maybe I read your mind,” I smiled.
Melissa is studying to be a medical assistant. Raised Catholic, Melissa only goes to church these days “when somebody dies.” She just got back from two weeks in California. Her sister is a Marine stationed in San Diego.
Though so close to Mexico, she never hopped over to Tijuana because “it’s too dangerous.”
Actually, Kensington is much more deady than Tijuana. Unlike the Mexican city, it’s also desolate and squalid. Melissa may not get another chance to see a foreign country.
This evening, 53-year-old Ernest also popped in. This Puerto Rico native was a chemical mixer for Estee Lauder in Bristol, PA, but yesterday was his last after 19 years. They’re giving a decent severance package.
“I’ll get $125,000 right away, plus two years’ unemployment, so it will add up to $175,000.”
“You’re like the richest guy in this bar!”
“I know.”
Ernest has a house in Kensington, plus one and some land in Puerto Rico. He doesn’t care to sit around doing nothing, however, so is applying to be a custodian at the Visitation Roman Catholic Church and School.
“It’s a great school! I know a teacher there. The kids are very respectful. Many of them are Dominican, but they have all kinds of kids there.”
“I talked to a nun on the phone. I’ll come in for an interview on Tuesday.”
Divorced, Ernest has two grown kids and a younger girlfriend, “I don't want them too young. A 20-year-old woman doesn’t know anything. She has to be at least 30.”
Hearing his dad rave about Spain, Ernest wants to visit that country, but he has never even been to Europe.
When I told Ernest my name, he said it means “good looking man” in Spanish. Even if Linh Dinh sounds like Lindo, that doesn’t mean I’m the Vietnamese Alex Garcia. It’s irrelevant the viewer’s state of intoxication or madness, and the best lighting won’t help.
The handyman at Visitation is a Vietnamese immigrant, by the way. After escaping Vietnam by boat in 1981, Tung spent a year in an Indonesian refugee camp. Settling in Louisiana, he found work on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig.
Though the pay wasn’t great, Tung could still save, since the 27 men on that rig weren’t even allowed to get trashed. Work done, they fished.
After his company sank, Tung drifted to Spokane, Seattle and Kansas City, before hobbling into Philly. Here, he labored at a steel processing plant for 13 years, before it, too, shut down.
All four of his children have attended or are at the Visitation School. His oldest has been offered full, eight-year scholarships to four colleges, including Temple and UPenn. After school, Tung’s kids are kept at home, since this is, after all, deadly Kensington.
Last year, some guy was hacked to death with machetes just across the street from Bentley’s. At this lovely bar, if a regular doesn’t show up for more than two weeks or so, it’s naturally assumed he’s dead, most likely from an overdose. To many here, an abrupt, relatively painless exit doesn’t sound too bad.
[Melissa in Bentley’s Place on 12/24/14]
[Ryan in Bentley’s Place on 2/28/15]
[Emily Diefendorf’s class at Visitation School in Kensington on 11/3/13]
[Kensington, 5/25/16]
Interesting, this old American vignette. I do have the impression that street people here in the U.S. are more disconnected from stability and family and religion than those abroad who have been your other focus, Linh. Perhaps this comes from the paper-thin culture of the U.S. --- hard perhaps to even call it culture. Just plain depressing in so many ways. I had a belly full of U.S. street people in 25 years working as a public defender in California. I would guess that the California street contingent was even more bereft of any cultural background than those "back East." Interesting, though, was the absence of Mexicans in this mix. Plenty of poor Mexicans, of course, but still imbued with the values of a more durable culture. Rarely living on the streets either.
This is what you're best at, Mr. Dinh, fishing out strange stories from random people whom no one would otherwise hear about. "Somebody nobody knows", as Kris Kristofferson sang. It's a talent just to be able to talk to all these people, and even more turning it into prose. The world would be a better place if we heard more from those people and much less about manufactured icons such as Taylor Swift, etc.