Holding hands on a dark street

Mr. Sit.

Mr. Sit is an elderly man who spends sunny days on a lawn chair on the sidewalk in front of his apartment. He has a shock of white hair that flips boyishly onto his forehead, and a smile that makes my heart feel like it's being squeezed. His voice is soft and wavering, like Mr. Key's, and you can tell by his accent that he's lived in Brooklyn a long time. His clothes are impeccable. Whenever I walk by with a man, any man, he says exactly the same thing: I say, "Hello!" He studies me for a moment and then says, "Helllllloooooo. Have a nice day!" Then, when I'm almost past him, he says, "you make a lovely couple". Except with Sean Howe; we make merely a handsome couple. I brought some friends to meet him this weekend. They knew about his lovely couple comments and wanted to earn one for themeselves. We greeted him, and as we passed him, it seemed that he wasn't going to say anything else. At the last moment, though, they got his best comment to date: "Hubba hubba!" Mostly, though, i see him when I'm walking alone. Sometimes he'll say, "You're on the way to Hollywood!". But usually, we just chat about the weather and shoes and stiff knees and the newspapers. I'm making him a linoleum print of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Sergeant John.

We stumbled on Sergeant John's stoop sale on a Saturday of otherwise bland stoop sales, making his seem all the more extraordinary. When we walked up, he said, "It's September 11th, remember those who died, stop and shop, it's my birthday!" Scattered around the stoop and sidewalk is a huge assortment of junk and treasure and bric-a-brac. A rubber Nixon mask from the 70s has been placed over the end of the bannister. There are ladies' hats from the 50s, a velvet Elvis (which I bought), newspapers from six different decades, including Nixon's resignation headline, toys, silver candlesticks, cookie tins, and fixtures he tore out of old L trains that were being chopped up for scrap. Sergeant John has a special love for trains. He speaks with love about the old subways, gently touching the maps and metal signs and route destination signs, and shows us the toy trolleys. Picking up a paper trolley, he tries to demonstrate the electric attachment at the top, but it falls inside the trolley and he can't recover it. "I broke your trolley pole!," he exclaims. Then he picks up a metal Japanese trolley, and says, "The Japs made these in the 60s. Who else would make a toy trolley with rubber wheels? The Japs control the money of the world." Then, quickly, "but more power to 'em. They've had a hard time. Look what we did to them." Sergeant John flits from subject to subject, but not lightly. It's all very fast, and very random; the thoughts and words of a man who is bursting with the kind of life I haven't ever thought to ponder before today. "Look at this!" he barks. "I'm 64 years old today and look at this." He flexes his muscles, over and over, the biceps bulging when he squeezes his fists. "I got a full head of hair," he says, pulling off his Vietnam Vet hat. The grayish brown hair is thick and tussled. It's a source of obvious pride, but a source of fear as well. "Ronald Reagan had a full head of hair too. And the Alzheimers...I don't want to end up like that". He shakes his head and takes off his sunglasses, peering up at us. His eyes are shockingly blue, something we will mention later as we are eating sandwiches at a restaurant a few blocks away. Sergeant John fought in Vietnam, as a sniper. He clearly relished the job, as he describes it, even the time when he was expected by a Cambodian village leader to eat moneky brains right out of the skulls. "I was drunk on some local stuff they had, so I didn't even care. I just reached down and..." He makes big scooping gestures and loud eating sounds. What did monkey brains taste like? "Popcorn," John says. In Saigon, he bought a $500 bulletproof vest from a German who had been in the French Foreign Legion. The Sergeant relates the experience, giving the German a deep, gruff voice. "So, this German says to me, "Zee Vietnamese tried to keel me years ago. And now they will keel you. I says to him, 'Look, Krauthead, I have American money to spend.' And I pull it out. And suddenly, he loves me. 'Ooooh, show me zee money!' that krauthead says. We took that vest out and tacked it up to a tree. I shot it 20 times with an AK-47. Afterwards, there were 20 bullets on the ground and the vest was totally unmarked. 'I'll take it,' I said. That vest saved my life when my helicopter went down. I was the only one in my regiment who survived that crash." Sergeant John shows us shrapnel scars on his wrist. When he was wounded, though,he healed quickly, which he attributes to parsley. He eats a lot of parsley. "Parsley is full of your vitamins. It's good for, you know, anything. The Trojans ate it, and their wounds healed really damn fast." John also gives parsley the credit for his youthful vigor. He flexes his muscles some more.

There was a special woman in Sergeant John's life once. "She's up at St. Charles cemetery now," he says. "She smoked a pack a day." He pauses. "I got a lot of money. All I ever wanted was one thing. You know what that was? A woman who wanted me, for me. Not for my money" He taps his chest. His voice gets softer. "This woman, she could have cared less about my money. She didn't want to go out for a fancy dinner. All she wanted was this." He lifts his right arm. "To hold my arm when we walked. Everywhere we went, she held my arm."

Meeting someone like Sergeant John is a rare and sacred thing. It's the kind of encounter that leaves you shaken afterward, happy and sad alike, and all the mixed up ways people feel when they meet someone that makes the world a little brighter and more lovely for a few hours. As we eat lunch, Sean and I are almost completely quiet. I know he's feeling the same thing.

After lunch, I bring the birthday cake Sean and I bought for Sergeant John over to his house. I walk close to the hedges so he can't see me. A few buildings down, I stop on the sidewalk and crouch down to light the candles. Some neighbors and people walking on the sidewalk gather around me. "It's John's birthday today," I tell them. They walk along with me toward his stoop. The candles flicker wildly, threatening to go out. A few feet from where John is sitting, we start singing Happy Birthday, quietly first and then louder as we reach him. Sergeant John, Vietnam vet, self-professed rogue and professional bachelor, lover of junk and history and parsley, leans forward, grinning, to blow out the candles.

*This update typed while getting ready to watch the Packers game with friends.