The Perfume Burned His Eyes. Michael Imperioli
Lippman was very old by the time I started to work for him. I gathered through his stories and reminiscences that he probably bought the business sometime before World War II.
Mr. Lippman liked me a lot. The day I started my second week of work he bought us egg rolls, fried rice, and steak kew from Lum’s Chinese restaurant. It became a weekly ritual. We would eat together at the counter and he would talk about the history of the neighborhood and how sad it was that things were changing so quickly and that soon we would all be speaking Spanish. I wasn’t so aware of the rapid metamorphosis that was happening around us but it made Mr. Lippman sad.
Mr. Lippman lived with his wife above the store. She had become sickly in recent years, so every few hours he would go upstairs and check on his beloved Zohra, leaving me alone behind the register. He trusted me that much. And in return, I stole from the man.
I justified the thievery by convincing myself that I wasn’t being paid enough. But this didn’t help. I still felt horrible doing it, though not horrible enough to stop.
I never got caught.
It was a very simple scheme: when a customer would pay for something small like a box of nails or a bottle of glue, I would “accidentally” push a pen off the counter so it fell near the customer’s feet. As the person bent to pick it up, I would hit No Sale and open the register without entering the price of the item. By the time the customer stood back up I would be handing him the change and bagging his order.
My fear was that Mr. Lippman would notice a discrepancy between inventory and sales, but that never happened. What did happen is that I put a few extra bucks in my pocket and felt like a royal piece of shit. And after each heist, I vowed to never do it again. But I did it many times.
The worst was always when he came back downstairs from god knows what kind of miserable scenario with his invalid wife.
“No fires or tornadoes?”
This was always the first thing he would say upon his return and he would crack a little grin. I couldn’t face him as I answered, “No.” I couldn’t bring myself to return the grin.
They say the first time you commit a crime is the hardest and that the subsequent crimes become easier and easier. You become immune and hardened to the transgression and whatever suffering is inflicted on the victim. This was not the case for me. I felt worse and worse each time I did it. And the question “No fires or tornadoes?” became more and more unbearable.
When Mr. Lippman’s wife died he closed the store, ending my life of crime and relieving me of the shame of facing his bushy gray mustache, his heavy shoes, his kind and trusting nature, his shuffling steps on the weary stairs.
I promised myself things would be different now that I was older and had started my life over in a new city (or borough, to be precise). I vowed to never steal again as I walked down the street to the Wellington, my favorite place in the neighborhood so far. I asked the woman behind the register if they were hiring. She stared at me while poking at her teeth with a toothpick.
“What do you do?” she asked.
I didn’t know quite how to answer so I just said: “I’m flexible.”
“Well, we don’t need no acrobats.” I didn’t realize she was making a joke and thought she had somehow misunderstood me. But as I stammered and searched for a reply, she yelled toward the kitchen: “Hey, Ciro, do we still need another delivery guy?”
The owner, a squat man who always looked as if he had just received some sort of bad news, came through the swinging doors wiping his hands on his apron. His eyes were immediately upon me, sizing me up and down. Then he jutted his chin in my direction and said with a European accent: “Do you have any experience?”
“Yes.”
I guess he believed me because his next question was: “Do you go to school? . . . Where do you go to school?”
“Hobart.”
“Hunter?”
Hunter was a college a few blocks up the road. I was confused. There was no way I could pass for a college student at that point in time and he didn’t look like he was teasing me. So I told him the truth: “It’s a private high school.”
“Oh yes, that’s a very good school . . . you must be a very smart boy.” He seemed genuinely impressed. If only he could see some of the morons who were my classmates. “When can you work?”
“Weekends and after school . . .”
“Can you work after school and do all the homework?”
“I don’t get much homework.” That was the truth. We didn’t get much and you had to be really dumb not to do well. (Plus, the grades were inflated to make the school look better than it really was, but that’s another story.)
“Your father, he lets you work?” said Ciro.
“My father’s in California. I live with my mother. It was her idea that I get a job.” I wasn’t telling many people the truth about my father at that point.
“California dreamer . . . and such a winner say . . .” Ciro raised an arm in victory as he sang the chorus. “You know the song?”
I nodded.
“I want to go to California. If I live in California maybe I have ten restaurants by now.”
The woman behind the register who hadn’t seemed to be paying attention to us rolled her eyes and muttered a derisive “Hmmmph.”
Ciro turned to her, the news he wore on his face going from bad to worse. “You don’t think so but then you complain! Lots of complain, complain, complain!”
She bore no resemblance to him so I assumed they were married.
“Who complains? I’m too busy to complain!”
Ciro dismissed this last comment with a wave and turned back to me. He agreed to hire me on a trial basis. The trial being that if he didn’t like the way I worked, he would fire me. Made sense to me.
I was to start that Saturday at seven in the morning. He told me that weekends were busy with breakfast deliveries and the tips were pretty good because it was working people enjoying their days off after payday. Weekend customers were in better moods than weekday customers, and they tipped better. The weekend shifts were eight hours each, seven am till three in the afternoon. He also offered me three weekday shifts after school from four till eight in the evening. I could have a free meal for every shift I worked—any sandwich, an omelet, a hamburger, eggs, pancakes, or waffles. I thought this was a very fair arrangement and was eager to get to work. On this we shook hands and he gave me a Coke to go.
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