The Perfume Burned His Eyes. Michael Imperioli
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!
eleven
Ciro asked me to work until midnight one Saturday evening. I had to ask permission from my mother. She said it was okay but that she wanted to pick me up when my shift was finished. I understood her concern but it made no sense because I already spent hours up until midnight walking all over the East Side, going in and out of buildings and strangers’ apartments.
At around eleven that night Lorenzo, the weekend manager, gave me a ticket for the building I lived in. The delivery was for apartment 8A, which I figured was one of the penthouses. The name on the order was Jones, which didn’t ring any bells. It was a weird order: two large OJs, two strawberry milkshakes, two double orders of bacon (a total of four orders), and lots of pickles.
Strange, but far from the strangest for sure. That dubious honor went to Miss A. Lundgren, a 400-pound woman who lived on East 68th Street. Miss Lundgren, dubbed “Circus Circus” by Ciro, had a standing order every Saturday and Sunday morning. At nine thirty a.m. she expected to be delivered to her door: half a dozen eggs sunny-side up, twelve sausage links, eight slices of toast with ten small packets of grape jelly, a triple order of home fries, and three large chocolate milks. Included as a courtesy in one of the bags was a full-size glass bottle of Heinz ketchup. The order stood for two years straight until one Saturday she didn’t answer the door and was never heard from again.
When I got to my building with 8A’s order in hand, the new doorman Jeff was on duty. I liked Jeff a lot. He reminded me of a character in an old Western who would play a sheriff or a train conductor. He was a tall, sturdy, healthy-looking guy. A Midwestern oh-my-gosh type with neatly trimmed hair and respectful, old-fashioned manners. He didn’t seem to belong in New York City at all.
But Jeff was far from straitlaced. He had a fetishistic obsession with ballerinas and would often hang around the entrance to the ballet school at Lincoln Center. He would lean against the building and pretend to read the paper but he’d really be watching the young dancers come and go from their classes. He wasn’t at all shy about sharing any of this with me and spoke of his fixation very casually. As if it was something that any normal American male would appreciate.
The girls who took classes there were young: from high school age down to like ten years old. Jeff would get this devilish twinkle in his eye when he described these aspiring dancers “in their little pink leotards and soft satin shoes . . . so small and petite.” He tended to like the girls on the older edge of the spectrum, thank god, and especially got off watching them smoke cigarettes and curse. Jeff claimed that ballerinas had some of the filthiest mouths anywhere.
I didn’t feel the need to be announced, so I didn’t tell Jeff where I was going. I was sure they were expecting me. The door to apartment 8A was about halfway