By Keith Keller

The old man eased his butt down onto the second of five steps that led to the door of a boarded-up storefront near the corner of Lafayette and Bowery in New York City. He liked boarded up empty storefronts because nobody ever asked you to move on when you were taking a rest on the stoop. Move on to where? They never told you that part. To them, “On,” meant “anywhere but here.”
He sat hunched forward, his head down, concentrating on the unbuttoning of three long woolen coats he wore over two flannel shirts. When all the buttons were undone he pulled the three coats open, and laid back on the remaining   stairs with a groan of satisfaction, the afternoon winter sun soaking the flannel shirts and his chest with warmth.

William had been painting since nine in the morning and it was now one thirty. Each day around this time he went down the old building’s three flights to Bleeker Street, turned west, and crossed Lafayette to a tiny sandwich shop where you could get a ham and cheese on white bread with lots of mayonnaise for seventy five cents. William had one for lunch six days a week. Sometimes he bought a soda. Today he went for just the sandwich. On the way back to his studio, William carried his ham and cheese in its white waxed paper envelope like a schoolbook. William’s firm grip on the sandwich caused much of the mayonnaise to slither out from between the two slices of white bread. Perhaps this unusually firm grip on his sandwich evidenced a precognitive experience; a primordial certainty that his lunch was in jeopardy.

“Hey,” yelled the old man from across the street, “can I have a bite of your sandwich?”
Bingo.

At first when William saw the old man gesture toward him he assumed he was asking for money. Then it registered; he was asking for food, and William was palming a ham sandwich. This put William in a bad position. Not that losing his sandwich would be such a big deal, but he would lose his rhythm. He would have to go back and buy another sandwich, then walk past the old man again who would be eating William’s first sandwich. That was no good. It bothered William that for him it was no problem to just buy another sandwich. Finally, he gave his sandwich to the old man.

William did not go back and buy another sandwich for himself. He decided he was not hungry and would take a nap instead of eating, proof that his rhythm was shattered.

‘Too much mayonnaise,’ thought the old man, wiping his fingers on his outer top coat. As he ate he thought about where he would spend the night. It had been an unusually warm winter day but the night was another story, and if the weather report was right the temperature would drop down to near zero. For two months he had managed to keep a refrigerator crate hidden in a Poison Sumac bush growing at the back end of an empty lot on Houston. He pulled it out of the bushes every night, being careful not to make contact with the Sumac leaves. He would slide the cover open enough to crawl in and then pull it shut over him. It was like sleeping in a coffin, roomier but less comfortable, even with his old wool blanket rolled up to make a pillow. Now both the crate and the blanket were gone, the lot had been cleaned up. Even the Sumac was gone. He had spent last night at a shelter. Men cried in their sleep, there were fights. Younger men stole from the older, if they had anything to steal. He considered the subway grate at Lexington and Fifty Second Street. You could sit on the grate, nodding off with your back to the building, the subway roaring underneath you, pushing up hot air like the rancid breath of some giant subterranean monster. The police would make you move if you fell over in your sleep. You had to sit up.

Of course there was one other option. He could stay where he was, fall asleep, and freeze to death. People on the street said it was a clean and easy way to go. No pain, just sleep, then nothing.

*          *          *

William woke from a bad dream he could not remember. It was night, and the studio was dark and cold. He switched on his gas heater and stood in front of it, the fan blowing warm air over him. His top floor location had two large windows facing south, bad painting light but great for getting through a New York winter. On the rare nights he slept at the studio, his gas heater made up for the mostly useless and silent steam radiators. Most nights he spent at his girlfriend’s apartment on East Third.

The black cloud of his awakening still huddled in his psyche, uneasy. Maybe it was the unremembered dream. Nothing was wrong other than he still was very cold, the heater was not having much affect yet if you were not standing in front of it. Then he thought about the old man and the sandwich. That was it. He felt stupid about it all; his hesitation, and his uptight attitude. He should have given the old man the sandwich right away. William wandered over to a window to look down on where the old man had been sitting. The street was not well lit. A dark form lay across the stoop wrapped in shadows. William ran for his door, clambered down the three flights, his feet barely touching the stairs, threw open the entry door and ran to where the old man half sat and half lay on the stoop. He skidded to a stop a few feet from him. He could see the old man’s breath. William stood staring for a moment then reached for his shoulder. The old man came to his feet, grunting, and was about to throw his left when he recognized William.

“What the hell you wake me up for?” the old man asked without much expression or interest in the answer. He lowered his hands.
“I have a stash of junk food upstairs,” said William. “Potato chips, Hostess cupcakes, stuff like that, and it’s,” he hesitated, “well, it is warmer than out here.”

The old man ate all of Williams’s potato chips and cupcakes plus three Ring Dings and a Choco Roll.

*        *        *

“You have mayonnaise on your coat,” William told the old man.
“Yes,” he said, “I am not as tidy as I once was.” He stared down at the white smears on his coat, remembering the sandwich. ‘Too much Mayonnaise,’ he thought again. William handed him a wet rag and he wiped the mayonnaise from his coat, scrubbing a little.
It would be all right, William decided, for the old man to spend the night in the studio. He told him that the work sink had hot water and suggested he might wash up when the room got a little warmer.
“You smell real bad,” he told him.

*          *           *

When William entered the studio the old man had swept the three floors of stairs and landings and William’s studio, which was a first. Then he started taking the trash down and fixing things and soon the tenants held a meeting to decide how much they could pay him to be the buildings permanent custodian.

Then William awoke. He sat up and looked around. It was dark and cold again and there was no evidence of an old man. He got up and walked to his window and looked down. Deep in the shadows that fell on the stairway of the old boarded up storefront across the street he could just make out the form of a man, legs pulled up tight under him, shoulders hunched, chin against his chest, not moving.

The End