Character Sketches # 1

It is a common misconception that all fictional characters are based on an author’s family, friends, or foes.  In fact, they are not.  I occasionally snatch a face, an idiosyncrasy, or an attitude from a real, live human being.  But not often.  And when I do, it’s usually someone I don’t know:  A beautiful women asleep on a bus.  A pizza deliveryman missing a finger on his left hand.  A veterinarian who looks exactly like a French poodle.

Everyone once in a while, though, I have a near collision with an individual so rare, so interesting, so poignantly sad or sadly significant that I promise myself I will capture his essence and put it in a novel.  When I was very young, very single, and very living in Manhattan, I met three people to whom I made, but never kept, that promise.  Since I still owe them a little bit of immortality, I would like to tell you about them today. 

The company where we worked – I’ll call it Graphic Transformations – created mail order catalogues for department stores like Macys and Saks Fifth Avenue.  Because the job was seasonal, it attracted employees like me who had big dreams and no money:  Songwriters, actresses, artists, dancers, filmmakers, and poets. To us, Graphic Transformation was more than a job.  It was a way station.  We were on our way up.  Or on our way down.  Tommy in the mail room and Helen in the main office were on their way down.  And out.  Bill would be forever stuck where he was. 

I’ll start with him.

Bill the Messenger was short, plump, and wore faded shirts and shapeless slacks that had been washed so many times they verged on threadbare. He had flaccid, city-dweller muscles, and resembled a guinea pig I had once known who only felt safe when backed into the farthest corner of his cage. Although Bill was not effeminate, he was soft in a way that suggested he would rather watch a soap opera than a football game. 

Watch is the operative word here, because Bill loved to watch TV. He lived in a small, stuffy box of a room where he ate, slept, and endured his solitary existence. Because he loved television so much, one day he went to an appliance store and made a small down payment on a very large and dreadfully expensive TV. Then he signed a contract agreeing to pay it off in monthly installments.  Probably for the rest of his life.

Less than a week after taking his treasure home, a junkie (may he rot in hell) broke into Bill’s apartment and stole it. The next morning, word of this calamity spread to the rest of us at Graphic Transformations. We worried about him; we grieved for him; it broke our hearts. The me who is alive today would have written out a check and given him a new TV. But the me who was alive back then
was as poor as Bill.  We all were. 

To have so little…to want so little…and to be deprived of even that seemed to be a huge metaphysical miscalculation. Over all of these years, the vision of that gentle and inconspicuous man continuing to make payments on a television set that he no longer possessed still haunts me. I suspect that it always will.

Helen the Art Coordinator. Technically, Helen was my boss. I collected and organized our client’s products for photography, and Helen turned the images into a catalogue. One day, for some unfathomable reason, the art director decided to send us both to Washington, D.C. to pick up the merchandise ourselves.

Helen was one of those creatures who seemed to have emerged perfectly groomed from the society pages of Town & Country magazine. She was petite and slim.  Her face was an exquisite arrangement of angles. She had dark blue eyes, naturally long eyelashes, and raven black hair that she wore pulled away from her face like a prima ballerina. There were tiny signs of wear around Helen’s eyes, but nothing that detracted from her unmistakable look of “breeding.” Except for the whisky bottles that clinked when she carried them with her everywhere. In her purse. In her suitcase. In her briefcase during meetings with clients. 

Over dinner, which Helen drank, she told me about her ex-husband, the books that he had written, the movies that he had produced, and the home in the Caribbean where they had lived when they were in love.  John Wayne, she told me, had once visited their island, patted her on the hand, and called her “little lady.” 

Helen had cherished that brief interlude. An innocuous memory of a lost time. A lost life. 

Somehow, I feel as though I should remember it, too.

Tommy in the Stock Room: Tommy was long, lean, light on his feet, and so handsome he made me wish that I were an artist with a sketchpad instead of a writer with a pen. But Tommy suffered from the same malady as Helen. Three feet away from him, he reeked of booze. 

My contact with Tommy was as abbreviated as his career at Graphic Transformations, but it did include one memorable conversation. 

“I am a dancer,” he told me.

I looked at him.  Of course, I thought. With a body as lean and lyrical as a line of poetry, what else could he be? He told me his ex-wife’s name, which I instantly recognized. Just as quickly, I envisioned the two of them gliding across a stage. She, a famous Broadway dancer, lovely and long legged, with an irresistible cat-like grace. He, tall, masculine, and as agile as Fred Astaire. They seemed to belong together, those two. Like runners on a winter sleigh. Which is probably why, despite the air of doom that cloaked him like an old raincoat, she had married him. Even in the glory days of his youth, Tommy must have been an irredeemably hopeless, if breathtakingly beautiful, drunk.

Some of us at Graphic Transformations eventually snagged a few fingers around our dreams.  Some of us stumbled. Others fell. But of those I worked with in the long ago way back when, these are the three whose fates I dread to contemplate, but whom I can never forget.