The Death Has Occurred Of Cesar Almeida

The Death Has Occurred Of Cesar Almeida

“I tell ya one thing kid, forget your cooks and seamstresses, what ye gotta do is, ya gotta find a woman who can make love like a 5th Avenue hooker, and shoot a piece as cleanly as she chops onions. Once ya do that, oh boy, ye got it made.” His New York drawl scratched its way through the mid-November air, cutting  puffs of CO2 smoke signals from meaty jowls. 

I was a misplaced teenager, full of angst and directionless anger. I was lost in the mire of adolescence. An old dog cast adrift in a sea of hungry wolf pups.  I was different from my peers. The usual trappings of youth bored me. I wasn't interested in boys, or girls for that matter, at least not yet, and everyone around me infuriated me. I felt set apart from them, as though  I were from a distant time, where vapid hackneyed cliché’s were not the currency of youth. I had nothing to offer this teenage economy, so I went to his store every day, just to hear his stories. 

 We would stand outside the front of the store, backs flush against the grimey, brown tinted glass, the street, our theatre. He would keep me enraptured with tales of the iniquitous scandals that made up the daily bump and grind of my neighbours’ lives.

One time he told me that on the night she shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas had come into his shop and bought a pack of smokes and left one of her manifestos on his countertop. “She was one crazy broad, she was wearing one of those little paper boy hats, five feet tall is all she was. I knew she was up to something when she left that coocoo magazine on my counter. I tell ya kid, not for nuttin’, she looked like a real skel, you know what I’m saying?”

He told me that when she left her manifesto there, he had picked it up and read it; The S.C.U.M Manifesto. S.C.U.M stood for Slice and Cut Up Men. He had binned it there and then and went home that night and told his wife about the kooky broad who had left a homemade magazine in his shop about killing men. 

The next day he read in the paper that Andy Warhol had been shot and he didn’t even need to read the rest of the story, he knew who the shooter was. 

Another time he told me that the famous mob boss Joseph Columbo Sr was a regular visitor to his store in the late 60’s. “He was a real nice guy, you know, decent. Not like the wisenheimers runnin’ the streets these days. He was a crook, sure, but we all knew that. He was good to the locals ye know, a real ‘you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours’ type. He was a whatchacallit, an ordinary decent criminal.  A Goodfella, ye know.”  Joseph Columbo Sr. was the boss of the Colombo crime family, one of the "Five Families" of the Cosa Nostra. He died of a heart attack in 1978, and Cesar used to tell me it was because his son broke his heart because he refused to go into the family business. Instead he got a job at Ray’s and delivered pizzas around Brooklyn on a Vespa. “I tell ya kid, he broke his faathas haat the minute he took up deliverin’ those pizzas to all the skels on Brooklyn Avenue, that’s what killed him ya know, the shame of it.”

I didn’t believe most of what he told me. His stories were the essence of him. They were part of the big beautiful mess that made up his entire identity. Whether they were true or not didn’t matter. They were all part of an intricately woven loom full of colour, and light and heavy with detail. I didn’t care if they were true, I loved my time with him. Sitting on his window ledge or leaning against his store counter top. Just listening to whatever fantastic web he would weave next. 

Looking back now I can see that he embellished his stories to create an image of himself that didn’t exist. To make himself feel important, larger than life, part of the ‘big time’. What he really was, was crass, brash and lewd. The language that spilled from his mouth every bit as foul as his body odour. His name was Cesar Almeida, of Portuguese descent, 2nd generation American. He had lived in Brooklyn all his life.  He was a huge hulk of a man, jaundiced and sagging. His thick dark lips peeled back in a half-cocked grin to reveal crooked, yellowing teeth. His big round eyes set deep in leathery caverns, brown as dirt and twice as murky. 

His clothes were always a hodgepodge of Good Will store choice cuts, and you could always see part of his oversized gut, peeking at you through the gap between his t-shirt and corduroy jeans. His hair was obsidian waves of heavy wax, slicked into submission atop a weighty slumping head. 

He was a man who spent his time pouring over the top shelf magazines and learning all of the girls’ names and statistics off by heart. He did this just to impress some of the local boyos who came in fortnightly to purchase the nefarious publications. “It’s what keeps ‘em coming back”, he’d say, “They like to quiz me.”  

He was a man who was well versed in the language of the street. He knew how to talk to people. From the sweet old ladies who came in every morning to buy their groceries and exchange gossip, to the rowdy rabble-rousers who bust through the doors after midnight in a cacophony of dirty jokes and songs, seeking more beer, condoms and smokes.  

He was a  former street vendor, who had worked his way up from a newspaper stall on the sidewalk, to a corner shop of his very own. He understood the world with an earthy wisdom that was harsh and glaring and sharp. He was a walking caricature of himself, a heavy greasy reminder of the way things used to be. 

But despite all of this, despite his weighted stories and ideas of grandeur, despite his enormous  presence and the sticky grip he had on that street corner and the tiny  world that revolved around it, he was forgotten. Ultimately, his insignificance lost him to the city’s rat race. 

But I remember him. I remember the things he said to me, about the good old days and conspiracy theories and how to talk to girls. About the celebrities that used to frequent his shop during the glory days of 1960’s Broadway. I remember his moments of unflinching honesty when asked for advice or guidance. I remember the remorse in his eyes every time he spoke about a son whose name I never knew, but whose picture hung behind the cash register of his shop. He referred to him only as the kid, and spoke about him in hushed baritones, thick with emotion and heartache. His murky brown eyes would glisten then, with the spectre of loss. 

I remember him. 

I hadn’t remembered him in a long time. But today I picked up a paper to read on   my train ride home, and when I turned to the death notices there he was, his face smiling up at me with that sickly saffron grin. He would have been old. Older than my parents I’m sure. I hadn’t even thought about home in years. Not that home anyway. That time in my life was a chaotic blur of isolation, self-deprecation and self-induced loneliness. I tended to shy away from thinking about that time in my life, but now seeing old Cesar staring up at me from the pages of a limp newspaper I couldn’t believe I hadn’t always remembered him. 

Suddenly now, the loss of him felt huge. Bigger than he had ever been in life. This character, this great dusty old man, was suddenly all I could think of, all I could imagine. Memories of hazy summer days spent in his shop, flicking through magazines and squinting at him through the mid-morning glare, the sun bouncing off specks of dust and turning the air to glitter. Suddenly I was filled with such immense sadness. He had saved me in many ways, old Cesar. He had taken me under his own fractured wings, and shielded me from the baying pack of wolves outside. I was not a kid that was cut out for the streets of New York. He saw that in me. Maybe he saw himself in me. All the things I’d never be. 

All the opportunities I’d never have, the way I would become lost in the maelstrom of this unrelenting city. The way he did. Like him, I was just like him. I realised this in a rush of sorrow with a deep guttural ache. I was more like him than my own father.  

And then a stinging pain began in my heart and it occurred to me that he didn’t deserve to ever be forgotten, because he had saved me from the harshness of the world. He was a hero. I felt a compelling need to remember all the other people who’d fallen through the cracks of my prosaic existence. I stayed on my train, for five stops too long, and wrote a list of all the people I had forgotten to remember. Then I stuffed it in my pocket, got off the train and walked back. 

I walked all the way to Brooklyn Bridge and stood in the breeze. I stared down at this piece of paper that I had balled up in a purple fist. 

I began to read their names aloud to the sky, the wind pulling their memories from my lips in icy gusts and carrying them back towards the city.

It was after 11pm when I got home that night, a stiffened wreck of  frozen bones and tear stained cheeks. I looked around my empty apartment, bare and grey, a shrine to banality. I slept that night as though someone had flipped the off switch. Heavy and black and full of remorse. 

The next morning, I decided to ring my parents to tell them about Cesar. They didn’t know. They didn’t remember him either until I reminded them. They didn’t care. They hadn’t cared about him in life, to them he was simply the local corner shop guy. Nothing special, nothing worthy of note. Just a forgettable face in the forgettable history of a forgettable part of their lives. That was it, there was nothing more for me to do. I didn’t know if Cesar had anyone else but me to mourn him. I doubted it. He had never had any other children other than ‘the kid’. The death notice had been simple, an announcement of his death, no ‘mourned by…’ section, just: ‘The death has occurred of Cesar Almeida, late of 86th St. Brooklyn, at his home.’ That was all his life had run to, a single line in the death notices of a local broadsheet. 

I spent the morning on the phone trying to find out where the funeral would be, it was going to be held in St Anne and The Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights. The church was empty but for the coffin, the priest, an altar boy and me. I sat at the back. The soft musty air of the church morphed the distance between myself and the dead into something solid and hard, but I couldn’t bring myself to move any closer. It was a closed coffin and I was glad. I don’t think I could have bared to see what the ravages of time had done to an already ruined man.

At the end of the mass I got up, knelt and blessed myself and turned to leave. “Wait!” the priest called out after me from the pulpit, he made his way down to me, his vestments flapping wildly as he quickened his pace, “Did you know him well?” he asked me. “I used to Father,” I said, “a long time ago, I used to know him.” “It’s so sad isn’t it?” The priests’ voice was unguent and laden with sadness, “How the elderly are so often forgotten, his wife died a few years ago and there really was no one else in his life. 

The funeral was arranged by a nephew who I have never even met, we just spoke over the phone. Cesar came here every Sunday, but I never saw him talking to any of the other parishioners. Oddly enough he always used to sit exactly where you were just sitting.” He said this with a smile and placed his hand over my hand and said, “How exactly did you know him?” I looked long and hard into his eyes, and through a thickness in my throat; “My hero”, I said, “he was my hero.”

I turned on my heels and walked out onto the street. The crisp midday breeze slicing through the dull grey glare. I walked slowly back towards my apartment. The hustle and flow of the city swallowed me whole, and the cold began biting in stinging circles around my eyes, through a different mid-November air.