Sammy the Madman was a self-described existentialist, devoted to exercising his free will in a purposeless universe. While he never acknowledged any needs, he certainly had lots of wants. But, since his biggest want was probably a death wish, he should have been glad his wish was unfulfilled so far. His poor wife Sarah certainly was glad because he was the only one bringing home a paycheck.
Sammy was a short, dark, medieval-looking guy in our neighborhood. Back in the day when New York’s Lower East Side was wrenched violently into the 1970s, He should have been an abbot or a monk. Reason I say this is that he always managed to bring up the subject of passing over in general, and specifically the number of near-death experiences he’d had. Then he’d want to discuss the larger picture and put his experiences into a philosophical context.
One night, a bunch of us were considering the merits of the Beatles versus the Beach Boys, and why New Yorkers got mellow when they were stoned, while West Coast people just wanted to run and jump in the surf. Everyone asks eternal questions. Even Holden Caulfield, who defined my adolescence, asked, “Where do the ducks in Central Park go in the winter?” That’s the kind of thing you might want to chat about while sipping a brew at the White Horse in the Village or up at Pete’s Tavern. But then Sammy interjected something from Martin Buber.
That was Sammy. He’d bring up Nietzsche or Bergson as soon as the barkeep put a glass in front of him. Further, he wouldn’t toss off a phrase just to give his point a little depth or some academic savoir faire. We could take that, knowing he translated Russian technical manuals for a living and majored in philosophy before being asked to leave Queens College. We could have ignored Sammy if he would just let his obscure reference float away over our heads.
But no, he’d drop phrasing on the table like a hammer, and say “Buber explained it wasn’t Eve simply eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Adam and Eve didn’t have to die after eating the fruit. They just plunged into human mortality.”
There was a stunned silence while people tried to figure how the hell that related to John Lennon’s lyrics in “Let It Be.” Sammy just smiled his wimpy grin.
He didn’t mind if Klein the Biker or Allen the Stockbroker told him to knock it off. Everybody ignored Sammy. I didn’t tell Sammy off, but neither did I encourage him, because I understood Sammy always talked about death. Sammy had so many close brushes with death that it was on his mind a lot. He was on close personal terms with the Grim Reaper.
But death isn’t a conversation starter at a party. Like the time he was forced to play Russian roulette with some homeboys in Chelsea. For a quiet guy, Sammy got around.
That evening was one of those times when we had enough. Klein, Allen, Sammy and I were having a few over at this Irish place — O’Neill’s on Avenue B — when Klein got really pissed at the drift of Sammy’s conversation. Klein looked like a wooly bear with more hair than a barbershop. I knew he was mad when all I could see were two beady eyes popping out of his furry face.
“Sammy, you are really bringing us down with your morbid talk. Why don’t you go home to Sarah and your kid?” he said.
I added, “You’re worse than morbid tonight. You’d make an undertaker look like Happy Jack the Clown.”
Sammy did his self-effacing grin, like he’d been caught doing something nasty, and he got up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he announced. I guessed he had taken the hint and was bowing out gracefully.
We had a heck of a night. Allen got it in his head that we should do a progressive dinner. We would have one course — and only one course—at a different place, giving new definition to eating on the run. Allen’s a good man for coming up with original ideas.
We finished up at O’Neill’s and cabbed a cab down to Mott Street to get some snails at Hong Fat’s for an appetizer, then we caught another cab to a Mexican place on Greenwich Avenue for gazpacho, and walked to Delancey for the best pastrami in the city. From there, we went down to the Chinese place on Bayard for mango ice cream. New York is the greatest place for turning dining into performance art.
The phone was ringing when I got back to my apartment. It was about 2 a.m. and it was Sammy’s wife.
“Jake, I’m looking for Sam. He’s not home.”
“Sarah? I have no idea where Sam is.”
“Isn’t he with you now?” she asked in her little-girl New Jersey voice. She pronounced “now” as “na-y-aow,” with three syllables. “He said he was going to be with you.”
“Yeah, Sarah, he was with us — but that was hours ago. He disappeared while we were sipping a brew.”
“I thought you’d take care of him,” she said, her voice trailing off. “How could you let him wander off? By himself.”
That brought me down. Should we have taken care of him? At 2 a.m. it wasn’t a pressing question and I went to sleep. Sammy was a survivor.
Action like Olympics-style eating and drinking can only happen on weekends when you have a straight job during the other five days. That’s why it disturbed me every time Sammy said, “Every night is Saturday night for us existentialists.” I’ll never be an existentialist until I can treat Monday like Saturday. So it was the following Saturday before I ran into Sammy on Second Avenue. He was studying the posters in the window of the St. Mark’s Theatre on Second Avenue, probably wondering if he was up to another Orson Welles film.
I said, “Sarah was looking for you last Saturday. She called me at two in the morning. Where’d you go?”
The little smile came over his face.
“I got up to go to the bathroom.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of a — story.”
I bought us some coffee at Austin’s deli and he proceeded to tell me about his disappearance. He said he recalled getting up from the bar and weaving off toward the men’s room. He opened the door and that was the last thing he remembered. When he woke up it was dark and he was lying flat on his back. Slowly, he said, he felt around and his fingertips touched walls on all sides of him.
“I thought I must be dead and I was in my coffin. It was so still and quiet. Not a sound. But then I wondered, if I’m dead, why do I still have to go to the bathroom?
“And I felt around some more and found I was lying on beer cans. I was lying in the box where they throw the empties down in the basement. I took the wrong door to the men’s room and fell down the basement stairs.”
Feeling the spirit, I exhaled a “Jesus,” more to encourage the rest of this story than to lend theological emphasis to it.
“Then what happened? We waited for you,” I lied.
He shrugged. “Well, I went upstairs. The bar was empty. Everyone had gone. It was locked up. I was locked in. There was nothing I could do, so I sat down at the bar and got a beer.”
I began laughing so hard the coffee came out my nose.
“Then the cops came and banged on the door, and they called O’Neill, and O’Neill came down and opened up, and the cops arrested me. For breaking and entering. I tried to explain I didn’t break in, because I was already in, and being already in I couldn’t enter. You can’t go in twice—philosophically speaking — without at least going out once. But they took me down to the 9th Precinct and booked me. I think the judge will give me probation.”
I yanked a paper napkin out of the dispenser and dried my eyes.
“Well, Sammy,” I said, “you remind of those immortal words spoken by that profound thinker, Emanuel Kant.”
His eyes lit up. I was on his turf now, talking philosophy. “What’s that?”
“He said, ‘If it’s not one thing, it’s another.’” I put my hand on his arm and tried to look serious. “The cops booked you for impersonating a philosopher.”
Walt moves between writing genres, from mystery to humor, speculative fiction to romance with a little historical non-fiction thrown in for good measure. His work has appeared in print and online in over two dozen publications. Earlier, two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, were available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other online booksellers. He’s also bounced from Fortune 500 firms to university posts, and from homes in eight states and to a couple of Asian countries. He now lives in New Jersey where he moderates a writing group.
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