15 February 2008

Jack Malarky

Mardy 1 sent the note around to the usual suspects yesterday, and it caught me up short.

Jack is dead. Gone. Checked out Big Pink for good.

I knew he was ill, had been ill, I corrected myself. Carol B told me about it when I called on her briefly in the office on the fourth floor of at the big glass building with the cipher-locks and guards. I was meaning to get over to the care facility and call on him. It would have been the right thing to do, and I had the name of the place scrawled on the manila folder I was carrying. to protect the receipt from another Task Order that we probably will not win.

I did not get to it, and looking inside myself I don't know if I would have, even if I could find the folder that disappeared in the move to the new building on Monday.

Jack will not be hanging out on Tony's porch when Tony is out doing his Saturday chores in the sleek black Corvette. He thought highly about the Invisible Woman, since he could see things that other people cannot. He did not have The Sight, but he had a unique perspective from his professional occupation, and later from his age.

I looked out the window of the new office on the eighth floor of the shiny new building with the upscale Chinese restaurant on the ground floor.

Upscale Chinese. It's an oxymoron like “Military Intelligence.” Go figure.

I am ambivalent about the view from where I sit; I can see the Staples parking lot across the street that is going to be something else as soon as the economy permits.

You know I don't normally use real names, but this is Jack's true one. No one could make up anything more perfect. I read the words:

“Jack Malarkey's Memorial Visitation

A Memorial Visitation will be held for Jack on Saturday, from 2-4 PM in one of the viewing parlors at the Murphy Funeral Home on Wilson Blvd. His death notice is scheduled to run in the Washington Post next week.

Jack will be cremated and hopefully his cremains will be present for this visitation.

Feel free to bring pictures or any memorabilia you may want to share about Jack.

This is not a formal funeral service; there will be no clergy.”

I did not think that Jack was a religious man. His life was a complex ride down the rapids. He was a rake and a roué in his youth. A Coast Guardsman, after the Big War, I think, early Fifties, maybe a way to duck carrying a rifle in Korea. He was still relatively young, though he had ridden the pony hard and put it away wet and it showed.

When I met him, he looked like the Millionaire on the Chance cards on the Monopoly Board, dapper and neat. Last time I saw him, when the weather turned cold, he was standing by the concierge desk in the lobby and he needed a haircut and looked gaunt, almost translucent.

He had a soft Balla'more accent, all the consonants run into the vowels as they did when the Charm City still had its own dialect of English. He had been a baseball player, a little guy, but wiry and agile. Somewhere in the infield- Second base, maybe, or a shortstop.

He still smoked cigars when I met him when I arrived at Big Pink, though he had sworn off the booze that apparently helped swirl him down the years. He had a sarcastic streak in him that suggested he had been a mean drunk, and the brutal honesty that remained made it appear that he had been most down some of the first steps at AA.

I don't know if he ever married. I assume he must have, since that is what you did in the fifties. He was a lady's man, that's for sure, and had an eye for beauty right to the end.

He could be charming, in his way, and downright courtly. The women in Big Pink took care of him. They would drive him around to his doctor's appointments, and take him to dinner. He no longer drove, and was on a pension in his eighth floor efficiency with his television and sports.

He had been a telephone lineman, and the Concrete Workers liked him, since he was a union man from day one. I assume he was retired on one of the pensions that finally bankrupted Ma Bell. He had some stories about his days up in the wires, and some of them were more than a little unsettling.

He told me one time he had climbed up a pole like his description of climbing up to check a connection in an residential Arlington neighborhood. The pole was on an alley, and from his aerie he was able to look in the back windows of all the houses at the ladies going about their business. He was no peeping Tom, of course, since he had the phone company truck, and a free pass since he was on official business.

Sometimes he would schedule important overhead work for just around the evening rush hour in summer near the business district, so he could watch the women in their skirts try to get organized in their cars to drive home.

He also had the keys to all the utility rooms in the garden apartments around here, and in that official capacity, not as a voyeur, he had seen and done everything. He even got into the White House to do telephones on special assignment.

I am going to miss Jack, though he could be a bit of a jerk at times, and reminds me of someone uncomfortably close to home. He was rumor central, and had his nose in everyone's business when the weather was warm and he still got out of his apartment.

He was a gossip, and loved a juicy story.

I guess there is a lot more of Jack in me than I would like to think.

Rest in peace, Jack. I hope your cremains make it to the ceremony. I'll be there.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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