Mentor
from SUCH DANCING AS WE CAN
Mentor
The only thing people really knew about him– apart from the fact even during that scalding hot summer, he always wore a waffle shirt with long sleeves– was that he’d leased the Wymans’ old trailer. Mrs. Wyman figured he had nightmares. She’d often hear him screaming after dark; but he didn’t cause any trouble otherwise, she said, and he always paid his rent right on time.
Our gang liked the library, which is where we met him. He was surprisingly pleased that we wanted to spend time there, even though in all honesty for us it was mostly a hangout on weekends, when we weren’t at summer jobs. The building was cool, and the librarian a sweetheart who didn’t seem to mind our chatter if we weren’t disturbing other visitors, of which there were few.
The stranger claimed to be doing research for a novel. Once or twice he gave us a rapid-fire summary of how the book would go. When he said that it had partly to do with heroin, we thought he must mean heroine. When he cursed the drug, we figured his female protagonist was an evil one indeed. In short, we were confused, but were too sheepish to ask for clarification. In time, we came to understand that he meant it concerned an addict, a term we barely knew. His book would chronicle his character’s constant, reckless, and finally fatal behavior.
The man often fell asleep at a little table in a dark corner of the reading room, but awake, he was eager to talk. I recall his command of big words, his yellowed moustache, but more than anything else his expression, always so tired. No wonder he slept, though what caused the fatigue was a mystery.
Miss Tyler, our librarian, treated that summer’s stranger well, but then she treated everybody well. She reminded us of Cinderella’s fairy godmother in the Disney film. She may well have known more than we did about this fellow, but she never said a word.
Our friend Walt was clearly Miss Tyler’s pet, though his only difference from us was how well he could draw, which he did more than he read. When he did take down a book, it was always one about artists he claimed were famous, with reproductions of their work. He showed me a drawing one day by someone named Schiele, asking if it didn’t depict agony in an extraordinary way. I agreed. I just wanted to go along with Walt, though in fact the sketch struck me as ugly.
Walt noticed things. For example, he was the first of us to mention how often the stranger scratched and rubbed at himself, especially at his neck. When he did, we saw marks like bug bites on every knuckle and in between and on both his wrists.
Who cared? He cared about us and we were glad we’d met him.
Every time he spoke of the woman in his novel, his eyes got wet, which intrigued us, although it also put us a little on edge. We didn’t really know how to respond to that display, but he didn’t seem to demand a response; he’d quickly start talking again.
“Oh, the gifts she had!” he’d sigh. “Why on earth would she waste them?” It was just as if he were describing a real person, someone he actually knew.
Just before he vanished, he advised us to do something useful with our lives.
We all did, to one degree or another– except for poor Walt, who, after half year at art school in Rhode Island, died drugged and alone one Philadelphia winter, having dropped out of art school in Rhode Island. He’d kept himself out of touch with us, but still we were sad when we heard.
What a waste, we thought. He was so gifted.