He was Irish, of course, and he took pride in Irish accomplishments when he could have none of his own. He had known Frank O’Connor when that writer had been at Harvard. He told me on many occasions how O’Connor had stopped to talk every day on his way to the Yard. He had also known James Michael Curley, and his most colorful memory of the man was a long-ago day when he and James Curley sat in a Boston bar and one of Curley’s runners had come in and said: “Hey Jim, Sol Bernstein the Jew wants to see you.” And Curley, in his deep, memorial voice, had said to James Sullivan: “Let us go forth and meet this Israelite Prince.” These were his memories, and I would obediently put aside my garbage cans and laugh with him over the hundred or so colorful, insignificant little details which made up a whole lifetime of living in the basement of Harvard. And although they were of little value to me then, I knew that they were the reflections of a lifetime and the happiest moments he would ever have, being sold to me cheap, as youthful time is cheap, for as little time and interest as I wanted to spend. It was a buyer’s market.

II

IN THOSE DAYS I BELIEVED myself gifted with a boundless perception and attacked my daily garbage route with a gusto superenforced by the happy knowledge that behind each of the fifty or so doors in our building lived a story which could, if I chose to grace it with the magic of my pen, become immortal. I watched my tenants fanatically, noting their perversions, their visitors, and their eating habits. So intense was my search for material that I had to restrain myself from going through their refuse scrap by scrap; but at the topmost layers of muck, without too much hand-soiling in the process, I set my perceptions to work. By late June, however, I had discovered only enough to put together a skimpy, rather naïve Henry Miller novel. The most colorful discoveries being:

(1) The lady in #24 was an alumna of Paducah College.

(2) The couple in #55 made love at least five hundred times a week and the wife had not yet discovered the pill.

(3) The old lady in #36 was still having monthly inconvenience.

(4) The two fatsos in #56 consumed nightly an extraordinary amount of chili.

(5) The fat man in #54 had two dogs that were married to each other, but he was not married to anyone at all.

(6) The middle-aged single man in #63 threw out an awful lot of flowers.

Disturbed by the snail’s progress I was making, I confessed my futility to James one day as he sat on his bench chain-smoking and smearing butts on my newly waxed lobby floor. “So you want to know about the tenants?” he said, his cat’s eyes flickering over me.

I nodded.