First of all I should say we live in a quiet, peaceful building and it’s only Percy Thistlethwaite who doesn’t fit in. He’s the guy in 3-C. He’s been living in the building longer than anyone else and is set in his ways. To give the guy his due, I have to admit that most of the time he minds his own business. But sometimes he snaps. I remember the last time it happened to me. I’m the building super and general handyman and was trying to fix one of the four washing machines we have in our basement laundry, though as usual I wasn’t having much luck. I know some guys get frustrated when they can’t get something fixed, but that never bothered me—actually I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and was only banging around inside the machine so that I could tell my boss Maury Steinberg that I tried to fix it but that it needed a pro. That’s our usual game, and Maury’s quite sensible about the arrangement. So anyways, I was in a pretty good mood thinking about the new deal down at McDonald's I was going to have for lunch when Mr. Thistlethwaite comes in with his laundry whistling a tune I recognized, and feeling friendly as I say, I poked my head out from under the broken machine and said, “Howdy, Mr. Thistlethwaite, I do that too when I’m doing laundry.”
I don’t know if I startled him or what, but for a long time he just kept loading his laundry and whistling as if he hadn’t even heard me. But finally after throwing in the last shirt, he looked up and said, in a non-too friendly tone, “Do what?”
“Whistle the jingle to Stain Away! It’s my brand too.” I pointed to the familiar red, white and blue box—“Colors you can trust” was their slogan. “You know—‘You keep the blues at bay/When you use Stain Away!’”
He stared at me as if dumbfounded for so long I started to get embarrassed. Then he said, “And all the time I thought it was a theme from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Thank you, sir. Thank you for enlightening me.”
Now I should say right here we’re getting into one of the reasons Mr. Thistlethwaite doesn’t fit in at 87 Pleasant Street. Everyone in the building loves rock music. Sadie Finklestein, whose arthritis is so bad she’s often been confined to a wheelchair since her eightieth birthday, has told me many times that her only regret is that she can’t boogie when she’s in the steel wheels. Tony Tortillini was just telling me the other day when we were walking over to Burger King on State Street to try the new chicken sandwich they were advertising that he loves the part where John screams in “Day in the Life.” At Howie Cavallaro’s sixtieth birthday last month we must have listened to Neil Young’s “Rust Never Dies” album ten times (Howie, having worn out the record years ago, had got the CD version so that he just kept hitting the repeat button). And of course all the young people in our building never go for their jogs or power walks without their Sony Walkmans bringing them the latest sounds. But Percy Thistlethwaite? He actually likes classical music!
Well, I could see his remark was sarcastic and I should have been on my guard, but I was in too good a mood to let it bother me (that deal at McDonald's included a Big Mac, large fries and a coke for just $2.99, so who wouldn’t be happy?) and I ignored the sarcasm and said, “Tell me, Mr. Thistlethwaite, where’s the place you call home?” and repeated when he just looked puzzled, “Where are your people from? The old country and all that?”
He looked at me as if I’d asked him the size of his you-know-what. “I don’t have ‘people’ like that, if you must know.”
“What do you mean?” I was really perplexed and thought he didn’t understand. “You know, what language did your people speak before they spoke English? That’s what I meant by ‘home.’ I’m just asking because the neighborhood Ethnic Pride Day is coming up.”
That’s when he went ballistic on me. Standing his full 6-2, skinny beanpole, shiny chrome-domed, faded blue eyed, pants up-to-the-chest height, he said drily, “Some of us approximate the condition known poetically as a stranger on the earth. Some of us” (his voice began rising until it thundered across the walls) “were born into misery and misfortune. Some of us, Mr. Hmtchs, have, in fine, no scene of domestic bliss and childhood sweetness to refresh our minds in the dry desert of quotidian existence.”
“Oh, I see,” said I, mustering all the sympathy possible when a guy you hardly know is yelling at you, “then you’re an orphan. I’m sorry.”
Mr. Thistlethwaite turned sharply and glared at me. “You, sir,” he roared, “may assume no such thing. It’s very presumptuous of you.”
You’d better believe I made myself scarce after that display. And you’d also better believe I’m not the only one who’s been the victim of a Thistlethwaitish outburst. Recently Tiffany Hernandez, who just married Chuckie Yamashita and moved into the building, just about got her head snapped off and was called an impertinent puppy for calling him “Percy” instead of Mr. Thistlethwaite. Mostly, though, it’s sarcasm that the guy in 3-C uses. Make no mistake about it, Mr. Thistlethwaite can be a sarcastic guy. Sometimes I get the impression he thinks he’s the only sane guy in a building filled with idiots. Take Jose, for example. The poor guy’s real name is U Suk Toe. A lot of people razzed him about that name, though with a name like Bob Hmtchs I never did. I must have heard the joke about the Czech guy who’s asked to read the eye chart at the optometrist’s a million times—”Read it? Hell, I know the guy!” I tell people my name is pronounced “him-chess” and the matter is settled, but the trouble with U Suk Toe is that it’s pronounced exactly as it’s spelled. So finally he americanized his name to Jose, as in “No way, Jose.” But Mr. Thistlethwaite, he always pronounced the “J” and made his name rime with “hose.” And the thing is, Jose’s a good guy—he’s really into punk rock and on weekends dresses like a Deadhead with tie-dyed shirts, headband and the works.
Another time he turned his sarcastic tongue on Sadie. She was sitting in her wheel chair in the shade in front of our building grooving to a Pearl Jam song, and at the same time Mr. Thistlethwaite was waiting for the bus and sitting on one of the benches. He was trying to read something and kept giving Sadie dirty looks until finally he asked her to turn the radio down a bit. But Sadie didn’t particularly like his tone of voice, so instead of doing what he asked she told him Pearl Jam wasn’t a group you listened to as background music, and she quoted Stanley Chen, the world-famous rock critic, who had written that the soul of America throbbed in every note that sublime group played. Then, Sadie said, a maniacal look came into Mr. Thistlethwaite's eyes so that she actually began to be afraid, but instead of physical violence his chosen weapon was sarcasm. “You know,” he said with a grimace horrible to behold, “if ever I’m on the verge of suicide I’m going to remember this moment.” “Why’s that?” Sadie asked. She found the remark really interesting, and what with the song being over and the news on she turned off the radio to listen. “Because of the healing power of humor is what is needed to fight despair,” he said. “To think that grown men and women actually make their living pompously criticizing music designed for pimply-faced adolescents and talking about it in terms of high art—why, it’s guaranteed to save one from despair.” And with that he slapped his knee and roared with laughter. But Sadie can’t stand to hear a word against Pearl Jam or Stanley Chen, and on that day I’m afraid Mr. Thistlethwaite made a bitter enemy.
Having made a lot of them through the years, Mr. Thistlethwaite hadn’t exactly built up a backlog of good will. Probably it wouldn’t have mattered, and we would have all gone tolerating him, except at this time the fateful idea of a mural of Walt Disney characters in our lobby came up. Bette Ceckowski’s daughter Cary offered to paint it for us, and Maury said it was okay with him as long as all the tenants agreed. “All the tenants?” I asked him. Already I could smell the skunk, but Maury said all twelve tenants had to agree.
Naturally the guy in 3-C made for a hung jury. His exact objection was something along the lines of hell freezing over before he’d see such drivel in the building he lived in. For two weeks people argued with him (not me—I knew it was useless), trying to convince him that the mural would
make our building unique, that Cary was the best artist in her high school and would do a marvelous job, that it wouldn’t even cost us a cent since she was doing it for artistic expression, not money, all of which pleading Mr. Thistlethwaite greeted with snorts of contempt.
After that murderlust grew in our hearts. In the lobby in the morning, at McDonald's or Burger King or Pizza Hut at lunch, out on the benches on nice nights, we’d meet and talk about him. Sandy Abu Saed (she was my pal Binky’s wife, but I have to admit in my imagination she and I have done some naughty things together— she’s a real black-eyed beauty, let me tell ya), Sandy, anyways, cut right to the chase at Burger King (new fish sandwich this week). “He’s doing something fishy in there, I can tell you. Why else would he sliver in and out of his door like a snake? We’ve been living on the third floor for five years now and have never seen inside his place.”
To which Buzz Singha countered, after washing down a huge bite of his Whopper with chocolate milkshake, which was half price if you bought the fish sandwich but Buzz just felt like a whopper so he paid full price, “If you ask me he’s murdered someone and is getting rid of the evidence in a vat of acid. Either that or he’s chopping the body up just like that guy in Milwaukee did.”
At McDonald's (free soft drinks with orders over $3) Bette Ceckowski thought he looked like a fellow on America’s Most Wanted, one of her favorite TV shows. The guy had swindled widows and old folks out of their life savings in eleven different states. “He was tall and skinny,” Bette concluded, “with blue eyes and fair hair just like our guy.”
Everyone was pretty impressed with this reasoning (Bette, you see, had gone to college) but later that night when a bunch of us were talking it over during half time on Monday Night Football Jose offered a different perspective on our problem. “How do we know his name is Thistlethwaite?” he asked as he passed around the pepperoni and double cheese pizza we had had delivered—the first at full price, the other two at half price.
Everyone looked dumbfounded, though as I thought about it you could see why Jose would reason along these lines. Finally after everyone chewed thoughtfully on their pizza for a while, Andy Xanthopoulis said, “Well, it’s the name on his mailbox. Besides, who’d think up a name like that?” He shook his head. “No, we want to know the real story, look for his picture at the Post Office. That’s what I’m going to do.” Andy was part of the Beta testing that proved Pepsi was better than Coke. He never drank Coke, only Pepsi, and you have to understand he spoke as emphatically as if he was on his usual spiel about how awful Coke was. He was so emphatic, in fact, for a while there I think we were all planning a trip to the Post Office first thing in the morning.
Then Binky Abu Saed chimed in with the fruits of his big think. “Who would make up a name like Thistlethwaite? I’ll tell you who—a guy who reads books and listens to classical music, that’s who. For me, I look forward to the day his trial’s on the Court Channel.”
“After we finger him at the Post Office,” Andy added.
“Or when we grab him and make him confess,” Jose chimed in.
I thought everyone was getting carried away. I understood their anger and frustration—with our building already thirty-five years old it would only take something special like the Disney mural to get us designated as a National Historical Site—but I think we were forgetting our uniquely American sense of fair play. When I brought this up, though, it was not at first well received.
Buzz said, “It’s one thing to be fair to a guy because we Americans are the fairest people in the world. But it’s quite another thing to be fair to a guy who’s not normal—who’s not even American.”
Well, that got us thinking again. I know my head was beginning to ache, and it looked like the boys were feeling the pain too. But for our building no sacrifice is too much! What Buzz said was true. Like my Martha used to say (I still call her my Martha even though it’s going on fifteen years we’ve been divorced), we all like to watch a bit of TV each night, have lunch at McDonald's once or twice a week, go shopping at the mall and see the people, talk about last night’s ballgame or what the Hollywood stars are doing in bed to each other, and generally participate in the culture of our great country. But Mr. Thistlethwaite? He didn’t even own a TV as far as I could tell. He didn’t like baseball, the mall, or fastfood.
And as Buzz pointed out, he didn’t know a thing about the OJ trial!
We talked about this for a while, and then Jose more or less seconded Buzz’s observation when he said, “He doesn’t seem to have a past. You never hear him speaking of the old country or of when his parents or grandparents came to America. I find it very suspicious. He ain’t like any American I know.”
He high-fived Buzz and Binky, then did an end zone dance like the running back who just scored a big TD for our side to remind us of his American credentials. In fact all the guys got quite excited since that TD put us ahead. Andy went out for a pass and Jose threw him a perfect spiral with the pizza box. Andy caught it, then knocked himself silly against the wall as he headed up field. All this time, though, I was still thinking. I’d seen enough detective shows to know we had to start from the facts if we were to solve the mystery. When I was a kid I wanted to be a cop, so naturally it was me (I say this in all modesty) who brought this to the group’s attention during the ad for the new chicken-bacon sandwich at Wendy’s. I counted off on my fingers the facts as we knew them. Mr. Thistlethwaite was in his mid-fifties. He was a widower and had two kids living in the Midwest (though no one could recall ever seeing these kids). He used to be a librarian but lost his job when the college he worked at folded. Now he lived on savings or some kind of an annuity.
Andy, who was just coming around from the hard tackle the wall had made, said these facts weren’t much to go on, so we all tried to think of someone he liked besides those old fart poets and composers. No one could ever remember him mentioning actors, rock stars, presidents, athletes or famous criminals in favorable terms. Buzz recalled that one time Mr. Thistlethwaite told Sonny Rodriguez he admired Martin Luther, but we all knew Doctor King has a holiday now and gives us the day off, so it went without saying that everyone admired him. The only suspicious thing was that he said Martin Luther. It just wasn’t like him to call a guy by his first name. I called Leroy MacIntyre to ask him if he knew anything about Mr. Thistlethwaite being involved with the Black Muslims. Leroy was the only black guy in our building and therefore our expert on black folks. But Leroy doubted it. “The guy’s as pale as a moon calf,” he opined. “He ain’t likely to be messing with them brothers.”
Well, so much for that theory. The guys started talking wild again, so I had to remind them that we needed facts before we could get the cops to arrest him, and that meant we had to get inside his apartment and nose around. Since I was the super, I had the best chance of getting in.
But another week went by while we tried various schemes without any luck. I tried to talk Mr. Thistlethwaite into letting me inspect his air conditioner by telling him that Maury wanted all the units checked since they hadn’t been serviced in years. Mr. Thistlethwaite, however, pointed out that he had never used his AC because he hated the noise it made. Next I suggested he needed his apartment painted and that I was just the man to do it, but he said as a matter of fact he was planning to get it wall papered and was only waiting because he was torn between Goofy and Tinkerbell as the motif. Three days later I told him I’d have to inspect his thermostat now that winter was approaching, and this time too he was ready for me. He took his contract from his pocket and showed me the paragraph where it said no entry could be made without his permission.
I now realized the guy in 3-C was fiendishly clever and that he was on to us. I reported this back to the others, who all became rather discouraged. Just then, though, our luck changed, and I’m proud to say it was owing to my cleverness, if I do say so myself. Perhaps Mr. Thistlethwaite underestimated just exactly who I was, but I didn’t. Bob Hmtchs is the name, clever dude is the g
ame! What I did was find out where he spent three or four mornings a week by tailing him. I disguised myself as a street mime, painting half my face black and the other half white, and wearing a sailor outfit with a jersey of white and red horizontal stripes and white pants. I don’t think even Martha would recognize me if she passed me on the street. As a matter of fact she did pass by, but she took one look and hurriedly rushed away. And I know Mr. Thistlethwaite didn’t. Every time he happened to look back at me I simply pretended I was in an invisible box. It was in this way that I discovered he went to the public library on these mornings.
My successful sleuthing emboldened me to try to break into his apartment with the master key the next morning he was gone, but once again he was one step ahead of us—he’d changed the locks. Sandy, Bette, and Sadie, who kept watch for me by the elevator and stairs, regarded this as proof of his guilt and were for calling the cops instantly. I had to remind them that Columbo and other experienced detectives (I was thinking especially of myself) always waited for proof before making arrests. Didn’t Bette’s face cloud over when she heard me say that! She reminded us that she had been to college and said that in college, unlike TV, proof was proof.
Then, the very next day, just like on TV, and not like in college, something occurred that unexpectedly allowed us to get inside the apartment. We owed our good luck to Sandy and Binky’s cat Snowball. That darn cat was forever getting into mischief like knocking grocery bags over, chewing through slippers, and so forth, up to more serious things like eating Sadie’s parakeet, whose name was Mick Jagger. This time Snowball was hanging around the door to Mr. Thistlethwaite’s apartment, and when he left it ajar as he went to the utility closet to get a mop before you could say Jumping Jack Flash, Snowball had slipped into the apartment and deposited a hairball on a valuable book. Mr. Thistlethwaite, coming back and discovering this outrage, began chasing the cat around the apartment and swinging at her with the mop. I could hear all this commotion down in the lobby and went up to investigate. I got up there to discover through the open door Mr. Thistlethwaite, his eyes wild with bloodlust, screaming that his book was ruined while Snowball was dodging his blows and howling in outrage that she wasn’t free to do what she wanted. Sadie had wheeled out into the hall and in her excitement apparently confusing Snowball and Mr. Thistlethwaite, she was screaming, “Good Lord! Stop him before he kills again!” Sandy (who was wearing a foxy tank top and tight shorts) was yelling at her neighbor to leave her cat alone. In the confusion I don’t think Mr. Thistlethwaite even noticed I slipped into his apartment under the pretense of trying to help out while actually my trained eyes were casing the place out.
There were books everywhere, in shelves, in piles on the floor, on tables, even on the window sills. By his easy chair was the one he must have been reading at the time and on which Snowball had deposited her love token—The Works of Shelley, a poet, I think. The walls had a lot of pictures of landscapes and such, and also a lot of what looked like old family portraits of dudes dressed up in old-fashioned clothes. It made me think he came from a family of actors. There was a certificate from the American Library Association and another for some club he must have belonged to (though I never remember seeing him going off to any meetings)—Sons of the American Revolution, it said. Tony later told me it was something like the Knights of Columbus. I didn’t see a TV anywhere, so we were right about that. He did have a great sound system with speakers as big as tanks, but of course all his stuff was classical, so I didn’t waste my time looking at it too closely. With Mr. Thistlethwaite chasing Snowball, Sandy chasing both of them, and Sadie in the hall yelling from her steel wheels, “Murder! Stop the fiend before he kills again!” it took great powers of concentration just to notice the things I was seeing. Luckily, just then Snowball made a break for the door, and all of them ran out into the hall. Quickly I checked his freezer to see if it was like that guy’s in Milwaukee, but it wasn’t. He was clean. In fact I saw once in a movie the apartment of a character who was a librarian that the detective had to interview, and I have to admit Mr. Thistlethwaite’s place reminded me of that set in the movie. I was going to have to tell the others that we couldn’t easily nail him on a mass murderer charge.
At this point, just when the guy in 3-C probably thought he had us on the ropes, I came up with a plan that got us the victory. Maury’s a softy, so I told Bette to let fly with some tears when we went to talk with him, and it worked. Maury let us have the mural on an eleven to one vote. Mr. Thistlethwaite, seeing that he’d lost this battle of wits (notice I don’t say I won, but you can draw your own conclusions), began moving his stuff out of his unit. But just when we calculated almost all his stuff was gone and we were looking forward to living in a Thistlethwaiteless building, something truly fishy began happening in 3-C. Three mysterious and large boxes were delivered, and Mr. Thistlethwaite stayed on. Strange young men and women came with backpacks and suitcases and spent the days inside, often not leaving until late at night. Sometimes, even though it was from that swanky emporium over on Cross Street, pizza was delivered! We asked Maury if Mr. Thistlethwaite was planning to sell his condominium, but Maury hadn’t heard a word. We tried asking the guy in 3-C what his plans were, but he’d just give us a goofy grin and say, “In the fullness of time, my dear people, in the fullness of time.”
By now Cary had finished her mural and the government officials came to check out our building. Unfortunately they rejected our request to become an historical site. True, they said, our place was 35 years old and therefore historical; but, they reminded us, it still needed something special to set it apart and they had already registered 143 buildings with Walt Disney murals. Everyone was of course very disappointed. For several weeks as we ate our Whoppers and Big Macs all we had to talk about (especially now that the OJ trial was over) was what was happening in 3-C. Sadie was quite sure he was building a nuclear device with smuggled Russian uranium. She read in one of the tabloids that a woman grew an extra breast after handling some of that illicit stuff and rather hoped something extra would grow on Mr. Thistlethwaite. Before that happened, though, she said we had to have the cops in to arrest him. Somewhat impatiently I had to remind her that we needed proof before we could get a warrant and that I rather doubted Snowball would volunteer for another assignment.
Mr. Thistlethwaite had been present on the day the government officials came to our building and was even seen talking to them as he waited for his mysterious young friends in the lobby. Sadie and some of the others suspected he had prejudiced the officials against us. For sure he watched them examine the Disney mural with a wry, self-satisfied smile on his face. Because of that I was doubly surprised about a month later when he came down to the lobby to give me the key to 3-C. “Of late I have had occasion to study the contract for my condo very closely. One article states that a key must be available in case of emergencies. Perhaps you did not know”—here he gave me a look fraught with significance—“that I recently changed the lock. Here is the key.”
“You’ll be selling your place I expect, Mr. Thistlethwaite,” I said as I took the key.
He rubbed his bald pate and peered at me through his thick glasses. “On the contrary, my stuff is being moved back today now that the renovations are done.”
He started walking away, then turned just like Columbo always does to deliver the zinger. “Oh, by the way, I’ve also called the government people in for a look. Not only that, but I’m afraid I must ask you for a favor. I’m called out of town to my son’s house and will not be available for the scheduled visit. I wonder if you’ll have the kindness to show them around 3-C.”
After he left you could have knocked me over with a feather. My hand was positively trembling as I got on the phone to tell everyone the news. The next morning, a half hour after Mr. Thistlethwaite left for the airport, Jose, Binky, Andy and I rushed upstairs to where Sadie was waiting impatiently in her steel wheels and into 3-C we went. You’re not going to believe it, but what we found wa
s the walls and ceilings of every room painted with at least a thousand wasps. Some were against blue backgrounds, some were on flowers, some were stinging other insects, some were in swarms, some were alone, some were huge six-foot paintings, some tiny and life size, but everywhere there were yellow and black wasps. Each room had been painted by a different artist so that there were many different styles. Most were realistic but some were stylized, almost abstract. Leaning against the kitchen counter we found a sign that said THE HOUSE OF THISTLETHWAITISH WASPDOM. TOURS AVAILABLE. It looked like he intended to have that on the door. The most interesting place was the spare bedroom. There the artist had painted human faces on the wasps—there were dozens of them, but the only ones we recognized were Washington and Lincoln because of the car ads on Presidents’ Day and Shakespeare, who does a lot of ad work too. The rest of them, of both men and women, showed a lot of old-fashioned people like in movies.
We were impressed and more importantly so were the government people when I proudly showed them around. Three months after their second visit to our building we were designated a National Historical Site, and Jose, Bette, Sadie and I started making some dough selling T-shirts that Cary designed—we didn’t make a lot from the visitors that came but enough to pay for our lunches at Burger King, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, so just try to tell me we’re not ahead of the game. Really, you should also try to get your place designated an historical site—I strongly recommend it. We Americans love history, so you’re bound to make some money.
Oh, yeah, I should also say something about the people who visited. The ones who came to see the Walt Disney mural were regular people. They wore T-shirts and sneakers and had Sony Walkmans soldered to their ears just like regular people always do. But the ones who came to see the guy in 3-C’s apartment were different. The men all wore their pants up to their chests and the women almost always had on dresses. There was a lot of blue hair among them too. If you bumped into them, they would all say, “Oh, I do beg your pardon.” But you know what? Cary designed a special wasp T-shirt of yellow and black horizontal stripes, and I’ll be darned if some of them didn’t buy them.
Percy Thistlethwaite is now a popular guy at our building. He’s changed too. The biggest thing is that he’s not sarcastic anymore. But you can see for yourself how he’s changed when I tell you about what happened when I saw him awhile ago. I thanked him for making our building the hot spot in our nation’s tourist industry that it’s become and said, “Everyone’s real thankful to you, Mr. Thistlethwaite.”
“My pleasure, Bob,” he answered with a modestly dismissive wave of the arm. “Glad to help.” His arm continued waving in the air and for a second there I thought he was actually going to high-five me, but really that would be too much. Instead he put his arm out to shake my hand and said, “Hey, call me Percy.”
I’ll tell you, that guy in 3-C is some guy. Hell, you could even say he’s one heck of a guy! He even bought one of the yellow and black T-shirts, and this morning he was wearing it. He seemed proud as a peacock and pleased as punch to be wearing the wasp colors. Go figure. Who’d want to be associated with an insect unless he was a really cool guy!