The Body of Brooklyn

Melon Man

......................................................................... MelonMan I remember the melon man in terms so impossibly caricatured that his image is indelible. In childhood, not yet jaundiced by experience , our visual taste buds not yet dulled, we see with a clarity that seems exaggerated to the older, larger, more worldly self. In “Such, Such Were the Joys,” George Orwell tells us that if he went back to his old school how small it and its inhabitants would seem. Yes, if we were to go back our heroes might shrink, our demons de-demonize, our confusions fade into the depressing process of understanding and categorizing, depressing in the potential of reducing our personal myths with our fears and confusions. How to keep both, how to use memory to enlarge and not dismiss? For one thing: realize what we have lost, acknowledge that we have forgotten even what we seem to remember. Which brings me, for many reasons, to the melon man. The melon man lived a scant block away, his house on the corner lot of Ocean Parkway and Manhattan Court. In some ways his appearance matched the house perfectly: the front yard was overgrown, unkempt in its creeping vines, rotting leaves, fruit trees half lush and half dead, completely shaded. The house was large, ugly brick and wood slanting in on itself, a fairy tale melange of aesthetic misdirection : a bric-a-brac house, brick and Braque. In memory it is uniformly dark and colorless. Surrounded by an old half-height chain-link fence, the yard would engulf all balls that bounced into its dominion, too scary for even the dared rescue. Our Spalding rubber balls were elastic Grails, one of the most familiar items of my childhood, and yet each almost instantly assumed its own character, its own color, displaying the provenance of its bounces and ricochets, and the relative firmness of its uses: stickball, punchball, stoopball, boxball . . . The balls that bounced into the melon man’s yard were sacrificed, yielded to a surreal landscape of rotting peaches, creepers, and the other detritus that washes up on lots and lawns. The melon man was very old, bent. Before I knew him as the melon man, a genial name that his appearance belied, he was the old man who lived in the scary house, a dour, rubber-featured entity, always in shabby black suit — the old country look that second-generationers such as myself had lost connection with — stained and faded white shirt buttoned to the top with no tie, floppy big black shoes that seemed never to have strolled, each foot lifted and stamped when he would apparently mimic what the rest of us called walking. He had the largest nose I had, or have, ever seen. It was multidirectional: it sloped and bulged and had a knot at the top and a wart or mole on the side. He was crescent bald, gray splayed hair spraying out the sides, down the back, at different lengths. He must have been sixty-five or so. He was scary, larger than life, yet I could nevertheless perceive something pathetic in his physical demeanor that didn’t rankle with his status as goblin, Golem. Children are open-mindedly fanciful, but astute. There he was in my kitchen, smiling semitoothlessly and nodding his head as I came in. “David, this is Mr. . . . ,” and there followed a Polish name, all consonants, which second-generation or beyond children are genetically incapable of pronouncing, or in trying to pronounce turn into bizarrely generic utterances such as “bushmishnish ,” trailing off into a whisper. They were sitting at the table eating honeydew. I joined them, the three of us making awkward, squishy sounds with our spoons for a few minutes, sounds that seemed to mimic the melon man’s name. As taught, I started excavating the rind, shoveling the spoon over the small ridges of fruit until all traces of opaque green yielded to white. As the child of Depression-era parents I was instructed to eat everything edible, even if only hypothetically so, on my plate. Gristle, fat, bones sucked dry. And one more scant generation removed from turn-of-the-century pogroms and shtetls, we ate foods that make some of my friends go white in holy gastronomic terror: marrow bones, intestines , brains, lots of liver, salvers of chicken fat the genteel regard as poisonous, for me a legacy of “eat the whole animal,” but also, in truth, delicacies I haven’t had in years, and dream about. The melon man...