photo #8309943

Finsbury Park, London. 1935. For twenty years, the lamplighter chased the shadows away from Chatham Square and the Bowery. My father worked on the docks and when I was young told me stories about pirates and sailors. He stayed off the open waves when Momma had me. Told me he had to stick around and take care of his little spark, especially after Momma coughed herself out of the world. I would hold his rough hand when I was just a little boy and he would sigh and put up his aching feet. It’s no life compared to climbing the rigging in a squall, he’d say, to the pitch and roll of the deck under your bare feet, but it would do. Go back to sea, Daddy, I’d tell him. Go back to sea. I can take care of myself. I’m a big boy. He would laugh and ruffle my hair and send me downstairs to the grocer for more beer, the old pail banging against my hip. First kiss I ever had was against that lamppost. Marie. A flower girl. It cost me a penny. I never spent money better, not on candy then or charms and whiskey now. That pool of light saved Johnny Tin Rickets’ ass when he was running from who knows who and fell into it just as a pair of coppers were passing. Tin Rickets waved his folding money at them and they rescued him. Then they rolled him. Even made him take off his shoes to get his sock money. I used the lamp to find my way home when I was drunk, it was my lighthouse for when I was lost at sea. I know I wasn’t the only one who leaned against it sick when the rum, whiskey and beer went down fighting. That lamp gave Darlo Ginty a job when he came back from the war. A few minutes before the sun ducked behind the tenements, Darlo would mutter his way up from Cross Street with his ladder tucked under one arm and a bit of flame in a smaller lantern over his shoulder. When we were kids we used to wave at him but he never waved back. I followed him home once. Dad was working a second shift at a rum hell on Bleeker and so I walked after Darlo as he made his rounds creating lighthouses on corners from Chatham Square to Warren Street, his smaller lamp bobbed like a playful specter. I was brave the way a lot of small boys are brave, and so I followed him through the darkness, even though I saw teeth at the edge of the light. I didn’t stop when Darlo got to a tenement on Spring Street, and I didn’t stop when he climbed the stairs. I didn’t stop when he got to the door or when he turned his key in the lock. I did let the door shut behind him, I had that much sense. I did peer in through the keyhole. Darlo sat down in front of a metal box with a sigh and he opened it with a hooked tool. A glow bathed his lined face and I knew he had the sun in there. He had a coal from some celestial fire. Darlo had not gone away to war, Darlo had gone to hell and brought back an ember from under the Devil’s stew pot. The years polished the memory until I knew it was just a coalbox for heating a small room on a cold New York night. I know. Years and learning polish memories down to slivers, buff away the shine from how children view the world. It steals every moment. Which is why I never told my father that I knew he’d never been to sea. He’d never left the docks. He wanted to stand tall in his little boy’s eyes and maybe he thought his dockworker stories weren’t good enough. Maybe he wanted to sail away after the coughing faded from my mother’s room for the last time and I thought she’d finally tired herself enough to sleep. Time steals enough. I’m a lot of things, but I’m no thief.