Hancock Stories: The Man Next Door

The big man who lives next door is called Stanley. He stands six foot six tall and weighs more than three hundred. He looks like a retired wrestler. He walks on the balls of his feet, light and smooth like Jackie Gleeson used to dance. 

Stanley lives with his wife Dona and his grandchildren. Nathaniel is a mixed race boy and Alisa is growing up fast becoming a woman. Their mother is there sometimes but she lives across town with her latest boyfriend. Stan and Dona  tend her children because it’s better that way since their daughter has some issues.

When they first moved in I was a little shocked because they were not our kind of people at all. It seemed like they’d dropped in from some hillbilly community or maybe a trailer park. They were loud and always had a cigarette in their mouth and the German Shepherd was usually on a chain out back; sometimes cowboy music played on the radio and Stanley was frequently under a car fixing something or other. Once he strung a heavy chain between the two Norway Spruce trees out front, to hoist an engine and that Fall he hung a deer carcass on that chain for butchering. There goes the neighborhood.

Stanley’s house was snug close to mine, an old, two story 1840’s country cottage standing back from the railroad track across the street  and at night sometimes I could see through the window and hear the muffled sound of their television. After a few months, in a strange way it was comforting, like I was part of the extended family. I watched them come and go, taking out the laundry early in the morning and bringing it in as the sun went down; backing the car up unloading plastic bags full of groceries from a downstate supermarket where the prices were cheaper. 

I’d watch Stanley leaning across the hood of his truck on the side of the road outside chatting with someone or other. I watched through my living room window and marveled at the joy of small talk and though I couldn’t hear the details, heard gusts of laughter now and then and cigarette smoke billowed and Stanley shifted his weight and turned to lean back against the truck taking in the warm sun and sucked again on his cigarette and gazed into the sky. 

I can’t remember how the social distance between us dissolved or when. It was after his friend suffered a stroke. I hadn't seen them together out front over the truck hood talking for a while and inquired about Chuck: “What happened?” I asked, “I don’t see Chuck around anymore”. 

“Chuck had a stroke”, Stanley told me. “He’s been inside for months. He’s been in bad shape – I go over there sometimes and we try to talk but he can’t hardly speak no more I guess, poor bastard.”  

“Poor bastard,” I thought. He was probably about my age too. A stroke. Shit. Poor bastard. And me, a lucky bastard, so far. 

“I miss you guys standing around talking”, I said. “Me too” said Stan. And so we started to talking; the weather, the small town politics, car repairs, the fucked-up economy. 

And after that, a couple of times a week Stanley ambled over to my place because the big man was lonely with a house full of women and his grandkids. Stan needed man talk – bullshit – some guy to shoot the shit with and I became a good listener.

I seldom spoke with Stanley’s wife in those days. She averted her eyes and seemed shy and had a humble, polite disposition. I nodded a greeting when we crossed paths in our comings and goings but the only thing we seemed to have in common was geography.

Then Dona had a stroke. I didn’t know until one day I saw Stan supporting her as she limped slowly from the car to the front door of their home, one arm around his broad shoulders the other holding a cane. She could hardly talk and one side of her was paralyzed so Stan and the girls took over the household chores. 

Stan was a pretty good cook and loved to barbecue summer or winter. And now he took over many of the inside chores as well and the girls washed the clothes. And he started to teach Dona how to speak again and recognize her old life, piece by piece, day after day. I still saw him messing around his yard and often young Nathaniel was in tow, honey skinned and black curling hair, his small hand buried in his grand-poppys. And I’d hear Stanley singing: 

“I love you, You love me,

We're a happy family,

With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you, 

Won't you say you love me too “ 

Memaw sits on her chair on the front porch smoking a cigarette and watching.

After Dona got sick Stan and I bonded and that winter he’d come over and I’d hear his footsteps on my verandah and then: “Anyone home?” and he’d be standing politely at my front door in a tee shirt as the wind blew and snow whipped through the air and I’d invite him in.

We’d sit by the wood stove and he’d pull out another cigarette and talk about downstate where he grew up, the black soil country around Montgomery and Middletown. Black soil country. The onions they grew there and the county fairs, he worked as a carny for a couple of years traveling up and down the east coast. He’d seen a lot of territory.

Stanley came from a big farming family with one of those strong mothers who took in local kids and fed them and some black city kids too, “and she wasn’t afraid to whooop their arse with whatever was closest including the stove shovel. I got that more than once,” and he laughs. “Never did me no harm – shiit, - you get caught doin that now days and they’ll put your ass in jail quick as that,” and he snapped his fingers.

His grandparents knew a lot about the old skills, gardening and root cellars and dandelion wine and shooting game and dressing it, and venison and rabbits, chickens and milking cows and fishing and putting fish guts in the garden. “My grand daddy had the best damned garden around.” Growing enough to preserve to get through winter.

Stan and the other kids rode horses to school and they brought their traps and rifles with them. The teacher locked the weapons in a gun cabinet. On the way home they’d check the traps and maybe shoot a rabbit. Most had been up before dawn milking the cows, putting out hay, collecting the eggs and they’d do it again when they got home. 

One of his uncles owned a junk yard nearby and Stanley spent a lot of time building cars back there and racing them around the fields. He had a brother like a twin, as big, brawny and as wild. The boys weren’t afraid of a fight and there wasn’t much one could do once they started. 

One time they got into it in the front yard and somebody called the police. Well the police walked onto the property and tried to stop it and finished up handcuffed to the front fence. Stanley and his brother got away with it too because the police were deemed to have trespassed. Stanley was lucky like that. 

Stanley didn’t get much schooling. By the time he was fourteen he left. There’d been too many fights and flights of fancy and too much work back at home on the farm. It was relentless and he was restless and already a man. He could split half a dozen cords and milk a hundred head and still make time for a party. He just wasn’t suited for school but he knew a lot already. By the time he was sixteen he had his own house.

Stan knew about cars, fast and customized and racing them on the back streets, donuts and smoking the tires and picking up the local girls. But it was not all fun and games. By now he had his own firewood business cutting, splitting, stacking a half dozen or more cords will make you hungry, horny and thirsty. 

I don’t know how he met Dona but I know how she became his wife. He had his eye on her for months. One evening at the local dance he screwed up enough courage to ask her to dance but she refused. So the word went out that nobody was to dance with Dona. If Stanley couldn’t then nobody could. I don’t know how long the boycott lasted but finally, one day many months later  she consented and the rest is history as they say.  

Stan and his wife both had Indian blood – Black foot and Mohawk. Both grandmothers were full bloods and Dona’s grandmother was blind as a bat. Stanley told me how when he first met, the small old lady was sitting back in the shadows and as he walked to greet her she perked up and says: 

“Stanley, you’re a big man ain’t ya, about six foot six I reckon and you gotta be close to three hundred pounds – she could tell without even seeing me – just from my footsteps. They was real smart and they used to go outside and collect all kind of things when you was sick. 

"I remember I gotta a bad cut once and my grandmother went to the barn and collected all the spider’s webs and she kinda folded em up and she put em on the cut and then wrapped it with a bandage and left it all night. In the morning all the bleeding had stopped and the damn thing was about healed. She used to collect them webs and store em in a brown paper bag and leave em in a draw".

Sometimes Stanley drove to New York City, to the Hunts Point Market, a wholesale grocery terminal in the South Bronx. This was when the Bronx was burning. Landlords abandoned thousands of buildings and by the time the seventies became the eighties, more than ninety percent were burned. The South Bronx was a wild waste land. “You’d pull up at the light and they’d jump on the back of the truck and pick you clean in a block. Stanley did it because he liked the adventure and the money. 

Stanley couldn’t really read or write though you’d never know. His work was usually menial, heavy equipment, machine repair, building and sheet rocking and really anything he could find to make a dollar. The family lost the farm when the City bought it out from under them with eminent domain. Then the City did nothing with the land. It was a sore point. 

Before he got married and as strong as an ox, Stanley used to fight for money.

“Whenever I needed a few extra dollars. I’d call and ask if there were any fights happening on the weekend in the city and they’d give me a number because we didn’t go by names just numbers, and you’d roll on down to New York City on a Saturday night and find a pay phone and make another call and this time they’d tell you the address for the fight that night and they’d find you a match.”

The fights took place in back allies and if you were good enough they pushed you up a notch to an underground parking garage somewhere, locked it off for the night of brawling. 

“I was pretty good so I saw a lot of those underground garages. You just turned up around midnight and there’d be all these black cars and limos, a big crowd, all kinds of folks in fancy suits and a lot of good looking women too. Shit, they’d spring the trunk and there’d be all kind of booze and cocain in there and you could take whatever you wanted and there’d be a circle of these people all standing around with these woman watching the fights”.

“It was rough. No rules. You’d get really pumped and when it was your turn they’d call your number – you never knew who you were gonna fight. You’d just stand there stripped and  ready with all those people watching and then it was on. 

“Some of them boys would pick up a lump of wood, anything went, and they’d lay into you and knock the shit out and just leave you there bleeding all over the floor. They didn’t give a shit. They’d leave you there till morning. Most of the guys brought their buddies just in case but sometimes I went alone.”

A lot of money changed hands too, there was betting  and Stanley could make some real money if he won, “and you could bet on yourself. I only lost once, I loved it. Shit, one time I took home five grand. They’d just hand you this envelope and you could go home with a pocket full of money.”

I looked at Stan as he sat by the wood stove. He filled the room and I imagined him in his prime, young, vigorous; his forearms where twice the size of mine, his hands were as big as a leg of lamb, his neck was like my thigh but he spoke softly and the curse words came with no venom and he lit another cigarette. I imagined him in that underground garage, under the lights stripped to his waist in his blue jeans, perspiration popping, arms flexing, watching his opponent, stalking him and then the smashing power of his fist beating the warm flesh, tearing and kicking and the blood and the grunting and knees sagging and the hard, cold concrete floor.

I imagined the uptown crowd, the Amani suits and the gorgeous women wet between their legs fixated. And the blood shot wild eyes and perspiration and the Blacks and the Spanish, the Chinese faces leaning in under the lights; the hustlers and the whores and the stockbrokers and lawyers and a few Hollywood types, crowded under the bright fluorescents. An orgy of violence. Gladiatorial. Primal.

Stan leaned forward looking into the fire, “some of those guys weren’t that big. There was this little black guy, shiit he could fight. He never lost and he beat me, he was so damn quick. It doesn’t matter how big you are, if you haven’t got the heart for it you’re gonna get hurt.

It took a few months before Stan’s wife hobbled outside on her walking stick carrying the laundry. Three times a week he’d take Dona to the hospital to check her progress and get more drugs. I watched through my window as the snow melted and the trees began to sprout green and soon it was summer again.

One day there was that familiar tap on the door and there was Stan holding a plate covered in tin foil. “Want some dinner?”, he asked. And after that maybe three or four times a week the same thing happened. I’d become part of the family and now memaw smiled at me and called me honey when I saw her in the yard and invited me to the table for dinner. Five-thirty she said. And more stories unfolded around the dinner table.

“I was working with this road repair company, I was good with machines and I could fix just about anything and one day we was using one of those big saws that cut the blacktop – a heavy son of a bitch – and we were unloading it and the damn thing kinda slipped and there was this other guy and me kinda guiding it out of the back of the truck and we lost control and he was right under it and I just grabbed it to take some of the weight ‘cause it was gonna crush him and I heard this snap in my back.

“Shit if that bitch had fallen on him it would have killed him for sure – I mean I didn’t even think about it. It was stupid I guess  but I couldn’t help myself,  I just tried to grab it before it squashed him and broke my damn back.”

They put metal bolts, springs and stainless steel screws in Stan’s back. He couldn’t bend over too much anymore and sometimes he had to take painkillers and in the winter when we were in the woods collecting fire wood, the steel got cold and that really hurt. But he could still climb under a car and use the chain saw, use the mall to split wood.

It’s Sunday and Stan’s wife, Donna is cooking Sunday supper and I can smell something delicious – London broil, potatoes and broccoli,  and she’s going to make a chocolate cake from scratch. “You want a plate tonight honey?, she asks as I approach the pile of logs in Stan’s front yard, our firewood for the winter, a tri-axel load to split and we’ll get about four cords each Plus we get the exercise. Plus I get to hang out with Stanley  working for a couple of weeks – coffee breaks and chatting – more stories – dinner with the family, my dog under the table like it was her home too. 

A few years later my friend Stanley got sick. Terrible headaches.  It happened quickly. One day he collapsed in his front yard and the ambulance came and I only saw him two times in hospital after that and he was in a como.  He was not sixty yet but he knew it was likely he’d go early. His family never seemed to make sixty. And so it was. 

And I thought there goes the neighborhood. The big man just faded away.

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