All About Buster
Here is the intro to the The Gene Pool After reading this intro, click here for the Q&A. Isn’t this exciting?
So I wrote this about a year ago. I no longer had a newspaper to write it for, the newspaper that didn’t think I could write intelligently anymore, so here you have it! Isn’t this cool?
Oh, wait. There is a reason I am sending you this. I got an email from a woman yesterday and here it is:
“Boston Lurker here. Sad question (sorry). Gene I think I know the answer to this but I just need some reassurance. I have a 17 year old semi-feral tabby cat that lives with me, on his terms, and I love him very much. I have not taken him to the vet in years because of the anxiety it causes him and he has always been indoors and healthy. He's currently under my bed dying. I know I should take him to the vet and get him put to sleep, but it will be extremely stressful for him for me to even grab him and get him into a carrier, then the car ride and the vet office experience (with the exception of the actual euthanasia, which I've seen with my other pets and it's very peaceful). He is terrified of other people besides me. Part of me says let nature take its course and let him die on his own terms. I also worry the vet is going to chew me out for not bringing him in sooner. What Would Gene Do?”
This is Gene, again. That was the email. Gene decided what he would do, immediately. It was yesterday. I didn’t know who this lady was, or how to get in touch with her. But there was Twitter, and I wrote her that she needed to contact a vet who visited houses, a vet who did this seconds after being hired, and euthanize the animal right away, and it was the loving, if difficult, thing to do: She wrote back, less than two hours later, that she had done it , and it had been the best thing she’s ever done for anyone. So Substack is pretty cool.
So that happened yesterday. Here is the still unpublished story I wrote a year ago. Preceded by a story I wrote two years ago. Here is the story I wrote two years ago. Stick with this, it will make sense. Older story first, okay? You read it now, in orange, above. See you back here in a minute and a half.
Okay we’re back. New Story below, About my friend Buster:
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The mayor of my town is dead. He died last month. His given name was Sherman M. Bodner Jr. but everyone called him by his nickname, Buster. I loved him, but Buster was a piece of work.
I live in Washington D.C., which already has its own duly elected mayor, but like most big cities, Washington is also an amalgam of neighborhoods – towns, really – each with a distinctive name and personality. Some sound reassuringly like towns (“Tenleytown,” for example) but others don’t, except in ironic and / or entertainingly revealing ways. “Adams Morgan” is a funky, seedy enclave, filled with jubilant self-awareness, so, of course, the center of its soul and of its throbbing, steamy nightlife Is a bar and restaurant roguishly named “Madam’s Organ.” Another neighborhood – “Friendship Heights” – is a gentrified, segregated, snooty, bloated-mortgage area that is the precise opposite of the heights of friendship. Likewise, my neighborhood, Kingman Park, is not kingly or even princely. It was once known principally for its proximity to the city dump. Kingman Park was built up from excrement, and it needed the genius of civil-design experts to turn it turn it into something even vaguely habitable, and so it was named for its savior, a man named Kingman, who had been the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Not classy.
That is where Mayor Buster came in. He was never elected to his position but was universally recognized as our chief municipal authority – the title was his, by acclamation -- because he embodied Kingman Park, which thumbs its nose at the larger, far more pompous city in which it squats. What he represented, more than anything else, was a lack of pretension, a lack that Washington needs the most. Other cities – Salt Lake, for example – do not have this need.
My city owes its fame to metonymy, which is the phenomenon that occurs when one word or phrase comes to signal a greater and grander principle than itself. The most common literary example of this is in the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” in which “pen” signifies writing and “sword” signifies brute power. This line was written by the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, forever infamous for the start of an unfairly maligned, perfectly serviceable opening line to one of his books: “It was a dark and stormy night….” Bulwer-Lytton, a man of no meager talent and accomplishment, was cruelly misunderstood, as was Buster, who lived his life, and gave his life, for the liberation from self-importance. Buster lived in Washington, D.C, and died in love with it, and in defiance of it, much like Socrates, in Athens. But I don’t wish to overstate.
Very few cities achieve metonymy. The only ones I can think of are “Detroit,” which is taken to mean “the American automotive industry” and “Paris,” which means “the global fashion industry” and a few politically mighty world capitals, including, Washington, which embodies the government, and full power, of the United States of America, the entirely of this country’s illustrious history, including a man on the moon, the cure for polio, defeat of the Nazis, so forth. If you live in Washington, you have pretension.
Bulwer-Lytton also coined the expression “the great unwashed” to designate the unfairly maligned multitudes. He was not an elitist. His point was that the masses can be oppressed only so much, and then they revolt and defy. Three hundred years before Buster, he was referring to Buster.
Buster was a hobo. He lived on the streets, and he lived entirely through his guile.
Everyone in the neighborhood assumed Buster had no fixed address, though I know he did. It was across the street from me, an address that I will not enunciate here, in his respect. The first time I met him, about seven years ago, he introduced himself and asked – believe me, I am not making any of this up – what was for dinner. As I recall, it was chicken livers, and we had plenty, with much to spare. I grew up Jewish. You make extra. Mine featured onions and croutons and mushrooms. Buster consumed a great deal of it, and then – wordlessly -- departed.
Buster embodied the hobo spirit and if you are younger than, say, 100, this might seem odd – he never really asked for anything unless he offered something in return. He didn’t have much, but he gave what he had. I once paid for surgery he needed – a couple of thousand dollars – and he repaid my girlfriend and me by delivering hot meals to our doorstep for weeks. He never stayed around for the meal ; we understood why. We had an understanding and it did not include a requirement of repayment or gratitude. We kept no tallies.
This is a complicated neighborhood. I love it, but it is not easy to comprehend. The Black people have less money than the White people, and yet have been here longer. There are tensions and no one is really to blame. The architecture of the area is of negligible beauty, except for one thing. Once every two years or or so, beneath a tree, a makeshift shrine will appear, in honor of a neighbor who died of a gunshot. It will be surrounded by empty bottles of liquor, consumed together, and left in tribute. There is one just a block from my house right now, to a guy nicknamed Juice. Every day, on his birthday, there is a toast and bottles. No one ever removes them.
So there are tensions, complicated ones . Buster breached them, to the point that he eliminated them. He was embraced by my neighbor Beulah and also my neighbor Jenny. And, also, by me. I am not going to tell you what color Buster was, because that is sort of the point.
Buster died, as he lived, owing nothing to anyone. More than anyone I have ever known he lived life on his own terms. Most of us don’t. We tolerate people we don’t really like, we toil at jobs we don’t really love, because life Is compromise. We make accommodations with ourselves. Buster never did. He promenaded on the strength of his character and likability.
He died of a lung and heart disease. It came on suddenly, and my girlfriend and I got him to the doctor, but there was nothing to be done. As he died, she kissed him on his nose. He’d always hated that, but always tolerated it. He was such a good boy,
The meals he’d left for us were newly dead rats. Uneaten, but appreciated. He was “Sherman Bodner’ because that was the name of my best friend in college, who was my co-editor at the daily newspaper at NYU in the 1970s. One night, after putting the paper to bed at 2 am, quite unacceptably pickled, I dashed an entire glass of Michelob in Sherman's face, and told him, “You stink of beer.” A guy can react a lot of ways to that but Sherman just laughed. He became a newspaper publisher. I became a newspaper writer. Life is compromise. He’s still my bud.
Buster's spirit lives with me, still. He taught me things I will never forget.
In a few days, Buster’s headstone will arrive from a place that specializes in making things like that. It’ll be carved out of a stone, and his ashes will be buried in our front yard, underneath it, with the headstone facing outward. Buster didn’t belong to us. He belonged to the neighborhood. It will be inscribed: “Here Lies Buster, 2009-2022, the Mayor of Kingman Park, and One Damn Fine Cat.”
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After reading this intro, click here for the Q&A.