Gentleman Rascal

ABERDEEN STOOD SEVERAL inches shorter than me, and most everything about him was round. His face was round, his nose was round, his body was round. Not that he was obese; the shape seemed to suit him, and he carried it well. His eyelids were puffy, which left his eyes simultaneously bulbous and squinty, though they snapped open wide in rare moments of surprise. He was jovial by nature, but he never smiled much beyond a smirk.

My guess was that he was in his 60s. Shocks of coarse, white hair sprung out from beneath his ever-present cap. He was always impeccably dressed, which made him even more of an anomaly in that neighborhood.

He first showed up in 1987 when I was working at a used-book stand in Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market. The terminal (sort of an enclosed open-air market in an old, block-long train station) attracted a remarkable cross-section of people, from the Amish to low-rent mobsters; hookers to yuppies; socialites to gang members. The building sat in a narrow no-man's-land between a fairly decent neighborhood and a post-nuclear hellpit. Of course, drawing that distinction in Philly those days was a tough call-referring to anything as a "decent neighborhood" back then was always more a matter of wishful thinking than anything else.

During the weekends, the Reading Terminal was packed with the mildly affluent, willing to venture into that part of town in order to load up on their Amazonian coffee beans, fresh arugula, German breads and organic mushrooms. The rest of the week it was much quieter and more dangerous. There were stabbings in the market, and muggings and robberies, mostly things I heard about second- or third-hand, as word spread from merchant to merchant. It was also during the week that the real characters would show up. Satanists, thieves, archivists and drunks. They all somehow found their way over to the bookstand.

I got bored with most of them pretty quickly, but not Aberdeen. He spoke quietly, in clipped, moist syllables (if that makes any sense), and with an accent that seemed to be a blend of Oxford and 1940s Harlem. That's the way he presented himself, too. He was articulate, he had style, he was proud-though it was never really clear what he was proud of.

Aberdeen was full of stories about himself, but only rarely did he tell me any of them. I don't know where he came from or how he made a living. I think he mentioned his mother once, but that was it so far as family was concerned. I suppose he lived close by, given that he walked to the Market a couple days a week.

And though he carried himself like he had money, he never bought anything beyond the occasional newspaper. He was clearly well-read, had traveled a good deal and could discuss any number of topics with some insight.

More than anything else, though, Aberdeen loved to tell those stories. Mostly they involved his encounters with the Great Figures of the 20th century.

One summer when he was 14 or 15, for instance, he was working as a busboy at a resort in upstate New York. It was near the end of the season when Rockefeller showed up. After staying a few days, Rockefeller was getting ready to check out. Before he did, though, he found Aberdeen preparing the dining room. He spoke with Aberdeen's supervisor, then asked the young man to take a walk with him. The two wandered the grounds for 20 minutes or so while Rockefeller offered the young Aberdeen some words of advice about working hard, following dreams and saving money. Then he left.

That's the way most of the stories went. People like Billie Holiday, Harry Truman, Andrew Wyeth and Frank Lloyd Wright would pick Aberdeen out of a crowd, chat with him, buy him a drink, give him advice, invite him to a party. This sort of thing happened wherever he went in the world.

At the time I just accepted his stories as fact. What choice was there? I wasn't going to call him a liar. Now, of course I sometimes wonder if they weren't just tall tales, there were so many of them, after all. Every time I mentioned a name he recognized, there he'd go again: "My goodness, I met him back in 1961?"

But who knows? I admit there was a strange, quiet charisma about the man.

(For a few brief moments while writing this, I convinced myself that Aberdeen was, in reality, Sun Ra in disguise. It would have almost made perfect sense. Sun Ra, after all, was living in North Philly at the time. Maybe "Aberdeen" was just one of his alternate personalities. Sun Ra was known for his fanciful tales, too. But in the end the fact that Sun Ra lived in Philly was pretty much the only thing that made sense about the theory. So no, it wasn't him.)

For all his worldliness, there were a few situations in which Aberdeen revealed himself to be surprisingly naive. One afternoon when he stopped by the stand, this normally placid character was suddenly all jittery.

"You won't believe what happened yesterday," he began. "I saw an ad in your paper"-he meant the Welcomat, the weekly to which I was contributing at the time-"for a place that offered steam baths and massages."

"Okay?" I said, afraid I knew already where this was heading.

"Well I thought that sounded very nice, so I went over there. First, it was on the second floor, so I had to walk up this long, dirty staircase?"

"Uh-huh?"

"?And I went through the door. It was just a small office, and there's this old Chinese lady sitting behind a desk. I told her that I wanted to take a steam bath. She hands me a towel, points me to a door and then-" his eyes went wide with that, "she asks me if I want a girl to join me!"

"You're kidding,"

"No, I'm not. I was flabbergasted. I told her, 'No, of course I don't want a girl to join me! Why would I want that if I just want to take a steam bath?' I turned around and left."

He was baffled by the whole scene. I sometimes got the feeling that the modern world in general baffled him.

I have no idea if Aberdeen was gay, though I can see how it would be an easy assumption to make if you were to meet him briefly. He did give me an awful lot of clothes. But then again, people have always given me clothes. I think they feel sorry for me or something, given the tatters I usually wear. In Aberdeen's case I didn't see anything strange about it, except that he was always buying me clothes that matched his own. ("I was in the store buying a new sweater," he told me one day, "and they were cheap, so I bought you one, too.")

It's more likely that Aberdeen, despite the airs he may have put on, was just a lonely old man living in an increasingly confusing world, who didn't have much of anyone else to talk to. That's why I feel bad that we lost touch so quickly after the store shut down. It was inevitable, really-I had no idea how to contact him, and apart from stopping by the market, he had no idea how to contact me.

I don't know what's happened to him in the last 15 years. o