Back to Running With Chisels Back to Main Page
Hump
Steve was in the lobby of the apartment building I was directed to when I was looking for a room in Long Beach, NY. He was the semi-manager of the building, owing somewhat to the fact that he was the only white resident in the otherwise black apartment building on the wrong side of the tracks. Everything near Long Beach City Hall was on the wrong side of the tracks.
The once thriving seaside resort was not a pretty sight during the early 70?s. It was the only democratic town in the Republican machine of Nassau County. All of the social rejects were sent down there, due to the amount of empty housing left over from the city?s heyday as a beachside destination. The old Jews with nowhere to go lived in the dilapidated hotels along the boardwalk; the blacks lived around City Hall to the west of the RR station, and who knew where the walkie-talkies lived. They were the mentally infirm, and they roamed everywhere, talking to themselves as they walked
I had dropped out of college and gotten a job pumping gas at a Getty station on the east end of the island in Point Lookout, a town Harry Chapin immortalized in two songs. I had some mechanical skills, and I thought that it was a good way to learn something about fixing cars.
Steve was looking for a roommate, and we agreed that every few months we?d rotate the use of the bedroom and the sofa couch in the living room. He was an easy enough guy to get along with, a nice, kind of goofy big kid that was a local butcher. My father had been a butcher and then a meat salesman before he drank himself to death in his mid thirties. I had never really known him, but it was enough for Steve and I to feel some connection.
Within two weeks of moving in we were telling each other about our dreams and goals. Steve told me that he wanted to be a gigolo. I told him he had better get good at going down on guys, because he couldn?t get too picky while trying to start out in that business. He didn?t like the idea that much and seemed intent on finding a way to prostitute himself. One of the reasons I gave him caution was that he was not a real looker, along with not being that bright. He was 6?2? or 3? and he was like a big puppy with a little potbelly. Light red hair and, as often as not, a sparse beard and mustache. With the puppy dog eyes and the height he did OK picking up girls in bars, so I guess he thought that he was a stud.
He started hanging out and then working at some of the nearby strip clubs, and they ranged through various levels of seediness. His favorite was one of the seediest, the Crossroads. It was next to the RR stop in Oceanside, right by the intersection of Old Long Beach Road on the south side of town. It had been a black nightclub and the Old Italian families that lived in the area probably preferred the strip club, but not by much. It was the town that NY Senator Al (Sen. Pothole) D?Amato grew up in.
Suffolk County, a little to the east, was a lot wilder. Total nudity, higher-class clubs and strippers, with a couple of spots that had live sex shows in the back. There were always cracks in the wall to let you know it was available.
The Castle, out on Sunrise Hwy, had talent shows on Tuesdays. Steve got the idea to be a male dancer, something that was new at the time. As he explained it, nude dancing was permissible in Suffolk as long as the dancer did not appear to get visibly excited. Kind of tough to tell with women, but not difficult with men. Steve was worried about getting an erection on while performing and have to get off the stage. I suggested that maybe saltpeter would help, and I reminded him about the stories of it being added to the potatoes in the meals at boy?s Boarding Schools to keep them in line. I could get it at the local pharmacy at the time. It was used as a diuretic but I had used it for making gunpowder.
As the fateful day approached, we did a test run on the saltpeter. There was no human dosage on the label to alleviate heat. There was one for cows and he took the appropriate amount for his body weight. He did get a little nausea, but he couldn?t get it up for days. Think George Costanza and shrinkage. There wasn?t much to shake around on stage, but it broke the ice for him. Chippendale?s wasn?t in his future, and the only interest he attracted was from the blue-haired ladies.
I did get a little action out of all this. One night I was woken up by a knock at the door. I was in my underpants when I cracked the door open to find a black girl that was one of the local strippers. She was looking for Steve, who wasn?t home, and she asked me what I as doing. ?Anything you want? I said, and we proceeded hit the sofa bed. When I woke up in the morning she was gone and the bed had been wet, and not with water. She?d come by every once in a while and if Steve wasn?t there we?d go back at it, and the bed would be wet again in the morning. I asked her about it, and she said that she would play around with my dick when I was sleeping and I?d piss. When I asked Steve if she was pissing in his bed too, he was relieved because she told him the same story when his bed was wet, and he believed it.
As you might expect, Steve was gullible. I had to be careful when I told him stories that I didn?t let them get out of hand. At times I couldn?t help myself from slipping into the absurd, and I?d have to tell him in the end that it was complete bullshit so he wouldn?t embarrass himself by retelling it. I?d also warn him to be careful when things sounded too good to be true.
That didn?t help him with Ricky, a friend of mine from college that I reconnected with after I ran into another friend pumping gas in the local Shell station. Ricky went through a few years at La Salle, a military prep school in Suffolk County, and he really liked to fuck with people?s heads. I was a better friend with his roommate, who he had little mercy on. I don?t respect that kind of thing, but I could tell that Ricky?s parents were as difficult as mine were and my heart went out to him. He was also brilliant, and I?m a sucker for brilliance.
After meeting Steve a few times Ricky told him that he needed a nickname. Steve got all puppy excited and told Ricky that his nickname in high school was ?Thumper.? Ricky, deliberately miss-hearing him, said ?Humper? Yeah, that?s a good nickname, we?ll call you Humper.? Steve, with a deer-in-the-headlights look of panic, said, ?No, No, No, Thumper. My nickname was Thumper.? Moving in for the kill, Ricky said, ?Oh, you don?t like Humper? Then we?ll just call you Hump.? And it stuck. Everyone Steve knew started using it. Years later I saw him on the street in a softball uniform and he explained to me that the team insisted on using Hump on his jersey. Their only concession was to allow him to prefix it with Sunshine, so it read ?Sunshine Hump? on the back.
It?s been thirty years now, but I still have a vivid memory of the day he came to me asking for a favor. He explained that he had gone to a Doctor in the past to cut out some cysts from behind his ears, and could I do it instead? I knew he liked to eat some of the raw pork when he was butchering, and I warned him that it wasn?t a good idea when he told me, but it didn?t seem to faze him.
I had a few drinks with him to get ready, and we started. It was really pretty simple, he told me. Just slice a cross in the skin on top of the cyst and it will just slide out. Then dab it with alcohol and pack it with cotton. There wasn?t just one or two when I looked, and there were a few that were as large as a nickel. I understood then why the Jews and Muslims banished pork from their diets.
I guess I was in the apartment for a year or so when I came back from a weekend with my girlfriend and found an ambulance and police cars swarmed around the entrance. One of the guys that lived upstairs decided to take a shotgun to a girlfriend that was working in the whorehouse down the hall from us.
I figured it was time to move.