I asked for his name.
He told me he was a sailor in the Navy
So I asked him again who he was.
“Norman Long,†he finally said.
Upon hearing this, I expressed my knowledge of a family living in Maine with the same last name. I then told Norman that his resemblence to them was striking. I finished by saying that, if I remembered correctly, the family made for a terrific bowling squad, one in which the members each shared identical form and delivery.
In a polite way, Norman Long stated he was of no relation to the family, and that he had a poor habit of rolling the ball into the gutter. His last name was, however, an indication of his size. He was tall, with long arms and legs, and a noticeably thin waist. He towered over those near him. His lengthy appearance not only suggested that his ancestors passed the name through entire generations, but that they had passed it through their reproductive genes, as well.
On the South Shore, where the Boston accent began to fade, two rival towns were becoming more of a twin city—Painesville and Central Heights. A river was their divide. It separated hill from valley and ran alongside the property at Riverside Village, to which the name so smartly made market. But the river was polluted. I learned that two summer seasons ago, when I floated down the thing for fun, and the scab on my ankle turned a greenish yellow.
There was a method and a movement of transportation, besides dirty water, that trapped Riverside in a box. Across the way, a small public airport had two asphalt landing strips that did a criss-cross. At the Riverside front exit, where the main road joined Route 22, a yellow cautionary light prepared all drivers to either slide into slow traffic or accelerate full on like a German car commercial. The railroad tracks we exempt and no longer traveled on by trains—only street corner men.
I stayed in Riverside Village during my young adult years. Riverside was home to people of low income and no income. There were 21 buildings in total. Each building had the same hallway stench, a mix between foreign food and the steam that came from the laundry room on the basement floor. And each apartment was just crawling with the carpet beetle. In letters written by the exterminator, these insects were referred to as “persisting†and “problematic.†The tenants, meanwhile, used an entire host of language to curse the critter.