The Dark Compact of the Shopkeeper
Slavic’s real name is Borislav, but as far as I know, nobody calls him that. I met him four or five years ago when he was either 57-years-old or 67-years-old. At the time, we were both living in Crown Heights, patronizing a medium-bad bar on Nostrand. The beer was neither inexpensive nor did it taste especially good– you got the feeling that they never really cleaned the lines. They didn’t serve food, so the place always stunk of the takeout Chinese across the street that everyone would bring in. Mitch owned the place, and he would do everything in his power to ensure that no matter how regular a customer you were, under no circumstances were you to receive a free drink. One time, he got into a fist fight with four women outside the bar, which ended with the front window and his hand shattered. He sat there panting silently in a corner for hours without his shirt on.
Slavic was a regular at the bar and still makes his living selling hand-painted eggshells from his native Czechia at the Union Square holiday market. When twas not the season, he would walk around the neighborhood drinking, smoking, and trading things out of his pockets. When I was hanging out with him, his big thing was amber– fossilized bits of tree resin with a fly or a scorpion inside. Slavic apparently had an amber guy who got it for him on the cheap.
Slavic has a daughter roughly my age named Bavina or Davina, and when she was in town, he would cajole me to come into his home and ply me with dried sausage and schnapps while imploring me to take her out for sushi– a food he could not tolerate, but ȸavina loved.
The two of us definitely exchanged numbers at some point, but I’ve never spoken to Slavic on the phone– what I always liked about him, as opposed to basically everyone else in my life, is that he was someone that I could find.
Neither Slavic nor I live in that neighborhood any longer, so I only really see him when I’m ambling through the Christmas market looking for a candle that turns into lotion when it melts or a $19 pastry. Most recently, I caught him playing backgammon for money against one of those guys who spend all day in the park at those little tables. The chess guys, I understand– you can be good enough at chess that you’ll reasonably best the overwhelming majority of passersby, but I’m not sure the same can be said of backgammon, which is played with dice.
Slavic is not always in good spirits. Rather, he often seems down due to circumstances he would have you believe lie outside his control. A while ago, I ran into him and asked him how things were going.
“It is not good. My wife, I do not like her. She take my son away and tell police I have machine gun.”
Slavic’s plight appeared to be either a fabrication or otherwise unserious, as by the next time I saw him, it all seemed to have cleared up. He and his wife were once again copacetic, spending the winters together at her resort in Mexico.
The neat thing about people like Slavic, or like some acquaintance that you only see at a certain friend’s parties, is that you don’t get them incrementally. The people you see all the time, the people that you talk to on the phone– they tend to update you. The answer to “how have you been” hits a lot harder when the respondent hasn’t kept you well apprised of their recent meals, dates, and pimples.
Maybe the key difference between the people you keep up with and the people you only know how to find is that you don’t really know them in time as much as you know them in space. But knowing them in space is not the same as being friends with them. A coworker, for example, is not a friend, and there’s some debate as to whether they truly can be. Coworkers also have a perverse tendency to discuss the inane for no reason other than to project their presence onto you.
One time, I walked into the kitchen in the dour office of the shambling corpse of the startup I worked at. I noticed an engineer filling the ice tray, and came within a hair's breadth of ruining his day (or even his life) with a “making ice?” I regained my senses and yanked back on the joystick at the last second.
There’s this whole other thing about people you know in space, that they know you can find them. When it’s somebody you always run into at the same parties that you both go to, that’s not super dramatic because it’s kind of part of the deal. If you really didn’t want to see the woman you struck out with at your ex-roommate's birthday party last year, either of you could always take the coward’s route and not go. Slavic, however, wouldn’t know how to find me, nor could he really avoid being found by me.
Such is the dark compact of the shopkeeper.