The Key in the Door

The old green station wagon complained its way down Clinton Avenue, past the boarded-up brownstones with the stoops ripped off.  Here and there, lighted windows beamed their messages into the street, "There's still someone here."  The November air stood still and grey as the car ground its way to the curb.

Bill sat in the car a long time, just looking at the store, with the windows boarded up, the big sign that said Hamann DRUGS reaching out over the sidewalk in front of the door.  The other sign, done with magic marker in black, “Store Closed” he had attached to the door frame with duct tape the night before. He remembered other mornings when he'd come to work to find "The Prophet" waiting for him to open, swinging his golf club cane and singing, "Doctor, Doctor, sing me a prescription for the blues."  And the bad old days when he'd have to elbow his way through a hundred junkies to put the key in the door. The time the guy went down in front of the store and he had pronounced him dead and called the ambulance, and the guy was in the store the next day to thank him.  The time the there was a fire in the cellar and the fire trucks were all over and there were hoses and firemen through the door and down to the cellar, and customers still came in, stepping around the firemen and over the hoses, asking for a pack of cigarettes or wanting to buy a paper.

He still sat in the car, unable to stop the memories. How, sooner or later, the bad old days got worse. Fires, vacant buildings and stuff going on that frightened anybody with any sense into getting out of the neighborhood to someplace safe. Around that time, two guys from Rite Aid had come into the store and offered to buy him out.  "No," he said, "this is where I belong. I grew up here. I've worked in this store since I was a kid.  I'm needed here. I'm the only medical person in the neighborhood, since Doc Van Duesen died."  And, so, they went away.

He recalled how every week there had been another building burned out and how the neighbors began to disappear.  Old customers who had moved away would call the order in and he'd deliver north, south, east and west on his way home at night.  He thought then, of selling the building or the business or both, but it was too late. No one in his right mind would take a chance on the corner of Clinton and North Lark. Then, the guys from Rite Aid came back, not to buy, but to hire him.  There was no other alternative.  He couldn't even pay the taxes on the building.  He had to say, “Yes.”

He got out of the car, at last, and walked up to the glass door with the wooden frame, peering in. It looked just as if it could open for business, shelves still lined, the Thanksgiving cards still in the racks, the great, big apothecary jar that had been in the front window since the turn of the twentieth century, when it was called Smith's Apothecary, was still there. 

He put the key in the door and opened it.  Then, they started arriving.  Joe McDonough came with his brother-in-law to take the two new, recently installed tubs out of the apartments upstairs.  "What are you going to be doing, Bill?"  "Going to work for 'Wrong Aid' and make some money." Handshakes. Well-wishing. It went like that through the morning as the antique shelves and cabinets with glass fronts went to friends who asked if they could have them. He didn't want any of it. It was just all old junk. Friends with stores in other neighborhoods came to get the cards and racks and drug inventory. Somebody came for the old cash register that weighed more than the safe.The place began to look like a junk shop. Anything that anyone thought had any value was gone. “Good riddance. Let the city have the place. Lucky I didn't die in this hole. Time to put the key in the door and go home.”

He went down the stairs into the cellar to shut the furnace off and remembered the time he was in one corner, taking a leak in the toilet, and the guy from Niagara Mohawk came down to check the meter in another corner, not knowing he was there. While he's taking his leak, a great big fat rat walks across the rafter a foot from his face and sits down to watch him.  Bill lets out a scream, jumps a foot in the air and bumps his head on the rafter.  The Niagara Mohawk man, hearing the scream, lets out his own holler, which scares Bill again so that he screams again.  And so on, until everybody is laughing and saying you wouldn't believe it.

He turned off the furnace and started back up the stairs. Suddenly, he had to sit down, as if somebody pulled the plug on him. He looked around him at the dirt floor and stone walls that were a hundred and fifty years old. The place had been a drugstore for more than a century, for crying out loud. He wondered what the city would do with it, now that it was claiming the property. "Who cares," he said to himself as he put his hands on his knees and pushed himself up fast and knocked his head on a beam.  "It figures," he moaned, rubbing his head and squeezing his eyes shut for a few seconds. He mounted the last few stairs slowly, as if he were moving through water. He shut the cellar door, grabbed his coat off the counter that he and Tommy had built when he first took over the store from Fred Hamann, and he started moving toward the front of the store. His head still hurt and he kept blinking his eyes to stop their smarting. "That's all. I'm done."

The  door open, he surprised himself by reaching over into the front window and picking up the apothecary jar. He stood outside, holding the glass jar like a baby in his arms, breathing shallow puffs, his head and his heart thudding. He leaned his forehead against the flaking paint and put the key in the door.

On the last day of his life, when he was waiting for Hospice to admit him to its care, he turned to me and said, “I’m tired. Put a sign in the window, and let’s go home.”