DOUGHNUTS
What I am attempting to write is
urban legend, what I remember of Doughnuts.
Not too much to tell, really; not so urban when you consider a town as
small as Toronto-- Toronto, Ohio, that is, if I may be so bold to borrow the tease
on words from a local cookbook.
Doughnuts walked in a perpetual
stoop, hands folded upon the small of his back, his oversized overcoat swaying
from side to side. You could not see one
feature of scenery where he trod, not so much as a flower, a mailbox, a lawn
ornament, when you saw Doughnuts walking, you saw only his gait. Whether he liked it or not, whether he wanted
it or not, he commanded attention.
They said he walked this way because
he had spent so much of his life down in the local mines. Doughnuts had a pair of paws like sledges,
forearms and wrists like steel cables, no doubt from picking veins of
coal. His bewhiskered face was as
angular and chiseled as the coal veins he hacked daily.
Or had he been a miner at all?
There were other rumors about his
origins. The one I heard most and the one
making the most sense to this then teenager was Doughnuts held a patented
invention for Titanium (Timet today) that made him a millionaire eccentric, our
little town version of Howard Hughes.
The locals said that Doughnuts lived
along the riverbank in the company of dogs in the south end. They also said he walked stooped over because
he was always searching for money, a strange habit I thought for a millionaire,
but befitting of an eccentric one.
I encountered Doughnuts only a few
times. I was inside Melhorn’s, sitting
upon a red vinyl bar stool sipping on Cokes and puffing on cigarettes with
friends. Doughnuts came in and skulked
to the corner booth near the jukebox. Whether music played, I cannot remember,
if it did I wouldn’t have heard anyway, his presence commanded that much
attention. The waitress came to him. He ordered coffee and powered doughnuts. A couple of minutes later, Lou Melhorn himself
brought the man two doughnuts and the coffee pot. Doughnuts carefully tilted the pot and
trickled the steamy coffee into a saucer, not a cup. He then dipped a powdered doughnut into his
coffee, nibbled on it, and then tilted the saucer to his mouth.
He was British, we decided. That’s how they drank coffee over there. We were 12 and 13 and worldly. Worldly, we watched him dip his doughnuts and
sip his coffee, until he finished. And
then he stood, hunkered over and wobbled through the haze of tobacco smoke, out
the door, into the invigorating air,
seasoned with coal soot, fly ash, lead fumes and steel dust. We watched through the big picture window his
head hobble by, disappearing south on Trenton Street, then Ohio Route 7, busy
with traffic.
One other time, I encountered the
man everyone called Doughnuts, perhaps that same summer of Kool Aid, Melhorn’s
Popsicles and filterless cigarettes.
One of the Conlon twins accompanied
me along the north sidewalk of the Overhead Bridge. Hardly anyone walked the south side, still to
this day. If you wanted to take the
shortcut, you sidled along the concrete base and skipped across the railroad
tracks in the cool eternal shadows below, saving you something like 15 to 20
seconds. Above at the western base of
the north sidewalk, we saw Doughnuts heading toward us, a caricature of a man
from where we stood, his head seeming directly stemmed to his shoes because of
his pronounced stoop.
But we were not taking the 20-second
shortcut; we were striding along the side of the sidewalk everybody took,
including someone walking stooped over with his hands clasped behind the small
of his back.
Our paths intersected near the top
where in my insolence, I said, “How are you doing, Doughnuts?”
He swiveled his head, his eyes
steely and penetrating, “None of your God-damned business how I am doing.” His voice was like sandpaper, number 2
grit. It certainly wasn’t High Tea
British.
Another time I saw Doughnuts up
close. I am uncertain what year. I certainly couldn’t pin a date by his visage. He was one of those people like your Great
Uncle Harry or your afghan-knitting baba, who always looked old, even when they
were younger than you in those faded brown vignettes sitting forever with the
knickknacks upon the fireplace mantle.
Doughnuts, I had to believe, was born gray on a gray day and swaddled in
sandpaper.
He was part of a crew pouring a
sidewalk in a neighbor’s yard on the Federal Street side of the ally,
cattycorner from my parents’ home on Biltmore.
Shielded from potential steely rebuke, I spied upon him behind
shrubs. Immediately I lost focus on the
other workers and features of the house and yard. Had a spittoon of gold glistened at the end
of the rainbow, I wouldn’t have paid it a glance. I saw only Doughnuts, his whiskers glistening
with sweat. He worked hard. He wheeled the wheelbarrow, hoed, shoveled, troweled.
He made that concrete lay down like an unruly puppy. Occasionally, he would stand erect, all six
feet of him, to point out some flaw in the concrete that needed attention, and
then he would resume his robotic labors.
He had what we T-town Hunkies called
the Hunky work ethic, although I didn’t know ethic from ethnic, but I
did know Doughnuts was one hell of a worker and didn’t stoop because of some
physical impairment.
I would later learn the man I had
insolently called “Doughnuts” to his face was actually named Barney and like a
large number of T-townies, he was of Eastern European descent, like me. I would also learn later somehow through the
self-awareness that the slow incubation of
maturity brings, I had stooped lower than the
tail of Barney Evanosky’s overcoat and was most deserving of being called a few
choice names, the one most salient starting with the letter A and ending in E,
and I don’t mean Ace.
I did learn Mr. Evanosky wintered in
Bergholz and returned every spring to Toronto. I like to think Toronto, Ohio is
the center of the Universe.
I like to think of him as another
colorful character in the history of this colorful city, another gem of the Gem
City, and upon a soft windy summer evening, you can smell a trace of powdered
sugar in the air and you can hear the steady clomp of invisible footsteps ascending the
north sidewalk of the Overhead Bridge, and somehow the surroundings become
fuzzy as though you are looking through a time telescope out-of-focus, and all
so silent, and the clomps trickle into
the distance while dogs howl in recognition.
