He Was the Shop

by M.J.Miello

 As a child, there was nothing I looked forward to more than going to work. Sure, I went to school, had a friend or two, and had an older brother to chase me about with power tools. But I spent the best parts of my young life in, what I shall forever recall as, “The Shop.”

In the early 1980s, a good Saturday always began with buying a fistful of tootsie rolls at the sweet shop. Then I would run up New Dorp Lane, passing the theater, the butcher, the shoemaker, the garden store, the vacuum store, the ice cream parlor, and dozens of other small, independent businesses, all of which have now receded into the folds of time. I ran with no adult supervision. No hand to hold. No warnings of “stranger danger” were needed. The capacity of my lungs and the tread under my Zips were the only factors limiting the expanse of my world.

The shop was often still locked and dark when I arrived. I’d press my face up to the glass to peer inside anyway. In the window was a pyramid of six televisions under an illuminated sign flashing “Zenith,” which, in my youth, I thought was the shop’s proper name. I’d wait on the steps, or, perhaps, cross the street to watch a train pull into the station. When it vanished into the perspective, I’d wonder about the parts of the Island that were, of yet, unexplored mysteries. Then I’d pace up and down the street, skipping over the cracks in the sidewalk. The block is still etched into my mind’s eye with no detail overlooked other than the names of the stores. The signs above the doors might as well have read, “Place that sells communion dresses,” “Office that sells nothing,” and “Sometimes gives me cookies.”

At exactly 9:55 AM (well after all of my candy was gone) Smitty would come plodding down the street with his lunchbox and his newspaper folded under his arm. Once the door opened with a jingle, I’d charge into the front office, a bunker composed of wood paneling, towering filing cabinets, shelves of binders, and bales of yellow paper covering a massive metal desk. The wall behind the desk was covered with letters, signs, and notices, all meant to make the place look important I assumed. The first order of business would be to leap into the green swivel chair and spin myself around. Then I would break a piece of Scotch tape from the weighty dispenser. This would remain stuck to my finger for the next several hours, only to wind up adhering to some random surface.

Past the front office was the tunnel of screens. In my memory, it was about a mile long, walled with restored televisions. As I walked down the hall, hundreds of distorted reflections of myself seemed to follow at different speeds. They stood at grotesque heights and slipped from one silvery screen to another as if passing through a hidden doorway.

Sime “Smitty” Kekich was my father’s sole paid employee, who most days ran the entire shop by himself. Smitty was a thoughtful man, who spoke with what I mistook for an Italian accent—I didn’t know there was any other kind. He was older than my father, short, squat, and balding. He was invariably wearing a plaid shirt and suspenders, and overlarge glasses that made his eyes appear huge.

After hanging up his coat and cap, Smitty would consult a handwritten note he had left for himself in his meticulous printing. Then he’d settle into the flow of his work. I spent years next to him, following his every move. He was easy to learn from because everything he did was done with meticulous slowness and precision.

I can still see him now, turning the screwdriver with unaltering speed. When he handed me a tool to hold for him, my small fingers would trace the letters of “S.Kek.” He wrote this on all his tools to distinguish them from my father’s inferior pieces. Each part removed would be placed in a dedicated spot; there was a place for everything in his world. Then he would, with intentionality and deliberateness, check over every small fuse, diode, and transistor with the delicate metal fingers of his voltmeter as he chased the elusive short through the labyrinth of circuitry. Without fail, he’d turn to me with a look of glee to show me the results of his hunt. “See?” he would say, pointing at a number on the voltmeter or the slight bulge in the crown of a capacitor.

When the work was done, he would close the TV up, putting every screw back in its proper place. Then he would gesture to me and say, “You do the honors.”

I pushed the power button and watched with pride as life came to what before was dead and silent. The light would expand to fill the screen, illuminating the wide lenses that covered his eyes, and bringing a broad smile to his face.

The day would progress with clockwork predictability. Though my father left the house before I did, he would not arrive at the shop until well after the morning passed. Smitty would eat his lunch out of his silver lunch pail, generously giving me one of his Yankee-doodles as I waited for my father (and my lunch) to arrive. Then, as if blown in by a storm, my father would be there with his denim jacket, unshaven face and his Jet’s hat; his very presence changing the nature of the shop.

Almost immediately, he would start yelling, and Smitty would be transformed into a harried man on the verge of exasperated collapse. “You spent all morning on one set? You’re a real Speedy Gonzales!” Then they would argue about Smitty’s tendency to order new components when, “We had it in inventory!” Years later, I would realize that Smitty was opposed to repairing a TV with used parts passed off as new.

Most of their conflicts, however, dealt with the reams of yellow papers that littered the office. Smitty tried to create sensible organizational schemes for the bills, receipts, orders, and invoices, but my father couldn’t be bothered to learn them. All it took was his needing to find one thing for my father to undo hour’s worth of work and leave the office in disarray.

Then my father would launch into what he considered a day’s work, furiously executed over a handful of hours. TV’s flew apart, and he seemed to zoom in on the problem with a combination of intuition, impatience, and luck. Then, his work complete, he would yell while searching for the screws he lost before he sealed up the TV, usually leaving one of his tools inside. He did it in a fraction of the time it would take Smitty, and it only had to be redone one out of three times. Despite such theatrics, he would get through all the remaining repairs. Then he would stand silhouetted in the doorway and tell me, “Go home for dinner,” before heading off to his next adventure, which I would not be a party to.

***

It always seems to rain on the worst days of my life. It was an unreasonably cold, dreary day in April 1987 as I sat waiting on the shop’s steps. I kept a watch for Smitty, eager to get to work. Twelve years old now, my father had granted me a much greater role in the repairs. I was using the voltmeter, looking for shorts, ordering materials, and even assembling working TVs from the excess parts that littered the store. Though the rain surged and subsided, Smitty never appeared. This was a thing unheard of. He had never missed a single day of work since I had known him. Trapped by some short-circuit of my own reasoning, I couldn’t leave. So I waited under the awning for two hours, until my father pulled up in his battered, green Dodge Colt. He motioned for me to get into the car. Thoroughly soaked, I leaped into the passenger seat.
“Smitty’s not coming back to work,” he said as he pulled away from the curb.

I shivered. “Why not?”

“Because he went and had himself a heart attack and died. Now on top of every other Goddamn thing I have to do, I need to hire a new worker.” The windshield wipers screeched out their wailing. The cold seemed to be seeping into my bones. I knew better than to cry in front of him, but my wheezing nose betrayed me as I inhaled a shaky breath.

“Don’t go getting all emotional. It’s not like he was the picture of health.” I looked away to the houses that rolled passed. The rain was sweeping down roofs and surging over the gutters. When he pulled into the driveway he lit a cigarette. “What are you now? Eleven?”

It stung that he didn’t know how old I was—I had just had a birthday two weeks before. “Twelve.” My voice was a weak thing.

“Well, that’s old enough to know the truth. We all die, kid. Some of us sooner. Some of us later. I’m gonna die. Your ma’s going to die. And you are going to die. Sooner you make your peace with that, the better, `cause before that happens, there is a shit load of work to do.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. I hated him in that moment for calling Smitty a worker—for acting like Smitty didn’t mean anything to him. I hated him more for yelling at Smitty and making him upset every day. Maybe if he treated Smitty better…

I slammed the car door and ran into the house.

***

“For what?” my father demanded when I asked to go to the wake.

“To pay my respects to Smitty,” I replied, trying to sound like an adult.

He laughed at that. “That’s not even his name. You don’t even know the man.”

“I do too!” My voice rose to that dangerous volume that invited parental wrath. But he was right; I hadn’t yet learned his real name.

“What’s his wife’s name?” I didn’t know. “What country is he from?” It never occurred to me to ask. “How many kids does he have?” He never mentioned his children. “He wasn’t your friend. He worked for us. You need to make friends with kids. You know what kids are, don’t you? Go play some stickball or ride that bike I bought you.” My face was starting to burn but my anger was checked by the weight of the shame I felt. Why had I never gotten to know the man despite spending countless hours with him? It was as if I hadn’t ever realized that he had a life outside the shop. He was the shop. At my mother’s insistence, my father agreed to take me to the wake. So that evening I sat on the couch wearing my church clothes next to my older brothers. They hardly knew Smitty and seemed immune to my grief as they laughed hysterically while watching “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes.” I waited until I realized my father was not really coming, then I fled to my room and cried into the night.

For days afterward, I refused to speak to him and as far as I was concerned, I was never going to the shop again. Weeks later he came into my room. I ignored him, continuing to repair my long-neglected Lego moon base. He put his rough hands on my shoulders. They were heavy. For a moment he watched me as I seated astronauts in their spacecraft.

“I’m sorry your friend died. He was a good man.”

“You said he was just a worker.”

“I was wrong to say that. He was one of us. We’re different from other people, Christopher. We have a skill, and when you have a skill, no one can ever take that away from you. You will always be needed. You will always have food on the table and gas in the tank. I want you to come back to help me out at the shop. Someday the shop is going to be yours, you know, so you should learn as much about it as you can.”

“Mine?” the word seemed to sparkle as I uttered it. Soon after, I returned to work. My father never hired another repairman, but he and my mother were at the shop much more often afterward. And he gave me much to do. But there was a troubling reality pressing upon me. Fewer TVs were coming in. My father tried to adapt, telling me that “VCRs” were going to be the new “cash cow”, but they were more difficult to fix, and they didn’t make up the difference.

We began a series of cost-cutting measures, such as selling off our archaic inventory of vacuum tubes. These, of course, had not been used in televisions for decades, but they had been hoarded in the dark recesses of the shop’s basement. Charged with making more money, I categorized them and printed out a catalog that I shipped to groups of collectors. They brought in a tidy sum.

Whenever I came across a vacuum tube that was unusual or in pristine condition, I would set it aside for my father. They were the only things he regarded with any nostalgia or sentimentality. Once I asked him why he liked them. He held one to the light, admiring it like a fine crystal. “Vacuum tubes take the chaos of electricity and force order upon it. They are order itself, sealed and secured inside a little globe of glass. I like the idea that there are at least a few places in this world where nothing changes.”

***

In the dim light of an autumn dawn in 1990, the train pulled into Grant City station. The first one onto the platform, I charged up the steps. I took them three at a time, and then at the top, bounded off the railing, landing on my skateboard and cruising into the street. My hair floated around my eyes as I pumped the board to faster speeds. Rush’s ‘Power Windows’ burst through the headphones of the Walkman stowed in the inside pocket of my denim jacket. First period’s bell was still far off; there was still time to put a few hours in before school.

I’d be far better off with the extra sleep, I knew. It was getting harder to stay awake in my morning classes. I had papers to do and tests to study for, but the survival of the Shop was the single most important thing in my life.

By now, I was making all the repairs myself—though these had sharply fallen in number. I computerized the checkbook and inventory, refurbished every TV that had been sitting around the shop, and even sold a few to my friends. During my classes I daydreamed up new marketing strategies. I wondered if I could transition the business to computer repairs, the way my great-grandfather had once expanded from radios to televisions.

I kicked the board up as I stepped onto the sidewalk and unlocked the door. By rote, I turned on the lights, the signs, and all the TVs in the window. Then I smelled the alcohol.

“Dad?” He was slumped in the chair at the desk. An empty bottle was propped up next to the monitor. He only switched from beer to gin when things were getting really bad. “Dad!” I kicked the side of the desk. He rose with a start, the image of the keyboard pressed into his face. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to work.”

“Work,” he laughed. “I should have taught you not to waste your time. It’s pointless.” His words were garbled. He was unsteady as he rose.

“What do you mean it’s pointless?”

“I mean, there ain’t no Goddamn point.” He pushed past me, reeking. He staggered through the front door and paused, looking back at me over his shoulder. “We lost the lease. The shop’s done. Take whatever you want and lock it up when you go.”

The door closed behind him. I don’t know how long I stood, dumbstruck, mouth agape, waiting for the emotion to crest. In my numbness, no tears came. I turned slowly and looked over the shop—every inch of it familiar. Leaving seemed an impossibility. It was home. My refuge. My only sanctuary.

I walked through the shop, running my hand over the TV’s, trying to create a memory that would endure the perils of time. Then I came upon the last box of vacuum tubes and picked it up, realizing my father would probably want them. I walked towards the front office but paused. “At least a few places left in the world where nothing changes,” he had said. It was a lie. Nothing was constant. Nothing could withstand the relentlessly rising wave of change. I spun, launching the box down the hallway, its contents falling free like a row of tiny glass bombs. They shattered, bounced and rolled away. I was a fool for thinking I could change the shop’s fate by myself. More than anything, I felt alone.

Then my hand reached, seemingly of its own accord, for a cabinet door. Inside was Smitty's red toolbox and a pair of his safety glasses. I put the goggles on. Then I picked up the toolbox, glancing down to read “SKek” painted across the top of it in neatly stenciled letters. Having all I needed, I locked the door behind me.

***

I watched her as she dipped the last of her California roll into the soy sauce and deftly popped it into her mouth.

She smiled coyly and raised her eyebrow. "I told you this place would be good! And you didn’t want to come here! What was it? Afraid of the toxic mercury?” Then her hand drifted effortlessly to her cell phone. While her lightning-fast thumbs typed out her cryptic messages, I scanned the room one last time. The wood floors were newly finished. There were oriental screens, grand Buddha statues, stone coy fountains, and above it all, an unrepairable flat panel television presiding victoriously from the wall.

After I paid the check, she held out her hand expectantly. “Come my darling, let us away!”

I took her hand and trailed behind her as she wove between the tables and out the door. From across the street, I studied the sushi place. Beneath the illuminated lanterns was the familiar old window. The heavy glass front door had been spared as well. Otherwise, there was no indication that there ever was a television repair shop there.

“Are you coming?” she asked, oblivious to the force of nostalgia that rooted me to the spot. If I had saved the shop, I realized, I might still be a slave to it, desperately hanging on to an antique dream while technological innovation changed the world around me. I have long since let that dream go.

I have new dreams now. I don’t fear the ever-advancing wave of technology. I ride it.

Learn more about the world of Christopher Salvatore here.