Where is Dennis?
From May 22, 2006
One of our favorite customers is missing. He periodically disappears for a while, a couple of weeks at a time, but usually by the time we really get worried he shows up again. His name is Dennis and if you've spent much time at Half & Half you've probably seen him sitting at the counter, quietly reading the New York Times and drinking a gigantic coffee. He's in his 40's, rotund and balding but incredibly hairy every where else. Usually he wears pants and a t-shirt--my favorite t-shirt is royal purple and says "trouble" in iron-on letters. He always keeps to himself and doesn't talk much unless there's no one else around. Then, he'll say things like, "Why is it so dead in here, did you scare everyone off with your cooking?" to which i'll reply, "No, Dennis, everyone could smell you coming up the street and cleared out of here!" I'll never forget one morning he delivered the zinger of all zingers. I get up at 5 in the morning, so I try to overlook the fact that I usually look like shit when I work. Dennis came in, I switched out the coffee airpots and used the usual joke, "Here Dennis, this is leftover from yesterday!" He gave me the once over and simply said, "nice hair." It was such a burn; deadpan and undeniable. I tried to come back with, "at least my hair is on my head, not on my back." But whatever, I got served.
When Dennis is around Portland, he spends at least an hour or two a day here, reading the paper and magazines. His mom lives in Roseburg, which is where he usually goes when he disappears. Lately he'd been talking about going to get a degree in art history in Venice, Italy, but I don't think he has the resources. When he's around, he's just a regular fixture that you will barely notice him. When he leaves town, it sometimes takes me a week to pick up on his absence. But then it's a gaping hole; there's a stool he should be planted at, there's an zinger suspended in midair. I worry that I'll never see him again, and he'll just be a memory of an old customer. I told him to call us if he was going to leave town for extended periods, so we didn't have to worry. He phoned over Christmas when he was gone for 3 weeks. For his birthday I gave him a gift certificate to Powell's so he could buy his own Sunday Times instead of complaining that we're too cheap to get it. Now he's been gone for more than a month, and we haven't heard anything from him. Dennis, come back to us!
<< | Posted by Robin at 3:32 PM | >>
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There used to be an elderly homeless gentleman who swept the sidewalks by the art school in Portland. There were a lot of trees there, so there was a pretty good supply of leaves. This was when the art school was in the Museum on the tony Park Blocks.
Stocking cap, a tan cloth raincoat, winter and summer, a shopping cart home with an assortment of brooms and rakes, he was very, very shy. Over months and years, some of the art students befriended him. They would bring him tools, lunch, a sweater, mittens. They discovered he could fix just about anything electronic - like boomboxes or radios. This was before iPods. The rumor was that he had been an engineer at the Texas Instruments electronics company. Every day he would conscientiously sweep the walkways around the school. We called him the sweeper.
One day he just disappeared. My worried friends went to the police to report him missing. They could not take a missing person report without a name! Seems like the police are, more often than not, there when you don't want them, or not there when you do, sad, they weren't interested.
This was not the story's end. I was visiting Seattle a few years later and found the sweeper carefully sweeping the sidewalks around the Four Seasons Hotel downtown. This old school hotel has more pedigree than the Hiltons, money and class. The Seattle hotel. Here was a homeless man, who no one but a few art students cared about, making around himself, a perfect world.
My friends were happy to hear their friend was fine.
Posted by Rob W. @ May 23, 2006 01:08 PM