"Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah fire and brimstone from the Lord out of heaven." (Genesis 19:24)
"My love, where are you?" asked Lot to his wife, scouring the edges of his vision.
She had stopped a step or two behind him. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, her teeth tightly pressed together, and her neck as stiff as a steel rod. Instead of walking, she was silently absorbing the sounds of destruction that came from miles back.
Lot tried again. "Don't let your mind go there," he said, still with his eyes on the horizon, "just put one foot in front of the other. Like me." He took one slow step and waited.
"And trust in the Lord," he added.
Lot's wife didn't budge. Instead, she spoke to him through her tight lips.
"Lot," she said, "do you think there will there be any... sur... survivors?"
Lot paused to consider his answer. He knew the Lord had done great and magnificent things, but also terrible and vindictive things. The Lord killed some, spared some, even brought some people back from the dead. You couldn't always tell what the Lord might do, or how exactly the Lord felt. But Lot could tell one thing from the noises and screams behind him: that whatever was happening in Sodom and Gomorrah was righteously pissing the Lord off.
"Survivors," thought Lot aloud, "I guess, if there is one good man left in either of those places, the Lord will surely spare him."
"He probably would, I mean," he added.
Those were the last words Lot's wife ever heard, because moments later she turned her neck around and the Lord transformed her into a pillar of salt.
Unbeknownst to Lot and his wife, someone else had indeed survived. He had escaped from Gomorrah and was trailing behind them, having managed to avoid being spotted by the Lord or being incinerated by the fire and brimstone. In the middle of the desert he wore a flashy print button-up with a giant collar and rocked a gray toupee to cover his brilliantly bald head. That person was my Grampa Freddy.
He had been walking in the same direction as Lot and his wife when he saw her turn into a pillar of salt. Freddy wouldn't have looked back. He wouldn't have even considered it. He would have waited until the rest of them had, then he'd have come back later to collect the salt.
"That's the secret to my happiness," Grampa Freddy told me, laughing, "God treated me properly, but he forgot to give me a conscience."
Since as far back as I can remember, Freddy's house was filled with toys, like little animatronic fish and talking cookie jars and grandfather clocks that chimed at unpredictable times. Recently he got into color-changing lights for toilet bowls. He gave me one for my apartment.
Growing up Freddy didn't have any toys at all. His mother, Lena, lived in a Brooklyn slum, slept around, and had lots of kids with lots of men. By the time she got pregnant with Freddy she didn't want any more kids. She tried to abort him, unaware that the universe was planning on keeping him around for a long time.
Instead, his aunt intervened, offering custody. She said she wanted a child more than anything in the world and that she would take him from Lena the moment he was born. But after the sun kissed Freddy's bright face for the first time, his aunt changed her mind and Lena got stuck with him. That's how Freddy came into this world on August 14, 1930, unwanted and uncared for, and that's why he didn't have any toys.
In the wintertime his mother would leave him up north with his sister while she went to Florida to spend the holidays. But his sister didn't care much for Freddy either, and she too designed to get rid of him.
One winter, when Freddy was eleven, his sister decided she had had enough. She gave him his satchel, bought him a Greyhound ticket, and sent him to visit his mother in Florida. But she didn't consider giving him spending money. Freddy had no money to buy food on the four-day trip. To eat, he swiped scraps off people's plates at the bus station restaurants.
That was 80 years ago. Freddy is 90 now and goes to restaurants all the time. He likes classic American food. He doesn't always finish his plate because now he doesn't have to.
Eleven-year-old Freddy's bus pulled into the Greyhound station. He looked out the window and saw everyone dressed in shorts and bathing suits under the hot Miami sun. Freddy, on the other hand, stepped off the bus wearing a thick winter coat and a cap with earmuffs on the sides. He didn't know what Miami was, so he had dressed for a winter in Brooklyn.
Lugging his satchel, a hot, tired Freddy wandered around the Miami boulevards looking for his mother. Somehow someone recognized him. "Freddy, what are you doing here?" he said. It was a friend of Freddy's brother.
"I came all the way here to see my mother!"
"Well, where is she?"
"I don't know!" said Freddy, realizing something.
"...nobody told me the address!"
That man told Freddy he could sleep on his floor and found him a job at a fruit stand. Freddy didn't have a plan, didn't have any money, and didn't have an address to find his mother. To eat, in between customers, he'd help himself to as many bananas and pineapples as he wanted. Days and then weeks passed like this.
Then one day another person came to the fruit stand. She wasn't known to visit this particular fruit stand, and her appearance was, as Freddy described it, "like a miracle out of the clear blue sky."
She took one look at Freddy and said "Freddy? What are you doing here?"
"What am I doing here?", he said back to his mother "I came here to see you!"
In his old age, Freddy lives a more predictable life and doesn't have to find work at fruit stands, but he still eats pineapple every day like a growing boy.
He tells stories a lot. They always come out with the polish of someone who's told them a thousand times, as if they were gifts wrapped with a tight little bow. Freddy's life has always been something like a director's cut, editing out the dismal parts and amping up the excitement.
Around high school, Lena gave up on raising Freddy and sent him away to Miami to live with his sister. And despite living with her and her abusive husband, Freddy managed to carve out a pretty comfortable life. He had a job as a bellhop where he socialized with the guests. He lied on the beach during the day and danced with girls at night. In the summers he'd visit his childhood friends in Coney Island to do the same thing.
It seemed like this might go on forever, but then Freddy got a letter in the mail. It had a postmark from the Selective Service System. The US Army wanted Freddy to join them in the fight against the Korean People's Army.
The army sized Freddy up, put him through basic training, and gave him a written test. Nobody knows why, but after collecting all this information they decided that Freddy would make a good medic. Freddy didn't have any medical training. Freddy was, by his own account, a bum. But they trained him anyway, and in 1951 shipped him off to the medevac unit in Korea.
In that year, 1951, the USO began entertaining troops stationed abroad to boost morale. Freddy was working the battalion aid station when the celebrities showed up. A woman came into the clinic that day and introduced herself.
"Do you know who I am?" she asked him.
"Sure I know who you are," he said to her, "You're Debbie Reynolds."
"Yes I am. And I have the most terrible cold, yet I still have to entertain the troops. Isn't there anything you can do?"
Freddy thought for a moment, scanning past her exposed biceps.
"Yeah. Pull down your jeans."
She turned around, pulled down her pants, and gave Freddy the moon of a full-on Hollywood star. Then he took his syringe full of penicillin and gave her a shot right in her ass.
"Best experience I had in Korea," he told me.
He savored that memory while he recounted it to me. What he won't recount to me are the times he had to scramble among the wounded and dead. He doesn't want to think about it, he says, because it gives him nightmares. We don't know if he even remembers.
There is one thing we know. As part of the medevac unit, Freddy was responsible for dragging wounded soldiers to the battalion aid station from the front lines of war. Once, doing just that, he discovered that not only were the Koreans shooting at the soldier he was dragging, but it seemed like they were aiming for him, too. They weren't supposed to be doing that. As it turns out, God didn't give the Korean People's Army a conscience either. They were targeting the medevac units, and one of the North Koreans shot him right in his ass.
Freddy still made it the half-mile to battalion aid with his ass bleeding. He had carried the wounded soldier all the way there. The US Army was right — he did make a pretty good medic after all.
When I think of Freddy, I think of those cartoon characters who can walk straight past the edge of a cliff without falling because they never think to look down.
"I would make the most serious thing into something funny," he said, "If anything serious happened, I would just laugh. But there are situations that I saw in Korea — like the killing and the murder — that if I think about them, I just have nightmares."
Freddy was like that, striking through the screenplay with a thick black marker to let the highlights shine, always laughing as he tells the stories. And being like that has its advantages. It makes it easy to move on, to push through, and to start over.
He started over in the Catskill mountains working a summer job at a hotel. It was there that 23-year-old Fred met 16 year-old Adele, and they danced and chatted in the evenings after work. Freddy thought Adele was nice and sweet, and Adele thought that Freddy was strong and handsome. For a long time she didn't tell him that she was only 16. I don't know if he ever told her about the war.
After Freddy moved back to Florida he wrote Adele love letters every single day for months and months, and Adele could no longer keep quiet about her feelings for him. And the more Adele fell in love, the more disgusted her mother grew. She decided to nip the whole situation in the bud, and flew both her and her daughter down to Miami so that they both could see Freddy for who he really was.
Adele saw Freddy for who he really was, and now Adele is grandma Deley. She's been married to Freddy for 65 years. The age difference that might have kept them apart is now just bookkeeping trivia. To me they're both just agelessly old.
Freddy and Adele might have lived a poor life in their youth, but they got by. With his $20 a week from the GI Bill, plus Adele's paycheck, they could afford a modest life in a boiler room in a garage under a house.
But Adele hated that boiler room. It was noisy and loud, and the maintenance man would come in all the time to top up the boiler — even while they were cooking or making love. But Freddy didn't mind that, because for the first time he had a real family, a family who loved him, even if that family was just Adele.
These days Freddy and Adele share a new apartment with a full kitchen, a master bath and a guest bedroom, and decorate it all with a smattering of family photos, portraits of every family member in every stage of life and in all possible combinations and permutations. For them it's a record of how far they've come. For me it's a reminder of how little they've changed.
In the mornings you can catch Freddy reading the classifieds. He's comfortably wealthy now and has everything he needs, but he's still looking for toys and good deals, just for the thrill of it.
When Freddy and Adele were living in the boiler room they couldn't afford shopping for thrills. They couldn't afford privacy or proper electricity. Back then Freddy read the classifieds looking for jobs instead of toys.
While flipping through the papers next to the noisy boiler an ad caught his eye. It said "TRAINEE WANTED. $75/week, SATURDAY AT 9 AM" and gave an address. Freddy didn't know what the job was and didn't care. What did he have to lose? It was $75 a week!
Freddy showed up at the address and looked at the sign above the warehouse. It read SINGER SEWING MACHINES in giant letters. Dozens of men just like him were waiting outside. Just like that, at 9am, the Singer suits came out of the warehouse, hoovered all the men into it, and hired every single one of them right there on the spot.
By 10am Freddy was almost entirely alone in the warehouse. Pretty much all of the other guys had left. They had a conscience, you see. After hearing what Singer expected them to do they didn't want to have any part of it. But Freddy didn't have a conscience, would do anything to make a buck, and just after 10am he left with the other salesman to go make bucks.
He's told me this story a hundred times, and I know what's going to happen.
Freddy stood in front of an apartment door in Bed Stuy, frozen with his clenched fist in the air.
"It was like a jungle," Freddy recounted, "and it was the hardest thing in the world to bring my fist down on that door. You don't know who lives there, you don't know what's gonna happen."
He knocked, and a tall black man opened up. "What do you want?" he said, making his first unforced error.
"Well," said Freddy, his confidence welling, "I'm Freddy, and I'm from Singer Sewing Machines, and I'm here to tell you about all the great things this machine can do for you, all the little ways it'll make your life better. Can I bring this one inside and give you a little demo? Free of charge, just to have you take a look." And the man actually let him inside, making his second unforced error.
Freddy clung on to him like quicksand and the man kept sinking. And after a little while Freddy brought in his "boss" — really the closer — to pull him completely under. Eventually the man relented and signed a three month contract for a new Singer sewing machine that he didn't want or need. But that was just phase one.
As Freddy left, he began to plant seeds of doubt into the mind of this new customer. He mumbled about the cost of repairs, about how the machine wouldn't last two weeks. "But hey, you bought it, it's yours now!" he said. This was phase two, when the real money would start rolling in.
Upon hearing about this piece of garbage he had just bought, this man started sweating and was about to shit his pants. He didn't want the machine anymore. He didn't even know why he bought it in the first place. And yet, inexplicably, he saw his name on the contract for it.
"Now I might have another machine in the trunk of my car," he said, rehearsed, "Someone's already bought it, so I can't technically sell it to you, but I can show it to you anyways as a courtesy."
Freddy brought out the new machine and it did all sorts of things that the other machine couldn't. He would even write the man's name in cursive. The target's face was glowing, and Freddy proceeded with the script, reaching its lethal climax. Phase three.
"What if I told you that — and I'm not supposed to do this — that I could sell you this same machine for the same money down and the same monthly price? And I take back the old machine, just to do you a favor?"
This poor desperate sap. Now he wanted that new machine. He craved it, and probably moreso, craved getting rid of the piece of junk he now owned. So he asked Freddy for a pen and, exhaling, signed Freddy's new contract.
Having said everything he needed to say, Freddy got into his shiny car with his closer and drove to the next house. What Freddy didn't mention, and what the man wouldn't realize until later, was one tiny change to the contract. The first machine had a contract that ended after 3 months. The second contract, with identical terms, conditions, and monthly payments to the first, terminated after 3 years.
"Sounds like you'll do just about anything to make money," I asked him.
"Well, some of the things we did were not really ethical looking back on it," he told me, "but for me it was natural."
Even though he had a briefcase full of made deals, Freddy still wasn't making money from his sewing machine business. The payments just never came in. Turns out people didn't give two shits about the contracts they had signed with him, and didn't really feel like paying for these sewing machines they didn't want or need. So he walked away from Singer and started a new company in Florida of which he was the sole employee. He called it the "Federal National Sales Company."
"I'm a bullshit artist," he told me, referring to the name, "I hustled."
After this is where Freddy's story gets hazier. His sales jobs got bigger, the commissions got higher, and his tactics got bolder. "It was the blackest part of my life," he said.
Also called the Tin Men, the Blue Suede Boys were awning salesmen who used high-pressure, deceptive sales tactics. Freddy was one of them. He told me this much on the outset, but getting him say more about his time with the Blue Suede Boys is a bit like trying to slow dance with a live trout. But with the right prodding, he opens up.
"We'd sell outrageously and to the wrong people," he eventually said, "We had blank mortgages and blank deeds all ready to go, and we'd pressure people into taking out a second mortgage on their house [to pay for the awnings]. We did all sorts of things that were not legal."
As Freddy talked these words made the circuit from his brain, out his mouth, through his ears, and back into his brain. I witnessed the spark of self-awareness as Freddy began reflecting on what exactly he had done. The resistance disappeared, and the calm, jovial Freddy that I always knew took the wheel and started talking again.
"We never really hurt anybody," he added, "I was innocent."
He changed gears to tell me about his successes, the things he wanted to talk about, what he wanted to be remembered for. How he had made it. He told me about being a banking executive and getting invited to expensive dinners, the kind of dinners where you meet celebrities and other people who've made it. Just like that, we had forgotten all about the Blue Suede Boys and we were talking about Debbie Reynolds again. Apparently, by chance, they had met at one of those expensive dinners.
"Don't I know you from Korea?" she had asked him.
Freddy called me the other day to talk about my successes, about my career, about the things I was going to be remembered for. He was worried that I wouldn't amount to anything, wouldn't have anything. No children, no career, no responsibilities. He didn't care if I was a bullshitter or not. Because Freddy has a big house, a flush retirement account, and a big family. And me? I don't got nothin'.
Freddy is slowly beginning to forget things, starting with the most recent memories. We have to remind him how to use the TV, his phone, and his computer. But forgetting isn't something new to Freddy. For years he has chosen to forget. His life is full of blank spots between the stories.
He doesn't talk about his heart attacks, his time in court, the money he lost in bad investments, except to say all the good things that came as a result of them. These are the things that even Freddy just can't laugh about, so he either ignores them, or stretches the silver lining to cover the entire damn cloud.
As he inches towards his centennial Freddy has even more problems that he just can't laugh off. For one, he is beginning to die. It's strange for me to watch someone who thinks so much about the future have to confront the fact that there isn't much more to think about.
Besides his own mortality I've learned that there are now other things that Freddy doesn't laugh about. For all Freddy brags about his successes, he tends to gloss over the times when he was a single bum. That's another part of his life Freddy doesn't like to joke about.
One of the last times we talked I was picking up a Christmas package from my ex-girlfriend. He couldn't believe she still talked to a bum like me. "Not after all the abuse you put that poor girl through."
I could feel him struggling to remember the story, meandering through the details and trying fill in the gaps in his memory. This time, the blank spot was one that he didn't put there himself. I tried to remind him.
"First of all, that's not what went down," I told him, "and plus, we're still friends."
"You're shit," he said, "She's an angel." Then he told me to marry her before he died.
Freddy had forgotten the story of me and Nico. He couldn't remember that it was her that had broken up with me, and that we had both been trying to make it work.
Maybe it could have worked, if only we had laughed it all off. Like Freddy.
One night I met Freddy in a dream. We were in his apartment, and he was sitting by the window in a big comfy chair. He looked like he always did until he spoke, then it seemed like he was talking to no one at all. "I hear someone's dying here in this apartment complex, and he's got a lot of stocks," he said, "What I think is that they should just give his stocks to me if he's not gonna be using them anymore." He dropped his voice a little. "They say he's got dementia. His name's Freddy."
We don't know how far along Freddy's dementia really is, or if he'll ever be as confused as he appeared in that dream. But his forgetfulness, his brusqueness, and his confusion are the first signs any of us had that Freddy's luck might be winding down. That the Lord might finally be ready to take him back.
The other day Freddy called me because he wanted to buy some cryptocurrency — an investment that might "go up a hundred times in the medium term" — but then asked me to double-check that I'd get the money in case he died before that happens. It's strange to listen to him talk as if he has so much to look forward to. I can both feel his impatience to tie up loose ends, and his acceptance of the inevitable. He wants to be sure that we have children, careers, and responsibilities, and that he invests in a few winning stock options before the party ends.
Lot was on his haunches in the sand, crying. He had thought he had lost everything when he first set out into that desert, but he had forgotten there was always more to lose.
Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder. "Who is that? Who is touching me?" he asked the hand, not daring to look behind him.
"I'm Freddy," said Freddy, "What's doin'?"
"Oh," Lot said, "I thought you were — that you might be my..." and then he started whimpering again.
Freddy's face softened and he patted Lot with his hand. "It's alright, pal," he said. "You got a lot going on."
He pointed to the horizon, with his other hand still on Lot's sholder. "Take a look out there, straight out there. Into your future. Tell me what you see."
Lot looked into the emptiness with tears in his eyes. He saw blurry white above and blurry amber below.
"I see sand... nothing... but sand..."
"You see sand. I see sandcastles," said Freddy, "You can't go through life wallowing in the past like that. You gotta think about the future. Your future. Otherwise when you get there you won't have nothin'. You'll be a bum."
"But I am a bum, and I don't have anything," said Lot, "not anymore I don't."
"You're not a bum. Look at you. You're young, you're healthy. So you're going through a hard time. We all go through hard times. You win some, you lose some. I don't let it bother me, that's life." But Lot was still blubbering.
So Freddy tried again. "You know, someone once said, I think it was Confucius or something, it's a quote. It goes, 'seek pleasure, avoid pain.' That's how I live my life: seek pleasure, avoid pain."
But Lot wasn't listening because he couldn't avoid the pain. Instead Lot wondered to himself, How can this man live like this? Ignoring such total destruction, seeking pleasure on a day like today?
Freddy tried to talk to him a little bit more but eventually gave up and walked on, leaving Lot there to wallow a little more and collect himself. He was pretty sure Lot would get it together eventually, he just needed to grow up a little.
There was something that Freddy didn't tell Lot, his other secret to happiness. When Freddy looked out into that desert, into the inert emptiness, he didn't just see sandcastles.
He saw all sorts of beautiful things that other people didn't. He saw futures with children, careers, and responsibilities. He saw sewing machines and stock options and bitcoins turning portfolios into porches and patios. He saw happy marriages and parents smiling at their children. He even saw the two shining untouched cities that Lot thought had been destroyed.
Toward all of that, that's the direction that Freddy walked, never looking back.
Author's note: Yes, amazingly, all of Freddy's personal story is true, at least as far as it was related to me. I kept his words nearly verbatim, only rearranging some of his sentences and lightly editing his language for consistency with the rest of the story.