REFRIGERATOR INSULATOR
This life has amazing twists and turns, even to this
day. I get dazzled by things; somehow the dumbest.
Just yesterday, walking past the short front of the
Longbow Tavern, this fifty-fifth street guy comes
slowly tripping out crowing. Curious, always, I am.
I sit at a nearby bench and - sure enough - here
he comes, Mr. Rambling Technique himself, and
sits him down. Happens often enough, I'm immune.
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When I was a kid, there was a TV guy named Foster
Brooks - Saturday-night, variety show stuff. He always
portrayed, in comedy skits with the stars and guests of
the evrning, a drunk - a sot, an inebriated talker with
long, rolling drunk sentences and wobbly head and eyes.
I always loved watching him. This guy was just like that.
-
Seems he had me a story to tell to. 'D'ya know how I
made all my money?' he said, and then proceeded - in
his way (I won't reproduce, I won't try again, all that
drunkman's funny ways with words and slurrings), but
needless to say the story was gold, and the story he told.
-
He'd made his money in refrigerator insulation, a
refrigerator insulator - try saying that nicely when sober,
then play with it as drunk. Go ahead. I'll wait, and it'll be
worth the waiting. He proceeded : 'every refrigerator, you
see, behind that metal exterior has wads of insulation - a
form of fiberglass weave mostly, stuffed in. My company,
yes, my very own, we supplied all that to manufacturers
everywhere - it weighed you know, it seems, almost of no
weight but it's not - we'd sell by the hundred-weight to
refrigerator assembly plants. It was a killing, maybe 34,
38 cents a pound back when to me, I'd contract and resell
and deliver sometimes upwards of 85 cents a pound to them.'
-
And that's how he'd made his fortune, way back, whenever,
or - as George Harrison once put it - all those years ago.
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