Eddie

Eddie's a longtime customer from Bay Ridge. He's got a slow, clear way of speaking, layered with a thick Brooklyn accent. "Gimme da TWO. On top of da FOUR. On top of da SIX TREE." At first, I didn't like him-- I had grouped him with the other scumbag Bay Ridge goons. Eventually I realized he was harmless and just wanted to bet; we even built up a little act where I would repeat all his bets in an exaggerated Brooklyn accent and he would repeat it again as if to acknowledge the way he spoke while declaring he was proud of it.

I also thought the guy was on drugs, considering how slow he spoke and the fact that he's so scrawny, even for a short little guy like him. I was mistaken-- apparently Eddie's got cancer, one of the bad ones, and a few years back stopped taking any medication for it because they were making him sicker than the tumor. (Or he couldn't afford it, he'll never tell.) He's had it for nine years but lately it's been getting worse. Not that he's told us, you can just see it. His skin is green. His white hair has lost its luster. He's even scrawnier and weaker than before. It's bad stuff.
It's weird to watch a man slowly die. The bulletproof glass between us serves as like a frame. He comes in one week, I see him, he comes in the next week, he's a little bit worse, etc. Everybody knows it's coming and there's nothing we can do, and because there's a line of other customers behind him, you can't even dwell on it. You'd think he'd want to use his remaining time to do some exciting stuff, or at least spend it with his family. He's a regular but he's not there constantly like most regulars, so maybe he does do this stuff. But on the other hand, betting to him is exciting, is fun, and as sick as it sounds, OTB is part of his family. So maybe he's going out the way he wants to go out.

I write about Eddie in present tense not to be melodramatic, but because I had been planning this article for a couple months now and just never got around it. This is basically what it would have been. The truth is, though, Eddie died a couple days ago. The cancer finally got to him. The clerks at his branch and some of the customers were saddened by the news. One clerk, who hadn't even worked in the branch or seen Eddie for ten years, bawled her eyes out.
I look down on a lot of these people because of how they live their lives but the fact of the matter is they're still people, with the same amount of neurons and thoughts and impulses charging through their brains as you or me. It's really a shame that with all the things in nature that could kill us, we still come up with a billion other ways to do it to each other or to ourselves. Life is ridiculously precious, even inside an OTB parlor, even to people who just refuse to treat it as such. But if a betting clerk can cry over the death of a customer, maybe there's hope for us after all.