But Isaac had no minivan now, and indeed, no driver’s license. An epileptic, he had crashed the Aerostar into the side of a church during a grand mal seizure. He’d been taken to the ER, where a doctor put a medical suspension on his driver’s license, and he couldn’t get it back until he could prove he hadn’t had a seizure for six months. This would require appointments with neurologists. Also blood tests, various costly scans and imagings, who knew what else; and furthermore, he wasn’t remotely seizure-free. He had hangover seizures, stress-related seizures, strobe light/trance music/op art seizures; he had just-for-the-hell-of-it seizures. “Everyone should have a seizure,” he told me. “It’s intense.” He hadn’t seen a neurologist since they sprung him from the hospital. He couldn’t. He had no health insurance. And rather than apply for Medicaid, he’d done what came naturally: He had slid effortlessly, numbly, fatalistically off the grid.
Somehow, he was maintaining a floor-sanding business on his bicycle. A floor sander, in case you’ve never seen one, is a huge thing. Isaac’s weighed probably 200 lbs. Then there’s the buffer, the edger, the milk crates full of sandpaper, the five gallon buckets of polyurethane—all this had to be transported to and from the job. Astonishingly, he was able to get the various housewives who engaged his services to shuttle him and his equipment in their SUVs and drive him to Home Depot, or to Diamond Tool, or Bell Flooring, often making several trips a day due to his chronic disorganization. He wasn’t apologetic or even particularly nice about it—he was basically a petulant, sarcastic teenager about it—and yet these housewives loved him. They loved him with all the exasperation and indulgence that their inner soccer moms possessed. I saw it with my own eyes. They clucked disapprovingly at his diatribes about, say, apocalyptic forms of population control, but still they made him nice lunches and sewed buttons on his shirts and paid him in cash because he didn’t have a bank account.
His invisible charm worked on me, too. The clichés pile up as I try to explain: He made me laugh. I could be myself around him. I’d never met anyone like him—gimlet-eyed and crazy in equal measure. Ultimately, though, he was just so naked and guileless. He concealed none of his emotions, positive or negative; everything he felt seemed to register on the surface of his skin. Within a month he had moved into my house.
Summer came. We rode our bikes all over town. Isaac showed me his cherished places: the decommissioned banks under the Frankford El; the impromptu, oddly homey arrangements of sofas and chairs and milk crates and industrial spools where junkies congregated in vacant lots; the boarded-up buildings that he’d pillaged or planned to pillage for light fixtures, doorknobs and other treasures. At some point in our travels, he showed me a mid-’80s Dodge Caravan, sun-dulled and putty-colored, beached on a Fishtown sidewalk in the shade of an ailanthus tree. It had a for-sale sign in the back window. “I’m gonna buy that minivan,” he said, and he wrote the phone number down in his sketchbook. I probably laughed if I reacted at all.
• • •
I forgot all about it. Then one afternoon I came home early to find Isaac sitting on our stoop, shit-faced drunk. Having nowhere to be that day, he’d gotten bored and polished off a bottle of vodka I had in the freezer. Thus emboldened, he’d called the phone number in his sketchbook and told the presumably delighted owner of the Caravan, “If you can get it to South Philly I’ll give you $400 for it.” Maybe half an hour later, the minivan pulled up to the curb in a cloud of whitish smoke and rattled to a stop. I took a look and went back in the house.
After a while, he staggered inside and found me sitting at the kitchen table.
