It caught me by surprise, too! Even as I sip my whisky here at Ash Creek, surrounded by familiar faces, I have to smile. I think back to another night, some thirty-two years ago, to another bar… Sinbad’s on the Detroit River. I will never forget the night… for two reasons. First, they served the best martini on the rocks I have ever had, before or since… it was served in a brandy snifter the size of a gold fish bowl. And second, for the conversation I shared with a stranger. A stranger of significant personage as it turns out.
I had just spent the day and part of the evening in my labor of selling clothing and furnishings to the “button-down crowd” of Grosse Pointe. Morty Coe, my colleague at Chipp decided to call it an early evening allowing me to enjoy a martini by myself.
The early stages of a martini point the senses. Refreshing hint of the lemon twist. Crisp. Invigorating. The languor and torpor only to come later. I think it must have been at sip two when I first took notice of him. A slow but steady gait, as he walked into the bar. He had a quiet manner, old clothes thread bare; but clean like him. He looked around for an opening and settled for the stool to my left.
He ordered a bass ale and a Lagavullin in a snifter, a glass of water on the side. He downed the Bass in two successive gulps, as if to quench a raging fire. Then he took a bar straw, dipped it into the water, put his index finger at the top of the straw and extracted a tiny amount of water and then surgically applied two drops to his single malt. He swirled the whisky and put his large nose into the snifter to take in its aroma.
“There!”
The precision to this act was a bit un-nerving. It was like witnessing Leonardo’s last brush stroke in completing Mona Lisa’s smile.
He raised his snifter, and without much fanfare, said to no one in particular, “Here’s to you Walt Disney, you dirty cocksucker!”
He took a healthy sip of the whisky, closed his eyes to focus its soothing flavour, pursed his lips, opened his left eye and raised its eye brow and asked me, “Do I look like a dwarf?”
There were questions he could have asked me… “Did you vote for Nixon?” or “Did FDR know about Pearl Harbor in advance?” But “Do I look like a dwarf?” was certainly a surprise. I judged him to be my height, maybe an inch or so more… and I’m 5’8”.
He took another thoughtful sip. “Like Disney, do you? Well… when I first met him, I liked him, too. My brothers and me, we all did. Sorry, my name is Merwin…” And he extended his hand to me, and punctuated the gesture with a warm smile. I accepted the handshake and hoped privately that the conversation had concluded, or maybe would shift to another topic.
“It was 1935 and my five brothers and me were living in Eva Goldfarb’s rooming house in Brooklyn. This Eva Goldfarb was some piece of work. Mr. Goldfarb had been a wealthy fur merchant. He traveled frequently to Russia on business to purchase pelts… and on one visit he met Eva, married her and brought her back to America. Eva stood 7′ 2”. Goldfarb was at most 5′ 6”… at least from the photos I had seen of him. By the time we met Eva he was already on the other side of the grass. Goldfarb committed suicide in the market crash and left Eva with nothing but their large house in Brooklyn Heights. 7’2” Eva turned their home into a rooming house to pay for expenses.”
I tried to picture a 7’2” woman. Wilt Chamberlain was that height. No one else that I could think of.
“Well… me and my brothers moved there after our parents had died. Mamma had gone first in a flu epidemic and Pappa died in what was described as an industrial accident. My two older brothers, Lenny and Nathan had work in the diamond district. My twin, Irwin and I worked as converters in the garment district… we bought and sold gray goods. Then there was Manny and Benjamin they were still in school. Bennie… we called him ‘Bennie the Ball’, because that kid had all the girls on a string.”
He finished his whisky, and a second whisky was placed in front of him without asking. Obviously, a regular patron of Sinbad’s! He went thru the same careful routine of adding two precise drops of water to his snifter of Lagavullin. He breathed in its fragrance, and returned the glass to the bar.
“Me and my brothers have always been close. Maybe that’s what happens when you lose both parents at a fairly young age. We have always taken care of our own. But we could cut things up pretty good at Eva’s house. You gotta understand, she was 7’2”! She looked like a prison guard or something… and she dressed in these severe clothes. Scarier than shit, let me tell you!”
And he raised his glass, and in one steady sip, polished off his second whisky. I blinked. It was like the very memory of this woman had to be purged from his mind. A third whisky was placed in front of him. It’s nice to be known.
“I guess the word got out about these six guys living with this ‘Amazon’. Sure, we would see people stroll by on Sundays to check us out. That’s natural. Who would believe such a story, know what I mean? How it got to Walt Disney, I can’t tell you. But it did. He showed up on our doorstep in Brooklyn Heights one Sunday afternoon. He even asked Eva if he could stay for dinner. Not that we knew who he was… but she said fine, and charged him $1.25 for dinner. He was quiet enough… he had a pad of plain paper and he kept doodling his entire time.”
He shook his head. Proceeded to the ministration of his drink. He smiled, briefly and sipped.
“Anyway, when dinner was done Eva stood up, and as was her custom, she began ordering everyone around. Merwin you do this, Nathan take care of that… on it went. We did as we were told, her shouts filled the house. It wasn’t particularly pleasant. It was the price we paid for an affordable rent. I don’t think Walt had anything to do with the clean-up and chore activity. Eva must have felt that the buck and a quarter satisfied his requirements. He continued to doodle in his pad. He may have asked us a few questions… what were our names. He pointed to my kid brother, ‘what’s the dopey one’s name?’ He point to Bennie…. ‘oh, that’s Bennie the Ball!’ And he just laughed.”
The story was now emerging on to familiar turf.
“So, 1937 rolls around and out pops ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ from the Disney Studio! But Disney changed the facts! Snow White wasn’t some pretty young thing and we weren’t dwarfs! She was a 7’2” dominatrix and we were just normal size guys… maybe we looked like dwarfs standing next to her. And we didn’t do no whistling while we worked… in the rooming house or anywhere else. Sure a couple of us worked in the gem trade. But the guy got it wrong. He ruined us!”
I just nodded. Interesting story. I nursed my martini… tried to make sense of the narrative.
“But you only had 5 brothers… how did Disney come up with the seventh dwarf?”
“I knew you were going to ask that! We think that he just made up Sneezy. And maybe things wouldn’t have taken a bad turn. But that Evil Eva decided to exploit the situation by putting a sign on the front lawn: JOIN SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS FOR SUNDAY DINNER $2.”
A fourth whisky was called for.
“At first we went along with it. Eva got a costume, that blue and red thing… and so did we. The tights itched, the shoes were uncomfortable and the dumb hat made my head sweat. She even got a kid from the neighborhood to come in to play the seventh dwarf. Do you think that we saw any scratch? Not a penny! Eva kept it all… and the people came to see us! We had to sing the fucking songs, and frolic around. Eva made us do it!”
I couldn’t resist… the question just burst out. “Let me guess? You were Grumpy!”
“How’d you know?”
I wanted to say that maybe Disney had type-casted him correctly. But that’s how bar fights start. I made a decent recovery, “Just a guess; but if Disney got it all wrong, it follows that he got you wrong, too.”
“Yeah. I’m no dwarf. But do you know what happened to me just last week? I went back to New York is visit Manny. He lives in New Rochelle now. We went into the City to grab a knish from Yonah Schimmel’s… and someone comes up to me and says, ‘I know you! When I was a kid my parents took me to a place in Brooklyn for dinner with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You’re Grumpy!”
He asked for his tab.
“It’s like I am still a dwarf, right? Yeah, I’m Grumpy; but you can call me Merwin.”