Zorro Sent Me
Patrick Silver left the baby in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. The baby, who was forty-four, sat in the upholstered chair, with his knuckles in his lap. His name was Jerónimo. A boy with gray around his ears, a Guzmann of Boston Road, his education had stopped at the first grade. He lived most of his life in a candy store, under the eye of his father and his many brothers. But the Guzmanns were feuding with the police. They couldn’t protect the baby on their own. They had to put Jerónimo in Patrick Silver’s care. Patrick was his temporary keeper.
Jerónimo had blackberries in his head. With a carpet under his feet, and candelabra around his chair, he was thinking of the Guzmann farm in Lock Sheldrake. It was the blackberry season, and Jerónimo wanted to stick his fingers in the briars and drink blackberry juice. But he was a hundred miles from Lock Sheldrake, waiting for Patrick Silver in a hotel with rust-colored wool on the floor.
Patrick Silver rode the Plaza elevators in a filthy soccer shirt. The elevator boy was uncomfortable with a giant who stank of Dublin beer. Silver had a ruddy look. He came to the Plaza without his shoes. He was six-foot-three in simple black socks.
Patrick began roaming the corridors on the third floor. Chambermaids pushed their linen carts out of the way; a shoeless man was anathema to the maids, who glanced at Patrick’s socks with their noses hidden in the carts. They returned to their business once Patrick knocked on the door. He muttered three words, “Zorro sent me.”
Part One — The Education of Patrick Silver — Jerome Charyn
Who would have known that Jerome Charyn’s third Isaac Sidel novel, The Education of Patrick Silver, was inspired by Richard Harris and that the principal protagonist of the novel, Patrick Silver (shoeless and filthy) was in fact the very same Richard Harris?
I found out this and much more just reading (and reading over) the wonderful introduction to Charyn’s latest Isaac Sidel Winter Warning in which the man, President of the United States, now, walks into the White House with his Glock.
My blogs on Jerome Charyn
A stinking voyeur in the house of the dead
Winter Warning
The Vampire of Paris
Blue Eyes
Vanesa
Glock-Verb- Transitive
The Czar’s Daughter
Currer Bell
And Zero at the Bone
The Dark Lady From Belorusse
I Am Abraham
I Am Abraham — which one?
Teddy’s Desk
Malamud
Charyn & J. Robert Janes
Jane Jacobs & Jerome Charyn
Marilyn the Wild
Dee
The Dark Lady from Belorusse
Margaret Tolstoy
Princess Hannah
Bitter Bronx
Seducing a Cockroach
The Electric Dark of the King Cole
The Little Duchess
Wolf Dogs in Central Park
The Polish Rider at the Frick
Dee- Eddie Carmel
Tanya’s Legs
The Colt
Flicked Away a Tear
Laurencia Riley
With Lines from Emily Dickinson
Without the power to die
Emily Dickinson’s White Dress
Originally published at blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.
