Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, but for me it also reminds me of a person from my past. The name says it all. Augie Gerwitz. He looked and acted just like his name sounds. Picture a perpetual 66 year old, chain-smoking, used-car salesman from Buffalo, with a mixture of black and gray curly or greased-back hair and one lazy (or glass?) eye, which was never in sync with the other. That’s Augie, the man who replaced my Grandfather I never knew. Grandpa died in late ’67 and Grandma remarried in ’72.
Augie was a good enough man...minus the short temper, the Playboy calendars which graced Grandma’s bedroom walls, and his devastating ability to tickle me and my brothers till we coughed blood. Everybody has a relative, near or distant, who simply cannot converse with, relate to, or otherwise understand small children; and these are the likely relatives who try to supplant conversation and relationship building with good, old-fashioned tickling. When it comes to tickling, there are those who have mastered the art and know precisely when to pull back and enjoy the moment, and there are those who push the tickling envelope and inevitably go too far. Augie was such a man. To this day I can still feel his vice-like grip on my side or my thigh, initially causing laughter, yes, but finally causing tremendous discomfort and screaming. Augie lacked the finesse to be an excellent tickler, never fully understanding that brute force and tickling do not go hand in hand.
Visits from Grandma and Augie started with the usual warm pleasantries, but Augie was not a man for in-depth conversations, unless they occurred around a card table or bowling alley. And even then they barely qualified as conversation, usually just boisterous retorts of disagreement. Without a card game breaking out, he would make his way to the couch by the TV and then the sinister game for me and my brothers would begin. To walk past Augie was an amazing contest of skill, perception, and random luck. But we needed to get past him to make it to the Atari machine...it had to be done. The initial challenge was to determine whether or not he was awake. Often slouching in the couch, with his glass eye staring menacingly ahead, it was near impossible to gauge his level of alertness. Was it the glass eye or the real eye peering out at you? The half-burned cigarette with the ash longer than the butt was never a leading indicator, for it was seemingly attached to his hand whether awake or asleep. In fact, we often thought of it as his sixth appendage. My brother, in a bold, damn-the-torpedoes maneuver, took a running start and sailed high past Augie without even generating a flinch. Obviously he was sound asleep, but I took no chances. Tip-toeing closer, closer until suddenly, with cat-like reflexes, his pincer-like claw lunges out until it makes contact with whatever part of your body it can. In Augie’s world every inch of the human anatomy could be ticklish, by willpower alone. Once locked on, the torturous tickle-fest begins. My brother sets the Atari machine to a 1-player game, while my struggles to escape begin…no help coming from him. I laugh in an attempt to appease Augie, but it doesn’t work. He doesn’t want laughter, he wants screaming and anguish. The others in the room laugh with amusement. Even Augie appears amused as he develops a smoke-choked cackle from deep within and a devilish grin transforms his face. And he’s just warming up. His ability to sustain the tickling is shocking every time you witness it. To maintain the onslaught, the cigarette with the long ash is deftly placed in the bottom corner of his crooked grin while both claws go to work on the victim. There are a few awkward pauses and you sense perhaps he wants to start a conversation, but then you realize he probably doesn’t even know which brother you are and he resumes. And then, as if sensing the precise moment before blood is coughed, the victim is released. The room is silenced, all except the low, rumbling chuckle, sounding like Jabba the Hut with lung cancer. Augie’s chuckle slowly turns to its own deathly cough which lasts for close to ten minutes, building and building until he takes a drag from his cigarette, like others might gulp water, and order is restored. Within minutes he will return to his state of quasi-alertness and the game begins anew. Augie always left our house with a trail of ashes in his wake. These are my memories of Augie. I knew him for some 23 years, yet I didn’t know him. We may very well have never conversed in all those years. An occasional, tone-deaf, “HOW’S SCHOOL?” was about all the conversation I can recall, yet I had little expectations of Augie, therefore he never disappointed me. He was cremated upon dying in ’95, which seemed oddly appropriate. He left this world with a trail of ashes in his wake, too. A good man, nonetheless, ashes to ashes.