Victor Navarro Jr.: Madman Laureate of Pittsburgh’s Little Italy
II
You can’t count on much in life. Things change so rapidly. People come and go, seasons change, but there’s one thing you can always be sure of: at any hour you can find Victor Navarro sitting cross legged and brilliant at one of the outside tables at the coffee shop on Liberty Avenue, chain smoking, drinking coffee, writing feverishly into a cheap spiral notebook while he rhapsodizes on every subject imaginable with some young starving artist who adores him.
If you passed him on the street, you might not even notice him. If you did, you’d see him for what he is: a crazy old man with greasy disheveled hair, wearing a tattered t-shirt and dirty shorts, walking with a slight zombie stiffness through the late-night haze of the street lamps.
It might surprise you to sometimes see two beautiful twenty something girls on each of his arms, laughing up at him. If you’re one of those girls you’ll see people look twice as you pass them on the sidewalk. There is no cultural context for an old bum to be with young and beautiful women unless they’re prostitutes and that’s probably what people think of me when they see me disappear with him into the sad, neon drenched foyer of the halfway house he lives in.
Really, he only sleeps there because by every definition of the word, the coffee shop is his real home. The regulars and the employees are his family. Hilary and the other girls take care of him. They give him free coffee and cut his hair. They wash his clothes and monitor his meds. They even sign papers when his caseworkers need to confirm his SSI allowance. When he was scheduled to get dentures, he decided he would rather suffer the pain of his rotting teeth than risk going under the anesthesia doctors said would be used during the procedure. The girls threatened to withhold coffee until he went through with it. Like nagging mothers, they cajoled and begged and urged him, but to no avail. I tried to appeal to the dirty old man in him.
“Victor, just think of all the girls you can kiss with your new clean teeth.”
“Ah, hun,” he said disgustedly, clearly not buying it, “I had teeth in the eighties and I still didn’t get any girls.”
I laughed at the way he measures his life in decades. He explained that the doctors used anesthesia before his shock therapy in the seventies and ever since it has scared him.
Soon, the girls stopped their coffee boycott and things went on as usual. One day Hilary stood wiping down the tables, clearly irritated with Victor’s stubbornness.
“He’s such a damn child,” she said, sitting down next to Jason, grabbing his pack of smokes from the table.
“Yeah he is,” Jason said slowly, “but he has a beautiful mind and we need to protect it.”
Hilary stared at the wall blankly, smoking and thinking. She nodded. I nodded, too.
He was absolutely right. It takes a village to raise a Victor.
