“When I was a boy I knew a man in London named Aloysius Gonzaga Jones, named after a Roman saint who died of the plague at the end of the sixteenth century. I ran errands for Aloysius around the East India Docks.”
“What kinds of errands?”
“Delivering things to people, small packages, mostly. I didn’t know what was in them. Aloysius always carried a pistol in one of his coat pockets. I told him I wanted a pistol, too, in case someone tried to steal a package from me. I was about nine or ten years old then. ‘When you’re older, Jake,’ he told me. He always called me Jake.”
“Did he ever let you hold the pistol?”
“Once. It was heavy. Aloysius had big hands, huge hands. The gun looked like a baby’s rattle in one of them.”
“So you never carried a gun?”
“No, I’ve never even owned one. There’s only one reason to have a gun, Roy, and I hope you never do.”
Roy’s grandfather, his mother’s father, whom Roy called Pops, ate smoked fish for breakfast every morning. He dressed well, wore three piece suits when he sat down at the table. Pops had been born and lived in London, England, until he was in his early twenties. He came to live in Chicago with his daughter, Kitty, and her son, Roy, when he was in his mid-seventies. Pops’s name was Jack Colby, he was in the wholesale and retail fur business with his brothers Nate and Ike. Another brother, Louis, was the founder and president of the Chicago Furriers Association. In the 1950s, all of them had offices in the State and Lake Building across the street from the Chicago Theater.
From the age of five Roy considered Pops to be his best friend. He told Roy and Roy’s friends stories about his own childhood in London, about growing up poor in the East End on Plumbers Row near the Mile End Road, a market street where Pops and his brothers—there were six of them at that time, two having died before the others emigrated to America—ran errands for the men and women who sold vegetables and fruits from wooden carts. The kids loved Pops’s accounts of the Colby brothers’ adventures with their pals and adversaries, such as Top Hat Tom, Black Harry, Dickie Apples and Pears, and Bob the Knifer.
Roy disliked the stink of smoked fish in the morning, which he refused to eat, but Pops always poured Roy a half cup of coffee with cream and two cubes of sugar in it. Sometimes before breakfast Roy would go into Pops’s bathroom with him and pretend to shave with one of his grandfather’s razors without a blade in it, soaping his hairless face and making strokes like Pops did. Pops had diabetes, so he tested his urine every morning, passing some into a glass tube along with a solution that turned the mixture gray, a positive result of his condition. Roy did the same, only the liquid in his test tube turned blue, negative evidence of his not having diabetes.
Pops was mugged late one afternoon when he was on his way home, walking the one block from the bus stop to Kitty’s house. Two young guys wearing leather jackets and burlap caps assaulted him from behind. One grabbed his arms and knocked off his glasses while the other stole Pops’s wallet and pocket watch that he kept on a chain attached to his belt, then they ran off. After Pops got to the house, Roy’s mother called the police. Two officers showed up, filled out a report, and said they’d keep an eye out for the muggers. They were never apprehended, and neither Pops’s wallet nor his pocket watch was recovered.
“I had about thirty dollars in the wallet,” Pops told Roy, “and the watch was only of sentimental value. It was a gift to me from Aloysius Jones on my twelfth birthday.”
“I’m glad they didn’t hurt you,” said Roy.
“I’m an old man, I didn’t resist.”
“If you’d had Aloysius Jones’s pistol you could have shot them.”
Pops shook his head. “No, Roy, they got the drop on me. But if my friend Bob the Knifer were around, he’d hunt them down and get even for me, and maybe get my watch back.”
Roy’s grandmother, Rose, from whom Pops had been divorced for many years, died a year before Pops moved into Kitty’s house, where she had been living. Because Rose always blamed Pops for their breakup, Kitty was cold to him. She took her father in due to his dire heart condition and close relationship with Roy, whose own father had died soon after Roy’s birth.
Shortly before Pops passed away at eighty, he had been relocated by his son, Buck, Kitty’s brother, to a nursing facility near his home in Florida. Buck thought the warm climate would be good for his father, and Kitty did not oppose the move. Roy, however, missed his grandfather terribly, and for a time after he learned of Pops’s death withdrew from his normal routines. He was not eager to play with his friends and often refused to go to school, claiming that he did not feel well. This wound never did fully heal.
Roy felt the loss of Pops for the rest of his life. Years later, when his mother told Roy that she should not have treated her father so badly, that perhaps she had been unduly and wrongfully influenced by her mother, it meant nothing to Roy. The only thing about Pops that Roy did not miss was the smell of smoked fish in the morning. 
Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into thirty languages. His most recent books include The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea, How Chet Baker Died, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada, Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, and Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels. He cowrote with David Lynch the screenplay for Lost Highway. Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch and based on Gifford’s 1990 novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. “Pops” will appear in his next book, Ghost Years, out in the spring of 2024 from Seven Stories. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Illustration: Barry Gifford
