Episode Nine: Pops and Senor Bum in the Jungle

In his retirement, Pops buys and fixes watches for resale. He frequents the pawn shops of Rosslyn, Virginia, at the foot of Key Bridge, which leads over the Potomac River into the District of Columbia. In the old days, this is a popular place for robbers to prey on the farmers coming back across the bridge after selling their goods in the city. Now there is not a single pawn shop to be found among the ugly office buildings competing for sky space. For a time in the 1970s and 1980s, there’s a restaurant and bar named The Pawn Shop in the first floor of one of these buildings, but it too is now gone.

Pops emerges from these hunting trips with treasure: a handful of scratchy Nylon watch bands and decrepit watches in the throes of death. He putters around with them, prolonging their agony, sitting at his handsome oak work desk at the back of his small house, wearing a loupe on his glasses. He brings them shuddering back to life. Almost every Sunday, Pops turns up with new watches to try to unload on us. John and Pops share an easy banter. John is stuck on more than one occasion with a Pops watch.

Once, a watch stops running before Pops even clears our driveway on his way home. No matter what the state of the timepiece, it always has a dirty face. This irks my mother as she thinks it is deliberate on his part. I think he just doesn’t notice or care.

I am with him once in an A&P grocery store and when we get to check out, he literally pulls up his jacket sleeve to reveal three watches. He makes a concerted effort to sell one of them to the cashier, but he’s onto Pops, too smart to buy.

On occasion, we’ll pile into the car and go to Pops’ house in South Arlington, Virginia. It is a brick duplex on the corner of S. Veitch and 6th Streets that he shares with his second wife, Mary. She seems to suffer from what we now call agoraphobia. In the spring, summer and fall, she focuses on the small yard. Mary has segmented the yard into small square plots of earth, surrounded by slate walkways. In each plot there is a solitary rose plant. These are not cheerful bush or shrub roses. They are stiff, repressed plants that she forces to produce large, showy blooms, Mary’s pride. If they are in bloom, she usually sends a few home to Mom.

Inside the rooms are small, and there isn’t much for four kids to do. That’s when Pops gets down to business.

He brings out the dice and teaches us to play craps, albeit a downsized version. Mary saves pennies so we have something to work with. And we spend a boisterous hour trying to beat Pops at his game.

The shelves in the living room are full of books that have never been read. Once Pops asks my mother to go to downtown Washington with him to the Goodwill Book Fair to get some books for his house. She is impressed because he’s never shown an interest in literature before.

As she stands at a table underneath a tent, lovingly paging through a book of fiction, he jostles her elbow, irritated.

“Why are you taking so long? We only want ones with good dust covers!”

And that’s what populates his shelves. Mary hides a fortune in five and ten dollar bills within the pages of these books. But to me, only one is distinctive and I puzzle over it for years. The title is Señor Bum in the Jungle. I didn’t know at the time that there was a lengthy subtitle: Up the Orinoco, Down the Rio Negro and Out the Mighty Amazon.

I decide to Google Señor Bum in the Jungle. I’m surprised that it can be found for sale from several companies, including Amazon. More surprisingly, this book is reviewed favorably by The New York Times in February of 1932. The headline for the short review is A Hard-Boiled Traveler in the Jungle.

This is no namby-pamby anthropologist’s take on the jungle. Author Algo Sands plays it down and dirty with the details of his trip. The review starts:

“Not a burial urn, a clay apron nor a stone hatchet in the whole book. Praise be! – and no archeological summaries and topographical aids to slow the story down. This is a book of haphazard-not scientific-exploration. Gory, hard-boiled and reckless, it is a grand yarn that gives the ‘lowdown’ on the jungle. . .

“. . .Life in the tropics is cruel and the explorer who would penetrate its deadly jungles would do well to forget the meaning of compassion. Mr. Sands writes of murders and executions by the score: he tells of a water gypsy struggling in a crocodile-infested stream who pulls his wife into the water after him to save his own hide, for it is known that crocodiles prefer the tender flesh of women. . .”[1]

Meals might consist of broiled spiders, boa constrictor steaks and baby gaviota squab ‘a la raw.’

Oh, Señor Bum, I never knew ye. You are everything a 10-year-old girl could want!

When I’m 12, I’m spending the weekend with Pops and Mary. In the early afternoon on Saturday, he bundles me into the car and drops me off at the local movie theater to get me out of their hair for a few hours. Once he’s gone, I find myself looking around the mostly empty parking lot of a shabby shopping strip. I don’t know the movie playing and when I ask to buy a ticket I am refused.

As it turns out, this theater now shows only porn movies. Thirty minutes later, perhaps after a contretemps with Mary, Pops reappears to pick me up. No words are exchanged.

[1] The New York Times, February 2, 1932