Dandy
When Jarrett Lytton was a teenager, he excelled in sports and, boasting a .462 batting average during his high school years, he hoped to become a professional baseball player. However, in the fall of his senior year, he severely injured his knee in a football game and lost all hope of a major league career. Given his mediocre grades, he decided to enter the workforce after graduation rather than further his education. Fortunately, his Uncle Dominick owned a sanitation company and offered his nephew a job.
"I can't put you in a management position just yet," his uncle apologized. "That wouldn't sit well with employees who have been with me for years. You'll have to start at the bottom, which means you'll be riding on the back of a garbage truck."
The young man was not too disheartened since being a sanitation worker paid a lot better than working as a Walmart sales associate.
Jarrett was on the job for three months when Arturo Ruiz, who rode the truck with him, moved to Florida. Uncle Dominick hired a new man, one who was to profoundly change his coworker's life.
"Where did you get a nickname like Dandy?" Jarrett asked when he was introduced to Dante Santoro.
"I always thought it was because I couldn't say Dante, but my mom told me that when I was small, she dressed me up as Uncle Sam for Halloween one year. My dad said I looked like a real Yankee Doodle Dandy. The name Dandy stuck."
"It suits you. Dante reminds me of Dante's Inferno. I had to read that in high school."
"I didn't go to high school," the good-natured, middle-aged man admitted. "I made it to the fifth grade, though."
In our politically correct world, Dandy might be described as "developmentally challenged," "intellectually disabled" or, as Dante's parents preferred, "special." The adjective that came to Jarrett's mind was "slow."
What if Dandy is a bit slow? he thought at the conclusion of their first day working together. I'm no Einstein myself.
What forty-two-year-old Dante Santoro lacked in intellect, he more than made up for in kindness and compassion. He lived at home with his aging parents and a houseful of pets.
"I have two dogs: Scooby and Lassie," he told his coworker on his first day on the job. "I have a cat named Miss Kitty, and there are about a dozen strays I feed, too. Then, I have goldfish, a hamster and a canary bird. I found a squirrel that was hurt once. I took care of it and wanted to keep it, but Mom said it belonged in the wild. What about you? Do you have any pets?"
"A dog. His name is Jeter. I called him that because I was always a big Yankee fan."
"You seem sad," Dandy observed, sensing a change in the young man's mood.
"It's nothing."
Jarrett did not explain that whenever he thought about baseball, it reminded him of his bum knee and his lost opportunity.
Why wallow in self-pity? he reasoned. It won't change anything.
"Knock-knock," his coworker said cheerfully.
"What?"
"It's a joke," Dandy explained. "I say, 'Knock-knock'; you ask, 'Who's there?' Knock-knock."
"Who's there?"
"Cash."
"Cash who?"
"I don't like cashews. I prefer peanuts. Get it?"
It was just the type of joke a child might tell. Although Jarrett did not find it remotely funny, it managed to temporarily take his mind off his lost baseball career.
* * *
Since the first scheduled pickup was at 7:00 a.m., Jarrett and Dandy had to punch the timeclock at 6:45. When Jarrett arrived at 6:35, he saw Dandy in the break room, eating a brownie and drinking a small carton of milk, the size usually found in school cafeterias.
"I brought you one of my mom's homemade brownies," the older man said, handing over a large, fudgy confection sealed in a Ziploc bag.
"Your mother bakes?"
"She sure does. Doesn't yours?"
"No. When I was a kid, baked goods came from either Hostess or Tastykake: Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Ding Dongs, Kandy Kakes and, my personal favorite, Butterscotch Krimpets."
"My favorite is my mom's apple pie. I like it right out of the oven with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream on it. It melts all over the pie and blends in with the gooey filling. Mmmm!"
Jarrett had to admit Mrs. Santoro's brownies beat the store-bought cakes.
At 6:45, the two men boarded their rear-loading hauler.
"This is fun," Dandy said as he tightly gripped the handrail.
His coworker smiled indulgently as one would at a child enjoying the swings at a neighborhood playground.
"Just be careful," he cautioned in a tone of voice his father had often used with him. "You don't want to get hurt."
"I will. I promise. I know the rules. Don't get off the truck until it comes to a complete stop. Don't ride on the step when it's backing up. And be sure to watch for cars."
For Dandy, who saw the world through a child's eyes, life was all about following the rules. He was taught from a young age to obey his parents, be kind to animals, respect his elders and mind his manners. Sure, some people liked to poke fun at him, but he never let their insensitive comments bother him. It was like his mother told him: those people only said mean things to make themselves feel superior. Thankfully, Jarrett was not one of them.
All week long, Dandy brought his new friend home-baked goods from his mother's kitchen. Friday morning was no exception.
"TGIF," the nineteen-year-old announced, sitting down at a table in the break room. "Ah. Chocolate chip cookies today."
"What's TGIF?"
"It stands for Thank God It's Friday. Haven't you ever heard that expression?"
"No."
"People who work on weekdays are glad when Friday comes around because it means they get the next two days off."
"Why? Don't they like their jobs?"
"I suppose some do and others don't. But either way, weekends are better."
"Why?"
"Well, for one thing, people can sleep late. For another, they can do what they want in their free time. Me, I plan on washing my car tomorrow morning, watching the Yankees play the Red Sox in the afternoon and taking my girlfriend to the movies in the evening. What do you like to do on weekends?"
"I like to tinker around with things."
"What do you mean?"
"I have a workbench in the basement where I fix things. Last weekend, I took the kitchen clock apart and got it working again."
"Really? It sounds like you're a useful fellow to have around."
Jarrett's compliment caused Dandy to blush and smile from ear to ear.
The following week, Dante Santoro proved exactly how useful he could be.
* * *
When the sanitation truck stopped in front of the house at 6 Roland Road, Jarrett was the first to hop off the back; Dandy, following the rules, waited until the vehicle came to a complete stop. There were two cans at the curb. Each man took one. Beside one of those plastic receptacles was an electric sweeper that had seen better days.
"I wonder why this is here," Dandy said.
"People put broken appliances out all the time. If it's small enough, we take it with the trash. For larger things, like refrigerators and hot water heaters, they have to call the office and we send out a special hauler."
"I can fix this."
"You think so? Just put it off to the side of the truck then."
"You mean I can just take it?" Dandy asked with astonishment.
"Sure. The homeowners don't want it. If they did, they wouldn't have put it out with the garbage."
When the three-man crew stopped for lunch, Dandy plugged the electric broom into an outlet and turned on the switch.
"I told you it was probably broken," Jarrett said when nothing happened. "I'll bet the motor is burned out."
"I can fix that and make it as good as new."
"Why waste your time?" Newton Tillyard, who drove the rear loader, laughed. "You can buy a new one for under fifty bucks."
"I like to tinker around with things. It's my hobby."
Newton shrugged his shoulders. If Dandy wanted to waste his time taking apart a cheap, useless appliance, who was he to discourage him?
Two days later, Dandy brought the repaired carpet sweeper to work with him. He left it in the break room and told his fellow employees it was free to anyone who wanted it.
"Does it work?" one of the women from the bookkeeping department asked.
"Yup," he answered and plugged it into the wall to show her.
"How'd you do that?" Newton asked. "That was all beat up when you found it. Now it looks like new."
"After I fixed the motor, I polished everything and used a little touch-up paint on the scratches."
"Amazing!" Jarrett exclaimed. "I don't suppose you could repair my watch."
The comment was made in jest, but Dandy took it seriously.
"What's wrong with it?" he asked.
"It's been running slow. I replaced the battery, but it still doesn't keep the right time."
"If you want me to, I'll take it home over the weekend and tinker with it."
"Sure, if you don't mind."
"Not at all."
On Monday morning, Dandy brought the watch to work with him. Jarrett checked the time at ten o'clock, noon, two and four. His watch had not lost a single minute. Like the electric carpet sweeper, it was in perfect working condition.
"You're good!" he exclaimed when the two men punched out at the end of the day. "Is there anything you can't fix?"
"Not that I know of," Dandy replied modestly. "I fix everything around my parents' house. I take care of all the plumbing and electrical problems; I keep the washer, dryer and refrigerator in good order; and I fix the car, lawn mower and snowblower when they break down."
"With skills like those, why are you working as a garbageman?"
"I have to do something with my life."
"You could open a repair shop."
"I don't have a head for figures. I'm only good with my hands."
Over the next six months, Dandy was kept busy on weekends repairing things for fellow employees of the sanitation company. He fixed stereos, toasters, microwave ovens and even a Sony PlayStation.
"It's amazing," Jarrett said when his coworker fixed Uncle Dominick's laptop. "To see Dandy, you wouldn't think he knew anything about computers."
"Maybe he's artistic, like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man," Newton suggested.
"That's autistic, not artistic."
"Yeah, well, maybe that's what he is."
"Nah. Dandy's just a little slow. That's all. Other than that, he's no different than you or me."
Before the month came to an end, however, the nineteen-year-old was to discover how wrong he was.
* * *
Late one January afternoon, with the temperature at only twenty-eight degrees and a windchill factor in the single digits, Newton turned the corner onto Bergen Boulevard, the last street on their route. Jarrett was glad the day was nearly over.
"I'm freezing my ass off!" he complained.
This was no exaggeration. The thermal underwear beneath his uniform, the heavy hat with earflaps and the Thinsulate gloves were not enough to keep him warm.
"What I wouldn't give for a nice, hot cup of coffee right now," he said as the truck came to a stop in front of a beauty salon at the corner of Bergen and Main Street.
Jarrett, who was riding on the righthand side of the truck, made it to the curb before Dandy did. Thus, he was the one who found the dead cat lying on the sidewalk. Frost and blood clung to its orange fur.
"Ah! The poor kitty," Dandy cried when he saw it several moments later. "It looks so cold."
"It must have been hit by a car, and someone tossed its body onto the sidewalk."
Dandy picked the animal up and cradled it in his arms.
"You probably shouldn't do that," Jarrett warned.
Despite his bad knee, the young man was physically strong and easily hoisted both cans into the air. As he emptied the second one into the truck, he heard a faint sound that he assumed came from his coworker.
"You can't get too upset over these things," he said, knowing his friend's fondness for animals. "Look at it this way. It probably didn't suffer. It ...."
When he turned back to the curb, he discovered that the sound had not come from Dandy after all. It had come from the cat. The first meow was faint but the second was both stronger and louder.
"That's impossible! That animal was dead!"
"She's okay," Dandy said, smiling down at the cat who, except for the blood on its fur, showed no sign of being injured.
Dante found a cardboard box in the recycling bin and used his woolen scarf to create a makeshift bed for the animal. Then he put it on the floor of the cab where it would stay warm.
"What are you gonna do with that cat?" Newton asked.
"I'm gonna take her home with me."
"But she might belong to someone."
"No. Her owners moved away and left her behind. She needs a home, and I'm going to give her one."
Newton did not question how his coworker knew the cat was a stray. He simply chalked the story up to an active imagination.
"Is that blood on her fur?" asked the driver, who had not seen the animal before its miraculous recovery. "Maybe you ought to take her to a vet."
"She's fine. All she needs is a bath and some food, and she'll be as good as new."
When he got back onto the step of the truck, Jarrett shivered, not from the cold but from the eerie certainty that the animal had been dead. Somehow, Dandy tinkered with it and brought it back to life!
* * *
The incident with the cat caused a change in the relationship between Dandy and Jarrett. Up until that point, the nineteen-year-old had been like an older, wiser brother to the forty-two-year-old. Now, Jarrett was in awe of his coworker. He tried hard to forget the sight of the dead animal, lying frozen on the sidewalk beside the trash can, but he could not get the image out of his mind.
That cat WAS dead!
Dandy, always sympathetic to other people's troubles, was concerned about his friend's welfare.
"You've been so quiet lately," he observed one morning as he handed Jarrett a slice of his mother's carrot cake. "Is something wrong?"
Although he had not told anyone of the miraculous resurrection he had witnessed, one question had been on the young man's mind for the past week and a half. Now that he and Dandy were alone in the break room, he finally had the opportunity to ask it.
"How did you do it?"
"Do what?"
"The cat. How did you fix it?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"It was frozen as stiff as a board one minute and the next ...."
"I just picked it up and held it."
It was obvious to Jarrett that not only could Dandy not explain how he had brought the cat back to life, but he was not even aware he had done so.
The following day, a Saturday, the teenager paid a visit to the Santoro home on the pretext of thanking Mrs. Santoro for the baked goods she had given him for the past seven months.
"It's so nice to finally meet you," Angelina said with a smile and invited her guest inside. "My son talks about you all the time. To be quite honest, you're the first close friend he's ever had."
"He's a great guy. I like him a lot. In fact, everyone at work likes him."
"I'm so glad. Why don't you sit down? Dante is down in his workroom. I'll go get him."
"Wait. I'd like to talk to you first—if you don't mind."
"Certainly," Angelina said, sitting down on the couch as Jarrett took a seat in the chair beside the fireplace. "What's on your mind?"
"Dandy found a cat a few weeks ago."
"Yes," the mother said with a smile. "He calls her Butterscotch. She's such a darling little thing, and she gets along well with the dogs and Miss Kitty."
"Mrs. Santoro ...."
"Please call me Angelina."
"Angelina," he said, finding it difficult to put his question into words. "That animal was .... It wasn't moving when I found it."
My mother always told me to rip the Band-Aid off rather than remove it slowly.
Taking his mother's advice to heart, Jarrett blurted out, "Mrs. Santoro, that cat was dead. I saw it with my own eyes."
Angelina nodded her head. The news did not surprise her.
"When my son was six years old, he found a dead squirrel in the backyard. Before my husband had the chance to bury it, Dandy picked it up. As he cradled it in his arms, the squirrel came back to life. We never told anyone because we doubted people would believe us."
"I believe you. I saw what he did for the cat."
"Squirrels and cats are just the tip of the iceberg," Mrs. Santoro continued. "Four years ago, my husband, Stephano, had a heart attack. While I was waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I saw him take his last breath."
"But Dandy's father ...."
"Is very much alive—now. I can thank my boy for that. He hugged his father as he lay dead on the living room floor, and suddenly my husband's eyes opened and he sat up. When the paramedics got here, they took Stephano to the hospital where he was given a clean bill of health."
"Don't you ever wonder how he does it?"
"At first, we did, but then we just accepted it as a miracle. I don't think we are meant to question miracles, do you?"
"I don't know. I never believed in such things before."
"I suppose that old saying is true: seeing is believing."
"I saw it," Jarrett admitted, "and I still have difficulty believing."
* * *
March came in like the proverbial lion with a storm burying the Northeast under nearly two feet of snow. Thankfully, the temperatures rose, and the snow melted a few days later. As the first day of April neared, it seemed as though the month would go out like a lamb.
Jarrett, who had recently celebrated his twentieth birthday, was looking forward to the end of winter and the start of baseball season. Spring training would soon end, and the Yankees would leave Tampa and return to New York.
"You like baseball a lot, don't you?" Dandy asked one morning when he arrived at work and found his friend reading an article on recent trades in the American League.
"I love it and have ever since I was a kid. I started playing Little League ball when I was four. It seems when I was growing up, I always had either a bat or a ball in my hand. If it weren't for my knee .... Ah, well! Who knows? Maybe I wasn't as good as everyone said I was. Maybe I never would have gone beyond a Double-A ball club. Lots of kids are good in high school, but few of them make it to the majors."
"You mean if you didn't walk with a limp, you would play baseball on TV?"
"I might have. A scout once wanted to sign me up to play for a Baltimore Orioles farm team, but then I got injured, and here I am working on a garbage truck."
For the first time since Jarrett had known him, the beatific smile on Dandy's face disappeared. Jarrett, who disliked anyone feeling sorry for him, thought it best to change the subject.
"So, what did your mom make for us today?"
"Crumb cake."
"Mmmm! Look at all that cinnamon streusel. I tell you, if I lived at your house, I'd weigh five hundred pounds."
Soon, other employees began arriving. Newton Tillyard walked in with a DVD player.
"Hey, Dandy. Do you think you can tinker with this? It's not working right."
"You still use a DVD player?" Jarrett laughed.
"Damn right, I do! I had a collection of my favorite movies on beta. Then I had to replace them with VHS tapes, only to have to buy them all over again on DVD. There's no way I'm gonna switch to digital downloads now. Not as long as I can keep this old player working."
"Don't worry," Dandy said. "I can repair it."
"I know, Mr. Fixit. You can fix anything!"
Sure enough, the following day, Newton had his DVD player back in perfect working order.
"I still think you ought to open up a repair shop," Jarrett declared as he and his partner headed for their truck. "You can make a lot of money fixing things."
But Dandy did not have a greedy bone in his body. He never accepted a dime from his coworkers; he liked to help people, and that was his sole motivation for repairing broken objects.
"I don't want to get paid."
"I know. You do it out of the kindness of your heart. You're a good man. I'm glad to know you, Dante Santoro."
"You're my friend. You can call me Dandy."
Jarrett would later recall that the weather that morning was mild. The sun was shining, and there was not a cloud in the sky. Traffic was light, and for three hours, the three-man sanitation crew worked at a steady pace. Then, at quarter after ten, the world as he knew it came to an end. Newton had pulled the hauler up in front of 182 Faber Street. As usual, Jarrett was the first man off the back of the truck. Dandy waited until the vehicle came to a full stop.
The young man was on the curb, with two full Hefty bags in his hands when he heard the squeal of tires followed by a loud crash. He turned and saw that a Chevy Blazer had collided with the rear end of the trash hauler.
"Dandy!" he screamed, dropping the garbage bags.
The driver of the SUV immediately put the car in reverse, and the injured man, who had been pinned between the two vehicles, fell to the ground. Newton hopped down from the cab and, upon seeing his coworker was seriously hurt, took out his cell phone and called 911.
"Don't try to move," Jarrett cautioned. "Just keep still until the paramedics get here."
"Oh, no!" the old woman who drove the Chevy wailed when she saw the man lying on the ground. "What have I done? I took the turn too fast. I lost control. I ...."
Her words were lost in a torrent of tears.
Dandy paid no attention to her. His eyes were on Jarrett Lytton.
"I'm sorry," he managed to say despite the agony caused by his crushed boy.
"Don't talk. Save your strength."
"I could have ... fixed you, but ... I was ... selfish."
"Please, Dandy. You're hurt. Don't say anything else."
Blood began to ooze out of the injured man's mouth, but he persisted in speaking.
"I didn't want ... to lose ... you as a ... friend."
Jarrett leaned forward and whispered to the man, "Fix yourself. Like you did with the cat and your father."
With great effort, Dandy raised his right arm. Jarrett hoped that he was going to heal his wounds, but instead, he placed a blood-stained hand on Jarrett's knee. The young man felt an odd tingling sensation where he had injured it in a football game back in high school.
"Don't worry about me," he cried. "Fix yourself!"
But Dante Santoro was beyond hearing his pleas. He had slipped into a coma. By the time the police and then the ambulance arrived, he was dead.
* * *
Despite not having played any sports in nearly two years, Jarrett had lost none of his athletic ability. With his knee as good as new, he began playing baseball again. Shortly before his twenty-first birthday, he was signed by the Portland Sea Dogs, a Double-A Minor League team affiliated with the Boston Red Sox. He would soon go on to play for the Worcester team and then enjoy a long, successful run in the majors, ending his career in Yankee pinstripes.
He never told anyone how he had regained full use of his injured leg, but on the day he was inducted into Cooperstown's National Baseball Hall of Fame, Jarrett Lytton thanked his wife, his parents, his children and Dante Santoro in his acceptance speech. He sincerely believed that Dandy could have saved himself that March morning, but with his life quickly slipping away, he unselfishly decided to fix Jarrett's knee instead of healing his own injuries.
Salem has his own trash can where he gets rid of his chocolate wrappers and empty food containers. As you can tell from the can's size, he eats a lot!
