To the Max

A zillion years ago, at the tail end of the Carter Era, I worked in a family-owned hardware distributorship in East Cambridge, Mass. One of my coworkers was a little old Jewish guy named Max Gass.

The name Max Gass may sound like a Mel Brooks shtik, a character with horrible flatulence, but Max was a dignified man. He wore glasses and a neatly clipped moustache, and he donned a dapper fedora when he set off for home. He was in his late 70s and was a retired high school teacher. The word was that he had been denied a university teaching post because of anti-Semitism.

Max said he needed to get away from Mrs. Gass for a while every day, so he asked his friend Mr. Kaufman, owner of Kaufman Industrial Supplies, for a part time job. Every weekday morning, Max would humbly pack boxes in the shipping department at Kaufman's. I was the shipping clerk, and I had great conversations with Max on a variety of subjects. He was of the opinion that vampire movies destroyed the morals of the young. He was worried about his digestion, and every workday at 10:00 a.m. he would put on a yamulke and have a mug of hot water and a banana, a combination that he believed would keep him regular. Once, someone at work played a joke on Max by stuffing a pair of dungarees and a pair of sneakers with newspaper, placing the half-dummy in the men's room toilet stall so that it appeared to be a person hogging the crapper.

Max confessed to me about his wildest caper, when he was a young man during Prohibition. He and some friends went to Montreal on the pretext of going to see the great actor Boris Thomashefsky in a Yiddish theater production, when the main reason for the trip was to have alcoholic drinks! Max's little mamele (mother) was never the wiser.

About a year after I left the place, Max had an industrial accident when a steel locker fell on top of him. He put my name as a witness on the accident report, but he wasn't trying anything fraudulent, he was merely confused. He stopped working not long after that, and he died a couple of years later. I always smile when I think of him, and I believe he may have been right about the whole vampire phenomenon.