Free Another Spaniard in the Works by Oscar Hijuelos Page B

scuffed. I was thin in those days and my hair was cut short, in the style appropriate to a soul-destroying office job. As I had approached him, I could feel my face heating up, my large ears, just like my father’s, flushing red.
    “Really, where’d you find it?” he asked, with a soft Liverpool lilt to his voice.
    That’s when I improvised: Because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by explaining that I had bought the book from a toothless black man for two bucks on the street, I told him, “The Gotham Book Mart.”
    “Yeah? What’d you pay?”
    “Twenty-two fifty,” I answered, that seeming a plausible number for a book by a former Beatle.
    “Twenty-two fifty? Goodness.” And he turned to Yoko, saying, “You have the pad?”
    Dressed as if she had just returned from the silver region of Mexico, in high suede books and a heavy woolen tassel-fringed shawl, his wife brought out a small yellow-covered Aquabee artists’ sketchbook from somewhere underneath and scribbled down that annotation. From what I could see, its pages were filled with all kinds of things: names and addresses and telephone numbers, perhaps even with ideas for new song lyrics. I supposed that he kept track of everything, even what his books were selling for around town. In any event, I asked Mr. Lennon if he wouldn’t mind signing my copy of A Spaniard in the Works .
    “Just my name, nothing else?” he asked me.
    “Well, can you sign it ‘To Victor Mercado’?”
    “ Mercado? How’s that spelled?”
    And so I, a nobody twenty-seven-year-old clerk, stood next to him, reciting aloud the letters of my last name, which he, being a real gent, took very special care to get right. My good impression of him was further enhanced when he handed back the book and I read his inscription. It said: “ For Victor Mercado, another Spaniard in the works, with all best, John Lennon ,” in a whimsical and looping scrawl. Then he shook my hand, thrilling me, for it was really the greatest thing that had ever happened in my life.
    While my sense of pride lifted me toward the upper atmosphere, he turned his attention again to the magazines, which he had gathered on the kiosk counter, in a pile of about ten or so. As the vendor, who resembled a boxer of the old school, his head dense, nose and ears flattened, added up the cost of the magazines, Lennon examined the contents of a racetrack Blue Sheet. Even as amazed passersby stopped to gawk at him, he seemed to hardly notice them. I lingered about dumbly, wanting to go off on a high note. Searching for something clever to say in parting, a hundred notions went through my mind.
    In fact, I wanted to tell Mr. Lennon that even the lowliest junkies in my neighborhood uptown had always enjoyed his music; that I had started playing the guitar when I was a kid because of the Beatles; that I knew many of his tunes—and that, thusly inspired, I was something of a songwriter myself. I had thought of telling him that I almost made it out to Shea Stadium to catch them performing in 1965 but could not come up with the money and that I had felt sick to my heart for months after. I felt like telling him that I also made drawings, though more realistic ones than his own; and that, as a kid, on certain difficult nights at home, when things were not good between my mother and father and they’d have it out, I would lay huddled under my sheets in bed with a transistor radio plugged into my ears, ever delighted when a Beatles song came on over the air, because hearing them always made me feel happy, as if there could be real hope in the world.
    But in that moment, the best thing I could come up with was, “Take care, Mr. Lennon, and thank you from the bottom of my heart!” He seemed genuinely touched, as if seeing someone of kindred soul in me. Just then, in fact, I felt something else about him: a kind of sadness, of someone throttled by fame but still bent upon civility. I nodded gratefully at Yoko Ono, who had stood by