Benny Jay: Crossword Guru « The Third City

Benny Jay: Crossword Guru

October 24th, 2009

A few days after he’s home from the hospital, my wife and I visit Milo, bearing a vat of her delicious homemade chicken soup.

He greets us at the door and ushers into the room off the kitchen, where the sunlight’s streaming through the window. His wife and my wife go off, wandering around the house doing whatever it is that wives do with each other when their husbands aren’t around. Probably bitching about their husbands.

Milo and I sit in the room with the sun pouring in. “So,” I tell him, “you’re looking pretty good.”

He nods. It occurs to me he must be dopey from the painkillers. Probably wondering when we’re going home so he can lay down and get some rest – not that I blame him. The man just had open-heart surgery, for goodness sakes.

I look at the table and see a book of crossword puzzles.

“Dang, Milo,” I say. ” Sunday New York Times — this is the real shit….”

“Yeah,” he says with a shrug.

The thing is I’ve got a love-hate relationship with crossword puzzles. I love them, but they hate me. At least, I suck at them. I can stare at a crossword puzzle for hours — waste my whole damn day — and still not figure out any answers. And it bothers me cause just about everybody I know – Big Mike, Jon Randolph, my cousin Bobby G, who knows everything about everything – is really good at them. They’ll be whipping through the crossword puzzle in no time and I’ll be staring at the clues, hoping, begging, preying that the answer magically appears.

Just about the only other person who’s as bad as me at crossword puzzles is my sister. Sometimes we do them together, though that’s not a good idea cause it usually leads to a fight. I insist on using a pencil and she insists on using a pen. I say, if you use a pen you can erase your mistakes. She says, if you use a pencil you can’t read what you write cause the pencil is too light. I say, if you can’t read what you write cause you have to scratch out your mistakes, what’s the point? She says, shut up, I’ll do what I want. I say, what if what you want to do is stupid? And so on and so forth…

Anyway, I pick up Milo’s crossword puzzle book and I can’t believe what I see: Puzzle after puzzle filled in with a pen. That’s right, just like my sister, Milo uses a pen. Only unlike my sister there’s no crossing out.

“Hey, Milo,” I say. “Did you do these puzzles?”

He shrugs.

“You might be as good as my cousin and he’s a freakin’ genius at this stuff….”

“Ah,” he says with a little wave of his arm.

I put the book down cause I figure it’s rude to do a crossword puzzle when we’re supposed to be talking. But I can’t resist, so I pick it back up, open to a puzzle that’s about three-quarters filled, and look at the first clue.

“Okay, Milo,” I say. “What’s a five-letter word for `ditto’?”

“Ditto?” he asks.

“Ditto,” I say.

“What you got so far?”

“Well, ugh, blank, blank, a-m-i….”

“Blank, blank?”

“Yeah, you know – as in an open box that we have to fill with a letter….”

“Oh….”

He shifts in his seat and falls silent. I figure the drugs must be kicking in so he’ll be no help. I stare at those two blank spaces in front of the a-m-i. The only sound is the dog, scratching at the screen door to be let in.…

Milo mumbles something.

I look up. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten he was there.

“Huh?” I ask.

“As am I,” he says.

“As am I?” I say, thinking he’s lost his mind from the painkillers.

“Yeah,” he says. “You know – like ditto….”

I look at the two blank spaces and it hits me. “Holy shit, Milo, you’re right!”

He shrugs.

After I fill in those spaces, the puzzle sort of finishes itself. When I’m done, I sit back all satisfied, like I’ve climbed a mountain.

On the way home, I’m still feeling pretty good about my crossword achievement. Plus, Herb Kent’s on the radio and he’s playing, “All About Love” – one of the greatest Earth Wind & Fire songs of all time.

I’m singing along when it occurs to me: Milo filled in the crucial missing piece. Not me — Milo. Wasted on pain killers, recuperating from having his chest opened like a lobster, and he’s still better than me. Damn, I suck!

Reminds me of the time I got out-rebounded in a basketball game by a pregnant woman. No lie. Happened in 1990. Her name’s Jennifer and she was in, I believe, her sixth month of pregnancy. We were playing at a health club. To this day, I contend she fouled me, coming over my back. But that’s a story for another day….