He had lived on our street since any of us could remember; yet none of us really knew him. Nobody knew how old he was, but he was at least 30, maybe even 40. He lived with his mother in an old house that was hidden from the street by shaggy trees and shrubs that just added to the mystery of the family that lived there. If he had a father, no one ever remembered seeing him. We didn't even know his real name. We just called him "Raymondo" because it sounded like he looked -- a freak.

He was tall and thin, and he had bushy eyebrows over beady little eyes, caved-in cheeks, and a nose like a beak with a hook at the end. His face had a stubble beard like someone hacked at it with scissors instead of a razor, and the end of his sharp pointed chin looked like it had some kind of dried food stuck to it. He always wore bib overalls that were several sizes too big and a faded red-checked flannel shirt with sleeves so long only the tips of his fingers showed. To complete the picture he wore a floppy black hat that was so big it rested on his ears, which stuck out from his head like butterfly wings. Shaggy brown hair flowed down the back of his neck.

Every morning and every afternoon, he would come out of his house and walk down the street toward the corner drugstore. We didn't know what he did when he got there -- we didn't care. He would shuffle along the sidewalk, moving his arms awkwardly like a puppet on a string. Before he had gone far he would stop and look up in the sky and point to something -- a bird, maybe, that only he saw. He would just stand there pointing. That's when we would attack!

We never planned our attacks on Raymondo; they just developed spontaneously whenever we saw him. Whatever we had been doing rarely was more entertaining than teasing or tormenting him. We would ask him what he was pointing at. He would get real excited and jab his finger at the sky: "A bird, a bird." We would ask him how big it was, what color it was, what sound it made, and on and on, laughing and getting ourselves worked-up for our attack.

Raymondo would go along with our game and never seemed to catch on that we were just making fun of him. After we tired of the teasing, one of us would get a devilish smile on his face and start to walk slowly around him in a tight circle. Then the rest of us would join in. Imagine the picture -- an awkward old man stumbling around on the sidewalk with four, five, or as many as ten children circling him like wolves, hyenas, or vultures getting ready for the kill. Then one of us would raise a middle finger to the mouth and take out a "gob" of spit and fling it at Raymondo. Quickly the rest would begin to do the same. We even had a chant: "Gob, gob, gob, gob........" Raymondo would raise his arms to cover his face, our primary target, and just stagger and lurch around until the attack was over, when we tired of the sport or ran out of spit.

Sometimes, when the attack took place close to home, his mother would come running out of the house yelling at us: "You kids leave my boy alone. He don't do you no harm. Leave him alone."

We usually didn't run away, but we did stop gobbing. We'd just stand around giggling and sometimes pointing in the air at imaginary birds. She would put her arm around Raymondo and start to lead him back home, yelling at us as they went: "You rotten kids. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

"Momma, they don't mean nothing, they're my friends, they're my friends," Raymondo would say.

If we had noticed, we would probably have seen tears on her cheeks when she said, "They aren't your friends. They spit on you."

Hard to believe but none of us ever thought of what we did to Raymondo as mean. Gobbing attacks were not restricted to Raymondo. They were part of our regular attacks on each other -- always a part of play, never anything serious. Of course, we were never his friends. None of us ever really talked to him, even when one of us happened to encounter him alone. We only tormented or gobbed him when there were at least three of us.

Our parents knew we called him "Raymondo," but they always referred to him as the 'bird man' because of his pointing. We never saw any of the neighbors talk to him, except Mrs. Ost who lived next door. She sometimes took some food over, and sometimes she sent Jerry, who was one of us. It was strange seeing Jerry being nice to Raymondo. He was usually the one who started the gobbing attacks.

Most people tried to avoid 'the bird man,' even crossing the street in the middle of the block. Our parents knew we tormented him, but I don't think they knew of our "gobbing." At least they never said anything about it. They did warn us to stay away from him, and we overheard them saying that he ought to be put away before he hurt someone.

One time, they did try to get him committed to an insane asylum (that's what we called it). They claimed he was dangerous, but there weren't any instances where he had hurt or even threatened anybody. Mrs. Stewart, the neighbor on the other side of Mrs. Ost, said that he kicked at her dog and threw rocks and sticks at it. That dog tormented Raymondo almost as much as we did. It would bark at him all the way down the street, and if it could get a hold of his pantleg, it wouldn't let go. Sometimes, dog and Raymondo would be tussling with each other in the grass, the dog growling and Raymondo making some weird noises like the Frankenstein monster. Mrs. Stewart usually had to rescue him because his mother was afraid of the dog too.

They said that his mother wasn't taking care of him properly and there was no one to help her. But the 'asylum' people said that they wouldn't take him. After that, his mother kept him in the house for a long time. But after awhile, he started his daily walks again and nobody complained anymore.

One day, when I was walking by myself to the store, I saw Raymondo bend over and pickup something out of the street. He did it so slowly and gently, I wondered what it was. As I got closer, I saw it was a baby bird that was hurt but still alive. He carried it in his hands and stroked its head, making cooing sounds to it. He put it down in a bush and then backed away and just watched it. I continued my walk to the store, and when I came back he was still there, watching the bird. As I approached, he went over to the bush and slowly picked it up. When I got closer I could see that it was dead. He knew it too. He put it back under the bush and, very slowly and carefully, covered it with leaves. As he stood up. I could see the tears in his eyes.

My feelings toward Raymondo changed after that. For one thing, I realized that I had not had any real feelings about him. It was like he was a thing, not a person. After the incident with the baby bird, I tried not to participate in the gobbing attacks. I didn't try to stop them, but I stood in the back and just didn't get involved. Some of the guys eventually noticed, and taunted me.

"Look at Weisskid, he's scared of Raymondo!"

Then I would join in, just to show them I wasn't scared. Afterwards, it bothered me that I had let the 'gang' push me to do something I really didn't want to do. To me, it felt like I was kicking someone when he was down. But still, I joined in again and again, just to go along with the gang.

So life went on. The period of our gobbing attacks lasted only two or three more years, but those must have been miserable years for Raymondo's mother. Raymondo seemed to think we were playing with him. At least during that time we paid some attention to him. Later on we began to treat him like our parents did -- just ignored him. He must have led a very lonely life. Or maybe he didn't know what kind of life he led.

As we got older, Raymondo didn't much get in our way, but he was always around, standing on the sidewalk, watching us play football in the yard, every now and then pointing to the sky, and finally shuffling slowly down the street toward the corner or home. We hardly noticed. We grew up, finished high school, and went to college. When we came home, we occasionally saw Raymondo shuffling along, his head lower and his shoulders a bit more bent than we remembered. He was as much a part of our neighborhood as the trees and flowers and about as much noticed.

One day at college, I got a letter from my mother. Along with the news of the family, friends, etc., she mentioned, sort of by the way, "You remember that crazy old man that lived next door to Jerry, the one that you used to make fun of because he was so strange? He died last week. His mother found him lying on the sidewalk in front of the Stewarts'. Must have been a heart attack or a stroke. His mother had a funeral for him. Mrs. Ost went, and she said that nobody was there except her and his mother. She told Mrs. Ost that the thing her son enjoyed the most was watching the neighborhood kids playing. That he thought the kids were his only friends."

Although we had all gone our separate ways and there was no way of knowing, I imagined that I was not the only one of those kids who had tears rolling down his cheeks upon hearing of Raymondo's passing. He died where he had been gobbed and where a dog had chewed his clothes, sometimes to shreds. What were his last thoughts - a group of rotten kids circling him chanting: "Gob, gob, gob" while flipping spit at his face? Kids he thought of as his friends? Or had he forgotten all of the insults, the taunting, the shunning?

Even years later, when I walked down Crump Street and walked past his house, the visions came flooding back along with a few tears. Although it was no longer of any importance, I couldn't get it out of my mind -- we never even knew his real name.  
 

I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee on Crump Street. "Raymondo" is one of several stories of various 'slices' of life' about the people who lived on this street back in the 40's. Now, I am a 68 year old retired chemist with seven grandchildren who reminisces and writes stories about those formative earlier times.