FW: Kramer, The Rain Man of Flatbush

[Guest guest]

Kramer, The Rain Man of Flatbush

COMMITMENT Kramer, 71, at Kramer's Hardware in Flatbush,

where he knows everything about everything, including the keys.

By SAKI KNAFO

Published:

January 9, 2010

Kramer sat hunched on his stool behind the counter of the small hardware store

on Coney Island Avenue, gazing out the window at the passing traffic. He was

bundled up in a heavy sweater, a maroon wool cap folded above his ears. Toward

the back of the store, beyond Mr. Kramer’s field of vision, Isaac Abraham was

rifling through a cabinet. Mr. Abraham, the store’s owner for many years, knows

Mr. Kramer about as well as anybody, and he was about to give a demonstration.

Kramer with Isaac Abraham

Quietly,

he removed a faucet knob from the cabinet and hid it behind his back. Then he

approached the counter and clapped it down with a flourish.

Mr. Kramer

gave it a perfunctory glance. “Gerber,” he said.

“Gerber

what?” asked Mr. Abraham.

“Ninety-nine,

eleven fifty-one.”

Mr. Abraham

turned over the package to show the catalog number: 99-1151. Mr. Kramer —

to me — is my second cousin, and he has worked at Kramer’s Hardware, in

Flatbush, Brooklyn, for 58 years. He has a developmental disability, which is

obvious to people who meet him, but he also has a rare and less apparent

ability: Like the late Kim Peek, the inspiration for

the film “Rain Man,” , 71, has a powerful memory for dates and numbers

and facts. If you tell him your birthday, he can tell you what day it will fall

on two years in the future. He studies phone directories and atlases in his

spare time. As one relative recently put it to me, “If you drop him in Oshkosh

or anywhere, he’ll find his way home.”

On the

surface, a run-down hardware shop in Flatbush might seem an odd place for a

person like to thrive. But if you set aside the sheets of pegboard and

the metal cabinets and the key-making machine, what is left are hundreds and

hundreds of small, obscure utilitarian objects, many almost identical to the

casual observer. can identify each nut and bolt and screw on sight, as

Mr. Abraham’s test was intended to show, and he knows where, exactly, in the

store it is kept. He can tell you its cost. And he can tell you the name — and

often the phone number — of the company that made it.

His command

of the inventory is such that Mr. Abraham has never had to invest in a computer

to track it. “My reliance on him is mind-boggling,” Mr. Abraham said.

That

reliance began with a favor. Thirty years ago, Mr. Abraham took over the store

from ’s father, Kramer, who was worried about his son’s future. Mr.

Abraham agreed to keep employed until was ready to retire, and

when he transferred the store to a new owner about a year ago, his successor

did the same. These owners well know of ’s value to the business; still,

the fact that ensured such a secure future for his disabled son is as

striking a feature of Kramer’s Hardware as ’s memory.

WHEN

was a child, his parents were told to put him in an institution. Though it’s

not clear whether doctors gave him a precise diagnosis at that time, they said

he would never be able to get along in society. His mother visited a couple of

schools — including the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, which later

became notorious for its brutal treatment of residents — but ultimately they

kept him at home. ’s younger brother, a copywriter in New Jersey, said

was eventually found to be mentally retarded but has not been examined

for his disability since childhood.

In

retrospect, the choice his parents made may seem like an obvious one, but it

went against the prevailing wisdom of the day, and it also raised a difficult

question for them: Who would support their son after they were gone?

Kramer, whose father, Gdal, founded Kramer’s Hardware around 1930, started

giving small chores around the shop — moving the stock, taking out the

garbage. According to the accounts of some of our relatives, had been an

unruly child, yet he proved an eager and reliable worker, and over time, his

responsibilities multiplied.

Three

decades passed and Mr. Abraham, then a young Brooklyn entrepreneur, began

expressing an interest in acquiring the store. By this time — 1979 — was

thinking seriously about retirement. “He was ready to teach me the business,”

Mr. Abraham recalled, “but there was a ‘but’ — and this was a big ‘but’ — he

wanted to make sure that would be secure.”

was

now 41. He handled the phones, dealt with customers and counted the cash at the

end of the night, and had long ago committed to memory the catalog number for

every eye bolt and corner brace and turnbuckle. asked Mr. Abraham to hang

around the shop for a few weeks, and at the end of that period he sat Mr.

Abraham down and asked him a pointed question: “What about ?”

If ’s

plan in requiring Mr. Abraham to spend time at the store had been to show him

’s value as an employee, it worked.

“I saw that

was an asset,” Mr. Abraham said. “In the medical terminology they might

call him autistic, but I immediately called him a genius.”

Mr. Abraham

promised that he would never need to worry about his son, and he says he

repeated the promise 12 years later, when , on his deathbed, asked about

one last time.

“If I shine

shoes on Broadway,” Mr. Abraham said he told him, “he’ll be shining shoes next

to me.”

MR. Abraham

has not had to resort to shining shoes, but his three decades owning the little

neighborhood hardware store have not always been smooth. Kramer’s has narrowly

survived several rough economic periods, and has contended with the arrival in

Brooklyn of two huge competitors, Home Depot and Lowe’s, both of which have

outlets within three miles of the store.

Through it

all, has been an ideal worker: honest (perhaps because he is incapable

of lying), uncomplaining and extremely punctual.

His routine

is as inflexible as a brass-plated wood screw. Every day, without fail, he

arrives in the neighborhood by bus at 7 a.m., an hour before the store opens.

Every day, he eats breakfast in one of two places — a restaurant called La

Guadalupana Taqueria Mexicana, next to Kramer’s, or a Dunkin’ Donuts a few

blocks away. And every day, regardless of which place he patronizes, he orders

the same thing: a bagel with cream cheese, coffee and orange juice — “the

combo.” raises the store gates at exactly 8 a.m. Most of the customers

are building superintendents, and as they trickle in, they greet him playfully:

“Hey, , did you miss me?” “How’s your girlfriend, ?” Much to their

amusement, he answers straightforwardly, with little inflection. “Yes, my

friend,” he might say, or “No,” or “I don’t know.”

At exactly 5

p.m., lowers the gates and takes the bus down Coney Island Avenue to his

home. He lives in one of several Brooklyn residences run by the Adult

Retardates Center, a group for people with developmental disabilities that his

parents helped found in the 1950s. He eats dinner with the other residents at

5:15, showers at 8 and goes to bed at exactly 11. His weekends are similarly

scheduled, with visits to the Young Israel synagogue on Avenue J and to a

recreational center — “the Club” — where he plays games, drinks Diet Cokes and

dances with his companion of 21 years, who lives in one of the group’s other

residences.

Every year

sends out dozens of birthday cards to relatives; every year he calls to

make sure the card has arrived on time. At family gatherings, which he begins

talking about months in advance, he insists on taking a picture of every person

at the table. His photo albums contain the most comprehensive record of my

family that there is — thousands of unevenly framed snapshots documenting

decades of Seders and Thanksgivings.

And yet, as

devoted as is to these routines, it is difficult to say exactly why he

performs them or how they affect him. He seldom makes eye contact. Hardly

anyone has seen him laugh, or cry, and although he is often pronouncing things

(mostly restaurants) good or bad — “Garden of Eat-In on Avenue J! That’s good!”

— it is hard to know whether he is expressing genuine feelings or repeating

opinions picked up from others.

Most of the

time, he is quiet. When he speaks, it is often to blurt out some phrase that

has no apparent relevance. Only when he is pressed does it become clear that

these utterances do, in fact, have meaning. “April 5th Monday night!” he

shouted out one afternoon in December, prompting a request for an explanation.

“I have to go shul April 5th,” he replied. “Mommy’s yahrzeit. That’s important.

But electric bulbs only. No candles in the house. That’s dangerous.”

Remembering Hardware

Jews

commemorate the anniversary of a person’s death, the yahrzeit, by lighting a

candle or a ceremonial light bulb and reciting the mourner’s Kaddish during

daily prayers. ’s mother died in 1985 and his father in 1991.

He is the

only member of the family who still marks their memory this way.

TO the

extent does engage in conversation, much of that conversation centers on

the past. “I’m reading a book about Ansonia clock factory on 420 13th Street,”

he announced at the store one time. “Who lived there? Pop Kramer and Mom Kramer

lived there.”

Another time

he got into an excited discussion with a customer over the pedigree of a local

apartment building. was excited, that is. The customer, a super, didn’t

quite share his enthusiasm.

“1620 Caton.

Is it the big building?” asked .

“!”

said the super. “Write down 1620 and that’s it.”

“1620 Caton

Avenue,” persisted. “I remember that building used to be Waxman

brothers!”

When

declares that the Waxman brothers owned this or that building, or that

so-and-so lived at this or that address, it often seems as if he is rattling

off an arbitrary, inconsequential piece of trivia. But these pieces of trivia,

put together, form a jigsaw-puzzle picture of a world that exists more vividly

in ’s mind than perhaps anywhere else.

In the many

years that has worked at Kramer’s, Brooklyn has transformed around it:

high-rises have shot up, new immigrant populations have swept in, and most of

the people who grew up with him have died or moved to the suburbs. Old

businesses are forever “going out,” in ’s phrase, and he announces the

passing of each with a staccato shout: “Brandz for Less 1351 Coney Island

Avenue is going out December 31st!” “Bargain Hunters 1605 Avenue M closed up

for good!”

Amid all

these closings and openings, appears to have changed relatively little.

He observes a host of customs that his parents taught him years ago, and many

of the obscure facts that preoccupy him have been preoccupying him for ages.

Even the store is sort of a time capsule. Almost all of its products were

bought years back, from companies that no longer exist. Piled on the shelves in

the rear are boxes and boxes of screws and bolts with old-fashioned labels

reading “Sturdy Nut and Bolt Co., New York, N.Y.” and “Universal Screw and Bolt

Co., N.Y. N.Y., U.S.A.,” relics from the city’s industrial past.

At 71,

though, is slowing down. Mr. Abraham said that he did not expect him to

last in the job much longer. “How long can he do it physically?” he said.

“There were times two years ago where he wasn’t very well and I was under the

full assumption that he was not going to make it back.”

The business

is slower, too. Perhaps because of the recession, the flow of customers is more

like a trickle. The shelves are half empty, and the bottles of cleaning fluid

are covered with dust. typically spends a good part of each day sitting

at the counter and leafing through hardware and restaurant supply catalogs, and

occasionally reeling off facts about the various companies whose names are

displayed on passing trucks (“Driscoll Foods! Clifton, New Jersey!”).

Change has

arrived at Kramer’s in one other way as well. Mr. Abraham, who had long served

as an unelected advocate for Brooklyn’s Hasidic community, embarked in 2008 on a campaign for City Council. He ultimately lost,

to Levin, but when he began his time-consuming bid, he handed off the

business to a new owner, a 36-year-old friend of the family named Moshe

Meyerson.

So, what

about ? Where did this transition leave him? Mr. Meyerson, noting how

long has been at Kramer’s Hardware, said, “He’s going to be there until

he retires.” Given ’s age, Mr. Meyerson added, he imagined that might

happen in three or four years.

When I

brought up the prospect of retirement with , he told me that he, too, had

been giving it some thought. But when I asked what he might do with his time,

all he said was, “I don’t know yet.”

He was

facing away as he spoke, toward the store window, with its charmless view of

Coney Island Avenue and the auto-body shops and apartment buildings beyond. As

usual, it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Nevertheless, it seems

likely that, someday soon, he will wake in the morning and have no gates to

open, no customers to greet, no shovels or wrenches or Gerber faucets to sell.

All of it will be gone.

But not

forgotten.