I first met Bobby some years ago when my rented home just north of Atlanta became infested with rats. After I reported the problem to my realty company, Bobby arrived the next morning in a huge black pickup, a modified Ford F250. I could hear some old-time country twanging from his speakers, loud enough to permeate his slightly tinted windows. He waved at me through the windshield and formed the shape of a gun—aimed at me—with his thumb and forefinger, a gesture I found mildly threatening but dismissed as an idiosyncrasy. The man—in his fifties, with a gray goatee, slightly overweight, dressed in pressed black slacks and a white shirt with the company’s logo embroidered on the breast—stepped out the truck, and, smiling broadly, retreated to the pickup’s bed and began to say over and over, “We’re going to kill us some fuckin’ rats today, ain’t we?” I placed his accent immediately: the mountain South or perhaps central North Carolina (my mother’s family is from that region). When he’d amassed his artillery—a bag of rat traps, glue traps, and poison—he came around and shook my hand. I told him about the rats and the problems they were causing, and he launched into a conciliatory monologue about how he was “going to fuck those little assholes up.” Instead of “up there,” he said “up’ere,” and instead of “like that,” “like’at.” I liked him immediately, but his personality seemed a mixture of Southern stereotypes and forceful honesty—as he’d already within these first few minutes admitted that he used to have drinking problems. He pronounced the word “drankin’.”
The first room of my house is a modified, bricked-in carport-turned-library with about 3,000 volumes, mostly poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, and fiction. Bobby followed me into the book-packed room and stopped abruptly, quite literally dropping all of his rat-killing implements on the floor. He tremblingly held his hand to his chest and yelled, “Books!” He chirped and ran to the shelves. “Oh, my Jesus,” he whimpered. He proceeded to assay the shelves with a nearly cartoonish fixation, his eyes wide and mouth agape. He grabbed Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and said, “I got this one and love it. You know what I love about this dude?” He didn’t wait for an answer: “He simplifies the definition of phenomenology to an extent that I admire, calling it ‘the study of essences.’” For the first time in my life, I felt myself disconnect from my body—it was a feeling I can best describe as a dreamlike joy. Bobby went on surveying the shelves, mentioning his love of Theodore Roethke (“the early work—stuff like ‘Cuttings’”), William James, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Shakespeare, and Hopkins. “I love that Hopkins fella. He sure as hell was ahead of his time, was he not? Died at 44, the poor bastard. Them sonnets are some of the best shit I read.” Then he recited half of “The Windhover,” began stumbling over the words, became immediately flustered, and shouted, “Fuck it! You know what I mean!” In the next few hours, I learned Bobby knew most of Keats by heart, that he lamented the fact that he could not read some books in their native language (“I ain’t no good at French”), that he could discuss theoretical physics, astrobiology, and German philosophy like a man who’s studied for several lifetimes. Nonetheless, even as Bobby has visited me four times in the last three years, sometimes to kill the “fuckin’ vermin,” and always to talk about books, I’ve learned that his most disarming characteristic is his naiveté, a quality that harmonizes, somehow, with his prodigious mind. Bobby has endured a very rough past—he grew up in an abusive household, never graduated from high school, and began drinking very early on—and says he found salvation through reading and reading and reading. However, he sincerely cannot understand why others in his line of work don’t understand him. He’s told me that he has tried to discuss such heady topics with “them boys” up at the exterminator shop, only to be met with scowls and open ridicule. He always seems vexed, bemused, as if their lack of curiosity were atypical, and not his insatiable thirst for knowledge. When he calls, he always asks, “You read [enter a very obscure or difficult text here] yet?” I’ll most often say “no.” His response is always, “Well, I figure you must have it on one of them shelves, so read the goddamned thing!” I love Bobby. // William Wright
