"This is home," Manny said, and shrugged.

It was around this time last year that I got a call from Annie in my old boarding house in the Bronx informing me that our fellow boarder Manny Upstairs had died. Apparently, after a night out drinking with his subway coworkers, he had come home about three on a Monday morning and keeled over on the staircase, dead from a massive heart attack.

I don't know how old he was--mid-60s, at least. I knew his real name only by the occasional cards in the downstairs mail slot sent from his daughter somewhere in Pennsylvania. Everyone called him Manny, and I called him Manny Upstairs because he lived right above me.

A decade ago, I had moved to the Bronx pretty much as a kid, a year or two out of college and trying to get a foothold anywhere in New York. Being from a small town, I was offended by the outrageous rents and couldn't possibly afford living in Manhattan, unless it was one of those awful "four strangers in a two-bedroom" set-ups. One of my cousin's classmates at CUNY told him of the incredibly cheap boarding house in the Bronx where he was a tenant.

I came, I saw, I rationalized. And so began my decade in Eddie's boarding house on Sedgwick Avenue, with Manny Upstairs and a cast of ever-changing characters.

(Eddie doesn't play much into this story, but allow me to say here that he is the best landlord I ever had and a fine man. He came to the Bronx from Puerto Rico in the 1970s after he blew out his throwing arm, thus ending a promising career as an outfielder. He moved to the boarding house as a boarder and ended up buying it from the cranky old Irish woman who owned it. Eddie made me feel like his kid brother from day one.)

Manny and I had one over-riding personal trait in common--we were both white in a neighborhood where nearly all white people had turned tail and run well over 20 years ago. I never knew what Manny's New York story was, but I knew him as one of those stubborn old white people who never left, despite popular white opinion of previous decades.

He thought I was nuts to move there, but I didn't know any better. I didn't know that much of New York City was segregated, and that white people simply didn't just pick up and move to a place like the Bronx, unless they were illegal immigrants or in trouble. And for all I didn't know, it didn't matter. Nothing horrible ever happened to me there, although I recognized immediately, and had plenty of reminders (usually verbal), that I was out of place.

It was good to talk to Manny Upstairs in the kitchen across from his room, because he seemed to understand my feeling of displacement. Manny was nuts, too. He worked as a subway token booth clerk--I still don't know in which station--but on graveyard shift, meaning he had to leave the house late every night to go to work. Asshole time in the Bronx unofficially is any time, but officially starts after sundown, and 11:00PM seemed like a risky, somewhat dangerous time for an old man of any color to be walking the streets.

He never had any trouble. When I asked him why he didn't switch to a safer shift, he said, "Nah, Billy, you don't understand. I deal with maybe 10 customers a night where I'm at now and get shift differential. That's what I call heaven--in an air-conditioned booth. As for walking to the train, just keep your head down and walk right past the bullshit. Don't waste your time on assholes, otherwise you'll have no time for yourself. I don't know about you, but when I get on that train, it feels like home to me."

We lived an Addams Family existence in the Bronx, one where cold, wet weather was just as welcome as a warm, sunny day. Why? "The assholes stay in," as Manny often said, "let it rain, let it snow, let the world turn to ice. Anything to keep the assholes in. You ever notice how eskimos don't have a graffiti problem?"

Weather was our main topic of conversation. Manny didn't have cable, but he would have loved the Weather Channel. Whatever the weather, according to Manny it was never as harsh or sweet as it used to be. The seasons outside the kitchen window would find me the same, boiling a pot of pasta while we talked. If leaves were on the trees, I could catch glimpses of the Harlem River far below. If it was winter, I could see the whole river stretched out like a black snake next to the glittering train yards on the northern tip of Manhattan. Manny sat at the kitchen table eating his usual: butter-fried hamburgers on white bread.

If we had time and if the mood struck him, Manny would tell great stories of New York past. Like the St. Patrick's Day when a mounted policeman's horse had been brought into the bar and was nibbling on peanuts and drinking from a bowl of beer, then went crazy and kicked him off his barstool. Or the time when a subway coworker on his way to work had been knocked down by a falling object under the elevated tracks along Broadway, only to find that it was the head of some poor kid who had been riding the top of a subway car and looked up at the wrong time.

When Manny was on, he was hard to beat. Some nights he was off. His weekend was the early part of the week, and this meant that I could often find him in the kitchen on Monday nights, drunk off his ass and not making any sense. I could tell when he was drunk just by looking at him--he put his glasses on the top of his ears and pursed his lips, as if he were mimicking a strict librarian. His cheeks and ears grew cherry red.

He wasn't a mean drunk--like most of us, simply an embarrassing one. He would try to talk to me, and when he wasn't mumbling, he was simply slurring words together that were often senseless. Whatever business I had in the kitchen was done in a hurry, sometimes to the point where I'd skip dinner, just to avoid seeing him like this. The next night, he would be Manny again, sharp and wise.

He nearly died during the blizzard of 1995, coming down with pneumonia days before it started and spending that time fighting for his life in a hospital bed. I imagined that he was kicking himself for missing such customer-free time in his subway booth.

He came back a month later about 50 lbs. lighter, eating salads, cutting back on his drinking and appearing healthier than he'd ever been. Still, it took something out of him, as he would no longer walk up The Hill--a massive, steep incline running from Bailey to Sedgwick Avenues on Kingsbridge Road, a hill he would praise me for challenging every day on my morning run. He took the long way around to the house, all the way up Bailey, more of a rolling hill than a steep one. And he stumbled onto an important discovery for both of us: less assholes along this route, thus facilitating my avoidance of The Hill from that day forward.

I left the Bronx in the spring of 1997, and Manny praised the wisdom of my choice. I felt like one of those fucked-up jack-in-the boxes leaving the Island of Broken Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Manny didn't have much to say, no dramatic good-byes or pieces of hard-earned wisdom.

I once asked him why he never left, and he answered, "This is home." We both knew that was a bit of a joke, that whatever home he had years ago in the Bronx had long since vanished, and maybe reappeared like a ghost every now and then around sunrise. The Bronx wasn't my home, although I've come to recognize it as such in terms of living in New York, the place where I grew up in many senses. It was also a place where I never felt at home, as hardly a day passed without someone giving me crap for the color of my skin, a hard lesson I didn't want to learn and still have many conflicting emotions over.

But when Manny said, "This is home," he shrugged afterwards and gave me a sad look, straight in the eye. I imagine I should have felt pity or sorrow that he was an old man living on his own, away from family, in a neighborhood that was less than desirable, but I didn't have one ounce of pity or sorrow for Manny, nor myself. We made our choices and lived with them.

This is the kind of realization that comes to you when you live alone in a place like the Bronx. I think there is a real danger in pretending you don't need anyone, one that I've toyed with far too many times over the past decade. Many times I've asked myself if I'm going to end up like Manny, dying alone one day in some strange place.

And the answer that has come to me is that it doesn't matter. That so long as we were talking in that kitchen, he wasn't really alone, nor was I. When there was the occasional letter in the box, or a friendly chat with a local deli worker or bartender, he wasn't alone. Cold comfort? Maybe, but I prefer to remember it this way--quality time with a sane human, something you look for whether you have dozens of people in your life, only a handful or 10,000 cats and a Social Security check.

I imagine the Bronx is a fine place to get buried in, and a lousy place to die. It was a strange place to live, and Manny did it well. Here's how I'll remember him. Early in the morning. Coming home from his job as I'm leaving for mine. Walking down Sedgwick Avenue like he owns it. Arms swinging, a copy of the Times in one hand. Wearing a navy blue windbreaker and his cheap plaid cap, which he tips to the ladies. As we pass, he smiles and says, "May you have a good day, young sir."