by Tom Perrotta
“What a hideous color,” she said. “It looks like chewed-up bubble gum.”
She glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then knocked on the side door. It swung open and the Wiener Man helped us climb inside. Only he wasn't the Wiener Man anymore. He was this normal-looking guy, just a little taller than my mother, wearing tan corduroy pants and a blue sweater. He had removed the gloves and scrubbed the makeup off his face. He was still wearing the beat-up sneakers.
The Frankmobile looked pretty big from the outside, but inside it was close and cluttered, like someone had taken an entire house and squashed it into one room. The three of us stood huddled between the door and the sink that jutted out from the opposite wall. The carpeted floor sagged beneath our weight.
The Wiener Man smiled at my mother. He had dark curly hair and a boyish face. “Ann,” he said. “You look terrific. You haven't changed a bit.”
“It's a nice place you got here,” she said. She turned to get a better look and her purse swung into the side of my head.
“This is the kitchen,” he said. “I don't use it much.” There were cabinets above the sink and a tiny refrigerator next to the door. A small wooden table folded down from one wall. An unplugged toaster sat on top of it, along with a stack of magazines and a houseplant in a red clay pot.
“Let me give you the grand tour,” said the Wiener Man.
The trailer swayed gently, like a boat, as we followed him through the bead curtain into his bedroom. We stood single file between the wall and the bed. There wasn't much to look at, except for a portable TV—it had aluminum foil flags attached to the rabbit ears—plopped in the middle of the sunken mattress. My mother asked the Wiener Man about his parents.
“Pop passed away two years ago,” he said. “Cancer.”
“I wish I'd known,” she said. “I could've at least sent a card.”
“It was bad,” he said. “We weren't even on speaking terms when he died. He never forgave me for not taking over the business.”
“How's your mother?”
“She's a pain in the ass, as usual. All she does is complain. Like I don't have enough problems of my own.”
He opened the bathroom door. My mother peeked inside and laughed. I couldn't see what she was looking at.
I sat next to my mother on a padded bench behind the kitchen table and played a game called Hi-Q while she talked to the Wiener Man. It was a neat game, something like Chinese checkers, but harder. The Wiener Man told me that he used to spend hours playing it on nights when he couldn't sleep. After a while it got too easy for him, so he took up crossword puzzles.
I listened to their conversation between jumps. Mostly it was about people I'd never heard of. Harvey owned an appliance store. Dolly finally got divorced from Phil. Someone named “Neemo” got transferred to Chicago. Angie had three beautiful daughters and a no-good husband. They both laughed when she told him that Louise had married a dentist, this little dumpy guy.
I didn't get the joke, but I laughed anyway. I was really enjoying myself. I liked the coziness and dim light inside the Frankmobile, the feeling of being hidden from the world but not alone. It reminded me of a trip I'd taken with my parents the summer after kindergarten. We rented a pop-up camper—the kind that emerges magically from a box when you turn the crank—and took it to Cooperstown, New York. It rained the whole time we were there, but we didn't mind. We spent our days browsing through the Baseball Hall of Fame, touching old uniforms, buying souvenirs, talking to Babe Ruth on a special telephone. We couldn't barbecue because of the weather, so we ate all our meals at this diner that had a revolving glass case filled with the biggest cakes and pies I'd ever seen. When we got back to the camper my father would fall right to sleep, but my mother and I stayed up late playing Go Fish by flashlight, whispering our questions and answers over my father's slow breathing and the steady patter of rain on the roof.
Staring at the Hi-Q board and listening to their voices, I let myself imagine we were a family. It seemed like a fun way to live, a permanent vacation, the three of us inside the Frankmobile, playing games and eating out all the time. I saw us zooming down the highway, a pink blur passing through a landscape of cactus and snow-capped mountains on our way to the next supermarket. But I saw something else, too: my real father wandering through our house, checking in the closets and under the bed, wondering where we'd gone without him.
My mother touched my hand. “Buddy, Mr. Amalfi wants to know if we're happy.”
I shrugged. “Sure. I guess so.”
She laughed and messed my hair, like I'd just done something cute. She pretended to count on her fingers. “I can't believe it, Mike. I've been married for nine years now.”
“That's a long time,” said the Wiener Man.
“I wish you could meet Jim,” she said. “I think you'd like him.”
The Wiener Man nodded. “Jim's a lucky man.”
“What about you?” she asked. “Are you happy?”
He uncrossed his legs and sat up straight on top of his little woodgrain refrigerator. “Happy?” he repeated, as if he hadn't understood the question. “I don't know about that. This is a decent job. I like seeing the country and meeting the kids. But it gets kind of lonely sometimes.”
“Why don't you get married?” my mother said. “You're still young.”
“I don't feel so young,” said the Wiener Man.
There was a long lull in the conversation. They just looked at each other. My mother took the gray purse from her lap and set it on the table. She unclasped it and took out her wallet. I thought she was going to give some money to the Wiener Man, but she looked at me instead.
“Buddy, could you do me a favor? Run into Stop & Shop and pick up a can of tomato sauce, okay? Contadina. The smaller can, not the big huge one. That's in aisle six.” She pressed a crumpled dollar into my hand. “You can get a candy bar with the change.”
I glanced at the Hi-Q board. There was no way I could win. “Right now?” I asked.
She nodded. “Wait for me outside. I'll only be a few more minutes.”
I stepped out from behind the table. The Wiener Man stared glumly at his feet. I wanted to cheer him up.
“Tell her about that kid you pounded today,” I suggested.
* * *
The night had grown cooler. High up, the sky remained a deep daytime blue, but near the ground it was dark. All the lights were on in the parking lot. I went over to the front window of Stop & Shop and stood on tiptoe to peer inside the dazzling store. I couldn't see any customers, just two checkout girls in green smocks talking across three empty counters.
I shoved the dollar into my pocket and hopped a ride on a nearby shopping cart. I glided toward Grand Avenue, gathering speed on the downward slope. I found the can of tomato sauce right where I thought it would be, lying against a concrete parking barrier. It wasn't even dented.
I walked past the Frankmobile and sat down on the curb in front of the launderette. I amused myself by tossing the can into the air with one hand and catching it with the other, enjoying the swift pull of gravity as it smacked into my palm. Across Grand Avenue, a chalky fingernail moon hung at a strange tilt over the jagged line of housetops.
“Hi.”
The voice came from Harold Daggett. Like me, he was still wearing his uniform. He was also carrying a gym bag. “I saw you sitting here,” he explained. He sat down beside me and set the gym bag between his feet. “Thanks for sticking up for me today. I didn't think you liked me.”
“You were right,” I said. “Billy was acting like a jerk.”
Harold looked at the Frankmobile. “Is he nice?”
“Yeah, pretty nice. My mom's in there.”
“I want to go with him,” Harold said.
“You mean like running away?”
Harold nodded. “I hate it here. You think he'll take me with him?”
“I'm not sure,” I told him. “Probably.”
We didn't talk for a while. The parking l
ot was flat and empty, almost like a lake, except for a few stray shopping carts that here and there gleamed silver in the artificial light.
“By the way,” I said, “it was interesting what you told us today. That stuff about hot dogs and hamburgers.”
“Oh that.” He shrugged. “It was in the encyclopedia.”
Seconds later, the door of the Frankmobile swung open. My mother stepped down onto the pavement.
“Buddy?” she called out.
I walked into the light, leaving Harold behind me, alone and invisible in the shadows.
“We're late,” my mother said. “We have to walk fast.”
My father was the assistant manager at a store called Lamp City. It was located just a few blocks from the mini-mall, on an otherwise deserted part of Grand Avenue. After dark you could see it from far away, a small solitary building surrounded by a smoky yellow halo.
There must have been a thousand lamps in there. They hung from the ceiling, stood on the floor, rested on shelves and tables. My father hated it. The glare hurt his eyes and gave him headaches. He tried wearing sunglasses for a while, but his boss got mad. When he got home at night, he sat in his chair in the living room and ate dinner in the dark. Some nights his eyes were so sore he couldn't bear to watch TV or read the paper.
He waited with his hands and face pressed against the front window. His expression changed when he saw us. He smiled and raised one finger, then disappeared in toward the rear of the store. When he hit the master switch, that whole galaxy of lamps went black. My mother turned to me in the sudden darkness and asked if I had done my homework.
Thirteen
“It's foolproof,” Kevin explained. “If someone comes in and buys fifteen dollars worth of gas, I just ring up five and keep ten for myself.”
“What about the pump?” I asked. “Doesn't that keep track?”
“Not really. It just goes back to zero every time you flip the switch.”
Gas was expensive that summer, in 1974, and for a few weeks we were rich. Kevin bought me albums, food, and sporting goods with the money he stole from Paul's Amoco. He paid his brother's friend Burnsy to drive us to Yankee Stadium and Bowcraft Amusement Park. Every time I returned from one of these excursions I told my mother the same half-lie. I said that Paul had paid for everything.
Paul was Kevin's new stepfather. He had met Mrs. Ross on the supermarket checkout line in February and married her in March. When he moved in, he bought Kevin a fantastic ten-speed bike and tried to be his friend. But Kevin didn't want to be friends. He claimed that Paul was a sex maniac.
“Listen to this,” Kevin said, just a few weeks after the wedding. He slipped a cassette into his tape player and cranked up the volume. All I could hear was loud static with vague murmurs in the background.
“What is it?”
“They're humping.” he said. “Can't you tell?”
He rewound the tape. The murmurs turned into soft moans and deep sighs. I had a hard time connecting these sounds with Kevin's mother, a thin quiet woman who smoked extra-long cigarettes and told him to be careful every time he left the house.
“I swear,” he said. “It's all they ever do.”
Kevin's real father had died a long time ago. He had been an amateur boxer. Kevin had once come to a Halloween party dressed in gym shorts and boxing gloves, with his father's jockstrap and huge protective cup fitted over his head like a mask. Whenever someone asked him what he was, he lifted the cup away from his face with his fat leather thumbs and said, “I'm a dick, what are you?”
A sticky heat wave rolled in early that summer, right after school let out. We got in the habit of going to Kevin's house in the afternoon to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone on channel eleven. Sometimes Kevin's older brother Jack would be there with Burnsy and a couple other guys, smoking pot from a red plastic bong. Jack had just graduated from high school, but he didn't seem too interested in finding a job. He made all the money he needed selling nickel bags to kids who hung out at the Little League and McDonald's. Kevin and I didn't get high—we had just finished seventh grade—but we liked to pretend we did, watching TV through our eyelashes and laughing hysterically at the commercials for Peter Lemongello's Greatest Hits and truck-driver training.
Paul barged in on us right in the middle of a great Twilight Zone, the one where the businessman steps into a time warp and returns, as an adult, to the world of his childhood. He meets his ten-year-old self on the playground and begs him to appreciate the beauty and wonder of youth while he still has time and not to be in such a big hurry to grow up. The kid pounds his baseball mitt, and says, “Sure, mister, whatever you say.”
“Wow,” said Jack. “Is that intense or what?”
We heard keys jangling, but it was too late to move. Paul stood in the doorway looking hot and grimy in his oil-stained work clothes. I thought he was going to deliver a big lecture, but he just turned off the TV and stared at us like we were Martians.
“Don't you guys have anything better to do?”
There were six of us in the room. One by one, we shook our heads.
The next day Kevin and Jack began manning the pumps at Paul's Amoco. Jack hated it so much that he quit after two days and moved down to Seaside, where some guys he knew were renting a house for the summer. Kevin stuck with the job and began stealing from Paul.
It didn't occur to me to think it was wrong. Ever since I'd met Kevin, he'd been doing crazy things and dragging me along. On the morning of our First Holy Communion, we'd slipped into the Sunday school cafeteria and raided a tray of jelly donuts; we got powdered sugar all over our new blue suits. For our first and only Webelos camping trip, Kevin had shoplifted a gigantic T-bone steak, which we never got around to cooking, though we did have a great time banging each other over the head with it inside our tent. We threw snowballs at cars, ordered pizzas for people we didn't like, and played whiffle ball when there was nothing else to do. He was my best friend.
The night he told me about the money, Kevin took me to Shoe Town and bought us identical pairs of Puma sneakers. Before we went home, we took off our old sneakers, knotted the laces together, and tossed them at a telephone line on Center Street. We didn't stop until both pairs were dangling from the wire, kicking back and forth like they were walking on air.
* * *
I was with Kevin at the St. Agnes carnival in Cranwood the night he first laid eyes on Angela Farrone. We were standing by the food booths, spearing french fries from a paper cone.
“Look at that,” he said. “By the Porta-John.”
She was a gum-snapping bleached blond about our age, a knockout in a white tube top and jeans so tight that Kevin said she probably had to pack herself in with a shoehorn. In one hand she held a green helium balloon on a string, in the other a goldfish in a little plastic bag filled with water. The door of the Porta-John popped open and a scrawny redhead stepped out, glancing sheepishly around. She took the balloon from her friend and the two of them entered the moving crowd, like cars merging with highway traffic.
We followed them past the bake sale, the wheels of fortune, and the creaky rent-a-rides, then out of the carnival and down a sidestreet littered with ripped tickets and greasy paper plates. They stopped beneath a streetlight, huddling together with their backs turned in our direction. The green balloon jerked up and down above their heads. We caught up with them just as they stepped apart, hands empty at their sides. For one miraculous moment the balloon and the fish were suspended in midair, connected by the string. Then they started to rise.
We stood with our heads back, watching the balloon gain altitude as it drifted upward and eastward over the treetops, toward New York City. The goldfish glinted orange in the light, then disappeared, like a match flaring out.
“Hey,” Kevin said. “Why'd you do that?” The blond shrugged. “The last time I brought a fish home, my Dad flushed it down the toilet.”
Kevin called Angela every night for a week, but she kept hanging up on him. Then he h
ad an idea. He bought a dozen roses and hired me—I was good in school—to write her a letter.
Dear Angela,
My name is Kevin Ross and I have a crush on you. We met on Friday night outside the Carnival. I've been thinking about your fish. Maybe it got lucky and fell in a lake! Will you please come to the movies with me sometime soon? We can see anything you want.
Your (hopefully) friend,
Kevin Ross
P.S.—In case you're wondering, I've employed a friend to give us a ride.
Kevin paid me ten dollars for the letter and another ten for delivery, five of which went to Burnsy, who drove me to Angela's house in the ritzy section of Cranwood. It was early evening, and a sprinkler spun jets of water across the plush front lawn. The shrubs near the house had been trimmed to look like gum drops and spinning tops. I set the roses on the welcome mat, then turned and ran back to Burnsy's Duster.
Kevin and Angela went to the drive-in on their first date. They really hit it off. Burnsy said there was so much heavy breathing in the back seat that he had to get out of the car and watch the second half of Billy Jack sitting on the gravel, holding the speaker to his ear. He told me this as we drove to Angela's to deliver another bouquet of roses, along with a poem I'd written at White Diamond:
Last night at the drive-in
The people in cars
Were watching the movie
But we were the stars!
It was Wednesday afternoon and I should have been doing my paper route. I was a carrier for the Community News, a freebie shopper paper. Once a week I had to fold 300 papers, secure them with rubber bands, then deliver one to every house in a six-block area. The entire process took about seven hours, and I made ten bucks.
I had been wobbling down Oak Street around noon on my old stingray bike when Burnsy's car pulled up and began crawling down the street beside me. Kevin rolled down the passenger window. I could tell from his greasy T-shirt that he was on lunch hour from the station.