Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  It was hard for Toni to tell anything in the dimly lit room, the electricity having been turned off; but Eddie, looking more animated than Toni had seen him in years, hurried to the only window not boarded up, rolled up the shade, and let as much sunlight in as he could. “It doesn’t look like much now,” he admitted, “but it’s got real potential.”

  Toni looked around at the old roadhouse with its dark wood paneling and floors. It was essentially one room, maybe eight hundred square feet, with about a dozen sets of tables and chairs (the chairs now resting upside down on the tabletops) and a wooden bar about twenty feet long. The barstools had seen better days, as had the mirror—cracked in several places—behind the bar. The empty shelves that had once contained bottles of liquor sagged even with no weight on them. Toni thought it looked small and kind of depressing, but by the smile on her father’s face she could see he clearly thought otherwise.

  “It used to serve hot dogs and hamburgers, like Hiram’s,” Eddie said, pointing toward a pair of swinging doors next to the bar, “so it’s got a small kitchen, but big enough for me to make pūpūs.”

  “Poo whats?”

  “Appetizers, Hawaiian style, like kālua pork spareribs. People will mainly come for the drinks at first, but I want the food to be good too, and maybe in time we can expand to a full dinner menu.”

  She peeked into the kitchen, the stove looking more grease-encrusted than the one at the French fry stand, and smiled wanly.

  “Dad, don’t you think it’ll take a lot of—work—to remodel…?”

  “Oh hell yes,” he agreed. “This is just a dump now, I know that. I’ll have to strip the wood floor, lighten it—replace as much of it with bamboo as I can—fill in the windows with drywall and plaster…”

  “What? You can barely see in here as it is!”

  “No no, you don’t want windows looking out onto Palisade Avenue, it’ll spoil the illusion that you’re in the tropics.”

  Right now it looked about as tropical as the inside of Grant’s Tomb, but her father looked so excited—and it had been so long, it seemed, that he had been excited by anything—that Toni was reluctant to dampen his enthusiasm. “How much rent do they want for this?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m not renting,” Eddie said blithely. “I bought it.”

  Toni felt as if she had been pushed, backward, at ninety feet up.

  “You … bought it?”

  “You bet. It was only twelve grand! Hell, there’s a gas station down the road that sold at close-out prices for eighteen, this was a steal.”

  One of the concession agents at the Central Show, a gentile with a nonetheless vast command of Yiddish, sometimes used a hybrid exclamation that Toni found amusing: “Oy dear,” a combination of “Oy vey” and “Oh dear.”

  Toni looked around the grimy little tavern and thought: Oy dear.

  She tried desperately to see it as her father did: decorated with wicker tables, adorned with ferns, an exotic, charming, tropical retreat.

  Nope. She saw only a dank, narrow, costly little shoebox of a tavern that would need months of scrubbing, repairing, painting, and God knew what else before anyone would step willingly through its dark doorway.

  But he’d actually purchased the place—what else could she do? She couldn’t let him lose his life’s savings without trying to make it a success.

  “Well, I’m ‘at liberty,’ as they say, for the winter,” she said, feigning enthusiasm and a bright smile. “So let’s get to work.”

  But inside she was still thinking: Oy dear.

  19

  THAT NIGHT, TONI WROTE a short letter to Cliff, telling him she’d returned to New Jersey and was helping her dad start up a new business. She talked about the hurricane and how it knocked apart Ella’s equipment like a petulant child smashing his Tinkertoys. And she ended by saying I miss you, wish I could be with you. Please write soon, Love, Toni.

  She agonized before signing it—“Sincerely” seemed ridiculous and “Best Wishes” sounded like a birthday card—finally deciding to hell with it, and wrote Love. If that scared him off, then it wasn’t meant to be.

  According to Central States’ tour schedule, the show would open at the Cimarron Territory Celebration this Thursday, September 14—and so she addressed the envelope to Cliff at the Central States Shows, c/o General Delivery at Beaver, Oklahoma, and mailed it first thing the next morning.

  After the post office she and her dad returned to work on the tavern. The power was now turned on, but to Toni’s dismay, electricity only served to illuminate how truly dirty and dingy the place was. Toni hauled all the heavy walnut-stained tables and chairs out back, then called the Salvation Army to come take it all away. With Eddie’s okay she threw in what was left of the glassware, particularly the big beer steins that conjured images not of the South Seas but of the Sudetanland. Eddie swept the bare floors, kicking up dust devils big enough to carry them both to Oz, but didn’t bother to do so to the faded linoleum because he immediately began tearing it up. Toni scrubbed down the mahogany bar, since Eddie planned to strip off the dark stain, lighten the countertop, and add a bamboo facade to the front.

  “So where do we get bamboo in New Jersey?” Toni asked.

  “Bill Holahan at the lumberyard can order it for us from a supplier in the Philippines. They also carry rattan, which we’re going to need too.”

  It was a long week—Toni and Eddie spent an entire day scrubbing years of accumulated grease off the kitchen stove, cleaning the oven, which was caked black with burnt food drippings, and scouring the sink and counters with Ajax. She was bone tired at the end of the day, but it was a vacation compared to the next, when they attacked the restrooms. The sight of the filthy urinals made her gag and she told her father, “This one’s yours, I’ll take the ladies’ room,” and Eddie didn’t object. Toni went through two bottles of Lysol and a can of Ajax before the little girls’ room looked remotely like a place a little girl could enter without contracting scabies.

  By the end of the week, all Toni could think was that she had gone from an exciting new career as a high diver to an unpaid janitor’s position. She was careful never to show her dismay to her father, who even as he mopped the men’s room floor was enthusiastically telling her about the rattan wallpaper that would spruce up the room’s dank-looking walls. But try as she may, she couldn’t imagine how this squalid little place was going to be transformed into the thing of beauty her father envisioned.

  Jack arrived on Friday after a long bus ride from Brooklyn, excited to hear about his sister’s adventures on the midway and eager to tell her about his first semester of classes at the Pratt Institute. He was majoring in illustration but, like all first-year students, was required to take “foundation” courses—Creative Design, Structural Representation, Color, Fine Arts, and, for some unfathomable reason, Physical Education. “I thought my last game of softball was long behind me,” he said, bemused, “but maybe getting picked last for a team prepares you psychologically for an artist’s life.”

  After dinner they watched The Camel News Caravan, NBC’s nightly fifteen-minute newscast with John Cameron Swayze, who announced the first good news from the war in Korea: U.S. Marines had landed at Inchon, one of the Communist North’s most vital ports, and were in the process of securing it. “Finally,” Jack said, “something’s going right for the U.S.”

  Toni discovered there was more to this family reunion when after the news Jack opened his art portfolio and said, “I’ve done a few sketches for the murals—see if you like any of these…”

  This was news to Toni. “Murals?”

  “I want a couple of wall murals,” Eddie explained. “A Hawaiian garden, maybe, or a stand of palm trees—something bright and tropical.”

  “Here’s one I worked up,” Jack said, flipping over the pages of a large sketchbook, “for behind the bar.” He tilted the sketchbook to show Eddie and Toni a rough sketch of a long beach bordered by tall coconut palms—shown in perspective, so that th
e nearest tree showed only the base of the trunk and the farthest, tallest ones sported feathery palm fronds—as on the right of the page, frothy ocean waves lapped up the beach.

  “Jack, that’s perfect!” Eddie said with enthusiasm. “It’s got everything—the palm trees, the beach, the ocean…”

  “It’ll have the same dimensions as the mirror behind the bar,” Jack said. “Toss the mirror, but keep the frame—it’ll help sell the illusion that the customer’s looking through an imaginary window at a faraway beach.”

  “Jack, this is really good,” Toni said, though wondering to herself if they weren’t a little bit crazy talking about imaginary windows into the South Seas. “But will this really make anybody think, even for a moment, that they’re anywhere but in Fort Lee, New Jersey?”

  “I don’t blame you for being a little skeptical,” Eddie said. “That’s why I’m taking you both out to dinner tomorrow night—in Merchantville.”

  “Merchantville!” Toni blurted. “Isn’t that practically in Pennsylvania?”

  “Yeah, pretty close. It’s a two-hour drive.”

  “What’s in Merchantville?” Jack asked.

  “Something you have to see” was all Eddie said, and they couldn’t get a peep out of him until they actually arrived there.

  * * *

  Growing up in New Jersey, Toni and Jack had a native fondness for the sometimes gigantic, often whimsical roadside attractions—signs, statuary, odd-shaped buildings—that fruited on the Jersey landscape as giant redwoods did in Northern California, or as towering derricks forested the Texas oil fields. Aside from the colossal attractions at Palisades, the first one Toni remembered seeing was the sixty-foot bottle of Hoffman’s Dry Ginger Ale Soda—a water tower remodeled into a twenty-five-ton bottle of pop—that sat atop the Hoffman beverage brewery in Newark. (It had, five years ago, been upgraded from ginger ale to beer, which Hoffman also brewed.) There was the two-story-tall green brontosaurus on Route 9 in Bayville, which once advertised a taxidermy shop. There was a house shaped like a windmill in Barnegat and another in the form of a pirate ship that had dropped anchor in Old Bridge. But the undisputed queen of New Jersey gigantism was Lucy the Elephant, a sixty-five-foot gray elephant—with contradictory male tusks—bearing a howdah carriage on her back, built in 1881 as a realty office-cum-tourist attraction. Whenever Toni or Jack would spy one of these colossi on vacation with their parents, the sight of them would give them a little shiver of wonder that such grandly eccentric creations flourished in their own backyard.

  So now, as Eddie drove down Route 38 into Merchantville, Toni was surprised to find herself getting that same little shiver she had as a child. Up ahead was a restaurant, most of it a long, low building with orange walls and a pitched roof of neutral color. What made the establishment unique was a round annex with a yellow domed roof scored in a repeated diamond pattern, with a crown of green “leaves” projecting up out of the roof.

  “Holy Hannah, it’s a giant pineapple!” Toni cried in delight.

  “Two stories tall,” Jack said, echoing her delight.

  “So it is,” Eddie noted with a smile.

  In front of the giant pineapple was a sign identifying it as the HAWAIIAN COTTAGE—DINNERS—COCKTAILS—LUNCHEON.

  “Look, there are even windows on the ground floor of the pineapple!”

  “This beats the hell out of the windmill house,” Jack decided.

  “This place was built back in ’38,” Eddie said with a smile as he pulled into the parking lot. “I think the pineapple used to be a coconut. I’ve been to every South Seas place in the tri-state area—Hawai‘i Kai in Manhattan, the Hawaiian Room at the Hotel Lexington, even another Hawaiian Room at the Teterboro Country Club—but I like this place the best.”

  He led them inside, where a hostess in a sarong ushered them into the main dining room. The interior decor was just as impressive: bamboo tables and chairs upholstered with colorful Hawaiian floral designs; ersatz palm trees, tall bamboo poles topped with fake ferns; and farther down, what looked like fishing floats hanging in nets from the ceiling. The walls were covered with rattan, along with several large murals of South Pacific and Hawaiian scenery. There was a bandstand, empty for the moment, and a rectangular bar topped by a round thatched roof that looked like a grass hat. Soft Hawaiian music was playing over the PA system.

  The dinner menu consisted mostly of seafood platters, pasta, prime rib, steaks, salads, and sandwiches, though they also offered some Chinese fare like chicken chow mein and a Chinese pepper steak. “The food’s not very Hawaiian,” Eddie admitted, “but everything else is pretty authentic.”

  Now, as a saronged waitress took their dinner orders—Eddie ordered prime rib, Jack the exotic-sounding pepper steak, and Toni the chow mein—the light in the dining room changed and bright tropical day gave way to a sultry island night. The fishing floats hanging from the ceiling began to glow red and white, casting the room in rosy tones of sunset that gradually deepened to a lush crimson; it felt as if they were sitting inside a volcano, painted by the light of fiery lava. Waitresses lit the candle holders on each table, the rows and rows of white glowing candles reminding Toni of votive candles in church—but the statuary the candles illuminated here were not of saints, but the kind of strange pagan gods her father liked to carve.

  Then, as their dinners arrived, the crowning touch: hundreds of previously invisible lights, strung from the ceiling, sparked to life, and Toni and Jack looked up to find the ceiling awash with “stars.” The heavens had descended from the sky, constellations from another hemisphere floating just a few feet above them, close enough to reach out and touch.

  “Oh, wow,” Toni said in hushed tones. “Now I get it.”

  A band of genuine Hawaiian musicians ascended to the bandstand; the twang of steel guitars being tuned, unlike any instrument Toni had ever heard, echoed in the sunset light and sent shivers of unexpected pleasure through Toni’s body. Their voices were almost like whispers as the band began playing a traditional island melody, “Hawai‘i Aloha.”

  Sitting under starlight that seemed nearly as magical as any Eddie had seen in island skies, he and his children took in the same sort of sweet music and sensuous beauty that had entranced him seven years ago—and for the first time, Toni and Jack understood.

  Dinner was delicious, and on the drive back home, Toni asked, “So what are you planning to call this tropic isle in exotic Fort Lee?”

  Eddie hesitated, then admitted, “I’ve been thinking of calling it ‘Eddie’s Polynesia on the Palisades.’”

  Jack smiled.

  Toni said, “I like it.”

  “It’s alliterative,” Jack noted.

  “It’s perfect,” Toni said with a smile that warmed her father’s heart.

  * * *

  Before the weather grew too cold, Eddie started work on the bar’s wooden exterior. He couldn’t perform miracles—it would never be a little grass shack—but he could repaint the wooden facade, choosing a light tropical green for the walls and a dark brown for the pitched roof. He replaced the old entrance door with a new one made of polished koa wood, decorated with tiki designs. Toni had no idea what he was up to when he began constructing a short arbored walkway in front of the entrance. The roof of the arbor he built in an A-frame shape, which both echoed the shape of the pitched roof and was inspired by the grass huts Eddie had seen in the South Pacific. But it wasn’t until the roofing materials arrived from Mexico that Toni saw the similarity: Eddie covered the peaked arbor with the kind of thatch grass that formed the roof of the bar in the Hawaiian Cottage.

  The Cottage’s owners, Michael and Mary Egidi, generously shared with Eddie their supplier for this and other decorations. Toni pored over wallpaper catalogs until she found a rattan pattern her father liked, measured the square footage of wall space, then placed an order for three double-roll bolts. When Eddie’s bamboo arrived from the Philippines, he sawed the bamboo sticks in half lengthwise and glued them to the base of th
e bar; the resulting facade looked like one of the bamboo thickets on Espíritu Santo. He used a thicker piece of bamboo for the bar railing. Then he filled in the tavern’s three windows with drywall, plastered them over, and papered them with rattan.

  Eddie had a huge collection of tikis, of course, with which to decorate the interior, and a few tiki mugs of his own design. But he wanted some of those colorful ceramic hula girl glasses he had seen at Trader Vic’s, and so last year had written them in Honolulu asking where they obtained those swell glasses and was it possible for him to purchase some for his little bar in New Jersey? With typical Hawaiian hospitality the owner, Granville Abbott, wrote back saying that their hula mugs and other Hawaiian tableware were manufactured by a company called Vernon Kilns, in California, and that though they were an exclusive license, Eddie was welcome to buy a half a dozen cases from the manufacturer if they had some in stock.

  The kiln was not only happy to accommodate Eddie, but ran those hundred-plus hula mugs off the assembly line without the “Trader Vic’s Ltd., Honolulu, Hawaii” imprimatur on the bottom. When the mugs arrived, Eddie was delighted to find they were the same long glasses with bas-reliefs of a black-haired, bare-breasted hula girl in a lei and grass skirt on one side, while on the other another Hawaiian maiden knelt on the grass reaching up for some forbidden island fruit.

  At Palisades, Eddie had also taken note of some little chalk hula girl figurines being given away as prizes in one of Harry Frankel’s concessions, and bought a few dozen from him to be used as table and bar ornaments.

  Meanwhile, six weeks had passed without Toni receiving a response to her letter from Cliff. Now she asked Minette, “Should I write him again?”

  Minette shook her head. “You sent him a telegram, wrote him a letter—if he wanted to write he would. Don’t go chasing after him, forgiving him for how he’s ignoring you, like I did with Jay all those years.” Gently she said, “It happens, honey. Carny romances seem so real and passionate when you’re on the road, but off the midway, they tend to fade away. I’m sorry.”