“We’ll take care of Fatima,” said Sam.
And they did—magnificently. They unscrewed one of the sprinklers and replaced it with a nozzle. They set the nozzle to jet spray. They set Fatima on a chair on the back of the deck. They gave her the jet hose. Fatima blasted them with the hose as they ran around the yard.
Fatima stood on her chair, up on her toes, whirling the hose around with the intensity of one of those white-gloved traffic policemen, with their crisply ironed shirts and braids looping over their shoulders. Fatima was in a watery heaven.
It was, beyond a doubt, the most wonderful fun Fatima had had in her entire life—ever. Better than anything. Better than Eid.
When Rashida came to get her daughter after an hour, Fatima wouldn’t leave.
Sam said, “She can stay. We’ll bring her home.”
When Sam and Murphy did bring Fatima home, Rashida gave them ten dollars.
“Sweet,” said Murphy.
It was Murphy’s idea to pick Fatima up the next afternoon. But before Sam and Murphy headed off to her place, they spent the morning getting ready. They got Peter Moore to bring his wading pool over. They dragged Sam’s old sandbox from a forgotten corner of the yard, and set it in the sun so the sand would dry out. They made lemonade.
Then the three of them walked over to the Chudarys’ place and knocked on their door, standing on the stoop like three little Jehovah’s Witnesses.
When Rashida answered, it was Murphy who did the talking.
“We were wondering,” said Murphy, “if Fatima would like to come to our water park.”
On the first day of their water park’s operation, they got Fatima and Erik Schmidt’s little brother Jürgen. They led Fatima and Jürgen through the sprinklers, let them spray the hoses and watched them splash in the pool. After two hours, Peter walked the soggy and exhausted toddlers home.
Sam and Murphy stayed behind, putting everything back in place and mopping up the basement. They were almost finished when Peter marched into the backyard, with two ten-dollar bills. They had made twenty bucks.
Murphy went to his cottage over the weekend, which didn’t really matter because it rained on Saturday. But they were back at it on Monday. Murphy, who had had two days to think about things, arrived with three white Tshirts and two days of pent-up plans.
They set up the backyard: the sandbox, the wading pool and the sprinklers. Then Murphy produced the white Tshirts.
“We should look professional,” said Murphy. They put on the white Tshirts and headed off. They were looking for customers.
That afternoon there were seven kids in the backyard. Four of them paying customers.
“Campers,” said Murphy. “Not customers.”
It’s not clear who thought up the waterslide. It might have been Fatima. Something about being the first kid there, the founding member of this club or camp or whatever this was—something, anyway, had given the normally shy four-year-old a massive injection of self-assurance. The highlight of each afternoon was the game they now called Jet Stream, the game in which Fatima stood on her chair, and whirled around and around with the hose, making them all run and squeal. Fatima, the smallest by a good half-foot, twisted and turned, running the backyard with the authority of a symphony conductor.
The waterslide could have been Fatima’s idea. But no one remembers anymore. And it doesn’t really matter.
Old Eugene who lives next door was involved. It wouldn’t have happened without Eugene. It wasn’t his idea, of course, and no one ever tried to say it was. But he was involved. It wouldn’t have happened without him.
Eugene had been watching since the water park first began. How could he not? Eugene, in his blue suit pants and his matching vest, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled to the elbows, had watched, sitting where he always sits on hot summer afternoons, on the old kitchen chair under his grape arbour. He was smoking one of his Italian cigars, nursing a tumbler of his homemade Chianti, tilting his chair dangerously backward, his feet feathering the fence whenever he started to teeter.
The day the waterslide was born, Eugene, in the middle of his ninety-second summer, tilted dangerously back in his kitchen chair under the grape arbour, the fruit flies buzzing around him, and the children too. He had been wondering if he should open another bottle of the five-year-old Chianti, or try some of last year’s batch, but then he had been taken over with the children and what they were trying to do. What in God’s name were they trying to do? They had two slides they had removed from two playsets, and they were duct-taping them together. Or trying to. They seemed to be trying to make them into one long slide.
“Sam,” called Eugene, in his throaty whisper, waving his spotted arm in the air. If it was a slide they needed, he had a better one. It was in his shed. He was pretty sure.
“Sam,” he called again, coughing and spitting on the ground, gesturing at the shed at the bottom of his garden.
Eugene has one of just about everything down in the shed: gardening tools, household appliances, leftover construction supplies. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface. There was also contraband, for instance: hidden bottles of eau-devie, secret cases of cigars.
He led the boys around his wife’s flower bed, past his famous fig tree, under the grape arbour, between the rows of peppers and tomatoes and into the earthy cool of the shaded shed.
When his watery eyes adjusted to the light, Eugene started Sam, Peter and Murphy moving stuff around: an old refrigerator, a bureau, two hand-push lawn mowers. It was dirty work and they were getting hot and annoyed because they didn’t understand what he was up to. Then they unearthed it. Eugene stepped back, and beamed, and the boys stood there in the sticky darkness without saying a word, struck dumb, staring into the back corner of Eugene’s shed as if they had just uncovered the gold mask of Tutankhamen. It was the greatest treasure they could imagine—a long plastic tube. It was a portable industrial garbage chute, the kind you use when renovating houses to slide debris from the second floor to the yard. Eugene had packed the chute into the garage thinking someone might have a use for it some day. And now they did.
Sam and Murphy had been trying to build a waterslide that ran from the back deck down to the garden. A little slide. A modest drop. But by the time they had finished, by the time they had heaved Eugene’s enormous plastic tube out of the shed, and dropped it over the fence, they had also heaved modesty out the window.
This was the waterside to end all waterslides. This waterslide didn’t start on the deck. This waterslide began at the second-floor bathroom window, traversed the family-room roof, looped around the clothesline pole, rolled over the picnic table and ended in the back garden near the pear tree.
Fatima stood on the deck with her little arms folded over her chest as the boys worked, nodding occasionally, pointing at this and then at that, like the foreman at a construction site.
It took most of the afternoon to assemble it. The hardest part was connecting the slides from the playsets to Eugene’s chute. They finally figured it out, and when they did, they all agreed it just might be the greatest waterslide built. Ever.
Any normal adult watching this unfold would have been seized by a spasm of anxiety and put a stop to it. But Eugene was the only adult watching. And at ninety-two, Eugene was a lot closer to boys, and the boyhood call to adventure, than he was to the anxiety levels of any normal adult.
What could possibly go wrong? After two wars and ninety-one and a half summers, the only thing Eugene worried about was his cellar of homemade wine, and the boys’ slide wasn’t going anywhere near that.
Fatima was the first one down. She bounced to her feet at the bottom like a trapeze artist. She confirmed it—it was the greatest waterslide ever built.
Word spread overnight. No one actually told anyone. The news spread through the telepathy of childhood. By the next day, there wasn’t a boy or a girl in the neighbourhood who didn’t know about the waterslide in Dave and Morley’s backyard. No adults knew a
bout it. The boys disassembled it at the end of the afternoon. They spent the next morning putting it back together. They didn’t believe they were doing anything wrong. They just had that intuitive understanding, shared by all children, that there are perfectly innocent things children do that adults are not equipped to handle.
No one was surprised then, the very next afternoon, when about twenty-five kids showed up. Or that everyone knew, without anyone saying anything, to wheel their bikes down the drive and lean them behind the house, so they didn’t attract attention from the street.
What did surprise them, however, was the moment that second afternoon when Eugene, who had been watching the children quietly from his chair under the arbour for two days straight, stood up, went inside and came out fifteen minutes later wearing nothing but a bathing cap and a knee-length blue bathing suit. He grinned, and waved at the kids, and then he propped his pruning ladder against the fence and climbed over, the veins on his knotty old legs throbbing with excitement.
It was Chris Turlington who started filming all this on his cellphone. It was his twin sister, Christina, who encouraged other kids to do the same, then edited the footage into a surprisingly slick video and posted it on YouTube.
Dave never would have seen it if he didn’t work in a record store and his staff weren’t attuned to this sort of stuff. A lot of people, apparently, are attuned. Tens of thousands, actually. The Waterslide became the most-watched video about an hour after it was posted. Everyone was talking about it. Though you understand when I say, everyone, I mean everyone of a certain age.
It was the Tuesday, I think. Although it could have been the Wednesday. It’s hard to be certain about this. And it’s not important. The days tend to blur together at the Vinyl Cafe, especially in the summer.
Anyway, it was the afternoon—that part is for sure. Dave was by the counter reading out loud from the back of a James Last album.
“Listen to this,” he said to Brian, who has worked at the record store for years. “This is a High Fidelity recording.” Brian is Dave’s oldest employee by far. Dave was reading this to Brian and to one of Brian’s friends, who doesn’t work at the store, but easily spends as much time there as Brian.
“It is designed,” Dave read, “to play on the phonograph of your choice. If you are the owner of a new stereophonic system, this record will play on it. You can purchase this record with no fear of it becoming obsolete.”
“What do you think?” said Dave. “Right or wrong?”
“Depends,” said Brian.
“On what?” said Dave.
“On whether they’re talking about the record as a concept or the concept of James Last.”
“What ever happened to James Last?” said Dave.
“Exactly,” said Brian.
Brian wandered behind the counter and dropped into the chair in front the computer.
He typed James Last into Google. Fifteen minutes passed before Brian was heard from again.
“Oh, oh, oh,” said Brian. “Have you seen this?”
Brian had given up on James Last and had flipped on YouTube.
“You have to see this,” said Brian.
Dave wandered over and peered at the screen. Brian pressed play.
This is what Dave saw: a grainy and very shaky close-up of an impossibly old man struggling over a fence. Then there was a cut and a jerky shot of the back of a house. The camera pulled back, and Dave saw there were kids dancing on the back roof of this house. Then the shot zoomed in, and Dave saw something that looked like a bobsled run coming out the upstairs window.
There was something familiar about it all. “I think I have seen this before,” said Dave. “This is like déjà vu.”
Then the camera zoomed in on one of the kids dancing on the roof. The boy had one of those tiny Italian cigars in his mouth.
“I know this place,” said Dave. “Is this a frat house? It looks like a frat house.”
Dave leaned forward, squinting at the screen. The picture was so fuzzy it was hard to be sure. The camera zeroed in on the window. A small face and two hands appeared. Whoever it was, was holding a bottle in each hand and dumping the contents of the bottle down the slide.
“I think that’s detergent,” said Brian.
“Shampoo,” said Brian’s friend. “That’s jojoba shampoo.”
They all looked at him.
“I recognize the bottle,” said Brian’s friend.
“Ohmigod,” said Dave.
“You ain’t seen anything,” said Brian. “It gets wicked better.”
There was another edit and the camera focused on the old guy again. It was hard to make him out because the kids were gathered around him slapping him on the back. The old guy was doing something to his mouth.
“Ohmigod,” said Dave again.
It was Eugene, of course, and Eugene was doing what he always does before he does anything that requires exertion. He was reaching into his mouth and removing his false teeth.
As Dave watched, the old man handed his teeth to a little girl who was standing on a chair holding a garden hose. The girl held the teeth high in the air. All the kids applauded. Now she was stuffing them into her pocket. She turned her hose onto the slide.
The camera left her to follow the old man inside the house. Up the stairs, into the bathroom.
Dave said, “Is this live?”
There was another edit. The old man was putting on a pair of nose plugs. There was a close-up of the shower. Two young boys were helping the toothless old man up onto the toilet and out the bathroom window. Then the point of view changed and the camera was outside again. It was on the ground, and there was the back of the house and then the camera zoomed in on the bathroom window. Everything was still for a few seconds, until—POW—the impossibly old man came flying out the window. He was sitting down and waving at the camera—until he hit the frothy spot where the boy had poured the jojoba shampoo. When he hit that spot, he flipped onto his back, gaining speed, his feet wiggling in the air. And that’s when everything came into focus for poor Dave. The old man, it was, ohmigod, it looked exactly like Eugene from next door.
“I have to go,” said Dave.
“It gets better,” said Brian. “The whole point is the end. When he hits the garden fence.”
But Dave was already out of the store.
So Dave missed the moment when Eugene flew out the bottom of the slide like he’d been shot out of a cannon. And he missed the part where Eugene smacked into the garden fence—the part where the old man struggled to his feet and stood there, toothless, covered with bubbles, his nose plug on, grinning madly, laughing, until he spotted his wife, Maria, on the other side of the fence. When he saw Maria glaring at him, his smile vanished, and his shoulders sagged.
“Busted,” said Eugene, sadly, to the camera.
Dave, who was already through the front door, missed that part. He was gone like a shot, turning right, past Dorothy’s bookstore, past Kenny Wong’s café, thinking don’t stop … there’s no time to stop. He had to get home, he had to…. He got four blocks, four long blocks, but no more, before his poor pounding adrenaline-shot heart felt as if it were going to explode. He pulled up short, gasping for breath. This was ridiculous; he couldn’t run all the way home. He needed to get a taxi. He got a taxi.
“Hurry,” said Dave. “Hurry.” Waving a twenty-dollar bill at the taxi driver.
It was 4:30. The hottest part of the day was done. Sam and Murphy were on the back porch, sitting on the double hammock. Well, they were more slouched than sitting. Or sprawled. Inching back and forth, but barely. The perfect picture of summer indolence. As still as a hot wind on a summer lake.
Dave burst onto this scene like a dog with a fetched ball. Dave was all sweaty and panting and out of breath. Doglike Dave.
Murphy and Sam looked up at him from the hammock with sleepy boredom.
“Hey Dad,” said Sam.
“Boys,” said Dave.
“Hey,” said Sam.
> This was not what he had expected at all. This was the last thing he had expected.
He looked over the fence. Eugene was sitting where he always sat—under the grape arbour, tilting back on his kitchen chair, his arm in a sling.
Dave looked at Eugene and then at the boys. He walked over to the fence and nodded. Eugene nodded back and spat on the ground.
Once when he was a boy, Dave’s parents gave him a dart set. He had begged them for the dart set. He couldn’t remember why. But he wanted it, and they gave it to him for his birthday.
Now in those days, Dave’s favourite show on television was Circus Boy, a show that chronicled the weekly adventures of a young boy called Corky, whose parents, the Flying Falcons, were killed in a high-wire accident. Corky was adopted by a clown named Joey and rode Bimbo the elephant in the show. He was played by, of all people, Micky Dolenz, later of Monkees fame. (Years later Dave and Dolenz and Mitch Ryder had a wolf of a night in London reminiscing about the TV show.)
The episode that had the biggest impact on Dave was about a knife-thrower and his wife. Dolenz didn’t remember it. But Dave did. Dave remembered it vividly. The wife was tied to a board. The assistant put the blindfold on the knife-thrower and spun him in a circle. Dave remembered everything about the show—the way the blindfolded man threw the knives at his wife, the way the knives stuck in the board all around her.
Dave was maybe eight when that show was on the air. He took his little sister, Annie, into the basement, and he stood her against the basement wall, and he threw his new darts at her. The first one stuck in her knee. The second in her shoulder. After the second one, she said, “This is a stupid game,” and ran upstairs.
Their mother fainted when she saw the darts sticking out of her daughter. When Dave explained why he had done this thing with the darts, his father seemed to understand, though he did confiscate the dart set. Dave always thought well of his father that he didn’t get mad. Or lecture him. It was an accident, and Dave wouldn’t have done it again. His father knew that.
Dave smiled at Eugene over the fence.
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