American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Hitler had a dream too. It was pretty awful. So what’s your point?”

  “My point is to put the fucking inspirational song after the fucking accommodationist song. Hell, Sis, I don’t know why you’ve got some of the kids singing ‘No Way to Stop it,’ anyway. There aren’t already ten good songs you could use?”

  Carla shook her head. “Just nine. And there might just be eight if half of Mrs. Drexel’s class continues to refuse to do ‘Lonely Goatherd.’ She says the boys won’t sing it because she’s asking them all to pretend to be marionettes. The boys say they would rather eat fried monkey testicles than have to dance around on stage like they’ve got strings attached to their arms and legs.”

  “The teacher gave them that choice?”

  “You think this is funny, but it’s just making me depressed. We start rehearsals next week and Mr. Greene is sure he’s going to get calls from some of the parents of Mrs. Roesler’s students.”

  It was worse than that. Several of the parents gathered together in Mr. Greene’s office on parent-teacher night a couple of weeks later to voice their objections in person. Mrs. Roesler, the teacher of the sixth-grade class whose children had drawn the short straw while other fifth and sixth graders were, for example, analyzing the problem that is Maria and listing all of their favorite things, was there as well. Even though Mrs. Roesler had only a single working eye, one got the uncomfortable feeling that the other eye—opaque and stationary though it might be—was still honing in and making critical judgments.

  Mrs. Roesler had strenuously opposed putting her pupils (and their parents) through this indignity, but there was not much else she could do. All of the songs had now been assigned. None of the other teachers would trade with her, and Mr. Lipe, one of the fifth-grade teachers, noted with glee the irony of Mrs. Roesler protesting the inexorable imposition upon her students of a song that was about not protesting inexorable impositions.

  “I don’t like it one bit!” howled Mr. Hambert, the father of Melissa Hambert, a straight-A student who chewed her hair. “Why has my daughter’s class been singled out in this way?”

  “It was simply the luck of the draw,” said the beleaguered principal, who had come to parent-teacher night looking forward to showing off the new gym, which was very nearly finished except for the fact that its ceiling had yet to be sprayed with protective asbestos foam.

  “There’s the woman you ought to be talking to!” volunteered another one of the distraught parents. She was pointing at Carla, her finger jabbing the air as if she were implicating a suspected witch in colonial Salem.

  “Are you the one?” asked another woman, who spoke in a softer voice, but who seemed no less concerned. “Was it you who saddled my daughter’s class with this awful Nazi song?”

  Before Carla could answer, a man spoke up. He wore a grease-stained auto mechanic’s jumpsuit and must have come straight from work. “Do you believe our children to be selfish and whatchacallit—self-centered?”

  Carla shook her head.

  “Because that’s what the song’s telling these kids,” the man went on. “Don’t look out for nobody but yourself. That isn’t what our kids are getting at home, and it isn’t what they’re getting in their Sunday school classes, and if you ask me, it smacks of communism.”

  “What it smacks of,” said Mr. Hambert, “is submission and subordination. You’re teaching our children to go beyond simply respecting authority and obeying their elders. You want them all to grow up to be brain-dead automatons without the necessary tools for critical thinking. I’m not one of these conspiracy-minded people, Miss Willard, but I don’t think this is the way we ought to be raising our children.”

  The other parents in the room concurred with nods and under-voiced statements of strong agreement.

  “That isn’t why I picked it,” said Carla, exasperation creeping into her delivery. “I just happen to like the tune. It’s bright and breezy.”

  No one bothered to deliver a retort. Carla now knew where things stood. It had become quite evident to her (a teacher whose own pupils were having a grand time meeting the difficult polyphonic challenge of singing “Maria” against the vocalise counter-melody of the “Wedding Procession”) that she had failed both herself and everyone else in not paying more attention to what the song was saying. There was a reason, which she now understood, why the song hadn’t made it into the movie. It is true that negative sentiments have just as much right to be put to music as positive ones, but a lyricist often runs the risk of having his words taken out of character and situational context, especially when they are sung on the radio, or, let us say, on a cafetorium stage in a Pocatello, Idaho, elementary school.

  “So what shall we do?” asked Principal Greene. This was Greene’s customary modus operandi in meetings such as these: stating the problem and then entertaining various solutions before coming to a consensus. “Do we leave Mrs. Roesler’s class out of the Evening of Song this year?”

  Heads shook. One woman blurted, “Oh, God no.” She, too, had apparently come straight from work, because she was wearing her beauty parlor operator’s smock. It was stained with little red blotches, which looked very much like blood. Carla, when she thought about this later that night, wondered what in God’s name the salon was doing to its customers.

  There was only one thing worse than singing about Third Reich worldwide hegemony at Eisenhower Elementary. It was not singing at all. Greene retreated. “I’m aware, of course, that this is probably the least desirable of the remedies.”

  The woman who liked to point, whose name was Barbara Calbi, suggested combining Mrs. Roesler’s class with another class.

  Mrs. Roesler sighed her objection. “The other teachers wouldn’t have it. Because their students wouldn’t have it. My children have metaphorical cooties, you see. It’s common knowledge that we are the untouchables of Eisenhower Elementary.”

  “Well I never!” exclaimed Mrs. Calbi.

  “Children can be hateful little buggers,” said the auto mechanic. “When I was in the sixth grade, a bunch of juvenile delinquent sons-of-bitches stuck my head in a urinal and made me kiss a deodorizing puck.”

  Several of the women drew back in revulsion, while Mrs. Calbi gagged involuntarily.

  “May I then make a third suggestion?” offered Principal Greene. “It’s unprecedented, but in the end it would probably do the least amount of harm.” Greene was looking at Carla as he said this. It was her approval that would count the most.

  It was agreed by nearly everyone present in the principal’s office that night—including Carla Willard—that this was probably the best solution, the one that would draw the fewest objections. Mrs. Roesler’s sixth graders would sing a different Rodgers and Hammerstein song—one not from The Sound of Music.

  The text of the mimeographed program went as follows:

  Welcome to Eisenhower Elementary School’s Seventh Annual Fifth and Sixth Graders’ Autumn Evening of Song. Tonight we honor, for the most part, The Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

  Performances will proceed in the following order:

  Mrs. McNutt’s Fifth Graders will entertain us with: “The Sound of Music.”

  Miss Schulty’s Fifth Graders will enliven us with: “I Have Confidence.”

  Mrs. Beamer’s Sixth Graders will charm us with: “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”

  Mrs. Holiday’s Fifth Graders will delight us with: “My Favorite Things.”

  Miss Jackstraw’s Sixth Graders will enchant us with: “Do-Re-Mi.”

  Mrs. Drexel’s Fifth Grade Boys will sing: “The Lonely Goatherd.”

  Mrs. Drexel’s Fifth Grade Girls will dance the Alpian marionette dance.

  Mr. Lipe’s Sixth Graders will touch our hearts with: “Edelweiss.”

  Mrs. Domanian’s Fifth Graders will inspire us with: “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”

  Miss Willard’s Sixth Graders will enthrall us with: “Maria” and “Processional.”

  Mrs. Roesler’s
Sixth Graders will elevate us with “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

  The last song, which Carla remembered Jerry Lewis ardently rendering two years earlier during his telethon (suggested to him, he said, by a disabled child who was, no doubt, Broadway savvy), concluded the evening and left many in the audience elevated to the point of tears. Audience members were brought to their feet when on the line “Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,” the untouchables of Eisenhower Elementary stepped off their choral risers and literally walked down from the stage, each child then seeking out his or her grandmother and grandfather to embrace in a gesture that, while it had nothing to do with the song, was much appreciated by its recipients.

  Those who were unfamiliar with the full repertoire of songs from The Sound of Music thought that this was the song that the Von Trapps must have sung as they were hiking the Alps to freedom. Those who knew better still commended the selection as the perfect inspirational finish to the concert.

  Carla told no one—not even her opinionated brother—that her first choice (quickly dismissed) had been Oklahoma!’s “It’s a Scandal! It’s an Outrage!”

  Few knew what a wicked sense of humor Carla Willard had.

  1967

  GOING THE VOLE IN NEVADA

  Life’s a gamble. I learned this in ’46 when I married Lorna and took on her three kids by her former deadbeat husband like they were my very own, and voilà! I’m an instant dad and everything that goes along with that drops itself heavily into my inveterate bachelor’s lap, and whether or not I am up to the task is anybody’s guess. But it’s like Nescafé coffee. Some people try instant coffee and they like it, you know, instantly. Me, it took a while. But the kids did start to grow on me over time—Jed especially. Jed was born in 1938, the same year as the Nescafé company and the same year as this little convict-in-embryo who grew up down the street from where we lived in Butte, Montana: Robert Knievel. (More to come about Bad Boy Bobby.)

  Now if you don’t know Butte, I’ll probably be doing you a terrible disservice by trying to sum it all up for you in a few sentences, so please forgive me. Butte from its earliest days was a wild and wooly mining town—one of the most notorious of the copper boomtowns. But Butte was luckier than most boomtowns, which seem to have an annoying habit of eventually going bust. The reason: Butte was diversified. She had zinc and manganese and lead and molybdenum and silver and gold and brothels. Big business, those bawdy Butte brothels.

  That’s where Jed’s wife Babs was born. An unwed sporting lady by the name of Sicilian Cicely (most of the “soiled doves” of The Line, Butte’s red-light district in those days, had clever, geographically suggestive nicknames) was her mother, and it’s anybody’s guess who the father was, although I’d put my money on a favorite customer of hers named Bingham, which, coincidentally, is also the name of a copper boomtown in northern Utah that hasn’t fared nearly as well as Butte. Its ever-expanding open pit has literally been eating the town alive for years. And in 1971, the two dozen or so folks who were still left voted to disincorporate and get the hell out. It’s a bona fide ghost town now.

  Jed didn’t mind that Babs, whom he married in 1958, was the daughter of a whore, and it wasn’t something that Lorna and I would ever hold against a person. Like I say, Jed was my favorite among my three stepkids (although I know that dads, and stepdads, for that matter, aren’t supposed to play favorites).

  Now, I was talking about boomtowns, so I should make mention of Deadwood, South Dakota, which is where my stepson and his wife Babs moved in late ’58. Deadwood, as you might know, had a gold rush (1874—boom) and then a smallpox epidemic (1876—bust) and then a fire that wiped out nearly the entire town (1877—double bust). And that boom and bust pattern persisted into the twentieth century, as well. Right after Jed and his new bride got there—Jed was offered a job by a building contractor friend—there was a second big fire (1959—another blazing bust) that destroyed much of the town and sent the couple off on an interesting road trip. From 1959 into early 1962 they must have lived in about ten different western communities, Jed the itinerate laborer and Babs taking part-time secretarial work where she could get it. Their luck changed in 1962 when they wound up on a ranch outside of the little north Texas town of Summerfield, which coincidentally used to be called—I am not kidding—Boom. Jed worked construction and punched cattle, and Babs was employed as a receptionist for a dentist in nearby Hereford who took early retirement in late ’66 in large part because Hereford’s water supply has a high level of naturally occurring fluorine, and so few of the residents had much need for a dentist.

  Still, the couple was able to save about twenty thousand dollars during the four years they lived in Texas, and Jed and Babs were now convinced that their conjoined life had strong aspects of boom and bust to it, and since they seemed to have just gone boom (the success of the last four years) and now bust (Babs losing her job and a heifer stepping on Jed’s right foot and crushing three of his toes) they believed they were due for a change of fortune, and this is why Jed planned to take every penny of the twenty thousand they had in savings and put it down on either red or black at one of the Vegas casino roulette tables. (Since Deadwood wouldn’t be legalizing gambling for another twenty-two years, a Nevada casino was their only bet.)

  The big decision: red or black?

  “That’s all we need, Pops,” said Jed. “Just tell us: red or black?” Lorna and I had driven down to Las Vegas from Butte in early March to take a break from the harsh Montana winter, with hopes of using the additional face time with my stepson and stepdaughter-in-law to talk them out of this potentially ruinous idea.

  The four of us were having dinner at the Dunes’ Dome of the Sea restaurant. Lorna had the veal kidneys Berrichone. Jed and I had steaks frites and Babs had the quiche Lorraine, which she said tasted just like the bacon and Swiss cheese pie that a prostitute friend of her mother’s—Betty, the Natural Irish Reddie—used to make in the Dumas brothel kitchen in Butte.

  “You wanna gamble?” I asked. “Take a hundred dollars—take two hundred dollars to the table. That won’t cut too much into that nice little nest egg the two of you’ve built up. Don’t you want to have children? To buy a house somewhere?”

  “We can’t have children,” said Babs. “There’s something wrong with me down there.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you down there that I care about!” said Jed, looking lovingly and a bit hungrily at his wife’s crotch.

  “Oh, they love each other so much,” sighed Lorna, holding a bite of veal kidneys Berrichone in midair. “Mike, isn’t there something that Jed can do with State Farm?”

  “Selling insurance would be like a death sentence for me, Mom,” Jed burst out. “Sorry, Pops, but I have to be outdoors. If I’m not building or wrangling something, I go buggy. You’re the same way, aren’t you, Punklin? Didn’t working for Dr. Edder have you crawling the walls?”

  Babs nodded. “Although some of the children had interesting stains on their teeth from the dental fluorosis.”

  “I don’t just want a house, Pops,” Jed continued. “I want a ranch—my own ranch. Our own ranch,” he corrected himself while looking into his wife’s blue eyes, and then slightly down at her crotch again, and then back to her eyes. “I can’t buy a ranch for twenty thou. Not around Butte at least, which is where we want to wind up. Now forty thou—that puts us a heap closer.”

  “What about zero, son?” I persisted. “Because there’s that possibility, too. How many years do you think that would put you away from achieving your dream? Why do I have to tell you this? You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”

  “Everything in life is a gamble,” said Jed, looking at his watch. “The show’s about to start. Let’s go see the show, okay?”

  The “show” was the Dunes’ Casino de Paris Review starring Rouvaun, a thirty-five-year-old singer who was virtually unknown only a month before, but was now headlining a one-hundred-person extravaganza that sold out at every performance. (Ca
reer: boom!) I didn’t know at the time that Rouvaun wasn’t European—though his stage name gave one to imagine Caruso or one of the other continental greats. The “Vocal Vesuvius,” as he was later dubbed, was born Jim Haun in Bingham, Utah. That’s right: boom-and-then-bust Bingham, Utah.

  As the four of us sat listening to Rouvaun singing the hopeful “Somewhere” from West Side Story while a bevy of sequined, extravagantly fledged showgirls strutted and dipped behind him, Jed leaned across his mother to whisper into my ear, “Peace and quiet and open air wait for us…on the Montana plains.” A moment later, Babs, who had imbibed one too many Blue Hawaiis, summoned the attention of one of the dancers on the stage, whose name she told us was Siam Pam. According to Babs, Pam had once worked with Babs’s mother at one of the Mercury Street bordellos in Butte. “It’s a small world after all,” marveled Babs.

  The next morning over breakfast, Lorna and I tried one last time to talk Jed out of putting all twenty thousand dollars down on either red or black at the roulette wheel. We also appealed to Babs, but she was no help. Her head was killing her and even though she admitted that of course she didn’t want her husband to do such a foolish thing, he had his heart set on it and she loved Jed more than she loved money, and by the way, had we decided yet whether he should go for red or black?

  “Why should we be the ones to make that decision, dear?” asked Lorna of her son. “That would be a lot of guilt for us to have to carry around if we happened to choose wrong.”

  “Still,” said Jed, “I trust the two of you more than anybody.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Jed,” I replied in exasperation. “It’s all chance, whether I’m picking the color or you are. Life may be a series of choices—choices based on knowledge or experience or skill—but life is also made up of a number of haphazard events over which a person has absolutely no control. Zero. Zilch. This is such an event. Boom or bust doesn’t apply here.”