by Stuart Dybek
It almost looked that way at first. The new paraders from Douglas Park seemed to be enjoying themselves—laughing at our uniforms, marching backward, colliding into our ranks, and yelling, “Pow! Pow! Pow! motherfucker.” A lanky guy in a shower cap codirected us with a softball bat, mimicking Sovereign’s baton technique. We marched with our eyes fixed straight ahead, as if oblivious to the growing chaos at our flanks and the shouts of “You disturbing the peace!” But it was impossible to ignore the guy in the shower cap suddenly whacking the bass drum with the bat, radically changing the beat. We were heading along a sidewalk across the street from the park when out of an upper-story window someone emptied a pot of water into the tubas. A bottle crashed down. Voices yelled, “Hey! Shut that honky shit up down there!” The bass drum player was in a tug-of-war with a kid who wanted the trophy of a fuzzy mallet, while the shower-capped guy with the bat kept banging the drum.
We were double-timing, triple-timing, nearly jogging and still playing—I was back to droning middle C—and a confetti of garbage fell from windows and roofs. Sovereign was hit in the head—for an instant it appeared his skull had exploded, but it was just a tomato. He staggered and, looking stunned, directed us to turn down a side street. Mrs. Candido, blaring her horn nonstop, screamed, “Julio! Julio!” Julio broke ranks and ran for the car as a half-eaten pizza Frisbeed down, splatting the convertible top and windshield. It looked comical to see Mrs. Candido’s wipers working as she gunned away. I wished I was in the Buick with Julio—they wouldn’t hear a peep from me about the top being up—and when the car disappeared I felt abandoned.
A band member’s trombone was now in the possession of a guy whose biceps were not tattooed but branded with gang insignia, and who was busy working the slide to produce brassy lipfarts. A kid about my age, smiling cheerfully beneath the brim of a White Sox hat nesting on an Afro, grabbed for my clarinet. I wrenched it away, filled with sudden panic over having to tell Uncle Lefty, if he ever returned from California, that I’d lost his horn. The band broke into a disorganized jog, and then we were running, abandoning horns and glockenspiels, the drummers trapped in their harnesses, every man for himself in full retreat. I cut from the pack, down another side street and another.
The itchy cape flared behind me, tugging at my throat, perfect for someone to grab and pull me down. Voices shouted, but I didn’t turn to see who was chasing. My ill-fitting hat flew off, then my sheet music, and next the clip-on music stand, but I kept a grip on the clarinet. I was fast, the fastest kid in my school. I might be tenth clarinet, but I was first in every footrace, and the spats buttoned above my PF flyers seemed to make me faster still, as if I’d added winged heels. I thought I was fleeing in the direction of No-Man’s-Land but wasn’t sure. The streets were a blur and I had a stitch in my side, but I kept running. On an impulse I turned down a side street I hoped would lead back onto California. My gym shoes splashed through water, not puddles but a current that swirled the rubbish out of the gutters. The street was flooded: every hydrant opened, boards jammed in their geysering mouths, fanning pressurized water into the prismatic mist of phantom rainbows. I was in a strange neighborhood that expressed its anarchy in water, a village on the shore of pouring hydrants. Its inhabitants wore wet clothes plastered to their bodies and cavorted through the torrents. A young Spanish girl in shorts stood beside the fountain of a red fire pump, her arms spread as if she were balancing on ripples. She was humming aloud to herself—a tune without a language, maybe her secret fire-pump song.
“Hey, Clarinet Boy,” she singsonged, and I stopped and stood, catching my breath. “Play something,” she said and gestured for me to come through a curtain of spray. And, as if I belonged there, I stepped to the shelter of where she waited beneath a cascading canopy of water.
“What you want to hear?” I asked, as if I could play anything.
Live from Dreamsville
Their voices floated across the musty mud smell of the gangway into our room. Mick and I sat at the edges of our beds and listened, laughing until we were afraid we might be heard, then burying our faces in our pillows to muffle the laughter. Next door, Jano was drunk and cursing. His gravelly voice slurred from some cavity deep within the dilapidated frame house.
“Hurry up the goddamn food,” he kept repeating, and every time he said it, Kashka would fire back, “Don’t get a hard-on.”
“Hurry up the goddamn food.”
“Don’t get a hard-on!”
We got a whiff of food frying in the smoky crackle of lard.
“Phewee!” Mick whispered. “It smells like they’re cooking a rat.”
We both dove for our pillows, choking with laughter. I buried my face until it got sweaty and I could smell the feather ticking. Mick was still laughing; it sounded as if he was being strangled.
“Cool it,” I said, “or Sir’ll hear us.”
“Don’t get a hard-on,” Mick said.
We pushed our faces against the screen, trying to peer into Kashka’s house. Her window was a little below ours and off to the right so that we couldn’t see much beyond the torn bedspread half-draped across it. Even where we could see, the windowpane was the color of soot. A bare lightbulb gleamed through blackened glass. There were crickets in the gangway among the ragweed, trilling louder than the distant sirens rushing to some calamity.
Mick climbed onto the inside windowsill, squatting to get a better look. We were sleeping in our underwear because it was hot, though despite the heat we both resolutely wore homemade nightcaps cut from one of Mom’s old nylons. They fit tightly over our heads to hold our Brylcreemed d.a.’s in place. I reached up and pinched his ass.
“Ow!” he yelled, and banged his head on the sash.
“Shut up, you want Sir to hear? Get down, ya lubber.”
“Where’s the goddamn food?” Jano demanded, his voice getting louder, moving toward us.
“Don’t get a hard-on.”
“How can I without you?”
We tried very hard to stifle our laughter because we wanted to hear what would happen next.
“Don’t tear my goddamn dress … for crissakes take it easy, Janush.” Kashka’s rough voice sounded different than I’d ever heard it when she called him Janush. We heard a heavy thunk and then a clank like a pot falling from a table.
“You’re hurtin my titties.” She moaned. “Suck ‘em, don’t bite ’em, Janush.”
Then, except for an occasional groan, they got quiet, and we lay straining to hear, the word titties still hanging in the gangway like an echo that refused to fade. I’d always figured women, even Kashka, referred to them as their bosom or breasts, words more dignified than titties. Titties were for girls, something blossoming, maybe the size of tangerines. Kashka was built like a squat sumo wrestler. She had the heaviest upper arms I’d ever seen, rolls of flab wider than most people’s thighs, folding like sleeves over her elbows. She didn’t have titties, she had watermelons, and Jano, missing half his teeth, was sucking them. I listened for the slurping but heard nothing. I wondered what Mick was making of it all. I wasn’t sure how much he really understood about sex yet. The creaking of their house became audible, as if a galleon was anchored beside our window, and the moans resumed, louder and more frequent, though no sexier than those that came from behind the frosted glass of Dr. Garcia’s office, sounds we always regretted overhearing as we waited our turns in the dental chair. Then, mercifully, they fell silent.
“What do you think they’re doing?” Mick asked.
I thought of different possibilities but said nothing.
“Hey,” he asked, “you going to sleep?”
I lay listening to him tossing in his bed, flapping his sheets.
“I know you’re up, ya swab. You’re just fakin,” he said.
My eyes were closed, though he couldn’t see me in the dark.
“If you’re sleeping, then you won’t hear me calling you Toes. I won’t lose any points. Ha-ha, Toes! Hey, Toes? Toesush?”
I to
taled up his lost points, grinning in the dark. Minus five for each time he called me Toes. Those were the rules according to the Point System. Mick wasn’t old enough yet to go alone to the movie theater on Marshall Boulevard, and if he wanted to tag along with me on Saturdays, he had to lose less than a hundred points during the week. He could gain points for doing things for me, too, like folding my papers before I delivered them. Or sometimes he’d get something on me and blackmail me for points not to tell Sir. He’d just lost fifteen and was already a hundred and twenty in the hole.
“Hey, Toes, you eat boogers.”
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was coming this weekend, and Mick really wanted to see that.
I heard him getting out of bed, and I tensed, keeping my eyes closed and trying not to break up. I could feel him standing over me.
“Hey, Toesush,” he whispered.
I heard him rubbing his fingers together near my face, beneath my nose. He was chuckling maniacally. “I guess you really are sleeping,” he said, then got back in bed.
We lay there completely quiet for a while.
“I’m sure glad you’re sleeping, because you know what I did? I cleaned my kregs and sprinkled the toe-jam on your face.”
My not saying anything was really driving him nuts. He shut up for a long time after that. When I figured he was about to drop off to sleep, I started to snore.
“Shut up! I know you’re fakin.”
I mumbled in my sleep and snored louder, and he bounced up again and gave my bed a shake. I rolled over with a groan as if in the middle of a dream. He gave me a jab in the back, then threw himself into bed.
He was turned toward the wall, convinced against his best judgment that I really was asleep, and trying now to sleep himself. Except for the ding of a freight train blocks away and a single cricket still trilling in the gangway, it was very quiet.
“You just lost a hundred points, matey,” I said.
He kind of flinched, then pretended he was sleeping.
“You might as well forget about that movie. I bet it’s really gonna be great, too. The coming attractions were fantastic. Oh well, I guess you didn’t want to see it anyway. That’s why you’re not saying anything. At least you ain’t gonna beg. Which is smart because there’s no way I’m changing my mind. Not after having toe-jam sprinkled in my face. And getting socked in the back. That was a test. Now I know what kind of stuff goes on when I really am sleeping. Well, okay, good night, I’m going to Dreamsville.”
I tucked the sheet over my head and curled up in the middle of the mattress. Both of us knew he no longer believed in Dreamsville, but neither of us was about to admit it. A year ago he’d still been convinced I had a secret trapdoor in my bed that led to a clubhouse full of sodas, malts, popcorn, candy, a place where the stray dogs and cats in the neighborhood gathered at night. In Dreamsville, animals could talk. Sometimes celebrities like Bugs Bunny would drop in.
Mick would hear fragments of our merrymaking, muffled as if the trapdoor had been left ajar: my voice saying, “Hi, Whiskers. Hi, Topsy. Oh, hi there, Mousie Brown, you here tonight?”
Whiskers was our cat, supposedly out for the night. Topsy was Kashka’s ginger-colored watchdog. He was supposed to guard the chickens she kept illegally, but he’d let me sneak over her fence, and while he wagged his tail, I’d untie the clothesline noosed around his neck and boost his back end over the fence into the alley. Whenever we managed an escape, he’d spend the rest of the day following Mick and me around the streets until Kashka or one of her demented wino friends caught him again. Though Kashka had never caught me in the act, she knew I was the one springing Topsy, and hated me for it, not that I cared. Mick and I loved Topsy and had planned to steal him for good when we got old enough not to need Sir’s permission to keep him, but a couple of weeks ago I’d sprung him and the dogcatchers caught him. Kashka had just replaced him with a black puppy.
Mousie Brown was the name of Mick’s favorite stuffed animal, one he slept with until a night when, sick with flu, he puked all over it. When Moms tried to clean it, the fur washed off, leaving behind a raggedy, bald lump that reeked of vomit, so she threw it out on the sly.
They’d all bark and meow hello, and Mousie Brown might squeak, “Have a Dad’s old-fashioned root beer, Perry.”
It was during the winter, back before there was a Point System, that Mick still believed in Dreamsville. I’d made it up as a joke, one I didn’t expect he’d take seriously, but he must have wanted to believe, and once he did, he wanted to go to Dreamsville, too. In winter, I slept beneath a piersyna—a big old feather tick our grandmother had brought from Poland—and once I disappeared beneath it into Dreamsville, Mick would get out of bed and try to lift the piersyna up to get at the trapdoor. I’d lie tucked into a ball, holding the piersyna to me, with him on top tugging at it, punching me through the goose feathers, getting worked up so loud sometimes that Sir would hear the noise and charge in swinging a belt or a shoe or whatever was handy, an attack he called a “roop in the dupe.” Seeing the covers ripped and me getting my dupa beat tended to weaken Mick’s belief in Dreamsville. Though for a while I was able to convince him that, in order to preserve the secret, I’d come up through the trapdoor just before Sir whisked off the covers. Since Mick was getting rooped, too, he couldn’t really be sure. Then one night, instead of first yelling down the hall that we better get to sleep, Sir snuck up on us and suddenly stepped into the room, flicking on the light and stripping the piersyna off me where I lay bunched up in the middle of the mattress.
“What the hell do you guys yak about so much in here anyway?” he asked.
As usual we both pretended to be groggy, as if he’d just awakened us from a sound sleep.
“You’re the older guy, Perry,” he said to me. “You should be setting him a good example instead of this fooling around every night. You know he’s like a monkey—copies whatever you do. Then in the morning your mother’s gotta fight with you guys to get up for school and she’s nervous the rest of the day.”
I lay there hoping he’d control his temper, feeling naked in the light, and diminished, like the room made suddenly tiny without its darkness. Finally, he switched the light back off and left. I guess when he was angry enough to come in swinging, he didn’t like the light on any more than I did.
A few nights after that I decided that I’d finish off Dreamsville before Mick did. He’d already stopped begging me to take him there. I was under the piersyna talking in my pirate accent to the animal crew: “Whiskers, pass the peanuts, matey, and squirt a ducat of catsup on these fries. Yum, tasty! Purr, purr. Squeak, squeak. Hey, Mousie Brown, hoist that case of cold pop off the poop deck, yo-ho-ho, pass that cotton candy, please. Pass the popcorn, pass the pop, pass the poop, me hardies.”
We both exploded into laughter. When the laughter would let up, one of us would say, “Pass the poop, me hardies.” Mick laughed so hard he had to go to the bathroom, but I convinced him it would be a mistake to let them know he was still awake and talked him into pissing out the window.
It was cold and raining. We quietly slid up the window, then the storm window. The radiator was in front of the window, and Mick had to slide over it in order to sit on the sill. I held on to him so he wouldn’t fall.
“I’m getting soaked,” he complained, and I started laughing hysterically again. “What’s so funny?”
“You must be totally crazy hanging out a window and pissing.”
“Okay, get me in,” he demanded.
“Oh-oh, you know what?”
“What?”
“I bet Kashka’s looking out her window and saw what you just did.”
“Get me in, get me in!” He was getting frantic, struggling for leverage.
“She’s probably coming around the back way to grab your legs and pull you outside.”
“Come on, quit fooling around, get me in.” He sounded ready to cry, so I let him in.
“My pajamas are all wet. Now I can’t sleep.” He was w
earing his flannel pirate pajamas.
“Let that be a lesson to never piss out a window.”
Even though Mick no longer believed in Dreamsville, it still got to him when I’d disappear under the sheet, like now, describing scenes from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as if I had my own private screening room down there.
“The pods are coming! Aaayyiiii! Everyone’s a pod! This is the scariest movie I ever saw.”
“If you were up, why didn’t you say so? I was just seeing if you were fakin.”
“Almost too horrible to look at!”
“I didn’t really mean it.”
“Hold it. Stop the movie a second. I think I hear something. What? Did you wake up?”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“Didn’t mean what?”
“Whatever I lost points for.”
“Like what?”
“Calling you Toes.”
“Okay, even though I ought to take extra off for ushing me, you can have the fifteen points back. Anything else?”
“Like sprinkling toe-jam in your face.”
“Jesus Christ! You might as well forget apologizing for that.”
“I swear I didn’t really do it.”
“Don’t lie. I felt it. I smelled it.”
“Honest to God! I didn’t do it! I was just rubbing my fingers together making the noise.”
“His fingers sure smell a lot like his kregs, ladies and gentlemen.” Kregs was a name Mick had coined for the spaces between toes.
“I did it just like you did the peanut butter.”
“Just because I’m laughing don’t mean I believe you,” I said, breaking up just thinking about it. A few days earlier, while Mick was reading a Mad comic, I’d snuck up on him with a glob of peanut butter on a sheet of toilet paper, smeared it on his arm, and told him it was shit. At first he didn’t believe me, so I told him to smell it. He did and started screaming, “You really did it! You’re crazy! I’m telling Moms!” I tackled him before he could get away and began trying to smear the glob off his arm into his mouth. He was fighting back hard, yelling I’d gone completely crazy, wrenching his face away, spitting it out every time I got it near his lips. I thought once he tasted it he’d see the joke, but I had a hard time getting him to believe that it was only peanut butter.