Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

“And you’ve got your own room?”

  I sat up and observed this person in her white ski suit and white hat with a red ball for a long and exhilarating moment. “It’s adjacent to my father’s. There’s a door—”

  She took her hat off. Her hair was matted and short like a boy’s. Fat rosy cheeks, windblown from skiing all day, slightly puggled nose. Chapped lips. More or less my age.

  “But the door locks,” she said.

  “The door locks.”

  If only anything in my life since had gone this much without a hitch. It must have been at least a full day before we met up in my sliver of a room next to my father and Cindy Roo’s. But hotel time is compacted, a day can be an hour, an hour a few minutes, and in the filth of memory—it happens almost instantaneously after she discerns that the adjoining door locks. That room, narrow and snug as a shoebox. From the bed you could touch all four walls. Above the bed was a rack, like they’d have on a train, where I kept my diminutive suitcase. There was a single round window, a porthole, out of which you could see the mountains. On the wall, a house phone. Claud (her name was Claudia, but she’d shortened it; she said she didn’t like an ia on the end of anything) told me the room was where the manservant had stayed in the old days.

  “Manservant?” I said. “I like it.”

  “You like it?”

  Mornings Claud would clomp out the front doors of the hotel, her skis and poles cradled in front of her like she was carrying firewood. “Au revoir, mademoiselle!” the doorman would shout. Then she’d clomp clomp clomp, her ski boots pounding the cobblestones, around the block to the back door of the hotel and take the freight elevator up to my floor.

  The phrase “losing your virginity” is so ludicrous it circles around to being accurate. Except forget the virgin part. Who’s unpolluted? Either by our own hand—or, if we’re luckier, by someone else’s. But to lose. Yes, although in this case, the loss is a gain, and so becomes weight. You end up carrying it on your back. Years pass, and the loss becomes heavier. I’m trying to say that loss in these circumstances is a debt that increases. I’m muddling this. At the time, we fucked a lot. Crazy to think about the hormones of a couple of sweaty barely fifteen-year-olds in a minuscule room with unlimited access to room service. As if all we were was hormones, as if we had no other existence aside from the fact of hormones, hormones incarnate, we bedswam across those four or five days. And it wasn’t as though there was anything to learn. How long had our bodies been preparing? Actual experience is a limitation. What we didn’t know made us bolder. Those short Swiss days, those mountains, that little porthole window. We also talked. We probably talked more than anything. I told Claud the same things I’d told the concierge. About my emancipated brother and how he didn’t give a shit about me so long as the State of Illinois didn’t boss his ass around.

  Claud would light a cigarette and pop her lips and send smoke rings to the ceiling. “I’m bored,” she’d say like an actress. And she’d lie back and smoke and tell me about Tulsa. She said her father was up to his gonads in oil. Maybe that’s why he can’t find them anymore. And we’re not even the richest Jews in Oklahoma. You’d be surprised how many of us are there. The Rabinowitzes are the richest, though they changed their name to the Travises. But you can tell they’re Rabinowitzes.

  “The noses?”

  “Their teeth. All the Rabinowitzes are bucktoothed as horses.”

  “Oh.”

  “My mom’s sleeping with the concierge.”

  “Pascal?”

  “No, the concierge at the Gran Moritz.”

  “Pascal’s brother Pascal.”

  “Her name is Karen.”

  “Oh.”

  “She does it every year. Not the same Karen.”

  “I guess that makes me kind of like your concierge.”

  “Except you don’t know anything. Where’s the Conditorei Hanselmann?”

  “No idea.”

  “See?”

  Horny kids, beyond horny. We were overheated baboons. At first, I remember, I kept my eyes closed. I wanted to feel whatever I was feeling, which was mostly a kind of stoned bewilderment, alone. I no longer had to imagine another body. And yet, I’m not so sure that I stopped imagining. Claud’s body was as much in my mind as it was tangled up with my arms and legs. But after a while I did begin to open my eyes. I wanted to meet hers, but though her eyes stayed open, she never looked at me. Whatever position we were in, Claud always found a way to stare at the ceiling. This sounds joyless. That wouldn’t be exactly accurate. I think we were both just concentrating so hard, separately, on the pleasure of it. And Claud would never say a word until we stopped and started talking again. She wanted to know all about Cindy Roo, like where my father found her. Did she have a middle name? Was she the prettiest of my father’s girlfriends?

  “She’s the tallest,” I said.

  “And almost scrawny,” Claud said. “She looks like a cadaver except that she goes on for miles. Thin lips.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And she’s pigeon-toed.”

  “Cindy Roo is pigeon-toed?”

  “Do you notice anything? Or does it all just pass by you in a fog? She’s his secretary?”

  “She’s a realtor.”

  “Ask housekeeping to put on new sheets.”

  “Okay.”

  “You need to leave a note. Otherwise, they won’t change the sheets.”

  “I said okay.”

  “My mom thinks I’m big-boned, which is weird because I’m so short. You think I’m big-boned?”

  Right, at first I closed my eyes. I must have wanted to be alone. At first. But then, I remember, I didn’t. It was too late. She looked at me only when we talked.

  Once, my father called from the lobby. Claud answered and told him he had the wrong room. She hung up. He didn’t call back.

  For about a year afterward she wrote me letters.

  There in the room she’d fall asleep, and I’d sit up against the wall and stare out the peephole at the mountains. Claud told me the Alps were above the tree line. Therefore, they weren’t beautiful. She was right. The Alps weren’t beautiful. They were bleached, treeless humps with ants streaming down them. And the weather was always the same, bright, no clouds. It must have snowed while we slept. Around four o’clock, when the lifts closed, Claud would put on all her gear and gather up her skis and poles from the corner of the little room and clomp out to the freight elevator. I’d get dressed and ride the regular elevator down to the lobby. After she thrashed through the revolving door, all suited up, skis and poles clattering, that red tassel bobbing on her head, she’d say “Hey” and plomp down next to me on the couch.

  1984

  Gina Aiello and Danny Fishbein going at it in my mother’s bed—Italians and Jews unite! All roads lead to Rome! Next year in Jerusalem!—and Danny forgetting to lock the door, or maybe not forgetting, maybe he left the door open on purpose, and a whole parade of stoners looking for a place to fall down stumbled right into the action. I think that was the party when somebody figured out how to make a pipe out of an apple core. All we had was a dime bag and no way to smoke it. We were about to just dump the pot into a cereal bowl, light it on fire, and huff it up like that when somebody munching an apple said, “Hey, this here fruit has a porous core.” And later, this overhappy crew wanders into my mother’s bedroom, and Danny and Gina are in her bed, or on top of her bed, maybe they didn’t bother with the sheets, and Gina rises up out of the darkness, flicks on the lamp beside the bed, and starts belting out “Maggie May,” which whatever you want to say about Rod Stewart is one of the greatest songs ever written by mankind.

  Gina was part of the theater crowd. She took any opportunity to perform before an audience no matter how sleepy and disinterested. Danny was one of those jocks who liked to mix it up with artsier kids. And according to one of the more observant stoners in the room that night, he didn’t seem to mind the interruption and just stretched out on my mother’s bed, his hands behin
d his head, and enjoyed Gina’s singing.

  We all did.

  This was in the house my mother rented on Laurel Avenue across from the Episcopal church, where we’d moved after my mother, brother, and I fled my father’s house with my mother’s convertible full of our crap like we were the Clampetts. My father came home that night and asked, Where the hell’s my family? Later, my mother said, You should have asked that question years ago.

  Danny Fishbein took in the whole moment the way high-school athletes tended to see the rest of the world. Like the rest of us are sort of monkeys to them, but nice, interesting monkeys. The stoners collapsed on the carpet in a drowsy scrum.

  And Gina sang.

  We’re prohibited by Mr. Stewart’s management company from quoting the sublime lyrics.

  I don’t know if Gina ever acted, or sang, when she got out of school. I haven’t heard about her since. What difference does it make that it was my mom’s bed? Can’t we be forgiven for believing she’d go on singing? If only in her head? A group of us was in the backyard trying to barbecue some frozen chicken breasts we’d rooted out of the freezer.

  “Asswipe, you got to defrost the chicken first.”

  Somebody turned the music off.

  Listen!

  Gina, in my mother’s room, the light on, the window open. We held our beers to our noses; nobody breathed.

  The Captain

  After they arrested the balloon lady, we bought our dope from a man who stood in a doorway on Howard Street dressed as Captain Kangaroo. Red suit with white trim, barn colors, fluffy white wig, the whole deal. You’d drive past him, and if he liked the look of you, he’d nod, almost imperceptibly. If he didn’t signal, that was it. Once you were rejected, you couldn’t drive by that same night. The balloon lady took all comers. She’d sell weed to nine-year-olds, along with a balloon. The Captain was more discerning. He didn’t bother with any sort of front. And the transaction was fast, professional. If you got the nod, you parked whoever’s mom’s car you were driving on a side street off Howard and walked to the Captain’s door on foot. He wouldn’t be standing in the doorway anymore, but the door would be slightly ajar. You pushed it open. A little way up the stairs to his walk-up: the Captain. Exact change or forget it. He’d hand you a baggie and that was that. It was so public, so brazen, him standing there in that getup and selling right out of his apartment. Maybe he had it good for a while because he hid in plain sight. Or maybe the cops figured, whatever the guy wore, the fact that he conducted all own his business hand to hand was almost respectable.

  This went on for months. We’d drive south to Howard Street, Friday nights. One night, he wasn’t wearing his Captain suit. He was standing in the doorway in a bathrobe. No wig, either. And his nod was more emphatic. You could actually see his chin move up and down. Shackenberg parked his mom’s Volvo a few blocks away. It was me, Joey Pignatari, and Newt Shackenberg. Joey said maybe his suit was at the cleaner’s.

  When we reached his door, he was sitting on the stairs as usual. But he held up empty hands. “Scholars,” he said, “I’m temporarily out of stock. Would you like to come upstairs and listen to music?” It was the first time any of us had heard his voice. An older guy, a drug dealer in a bathrobe, invites some high-school juniors up to his apartment. To us, in 1985, it was the pinnacle of cool. Even Shackenberg was into it, and Joey and I only brought him with us because we needed his mom’s car. We followed him upstairs. When we reached his apartment, the Captain asked us if we didn’t mind taking our shoes off. There was a little rack outside his door.

  The apartment itself was immaculate, two clean white couches, a coffee table with coffee-table books on it. There was art on the walls. A couple of large, well-stocked bookshelves. He had a cat.

  We tried to hide our disappointment. The place was so dopey.

  Joey made casual conversation. “So, who’s your supplier?”

  “A guy in Oconomowoc,” the Captain said. “You know the place? Nice lake up there. Good swimming. Can I get you guys anything? Tea?”

  We looked at our hands.

  “We’re good,” Joey said.

  “You guys into Keith Jarrett?”

  He put on a record. We sat there listening while the Captain tapped his feet and grooved.

  Drug dealers shouldn’t let their guard down. They lose their mystique. It didn’t bother us that this guy, by dressing up as a beloved children’s TV character, preyed on suburban kids who’d pay double what city kids would pay for a dime bag. But a goofy-dad act? Joey shot me a look. Give this a few minutes, see what happens. When the music was over, the Captain went over to one of the bookshelves and pulled out a book.

  “Listen to this,” he said. “It’ll blow your minds. ‘One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap. —And I found her bitter—And I cursed her.’ Rimbaud. Any of you young Turks been in love?”

  Shackenberg asked if he could use the restroom.

  The Captain shot his arm out straight. He made a clucking noise and jerked his thumb to the right. You know how sometimes when people give directions, they overdo it? Normally, even back then, somebody quoted a little poetry—or whatever that was—and I’d get a little swoony. But I was beginning to feel sorry for him. The Captain was turning out to be one of those lonely people who just want you to stay. These people will do anything, including sit totally still, trying not to make one false move. Just so you won’t leave. The whole time Shackenberg was taking a piss he sat like that, holding his book, as if he couldn’t say a single word unless all three of us were present. He was just some guy in his early thirties. Totally presentable, aside from the fact that he was wearing nothing but a bathrobe. Without the Captain’s wig, he had short black hair. Clean-shaven. A couple of droopy-looking tired eyes. He could have been anybody. Turned out he taught English at Loyola. We only wanted to get high.

  This might have been a unique phenomenon of that era. Older guys befriending teenagers, not for sex (though I’m sure there was enough of that) but for a little company. Was it a time when certain people, for whatever reason, fell through some invisible social crack? There was this other guy we knew, Mel, who lived in a town house near the high school. We used to go to his place after school, drink warm beer, eat bag after bag of potato chips, and watch porn. But even this was oddly chaste. We’d sit there and stare numbly at the screen like we were scrutinizing plants.

  We rode it out. We’d probably been there a couple of hours when the Captain, beat from keeping our little nonparty going, nodded off, slumped over on the couch with the cat in his lap. I’ve heard it said that it’s impossible to hate a sleeping man. That a sleeping man’s vulnerability is a kind of protection that wards off harm. We searched the place, pocketed a few pharmaceuticals. Shackenberg found a bottle of wine in a kitchen cabinet. After rummaging around in drawers to find a corkscrew, we took turns swigging it.

  I find myself thinking about peripheral people in my life, people I hardly knew. Shouldn’t I have forgotten about that forlorn clown by now? Why is the Captain—on the couch sleeping—more vivid to me than some of the people I see every day? We only paused in that apartment. It was a set of rooms we walked through. We knew that, whatever happened, we wouldn’t be caught dead begging anybody’s crumbs into our thirties. At least that much had been drummed into us. Our mothers had whispered we’d be kings. Of what it didn’t matter. Joey took over his father’s home-security business and turned it into an empire. He protects the entire North Shore from home invasion. Now he flies all over the world to run marathons. Shackenberg’s a cosmetic orthodontist in the Loop. Even I’m regularly employed, in what you might call high-end hospitality. We went and got our shoes off the shoe rack, put them on, and went back into the apartment. On a signal from Joey, Shackenberg and I kicked him once each, hard, in the groin. I took a crack at the cat, missed. Cat yawned. We took off down the stairs into what’s become the rest of our lives.

  Solly

  Not long ago, I came across a one-column obituary of Sol
ly Hirschman. Solly Hirschman lived deep into the 2000s. How is it possible he’d been alive all this time? Solly was, for centuries, the owl-eyed editor of high-school sports for the Chicago Sun-Times. I’m sure he could’ve moved up to college or pro sports, but for Solly this wouldn’t have been a promotion. Forget the Fightin’ Illini, forget the Bears. Solly Hirschman breathed the infinite passion of secondary-school sports in Chicago. For a time, I was one of Solly’s boys. Throughout my senior year in high school I’d drive my mother’s car out to football games in Romeoville, Long Grove, Palatine, Bolingbrook, Mundelein. After the game, I’d call in the score from a pay phone. In the spring, I covered baseball, but this was only because football hadn’t started again yet. Solly, like his readers, disdained baseball. Baseball was geometry and pansies. What he hungered for was full contact. The drill was that a stringer would attend a game and call in the score. Sounds simple, but it wasn’t. Solly would pepper you with questions to satisfy himself that you’d actually been present at the game. Some of the more experienced stringers would often collude with stringers from smaller, local papers and call in a score without getting out of bed.

  “Crowd?”

  “Subdued. Wet.”

  “Weather?”

  “Likewise, crap ass.”

  “Approximate temperature at halftime?”

  “With the windchill or without?”

  “Windchill’s not a scientific fact, it’s a cowardly state of mind.”

  And if the game was important in terms of the regional standings, Solly would ask a few more questions, and you could hear him on the other end of the line, typing up a one-paragraph story.

  “Any vicious tackles?”

  “Second quarter linebacker Jablonski blitzed and knocked QB Thomason unconscious.”

  “Concussion?”

  “Must have been multiple.”

  “Confirm with the coach or the team doctor?”

  “Nope.”

  I was paid twenty-one dollars a game. The money was sent directly to my house in the form of a check. Subtracting the gas I put in my mother’s car to run all over Cook, Lake, Will, and DuPage Counties, I probably made more like ten bucks a pop. Didn’t matter. And I’ve never cared less about sports, any sports. I was a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. I had a press pass that I had laminated at the fake-ID place on Dempster in Skokie. I used my credentials to gain access to the field at Deerfield High School when President Reagan landed there in a helicopter. I stood in a receiving line and shook Reagan’s hand. It was huge and soft, more coddled foot than a hand.