by Robert Ward
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he says finally. “Even if Eichmann gives me the slip today, I won’t rest until I get the bastard. I’ll haunt the ball park. You can believe that, son.”
He is gnashing his teeth.
“That bastard even touches you or any of your little friends, I’ll break his Nazi ass. Those queer boy Nazis are pretty effective against helpless kikes and little kids, but it’ll be honky do re mi when I get my hands on him.”
He is pounding the dashboard furiously, narrowly missing a coal truck, as we sweep in to the curb. Then we are leaping out of doors, into the mud. I stand close by his side, shivering and pointing to center field.
“There he is, Dad,” I stutter. “He’s out in the grass. It’s Ick-man.”
“I see him, son. Don’t faint, I won’t let you down.”
My father slams me on the back and bounds around the rotting stands. In a flash he’s across first base, streaking for center field. Ten feet away, the startled doggy-walker turns and gives a little cry of terror.
“You’ve had it this time, Eichmann,” screams my father.
I stand in the dark rain, watching the arms and legs tangle in the slick grass.
VI.
Life Among the Primates
Mr. Pensy, our eighth-grade teacher, has a huge ass. The huge ass is responsible for the fact that Mr. Pensy is still with us, for if he had a normal-size ass, he would have gone through the open window. Our class saw from the first day that Mr. Pensy is a mark. He told us that if we all did our very best, there would be nothing to worry about, but if we didn’t, he wasn’t going to fool around with us. We would just have “Nasty” written across the top of our report card and that would be that. We would also have a red “Nasty” written across our permanent record, and later on in life, when we went to get jobs, the red “Nasty” would stand out above all we had accomplished. We would be laughed out of the business world.
These remarks brought a unity to the class that had not before existed. I turned slowly and looked out of the corner of my eye at a Jew named Levin. He winked back. Other people did likewise. Mr. Pensy was going to be in for a rough time.
The second day of class, Mr. Pensy is trying to show us how an isosceles triangle works. He is hit in the head with an eraser. When he turns around, everyone is silent. Mr. Pensy decides to let the first offense go, and continues to tell us about A and B. He calls Levin to the front of the room and hands him a rubber-tipped pointer. Levin breaks the pointer over his knee, says “Here, Prick” and hands both halves back to Mr. Pensy. Mr. Pensy gets a girlish look of terror on his face and demands that Levin leave the room. Levin faints and is dragged into the hall by Grossman, who shouts that Pensy is a “Jew-hating murderer.”
On the third day, Renus, a boy with one of the last of the ducktail haircuts who wears his Luckies rolled up in his sleeve, tells us that Mr. Pensy is a trolley-car driver in the summertime. When we enter class (twenty minutes late, at Levin’s request) Mr. Pensy is greeted with a cattlelike roar of “Ding Dong Pensy.” It is here that Mr. Pensy first tries to leap out of the window. We scream as his ass gets jammed and he is forced to come back inside.
During the semester, a boy in class becomes as badly thought of as Mr. Pensy. His name is Smart and he has a loud mouth, gray skin and wears rippled-sole shoes. Whenever Mr. Pensy needs someone to take the rap, we scream “Smart did it, sir,” or “Mange did it. It was most definitely the Mange.” Mr. Pensy invariably believes us, and keeps Mange after school. One month Mange is taken out of class and put into Baltimore Memorial Hospital. He has hepatitis and may die. For two days we all feel guilty but on the third day Mr. Pensy wants to know who shit on his chair (Renus did, after lunch) and we all scream “Mange.” We go from the classroom happy to have been liberated from regarding Mange as a human being.
Later on in the semester, Walter joins our class. He has been thrown out of an ?-course section for piling up old sandwiches in the back of the room. Walter is very witty and says things under his breath, while erasers and pens books and slide rules sail up at Mr. Pensy. I never fail to break into helpless gales of laughter at Walter’s remarks. Mr. Pensy catches us and keeps us after school. By the end of the day, his room is like a department store after a serious fire. Squashed apples, tomatoes and pears drip from the blackboard. Chocolate candy bars grease the legs of chairs. Pencils and sharp objects (many knives) sit in clusters on Mr. Pensy’s desk, which features a crude carving with the caption MR. PENSY SUCKS A PENIS. Mr. Pensy looks up at us with exhausted, wrinkled eyes and asks us why we always talk in class. I stare at my book The Wonderful World of Geometry, and listen to Walter:
“We do not talk in class, sir. It’s the Mange … I mean it’s Smart.”
“Smart?” says Mr. Pensy.
“That’s right, sir,” says Walter. “Smart has been reading a book called How To Be a Ventriloquist and throws his voice across the room. He has it in for Ward and I because we won’t help him disrupt the class.”
“That’s right, a ventriloquist,” I say.
“A ventriloquist,” says Mr. Pensy.
Mr. Pensy picks up one of the confiscated fountain pens and writes “Smart is a ventriloquist.” He sits there rubbing his square head for a few seconds, then demands that we come to the office with him.
At the office Mr. Pensy dials the phone with thick certain gestures. He stares between us, his eyes burning with rage.
“Hello, Mrs. Smart, this is Pensy at City High. Your son is a ventriloquist.”
From the look of horror on Mr. Pensy’s face we know that Mrs. Smart has told him that the Mange is back in the hospital with a relapse of hepatitis. We watch as Mr. Pensy drops the phone and attempts to leap through the office window. He does not fit and becomes wedged in, his bulging ass shaking to and fro like a giant Jell-O.
During the last few weeks of the semester, Mr. Pensy decides to give us a test every day. He stands slumped in the front of the classroom, his brown double-breasted suit buttoned in the wrong holes, his red blotched face squelched in a leer.
“Every test will count. If you don’t know the work, it’s your tough luck.” He hands out small yellow sheets of paper and puts an impossible problem on the board. While he is drawing it, we are all writing things like “Eat a Wet One, Pensy” in big black letters. Thomas Gurn, a friend of Renus, who wears silk jackets with pictures of Mount Fujiyama on the back, takes the papers up to him. Gurn’s penis is protruding from his pleated pants.
“Here Mr. Penthy thir. Here are the testies. Even dumb pricks [points to his fly] like us know the answers to thuth easy quethtions.”
Mr. Pensy’s hands shake uncontrollably and he runs for the window. This time the seat of his pants burst and we are treated to a giant birthmark on his hairy ass. He still does not fit through.
VII.
Art and Celery
Up in the attic, among the cobwebs and spiders and half-shapes, I find an old trunk with my father’s artwork in it.
“Wow, Warren,” I say. “My father used to be an artist.”
“Undoubtedly a Norman Rockwell …”
“No. Look at these.”
Wiping off the dust, I pull out a portfolio filled with great cartoons. Cartoons of the Kaiser, cartoons of Baron von Richthofen, wearing an eyepatch. Underneath the baron is the caption A REAL MAN. Next to him is a cartoon of a deacon, long face and hanging jowls. Caption: THE FALSE FACE OF HUMILITY.
“Warren,” I say, “do you know what we have found?”
“What?”
“My old man’s Town of Thatched Rooves.”
Excitedly, I whip through a box of ancient dresses, old baby shoes, Gene Autry wristwatches (two of them; one of them was broken when I bashed Walter in the head), broken Mix-masters and a moldy Hoover vacuum cleaner. Then I hit the jackpot. A roll of green tagboard, wrapped with a blue rubber band. I slide the band off and the picture springs to life. It’s wonderful. A huge landscape of dinosaurs, winged leather birds and great ha
iry mammoths with gigantic ivory tusks. All of them sitting in charcoal slime, while up above lightning flashes, and one strange fish stares at the sun.
“Incredible. Who would have thought old Glenn?”
“Come on,” says Warren. “He probably copied it out of a National Geographic.”
“So what? Even if he did, that fish in the corner is something he added himself. I know it is. It’s got style.”
Suddenly a great change comes over me. I want to race downstairs, grab my old man. I want to tell him that his Town of Thatched Rooves is alive and well, that it no longer has to hold its breath. I want to show him that his prehistoric monsters are breathing, finished with gagging in the dank attic.
I race down the steps and leap into the living room. Mother Freda is sitting next to the window. She is reading a book by Aleister Crowley called Magick, in Theory and Practice. This week she is “researching the black magicians” for her Garden Club lecture.
“Bobby,” she says, “you should stay. I find these old books so stimulating.”
“You’re lying,” I say. “I checked the book mark. You haven’t been reading it at all. You just stare at it.”
Instantly her facade crumbles. I don’t know why I attacked her. She shakes her head and begins to cry.
“Oh God, God,” she says. “I wish I were a magician. God how I’d love to disappear. But it’s no use crying. I’ve no one to blame but myself. I could have married Ronald Hogan. He would have understood my sensitive side.”
“Speaking of that,” I say, spreading the drawings open on the floor, “just what do you make of these? Aren’t they terrific?”
She looks at the cartoons and then the monsters. She bites her lower lip.
“Oh, those old things,” she sighs. She waves her arm like Marie Antoinette.
“What do you mean?” I scream. I can’t believe my ears. Here is living proof that Glenn existed outside of Scar magazine and oozing cysts.
“Do not scream at me,” she whines. “It’ll give me the pins and needles.”
Pins and needles. That’s her new thing. Last week it was spastic fingers, and the week before that trick elbows. (She would lay her fat arms on the kitchen table and her “bad nerves” would cause her elbows to fly up. It made her look like Red Skelton doing his sea gull routine.)
“I would never want to give you the pins and needles,” I say, “and I know that you could have married the missionary. But how can you dismiss these? Glenn drew them. I mean, they are damn good.”
Before she can answer, my old man walks through the door. Dramatic entrances are a habit of his. I am certain he waits until the most opportune moment to attack, and I feel a surge of admiration for his new style.
He is carrying a shopping bag, and some celery is sticking above his forehead. I suddenly picture him as some great, blossoming vegetable. He will lie down and Mother Freda will grate him up, cover him with her blue cheese.
“Dad,” I say, “I found the Town … I mean the cartoons. They are great, really.”
“Celery,” my old man says. “This goddamned celery. It tried to leap out of the bag all the way home. And if I pressed it to my face to keep the son of a bitch in the bag, then it tickled me. They get you any way you look, Freda. You turn left—whammmm. You turn right—mash. Any way at all. What’s this?”
He has finally noticed the cartoons spread out in front of him.
“Great,” I say. “Would you show me how to draw?”
“The last person I showed how to paint was her,” he says.
He points at Freda. Instantly she is upon him.
“That’s it,” she says, “call me ‘her.’ I don’t mind. It’s quite all right. Old ‘her’ will do the dishes. Old ‘her’ will sit up all night when you have the measles. I don’t mind. Really. Here, you want to come over here and laugh at me. Why don’t you? Old ‘her’ wouldn’t mind.”
“Fucking celery,” says my old man. It’s drooping out of the bag and he is propping it with his chin. Finally, he drops the entire bag of groceries on the rug.
Freda screams. “That’s it. God, that’s just what old ‘her’ wants. You dumb bastard.”
She is hopping off her chair, bounding around my father, who is laughing and waving the celery in her eyes.
“See how it tickles,” he yells. “See?”
Her blue chemise is swirling in the air. Her ringlets are springing off her head and she is flailing her arms at my father like a flabby windmill. He tickles her face, again and again. She lunges after him now, and he leaps back and steps on the Kaiser. They are locked in battle above me and I am trying to gather up the dinosaurs but it’s too late. Her high heels catch the fish on the sun and rip open his intestines. The red rug shows through. I know it’s his blood.
“You bastard,” she screams as they whirl around the room. “Gimme that celery now. Gimme it.”
I grab the drawings again, but Freda’s heel catches the corner of a paper and rips it to shreds. She reaches down and pulls them out of my hand, puts them in her mouth and chews wildly. My old man picks up the Dinty Moore Beef Stew and hurls it at her. And I am screaming then, Wait a minute, wait, save the cartoons, don’t eat them, Freda, don’t eat the Town, wait, wait, will you just wait a goddamned minute and stop stop stop stop stop. I mean don’t, no. Will you look at those cartoons?
VIII.
The Hangy Wangy
Bent beneath neon. I am with Kirk and Walter. We have taken to hanging out at the shopping center. We watch each other’s acne, twice as red and lumpy inside this purple glare. With us is fat Baba Looie. Later on he will choke to death on a submarine sandwich, and most people will be delighted. But now he is our hero. Among the three of us, Kirk is Baba’s personal favorite. Walter is feared and disliked because he looks like a baby professor. I am too nervous. Only Kirk has won the fat heart of Baba.
Now Baba slouches in front of Read’s Drug Store, his big hands running through his greasy scalp, his cigarette drooping to his button-down shirt. His stomach rolls over his s-t-r-e-t-c-h belt and his chinos are a crumpled mass (crumpled from battles, I am certain. I get hard-ons dreaming of battles, Baba beside me, chains in Polack faces, myself in shining shopping cart, Baba wheeling me through downtown Baltimore, both of us carrying underground bombs, dealing death and destruction to everything in our path. Some nights I dream of Baba and myself killing Kirk, dragging him through dark places, his organs spread over the macadam like a run-over dog’s. Great guilt comes over me for this dream, and I spend days being Kirk’s devoted friend to make up for it).
We are waiting for Baba to do the Hangy Wangy. It is an event and Kirk, by laughing with Baba and cutting a riff about where we should put old people, has convinced him that we are worthy of witnessing Baba’s art. (And a good riff it was too. Listen to Kirk’s voice filling up the great hole that is Baba’s ego: “I’ll tell you one thing, Baba. Man, we got to get rid of them old people. We got to do ‘em. And I got just the plan. We take all the old people and throw them in the Grand Canyon. That’s right, just throw them in there. Get a bunch of young cats with whips and things. Move it along, old people. Keep it going. Just pushing whole long lines of ‘em in the Grand Canyon. You dig it? Then, when we got ‘em all in there, we get you to come over ‘em in a Sopwith Camel, and bomb ‘em with grandfather’s clocks, old butter churns, wine-stained piano stools, stuff you copped from their houses. [Baba loves that. He begins his slow lizard smile and deep throaty laugh. We all join him.] So, dig, once we weight those old mothers down with all that stuff, you can shoot gas in on ‘em. That’s right, gas. Just shoot it right in and that’s the end of those old cocksuckers, pronto….”) Baba is nearly falling off his shoppers’ bench over this, and the rest of us lean back with him. When he puts his arm around Kirk, I feel great pangs of jealousy.
But such small emotions die quickly in the grandeur of the Hangy Wangy. Baba stands below the aluminum roof, waiting for the last group of shoppers to go to their cars. Then, with one mi
ghty effort, he hawks mouth saliva onto the ceiling.
It is a great dripping loogie, one that looks very much like a Chesapeake Bay oyster. We watch it hanging there, slowly starting to come down, and then like a Duncan Yo-Yo walking the dog, it springs back to its base. Kirk is beside himself with glee. Walter and I lean confidently, content to be second lieutenants in Baba’s army. Down and up, down and up … An old man with a veiny nose and ragamuffin coat comes under it but escapes. Two businessmen, fitting recipients, leer at us but fate has dealt the hanger to someone else.
Finally it happens. A mother comes out of Read’s with her small son. They stand (oh great joy) beneath the swaying spittle, the child eagerly holding out his hand to receive his model Kitty Hawk. Splattttt—the full force of the spittle lands on their outstretched arms. We scream. We howl (keeping one eye on Baba; will he notice us, will he fully appreciate our loyalty?). Kirk is slamming himself against the drugstore windows. Walter is hammering a trash can. I am rolling on the warm cement, laughing, crying. The woman is screaming at us, trying desperately to find a handkerchief. The spittle has taken on a life of its own, growing down both their arms. It’s too much. It’s beautiful. The Hangy Wangy.
IX.
Heart to Heart
Walter and I go to the pipe. I sit on top of the pipe and hang my legs over. Walter slides down the muddy bank and flips rocks into the stream.
“What did you get out of the Hangy Wangy?” I ask.
“A few giggles.”
I hate answers like that. Typical of girls who will later become telephone operators.
He is shaking his pear-shaped head and rubbing his stomach. The sun is glinting off the steel rims of his glasses.
“You know, Walter,” I say, “you always rub your stomach when you’re lying.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”