Now that you must appreciate, the beauty of being four years old, or five, and squirting another adult with the complexity of your father—I mean, he even thought it up—can you picture the beauty of it? Great. I’m glad you can. Because as I got older, there were still other tricks. The simplest is one I’m sure you’ve seen elsewhere, but to a child who had never seen it, it was magnificent. What was the gimmick? You’d solder a quarter really well onto a nail. And you’d hammer the quarter into the wooden countertop, in an out-of-the-way place, kind of away from your view. And then on a busy day you’d make believe that you were occupied elsewhere, and you’d wait to see who would try to steal the quarter. It was a beautiful thing to see the hand reach out, the “thief” waiting for you not to look. As he’d grab the quarter and try to pull it away, it would stick to the counter, and the look on his face—the look of how he was caught; his hand caught in a bear trap.
Another of our games was the tapping trick, which carried me from the age of six to about thirteen, fourteen. This must have been developed in a carnival somewhere, because it was somewhat of a barker’s cane that was used, although if you didn’t have a cane, a yardstick could substitute, or even a small stick. It was simple. Here was how we’d set it up: A man would be at my father’s counter bargaining with him, or at someone else’s counter, and you’d go up behind in the crowd. Of course, you wouldn’t give away your trick by looking down; it had been perfected. You’d place the cane just above his toes, over his shoes. And just as he’d reach in his pocket to pull out a coin, to pay for merchandise, you’d give him a good tap right on the toe just as the coins came out. That’s it. The guy was finished. He’d look down. You’d pull the cane away and he’d start looking down. He’d search the floor; he was sure he’d dropped the coin because it hit his foot. He’d start in, he’d say, “Look, mister, I dropped a coin,” and then of course the other guy would say, “You didn’t drop nothin’. I’m tellin’ ya, ya didn’t drop. Stop botherin’ me, you’re making it up.” And this guy would search and search and he wouldn’t go away; for fifteen minutes he’d be looking on the floor for a coin that never existed.
Now, if that doesn’t turn you on, we had a better method. Actually, the tapping game was fantastic, because you’d find people have very different sensitivities. I mean, there were times when I was hitting people on the feet with a yardstick—you’d start with your tap light; no response. You’d tap a little again; no response. Again, again; no response! Till you’re actually pounding on the guy’s foot with a stick. No response. To vitalize the sensitivities of these dull-footed individuals, another variety of the tapping game was originated. This was the jingling game. You would simply take a coin and drill a hole in it. Then you’d cut rubber bands and tie them together so they made a string, and you’d tie the rubber band string through the hole in the coin, and you’d wrap one end around your finger. And then while the man dug for a coin in his pocket, as he was paying, you would throw the coin in your hand out onto the wooden floor so it jingled, and it would bounce right back, really fast, faster than the eye, almost, and the man would look down, right? He was sure he dropped the coin. And those guys were the worst. When you pulled that trick, that was the final one, because you would get them looking for an hour. They would search through the dust and the grime underneath the counter for the coin they were sure they dropped; a coin they would never find.
A few other details come to me regarding the dear old market. In particular, I remember, in the back of the store, there were two of those dimwitted signs bearing particularly cute American phrases. One was to the effect, “We grow up too soon old and too late smart.” It took me years to figure that out; by the time I’d figured it out, it was too late to do anything about it, I was too old. And the other one was from the class of sayings, like, “Old golfers don’t die, they just lose their balls.” But this one in particular struck me every day as I went to the bathroom downstairs in that dingy, dark, depressing, stinking bathroom that I was afraid to pee in. It stank, it had a dim 20-watt yellow electric bulb, it was cold. And inside this horrible bathroom, atop this stinking urinal, inside this freezing, cold Dickensian basement craphouse, there was one of those “old golfers lose their balls” signs, and this one said in pseudo-Yiddish script, “Please piss in the bowl.” Of course it took me years to understand, (a) that it wasn’t in Yiddish, and (b) what it said, that it really just said, “Please piss in the bowl.” For years, I thought it was some kind of religious sign to do with peeing; you know, from the Old World, like from the Torah. Well, what can a kid know? SO, it took me years to figure that one out.
Now I’m jumping ahead to years later. My father has had his first heart attack and it’s a great trauma to the family, because he was this great strong man, yelling, telling everybody what to do and he was usually right. Finally, the patriarch of the family was laying under oxygen. Number One Son, ripped from college, has to take over getting the family income. So I would open up my father’s antiques market every morning, and try to do a little business. And I didn’t do too badly, I thought; I brought home a few—five, six hundred—bucks a week, gross income; who knows what it netted? Nevertheless, there was a little cash flow coming into the house. You guessed it. It wasn’t good enough for the old man. Under oxygen, he gets my report: “How’s business?”—“Not bad. Moe came in, he took his lamps.” “What: What lamps? Don’t let any of those sonsabitches bullshit you. They’ll come in and they’ll tell you, ‘how’s Benny,’ and this and that, and they’ll look to rob a pair of candelabra on ya that cost me seven fifty.” All right, that’s not good enough. He’s laying under oxygen there, a week in the tent, he remembers, he gets a bug in his head. In front of the antiques, he sold old clothes—to always be safe; he had it all figured out. In front he sold used clothes, a rusty razor blade, an old knife, an old fork that he bought at an auction. He took in ten cents, fifteen. He always said it made lunch money; if the antiques didn’t sell, he’d make money from the junk in the front. As you progressed back, the merchandise became more expensive till finally at the top tier was the expensive stuff. So under oxygen he remembered his lot of clothes. He asked me, “How are the clothes going?” Who remembered clothes? To me it was a bunch of rags. We’d throw the boxes out and let the bums go through it. He said, “What about the sweater?” I said, “What sweater?”—“The ski sweater, the good black sweater, the Austrian sweater.” “I don’t know about no sweater,” I said. “I sold it to someone for about two bits, twenty-five.” That did it. In his oxygen, they almost had to come in and give him a sedative. That his stupid son running the family show sold a sweater worth at least three dollars for a quarter. This was all that was on his mind.
Now, Benny’s beautiful paranoia was a reflection of his image of the world, which was based largely on his many years working among the cream of society of the Lower East Side of New York. Take the way he entered his stand in the market. He backed into it. I didn’t know from backing in, walking in forwards, whether to go it sideways. There was a little corridor entering his booth, and then in front was the merchandise. He’d always warn me, “You’ll always walk in backwards. Never take your eyes off them. You take your eyes off them for a second, they’ll hit ya like a hawk.” He’d say, “They’ll look ya right in the eye, they’ll talk to ya, and they’d wait for ya to blink, and the minute ya blink or ya sneeze, boom! Ya lost somethin’ and you’d never know it.” So, as you would guess, he figured out in the oxygen tent that someone clipped an Austrian ski sweater fr
om me because I failed to back into the stand; that is, I didn’t walk in backwards at work. At college you had to do that a great deal, walk backwards into your seat. Can you imagine that? It’s pretty crazy. What a reality. I mean, how was I supposed to have known to walk in backwards? But in his mind, he probably thought professors backed slowly into their rooms, never taking their eyes off the students for fear that some philosophical wizard would steal a thought, you know what I mean?
Another guy pops to mind. This was the freak, the one-titted man. His name was Harry the Freak. Harry started out as a freak in Coney Island. Just a regular barnyard freak. And his big attraction was that he had one tit. Big deal. He billed himself as “Half Man–Half Woman.” As years went on, he became fairly well off. He became a capitalist freak, and he opened up his own sideshow in Coney Island. He employed and exploited his freak brothers and sisters, the microcephalics, the macrocephalics, the midgets, you know, the standard dwarf that would say a little thing with his voice and scare the kids, “blah, blah, blah,” you know. And the bearded lady, too. But Harry’s game was running the freak show, and he made a lot of money—and where would he spend it? This distorted, twisted man would buy beautiful antiques; that was his counterbalance. And he’d spend virtually all his money on such merchandise. He lived in Long Beach, in a little Godfather-like house. It was strange. From the outside it was a regular house in Long Beach. You’d knock on the door—I remember I went a few times with my father to make deliveries of, oh, a bronze figure of something, or a grandfather clock—and the door would open, but never all the way, only just a crack through which you would come in sideways, schlepping the thing in with you. And there it was: from floor to wall to ceiling and back again, with no apparent order, merely a storage house of antiques. No order, no rhyme, no reason to the display; as he got them, he dragged them in, found a place for them, and stuck them there on the floor, maybe moving a few things around. And this was the world he lived in. He treated his antiques just as if they were mere objects of art. So in a sense he had a purer vision of what these things were. He didn’t worship them, give them a pedestal or a special place; he merely liked associating with them, and treated them as such, as mere objects. SO you might say that Harry the Freak was really an antiques chauvinist.
In the beginning, the 1940s, the men at the market earned their living primarily by buying merchandise that had been left in the subways, unclaimed merchandise, unclaimed steamer trunks and the like. I was told that in those days, if a trunk was unclaimed it was sealed at the wharf and then put up at auction, unopened. Which means in the good old days of the thirties and forties, you used to bid on the trunk according to what the trunk looked like in value on the outside. If it was an expensive leather with brass fittings, you bid accordingly. You could never tell what was going to be inside. But the men liked playing the game. It was interesting to them because it was taking a chance. They’d bid maybe seven dollars for a good trunk; four or five dollars for a poor-looking one. And they’d buy six, seven, eight trunks at auction, take a little truck, and haul them into the market, usually late at night. As they proceeded to open the trunks up, everyone who went to the auction, they’d have a kind of free-for-all, comparing who did better in the game of chance.
One trunk story in particular sticks in my mind. One trunk had belonged to a nun. They could tell it was a nun’s trunk because of the photographs inside. They had also found her habits in there—a few old nun’s habits and articles indicating she was also a nurse.
As they were rummaging through, looking for a few valuable candlesticks or whatnot to put up for sale and get back their seven bucks profit, they found a strange object at the bottom wrapped up in muslin. Being inquisitive sorts, they proceeded to unfurl the muslin package. What would be at the heart of this onion-like skin but an embryo. A human embryo, all wrapped up neatly in a nun’s trunk.
TWELVE
Hegira from New York
My first hegira from New York was a bus ride to Miami.
The dining highlights I recall were the chicken bones in a greasy bag, thrown under the seat by an old lady going to her retirement; and chicken again, this time the “Southern Fried” variety at a bus rest-stop in the middle of an Atlanta winter night. I always loved fried chicken as a boy, and this was really going to be a treat. To gorge on greasy chicken thighs and breasts in the heart of Dixie, where I had heard they had first perfected the recipe.
The only factor limiting my enthusiasm was the time. I was asleep like Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman’s grizzled drifter in Midnight Cowboy) on his death ride, sweaty and in a fit of sorts, when the jouncing Greyhound abruptly stopped. The lights were flashed on. “Rest Stop, everybody out,” shouted the bus driver, and he came down the aisle prodding each and every one of us, even the old chicken-bone lady, reminding me of the cartoon cop of the past who cracks his billy across the soles of the sleeping park bum.
Maybe he got a kickback from the rest-stop owner, I really don’t know, but everyone on that bus was hounded into that eatery, the doors to our carriage locked; there was no escaping it. I would have Southern fried chicken, even though I was slightly nauseous beneath that three A.M. Georgian night sky with stars as sharp as fractured mollusks in a barrel.
It was OK, that’s all. Too crusty, too greasy. Of course, today I know it was probably cooked in lard, and that the saturated fat would account for my early death had I kept on with my dietary ignorance. But the slight case of indigestion I nursed all the way to Jacksonville gave me that slight something to think about, which oh so softly pushed me into the arms of Morpheus.
Miami
In those days (c. 1958), you could get a full breakfast for thirty-nine cents. Two sunny-side-up eggs, fried in butter, one slice of grease-ridden ham, two slices of white toast suffocated in butter, coffee, and juice.
I loved every bite, but have never again eaten anything like that. Now it’s one healthful (and bland) dirge after another. But I’m still alive, which is an achievement in this world. Balancing your wants against your needs without becoming homicidal or suicidal is success, though I will admit to approaching both states several times along the road.
Kerouac’s On the Road had just surfaced at Queens College. Harold, the older, fat boy in the crowd, smilingly fished it from his tentlike trench coat one rainy autumn day in Flushing. He told us younger guys, milling around between classes, that the book portrayed a wild car ride across America. Free sex, saxophones, and drugs on every page.
As they say today, it was a real “page-turner.” My first, really—unless you count that book I read when I was about eight about some guy who flew a seaplane into Arctic lakes, saving Eskimos and trappers.
Kerouac’s odyssey was not about saving others; he was on his own road of salvation, seeking drama through thrills, not yet knowing that peace within came only when the trips were over and you could sit on a balmy pier watching the gulls while thinking about where you had been and what you thought you were doing there.
Now, it is true that Tolstoy died in his eighties, covered with snow on a train station bench after setting off on one more journey. And that there is something defeatist about saying you’re through traveling while still young and healthy.
This attitude is true sacrilege in a nation obsessed with motion. But, like Kerouac, America too will learn her limits and I hope it’s before we burn out in an old armchair in front of a television, drunk and drugged, watching another one of our endless foreign “peace” missions.
But Harold’s book was just the kick I needed to unchain myself (so I thought!) from clan and caste. So during midsemester break, it was my first bus trip to Miami, followed in later seasons by a wild nonstop car ride,
eight of us packed into a fast hemi-Dodge, and later still, an army surplus DC-3 that taxied on a tail-wheel from Newark. Tilted at 45 degrees, you felt like Buck Rogers about to take off on a space adventure. Until the stewardess, not yet a “flight attendant,” distributed those box lunches that smelled of cardboard.
Other than being robbed in a fleabag hotel by a midget bellhop, who pulled some kind of trick on me by making my bankroll of eighty dollars disappear from the hotel’s safety box, nothing much exciting happened down there.
It is true I got my money back by causing a bad scene, provoking seedy Orson Welles types to slowly close in on me in a circle, only being saved at the last minute by the Dade County blue boys. They came, mind you, because the midget had called them in an attempt to intimidate this Yankee into backing off on his crazy demands. But when the six cops arrived, as I say, I was surrounded by an assortment of perfectly fine carnival geeks, and the midget suddenly discovered that my money was somehow still in that steel box.
Train Tracks Page 6