The winter before this youth met the girl with the honey-colored hair, there came to him one night a question that he had never before posed himself, one that he had, perhaps consciously, never even formulated, or, to be more precise, refused to formulate: Why did Orville, an old, gray-haired man with brown-stained teeth and yellow fingers, buy and keep every issue of Beauty Parade? As soon as this question “arranged” itself, let’s say, in his head, his face grew hot and red. He and Orville, Orville and he and the women. The women are theirs, they shared them that entire summer of his sixteenth year. He and Orville.
Orville was a color lithographer and worked for the Journal-American.
Jackie owned a service station, Jack’s Texaco. His best mechanic, Andy, had a sister who worked as a nurse’s aide in the Caledonia Hospital in Brooklyn.
Linda! Louise! Candy!
Linda! Louise! Candy!
Linda! Louise! Candy!
Music! Music! Music!
Again! Again! Again!
“My devotion, dear ladies, is endless and deep as the ocean.”
The black force of Eros
BUT WHAT OF THE WOMEN IN BEAUTY PARADE? They have been somewhat carelessly, if rhetorically described as “big luscious women, all rich curves and swelling flesh pushing out of the tight, astonishingly abbreviated costumes” of a kind that no woman, inhabitant of the mundane world, would ever wear or even consider wearing. But the youth whose eyes have been bedazzled by the precise and overt lewdness of these erotic icons will not believe this. Let’s say that he can’t afford to believe it, read that as you will. There, lying on the daybed in the corner of the musty, stiflingly hot Lang porch, is the August 1944 issue, in which six of these stupendously free and arrogantly sexual women pose in quintessential lasciviousness. They are not wholly free, though, for their status as wives, lovers, mothers, daughters, friends, or whores, their very existence, is dependent upon the narrative skills of the foolish adolescent boy who drives them and himself hither and yon in his adoring imagination. His body grows hot and dry as he thinks of them, one at a time, waiting for his attentions, in the impossible gleam of their satin, the immaculate crispness of their lace.
They are all there, Mary Marshall, Dolores Salvati, Georgene Rydstrom, Charlotte Ryan, Nancy Ippolito, Terri O’Neill: minions and bacchantes, servants of Aphrodite and Dionysos, slaves to the black force of Eros, devotees of earthy, occulted mysteries. They order that which they desire to be done to them by their acolytes, their groveling husbands and lovers and trembling fools. They are pleased to have this power, although they are not aware of its effect on the boy who, though its creator, is obedient before it. Their not knowing is very much the same as not caring, the aristocratic aloofness of the hierophants who keep secret the sacred mysteries. They will live forever, at the behest of the dark gods, their incarnations will be endless, unceasing. Mary, Dolores, Georgene, Charlotte, Nancy, Terri.
For three months of the year, Apollo left his temple at Delphi, and his place was taken by Dionysos.
It is, surely, ludicrous to think of this stupefied boy, in 1944, as venerator of the god, but in the slow, burning days of that wartime summer, he worshiped, as it was given him to worship, as best he could. It may be that the god noticed and was pleased.
Drunk, with a half-smile, his hair bound up with aromatic grasses, a “young boy loggy with vine-must.” And the burning, orange-colored sky.
Mechanics of the dream world
IN THE STRANGELY UNBALANCED YET PER fect mechanics of the dream world, he’s stroking the girl’s breasts through the smooth material of a blouse or dress, while she licks a Charlotte Russe which he holds rather carelessly. Then he’s inside of her, but with no appreciable change in their positions, and he is mildly surprised to find that she’s Ruth, after all. Her young breasts fall easily out of her creamy-white, frothy slip. He smiles at her serious face, which seems to be receding into the suddenly dim room, and he realizes that she doesn’t know who he is. She’s sweet and kind, though, and her mouth is wet and cool and sweet, filled, as it is, with whipped cream. He decides that he’s probably going to have an orgasm in a bed that he seems to be lying in, and as he begins to ejaculate, she waves and walks down 14th Street, toward S. Klein’s. He wakes up, more or less, and begins to substitute for her face the face of somebody else, he begins, that is, to arrange the dream. Slowly, it is compromised and written, that is, of course, faked.
In “The Dream-Work,” Freud says, quite clearly, that a dream is a picture puzzle, a rebus, and that the dream contents’ hieroglyphics, or symbols, must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts. It is, then, incorrect to read the symbols as to their values as pictures. A rebus, that is, may not be judged as an artistic composition.
It has been smugly fashionable and acceptable for some years now to denigrate Freud as a kind of bourgeois homophobic misogynistic charlatan, wholly insensitive to the needs of This, and wholly dishonest in his writings on That. Many of those who so denigrate him have advanced degrees from excellent universities, at which latter they also teach, drive, for, doubtlessly, some intellectual reason, expensive cars, have friends with whom they—you’ll pardon the expression—“play tennis”—and care not a whit for conventional thought. They are, for the most part, a credit to American education. At last count, they numbered 47,109. They dress very badly and read third-rate fiction.
In the thirties and early forties in New York, there was a Charlotte Russe “season,” during which period (it was, I believe, in late spring) Charlotte Russe purveyors rented empty stores to sell their delectable confection. They remained for, perhaps, two or three weeks, then they would disappear until the following year. A mysterious hieroglyphic, or symbol. For, perhaps, the Depression.
The dreamer sometimes says, with little attention paid to accuracy, “My dreams are getting better all the time.”
[“Creamy-white, frothy slip” is, if you’ll permit me, somewhat tired, yet I see how it “rhymes” with the Charlotte Russe motif.
“Uh-huh.”]
Poor banished children of Eve
THE OLD MAN LIGHTS A CIGARETTE AND walks into the elevator and right out its rear wall into the 69th Street ferry waiting room. He’s not the man he thinks he is, though, but Buddy Mazzolini, The Boy Bus Driver, who was, at one time, the drunken cop who shot the dog on the corner outside Flynn’s Bar and Grill. Somebody across the street tells him to go fuck his mother and his face turns bright blue and then black and he disappears. He drives down Ocean Parkway. Others stare at the photographs that the bus driver displays because it is quite clear that they think that these heartbreaking images will substitute for or ameliorate their ignorance. They wish the world to be kind to them, to pardon them their sins, their tattered pasts. Look at the lost people in the pictures! Look! Young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful; young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful; young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful. Sweet Mother of God!
Ghosts.
Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us; and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
Shoes rain of the cops
THE OLD MAN ABRUPTLY SITS DOWN ON A kitchen chair in the sunlight glaring through the window. He yields, gratefully, to the painful nausea that is attacking him and throws up black blood on his shoes and the shiny linoleum of the floor. Well, this is probably serious, he thinks. When his daughter comes into the kitchen, her face shocked pale and tight with disgust and fear, he smiles through his dirty lips, grotesquely, he knows, and prepares to tell her not to worry, she just probably has to probably call the doctor. He suspects that he, indeed, looks grotesque, smiling, but thinks that a somber face will only frighten her the more. He has the words now, and speaks them: “unspectacular
explosion him, to be made smoking next, to name to name before.” His daughter clutches one of her hands with the other, and says oh Jesus Mary and Joseph Poppa, oh Jesus Mary and Joseph. Her father waves a hand nonchalantly and adds, “overpass Luckies shoes rain of the cops, like into a gawm ticket.” He pitches off the chair and lands on the floor, his face in the slick of bloody vomit. You, you, you and that goddamned rotgut whiskey, she shouts at him. She kneels and touches his hair. She was a very beautiful girl once.
To call upon Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to assist one in time of trouble was a common enough habit among many Irish Catholics in New York in the early years of the century. It may be still, but that seems doubtful.
Linoleum is now rarely used as kitchen flooring, and has, for that matter, the look of poverty, so much so that even the poor are averse to it. Oddly, its aura of poverty increases with its newness. And yet, it is not quite so louche as oilcloth, which is the absolute and incontrovertible sign of indigence, and which not even the vapid dictates of junk decoration can rescue.
That terrible events should occur on sunny, warm, and pleasant days seems a sour irony, and may well account for the quiet madness and despair, the frenzy and sudden violence, that are virtually inseparable from life in California.
Beauty is but a flowre,
Which wrinckles will devoure,
Tumbles book pencil blare,
Chow mein equities, hair…
Presidential Greetings
UTOPIAN GAMBLING SYSTEMS DEPEND ON the idea of the investment of a little money so as to make a lot of money. Such schemes are, uncharitably speaking, self-constructed cons. Of course, there are schemes that call for the investment of a lot of money to make more money, which systems work more often. These are not true, or, if you will, honest schemes, but are patterned on the loathsome practices of bankers, stockbrokers, commodities traders, venture capitalists, and other money pimps, devotees of the sure thing. Gambling, of whatever kind, is sometimes used as a metaphor for life, but that’s not my fault, and it is certainly not the fault of gamblers, who never think metaphorically: a dollar is a dollar, a flush a flush, a boat race is always a boat race. Likewise, a chump is, first and foremost, a chump.
Fat Harry would take the young man to a diner on President Street and either pull out a fat sheaf of bills from a napkin that the waiter placed on the table, or put a fat sheaf of bills into a napkin, and place this at the edge of the table. In the latter case, when the waiter returned to the table with water and menus, he would pick up the cash-thick napkin, remark that it was dirty, and remove it in favor of a different napkin. When Fat Harry won, he would remark that it was a nice day, a hell of a day, and if he lost, he’d note, somberly, that the horseplayer had not been fucking born who could fucking beat the fucking nags. As he and the young man left, Fat Harry would toss a copy of the Daily Mirror on the counter, in whose racing pages he had marked his selections for the day. He disdained to play the horses touted by the comic strip, Joe and Asbestos, because of what he thought of as its ignoble practice of regularly recommending bets to place or show. This struck Harry as bush, and he would bet place and show only as part of an across-the-board wager. “You have got to have faith in the horse,” Harry would say. He also told the youth that Ken Kling, the creator of the strip, was a millionaire who had never put a nickel on a horse. The lesson was clear.
Fat Harry, a painting foreman for Aquatic Ship Scaling, Inc., fell into the water one day at the Navy Yard, and was crushed to death between the hull of the freighter, John H. Derrenbacher, and the pier. A Norwegian scaler, half-drunk on his scaffold in the steamy sunlight, heard his cries and looked down to see him, thrashing in the oily water, just as the ship was heaved up on a swell and rode into the pilings. There was nothing that the scaler could do, but for a moment he thought that Harry would somehow—what?—avoid the ship? But he more or less exploded in a red surge of blood. All but one of his bets lost that day. Presidential Greetings, in the third at Santa Anita, paid 3.24 to show.
Aquatic Ship Scaling won a Navy “E” that year.
One of the napkins that occasionally turned up at the table in the diner had the letter “D” embroidered, in blue, on one of its corners. The napkin could not have represented the diner, which was named, somewhat poetically, the Rondelle.
“Maybe it stood for Dolores.”
High priestess of the Navy Blue Jumper, temptress of the White Cotton Blouse, goddess of Black Lace Underwear.
While it is true that Ken Kling was a millionaire, it is also true that he played the horses, despite Fat Harry’s belief. That does not mean, however, that he was a horseplayer, that is, the great steeds and contests of the royal oval did not possess him, body and soul.
[It might be worth noting that one day, Fat Harry told the young man that his youngest son, Ralphie, who was studying accounting at Fordham, was engaged to a nice girl who, Harry was pretty sure, used to live on his block. He was absurdly relieved to learn that the girl was Charlotte Ryan.]
Erratum
The hulls of ships of the considerable tonnage of the freighter, John H. Derrenbacher, are customarily repaired, scaled, and painted in dry dock; so that the death of Fat Harry, in the manner here described, is highly improbable.
—Ed.
This is the life
HE RINGS THE BELL AND SHE OPENS THE DOOR. This is not her family’s apartment, but somebody’s apartment, one of remarkably opportune availability. Somebody has gone away to Miami or someplace. Without further ado, she makes him a drink, Cutty Sark on the rocks, and they sit on the couch. She’s a little drunk, or so he thinks. As soon as he kisses her, she takes off her cardigan and kisses him back. She looks curiously formal in her plain white brassiere and demure plaid skirt. There’s a grand piano in the enormous living room, and it has the effect of placing him outside this event, if that’s what it is. He touches her breasts tentatively, and she stands up and leads him into the bedroom. She sits against the headboard of the king-size bed, propped against pillows. This is the life. She tells him not to look at her, then pulls her skirt and half-slip up to her hips, and opens her thighs a little. She still has her penny loafers on. He sees that she still has her panties on, too, plain white cotton. He takes a condom, in utter despair, out of his pocket, and tears the foil wrapper open. Semper paratus. What is he supposed to do now? He lies, awkwardly, on top of her, cradled in her arms, straddling one of her thighs, the condom between thumb and forefinger. He has no idea if he should open his pants, but he does manage to touch her crotch with the back of his hand. She says that maybe they ought to go and have coffee, Ellen will be home soon. Actually, she says that she’s afraid that Ellen will be home soon. He doesn’t know who Ellen is. Home? What about Miami? But he says, OK, sure, Ellen. What a suave customer he is. Do you want to touch me again, there, touch me there? she says. Yes, he says, blushing. He sees that she’s sitting on a bath towel, another sad optimist.
“Without further ado,” eh? He turns a nice phrase, useless towel and all.
The Grand Piano is yet another beautiful novel unknown to the barbarians who run things, and just as well. There are many things the existence of which should be kept hidden, lest they be soiled and cheapened.
The plaid skirt, the grand piano, the towel on the bed, etc., etc., are motifs, yes, but are they bound motifs?
The apartment was on Cortelyou Road.
The grand piano may figure large in subsequent tales, like a submerged bicycle, a loaded rifle on the wall, a container of yogurt. Then again, it may just be a touch of the authentic, a detail to do something or other. You know what I mean, right?
Ellen, years later, said that she entered her family’s apartment at about midnight to find her friend and some “dumb-looking guy” playing Monopoly.
The girl’s name was Linda, a name, incidentally, that one doesn’t hear much anymore.
The salt of the earth
THE GREEK, IN HIS RENTED WHITE DINNER jacket and black tuxedo trousers, was throwing
up on himself in front of the Shore Road Casino. Fat George had lost, somewhat surrealistically, half his tie and was sitting in a garbage can accompanied by a quart bottle of Rheingold, the pride of New York. Sal was attempting, in the best of humor, to persuade the short-order cook in the Royal to scramble him three eggs for the price of two, and Rocco waited outside, admiring his reflection in the plate-glass window. Nothing, but nothing, like a pearl-gray fedora! The Lion’s Den was jammed with what Donnie called “revelers,” and Whitey, in the spirit of revelry, was fucking Chickie in the telephone booth. In another telephone booth, a few doors away, Bromo Eddie was making random calls with the aid of a safety pin as substitute for legal tender, employing a method known and used by many citizens, though heartily condemned by Ma Bell: “It raises the costs for all, la-da, it raises the co-oosts for alll!”—of course it does! Carmine felt that Whitey shouldn’t be doing what he was doing, people had to use that goddamn phone booth, for Christ sake. What if somebody needed an ambulance, too? Had he no home? Couldn’t he fuck Chickie in the park under some bush or some damn plant? Donnie noted Carmine’s objections in a spiral notebook on whose cover he had written, “Local Color.” The other Sal was studying a menu in the diner, although Anna, his companion for the evening, was adamant about ordering the Cheeseburger à la Deluxe, to wit: “I am not eating any fucking soup, Sally!” Red punched Mickey just for the hell of it and then arrogantly appropriated his beer. The police were called by a citizen fed up with something or other noise or some girl who was being bothered or too loud and the neighborhood was gone to the dogs. And fuck the cops too! “Drunken boat,” he said. And then again, “drunken boat.” The bars closed at four, and at least thirty revelers sat in the breathless park with cardboard containers of beer until seven-thirty, then walked back to the Lion’s Den and waited for the doors to open, although the joint really had but one door. “Poetic license,” he said. “He who catches the early bird, catches the early bird,” Donnie said. “It’s the same as a drunk’s coat,” Fat George said. He smelled, of course, but not too badly, of garbage. Yet his chums reasoned well that a little garbage never hurt a Greek olive peddler. That was the God’s honest truth, and so they swore on their mothers! Cheech and Nickie stood at the saloon door and watched the girls on their way to the subway and work, work, work! Idle pleasures, indeed. Mary passed and told Nickie that he was a bum. Dolores passed and told Cheech that he was a disgraceful bum. Georgene passed and told Nickie that he ought to be ashamed of himself, to look at himself at eight o’clock in the morning. There was no chance that he’d ever pass the police test! They were all impossibly beautiful in their high heels and pleated skirts. Not for the likes of “you bums,” Donnie yelled from the end of the bar. Tommy Azzerini passed and told Nickie and Cheech that they talked like a coupla guys with paper assholes, although they had not addressed him. Nickie offered to knock him on his ass and Tommy said, in effect, oh, buy me a beer, for Christ sake, you guinea bastard. Pat exited his apartment building, pale, shaking, and, just an inch or so removed from a fine bout with the horrors, carefully made his way to Carroll’s for a double Three Feathers and a large beer chaser; ahead lay another day of honest labor for the youthful Irish American. The salt of the earth, the coat of the drunk, the boat of the revelers, the indisposed and lazy, the insulted and injured, the hurt, the forgotten, the salt in your stew. The sail in your dreamboat. The Greek arrived, smelling of vomit, looking, as he drolly put it, for “the party.” Many were called, oh many, and none were chosen. Pat sat back in the cab as it made its way to Joralemon Street and his, as he liked to put it, “place of business,” and amused the cabbie mightily by unsuccessfully attempting to touch the trembling flames of many matches to his cigarette. Cabbies take their laughs where they can get them, disgraceful bums that some of them are. Others, however, are the salt of the earth, good family men, the cream in your coffee, and were or will be ready to serve their country when called. “Not as fucking asshole officers, though,” Fat George opined.
Little Casino Page 4