by Tyler Knox
Not to forget Sylvie, on a break from the street, sitting alone, staring into her coffee as if it were to blame for what she had become. Celia supposed she should have felt sorry for Sylvie, in the way good girls feel sorry for girls like that, but Celia was no longer a good girl and what she felt instead of pity was a kind of bitter envy. Sylvie had the most magnificent body, long legs and wide hips, pillowy breasts, all of which she showed off with the sweaters and tight wool skirts and gorgeous high heels that Celia would never ever wear. When Sylvie walked through the dining room with her tray, each man in the restaurant watched the shifts of her body with some sad longing in his eyes. That it was as available as the lemon meringue pie behind the little glass doors if you had enough change didn’t alter the way they looked at her.
“You’re such a pretty girl,” her mother had told Celia over and over. “You have the face of an angel. You’ll have the family you deserve, a family to make you whole.” This was not what she supposed her mother meant, this ragtag assortment of losers and late night hangers-on that surrounded her each night at the Automat, but this was the closest thing she now had to a family. “The boys will come running, they won’t let you slip by just because,” had said her mother. Except they had, hadn’t they, Mom? All but Gregory, who behaved as if he were doing her the greatest favor of her life, reaching down to help the disadvantaged, like they were two models in a March of Dimes poster.
Maybe Gregory actually was doing her the greatest favor and maybe she should be ever so grateful. He was basically decent and fairly upstanding and not bad-looking in a scholarly sort of way. But Gregory had no problem with indecipherable messages, he delighted in relaying to her the meaning of everything. Of course he was a graduate student in Russian history and so he knew just enough about everything to be unbearable. And of course he was a Communist, which meant his earnestness and self-importance were beyond endurance. But it was not like she had so many alternatives. And he seemed so certain of everything, which was comforting in its way because Celia was the most uncertain person she knew. Maybe his certainty was why she had stifled her doubts and let Gregory move into her little walk-up when his lease ran out.
So now she was living in sin. She laughed ruefully at that. Living in sin was what her mother called it when she spoke of the town strumpet or the widow in the next township. Oh, the image it brought to a young girl’s mind. Other girls dreamed of marriage, of children, of the family Celia’s mother so desperately wanted for her; Celia had dreamed of living in sin. Well, be careful what you wish for. Where was the canopied bed, where were the long lascivious nights, where was the secret passion that kept the world’s scorn at bay?
Living in sin, hell, it was more like living in Cleveland.
She turned to look out the window at the passing stream, a scene decidedly roguish. Sometimes she thought she stayed nights at the Automat to be apart from Gregory, and sometimes she stayed nights to feel a part of this. This was the juice in her life, not Gregory, not the job, not her pale hopes for the future, but her little table at the Automat, sitting with this strange dismal family, separated from the carnival of Times Square by a single pane of glass. It was sometimes hard to impress, even upon herself, exactly how pathetic her life had become.
Someone caught her attention in the throng outside the window. A man in brown, a handsome-faced man in sunglasses walking with a strange, jerky step. He had a ragged beard, his suit was on wrong, though how it was on wrong she was uncertain, his nails were long and unkempt, and he had a bizarre smile fixed around the cigarette in his teeth. Her immediate reaction to spotting him outside her window, just a few feet from her, was an irrational but very real fear. And her peculiar fear increased when he stopped right next to her, turned to the window, and stared inside.
She cowardly dropped her gaze to the tabletop before her. At all costs she wanted to avoid this strange man’s gaze. “Please, please,” she whispered to her coffee and still-uneaten pie, “don’t come into the Automat.” Celia loved being part of the midnight world, but only so long as she could maintain sufficient distance from its inhabitants. That was her method of approaching all of her life, the rigid defenses of the maimed.
She stirred her coffee, lifted it to her lips, felt its tepid heat upon her teeth. When she put it down again she glanced up to the window. He was gone. Relief and disappointment both all at once and she wondered to herself at why that man had given her such unease.
It was his awkwardness, his hesitance. Celia could tell in some subliminal way that the mass of instinctual acts we take for a physical presence were not, in his case, being done instinctively. Nothing was easy, nothing was natural. That was it, his raw unnaturalness, and who felt more unnatural than Celia? In that way he was a mirror into her own uneasy place in the world and she mustn’t have that. She had troubles enough, she didn’t need some lunatic in a bad brown suit pointing out to her with utter clarity her own gnawing sense of alienation. So instead of reaching out, one alien to another, she hid in her coffee cup. How brave, Celia, how wondrously courageous. She felt sick, useless. Maybe that was why she didn’t want to go home, so that even Gregory wouldn’t find her out.
She glanced up and saw the man in the brown suit suddenly inside the restaurant, his right side brushing the wall as he scurried toward the food. It was a shock to see him and she had to fight a strange revulsion. But having castigated herself before, this time she bravely refused to look away.
He reached the glass serving doors and peered inside at all the offerings, the pies, the fruit, the sandwiches, tuna, egg salad, deviled ham, olive loaf, the crocks of baked beans, the bowls of soup, the little dishes of spinach, of macaroni and cheese, of Harvard beets and carrots glazed with brown sugar. His head moved back and forth and his whole posture bent with a desire so obvious it was pitiable. When had he eaten last? He reached out a hand, caressed one of the little glass doors, grabbed hold of the chrome handle, pulled. It didn’t open. He pulled harder. It still didn’t open. He slid to another door, took hold of the handle. Then to another. He moved from one to the next, looking for a door that would open. He must be hungry and have no money. He shouldn’t be in here if he didn’t have any money. Why was he here, ruining it for everyone? Why did he insist on making everyone feel so uncomfortable?
She spun her gaze around the Automat. The politicians, the college boys, Sylvie, the comics, no one was noticing the strange man in brown. Even the cashier was more interested in her nails. It was only she whom he was making uncomfortable. Celia felt suddenly ashamed at everything she had been feeling, the revulsion, the anger, even the pity. Who the hell was she to feel any of those things for anyone else when she felt those exact same things for herself?
Almost as an act of penance she was about to stand and make her way toward him, to buy him a sandwich, when she realized he wasn’t alone. There was a smaller man in a bright green suit bustling about him. She recognized the suit immediately.
Mite, the tiny young aspiring gangster who spent his evenings at the Automat huddled over a hot tea, eyes desperate and searching, ever vigilant for a mark to hustle. Mite introduced himself to everyone new at the Automat, sat down, told an elaborate series of lies, and then asked to borrow thirty-nine cents. Always thirty-nine cents, as if the sheer specificity of the number made it hard to refuse the entreaty. He was short, thin, nervous, full of hope and despair all at once, and Celia, overwhelmed by the empathic sympathy only one loser can feel for another, had given up the thirty-nine cents more times than she could remember. Now they were close to friends.
She was shocked to see him there, in the Automat, that night. A few weeks ago he had told everyone about the big deal he was about to score. A little import-export, he had said. All he needed was some up-front cash, he had said. It was sad seeing the hunger that marked his face like a stain, a hunger that couldn’t be satisfied in that Automat with all the nickels in the world. It was that hunger that had sent him to Big Johnny Callas, who often held court in that very A
utomat, to borrow the up-front cash at the Greek’s brutal rates. And, as could only have been expected, Mite hadn’t settled up when he was supposed to. She hadn’t seen Mite for a couple of nights, she had heard he was on a bus to somewhere new, Moline, she had heard, or Fresno, away. She’d been glad he had escaped.
But now here he was, stunningly present, accompanying the strange man in brown. And now here he was leading the man by the elbow, bringing the man across the floor, past the politicians, past Tab and the comics, right smack to her table.
“Yo, Celia,” said Mite. “This is my new friend, Jerry. You mind if we sits here with you?”
Celia kept her eyes off the strange man, always obedient to her mother’s order not to stare whenever a strange or deformed person crossed her path, much as others fought not to stare at her. She would have liked to say no, would have liked nothing better than to be left alone that night to peer at Mite and the stranger from afar, but Mite just then seemed so anxious to please, so desperate almost, that her heart cracked for him.
“What are you still doing here, Mite?” she said. “I heard you were already on a bus out.”
“You heard wrong, then, didn’t you?”
“Big Johnny has been telling everyone about his plans for you. They’re not very pretty.”
“Let him talk.” His nonchalance died quickly and he peered out at her warily. “What plans exactly?”
“Something to do with the spleen. You know where the spleen is, Mite?”
“Isn’t that in New Jersey somewheres?”
“It’s behind your liver. Big Johnny says he intends to remove it.”
Mite sucked in a breath and then shrugged. “Well, the hell with him, excuse my Polish. He wants that spleen thing he can have it, I gots no need for it no more.”
“Mite, you have to go. It’s too dangerous for you here. Do you need money, bus fare?”
“Nah, I decided to maybe stick around a bit. It’s a free country, ain’t it? Believe it or not, things is looking up for me. Thanks to my friend Jerry, things is looking way up. So can my pal park hisself here while I grabs us some grub?”
“Sure, I suppose,” she said. “Any friend of yours…”
Mite pulled a chair from the table. “Sit down, palsy. I’ll take care your dinner. Keep an eye on him, Celia, won’t you, whilst I load up? Anything you want?”
“No thank you, Mite. I’m fine.”
Mite winked and then was off to the wall of food.
She watched him go before turning to the man in the brown suit, who was still standing.
“Sit, please, Mr….”
He kept standing until she gestured at the seat Mite had pulled out for him and finally he sat.
The strange pull of revulsion she felt when she spied him outside the window, and then by the wall of food, strengthened in proximity. He had a peculiar smell, strong and furry, less the deep neglected tones of normal body odor, more the higher-pitched animal musk that arose with its own not-so-hidden message from the carnivora house at the zoo. His beard was dark, his hair, beneath his hat, long and greasy. There was something disconcertingly real about him, as if the rough edges of existence, normally smoothed by societal conventions or blurred by the plate of glass through which she viewed the world, were still jagged and sharp on him. He sat there in his dark glasses, unmoving, as if he were blind, but at the same time it seemed as if he were staring at her with a brutal intensity. She tried to stare back, to see beyond her own reflection in the dark lenses, but failed to connect with his eyes.
Suddenly he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out something small and golden. He flicked open the top, spun the wheel. A small flame erupted. His smile increased its vast wattage.
Celia tilted her head, unsure of what the stranger was doing. In the way he smiled and held himself, he seemed to be trying to impress her, as if he were some prehistoric man showing off to the females of his clan his ability to make fire. She felt strangely flattered, there was something almost gallant in the gesture. To be polite, she reached into her purse, took out a cigarette, leaned forward and lit it on the flame, all the while staring into the dark lenses.
“Thank you,” she said. “Your name is Jerry?”
“Blatta is it? Jerry Blatta?”
“That’s an interesting name.”
He continued to stare.
Self-consciously she leaned back, crossed her arms over her breasts. “And you’re a friend of Mite’s?”
“Sure, I suppose. Any friend of yours…”
The register of his strange disjointed voice suddenly slipped higher, as if in imitation of her own, using even her own words. She began to laugh, she couldn’t help herself, the charming gesture, the flattering imitation, the disconcerting stare.
He drew back as if under attack, and then through his fixed smile he laughed too, a laugh as high and girlish as her own.
Mite returned with a tray laden with plates and cups and glasses. Before his friend Jerry, Mite placed a ham and cheese sandwich, cut diagonally into two triangles, an apple, a tapered glass filled with tapioca pudding and topped with whipped cream, a cup of coffee. Ever frugal, for himself Mite brought only a hard roll, two pats of butter, a glass of water, and a cup of tea. Mite sat himself next to Jerry, solicitously close, and edged the plate with the apple, red and shiny, toward his friend.
“Go ahead, Jerry,” he said. “You know what they say, an apple a day keeps the coppers at bay.”
Celia watched the strange maternalistic display with a curiosity that turned to amazement as this Jerry Blatta devoured the apple in four bites, swallowing skin, core, all, leaving only the tiny stem sticking out from his teeth.
“He’s a hungry boy, your friend,” says Celia.
“Ain’t we all. Look at him close, Celia. He’s my ticket.”
“Your ticket?”
“Oh yeah.”
“To where, Mite?”
“To the pineapple pie, sweetheart, where we all wants to go. Just like Pinnacio. You ever hear of Pinnacio, what worked out of the Square a few years ago?”
Celia shook her head.
“He’s a legend now, sure, Pinnacio, but back then he was just an Alvin like me, a skinny hustler what styled hisself a show biz impresario with nothing but a single blue suit and a pretty face to get him through. He had two clients, a sad-sack comic who got the mokes laughing only ’cause he couldn’t stop sweating on stage, and a contortionist what had a fatal fondness for chocolate and couldn’t no longer touch her toes. Pinnacio used to hoard his nickels so he could sit over his coffee at the Automat and read a Variety he’d pluck out of the ashcan and plot the careers of his two loser clients. And then each night he would squeeze his way through the stage doors of every cheap vaudeville and burlesque house in the Square, scoping for the next big thing. You asked anyone then, the next big thing for Pinnacio was going to be the Bowery. You want cream in that, palsy?”
Blatta didn’t answer but continued to stare at the cup filled with hot coffee. As Mite and Celia looked on, he stuck his finger into the cup, pulled it out, stared at it as it reddened from the heat.
Mite took hold of his own cup by the handle, pinkie sticking out absurdly, and lifted it to take a sip. Blatta, seeing this, did exactly the same. It is as if he is learning, thought Celia, as if he is a child learning his way in the world, latching onto the worst possible teacher in Mite.
“So one night, Pinnacio’s at the Roxy and he sees a girl what looks no older than twelve doing a semistrip, and the geezers in the house theys just loving her show. She’s got something, sweet little Suzy does, something a twelve-year-old shouldn’t have, which makes sense ’cause this girl she’s twenty-two and working a second shift on her back after the theater darks. But on stage she’s playing the little-girl thing for all it’s worth and the yards in the joint are springing to life like a crop of winter wheat, you get the picture? So Pinnacio, with this Suzy, he sees his ticket.”
Jerry Blatta lifted half of the ham and c
heese sandwich off the plate and squeezed the half in his fist until the cheese and mustard oozed out. He stuck the mess into his mouth, jamming it all in until his lips could close one upon the other. Celia stared at him, dumbfounded. Blatta stared back with defiant humor, even as he reached for the other half.
“Well Pinnacio,” continued Mite, “just the day before, in a Variety he hawked from a can, spied something about an opening for a juvenile in some second-rate C movie they was filming in Brooklyn. He strolls right up to little Suzy what wasn’t so little and tells her he can get her an audition if she signs a management contract with him. She shrugs her shoulders and signs, figuring this skinny mope didn’t have the pull to get the audition in the first place. But the thing was, this audition it was open, he didn’t need no pull, and she didn’t need no him, but there it was. And in that audition room she gives it the full twelve-year-old-with-a-glimmer-in-the-eye treatment and the director is a perv through and through and so hot to lay his mitts on a twelve-year-old he practically throws hisself at her feet. Now she’s in Hollywood, a real star, and Pinnacio, he’s riding around with a tan and a Cadillac, living flush in the pineapple pie. All because he found his ticket.”