Whrrrr. Whrrrr.
“I’m listening, smart guy.”
What a tiger was Darlene, now that Lenny’d freed her from her cage! He raised his hand. “Please. It’s about to begin.” Miriam’s folksinger coughed, tuned a string. Then his flat piercing tenor droned through the waiting area, strummed chords giving faint color:
I met a man, a working chap
Heart broken by a team
He grabbed my arm, he held me there
And told me of his dream
New York may hold a million stories
But it’s not for million-aaaaires
Our ball clubs fled for western shores
The Yankees win but no one cares—
“You can’t do that,” said Shea’s secretary.
Whrrrr. Lenny turned the dial, stopping the tape. “Don’t talk, you’ll miss the chorus. Can’t do what?”
“Mention Yankees in the lyric. It makes no sense. This is supposed to be a theme song. Don’t include the rival brand.”
“The team’s configured as a thorn in the paw of the plutocrats,” said Lenny. “There’s not only disappointed Dodgers and Giants fans out there, believe me—there’s an ocean of Yankee haters. It’s the villain that quickens the blood.”
“I’d advise something more upbeat.”
“This is what is known as a demo reel. In the final treatment there’d be musical context, trumpets, glockenspiel, fifty-seven varieties of syrup to make the message palatable.”
“You sound unpersuaded yourself.”
“Shhhh. The chorus.” Whrrrrrr—
Then from workers’ ranks a ball club rose!
A starting nine to topple equality’s foes!
Here to salve the people’s woes!
The Sunnyside Pros!
The Sunnyside Pros!
Look—away—eeeeeooohhh!
“Why the yodeling?” said Flora. “He sounds like a dust-bowl hick.”
“This is the fashion,” said Lenny apologetically. He snapped it off there, before what he knew was coming, the singer’s additional extraneous flourishes. Lenny’s and the secretary’s heads leaned together, nearly touching. Lenny might win her by the song’s failure, a mixed fate. His doubts about Gogan’s tune were enough as it was. To not advance it past Shea’s flunky could prove fatal. “This constitutes good singing, nowadays, the voice of the people. Trust me.”
Lenny wondered what stink of doubt emanated from his sweat-saturated jacket, undetectable to himself, since he went everywhere in a cloud of the stuff. Instead Doria’s sweet tang filled his nostrils, mixing with a certain tweed mustiness that might be her skirt or the office furniture. How long had it been since he’d smelled the body of a woman? Not yet thirty, he mourned his life.
Shea had come through his office’s inner doors and now stood watching Lenny and the secretary huddle at the tape player. The tall man in the suit coughed into his fist and they jumped. The strapping, glad-handing Irishman, the mayor’s man, Lenny’s conduit to Moses and Rickey. Delia or Felicia likely knelt on the carpet and sucked him off twice daily, once before lunch, once after. The carpet being perhaps where Lenny himself ought to kneel, rather than romancing the secretary. Not for the first time, Lenny Angrush bumped into the remainder of his own innocence, a part that had still underestimated corruption. This was nothing to congratulate himself over in a world of pragmatists and price tags, a world as yet unrenovated by revolution.
The song: Had Shea overheard it?
“Mr. Angrush, welcome. Why don’t you step inside?” Lenny offered his hand and Shea’s palms closed on it like a giant clamshell. No wonder the man had been entrusted with reclaiming baseball for the Dodger-bereft; he wore mitts of flesh. William Shea should have been Lou Gehrig, doffing his cap and silencing millions with a gesture of inner calm, just as he now re-instilled order to his secretary’s zone with the minutest nod of his chin. Lenny waddled inside, clutching briefcase. Here was where the air-conditioning was hidden. Canadian gusts reached the great lakes of Lenny’s armpits, chest, and belly. He turned to see the girl removing his reel and tucking it back into its box, then reclasping the reel-to-reel’s hood, her posture absurdly dainty and obedient. Then Shea closed the door, severing Lenny’s view of the scene to which he’d imported a brief measure of music and longing—all snuffed effortlessly. The light glared through shades from behind Shea, silhouetting him like an interrogation cop.
Here, inside Shea’s sarcophagus of propriety, the walls lined with handshake photos and gold-seal certificates, Lenny reversed his guess again: Shea would never have fucked his secretary. Bill Shea was the other variety of power animal, a paragon of rectitude, who fucked his wife if he fucked at all. This office was a place of muffled and euphemistic rearrangements of the lives of other men, of amoral solutions writ in legalese—fixes to the crises of horse-betting city councilmen and real estate developers tripped up in their own chicanery. The element of chaos here, the imperative to think of fucking in the first place, was all in Lenny. Shea blanketed the area with uprightness, with Christian notions of normality and virtue, making everyone in range of his signal ashamed of their worst thoughts and grateful to be rebuked.
This was why he got the big assignments and the fat checks. Because Shea got it from his wife or perhaps discreetly in an apartment kept for that purpose on the West Side—here Lenny split the difference between corruption and sanctimony, for of course Shea fucked, he fucked hard and like a hammer, a man of his type would have appetites—but never, never in a million years would he accept even a passing blow from a gum-cracking type of secretary from the city’s flung-most periphery. It was Lenny, who wasn’t getting any, who felt the need to be on the brink of sex and disaster at this instant, in this office.
So it was, that in the seconds before Shea opened his mouth to betray him, Lenny was instilled with a certainty that he gazed on the face of the revolution’s worst enemy. Shea had the unflappability of self-certitude, of self-suasion. Lenny Angrush prized special capacities in himself, capacities for the recognition of capitalism’s fatal flaw, its undertow of squalor, its keening and clawing, the morbidity behind the sales pitch. These called to him by manner of his own squalorous keening, present always in himself like a high signal, a brainpan whine. Bill Shea didn’t register on this index, was something wholly other. Shea was righteous. He believed that bad things could in him be made good.
It was this belief, afloat everywhere in this great land, but occasionally coming home to dwell in a human outline, usually a big beefy masculine template exactly like that before Lenny now, that had prohibited Communism from arriving in the United States of America.
Beefy template dropped a hand mitt on Lenny’s shoulder and took measure of his utter smallness.
“Did you hear the song?” Lenny groaned.
“The National League’s coming in,” said Shea. “It’s expansion, just two cities, New York and Houston. Flushing gets its baseball club.”
“You’re joking.”
“What would I be joking about? Rickey and Frick are lined up. Wagner, too.”
“You ditched it.”
“I ditched nothing. National League baseball returns to New York City. They’ll announce it in a week. Under your hat for the time being, please.”
“The league, the Continental League.” The People’s League, though Lenny didn’t say the words.
“This is better.”
Mayor Wagner and, behind him, always, Robert Moses. Ford Frick, baseball’s commissioner. Branch Rickey, author of the Continental League. Lawyer Shea, the fixer. All the dominoes Lenny meant to fingertip-topple, now toppling backward onto him instead.
“What about the other cities?” Lenny asked, not so much caring for the answer as groping for instruments of comprehension: Who’d screwed whom? Was Rickey the Machiavelli, bending Shea to his contrivances? Was it higher up? Or right before his eyes? No matter. Crushing betrayal straight down the line: A life’s study informed Lenny Angrush it had nothi
ng to do with him. Nor any other individual agent of history’s disregard. That he felt personally screwed, mere faint residue of luck’s design. He wondered how he’d break the news to his bespectacled pitcher, scholar of Gorky in the original.
“Let the league appease the other cities. You wanted baseball in Queens. Get happy, son. This is a thousand-percent victory.”
“The Pros,” Lenny almost whispered. The name, at least. Salvage the name. A kind of dissolving grace was upon him. Waning residue, backwash of unluck. Get him out of Shea’s office. He felt light-blinded, invisible. Who knew how many had entered never to leave. The glossy framed handshakes. He might if he wasn’t careful be reduced, like Vincent Price’s fly, to a head atop a suit. Nauseated smile as Shea knuckle-gripped the life from him. “The Proletarians!” Lenny uttered in protest as he shrank to the door. Outracing the effects of the spell—he needed to be tall enough to reach the elevator buttons.
“I’ll take it under consideration.”
Shea’s token phrase buffeted Lenny’s shoulders as he fled. Under consideration, with Gi-Odgers and Dodgants. The difference between Shea’s inner office and the outer like stepping into a furnace. Lenny was surprised frost didn’t form on Shea’s door, now closed behind him. Blinkering himself in shame past the secretary’s gaze, Lenny forgot his reel, so she raced to catch him where he poked a button for the elevator. She pushed the white box in his direction. He pinned it with his elbow to the briefcase, adeptly now, locating in despair the poise his enthusiasm routinely destroyed. Let her fall in love with his departing outline. If only the elevator would come.
“I was thinking,” said Moira or Maureen.
“Yes?”
“What you want is something more typical of the life of the city. Street-corner music, like doo-wop, which is all the rage. My brother’s in one of those groups. If you’re trying to find a voice for the workers of New York City, I doubt they’re likely to care for that square-dance or banjo-picking sound, when they’ve never seen a cornfield or a dust bowl in their lives.”
Of all indignities. That she should produce a historically apt critique of the Popular Front. What Lenny needed least was what he got. He spoke without turning his combusting face from elevator doors that refused to open. “I’m inclined to agree with you. The progressive’s sentimentalization of the rural farmer type who doesn’t actually pardon my French give a flying fuck about him, and who wouldn’t be worth organizing even if it were possible, is for me a matter of permanent deep distress. We ought to rally around some street-corner doo-wop for a change. I’ll take it under consideration.”
Lenin Angrush had short blunt thumbs. Unavoidable once you noticed them, lying as they did in hideous view of any observer. Where desire’s gaze fell, thumbs went questing next, for a baseball card or cat’s-eye marble, for a twist of licorice. Lenny was six when another kid first pointed it out, a difference enough to register with the difference-tabulating engine of the collective grade-school mind of Sunnyside Gardens. In class, handed a pencil for his introduction to forming the alphabet, Lenny accepted it with a grip consisting of four fingers and a big toe. The teacher had to help him cultivate a unique approach. A person’s two thumbs, if you let yourself feel it, consisted of the out-grasping claws of the body, forming a pincer hinged right at the heart. Even in the sphere of solitary affairs, a thumb was hung out to dry when you dug in your nostril for a hanger or grasped pecker in fist. You had no option but to maul yourself with your own deformed instrument. So a crucial part of Lenny, industrious, animated, agile, a part defining his human difference from the animal kingdom, fell short. This one fact about himself might have stood for all else in a global account of his failings, had he granted himself that luxury. Some differently constituted person could sit home moping at his thumbs forever. Not Lenny. He comprehensively forgot them, so that he’d blink in genuine confusion if your gaze lingered there, let alone the rare times in adult life when someone remarked.
Why, then, in the presence of Tommy Gogan did Lenin Angrush discover himself persistently sitting on his thumbs? Thrusting them in blue-jeans pockets, masking them behind foam-webbed beer steins? Simple. Tommy’s relaxed elegant hand, spidering chords at the top of his Gibson’s neck. During kitchen-table conversation the folksinger sat with the guitar like an extension of his body, fingers shifting silently on frets even while his strumming hand gesticulated conversation or waved smoke-bannering cigarette or spaghetti-bannered fork. Miriam Zimmer had fallen in love with the sole profession in which Lenny’s small divergence mattered, the sole in which it counted as an infirmity. Lenny, traipsing after Mim through coffee-shop evenings, had been handed a guitar once. He handed it right back, knowing where his mittenish hands could and couldn’t go.
So now he sat, thumbs throbbing in concealment, watching Tommy form chords. As evenings dragged on the Irishman liked to lay a soundtrack of changes behind routine conversation, making a strings-damped talking blues of nearly any gibbering exchange, any wine-soaked, purposeless confusion. You hungry? Nawp, I cadged me one of them free cheeseburgers at the Caricature, dum, dum, dum. Wait, how can you be opening for Van Ronk at the Gate of Horn on Tuesday when Van Ronk got eighty-sixed from the Gate of Horn, dum, dum, dum. Pass the salt, dum, dum, dum. Tommy Gogan, such that Lenny could make out, possessed no wild melodic gift. Those long, nearly double-jointed thumbs, which might have reached for a hundred chords, instead trudged endlessly over the same hoary folk clichés. C-A-minor-G, C-A-minor-G. It’s not as though I have a stumpy prick! Lenny wanted to scream. Why couldn’t saxophones be the craze?
Two of the foam-webbed empties on the White Horse’s table tonight were Lenny’s own. Having guzzled what he’d usually nurse, on an empty stomach, too, he swam in his beer and his grudges and the bar’s sweaty beatnik roar and gloom. Lenny’d worked the conspiracy’s algorithm in his head, waiting for Mim and Tommy’s spontaneous confab to thin out (See ya lads tomorrow, hey don’t stick me with the check, dum, dum, dum). Then, when at last he faced the happy couple alone across the scarred wooden table, Lenny spelled it out for them. Mim’s head tipped to Tommy’s shoulder, bobbing slightly as he strummed. The formerly bold young woman, the flame of Sunnyside, now seeming to wish to merge with the shoulder of her god, to blend her dark hair into his hoodlum’s sharkskin jacket, which he wore over a white shirt and loosened tie, despite the heat, believing himself to be Paul Newman, apparently.
“J. Edgar Hoover made a deal with Wagner and Moses to kill the league.”
“Eh, sorry?” (dum, dum, dum)
“Shea’s a stooge. Branch Rickey too. The FBI’s in bed with the syndicate that runs the major leagues. They coughed up a team to halt Socialist baseball.”
Miriam piped up without raising her head from the folksinger’s shoulder, voice coming from a frizzy baffle of hair that cloaked her eyes from Lenny’s view. “Is the whole FBI required to explain why Shea put the kibosh on your Proletarians?”
“The prospect of a new league threatened them enough that Hoover even stood up to the Yankees, to force the National League into their market. Maybe in fact there was a backdoor deal with the Yankees—watch, I predict we’ll see Shea’s glorified farm team sell its best players uptown, like a local branch of the Kansas City Athletics.”
“Is there a place for Whittaker Chambers in your scheme? I think he’s feeling a little lonely.”
“What about Franz Kafka?” (dum, dum, dum)
“Feh to you both.”
“He’d make a heck of a stopshort.” (dum, dum, dum)
“Shortstop, you uneducated mick. You ought to show some respect for the pastime of your adopted land. And I’d like Kafka better in right field, where his lousy attitude wouldn’t infect the whole diamond. Another round for us here, when you can.” This last to the bar’s girl, who came clearing their glasses onto a tray balanced overhead as she wound through the maelstrom. Lenny needed another place to hide his thumb.
He slurped the top off another ale and then something bro
ke in him, something like a chunk or facing of ice or stone shearing off a cliff and shattering in a valley distantly below. He couldn’t catch it before it fell, couldn’t issue any warnings to those humans like ants so minuscule beneath. Only watch it fall.
“To see you neo-ethnics cavort you’d think it was 1936 all over again.”
“Neo-ethnics?” Dum, dum, stop. The folksinger was at least alert enough to sense when a bucketload of ire was directed at him even if in a language beyond his reckoning.
“You Appalachians. You gaseous yodelers. You plow humpers. The entire fershlugginer diversion represented by the WPA years, when the left fell utterly into Comrade Roosevelt’s grip, and every formerly sharp-eyed urbanist went chasing after some oil-rigging cowboy with charcoal and a sketch pad, or shoved a reel recorder under the nose of some illiterate sharecropper clutching a one-string guitar. The party seeking solidarity with the folk. Your music is the gasping cartoon the Popular Front left in its sorry wake.”
The trigger, the blow that had loosened this cascade, had come hours earlier, when Shea’s secretary handed Lenny the box with the neatly rewound reel, the tape containing Tommy’s useless theme song. It now lay in his briefcase, with his ledger and the rare coins, at his feet here in the White Horse. Other shames, pertaining to the secretary’s allure, the closing of Lenny’s head near to a point where he’d detected not only her scent but her warmth emanating, that whisper of possibility, these too were tightly containerized, caulked, and salted like radioactive material in some depth of his recollection’s seafloor.
“My music can do all that?” said Gogan. “I’d sure like to be able to make a cartoon gasp.”
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