My senses actually reeled as I clutched the arm of that bilge-green chair for support Junie Jo Prewitt made Cleopatra look like a Girl Scout!
Five minutes later we are sitting in the streetcar, heading toward the bowling alley. I am sitting next to the most fantastic creation in the Feminine department known to Western man. There are the four of us in that long, yellow-lit streetcar. No one else was aboard; just us four. I, naturally, being a trained gentleman, sat on the aisle to protect her from candy wrappers and cigar butts and such. Directly ahead of me, also on the aisle, sat Schwartz, his arm already flung affectionately in a death grip around Helen’s neck as we boomed and rattled through the night.
I casually flung my right foot up onto my left knee so that she could see my crepe-soled, perforated, wing-toed, Scotch bluchers with the two-toned laces. I started to work my famous charm on her. Casually, with my practiced offhand, cynical, cutting, sardonic humor I told her about how my Old Man had cracked the block in the Oldsmobile, how the White Sox were going to have a good year this year, how my kid brother wet his pants when he saw a snake, how I figured it was going to rain, what a great guy Schwartz was, what a good second baseman I was, how I figured I might go out for football. On and on I rolled, like Old Man River, pausing significantly for her to pick up the conversation. Nothing.
Ahead of us Schwartz and Helen were almost indistinguishable one from the other. They giggled, bit each other’s ears, whispered, clasped hands, and in general made me itch even more.
From time to time Junie Jo would bend forward stiffly from the waist and say something I could never quite catch into Helen’s right ear.
I told her my great story of the time that Uncle Carl lost his false teeth down the airshaft. Still nothing. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that she had her coat collar turned up, hiding most of her face as she sat silently, looking forward past Helen Weathers into nothingness.
I told her about this old lady on my paper route who chews tobacco, and roller skates in the backyard every morning. I still couldn’t get through to her. Casually I inched my right arm up over the back of the seat behind her shoulders. The acid test She leaned forward, avoiding my arm, and stayed that way.
“Heh, heh, heh.…”
As nonchalantly as I could, I retrieved it, battling a giant cramp in my right shoulder blade. I sat in silence for a few seconds, sweating heavily as ahead Schwartz and Helen are going at it hot and heavy.
It was then that I became aware of someone saying something to me. It was an empty car. There was no one else but us. I glanced around, and there it was. Above us a line of car cards looked down on the empty streetcar. One was speaking directly to me, to me alone.
DO YOU OFFEND?
Do I offend?!
With no warning, from up near the front of the car where the motorman is steering I see this thing coming down the aisle directly toward me. It’s coming closer and closer. I can’t escape it. It’s this blinding, fantastic, brilliant, screaming blue light. I am spread-eagled in it. There’s a pin sticking through my thorax. I see it all now.
I AM THE BLIND DATE!
ME!!
I’M the one they’re being nice to!
I’m suddenly getting fatter, more itchy. My new shoes are like bowling balls with laces; thick, rubber-crepe bowling balls. My great tie that Aunt Glenn gave me is two feet wide, hanging down to the floor like some crinkly tinfoil noose. My beautiful hand-painted snail is seven feet high, sitting up on my shoulder, burping. Great Scot! It is all clear to me in the searing white light of Truth. My friend Schwartz, I can see him saying to Junie Jo:
“I got this crummy fat friend who never has a date. Let’s give him a break and.…”
I AM THE BLIND DATE!
They are being nice to me! She is the one who is out on a Blind Date. A Blind Date that didn’t make it.
In the seat ahead, the merriment rose to a crescendo. Helen tittered; Schwartz cackled. The marble statue next to me stared gloomily out into the darkness as our streetcar rattled on. The ride went on and on.
I AM THE BLIND DATE!
I didn’t say much the rest of the night There wasn’t much to be said.
VII FLICK OFFERS ME HARD LIQUOR
“You sure you don’t want a shot? A little bourbon maybe?” Flick asked, oozing sympathy. He went on:
“Do you remember the time Jane Hutchinson left me standing in a snowdrift for four hours? While she had a date with Claude Eaton!”
“Whatever happened to her?”
“I hear she moved out somewhere near Cedar Lake.” Flick mopped the bar pensively.
“Cedar Lake! I haven’t heard of Cedar Lake for years! The Dance Hall! The Roller Rink! The Smell! Is it still out there, Flick? How is Cedar Lake?”
Flick paused meaningfully in his swabbing, savoring to the full his next statement.
“Cedar Lake. It’s the first time I ever heard of ’em doing it to a lake. It’s Condemned.”
VIII HAIRY GERTZ AND THE FORTY-SEVEN CRAPPIES
Life, when you’re a Male kid, is what the Grownups are doing. The Adult world seems to be some kind of secret society that has its own passwords, handclasps, and countersigns. The thing is to get In. But there’s this invisible, impenetrable wall between you and all the great, unimaginably swinging things that they seem to be involved in. Occasionally mutterings of exotic secrets and incredible pleasures filter through. And so you bang against it, throw rocks at it, try to climb over it, burrow under it; but there it is. Impenetrable. Enigmatic.
Girls somehow seem to be already involved, as though from birth they’ve got the Word. Lolita has no Male counterpart. It does no good to protest and pretend otherwise. The fact is inescapable. A male kid is really a kid. A female kid is a girl. Some guys give up early in life, surrender completely before the impassable transparent wall, and remain little kids forever. They are called “Fags,” or “Homosexuals,” if you are in polite society.
The rest of us have to claw our way into Life as best we can, never knowing when we’ll be Admitted. It happens to each of us in different ways—and once it does, there’s no turning back.
It happened to me at the age of twelve in Northern Indiana—a remarkably barren terrain resembling in some ways the surface of the moon, encrusted with steel mills, oil refineries, and honky-tonk bars. There was plenty of natural motivation for Total Escape. Some kids got hung up on kite flying, others on pool playing. I became the greatest vicarious angler in the history of the Western world.
I say vicarious because there just wasn’t any actual fishing to be done around where I lived. So I would stand for hours in front of the goldfish tank at Woolworth’s, landing fantails in my mind, after incredible struggles. I read Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield the way other kids read G-8 And His Battle Aces. I would break out in a cold sweat reading about these guys portaging to Alaska and landing rare salmon; and about guys climbing the High Sierras to do battle with the wily golden trout; and mortal combat with the steelheads. I’d read about craggy, sinewy sportsmen who discover untouched bass lakes where they have to beat off the pickerel with an oar, and the saber-toothed, raging smallmouths chase them ashore and right up into the woods.
After reading one of these fantasies I would walk around in a daze for hours, feeling the cork pistol grip of my imaginary trusty six-foot, split-bamboo bait-casting rod in my right hand and hearing the high-pitched scream of my Pflueger Supreme reel straining to hold a seventeen-pound Great Northern in check.
I became known around town as “the-kid-who-is-the-nut-on-fishing,” even went to the extent of learning how to tie flies, although I’d never been fly casting in my life. I read books on the subject. And in my bedroom, while the other kids are making balsa models of Curtiss Robins, I am busy tying Silver Doctors, Royal Coachmen, and Black Gnats. They were terrible. I would try out one in the bathtub to see whether it made a ripple that might frighten off the wily rainbow.
“Glonk!”
Down t
o the bottom like a rock, my floating dry fly would go. Fishing was part of the mysterious and unattainable Adult world. I wanted In.
My Old Man was In, though he was what you might call a once-in-a-while-fisherman-and-beer-party-goer; they are the same thing in the shadow of the blast furnaces. (I knew even then that there are people who Fish and there are people who Go Fishing; they’re two entirely different creatures.) My Old Man did not drive 1500 miles to the Atlantic shore with 3000 pounds of Abercrombie & Fitch fishing tackle to angle for stripers. He was the kind who would Go Fishing maybe once a month during the summer when it was too hot to Go Bowling and all of the guys down at the office would get The Itch. To them, fishing was a way of drinking a lot of beer and yelling. And getting away from the women. To me, it was a sacred thing. To fish.
He and these guys from the office would get together and go down to one of the lakes a few miles from where we lived—but never to Lake Michigan, which wasn’t far away. I don’t know why; I guess it was too big and awesome. In any case, nobody ever really thought of fishing in it. At least nobody in my father’s mob. They went mostly to a mudhole known as Cedar Lake.
I will have to describe to you what a lake in the summer in Northern Indiana is like. To begin with, heat, in Indiana, is something else again. It descends like a 300-pound fat lady onto a picnic bench in the middle of July. It can literally be sliced into chunks and stored away in the basement to use in winter; on cold days you just bring it out and turn it on. Indiana heat is not a meteorological phenomenon—it is a solid element, something you can grab by the handles. Almost every day in the summer the whole town is just shimmering in front of you. You’d look across the street and skinny people would be all fat and wiggly like in the fun-house mirrors at Coney Island. The asphalt in the streets would bubble and hiss like a pot of steaming Ralston.
That kind of heat and sun produces mirages. All it takes is good flat country, a nutty sun, and insane heat and, by George, you’re looking at Cleveland 200 miles away. I remember many times standing out in center field on an incinerating day in mid-August, the prairie stretching out endlessly in all directions, and way out past the swamp would be this kind of tenuous, shadowy, cloud-like thing shimmering just above the horizon. It would be the Chicago skyline, upside down, just hanging there in the sky. And after a while it would gradually disappear.
So, naturally, fishing is different in Indiana. The muddy lakes, about May, when the sun starts beating down on them, would begin to simmer and bubble quietly around the edges. These lakes are not fed by springs or streams. I don’t know what feeds them. Maybe seepage. Nothing but weeds and truck axles on the bottom; flat, low, muddy banks, surrounded by cotton-wood trees, cattails, smelly marshes, and old dumps. Archetypal dumps. Dumps gravitate to Indiana lakes like flies to a hog killing. Way down at the end where the water is shallow and soupy are the old cars and the ashes, busted refrigerators, oil drums, old corsets, and God knows what else.
At the other end of the lake is the Roller Rink. There’s always a Roller Rink. You can hear that old electric organ going, playing “Heartaches,” and you can hear the sound of the roller skates:
“Shhhhhh … sssshhhhhhhhh … sssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.…”
And the fistfights breaking out. The Roller Rink Nut in heat. The Roller Rink Nut was an earlier incarnation of the Drive-In Movie Nut. He was the kind who was very big with stainless steel diners, motels, horror movies, and frozen egg rolls. A close cousin to the Motorcycle Clod, he went ape for chicks with purple eyelids. You know the crowd. Crewcuts, low foreheads, rumbles, hollering, belching, drinking beer, roller skating on one foot, wearing black satin jackets with SOUTH SIDE A. C. lettered in white on the back around a white-winged roller-skated foot. The kind that hangs the stuff in the back windows of their ’53 Mercuries; a huge pair of foam-rubber dice, a skull and crossbones, hula-hula dolls, and football players—Pro, of course, with heads that bob up and down. The guys with ball fringe around the windows of their cars, with phony Venetian blinds in the back, and big white rubber mudguards hanging down, with red reflectors. Or they’ll take some old heap and line it with plastic imitation mink fur, pad the steering wheel with leopard skin and ostrich feathers until it weighs seventeen pounds and is as fat as a salami. A TV set, a bar, and a folding Castro bed are in the trunk, automatically operated and all lined with tasteful Sears Roebuck ermine. You know the crew—a true American product. We turn them out like Campbell’s Pork & Beans.
This is the system of aesthetics that brought the Roller Rink to Cedar Lake, Indiana, when I was a kid.
About 150 yards from the Roller Rink was the Cedar Lake Evening In Paris Dance Hall. Festering and steamy and thronged with yeasty refugees from the Roller Rink. These are the guys who can’t skate. But they can do other things. They’re down there jostling back and forth in 400-per-cent humidity to the incomparable sounds of an Indiana dancehall band. Twelve non-Union cretinous musicians—Mickey Iseley’s Moonlight Serenaders—blowing “Red Sails In the Sunset” on Montgomery Ward altos. The lighting is a tasteful combination of naked light bulbs, red and blue crepe paper, and orange cellophane gels.
In between the Roller Rink and the Dance Hall are seventeen small shacks known as Beer Halls. And surrounding this tiny oasis of civilization, this bastion of bonhomie, is a gigantic sea of total darkness, absolute pitch-black Stygian darkness, around this tiny island of totally decadent, bucolic American merriment. The roller skates are hissing, the beer bottles are crashing, the chicks are squealing, Mickey’s reed men are quavering, and Life is full.
And in the middle of the lake, several yards away, are over 17,000 fishermen, in wooden rowboats rented at a buck and a half an hour. It is 2 A.M. The temperature is 175, with humidity to match. And the smell of decayed toads, the dumps at the far end of the lake, and an occasional soupçon of Standard Oil, whose refinery is a couple of miles away, is enough to put hair on the back of a mud turtle. Seventeen thousand guys clumped together in the middle, fishing for the known sixty-four crappies in that lake.
Crappies are a special breed of Midwestern fish, created by God for the express purpose of surviving in waters that would kill a bubonic-plague bacillus. They have never been known to fight, or even faintly struggle. I guess when you’re a crappie, you figure it’s no use anyway. One thing is as bad as another. They’re just down there in the soup. No one quite knows what they eat, if anything, but everybody’s fishing for them. At two o’clock in the morning.
Each boat contains a minimum of nine guys and fourteen cases of beer. And once in a while, in the darkness, is heard the sound of a guy falling over backward into the slime:
SSSSGLUNK!
“Oh! Ah! Help, help!” A piteous cry in the darkness. Another voice:
“Hey, for God’s sake, Charlie’s fallen in again! Grab the oar!”
And then it slowly dies down. Charlie is hauled out of the goo and is lying on the bottom of the boat, urping up dead lizards and Atlas Prager. Peace reigns again.
The water in these lakes is not the water you know about. It is composed of roughly ten per cent waste glop spewed out by Shell, Sinclair, Phillips, and the Grasselli Chemical Corporation; twelve per cent used detergent; thirty-five per cent thick gruel composed of decayed garter snakes, deceased toads, fermenting crappies, and a strange, unidentifiable liquid that holds it all together. No one is quite sure what that is, because everybody is afraid to admit what it really is. They don’t want to look at it too closely.
So this mélange lays there under the sun, and about August it is slowly simmering like a rich mulligatawny stew. At two in the morning you can hear the water next to the boat in the darkness:
“Gluuummp … Bluuuummmp.”
Big bubbles of some unclassified gas come up from the bottom and burst. The natives, in their superstitious way, believe that it is highly inflammable. They take no chances.
The saddest thing of all is that on these lakes there are usually about nineteen summer cottages to the square foot
, each equipped with a large motorboat. The sound of a 40-horsepower Chris-Craft going through a sea of number-ten oil has to be heard to be believed.
RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRR!
The prow is sort of parting the stuff, slowly stirring it into a sluggish, viscous wake.
Natives actually swim in this water. Of course, it is impossible to swim near the shore, because the shore is one great big sea of mud that goes all the way down to the core of the earth. There are stories of whole towns being swallowed up and stored in the middle of the earth. So the native rows out to the middle of the lake and hurls himself off the back seat of his rowboat.
“GLURP!”
It is impossible to sink in this water. The specific gravity and surface tension make the Great Salt Lake seem dangerous for swimming. You don’t sink. You just bounce a little and float there. You literally have to hit your head on the surface of these lakes to get under a few inches. Once you do, you come up streaming mosquito eggs and dead toads—an Indiana specialty—and all sorts of fantastic things which are the offshoot of various exotic merriments which occur outside the Roller Rink.
The bottom of the lake is composed of a thick incrustation of old beer cans. The beer cans are at least a thousand feet thick in certain places.
And so 17,000 fishermen gather in one knot, because it is rumored that here is where The Deep Hole is. All Indiana lakes have a Deep Hole, into which, as the myth goes, the fish retire to sulk in the hot weather. Which is always.
Every month or so an announcement would be made by my Old Man, usually on a Friday night, after work.
“I’m getting up early tomorrow morning. I’m going fishing.”
Getting up early and going fishing with Hairy Gertz and the crowd meant getting out of the house about three o’clock in the afternoon, roughly. Gertz was a key member of the party. He owned the Coleman lamp. It was part of the folklore that if you had a bright lantern in your boat the fish could not resist it. The idea was to hold the lantern out over the water and the fish would have to come over to see what was going on. Of course, when the fish arrived, there would be your irresistible worm, and that would be it.
In God We Trust Page 6