My kid brother is with me and we have one of those little running ball games going, where you bat the ball with your hand back and forth to each other, moving homeward at the same time. The traveling game. The ball hops along; you field it; you throw it back; somebody tosses it; it’s grabbed on the first bounce, you’re out, but nobody stops moving homeward. A moving ball game. Like a floating crap game.
We were about a block or so from my house, bouncing the ball over the concrete, when it happened. We are moving along over the sandy landscape, under the dark lowering clouds of Open-Hearth haze that always hung between us and the sun. I dart to my right to field a ground ball. A foot lashes out unexpectedly and down I go, flat on my face on the concrete road. I hit hard and jarring, a bruising, scraping jolt that cut my lip and drew blood. Stunned for a second, I look up. It is the dreaded Dill!
To this day I have no idea how he materialized out of nowhere to trip me flat and finally to force the issue.
“Come on, kid, get out of the way, will ya?” He grabs the ball and whistles it off to one of his Toadies. He had yellow eyes. So help me God, yellow eyes!
I got up with my knees bleeding and my hands stunned and tingling from the concrete, and without any conception at all of what I was doing I screamed and rushed. My mind a total red, raging, flaming blank. I know I screamed.
“YAAAAAAHHHH!”
The next thing I knew we are rolling over and over on the concrete, screaming and clawing. I’m out of my skull! I am pounding Dill against the concrete and we’re rolling over and over, battering at each other’s faces. I was screaming continually. I couldn’t stop. I hit him over and over in the eyes. He rolled over me, but I was kicking and clawing, gouging, biting, tearing. I was vaguely conscious of people coming out of houses and down over lawns. I was on top. I grabbed at his head. I caught both of Grover Dill’s ears in either hand and I began to pound him on the concrete, over and over again.
I have since heard of people under extreme duress speaking in strange tongues. I became conscious that a steady torrent of obscenities and swearing was pouring out of me as I screamed. I could hear my brother running home, hysterically yelling for my mother, but only dimly. All I knew is that I was tearing and ripping and smashing at Grover Dill, who fought back like a fiend! But I guess it was the first time he had ever met face to face with an unleashed Tasmanian Devil.
I continued to swear fantastically, as though I had no control over it. I was conscious of it and yet it was as though it was coming from something or someone outside of me. I swore as I have never sworn since as we rolled screaming on the ground. And suddenly we just break apart. Dill, the back of his head all battered, his eyes puffed and streaming, slashed by my claws and fangs, was hysterical. There was hardly a scratch on me, except for my scraped knees and cut lip.
I learned then that Bravery does not exist. Just a kind of latent Nuttiness. If I had thought about attacking Dill for ten seconds before I had done it, I’d have been four blocks away in a minute flat. But something had happened. A wire broke. A fuse blew. And I had gone out of my skull.
But I had sworn! Terribly! Obscenely! In our house kids didn’t swear. The things I called Dill I’m sure my mother had not even heard. And I had only heard once or twice, coming out of an alley. I had woven a tapestry of obscenity that as far as I know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan. And my mother had heard!
Dill by this time is wailing hysterically. This had never happened to him before. They’re dragging the two of us apart amid a great ring of surging grownups and exultant, scared kids who knew more about what was happening than the mothers and fathers ever would. My mother is looking at me. She said:
“What did you say?”
That’s all. There was a funny look on her face. At that instant all thought of Grover Dill disappeared from what was left of my mind and all I could think of was the incredible shame of that unbelievable tornado of obscenity I had sprayed over the neighborhood.
I go into the house in a daze, and my mother’s putting water on me in the bathroom, pouring it over my head and dabbing at my eyes which are puffed and red from hysteria. My kid brother is cowering under the dining-room table, scared. Kissel, next door, has been hiding in the basement, under the steps, scared. The whole neighborhood is scared, and so am I. The water trickles down over my hair and around my ears as I stare into the swirling drainage hole in the sink.
“You better go in and lie down on the daybed. Take it easy. Just go in and lie down.”
She takes me by the shoulder and pushes me down on the daybed. I lie there scared, really scared of what I have done. I felt no sense of victory, no sense of beating Dill. All I felt was this terrible thing I had said and done.
The light was getting purple and soft outside, almost time for my father to come home from work. I’m just lying there. I can see that it’s getting dark, and I know that he’s on his way home. Once in a while a gigantic sob would come out, half hysterically. My kid brother by now is under the sink in the John, hiding among the mops, mewing occasionally.
I hear the car roar up the driveway and a wave of terror breaks over me, the tenor that a kid feels when he knows that retribution is about to be meted out for something that he’s been hiding forever—his rottenness. The basic rottenness has been uncovered, and now it’s the Wrath of God, which you are not only going to get but which you deserve!
I hear him in the kitchen now. I’m in the front bedroom, cowering on the daybed. The normal sounds—he’s hollering around with the newspaper. Finally my mother says:
“Come on, supper’s ready. Come on, kids, wash up.”
I painfully drag myself off the daybed and sneak along the woodwork, under the buffet, sneaking, skulking into the bathroom. My kid brother and I wash together over the sink. He says nothing.
Then I am sitting at the kitchen table, toying with the red cabbage. My Old Man looks up from the Sport page:
“Well, what happened today?”
Here it comes! There is a short pause, and then my mother says:
“Oh, not much. Ralph had a little fight.”
“Fight? What kind of fight!”
“Oh, you know how kids are,” she says.
The axe is poised over my naked neck! There is no way out! Mechanically I continue to shovel in the mashed potatoes and red cabbage, the meat loaf. But I am tasting nothing, just eating and eating.
“Oh, it wasn’t much. I gave him a talking to. By the way, I see the White Sox won today.…”
About two thirds of the way through the meal I slowly began to realize that I was not about to be destroyed. And then a very peculiar thing happened. A sudden unbelievable twisting, heaving stomach cramp hit me so bad I could feel my shoes coming right up through my ears.
I rushed back into the bathroom, so sick to my stomach that my knees were buckling. It was all coming up, pouring out of me, the conglomeration of it all. The terror of Grover Dill, the fear of yelling the things that I had yelled, my father coming home, my obscenities … I heaved it all out. It poured out of me in great heaving rushes, splattering the walls, the floor, the sink. Old erasers that I had eaten years before, library paste that I had downed in second grade, an Indian Head penny that I had gulped when I was two! It all came up in thunderous, retching heaves.
My father hovered out in the hall, saying:
“What’s the matter with him? What’s the matter? Let’s call Doctor Slicker!”
My mother knew what was the matter with me.
“Now he’s going to be all right. Just take it easy. Go back and finish eating. Go on.”
She pressed a washrag to the back of my neck. “Now take it easy. I’m not going to say anything. Just be quiet. Take it easy.”
Down comes the bottle of Pepto-Bismol and the spoon. “Take this. Stop crying.”
But then I really started to cry, yelling and blubbering. She was talking low and quiet to me.
“We’ll tell him your stomach is upset, that you ate some
thing at school.”
The Pepto-Bismol slides down my throat, amid my blubbering. It is now really coming out! I’m scared of Grover Dill again, scared of everything. I’m convinced that I will never grow up to be twenty-one, that I’m going blind!
I’m lying in bed, sobbing, and I finally drifted off to sleep, completely passed out from sheer nervous exhaustion. The soft warm air blew the curtains back and forth as we caught the tail of a breeze from the Great North Woods, the wilderness at the head of the Lake. Both of us slept quietly, me and my little red-eyed, fanged, furry Tasmanian Devil. Both of us slept. For the time being.
XV FLICK DISPLAYS A PETTY JEALOUS STREAK
Flick chuckled in a somewhat dirty way.
“The next time that bastard comes in here, I’ll tell him you’re in the phone booth.”
All the beer I had drunk had brought upon me a feeling of great peace and magnanimity. I stared dreamily at the gas station down the street. The wind sighed through the high-tension wires somewhere off in the distance.
“Yep. I always was wiry,” I said.
“Oh yeah? I remember the time Paswinski chased you up on the garage and you stayed there all Saturday,” Flick sneered, stroking old fires.
“I liked it up there! What do you mean, I used to always go up on the garage—I liked it up there.”
“Oh sure. Especially when Paswinski was throwing rocks at you.”
“Well, I notice he never did anything about Grover Dill!”
We both watched silently as across the street a solitary drunk struggled from doorway to doorway. For some reason he carried his hat in his hand, waving it frantically at each passing car. Flick, an old connoisseur of drunks, watched his technique critically as he ricocheted from storefront to storefront.
“They don’t make ’em like old Lud Kissel any more.” Flick had the sound of a man describing a recognized all-time great.
“Funny thing, Flick. I thought of Lud Kissel in New York, this past Fourth.”
“Fourth of what?”
“The Fourth of July.”
“The Fourth of July? Reminded you of Ludlow Kissel? Old Lud Kissel, the drunk?”
It was my turn to play it expansive. I leaned forward over the bar, sipping my beer meaningfully, milking the moment.
“Flick, do you mean to tell me you don’t remember Lud Kissel’s Dago bomb?”
“Dago bomb?”
We stared at each other for a long moment and again he lit up like a 60-watt Mazda.
“You mean that big Dago bomb that blew out the …?”
“Yes indeed, Flick, that is the very one I am referring to.”
XVI LUDLOW KISSEL AND THE DAGO BOMB THAT STRUCK BACK
I threaded my way through the midtown, midday sidewalk traffic that eddied and surged over and around the clutter of Construction paraphernalia. It was desperately hot. My wash-and-wear suit clung to me like some rancid, scratchy extension of my clammy skin. All around me New York was busily, roaringly, endlessly rebuilding itself, like some giant Phoenix arising from still red-hot ashes of its dead self. New York’s infamous Edifice Complex blooms mightily in Midsummer.
I scuttled feverishly through shimmering waves of asphalt-scented heat toward the paradise of dark, expensive decadence of my favorite French restaurant, Les Misérables des Frites, little realizing that in another split second I was about to enjoy one of the truly secret subterranean pleasures of the human soul. Frantically taking my place in a hunched line of prickly-heated City dwellers doggedly plodding single file over a long, planked gangway, tightly jammed between an enormous excavation and a line of throbbing bright orange engines of construction. Ahead of me a short, stout lady wearing a damp flowered dress, clutching a Bonwit Teller shopping bag in both hands, ducked her head low as she ran interference for me and for those behind me through the wall of ringing sound and sensual heat.
My mind, as is so often the case these days, was totally blank. Sweat trickled in a long, thin, cool line down the knobbles of my backbone and spread out damply along the waistband of my twisted jockey shorts, which were threatening to emasculate me at any moment. My feet moved steadily to the rhythm of a colossal Diesel engine pounding insanely off my port bow. All around us, reaching high into the copper heavens, the stainless steel and aluminum green-glassed cliffs of partly completed and already eroding towers acted as colossal baffles, amplifying the subterranean reverberations of construction almost beyond endurance. New York’s Summer Festival was in full swing, and I was a celebrant.
I had reached perhaps the midpoint of the plank ladder, breathing shallowly of the rising clouds of pulverized cement dust and carbon monoxide fumes, a subtle mixture that forms one of the more insidious anesthetics yet devised, dulling the senses and clouding the soul, when it happened. It was more felt, at first, than heard—a long, low gurgling sensation pushing up suddenly from the gut and exploding in the brain like some great comber of some ancient sea, on a lost, forgotten beach:
KAARRROOOMMMMPPHHHHH!
For a split second the great sound hung in mid-air and then, unthinkingly, my ancient GI reflexes working magically and smoothly, I hurled myself to the clapboards, digging in as I landed. The bombardment had begun!
I clung to the earth, waiting for the second round of the bracket, which should come, I hastily calculated, off to my right. Suddenly I became aware of an insistent rapping on the back of my neck as an elderly crane-like citizen behind me croaked:
“Get up, you bum. If you’re going to sleep on the sidewalk, at least find a doorway, you soak!”
He stepped over me and sheepishly I regained my feet. Up and down the line I saw other ex-GIs brushing themselves off and once again moving forward in the unending stream of Twentieth Century Man, bound for God knows where. My mind raced as I peered down through the haze of the great canyon of excavation that lay just beyond the barricades. And then I could smell it, an acrid, faint, delicious, familiar, naggingly pleasing scent—Dynamite! The real thing!
Minutes later I sat pensively at a tiny corner table of Misérables, waiting for my luncheon date to arrive and vaguely conscious of a difficult-to-define sense of nostalgic pleasure and euphoria. Could it be the Bloody Charlie I was drinking? No, I had barely touched it. As I idly and comfortingly fingered the smooth, sleek surface of my Diners’ Club card—my protection against the world—the way a gunfighter of old must have absently fondled his Smith & Wesson Thirty-Eight, I tried to analyze my sudden sense of warmth and well-being. It had started immediately after the blasting operation at the construction site. Could there be a connection? No man wants to admit that he is a secret Atom Bomb fan, so I hastily rejected this transient thought. Yet somehow I could not deny that the tiny whiff of blue smoke had awakened some ancient memory, some long-dormant pleasure. I absently munched one of the new No-Cal composition cashew nuts which are featured at the boîte as I raked my memory for a clue. The pleasant sound of diners’ voices mingled with the Muzak and the popping of corks. The sizzling of the grill and the hum of air-conditioning lulled me as the Bloody Charlie began its soothing work. Out of the din, voices and sounds of the past emerged, dripping ooze and slime like some ancient creatures unearthed from long-sealed caverns. Dynamite!
Let’s admit it. There are few sounds more soul-satisfying, more frightening, more exciting than an explosion. Explosions of one kind or another have always been part of great Folk celebrations from weddings to Wars. I sipped my drink and mused on the first time I had heard that primal roar of exploding black powder. And then it hit me. My God! Tomorrow was the Fourth of July!
The Fourth of July! It had crept up on tiny cats’ feet on the scale of the calendar, unnoticed, unsung, unbombarded. It was then that I knew where those pleasant tinglings of mingled regret and exhilaration that we call Nostalgia had come from. Yes, in just a few hours it would be the Glorious Fourth. And here I was without so much as a sparkler to my name. I ordered another drink and settled down comfortably into my soft eiderdown bed of remembrances
of things past. There are times when you just have to let it go.
As I idly mulled the twin olives in my classical Charlie, the Northern Indiana landscape of the late Depression era began to take form, shadowy and persistent, amid the green and gold bottles behind the mirrored bar directly ahead of me. The blackened stumps, snaggle-toothed and primal, of the steel mills and the oil refineries lay etched against the hazy gray-green horizon of the July skies of the Great Lakes. Somewhere off in the distance the construction crew set off another dull, thumping blast that jiggled the silverware on my table, and it all began to come back.
Dynamite, heat, and excitement were all intermingled in that Fourth of July ritual that has long since departed. What is there about a solid, molar-rattling explosion that sets the blood a-tingling and brings the roses to the cheeks? There are muddle-headed souls who will tell you over and over that Man is basically a peaceful and quiet creature, destined ultimately to while away his golden days strumming lutes, penning odes, and watching birds. I have never yet witnessed a turtle preparing to ignite the portentous fuse of a Cherry Bomb. No, it remained for Man to concoct black powder from the innocent elements of the earth and ultimately to split the atom, all in pursuit of that healing balm—the thundering report.
And nowhere was this particular pleasure more honored and indulged than in the mill towns of Northern Indiana. Even today there are countless veterans of those fireworks barrages—hearing partially gone, a high, thin, singing sound in the cranium, sporting stunted, stubbly eyebrows, vaguely jumpy from borderline shellshock—who search in vain for the Fireworks Stand to assuage their deep hunger for the celebrating concussion, the better to honor our glorious American past.
In God We Trust Page 11