Odditorium: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  “So what’s the story?” Maury from Wall Street, peering over his Ben Franklins. “Are we all taking a nap?”

  “Deal cards. Deal cards.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Dinner time,” Pierce said, “Hey, Freed, why don’t you open a restaurant in here? Some of that new light-on-the-mind cuisine, you know, raw fish wrapped in seaweed and eight-dollar salads. Maybe the publishing people would start coming here for lunch, you might do yourself some good.”

  “What would you know about it?” Freed growled.

  “I’m a writer myself, Freed. I know what it’s like to face that blank white sheet.”

  “Do you wanna play cards or would you rather smartass?” Steve the Record Producer was by now getting after everyone.

  “Sure, sure. Why don’t you deal something really challenging like Anaconda or Spit in the Ocean?”

  But the game was draw, jacks or better. Christo’s five-hundred opening was called around, even by Pierce. Christo rapped on the table, passed one hand over his cards. Pat. Everyone but Pierce came right on into him, but his straight to the eight was mortally locked in.

  Christo pushed his tightly fanned cards into the middle of the table. “Dealt,” pointing across to Steve the Record Producer and then, with the rude leer of someone tipping a Reno blackjack dealer for her cleavage, throwing a folded ten-dollar bill to him.

  “Motherfucker.”

  Impossible to say who came across the table first. Christo landed the first and last real punch, a chopping right to the side of the neck. A pawing uppercut was the best Steve could do before Freed’s rented muscle was all over him with a hammerlock.

  Maury from Wall Street was yelling at the top of his lungs. “Bloody idiots. Bloody idiots.”

  “You’d best take your damn seat, turkey,” Mr. Hercules said, shoving Christo with his free hand. “Or two seconds after I break his arm I’ll be breaking yours.” Then, curving the other’s body with a slight twist and tug, “Seems you and me already been to this movie, eh little Stevie? Little Stevie Wonder. I’m gonna have to kick your ass up around your collar if you don’t learn how to behave.” Something he often said after confiscating a blade in the halls of Printing Trades High.

  And then Freed stepped in to mediate the money situation, boundaries between individual stakes having been obscured in the commotion.

  “Now who had the brand-new fifties?”

  “I did,” Christo said. “But where’s his ten? Let’s find Little Stevie’s ten first.”

  Freed stuck a hand inside his shirt, somewhere near his heart. He looked at Pierce and clicked his tongue. “You get the man’s money together and then you get him the fuck out of here.”

  In came Eddie the Agent massaging his receiver ear. “Hey, what’s happening, beautiful people?”

  Warm rain had come with darkness into the streets. Night walkers kept close to the buildings, rushing along with heads down, jostling as they passed. Cabs poured down the wide avenues with wipers slapping and the bleeding edges of distant traffic lights, taillights were sucked up into particles of mist—sweat mixed with steam, steam with soot.

  Christo shadowboxed his way past a restaurant window, college girls inside blowing on their soup. His pockets bulged. “Man, but I put out their lights.”

  “Sometimes,” Pierce said, “sometimes I wonder why I have anything to do with you.”

  “What’s your problem now? It was like printing my own money. I cleaned up on those ginks and now I’m ready to invest.”

  “But, jazz, you burned the game down. You fucked me up with those people and some of them are customers.”

  “The hell with them. We got a whole new operation, partner. New worlds to conquer. With my radar I can put us on to most of the psychiatric shoppers in this city, doctors and patients both. Who needs drugs more than they do?”

  Pierce caught him by the belt loops, pulled him out of the path of an oncoming bicyclist. “Why don’t we go stash that in my safe at home before it works its way out of your pockets?”

  “No, I want to feel it and look at it and spend it. Let’s go get some cocktails and a few pounds of meat. I’m paying.”

  Christo had never tasted a Rio Rumba before. It contained absinthe and three different kinds of rum. He had four of them before dinner and had to have someone cut up his sirloin for him. Just outside they’d run into some people Pierce knew, an AP radio reporter and her husband. She was small and aggressive and undernourished. He had a couple of children back in Venezuela and had married her to keep from being deported.

  “Come on. You have to line your stomach with something if we’re all going to make a night of it.”

  She was carving his meat and feeding it to him. Nice action. He ought to find out her name.

  They bar-hopped their way down Second Avenue in the general direction of a birthday party. Some fanatic in a plastic derby started buying drinks in a place by the Queensboro Bridge, so they lingered there awhile. Largely drowned out by Irish reels from the juke box, Pierce tried to talk politics with the husband. Christo and Monique (the name he’d given her for the evening) slipped out of their shoes, chalked the floor and played hopscotch. By the time they made the party it was well past midnight and running steady. The lights were off and the music was loud and it smelled like the inside of a rain boot. Monique danced until the sweat ran in her eyes. She had Christo up against the side of the refrigerator, groping with one hand, tugging at her pantyhose. She whispered something unintelligible in his ear and then a light blinked on, blinding white. The refrigerator door was open, someone saying, “Where’s the damn beer?”

  Later Christo got into an ugly, window-rattling argument with a woman, both of whose parents were psychiatrists, who became so angry she spat in the host’s fish tank. They left the party by popular demand and visited a few more bars. Things went entirely out of focus. Somewhere in there as the morning wore on they landed in an after-hours Italian social club, Pierce and Monique shooting an endless eight-ball game while her husband slept on his arms at the bar and Christo belched gingerly, sipped expresso. Monique dropped ashes on the pool table and laughed like an idiot. But finally, inevitably, everyone got crashed out and depressed and went home.

  Christo had to really lean on the bell before anyone came to unlock the lobby door. The night porter didn’t see any reason for anyone to be awake at this hour. Christo gave him a carton of Italian cigarettes he found under one arm. The porter accepted and kept grumbling. Christo stood in the motionless elevator with the door closed for some time before he remembered to push the button.

  He was going to beat all over the door, but Tildy answered right away.

  “Morning.”

  “Is it?”

  “Okay if I come in?”

  “Sorry.”

  He brought up his arms and she dodged away from him. “You mad with me?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “You can’t be mad with this.” He emptied his pockets one after another, greasy, misshapen doughnuts of money piling up on the bed.

  “You’ve been wobbling around all night with that on you?”

  “Yeah, I could just kiss myself.”

  “And how soon will the cops be here?”

  “No, baby, I made those cards fly tonight and it’s mine. Coulda made ’em swim if I wanted.” He reached for her again, fell forward, steadied himself on the bed. “What is … What is this about?”

  There under all the green paper, tidily lined up with the stripes on the coverlet, were Tildy’s clothes all folded and ready for packing.

  “I’m through,” she said, turning her back and looking for a cigarette. “I’m off.”

  “Hold it there. We’ll have to talk about this.”

  “I’d really rather not go into it.”

  “Too cold.” Christo sat roughly on the floor. “It’s panic and I’m not even sure I like you.”

  She bent and clasped her cold hands behind his neck. “Has nothing to do
with you, so don’t feel bad.”

  “But I was thinking we could be …” His head was so heavy and slow; he pressed hard on the bone between his eyes. “Partners.”

  “You’re better off.” He caught her wrist when she tried to get up. “But you’re too drunk, Jimmy. I’m not going to try and follow your eyes and pound words into you. It’s like writing in sand.”

  “I’m down, I’m all the way down. So talk to me. You can call me Jimmy, but just talk to me, tell me the story.”

  She flopped down in surrender with that cigarette still unlit. “Not a very interesting story, a girl stuck in neutral … I came up here with you to get away, right? But nothing happened. I had three tosses for my quarter and didn’t score. That’s when you walk away. You go home and take care of your husband and wait on tables like any other ordinary broad.”

  “But that’s all wrong. You don’t belong with that chump. And you don’t want to play hauling pitchers of beer and getting your ass pinched by guys in canvas hats.”

  “Forget about Karl. You don’t know what that is.”

  “But you’re wasting it all, we both know it. It’s easy to say: ‘This is not how I pictured it. Not at all.’ Sure, easy. Everyone knows how to give up, but is that really what you want? To just fade into the wallpaper?”

  “Very nice, Jimmy. But I’ve heard all the stories, I’ve been hearing them since I was sixteen. And time just keeps roaring by. A lot of years people have been hitting on me. The circuit should have made me tough enough to get what I wanted on the ‘outside,’ seems like it just wore me out instead. When I close my eyes all I see are, are these, what—landscapes from some distant, unreal past. I feel this dull, maybe I should be dull. So I guess you’re right, I guess I do want to fade into the wallpaper.”

  Christo was stumped. He asked for a drink of water. Tildy filled a glass in the bathroom. When she gave it to him, words stuck in his throat like wool waste in a clogged oil line.

  Now she lit the cigarette. “But didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say I’d show you just how much of a bitch I could be?”

  On her way to the airport Tildy had the cabbie stop at a farfetched downtown address. She told him to wait. What the hell, Christo was paying. Looie was waiting for her as she came off the elevator cage unbuttoning her blouse.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” she said, moving for the rear of the loft. “Roll me a joint.”

  TAKE TWO

  It may be that happiness lies

  in the conviction that one has lost

  happiness irremediably.

  —Maria-Luisa Bombal

  11

  DIM AND MUFFLED MUSIC of the seasons. The moon half asleep in its phases. But even in the tropic zone there is winter, a collective downturn: Citizens put on weight, slept longer, reacted with unconscious gloom to the early arrival of darkness. Even lifetime residents who had never salted a driveway dreamed of toddies by a crackling fire and sleigh bells in the snow. Up and down the Sunshine State, people ringing in the New Year with banana daquiris.

  But there was a hollowness that nagged here, a sense of borrowed mythology, like the canned apple juice and paper oak leaves of a New Mexico Thanksgiving.

  Karl Gables wobbled down the gangway of the Miss Jenny Lee III holding one end of a cooler packed with fillets: Yellowtail, mutton snapper. Oscar Alvarado, retired tattoo artist, held the other end, and following close behind came Cocoa Jerry with a blood and fish scale-spattered baseball cap turned sideways on his head. Cocoa Jerry was drinking “shark repellent,” half vodka and half instant coffee. They’d been on an all-night charter party and everyone, including the captain, was pretty well plotzed. Everyone except Karl, who’d confined himself to ginger ale, saltines and, when no one was looking, a few chunks of bait.

  Walking up the pier they argued over how to split the catch. Alvarado pointed out that it was his cooler. Cocoa Jerry pointed out that he’d supplied the ice and done all the gutting and cutting. Karl, who had boated only a few small ladyfish, kept his mouth shut.

  “How about we roll dice?” Cocoa Jerry suggested. “Winner take all.”

  Alvarado said he’d rather eat steak anyway and why didn’t they go on over to Bummy’s, see what they could peddle to the early morning jar heads.

  Winter in Gibsonton meant party time. The carnies were on hiatus, filling dead time with noise and fast motion. There were card games, pancake suppers, dances at the Independent Showman’s Hall. And there was drinking, lots of it. The bars were always full of glowing folks exchanging lies and confessions, sighs and professions of love. Marriages broke and reformed in a matter of hours, lives were threatened and memories erased. Uncoverable wagers were made on the eye color of the next person to come through the door. And if all else failed, there was always shop talk, prospects for the upcoming season to be discussed and, inevitably, lamented. “When I came up there was two, three times as many shows goin’ as now. It’s the damn television that’s killin’ us.”

  Bummy’s jukebox was sending out steel guitar breakfast music as Alvarado tugged the cooler inside and sat down on top of it, his head in his hands. Doc up in Tampa had told him he’d better slow down or one day his valves would blow out.

  Karl arrived with a roll of aluminum foil (he’d left Cocoa Jerry heaving into the dumpster behind the market) and the two of them worked their way from stool to stool down the bar, hawking fillets.

  “Not outta the water two hours,” Karl said, wrapping four pieces of snapper for Elsa Spitz, Queen of the Midgets. “Got all your vitamins.”

  “I’m buying for my cats,” Elsa said, raking him with the same imperious sneer she gave the gawks from her little linoleum platform in the freak tent of Yester’s Family Circus.

  “I been up all night, don’t go busting my chops now.” Alvarado was getting hassled over price a few feet down the line.

  “It’s fuckin’ food is all, ain’t no investment. I’ll give you five bucks for that lot.”

  “We didn’t catch these babies off the rocks, amigo. Kearny don’t take you out to the deep water for nothing, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Ah … You dickhead.” But he came up with the seven fifty out of his change on the bar.

  Bummy took foil packages, etched the proper initials on them with his thumbnail and shoved them in with the bottled beer. None of these rummys was going anyplace for a while yet.

  George Beasle, who’d run for mayor back in the ’50s on a bars-never-close platform, announced that Mrs. Beasle made a superb fish chowder and he’d buy up whatever was left. The woman next to him pointed out that Mrs. Beasle had died of throat cancer well over a year ago.

  “Thanks for squashing my deal, honey,” Alvarado barked.

  “What are you, sick?”

  “Shit, I would have thrown in my own cooler here for an extra ten bucks. Sound good, George?”

  Beasle’s face spread out in a smile that was like time-lapse film of a blooming rose. “That’s right! She bought it, didn’t she? Well, damn, a round of drinks on that, Bummy.”

  When Karl declared that all he wanted was a glass of plain soda with maybe a squeeze of lemon, there was widespread disbelief.

  “Karl takin’ plain soda?”

  “Karl Gables, the ferry man on the whiskey river?”

  “Maybe it’s somebody just looks like him.”

  “Nope, this is me,” he said. “But I done stared temptation down. I’m like that old horse you can lead to water, you know?”

  “So what’s the story, Karl? Did you have a talk with Jesus or something?”

  “Just the love of a good woman,” laying one hand over his heart. “A pearl of a girl.”

  “Yes. Just this morning I purchased from your wife some bunion pads.” Elsa Spitz held up a stapled paper bag for all to see. “To me she looked run-down.”

  A few blocks to the south, at the Medi Quik, Tildy examined herself in the antitheft mirror: wan and pulpy, skin like the white of an egg. What she needed was some pr
olonged exposure at the beach, a new haircut. Or maybe, maybe it’s an allergic reaction to all these beauty products, to the terminally sleek fashion faces of the merchandising displays, the bright package graphics.

  Six and a half hours until quitting time. She moved down the aisle with her clipboard, taking inventory…. Q-Tips, cotton balls, eyewash, mouthwash, lip gloss, dental floss. She felt disapproving eyes on her. Ray Holstein, store manager, whose duodenal ulcer had forced his retirement as Oceola High basketball coach, was checking through the previous day’s receipts and hoping to find a mistake.

  “Cindy. Cindy, can you hear me?” He could never get her name right. “You’ll have to step it up. I need that inventory by twelve thirty. I’m having lunch with the district supervisor.”

  Hallelujah. Lunch with the D.S. would be the highlight of Holstein’s week. Not that he lacked suitable fear of a company superior, but the D.S. was someone with whom he could feel affinity, rapport. (Rapport—wasn’t that what team sports were all about?) They shared interests, could gab all afternoon about target shooting, marketing, home video equipment. They had the same tastes in sportswear. Holstein was desperately hungry for this kind of thing. He hated Gibtown and the people who lived there. He felt isolated, a lone sentinel of decent reality among stooges, chiselers, fast-talkers, the mentally and physically deformed. Every single one of them breaking some kind of rule: moral, behavioral, genetic. Holstein was a true believer in rules. He had once bounced his top play-making guard right off the team for wearing unmatched socks to a game.

  Tildy rattled her pen on permalloy shelf supports to get his attention. “Did you reorder those party supplies? The paper hats and all that?”

  Hand going to the knot in his tie. “What about it?”

  “We’ve still got everything from last month.”

  “It wasn’t my idea, got a memo on it from the central office. They must be stuck with a whole warehouse.” Looking away, into the green digital readout of the cash register. “So what are you worrying about it for, Cindy? All you have to do is fill in the boxes on your inventory forms. Somebody else will take care of decision-making.”