Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  “What?”

  “To see Bozo’s Circus.”

  The man nodded. He told me his name was Mr. Roush, and that he had known Bozo for years.

  “Nice guy,” Mr. Roush said. “Private, though. He can be a little, I don’t know, aloof. You know how I know him? We bum cigarettes off each other.”

  “Bozo smokes?”

  Mr. Roush’s brow furrowed. He must have realized he’d told me something he shouldn’t have. He cleared his throat then left me alone in the room for over an hour. When he finally returned, he said, “Your story checks out, son. Every name you gave me is on our mailing list. Was on the list, I should say.”

  “Was?”

  “Yeah, we cancelled all of them.”

  I was hoping he was going to offer a set of tickets to me as a reward for providing invaluable information, but Mr. Roush only opened the door and said, “Okay. You’re free to go.”

  “Can I use your phone?” I asked.

  “Local call?”

  I nodded. Mr. Roush picked up the receiver and handed it to me.

  “Dial ‘9’ first,” he said.

  I was frozen in place, afraid of what my mother was going to say to me. I could hear a band nearby playing the opening song to Bozo’s Circus. The show had begun. Mr. Roush leaned forward and dialed the number 9.

  “You’ll have to dial the rest yourself,” he said.

  I stood on the sidewalk outside WGN and waited for my mother to come get me. I worried that Norm would come roaring up, jump out, and skin me alive with his new Barlow knife, as promised.

  I stood there for what seemed like several hours, kicking the same rock back and forth. Eventually, the studio audience came pouring out the doors. Everyone was smiling and laughing. A boy about my age held several toys against his chest while his parents carried what he couldn’t hold.

  Damn you! I thought, but at least he didn’t have a new Schwinn bike and a bag full of silver dollars.

  At the tail-end of the line was Ralph, yukking it up with some kid’s father. When Ralph saw me, he shook the man’s hand and waved goodbye to the rest of the family.

  Ralph, grinning, said, “You were right.”

  “About what?”

  “It’s a great show. I should start watching it.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” I asked.

  “When they took me to the other room,” Ralph said, “I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Instead of taking a leak, I sneaked into the studio and grabbed a seat.”

  “You saw Bozo?” I yelled.

  Ralph nodded. “After Bozo, they were going to tape something called Donahue in the next studio over. I was thinking about sneaking in there to see what that was like, but I didn’t see any clowns.” He tapped his wrist-watch. “Plus Norm’s probably going to murder us as it is.”

  I couldn’t even look at Ralph. “I’m waiting for my mother,” I said coldly, staring at my shoes.

  “Wise move, Grasshopper.” Ralph slapped me on the back and said, “If you never see me again, I’ve been killed. I want you to give the eulogy, okay?”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  Ralph headed back to Addison Avenue. An hour or so after Ralph had left, Mr. Roush stepped out of the building. Walking alongside him was an older man dressed in a suit jacket and dress pants but no tie. He was also wearing a long wool winter coat that stopped around his ankles. He was taller than anyone else I’d met that day, wore wire-framed glasses, and had gray hair parted on his side. I worried that maybe this was the president of WGN who, having heard how I had tried to sell free tickets to one of his shows, wanted to rough me up, but the older man looked over at Mr. Roush and said, “Is this the li’l fella you told me about?”

  “Yes, sir, he’s the one.”

  “What’s your name?” the man asked, smiling. His voice was gravelly. His eyes, watery and surrounded by wrinkled skin but bright and familiar, caused me to relax.

  “Hank,” I said.

  The man reached out and shook my hand. “I’m Bob,” he said. He buttoned up his coat and said, “It’s cold out here, Hank. Someone coming to pick you up?”

  “My mom,” I said. My voice was starting to quake. Mr. Roush, grinning, kept looking from me to Bob and then back to me.

  Bob nodded. My heart was pounding so hard, my eardrums hurt. “Well, it was good meeting you, Hank. You look like a fine young man. Stay out of trouble now, okay?” Bob reached out and ruffled my hair.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Mr. Roush and Bob turned, walked a few steps, and stopped. Mr. Roush pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook it until a few appeared. When Bob pulled one from the pack, Mr. Roush turned back to look at me. He raised his eyebrows, as if to say, See?

  The two men had no sooner gotten into their own cars and driven away when Mom pulled up next to the curb. I slid into the car and shut the door. I wanted her to say something, but she wouldn’t even look at me. I rubbed my palms on my thighs. I thought, Say something. Anything. At a stop-light, I asked, “Who’s your favorite clown, Mom?”

  Mom gave me a look that warned me to quit speaking. She shook her head and said, “Hank.” And then: “Hank, Hank, Hank.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I smiled.

  Hey, that’s me! I thought, and I started laughing like a crazy person, the way Bozo laughed like a crazy person when everyone yelled his name, but unlike Bozo I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed and laughed until Mom pulled the car over and made me breathe into a paper sack.

  “You’re hyperventilating,” she said.

  I puffed the bag out and sucked it in, over and over, until the dizziness went away, and then we sat there for another few minutes, as though we were taking a commercial break from our lives, before Mom pulled back onto the road and took us home.

  13

  I usually didn’t have enough money to buy any, but I loved record albums. When South Side Records opened, a tiny store with narrow aisles, I visited it once a week to see the new arrivals. The albums, set in row after row of plywood bins, were a buck-fifty less than what you’d pay for them at the local Kmart or Zayre, but I still couldn’t afford them. Each week, though, you could pick up a free list of Chicago’s top-selling music. The top ten albums were listed on the left side, the top forty singles on the right. On the back was a photograph of a Chicago deejay, and it always scared me to see how different they looked than their voices had led me to believe. Whenever my father had a disagreement with someone who wasn’t particularly attractive, he’d nudge me afterward and say, “Talk about a face that was meant for radio.” I never knew what he meant until I saw those photos.

  The man who owned South Side Records was an old hippie, except that he’d trimmed his wiry beard and cut his wiry hair, grooming habits that probably didn’t sit well with other hippies, the ones who still wore moccasins and leather fringe vests, who bathed only once a year and called everyone and everything (man, woman, child, or animal) “man.” When I went into South Side Records, I started calling everyone “man” so that the owner understood that I could have been a hippie, too, if circumstances were different.

  “How’s it going, man?” I’d ask as soon as I had stepped foot inside, and the owner, whose name was Larry, would say, “There he is!” as if everyone had been waiting for me. Larry hired only pretty high school girls, and since he seemed to have different employees every couple of weeks, I made it a point to show the new girls that Larry and I had this special bond. Sometimes, after asking how he was doing, I’d point at him, wink, and nod all at once, and Larry would call me something new and startling like “The South Side Messiah!” or “Little Big Man!” or “The Merchant of Venice!” I loved hearing what he called me. I imagined that these names came to him in the form of a flashback from his hippie years, funny words and combinations of words still sizzling inside his head, itching to get out.

  One day, in the spring of my eighth grade year, Larry said, “If it isn’t Mr. Clean himself! How goes things for the almighty
bald one?”

  I pointed at him, winked, nodded. The two high school girls giggled.

  “Listen,” Larry said, “I was thinking. You come in here all the time, but you never buy anything. Why is that?”

  Hippies on TV shows called money bread, so I shook my head and said, “Bread, man. No bread.”

  Larry nodded. “No moulah? No dinero? That’s no way to go through life, pal. Tell you what. How’d you like to trade a few hours a day for an album of your choice? You come in, do a little sweeping in the back room, maybe unload a few boxes, and I’ll let you pick whatever album you want.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. But here’s the catch.” He leaned onto the counter so that his head was level with my head, and said, “You can’t tell your folks.”

  “Not a problem!” I said. My father had recently quit his job at the 3M plant, and my mother was mad at him, so I pretty much went wherever I wanted without either of them noticing.

  “I mean it,” he said.

  “No, really,” I said. “They don’t even know I’m here right now!”

  At this revelation, Larry’s eyes widened. “Good!” he said. “That’s terrific.”

  On my first day, Larry led me to the back room. It looked as though someone had opened up the service door and thrown a couple of grenades inside. The floor was entirely blanketed with empty and half-empty boxes, soda cans, broken albums, Styrofoam peanuts, and crumpled posters of rock bands. Taped to the far wall was a poster of The Bee Gees wearing white sequined jumpsuits. Someone had written underneath them THESE THREE MUST DIE FOR THE GOOD OF EVOLUTION!!!

  Larry saw me looking at the Bee Gees and said, “You realize I’m kidding, of course. I’d never kill anyone.” He said, “You don’t like them, though, do you?”

  “Nuh-uh,” I lied.

  “Good man.”

  After explaining the various chores to me and showing me where he kept the broom, a mop, and cleaning solvents, he left me alone. It wasn’t easy figuring out where to begin. I needed a strategy, so I began dividing up the junk—boxes in one corner, shattered albums and torn album covers in another, posters stuffed into the room’s only garbage can. At the end of the day, I picked out Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

  Larry frowned when I handed it over. He said, “That’s a double album, my friend. Single albums only. Sorry.” I returned it to the bin and brought up Kiss’s Dressed to Kill instead. “Is this what you want?” Larry said. “Really?” I nodded. Larry said, “Hey, it’s your hard-earned money, pal, not mine.” He slipped the album into a sack and handed it over.

  Before reaching home, I slid the album up under my shirt so that my parents wouldn’t see it. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t think that they would have approved of me working. My mother might have wanted me to start paying for my own groceries; my father might have thought that I had taken a job just to make a point about him quitting his job. But when I stepped inside the house, I realized that no one would have noticed if I had come home wearing a leopard skin loincloth, holding a spear, and dragging a King Cobra behind me. My mother had locked herself in the bedroom—I could see the light on under the door—and my father was sitting at the dining room table reading 1001 Best Jokes of the Century. Every once in a while he’d chuckle. Even when I couldn’t see my mother, I knew that the sound of Dad’s chuckling multiplied her anger. It wasn’t enough that he’d quit his job, but now he was in a good mood, walking around and smiling! I knew my mother. I knew that each chuckle was like a hot iron tapping the back of her neck.

  In my bedroom, I put the album onto my turntable and kicked back to listen, but the album skipped every few seconds, the record player’s needle jumping and landing with an amplified thud each time it skipped. I wanted to exchange the album, but since I wasn’t sure what kind of return policy Larry offered, especially given our arrangement, I decided not to say anything to him.

  The next day at work, as I studied a vandalized promotional photo of John Travolta, whose eyes had been cut out, someone began pounding hard at the service entrance. I opened the door and was surprised to see not a person but instead a custom van with a person inside. Everything inside the van was carpeted, shaggy. A Middle Eastern man with a thick mustache was sitting inside the shaggy van, smoking a cigarette and tapping, with one finger, the fuzzy dice that hung from his rearview mirror. His window was rolled down, and he blew a cloud of thick smoke at me. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone knock on a door while still in their car, so I wasn’t entirely sure how to greet him. I expected him to have an accent, but he didn’t. He said, “Tell your boss that Ghassan is here.” Before I could turn around, though, Larry was yelling, “As-sallaamu-alaykum, my brother. As-sallaamu-alaykum!” but Ghassan wasn’t having any of it. He flipped his cigarette half-a-block away. With the engine still running, he opened the van’s door and slid out.

  “Gotta lay low for a while,” Ghassan said. “Feds are cracking down. I got a friend who pirates all that Disney crap, and they arrested him last Saturday at the Twin Drive-In.”

  The Twin Drive-In was a flea market that opened on the weekend. Nothing I’d ever bought there worked—sparklers, a transistor radio, a wind-up toy car—but I couldn’t bring myself to throw any of it away. I stuffed all the broken junk into a dresser drawer that was full of old socks with gaping holes that I couldn’t bear to throw away, either.

  Larry turned to me. “Give our friend Ghassan a hand.”

  The back of his van was packed full of thousands of black concert T-shirts, and I helped carry hundreds of them inside. They were grouped first by musician, then by size. After Larry’d handed over a fist of cash to Ghassan, and after Ghassan had driven away, I held up a Nazareth T-shirt and said, “These are cool, man.”

  “They’re bootleg,” Larry said. “I get ’em for a buck, sell ’em for four. If I went through the promoters, I’d be lucky to make fifty cents. You can’t live with a profit margin like that. You do what you got to do. Remember that, buddy.”

  Although it was supposedly new, the Boz Scaggs album that I took home that night had a long scratch that ran from the label to the outer edge. It was deep enough that the song popped on every rotation. I knew that I’d have a hard time convincing Larry that every album I took home, every new album, was damaged before I even opened it up, so I filed it under my bed with the other damaged album.

  The next day brought more pounding at the service entrance. By this time I had cleared a path to the door, but now there were concert T-shirts piled everywhere, narrowing the room’s width. I expected to see Ghassan sitting in his van again, but it was a guy in his early twenties with long greasy hair and whiskers sprouting from his pimples. He was sitting on a girl’s bicycle. Pink and white plastic tassels hung from each handlebar. He handed over a stack of rubberbanded tickets and said, “Tell Lare-O this was all I could score. Tell him I’ll do better when Nugent comes to town.” When he saw me looking at the girl’s bike, which had a tiny license plate that said BECKY, he said, “Found this leaning against a Dumpster. I’m taking it to a pawn shop right now.”

  I nodded, shut the door, glad I didn’t have to look at him any longer. I brought the tickets to Larry and relayed the message.

  “Pink Frickin’ Floyd, and this was all he could get me? Okay, tell me again. What exactly did he say?”

  Both girls behind the counter—new girls—gasped. “You got Floyd tickets?” one asked, and the other one, who was wearing several long bird feathers clipped to her hair, said, “Far out! We’re going to Floyd!”

  “Whoa,” Larry said. “Easy, girls, easy. I was expecting more tickets than this. I mean, c’mon now, I’ve got bills to pay.”

  After picking out my album for the night—the soundtrack to Rocky, good music for jogging in place and punching the air—I found Ralph and told him what I’d seen these past few days.

  “Bootleg T-shirts and scalped tickets?” he said. “You better watch your back.”

  “You t
hink?”

  “Do I think? Yes, I think. That’s heavy stuff. And if you ask me, I bet it’s just the tip of the iceberg lettuce, so to speak. You think things got bad with those Bozo Circus tickets? Well, you’re not dealing with a couple of security guards here. This is underground stuff, my friend.”

  At home, my father peeked up from his book and said, “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good. Because I want to tell you a joke. Are you ready?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here we go.” I had a hard time following the joke, but it had something to do with a priest walking into a bar and complaining to the bartender about his boss. Once the bartender realizes that God is the priest’s boss, he gets sort of disturbed by the conversation. The joke didn’t end there, though. It went on and on. My father kept going back and telling some of it over. He paused a few times, trying to remember what happened next. When he finally finished, he opened his eyes wide, waiting for my reaction.

  I said, “Is that from your joke book?”

  “You don’t think it’s funny?” he asked, but before I could answer, he said, “Did I leave something out? Maybe I forgot part of it.”

  I excused myself, fearful that he’d start telling the joke to me again.

  In my bedroom, I listened to Rocky. Amazingly, it was the first album that didn’t have any problems when I played it, but it was missing the inside sleeve. You could tip the cover and watch the naked L.P. roll out. But at least it didn’t skip or pop. I was happy about that.

  On my fourth day at work, I walked into the back room and found Larry kissing a woman I’d never seen before. He was sitting in a metal folding chair and the woman, who was his age, was sitting on his lap. She was pudgy and wore thick eyeglasses, and when she looked up at me, her lenses were steamed over. “Who is it?” she asked Larry, and Larry said, “It’s Hankenstein.” “Oh,” the woman said. “Hello, Hankenstein.”

  “I can come back later,” I said, but Larry held his palm up toward me. A few minutes later, they were both gone and I was alone.