Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  By the end of the week, I had quit greeting people when I walked into the store and they had quit greeting me. No more “Little Big Man!” from Larry. No more winking, pointing, or nodding from me. I’d simply walk past everyone and head for the back room. The sooner I could start working, the sooner it would be over. The way I saw it, I wasn’t getting paid for the time it took to chat to everyone. In fact, I wasn’t getting paid at all anymore. I’d lost interest in picking out albums for myself. Something was always wrong with the album, so it didn’t seem worth the extra time that I spent in the store looking for one. More depressing than that, though, was the disappointment that swallowed me each time I played an album and heard its fatal flaw. I found myself holding my breath until the first angry pop, and then I’d feel as though I’d stepped off the side of cliff. My heart actually hurt from pounding so hard.

  On my seventh day at work, I was dragging all of the trash outside, taking it to the Dumpster in the alley, when a milk delivery truck pulled up beside me.

  “Go get Larry,” the driver said.

  I didn’t like getting ordered around—especially now that I was working for free—but I wasn’t good at talking back to someone older than me. Besides, the driver was one of those fat guys who was hairier than an ape and who looked as though he’d run you over with his truck for the fun of it, so I trudged to the front of the store and found Larry. He was behind the counter, smoking a Tiperillo, and a new girl was sitting next to him, blowing on a stick of incense, watching the red ember glow then dim.

  “Someone wants you,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “How should I know who?”

  The girl blowing incense stopped blowing, peeked up, and cocked her head the way dogs do when they hear a high-pitched whistle. “Dude,” she said. “Chill.” She shut her eyes and resumed blowing.

  My father used to come home from work and, after telling us a story about someone who annoyed him, say, “One of these days I’m going reach over and choke that numbskull.” Whenever he said it, which was several times each week, I feared he’d eventually choke one of his co-workers and end up in jail. As a customer at South Side Records, it had never crossed my mind to hurt anyone who worked here, but as an employee I had an urge to reach over the counter and choke the girl with the incense. The urge passed as quickly as it came, but nothing during that split-second would have made me happier.

  Cracking my knuckles, I followed Larry through the store and into the alley. “Ah ha!” Larry said when he saw the milk delivery truck. He turned to me and said, “We need your help, maestro.”

  I stood at the back of the truck while Larry and the driver handed milk crate after milk crate down to me. Each crate, crammed full of albums, was as heavy as a cinder block, so I could carry only one at a time. I lugged each one to another room in back, a room I hadn’t even been inside before today, and I set all of the crates against a wall. Larry gave the driver a fat wad of money and then the man got back into his milk truck. He put the truck in gear and then rumbled down the alley, his axle creaking with every shallow hole, thick blasts of exhaust appearing each time the truck coughed.

  Larry’s eyes, following the truck, eventually landed on me. “Oh. There you are,” he said. “C’mon, kiddo, let’s see what Santa brought us, shall we?”

  Inside, squatting, Larry pulled stacks of albums from milk crates, resting them on his thighs, and flipping through them. “Not bad. Hey, look. The new Van Halen.”

  “Getting into the used record business?” I asked.

  Larry laughed. He explained to me how all of these albums were recent returns at other stores, how he had connections, and how his connections made more money by selling the returns to him than if they actually returned them. “And I’ve got this machine here,” he said, pointing to a contraption in the corner of the room. “It’ll shrink wrap these babies so they look like brand-new.”

  It took a moment for Larry’s words to sink in. “So all your new albums are already old?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t say they’re old,” he said. “People buy albums, and for one reason or another they sometimes decide they don’t want them. Most stores have a thirty day return policy, so they’re not that old. Thirty days tops! My return policy is twenty-four hours. I can’t afford returns. Who would I return them to?” He started explaining to me how the shrink-wrap machine worked, but I told him that I needed to go. Larry said, “Hold on, big guy. I need these puppies on display by tomorrow morning. You can’t stay a bit longer, help out your old friend? I could probably swing that double album you wanted.”

  “Nah. I don’t think so.”

  “Go then,” he said. “Scram.” He was trying to make me feel guilty, but I wasn’t falling for it. As the door shut behind me, he yelled, “Don’t come back! And don’t take an album today! You hear me?”

  I didn’t take an album. I grabbed three concert T-shirts instead, and when I reached the front counter, I walked around behind it for the first time. The girl at the cash register quit blowing on the stick of incense. She pointed the red-hot tip at me and said, “Did Larry say you can come back here?”

  “Actually,” I said, “Larry wanted me to tell you something.”

  When I didn’t say anything, the girl said, “Well? Do I look like I have all day?”

  “Larry told me to tell you that you’re fired.”

  “What?”

  “You’re fired,” I said.

  The girl put down the stick of incense onto the glass countertop. The tip, still on fire and radiating a circle of heat, started to leave a black mark on the glass. The girl narrowed her eyes, as if unsure whether to believe me, but then she looked toward the back room, holding her gaze on the wall, as if the power to see though drywall might suddenly possess her.

  “Who came to see him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know her name,” I said, trying to remember one of the other girls who used to work for Larry. “She has pigtails. Marcy, I think. Yeah. Marcy!”

  “Is she back there with him right now?”

  “They’re in that other room,” I said. “The small room.” For dramatic effect, I added, “The room with the shrink-wrap machine.”

  Her eyes, filling with tears, lost focus on the wall. She walked around the counter, shot one last glance at the back of the store, then walked outside, a tiny bell jingling cheerfully over her head. I stood on a stepladder, slid two Pink Floyd tickets from the grip of its rubberband, and tucked them into my back pocket. With my new T-shirts draped over my arm, I walked out of South Side Records for the last time.

  I hadn’t realized how bad work had been making me feel until this very moment. I was breathing easier now, grateful for all the free time ahead. I walked down the exact same streets I walked down every day, but the way that everything looked so new, so strange, I might as well have been walking on a different planet. Quitting the job was like being pulled from the tight confines of a deep and narrow well, but when I started to picture the scene—rescue workers huddled around the opening and pulling on the rope—I was surprised to see that it wasn’t my own head emerging from the well, that it was my father’s, and the poor guy, blinking at the sunlight and smiling, had never looked happier.

  14

  On the last day before spring break, Jesus showed up at Rice Park, next to our school. He kept his distance, slinking around the monkey bars, looking pretty much like every drawing I’d ever seen of him: dingy-white robe, long brown hair, well-kept beard with a neatly trimmed mustache. I was in eighth grade, and none of my classmates knew what to do about him, so we loped around the blacktop with our hands jammed inside our pockets, occasionally shooting him a look that said, Yeah, okay, we see you, but we’re not really that impressed.

  Ralph nudged me and said, “Check out his feet. He’s wearing flip-flops. Who does he think he’s fooling?”

  Ralph’s voice had recently dropped two octaves, and the speed at which hair appeared on him reminded me of scenes in The Wolfman
when Lon Chaney, Jr. watched his own arms turn from man to beast.

  By recess, Jesus had moved to the seesaw, and he started luring over some of the eighth grade girls. One by one, the girls sauntered over with their heads bowed, returning minutes later to relay his messages. “He says he’s the son of God,” Gina Morales said. “He says he died for us,” Mary Polaski reported. Lucy Bruno, weeping, muttered under her breath, “He says it was time for him to come back to Earth because there’s too much cruelty.”

  When Mr. Santoro, our principal, finally spotted Jesus, he quickly lifted his battery-powered bullhorn, pressed the mouthpiece to his lips, and clicked it on. “Stay away from that man!” Mr. Santoro yelled. “He could be dangerous!”

  Terrified of the bullhorn, we fell silent as the word dangerous echoed across the blacktop. Jesus merely stood from his crouched position at the seesaw and waved at us, as though from the deck of a departing ship.

  Mr. Santoro was naturally a nervous guy, but lately he’d had good reason. It was 1979, and four months ago, in December, police had removed twenty-seven bodies from the house of a man named John Wayne Gacy. Gacy’s house was only twenty miles away in a northwest suburb of Chicago. Where I lived, on the South Side, it wasn’t unusual for a kid to get jumped by a car-load of bullies from another neighborhood, but what we saw on TV each night about Gacy was something altogether new for us. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, from a house nicer than ours, men carried out body bag after body bag; and just when we were starting to think that they’d found all that they were going to find, winter gave way to spring, the rock-hard frozen ground softened, and police discovered even more bodies. At last count, they’d found the remains of thirty-three men and boys.

  Mr. Santoro clicked on the bullhorn, reassuring us that everything would be okay if we simply followed his instructions. Then he ordered us to form a single-file line and start heading for the building. “Chop, chop!” he said.

  “You know what I’d do if I was him?” Ralph said, nodding toward Jesus. “I’d show up here with a burning bush. I’d probably have some sort of speaker rigged up inside the bush, maybe bury the wire underground, and then I’d have you”—he jabbed me in the chest—“hidden somewhere talking into a microphone. You know, saying things the bush might say.”

  “What would a bush say?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ralph said. “Maybe, ‘Hey, look, I’m on fire! What do all you peckerheads think of that?’ You ask me, a burning bush would have some attitude. It wouldn’t just stand around and say a bunch of cheeseball things like this bozo.”

  The word bozo made me cringe. It seemed a blasphemous thing to say until we had a little more information on the guy.

  Ralph, shaking his head, finally turned away from Jesus. He said, “Listen. Kenny and Norm had to bail on a side-job. I told them we could do it.” The idea of doing anything Ralph’s cousins did made me queasy.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What kind of job is it?”

  “It’s an acting job,” Ralph said.

  “They’re actors?” I said. “What about their job at the Tootsie Roll factory?”

  Ralph said, “They’re not professional actors.”

  I waited for Ralph to explain what “not professional” meant, but he didn’t.

  “What kind of acting job is it?” I asked.

  “We’ll find out tomorrow morning. Kenny’ll pick us up.”

  “Why’s Kenny picking us up?”

  “Because,” Ralph said, cocking his head and pausing after each word, speaking as if to an alien. “He’s. The. One. Who’s. Taking. Us. To. The. Job!”

  “Oh,” I said. “And where’s that? The job?”

  Ralph said, “Would you quit asking so many questions?”

  I couldn’t ever seem to get a handle on Ralph. For starters, I didn’t understand how he could agree to do something without knowing what it was that he was agreeing to do.

  “Okay,” I said, meaning that I would quit asking questions, but Ralph took it to mean that I would do the job with him.

  “Good!” he said, cracking me on the back. “I knew we could count on old Hank.”

  •

  After recess, Mrs. Davis quizzed us on Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” I hadn’t read it, but even the brains of the class, distracted by the arrival of a squad car, weren’t participating today. The cops had come to haul Jesus’s sorry butt away.

  “This is exactly what happened to him the first time!” Gina Morales cried.

  Lucy Bruno, the class weeper, began weeping. “It’s starting all over again,” she whined.

  Mary Polaski, who was in my weekly CCD class at St. Fabian’s Church, looked pleadingly at Mrs. Davis. “Can’t you do something? Can’t you stop them?”

  Mrs. Davis ordered the girls away from the windows. She said, “The young man outside is nothing but a hippie.” She spit the word “hippie” at us. I liked hippies. If he was a hippie, I’d have liked him.

  I looked over at Mary Polaski to see how she was holding up. Earlier that month, I had fallen insanely in love with Mary Polaski. She had long blonde hair parted in the middle and feathered like Olivia Newton-John’s. She was seeing a jug-eared high school boy named Chuck McDowell, and she spent the better part of her days in school drawing bulbous hearts with their names lewdly intertwined inside. Just a week ago I had sent Mary an anonymous love letter. Alluding to her evenings spent with Chuck, I quoted my favorite Journey song, “Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’,” the part about being all alone while she was out with somebody else.

  In a careless moment, I had shown a copy of the letter to Ralph’s cousin Kenny, who was twenty-six years old. Kenny read the letter, turned it over to see if I had redeemed myself on the opposite side, and then flipped it back again. He said, “You should have quoted Zeppelin, man. ‘Whole Lotta Love.’” With his air guitar, he started playing the opening riff: “Nuh, nah, nuh, nah, NAH nuh-nuh NAH nuh-nuh NAH nuh-nuh NAH…”

  Since sending the letter, I’d begun calling more attention to myself. For the past eight years I’d been a quiet kid, a solid B+ student, but now that my grade school career was careening to an end, I had become, to use my father’s words, a Class-A wisenheimer. The problem was that no one ever laughed at my jokes, and today wasn’t any different. Lucy Bruno sat in front of me, and after my sixth wisecrack in a row, her arm shot up.

  “Mrs. Davis!” Lucy said. “I just wanted to let you know that if you’re hearing any snide comments, it’s not coming from me, it’s coming from him!” She turned around and pointed at me. I turned around, too, as if searching for the real perpetrator, but since I was surrounded only by girls, it was clear that I was the him in question, the one making snide comments.

  “Enough!” Mrs. Davis said. “All of you. You may think that because you’re graduating in a few short weeks that you don’t have to take these assignments seriously anymore, but let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. Keep in mind, if you don’t pass this class, you will not be graduating with your fellow classmates. Have I made myself clear?”

  A grim silence fell over the room. We knew that Mrs. Davis wasn’t bluffing. All we had to do was look at Ralph. He served as our constant reminder of how bad things could get.

  “Good,” Mrs. Davis said. “Let us continue then.”

  Most of the houses in our neighborhood looked alike, but the house Ralph lived in with his mother was at least thirty years older than the others and covered on all four sides with roofing shingles. Long and narrow, it was what my father called a shotgun shack. Since I’d never stepped foot past the sagging fence, let alone inside the house itself, I waited by the gate tonight, hoping Ralph would look out a window and see me.

  I never told my parents that I was going over to Ralph’s because I knew that my mother would sigh loudly and say, “Just remember: you’re judged by the company you keep.” To which my sister, Kelly, would add, “You are what you eat.” The sad fact was that
I constantly worried about being judged by the company I kept, and so I was always walking a razor-thin line—being Ralph’s friend, on the one hand, but pretending to everyone else that that we weren’t friends. My family would be disappointed in me if they knew that I was friends with Ralph, and Ralph would be disappointed in me if he knew that I told people that we weren’t. My stomach ached just thinking about it.

  Ralph finally opened the front door, bounded down the front stoop, and walked over to the gate, but he didn’t invite me inside. He was wearing a too-tight T-shirt with a decal that read “Class of ’73.” It was 1979, and Ralph hadn’t graduated from anything yet. The shirt was probably a hand-me-down from one of his cousins.

  “I saw you stalking around out here. What do you want?”

  “Have you talked to Kenny again?” I asked.

  “Kenny? Why?”

  “The job,” I said. “I was wondering what kind of acting we need to do. Do you think we’ll need to memorize any lines?”

  “Memorize lines?” Ralph said. “What for?”

  “For the parts we’re going to play,” I said.

  “Go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow’ll be here before you know it.” He shook his head and said, “Sometimes I don’t know what to make of you, Hank.” He huffed, then turned and headed for his house, his T-shirt creeping further up his back with each step.

  The very next morning, the first day of spring break, Kenny roared up in front of my house in a souped-up Nova that he’d been working on since I’d started grade school. Each time Kenny pressed down on the accelerator, toxic clouds exploded from the dual exhaust pipes. Coughing, eyes watering, I was reminded of the air pollution movie we were forced to watch in Science every year, a movie about the year 2000, and how the few remaining people on Earth would be wearing space suits with oxygen tanks, thanks to inconsiderate people like Kenny. I was going to tell Kenny about the movie, but when the Nova violently backfired and Kenny, clutching his stomach, said, “Excuse me, boys,” as if the noise had come from him, I no longer saw the point in bringing it up.