“You don’t get tired of it, Grack?”
“Sick of it. Sick of what, eh? Sick of them all and their pockets full of hanky-pank money—but you’re a young fellow got his end before him.”
“You get like that, Grack?”
“Got his end in front of him. I already come to my end, boy.”
Even so, sometimes his thumb-and-finger snapped with a yen for the girls, and then there might be trouble, since the flypaper eyes were the smartest thing about him and they didn’t reckon on anything but the sale. Me, I was a brat yet, not much older than Joy, a sawdust streetkid, and I asked too much of men in our world without women; that’s ahead of the story. Grack, maybe he asked too much of the crowd in a world made, whatever he said, by individual men, just as one of them had made the rasping ho-hee platter which backed him up each workday evening, winters and traveling excluded.
How it happened with us is as easy as this: Grack, this fine talker, he stood in his box near San Diego and plucked a tricksie in shorts as she wiggled by. He took the thin pants between his horny fingers, appreciating her ripeness by the plump distance she jumped straight up, and roared like a kid: “Snookums!” He patted. He pinched. He held on.
She had friends, it seemed. In that crowd, with Tricksie jostling them every chance she got—I’ve seen her on all my midways in these wide States—they were blowing for a fight. “Ouch,” she peeped. “Oh me,”—and she rolled her round little eyes to see what she could see.
“You goddamn bum,” her marko friend yelled. “What you think you’re doing, squeezing tomatoes?”
“Yeah, goddamn, you think so?” his friend asked.
Craw jerking, Grack said, “I’ll explain it to you for the price of admission, children’s rates. See me after the show.”
They both jumped the Grack. He let go of Tricksie’s prettiness and murmured, soft-like and reluctant, “Hey, rube.”
Hey, rube!—with a ho and a hee for this carnie battlecry. Hey, you fearless rubes!
Dreamy in my high, I floated down from the next platform to kick the smaller mark where it would tell on him. I did it with my toes, as light as I could, though he did not appreciate this. It turned out that he was a real sociable fellow with a wide circle of friends and one of them came at Grack with a bottle. Grack whistled between his teeth. He had to rap the bottle baby on the knuckles. They were a party; we found ourselves with an old-fashioned hey-rube and obliged to move the show on that night. There was no patching it. I remember looking over to Tricksie with her pretty little hand tip-touching the black-and-blue spot, and I hoped that she would finally let Grack fix the rest of her for her, but just then someone broke my nose and I went thrashing about, spouting blood over everyone and yelling my courage mixed with salty phlegm. How could I do any better? I worked toward the best pleasures on earth, ready for high virtues of friendship even if the sharpest nosebones worked their way into my cheeks.
“Oh, do it for me,” Tricksie was saying.
Sam the Popcorn Man was throwing canvas over his machine and had it almost covered when a rube heaved a tent-stake and the popcorn blew like snow among us. “Hee! hee! hee! Ho! ho! ho!” Someone was windmilling an empty bucket. Someone had found a case of beer. Someone turned up the speaker at the zoo and it roared till our scalps shivered with it. “HO! HO! HO!” A small sliver like a fishbone had pierced my nostril in just the place where Grack’s wart lay. I noticed it at the time. Tricksie was rubbing herself and murmuring happily, “Oh, my, won’t you? Kill him for me, please.” She was lonely because nobody touched her after Grack. Picking her hand through the broken glass of the popper, she stuffed her mouth and said, “All for me? Oh, you shouldn’t hurt yourselves, boys. It’s not right. Get the skinny fellow over there, he’s the one. Kill him. I’m just a defenseless little girl. No, the one with the funny nose.”
Joy dumped a jug of warm peanut oil on Tricksie’s new hairdo. Tricksie stuck her tongue through it like surprised. Joy said to me: “Oh that must hurt, Bud. Bud! Let me wash it for you.” She was crying.
Later Grack picked me for true and handed me a compliment on the new nose. “You don’t look like a kid no more, kid, never will. Thanks for coming. You was first. I really mean it.”
“I was nearest, that’s all,” I admitted modestly.
“How was I to know the whole town was her friend?—in thin panties and fruitcake fat like that. We only just got in town. I didn’t hardly see that mark with the bottle. I should of known, though, frisky like she was.”
I blushed at this apology for the trouble and my broken nosebones. “You couldn’t have guessed, Grack. You were busy with business.”
“Business, kid, you mean monkey business. That there business finger got to look out for itself sometimes. Never did learn, did you?”—and he frowned at the dark hand with its pink ringed mounds of callus. He sighed, finished his study, and stuck his head toward me. “How’s the face?”
“Still there.”
“Looks fine, just fine.” He sighed again and put his vaporous eyes upon me. He didn’t con me with the finger, though. The wart lay sleek and still. “Just dandy,” he said.
“Glad to get it for you, Grack.” If I wouldn’t earn this face and the skewered nose for him, then who could be worth it? I was lucky in this case that friendship and principle came together in a time of risk. Since love is the principle and Grack a man with a use for everything, my choice fell happy here. You don’t always find it that way with grifters, family, and the others you meet in business.
The next mornings I took to crawling up on one of the rusty Ferris wheel benches, braked while the carnival slept, and tried to remember Phyllis and my faraway father in Pittsburgh and the squares beyond. Motherless since birth, I dreamed only of my father, who was lost to me in the immobility of his mourning, his fleshly discontent, his business, and his shameful and secret watching over me. A five-dollar habit helped me forget and then remember. I was keeping cool and making the effort to give an answer like that of Grack’s funhouse speaker. He had invited me to sleep in his truck, where we found room for two easy.
2. Had memories, old friends, and a bad habit
I WAS with it and for it. I was picking pockets in a wholesome diversification of ways, as the stockbrokers put it—countstores, girlie shows, even taking bets in the funhouse on how high a skirt would blow. (Saw many a frayed hem. Some girls are more careless with their underthings than you’d ever have occasion to know in another line of work.) I had risen fast despite my habit, from tent man and candy butcher to shill and apprentice inside man in a count-your-ball, rob-’em-all shop. I was no first-of-Mayer staying put with the rent at home until the spring made it nice on the lot. I traveled through foul September rains on the canvas. I gave myself to voyaging.
Only my tenderness sat flabby in the way, an overtenderness both to myself and to others. That was how, trying to keep cool and out of the way of such as Phyllis and my real pa, I picked up the habit. A businesslike five-dollar habit helped me mix the carnie hardness with the carnie softness which takes the place of the rules of courtesy in a traveling show. Grifting troubadours, bonnie princes of con with ten-gallon hats, we trailed our unchivalric careers through the dust of many counties. Grack could snip the fringe off a gypsy’s ribbon and sell it back to her. My father, too, sold service—work service, loading his truck at any hour of the day or night in Pittsburgh, and never with schnapps even when Hizonner Volstead had made owning a truck and knowing the road profitable. Grack serviced for profit the marks with their greedy eyes and the dry lips of worried fraud.
Pauline, who liked Grack, said to Joy: “You just stay from under Grack, hear me? Get your first loving-up from somebody needs it of you, daughter-a-mine. You got cute shape, cute face just like your papa—I see nothing but trobble less you hold out for the genuine loving. And cover yourself afterwards so’s you don’t catch a chill—I see past, present, and future clear as glass.”
Me, I booted the mark down the midway when I
saw that squirrelly look which says: “Win it all back with the rent money because they can’t, no they can’t do this to me.”
When the eyes fevered over this way, fright moving in on the larceny in their hearts, I dumped them outside and said, “No, no, there’s a limit on losses here. Be a good loser now, sir. Go home. Here, take a nice babydoll to the wife and just thank the management.”
It was policy, sure, to keep them on the move and smiling, but I was too quick with policy, and sometimes a mark would come back nasty: “Mind the wax in your own ears, sonny boy. Whose money and day off is it? Get back there behind the counter and set ’em up again.” The kicks gone from it, I would have to sweep in the leavings of his cash, his watch, and his bad checks. I couldn’t enjoy it anymore. Dad had done this to me, faraway in Pittsburgh, tiddling me with unpleasure for my pleasure and putting pellets of lead under my tongue and at the nimble tips of my fingers. Grack had no such troubles; neither did the others. If they had fathers, they knew what to do with them; they left them far behind and gave themselves over to proving who was who: Gig and gouge, take your best hold.
I tried to be different. I had an outlook.
You should have seen me rouge all over for the rightness of the world because Palmistry Pauline, the queen of our mittcamp, liked to tell the ladies nice things: he loves you truly, he’s coming back to you soon, he’ll be tall, dark, and with his hernia tucked in.
Later, washed by the dawn sky above me, in the truck with Grack or alone on a Ferris wheel mat, I knew that even sweet Pauline couldn’t fix it for anyone. They all knew. She had her own troubles, a dollar-eating daughter to raise, the change of life, an old conviction for stag movies and illegal matroning. She demanded the minimum donation for reading the future, thus giving time and the ladies’ hands a moral sense. You can see that we had a heart for each other’s hearts, although Pauline couldn’t do good anymore for anybody, not anybody. She went on trying. She could still be kind.
“Hernia Hoo?”
“Ropture, I said, modom. Tray-o-diemints. No more trobble.”
“And for this you charge fifty cents?”
Still, paying the broads with tissue paper in their garters or telling as if, secure in morphine or other pacifiers, wobblies, ex-cons, gypsies, depression bums, freaks and cripples, guys with habits and light-footed guys and clever chappies with no place to rest their cleverness, gentlemen who were with it for every bad reason in a world of bad reasons, we found in the show that forgotten moral thickness for which so many of us were sick. “The Feast of Our Lady of Syracuse,” Bigcut Stan wrote to Billboard, “the Biggest Feast in the East.” Mindful of a sick past, we embraced this sick present, its festivals, sentiments, trials, and especially its divided religion which attempted to bring together a sublime freedom for elbow-room with a divided loyalty for friendship. “Those that know me, come on in,” Stan the Bossman advertised in the springtime, “but no collect telegrams.” There was society enough for the Sunday Times. For example, Pauline’s little Joy tried to pass me a pop bottle during the hey-rube, poured peanut oil on Tricksie, later laved my nose and tried to mother it like a grown woman, still later whispered, “Here, have a sandwich, Bud. Don’t you know you got to eat?”
“Nose hurts and no appetite. Thanks.”
“You got to. Minced ham on white, peanut butter and jelly on cracked wheat, all those nourishing vitamins.”
I watched Grack winking and grinning at this nervous-kneed girl who wiggled like a woman to offer me sandwiches in a bag and jelly on her wrists. Although I had only a couple of chinhairs and summers on her, Grack’s grin made me stiffen away and pull my mouth down, saying, “Little girl, y’ bother me. Got my own vitamins.”
“Okay, Bud,”—dipping.
“But I mean to thank you anyway, little girl,”—but she had already gone, fast on small feet, a shy monkey, quick and busy and pretty little mug coming to an angry pout.
Grack was still shaking his head and scratching. “Now you hurt the filly’s feelings,” he said. “Little boy, you’re plenty rough. You don’t want to hurt a feeling like that less you really like her. You only nip like that, puppy, when you’re—” He stopped and grinned.
This is what I mean by society just like yours even among all us complacent oddballs. “Shouldn’t worry you because it tickles me to watch—that kid was making up to you so sweet,” Grack said. Our cooktent had a pleasant business warmth, too. For other examples from the society page of Stan’s Famous Truck Show:
The wedding of Roly and Poly, our Siamese twins, to the Hayworth Brothers, who were billed in the West as “Those Gallant Aristocrats of the Trapeze,” until Chet Hayworth accused his brother, Poopface, of having eyes for Roly and the act split up. Or the hey-rube when a farmer took off after Red Rosalie, the belly-dancer, and Rosalie blushed, pouted, bargained, and finally consented. We heard the mark’s howl from the Ferris wheel to the last countstore when he discovered that Rose is a man like the rest of us, or nearly. “Dincha know?” Rosalie lisped when we got him subdued. Or the long sleepy drinkdowns during the slow Florida winters at Jacksonville, when, if off-season and off-luck meet, the very richest carnie you meet is like to sell his pins and buckles and rings and end up a wino at the Salvationists by Feb or March. Or the boosting from the A & P, when we put bets to see who could get away with the most bottles of vanilla extract in two hours; no fair buying, fellows. I used to kiss Pauline’s ring for luck; Joy wasn’t looking—she went to high school wintertimes. Or Casanopopolous, who had a pair of the widest nostrils for a mark in a crooked show, who sniffed them out and vacuumed them in, who drove a trailer and ironed his money at the end of each day. Yes, he put out his board and heated the iron on a stove and smoothed out the rough places. That man hated creases. Once or twice in the season, and every season, he was looted. Broken into. All gone. “Why don’t you lay it away in the bank?” I used to ask him. (This happened every year.)
“Don’t trust banks,” he said.
He knew too much about con to fall for that one, but he never managed to save a buck. We all felt sad sometimes to have sneakthieves among us, but what can you do with a mark besides giving him a chance to enjoy his flatwork or win a free Indian blanket?
One day Grack strolled over and stood spraddle-legged at my booth, grinned to show his friendly black tooth—I was warming up to the empty air, “Try a free one, they’re all free, folks”—and laid a finger to the fat-bellied wart and his mushy eyeflesh. He snapped it away to kid my ears empty and my head ready. Making me watch, he closed his mouth for a moment; he was the rare carnie who could live without brag. He carried the talent of silence with him. He reached for my arm, rolled up the sleeve, and poked at the sore places on the veins. Gently he scratched the scabs. “Why don’t you kick it?” he said finally.
“Don’t know how.”
“It’s an expensive habit.”
I was thinking: Expensive to myself without the habit, too, Grack. I touched my nose healed flat but still sore.
“What say?”
“Didn’t answer yet, Grack.”
“Come on along, kid.”
“You know it ain’t easy, Grack.” The trade had already wandered away. It was a windy afternoon, the shadows still short off the mountains, and they were just looking things over with their palms not itchy and hardly a dime jingling. I said: “But another thing, now you’re asking, what do you do what you do for, Grack?”
“Wha-what?”
“Grifting, you know it. All right, so let’s cut up a jackpot. How long you been grifting?”
This made him frown and rock softly on his heels. “Listen, kid, I studied for priest, but I didn’t like it. It didn’t agree. So? I did it for my mother.”
I leaned to him over the board and shook three marbles in my fist. “You think you can always make it like this? You ready to go on for always?”
“Get myself a skillo, get myself a patch in every town, what more do I need?” He looked over the apprehensive afternoo
n crowd with its know-it-all faces and its pockets joylessly buttoned. They weren’t even buying balloons, cobweb candy, or Spicy Artist’s Views. He took the pencil from behind his ear, under the Texas hat, and tapped my knuckles with the marbles in them. “You make good money on a skillo wheel,” he said carefully, as if I had touched a difficult place in his way of thinking. “I love, really love to see how the mark runs and then he’s headed off by a wideawake patch.”
“What I mean, Grack,”—and I took the pencil. It changed hands. “What I mean is what’s in it for you? You got yourself no habits. You just like the feel of the crowds maybe.”
“That’s it, friend, I love to let the crowd feel me. With a ha ha ha and a hee hee hee. I love to let them do it. You hit it there now. I wish I could dress snappy like a priest, but they’d never trust me. No, you’d start slow and get away slow.…” He tipped back the hat and shaded his eyes with his hand and watched the pickup bums setting down the Ferris wheel. “They’re going to tear that thing apart like that, not now, I only mean someday. No, you can’t dress queer, you got to look like the marks only wear a big-brimmed hat to show who you are, in this case Gracchus. I ain’t no sweet seminarian no more. I’m with it and for it.” He grinned and brought the finger around to his eye. “I ain’t forgetting, kid. You talk it up like a longtime grifter, real dealing how you talk it up. Listen here to me now, you. Kick it before it kicks you, kid. Before it beats you white. You can do it, you’re the kicking kind—that’s my bet on your nose.”
I wondered if he meant it, and tested him. “You can’t do it all by your lonesome, Grack. I mean me, I can’t.”
“I don’t know it?” He scuffed the waffle chips at our feet and pinched me with his Tricksie fingers. “I know it needs help, kid. I’ll help. I can sit you out. I used to join out the odds, had myself a stable of clappers for the gash-hounds too dumb to do their own howling, that’s how bad I needed it from those shyster country docs. I did it myself once, now I know it needs help and I’ll help you.”
Man Who Was Not With It Page 2