Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken

by Di Filippo, Paul

  Back in the middle of the intersection the crumpled trailer carrying the Baroness lay on its side, unhinged from Gürl’s truck, which itself had slued athwart the road under the impact of a bigger truck apparently barreling through the junction.

  People already congregated around the accident. Several onlookers capped their ears against the horrible noises wrenched from the Baroness by her injuries. To Rory, she sounded as if she occupied the ninth circle of hell.

  Ambulances and police cruisers soon arrived. Rory heard them, but didn’t hear them; saw them, but was blind. Kneeling in the grass at the side of the road, he vomited what seemed like six year’s worth of circus meals.

  Technicians were peeling back the side of the trailer with jaws of life, raising a racket like the sound of a celestial beer can being crushed. Still the horse’s screams transcended the audible torture of the metal.

  Rory heaved himself weakly up. Lispenard approached the carnage, carrying the big pistol from his trailer. The Baroness’s head protruded visibly now from a collar of jagged metal. Her foam-flecked muzzle and wild eyes imprinted themselves on Rory’s cortex in a diptych with Jacky Ray’s face.

  The technicians had ceased their useless efforts, having seen Lispenard take aim at the Baroness’s head. But before he could pull the trigger, Hugo Gürl appeared, bleeding copiously from a head wound himself.

  “Nein,” he said, and took the pistol from Lispenard’s hand.

  The crack of the shot shattered Rory’s world.

  Gürl returned the smoking gun to Lispenard, and then walked away. He passed the ambulances and just kept going. No one stopped him.

  Rory watched Gürl walk away carrying the better part of Rory’s soul, but couldn’t figure out how to call him back.

  Down in Tampa, the Pantechnicon mourned and began to recover.

  Everyone but Rory.

  His very reason for staying with the circus had evaporated. Lispenard, genuinely sympathetic, kept Rory on through the winter and into the new summer season. Rory worked as a roustabout, and even took a few rudimentary turns on the high wire. But his heart found no refuge in any of the acts anymore. His misery peaked each night the appointed moment of his act rolled around. He swore he could feel the phantom warm barrel shape of the Baroness’s body between his legs. Lifeless and enervated, he moped through his useless hours.

  One day in early June, Katie turned to Rory with a tragic sigh and said, “Do you ever remember me saying I couldn’t love anyone I was always feeling sorry for?”

  Rory nodded. He asked for no further explication, dreading the words that would make his unmanly failure explicit.

  On January 21st of that year, President Carter had issued a blanket pardon for draft-dodgers. Rory saw his course clearly.

  He went to Lispenard’s office and told him he intended to repatriate himself. The manager waxed philosophical.

  “Life is mutability. Always prepare yourself for a kick in the pants, and you will somehow learn to relish the blow. Nonetheless, your departure saddens me. You were a stalwart in the show during your tenure. Although not born to the greasepaint as so many here were, you have been a true son of the bigtop.”

  Before Rory could say anything emotional in response, Lispenard continued. “And now I suppose you’ll be wanting your accumulated wages. Ah, what a mercenary, just like all the others! Well, empty your pockets of all scrip! No good will such fairy gold do you in the real world. Meanwhile, I’ll total your accounts.”

  Rory dumped his circus money on Lispenard’s desk while the man penned some figures into his record book. The manager moved to the old safe then and, shielding the dial with his body, opened the heavy steel door. He took a pack of bills out and extended them to Rory.

  “Thirty thousand dollars, more or less, and you deserve every penny. I wish it could be more, but the shoestring supporting this enterprise frays even as we speak.”

  “Lenny—I don’t know what to say, except thanks.”

  The men shook hands and Rory left.

  Back at Katie’s trailer, he hoisted his packed duffel. Katie was dozing prior to her performance. With her golden hair spread across the pillows (untenanted), she reminded Rory of Sleeping Beauty or some other princess out of Grimm. He kissed her, but although she stirred she did not wake. He must be no prince.

  For the first time in half a dozen years Rory crossed the border without wearing a baldy cap, and by showing his rightful ID, an expired Iowa driver’s license. The authorities seemed unfazed, as if Rory had been preceded by others of his traitorous ilk.

  Rory headed directly for Iowa. As required, he registered with the proper Federal agency in Des Moines and began the official paperwork on his exoneration. Then he boarded a bus for Independence.

  The sign announcing the apiary needed painting. His swimming pool had been drained and the cement showed irreparable cracks. Otherwise the Honeyman homestead seemed in good repair.

  Rory knocked on the door. A son’s privilege of unannounced entry had been foresworn.

  His mother had put on weight, and begun dying her hair. She dropped the tumbler in her hand and the glass shattered. Her bear hug was commensurate with the winning of a thousand gold medals.

  Rudy Honeyman returned from his errands in town half an hour later. He wore a tan leisure suit with white shoes. His hair had gone completely gray. Encountering Rory in the parlor, Rudy Honeyman fell poleaxed onto the couch and pulled a pillow reflexively across his face. After recovering himself, Rory’s father spent the next four hours letting son speak without interruption.

  “How dapper you look with a beard,” Roz Honeyman commented during supper, after more momentous matters had been exhausted.

  Rory had forgotten he even owned a beard. He stroked it thoughtfully. Just a few days ago, it seemed, he had been squeezing water out of the hairs and trying to convince Lispenard of his utility to the circus.

  They had changed nothing in his old room. All his diving trophies appeared to have been dusted just that morning. Rory lay on his childhood bed, staring up at the ceiling. Hadn’t he been fixed in just such a posture only moments ago, contemplating his Olympic fiasco?

  A knock at his door. His father entered when bidden. Rudy sat on the edge of the bed, plucked at the loose skin of his neck and cleared his throat.

  “Plenty of work around here.”

  “Dad.”

  “Son?”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be staying.”

  “Didn’t think so. That’s okay though. Everything’s okay now.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Silence lengthened. The elder Honeyman spoke.

  “So. Any plans you want to share?”

  Rory verged on denying any coherent schemes. But then a desire, never previously articulated or even recognized, surfaced in him.

  “I think I’ll be heading east. Gonna check out a place I heard about once.”

  “This place have a name?”

  “Hoboken,” said Rory.

  Chapter Five

  Higher Economics

  The most mundane activities held the potential for artistry. Wiping one’s ass could equate with painting a masterpiece. If you did it right.

  This startling insight had been granted Rory during a long afternoon of rambling conversation with drop-in mystic, Ped Xing, that syncretic Jewish-Buddhist monk who served as the Beer Nuts resident rabbinical bodhisattva. The secret of true artistry, revealed Ped Xing, consisted of projecting ones whole soul and core essence into the act in question, achieving a oneness with the medium and the moment of creation/transformation.

  If you were really lucky, maintained Ped Xing, maybe your art and the rest of your life would fuse permanently. The art would swell to encompass all other activities, permeating each instant. Art and life indistinguishable, a whole, a universally personal attitude and stance, an ineluctable way of being.

  Rory quickly understood this lesson intuitively from his moments of diving exaltation, both solo and with the B
aroness. But such epiphanies lay all in Rory’s past. He experienced no current calling that would exalt him. Owning his sandwich shop provided only a semi-comfortable, slightly-above-poverty-level lifestyle, not vocational bliss.

  And yet the small confines of Honeyman’s Heroes did hold an accomplished master, one who had reached the other side of existence.

  Plain as the stains on his apron, Nerfball had transcended.

  Now, on this day some three weeks after Rory’s foray into the Old Vault Brewery to claim his employee, the pudgy man’s fingers moved like a maestro’s. Fluid, knowing, deft, they flew through their arcane rituals. Cutting, slicing, chopping, shredding, trimming, dicing. Layering and spreading, steaming and stacking, halving and wrapping—behind the high counter, his butterball body achieved grace and weightlessness. He twirled, flipped, glided, dipped, spun and pirouetted through the ballet of sandwich composition. His round face bore a look of otherworldly concentration, a kind of feverish satori. Nerfball: the sandwich wizard.

  Rory watched in sheer admiration. He thought of a Taoist parable Ped Xing had related, of the butcher whose knife never needed sharpening since he sliced cows so delicately into their component parts that they fell into pieces with only a whispered brush of the keen knife that never hit bone.

  No matter how many times Rory had witnessed this exhibition of skills, he never failed to marvel at it. Who would ever think—seeing Nerfball on the street, with his lank, longish greasy hair, his pimply face, his beltless, lowriding pants perpetually revealing his butt-crack—who would imagine they were looking at a man at the top of his chosen profession, a Stravinsky of salami, a Picasso of pastrami, a Tolstoy of turkey?

  From the hungry crowd gathered at the counter there suddenly erupted spontaneous tumultuous applause. Nerfball had tossed a flipperful of steaming roast beef and Swiss high into the air, whipped a small spatula through the stainless-steel well of mustard, spread the sunflowery condiment on a big slice of rye, turned around to pop up the toast for a BLT, and finally caught the falling meat and cheese on the slice of bread held out behind his back.

  Rory smiled in a paternal manner. At such times he felt almost fulfilled himself.

  Filling drink orders, replenishing Nerfballs raw materials as needed, taking money and making change, Rory experienced a vicarious measure of peace, psychic fallout from Nerfball’s harmony. His many worries momentarily dropped away. Life seemed simple and good. Even while he knew the feeling to be a temporary delusion, Rory found himself savoring it, appreciating this little niche he had carved out of the world’s chaos.

  The inside of Honeyman’s Heroes earned the description “clean, but not neat.” An incredible clutter, the accumulated bric-a-brac contributed over the decades of its existence by eccentric patrons, filled every available horizontal spot, and not a few vertical perches as well.

  Mounted on the exposed brick walls, numerous framed caricatures of local celebrities, executed in the inimitable Netsuke style, leered or smiled or frowned down on the crowd. Portraits of several Mayors, some musicians and singers, including of course Hoboken’s most famous native son, Frank Sinatra, and one of Bruce Springsteen, commemorating a brief visit during the Asbury Parkians fledgling days. An enormous illustrated menuboard constituted another Netsuke contribution. (When they had first broken up, Rory had momentarily contemplated expunging all traces of his former lover’s artwork from the store. In a calmer mood he had decided otherwise. Too much a part of his personal history and the store’s, Suki Netsuke could hardly be relegated to some emotional gulag. Nowadays looking at her artwork all day hardly pained him, although the recent close encounter of the fleshly kind in the abandoned brewery had reawakened certain twinges.) The menu listed—and illustrated in savory detail—each sandwich Nerfball could compose, and their contents. Impressively long and heterogeneous, the list included:

  THE SHAKESPEARE

  ham and danish jarlsberg

  THE BRITNEY SPEARS

  marshmallow fluff and iowa honey

  (“from the flow’ry banks of the wapsipinicon”)

  on white bread

  THE SINATRA

  tongue and bologna

  THE TRUMP

  caviar and extra lettuce

  THE MADONNA

  turkey breast, cranberry sauce, and spicy stuffing

  THE CHRISTIE WHITMAN

  sauerkraut and rat cheese on a hard roll

  And so forth.

  Bracketed securely to the side walls, scarred narrow ashwood counters afforded minimal dining space, abetted by tall stools positioned beneath. The lacquered countertops had been worn to bare wood in many spots. Most orders were takeouts, and no other seating was offered. Atop the counters rested napkin dispensers; paper cups holding sheaves of straws; and shakers dispensing salt, pepper and celery salt. A huge pickle barrel, its wooden exterior concealing a plastic tub, dominated the center of the store. Plastic tongs hung on a chain from the barrel’s rim.

  Nerfball worked at a long, scarred butcherblock slab, at the front of which stood a long shallow glass display case which functioned both as a divider between the artist and his fans and as a showcase for various figurines and good-luck objects donated over the years by various customers. A partial contents of the case included: a diorama of plastic dinosaurs attacking a battalion of toy soldiers; a three-quarters-life-sized bust of Elvis; a herd of horse statues; a collection of bees in jewelry form; a taped-upright crackled black-and-white snapshot of some vintage Army buddies, the obverse inscription “Honeyman’s Heroes” reflected in a mirror propped up for that purpose; the store’s first dollar in sales encased in Lucite; a framed yellowed letter from the government absolving one Rory Honeyman of all penalties for any defalcation of military duty; and a tarnished silver Olympic medal.

  At the left end of the counter, from the customer’s perspective, stood Rory’s old-fashioned mechanical ka-chinging cash register. Between register and display case, roughly a foot of open space facilitated the delivery of sandwiches and the transfer of money.

  Behind Nerfball the store stretched backward for half its total length. Ranks of refrigerators, freezers and shelves; piles of crates and boxes; empty plastic pickle buckets; mop and pail. In a sphere of personal space around Nerfball, all his implements and ingredients rested within easy reach. Bottles of Tiger Sauce, tubs of mayo, mustard, relish, ketchup, Russian and French dressing. Luscious mounds of butter and cream cheese. Piles of sliced tomatoes and onions. Sharp knives, flexible spatulas, resilient flippers, capacious spoons. Twin chrome steamers that could swiftly turn a quarter-pound of even tough corned beef into so much ambrosia (not that Rory bought any grade of meat but the best). Slit-top boxes of waxed paper and foil, stacks of plastic plates. Several opened loaves of various breads and rolls of assorted dimensions. Serving trays of coleslaw and potato salad with long-handled spoons protruding, and the square cardboard containers (cheaper than plastic, and biodegradable) needed to hold such creamy delicacies.

  The floor up front in the public portion of the store consisted of wide varnished and well-scrubbed boards; in the rear, age-grimed and less meticulously maintained tiles.

  A compact, simple and efficient little shop with lots of character. Rory had worked hard to make it so. When he had arrived from Iowa all those years ago, the space had held a bankrupt restaurant called Keynes and Smith, its hokey interior configured as a nineteenth-century saloon with all the authenticity of Disney World’s Europe pavilion. Having decided en route to make this New Jersey town his home, if any fit at all could be established twixt man and burg, Rory had eagerly cast about for some business to support himself. Realtors introduced him to the man who would become and remain his landlord down to this very day, a fellow named Mark Coyne who lackadaisically managed several properties from Weehawken to Jersey City and troubled Rory only infrequently with his random visits. Eager to resume getting some rent on this storefront, Coyne had convinced Rory of the inevitable success of a new restaurant in the same loc
ation where one had just failed. Opting for simplicity, Rory had spent a good portion of his Pantechnicon mustering-out money on gutting the place and remaking it in its current image.

  And although he had hardly gotten rich over the following years, he had made a meager living. Until lately.

  Shouted orders jogged Rory out of his reverie. No time for financial worries now. There were sandwiches to be made and distributed! Nerfball continued to respond to the demands of the customers with wordless speed, slices of pumpernickel flying through the air like ninja stars of death. What with the making of small talk, taking money, and digging cans of soda out of the cooler, Rory experienced the passage of the early afternoon as a blurry rush of faces, hands and paper sacks already splotching with seeping savory juices. Finally, with the clock (a neon antique from a defunct chain of filling stations) showing almost three, the store momentarily held only Rory and his assistant.

  Nerfball wiped his chapped hands on his apron, then lifted the cloth to his brow to dab at his sweat. He took a Kleenex and blew his continually troublesome nose. Gradually the King of Koldkuts lost his introverted look of intense concentration, a fuller cognizance of his surroundings returning.

  Rory walked over to his lone employee and clapped him with honest appreciation on his back.

  “Thanks, Nerf. You were, as usual, superb. I think I can handle the supper crowd alone—its always slow on a Monday night. Why don’t you break early today?”

  Nerfball nodded and began to untie his apron. As he did so, an unwonted curiosity struck Rory, and a question born of the gratitude he felt today toward Nerfball surged into spontaneous life.

  “Hey, Nerf, I just realized something. After all the time we’ve worked together, I still don’t know your real name.”

  Nerfball looked embarrassed. “Its Judd.”

  “That’s not such a bad handle. Would you prefer I call you that?”

  “My last name is Hudnutt.”