“Oh.”
“In school all the other kids used to call me ‘Pudd.’”
Judd “Pudd” Hudnutt. Too cruel. No wonder the name of a spongy toy had seemed preferable.
“Oh, man, Nerf, I’m sorry I even brought the issue up—”
“Hey, moll, don’t sweat it. I sure don’t anymore. Not since I moved in with the Nuts. They all understand getting picked on.”
“I can believe that. Well, anyhow, time once more for your new-style pay.” Rory moved to the register. As he cranked its big handle, he asked in a continuation of his unlikely camaraderie, “Nerf, are you happy here?”
“Happy? Who’s ever happy anywhere?”
Rory had not expected this cynical answer. He had hoped to hear Nerfball voice some of the inner serenity he must experience while making sandwiches. Always feeling itchy with his own discontents, his own half-chosen, half-defaulted fate, Rory wanted to know that at least one person in his limited circle of acquaintances experienced real happiness. But instead of reassurance, Rory had just now received only further discomforting input. People, Rory reminded himself, often failed to supply the answers to ones questions that one expected or desired.
The heavy wooden cash-register drawer popped open and struck an unwary Rory with mild violence in the stomach. “Ouch. Well, what would make you happy? What would you be doing in the best of all possible worlds?”
Nerfball wadded up his apron and tossed it petulantly atop a big glass jar holding chocolate-chip cookies. “First of all, I’d like to have a nice home and not be living with a bunch of sympathetic but easily pissed-off crazies who think a good prank is to put spices in my Nasal Irrigation Water.”
“Have they done that again?”
Nerfball reached up to palpitate his nose in remembered pain. “No, thank God.”
“Can’t you move back in with your folks?”
“No way. They threw me out years ago, because of my Ayurvedic practices. I think the incident when I left my bowel-cleansing cloth tape in the kitchen sink was the last straw.”
Rory repressed a merited but impolite “eeyeuw” noise, and made a mental note to scrub the store’s sinks with undiluted bleach.
“And I sure can’t afford an apartment,” Nerfball said, glowering at Rory, “because you don’t pay me with real money.”
Rory winced, and concentrated on examining the healthy but completely accounted-for contents of the till.
Nerfball seemed to be warming up to his assigned theme. “Now, what I’d really love to do would be to start a business of my own, a deluxe restaurant. Not a two-bit joint like yours, but a real classy place, where I’d be the host, not the slave labor. But how’m I gonna do any of that without some actual money?”
Rory reached into the till and extracted the original and unique spondulix which he had hastily scribbled weeks ago in a fit of desperate creativity. The old electric bill, now somewhat greasier and more tattered, still discernibly bore its green crayoned message promising the bearer ten sandwiches on demand, Rory’s signature below serving as validation.
Pinching the upper corners of the unique promissory note, Rory held the spondulix in front of his chest like a shield to deflect Nerfball’s justified wrath.
“Nerf, you know I would love to pay you what you deserve, in real, honest-to-goodness American currency. But every penny I take in goes for something crucial. I still haven’t paid the bakery for last week’s delivery yet. Mister Coyne, my landlord, is screaming for July’s rent even though it’s only the third of the month and he knows darn well I generally don’t manage to pay till the tenth at the earliest. Before you know it, August’s rent will come due. I have to prioritize my debts. If I paid you real money I’d go under. And where would my collapse put either of us?”
Nerfball’s look of adamant disgust did not abate. Rory tried even more valiantly to defend himself.
“Look, you know I don’t draw a salary for myself. I only take enough to cover the rent and utilities on my lousy apartment. I don’t own a car, I haven’t bought any new clothes in a year, my sneakers have busted laces knotted in a dozen places, and I cut my own hair. I am in this whole mess fully with you, Nerf! What more can I do?”
“You own this business, Mister Capitalist. By definition, you are expected to take all the risks and either suffer or benefit to the max. All I know is that if I owned my own restaurant I would not make my employees literally eat their wages.”
Rory sighed and dropped his arms, spondulix held by a single corner only “Nerf, I simply cannot pay you in US Federal greenbacks. Will you take spondulix, or have we come to a parting of the ways?”
Nerfball sighed dramatically, his large padded chest resonating cavernously. “All right. Hand over that stupid fake cash.”
Relieved, Rory surrendered the spondulix. He turned back to the till to count the days take, fully expecting Nerfball to perform the by-now familiar parting routine. Nerf would cobble together without much artistry ten sandwiches. These he would bring back to the Old Vault Brewery to share with his fellow Beer Nuts, who would compensate Nerfball by whatever esoteric bartering methods obtained there. Having satisfied the terms of the spondulix, Rory would retrieve the paper from Nerball’s momentary possession and put it back in the register. Their solemn daily enactment of this honorable commercial transaction had links to millions of similar fiscal exchanges throughout mankind’s history. The legalistic, symbolic paper document transubstantiated into material wealth, promises validated, bonds honored, the signifier become the thing signified.
The tinkle of the bell above the shop door made Rory look up with sudden concern. Nerfball was leaving, sans sandwiches. He still carried the spondulix.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Rory said nervously. “Don’t you want your sandwiches immediately?”
Pausing halfway out, Nerfball answered with a bit of a non-sequitur. “No, I don’t. Beatbox got a new job, after he got scared enough to quit his balloon-delivery gig.”
Worried about the imminent departure of the unique spondulix, Rory still found himself curious about Beatbox’s career. “Scared enough to quit? What happened?”
“Beatbox took a freelance assignment he picked up from some guy on the street, to deliver a big heavy box instead of his usual balloon bouquet. He got dressed up in his clown suit and borrowed the company van, drove to the address, handed the box off to the lady who came to the door. She popped the top and found her own little dog dead inside. Mafia warning to one of its own recalcitrant wiseguys. Now the dog-owner’s family is looking for Beatbox.”
Rory massaged his bearded jawline. “Holy smoke.”
“Luckily Beatbox was wearing full clown makeup, including the big red nose, so nobody has any idea of his real face. But he canned the old job anyhow and snagged some work at a Krispy Kreme shop. He gets to bring home all the old unsold donuts at the end of his shift. None of the Beer Nuts want sandwiches any more. They’re all pigging out on honey-glazed.”
“All that sugar will kill them.”
“I tried telling them that, but they won’t listen.”
“What use do you have for the spondulix then?” asked Rory worriedly. He felt immensely reluctant to let that piece of paper with its implacable promise backed by his signature leave the shop. Suddenly he felt all jittery inside, as if he had just survived a car crash or a stock-market crash or an airplane crash—the collision of something fragile with something perdurable.
The pudgy man’s next words did not lessen Rory’s case of nerves. “Oh, I’ve got a plan for this funny money.”
And so saying, he left with a slam of the door.
Rory slumped against the register. Doomed. He knew himself as utterly doomed. He had already perished. The corporeal information just hadn’t caught up to his brain. Like the Seussian lion who bit his own extra-long tail at bedtime so that the delayed pain would serve as a wake-up jolt eight hours later, Rory suspected a future self-inflicted agony lay in wait.
When the m
inor supper-rush had ended, Rory closed up the shop. He refrigerated the perishables. He swabbed the counters. He swept the floor. He made a big red JC through today’s date on the Robert-Crumb-artwork calendar. (Although what he was counting down toward—or away from—he could not have put into words.) He put the day’s “profits” into a night-deposit bag which he tucked under one arm, intending to pass his bank on his way home. He flipped the fingerprinted window-placard to closed. He locked the door from the outside and stood on the sidewalk for a moment. During this familiar routine Rory’s mind had been completely missing. His thoughts had been wandering through an all-too-vivid past and an all-too-hazy future. His head resembled a hive full of buzzing bees.
Somehow he made his cash drop and got himself home. He must have eaten supper, although he never tasted it. He didn’t watch the flickering screen of his ancient Quasar television set, although he sat in front of it for some time on his Salvation Army couch. He fell into bed around ten, still wearing jockey shorts and socks.
Around three am Rory had a dream—a most awful nightmare in fact.
He stood atop the ten-meter platform in Mexico City. Looking down at his own body, he noticed he was wearing the hated Speedo trunks of his sponsor. Across his bare chest ran a bumper sticker that said property of speedo. Angrily, Rory ripped the sticker off. Underneath it lay a second sticker, one that said property of the ioc. Really mad now, Rory peeled the second label off. Its gummy back stripped away many chest hairs, with consequent keenly felt dream pain. Then the surrogate Rory decided to drop his offending briefs. He skinned nimbly out of them to stand naked in the eyes of the spectators—impossibly close eyes that flared laughingly and jeeringly. Suddenly the eyes acquired faces, and not the anonymous faces of the historical audience. The crowd was composed of figures from his past. His parents, Katie Stearn and other Pantechnicon members, his drowned grandparents, the whole Beer Nuts crew, Tommie Smith and Lee Evans—And they were all shouting, shouting, shouting: “Payable on demand! Payable on demand! Payable on demand!” Rory looked down toward the pool far below. Not blue water but a sea of greenbacks filled it. Rory knew he had to dive into the fiscal medium. He had no choice. He came to the edge of the platform, tensed his muscles and launched himself off. The dive seemed to take forever. Halfway down he passed the Baroness Von Hammer-Purgstall. Avery Brundage, evil overlord of the IOC, straddled her. Brundage was dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West. “To war, to war!” Brundage yelled, flourishing a cavalry saber. His insane actions made Rory lose the water. Which way was down? Suddenly he hit the money, which offered reams of resistance. Sinking deep into the green depths, he fought toward the surface. A strong current now sprang into being in the pool, a tide pulling Rory away from safety. Niagara Falls lay ahead, a cascade of dollars! Smeared against the inside of his bottle, Jacky Ray passed Rory. The Enterologist was trying to tell Rory something important through glass-mashed lips. “What?” yelled Rory. “What are you saying? Speak louder!” Instead of complying with this sensible request, Jacky Ray shot a hand out of the uncorked top of his bottle, grabbed Rory by the hair and tried to pull the swimmer inside. Rory screamed!
The sheets around his body held enough discharged sweat to float a tea cup. Rory’s hair felt like a seaweed toupee. His heart still pounding, the beleaguered small-businessman crawled out of bed and prepared himself a warm-milk-and-aspirin cocktail. He contemplated his frightening dream in no very productive manner for an hour or so until he fell asleep on the couch.
In the light of morning things looked somewhat more cheerful. After all, what had actually changed in his life? Nothing except the release of one silly little IOU. A lone scrap of paper with a harmless promise half-legible on it. Surely such an innocent instrument could hold no threat.
Rory made himself some cold cereal, set out a dish of food for Hello Kitty. His pet did not make her usual swift hungry appearance. Coming and going through the always open kitchen window, she normally never spent the night away.
“Hello Kitty! Where are you?”
The cat squeezed out from beneath a sideboard bearing junkshop plates and repurposed jelly-jar drinking glasses. She waddled as she walked toward her plate.
“Gee, Kitty, even with constant exercise you’re getting fat. I always see you scampering around with Cardinal Ratzinger—”
Instantly alarmed by an appalling suspicion, Rory reached down and scooped Hello Kitty up. Her hard belly and well-defined teats revealed all.
“Goddamn it, Kitty, this is the last thing I need! And of all potential daddies, to choose that macho Cardinal Ratzinger—” Rory’s anger shifted to the Beer Nuts. “If only those irresponsible squatters had had their cat fixed.…”
Rory trailed off. Hello Kitty lay upside down in his arms, pregnant belly exposed, head hanging off the crook of his elbow, purring and inviting some serious scratching. Rory sighed and obliged. To himself he acknowledged his own guilt in the matter of Hello Kitty’s condition. The spontaneous creation of such ethically uncomfortable gray areas completely characterized relations between Rory and the homeless posse. Between these two intricately linked parties, much similar fucking and fucking-over had transpired.…
All the window-ledge radios and storefront speakers were playing the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” during the summer of 1978 when Rory moved to Hoboken. At least that’s the way Rory liked to recount his arrival to friends two decades later. The romantic synchronization of the Top Forty with his recent breakup with Katie Stearn made for a touching tale—exaggerated perhaps, but certainly harboring a kernel of truth.
Katie, his first mature love, still loomed large in Rory’s heart upon his entry to the modern El Dorado she had so enticingly depicted in pillow talk. One of the first things he did after finding an apartment and signing the lease for his shop involved tracking down the ancestral brewery Katie had told him about.
After a couple of pleasant hours of pedestrianism, during which Rory deliberately forbore from asking directions in favor of following his nose, he came across the decrepit yet undeniably impressive structure. Still in place hung the very padlock which Katie’s twin grandfathers had solemnly clasped shut. Rory shivered, feeling the ghosts of the eccentric Stearn Twins floating at his back. A tear came to his eye as he recalled Katie’s curt dismissal of him for pitiable wussiness. For the hundredth time he thought of contacting her, sharing with her his plans, impressing her with the way he was masterfully putting his life back together again. For the hundredth time he discarded the notion. He could never rejoin the circus and she would never leave.
How did it chance, Rory suddenly wondered, that the Old Vault Brewery remained empty and even perhaps unowned?
Eventually, after dealing with many obstreperous city bureaucrats and parsing many obscure records, Rory discovered part of Katie’s family history of which she herself seemed ignorant.
When all of Katie’s cloistered, clustered family had perished, she believed that no tangible estate remained. (This instant poverty had in fact precipitated Katie’s swift and eager entry into the circus life.) Long before Katie’s birth, an unscrupulous lawyer named Robert Peppercorn had transferred the title to the Brewery to himself, in return for a deal to pay the Stearns’ rent in perpetuity. Her grandparents had endlessly maundered over this notorious incident during Katie’s upbringing, until the factoid about the loss had been engrammed into her.
What Rory learned was threefold: Robert Peppercorn himself had recently died; his heirs, moving to claim the Brewery as part of their legacy, could find no written proof of the transfer from the Stearns; the state of New Jersey had taken temporary ownership of the building until litigation between feuding branches of the Peppercorns and any sought-for Stearn survivors could be settled.
Rory mused on his findings. Should he call Katie with this news? What would she do with the decaying hulk? Dozens of empty properties dotted the Hoboken landscape, and buyers were unlikely to jump at such a white elephant. Maybe absentee ownership of the Brewer
y would weigh Katie down. And, in the occasional harsh light of his sleepless dawns, Rory admitted that he did not at the moment have it within himself to do Katie an altruistic favor.
Ultimately, Rory abstained from action. The whole affair presented too many knotty complications. Best to let sleeping sins lie.
Nonetheless, from time to time Rory returned to check up on the vast brick towered edifice by the banks of the Hudson. Not for any logical reason, but simply to touch an obscure token of his past. The building remained unchanged for many years, save for new ailanthus seedlings on the roof and piles of crumbling mortar on the ground growing fractionally higher. Evidently the state in this case was trying to beat the record set by Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. After time, Rory came to accept the Brewery’s desuetude as eternal.
One day around 1997, Rory noticed a subtle change in the building. Something indefinable, an aura of illicit activity about it. Moved by an odd impulse as he stood before the factory, Rory stepped up to the tripartite front door and boldly knocked. Much to his surprise, he heard responsive noises inside that caused him to step warily back.
The door opened, revealing a pale-skinned man with Negroid facial features.
“Great to see you, moll,” said Earl Erlkonig without a second’s hesitation. “You can help us figure something out. C’mon in.”
Before Rory could deny his problem-solving abilities, Erlkonig had snatched him into the Brewery.
A half-dozen candles lit a bizarre scene.
People squatted around a circle chalked on the cold cement floor. Several of the folks held drinking glasses which they capped with their hands. Upon joining the coven, Rory could discern in each glass a trapped cockroach, antennae quivering.
“We’re trying to have a race,” explained Erlkonig. “First roach out of the circle wins. But we can’t keep the bugs straight, and everyone keeps claiming theirs won.”
Rory stroked his beard. “If you had several colors of nail-polish handy and put a different dot on each one—”
Erlkonig clapped his hands together like a child at Christmas. “Excellent, molecule, excellent! I knew as soon as I set eyes on you that you were a guy with brains. Lateral thinking, moll, that’s the key, right?”
Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken Page 15