Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  Albert Thibodeaux was a gambler. In the evenings he presided over cockfight and pit-bull matches across the river in Gretna or Algiers but during the day he hung out at Tujague’s on Decatur Street with the railroad men and phony artists from the Quarter. He and my dad knew each other from the old days in Cuba, which I knew nothing about except that they’d both lived at the Nacional in Havana.

  According to Nanny, my mother’s mother, my dad didn’t even speak to me until I was five years old. He apparently didn’t consider a child capable of understanding him or a friendship worth cultivating until that age and he may have been correct in his judgment. I certainly never felt deprived as a result of this policy. If my grandmother hadn’t told me about it I would have never known the difference.

  My dad never really told me about what he did or had done before I was old enough to go around with him. I picked up information as I went, listening to guys like Albert and some of my dad’s other friends like Willie Nero in Chicago and Dummy Fish in New York. We supposedly lived in Chicago but my dad had places in Miami, New York, and Acapulco. We traveled, mostly without my mother, who stayed at the house in Chicago and went to church a lot. Once I asked my dad if we were any particular religion and he said, “Your mother’s a Catholic.”

  Albert was a short, fat man with a handlebar mustache. He looked like a Maxwell Street organ-grinder without the organ or the monkey. He and my dad drank Irish whiskey from ten in the morning until lunchtime, which was around one thirty, when they sent me down to the Central Grocery on Decatur or to Johnny’s on St. Louis Street for muffaletas. I brought back three of them but Albert and Dad didn’t eat theirs. They just talked and once in a while Albert went into the back to make a phone call. They got along just fine and about once an hour Albert would ask if I wanted something, like a Barq’s or a Delaware Punch, and Dad would rub my shoulder and say to Albert, “He’s a real piece of meat, this boy.” Then Albert would grin so that his mustache covered the front of his nose and say, “He is, Rudy. You won’t want to worry about him.”

  When Dad and I were in New York one night I heard him talking in a loud voice to Dummy Fish in the lobby of the Waldorf. I was sitting in a big leather chair between a sand-filled ashtray and a potted palm and Dad came over and told me that Dummy would take me upstairs to our room. I should go to sleep, he said, he’d be back late. In the elevator I looked at Dummy and saw that he was sweating. It was December but water ran down from his temples to his chin. “Does my dad have a job?” I asked Dummy. “Sure he does,” he said. “Of course. Your dad has to work, just like everybody else.” “What is it?” I asked. Dummy wiped the sweat from his face with a white-and-blue checkered handkerchief. “He talks to people,” Dummy told me. “Your dad is a great talker.”

  Dad and Albert talked right past lunchtime and I must have fallen asleep on the bar because when I woke up it was dark out and I was in the backseat of the car. We were driving across the Huey P. Long Bridge and a freight train was running along the tracks over our heads. “How about some Italian oysters, son?” my dad asked. “We’ll stop up here in Houma and get some cold beer and dinner.” We were cruising in the passing lane in the powder blue Caddy over the big brown river. Through the bridge railings I watched the barge lights twinkle as they inched ahead through the water.

  “Albert’s a businessman, the best kind.” Dad lit a fresh Lucky from an old one and threw the butt out the window. “He’s a good man to know, remember that.”

  The Forgotten

  It was snowing again and Roy couldn’t wait to get out in it. Standing in line with the other second graders, all of them with their coats, mufflers, hats and gloves on, he was impatient to be released for morning recess. Roy had just told Eddie Gray that if the snow was deep enough they should choose up sides for a game of Plunge, when the teacher, Mrs. Bluth, called out to him.

  “Roy! You know that you are not supposed to talk while I am giving instructions. You remain here while I take the rest of the class down to the playground.”

  Roy stood still while everyone else filed out of the classroom. As soon as he was sure that they were on their way down the west staircase, Roy walked out of the room and headed in the opposite direction. Nobody was in the hallway. Roy walked down the east staircase to the ground floor and through the exit to the street. Snow was coming down hard and Roy put up the hood of his dark blue parka as he headed north on Fairfield Avenue. He could hear the kids yelling in the playground on the other side of the school.

  At the corner of Rosemont and Washtenaw, near St. Tim’s, Roy passed an old man wearing a brown trenchcoat and a black hat who was holding a handdrawn sign that said, “I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. JOB, 30:28.”

  “How old are you?” the man asked Roy.

  “Seven,” Roy answered, and kept walking.

  “Read the Bible!” the man shouted. “Don’t forget, like I did!”

  When Roy entered the house, his mother was seated in front of the television set in the living room, drinking coffee.

  “Is that you, Roy?” she asked. “I thought you were at school. It’s only a little after ten.”

  “They let us out early today,” he said. Roy went over to where she was sitting. “What’s on?”

  “The Lady from Shanghai. It’s a good one. Rita Hayworth with her hair bleached blonde. Do you think I’d look as good as a blonde, Roy?”

  “I don’t know, Ma. I like you the way you are.”

  She kissed him on his forehead. Roy never drank coffee but he liked the odor of it.

  “I’m going to play in my room,” he said.

  “Okay, honey.”

  About half an hour later, Roy heard the telephone ring and his mother answer it.

  “Yes, this is she,” she said into the receiver. “Uh huh, he is. He’s in his room right now. Oh, really. I see. Yes, well, that will be between you and Roy, won’t it? I’m sure he had a good reason. I understand. He’ll be there tomorrow, yes. Thank you for calling.”

  Roy heard his mother hang up, then go into the kitchen and run water in the sink. A few minutes later, she appeared in the doorway to his room.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, “I have to go out for a little while. Is there anything you’d like me to pick up at the grocery store?”

  “No, thanks, Ma.”

  “You’ll be all right?”

  “Sure, I’ll be fine. I’m just playing with my soldiers.”

  “Which ones are those?” she asked.

  “French Zouaves.”

  “Their uniforms are very beautiful. I’ve never seen soldiers with purple blouses before.”

  “These Zouaves are from Algeria,” said Roy, “that’s why their faces and hands are brown. They fought for France.”

  “And white turbans, too,” his mother said. “Lana Turner wore one in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Do you remember that movie, Roy? Where she and John Garfield, who’s a short order cook, kill her husband, who’s much older than she is?”

  “No, Ma, I don’t.”

  “Thanks to a tricky lawyer, at first they get away with the murder, but then they slip up.”

  His mother stood there for a minute and watched Roy move the pretty Zouaves around the floor before saying, “I’m going now, honey. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Okay, Ma.”

  “I’ll make us grilled cheese sandwiches when I get back,” she said, “and maybe some tomato soup.”

  It wasn’t until after he heard the front door close that he took off his coat.

  The next day at school, when he entered the classroom, Mrs. Bluth said, “Good morning, Roy. How are you feeling today?”

  “Fine, Mrs. Bluth,” he said, and took his seat.

  The other kids looked at Roy but didn’t say anything. Later, on the playground during morning recess, Eddie Gray asked Roy if he’d gotten into trouble for
having left school without permission the day before.

  “No,” Roy said.

  “Your mother didn’t yell at you?”

  “No.”

  “Why’d you leave?” Eddie asked.

  “I didn’t like the way Mrs. Bluth talked to me.”

  A few flurries began falling. Roy put up his hood.

  “What about your dad?” asked Eddie. “What did he do?”

  “My father’s dead,” said Roy.

  “You’re lucky,” said Eddie Gray, “my old man would have used his belt on me.”

  Mrs. Kashfi

  My mother has always been a great believer in fortune-tellers, a predilection my dad considered as bizarre as her devotion to the Catholic Church. He refused even to discuss anything having to do with either entity, a policy that seemed only to reinforce my mother’s arcane quest. Even now she informs me whenever she’s stumbled upon a seer whose prognostications strike her as being particularly apt. I once heard my dad describe her as belonging to “the sisterhood of the Perpetual Pursuit of the Good Word.”

  My own experience with fortune-tellers is limited to what I observed as a small boy, when I had no choice but to accompany my mother on her frequent pilgrimages to Mrs. Kashfi. Mrs. Kashfi was a tea-leaf reader who lived with her bird in a two-room apartment in a large gray brick building on Hollywood Avenue in Chicago. As soon as we entered the downstairs lobby the stuffiness of the place began to overwhelm me. It was as if Mrs. Kashfi lived in a vault to which no fresh air was admitted. The lobby, elevator, and hallways were suffocating, too hot both in summer, when there was too little ventilation, and in winter, when the building was unbearably overheated. And the whole place stank terribly, as if no food other than boiled cabbage were allowed to be prepared. My mother, who was usually all too aware of these sorts of unappealing aspects, seemed blissfully unaware of them at Mrs. Kashfi’s. The oracle was in residence, and that was all that mattered.

  The worst olfactory assault, however, came from Mrs. Kashfi’s apartment, in the front room where her bird, a blind, practically featherless dinge-yellow parakeet, was kept and whose cage Mrs. Kashfi failed to clean with any regularity. It was in that room, on a lumpy couch with dirt-gray lace doily arm covers, that I was made to wait for my mother while she and Mrs. Kashfi, locked in the inner sanctum of the bedroom, voyaged into the sea of clairvoyance.

  The apartment was filled with overstuffed chairs and couches, dressers crowded with bric-a-brac and framed photographs of strangely dressed, stiff and staring figures, relics of the old country, which to me appeared as evidence of extraterrestrial existence. Nothing seemed quite real, as if with a snap of Mrs. Kashfi’s sorceress’s fingers the entire scene would disappear. Mrs. Kashfi herself was a small, very old woman who was permanently bent slightly forward so that she appeared about to topple over, causing me to avoid allowing her to hover over me for longer than a moment. She had a large nose and she wore glasses, as well as two or more dark green or brown sweaters at all times, despite the already hellish climate.

  I dutifully sat on the couch, listening to the murmurings from beyond the bedroom door, and to the blind bird drop pelletlike feces onto the stained newspaper in its filthy cage. No sound issued from the parakeet’s enclosure other than the constant “tup, tup” of its evacuation. Behind the birdcage was a weather-smeared window, covered with eyelet curtains, that looked out on the brick wall of another building.

  I stayed put on the couch and waited for my mother’s session to end. Each visit lasted about a half hour, at the finish of which Mrs. Kashfi would walk my mother to the doorway, where they’d stand and talk for another ten minutes while I fidgeted in the smelly hall trying to see how long I could hold my breath.

  Only once did I have a glimpse of the mundane evidence from which Mrs. Kashfi made her miraculous analysis. At the conclusion of a session my mother came out of the bedroom carrying a teacup, which she told me to look into.

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “Your grandmother is safe and happy,” my mother said.

  My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had recently died, so this news puzzled me. I looked again at the brown bits in the bottom of the china cup. Mrs. Kashfi came over and leaned above me, nodding her big nose with long hairs in the nostrils. I moved away and waited by the door, wondering what my dad would have thought of all this, while my mother stood smiling, staring into the cup.

  The Old Country

  My grandfather never wore an overcoat. That was Ezra, my father’s father, who had a candy stand under the Addison Street elevated tracks near Wrigley Field. Even in winter, when it was ten below and the wind cut through the station, Ezra never wore more than a heavy sport coat, and sometimes, when Aunt Belle, his second wife, insisted, a woolen scarf wrapped up around his chin. He was six foot two and two hundred pounds, had his upper lip covered by a bushy mustache, and a full head of dark hair until he died at ninety, not missing a day at his stand till six months before.

  He never told anyone his business. He ran numbers from the stand and owned an apartment building on the South Side. He outlived three wives and one of his sons, my father. His older son, my uncle Bruno, looked just like him, but Bruno was mean and defensive whereas Ezra was brusque but kind. He always gave me and my friends gum or candy on our way to and from the ballpark, and he liked me to hang around there or at another stand he had for a while at Belmont Avenue, especially on Saturdays so he could show me off to his regular cronies. He’d put me on a box behind the stand and keep one big hand on my shoulder. “This is my grandson,” he’d say, and wait until he was sure they had looked at me. I was the first and then his only grandson; Uncle Bruno had two girls. “Good boy!”

  He left it to his sons to make the big money, and they did all right, my dad with the rackets and the liquor store, Uncle Bruno as an auctioneer, but they never had to take care of the old man, he took care of himself.

  Ezra spoke broken English; he came to America with his sons (my dad was eight, Bruno fourteen) and a daughter from Vienna in 1918. I always remember him standing under the tracks outside the station in February, cigar stub poked out between mustache and muffler, waiting for me and my dad to pick him up. When we’d pull up along the curb my dad would honk but the old man wouldn’t notice. I would always have to run out and get him. I figured Ezra always saw us but waited for me to come for him. It made him feel better if I got out and grabbed his hand and led him to the car.

  “Pa, for Chrissakes, why don’t you wear an overcoat?” my dad would ask. “It’s cold.”

  The old man wouldn’t look over or answer right away. He’d sit with me on his lap as my father pointed the car into the dark.

  “What cold?” he’d say after we’d gone a block or two. “In the old country was cold.”

  The Monster

  I used to sit on a stool at the counter of the soda fountain in my dad’s drugstore and talk to Louise, the counter waitress, while she made milk shakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. I especially liked to be there on Saturday mornings when the organ-grinder came in with his monkey. The monkey and I would dunk doughnuts together in the organ-grinder’s coffee. The regular customers would always stop and say something to me, and tell my dad how much I looked like him, only handsomer.

  One Saturday morning when I was about six, while I was waiting for the organ-grinder and his monkey to come in, I started talking to Louise about scary movies. I had seen Frankenstein the night before and I told Louise it was the scariest movie I’d ever seen, even scarier than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms that my dad had taken me to see at the Oriental Theater when I was five. I had had dreams about the beast ripping up Coney Island and dropping big blobs of blood all over the streets ever since, but the part where the Frankenstein monster kills the little girl while she’s picking flowers was worse than that.

  “The scariest for me,” Louise told me, “is Dracula. There’ll n
ever be another one like that.”

  I hadn’t seen Dracula and I asked her what it was about. Louise put on a new pot of coffee, then she turned and rested her arms on the counter in front of me.

  “Sex, honey,” she said. “Dracula was a vampire who went around attacking women. Oh, he might have attacked a man now and then, but he mainly went after the girls. Scared me to death when I saw it. I can’t watch it now. I remember his eyes.”

  Then Louise went to take care of a customer. I stared at myself in the mirror behind the counter and thought about the little girl picking flowers with the monster.

  The Ciné

  On a cloudy October Saturday in 1953, when Roy was seven years old, his father took him to see a movie at the Ciné theater on Bukovina Avenue in Chicago, where they lived. Roy’s father drove them in his powder-blue Cadillac, bumping over cobblestones and streetcar tracks, until he parked the car half a block away from the theater.

  Roy was wearing a brown and white checked wool sweater, khaki trousers and saddle shoes. His father wore a double-breasted blue suit with a white silk tie. They held hands as they walked toward the Ciné. The air was becoming colder every day now, Roy noticed, and he was eager to get inside the theater, to be away from the wind. The Ciné sign had a red background over which the letters curved vertically in yellow neon. They snaked into one another like reticulate pythons threaded through branches of a thick-trunked Cambodian bo tree. The marquee advertised the movie they were going to see, King of the Khyber Rifles, starring Tyrone Power as King, a half-caste British officer commanding Indian cavalry riding against Afghan and other insurgents. “Tyrone Cupcake,” Roy’s father called him, but Roy did not know why.