Red rolled down his sleeve and put his arm back into his coat.
“You guys don’t know what I’m talkin’ about, do you?”
Nobody answered.
“Didn’t think so. It’s the secret to pleasin’ a woman. She’ll show you what to do with it but you gotta ask. Don’t be afraid to ask.”
Red Fellows walked away. Roy, Jimmy Boyle and the Viper, none of whom had yet turned twelve years old, stood under the black and orange-striped awning in front of Bompiani’s Bakery and watched the rain turn to ice on the sidewalk.
“The name of the Indian girl’s brother was Running Bear,” said Roy. “That’s the name of the song. Johnny Horton made the record.”
“Red’s a man of the world,” Jimmy Boyle said.
“Where’s he been other than Germany?” asked the Viper. “He never fought no further from Chicago than Fort Wayne.”
“Red knows his way around,” said Jimmy.
“He knows how to get to Beebs and Glen’s,” said Roy.
A hard wind swept water under the awning, soaking the boys’ pants and shoes.
The Viper said, “Shit, at least Red knows enough to get in out of the rain.”
That night on his way home, Roy cut through the alley behind Wabansia and Prairie. As he passed a passageway between two of the garages, Roy heard an eerie sound, some terrible combination of sobbing and snorting the way a horse does just after it stops running. Roy stopped and listened. The rain had quit a few hours before and the temperature had fallen. The surface of the alley was almost entirely iced over and glistened in the moonlight. Roy edged closer to the garage nearest him. The snorting noise became punctuated by a guttural sound, then ceased altogether. The sobbing lessened but continued.
A man walked out of the passageway. Roy flattened himself against the garage door. The man turned up the alley and walked in the direction from which Roy had come. He was average-sized and wore a short, dark jacket and a dockworker’s cap. Roy heard another noise coming from the passageway, the sound of a person trying to stand up but slipping and falling in the attempt, scraping the wall with his body.
A second man came from the passageway. He stopped at the entrance to the alley and rubbed his face with both hands. When he dropped them, Roy could see that it was Red Fellows. Red blinked his eyes hard a few times, then worked them over again with his fists. He seemed unsure of where he was or in which direction he should go. Roy knew that he did not want Red to see him, though he was not entirely certain why. Roy had witnessed nothing and he did not even know what it was he had heard. Still, he was afraid. If Red looked his way, Roy decided, he would run and hope Red did not recognize him.
Red put his right hand against the brick wall to his right and leaned on it. He coughed and brought up some phlegm, then spat it on the ground. Red leaned there for a few moments, then stood up straight, steadied himself, and began walking up the alley in the same direction the other man had gone.
Roy watched Red negotiate the slippery, cracked concrete with mincing steps, stopping several times as he made his way, until Red was out of sight. Roy then peeled himself off the garage door and headed toward his house. The sky was now so clear that he could plainly see the seven stars that formed either the Big Dipper or the Little Dipper. Roy was not sure if the constellation was Ursa Major or Ursa Minor, but he did remember that the scientific name of the North Star was Polaris.
The Delivery
I went up the stairs carrying the two shopping bags full of Chinese food figuring on a fifty-cent tip. It was a good Sunday due to the rain, people stayed in. I had two more deliveries in the bicycle basket. I rang the third-floor doorbell and waited, feeling the sub gum sauce leak on the bottom of one of the bags.
A woman opened the door and told me to please put the bags on the kitchen table, pointing the way. I put down the bags and looked at the woman. She was wearing a half-open pink nightgown, her nipples standing out against the thin material. Her hair was black halfway down her head, the bottom half was bleached and stringy.
“How much is it?” she asked.
“Five dollars,” I said, looking at her purpled cheeks and chin.
“Just wait here and I’ll get it for you,” she told me. “Be right back.”
I looked around the kitchen. I was twelve years old and was not used to being alone in strange kitchens. There were dishes in the sink, and one of the elements of the overhead fluorescent light was burned out, giving the kitchen a dull, rosy glow, like the woman’s face, and her nightgown.
The woman came back and gave me a fifty-dollar bill. She had put on a green nightgown similar to the one she’d had on before, and flicked her pink tongue back and forth through her purple lips.
“I don’t have any change for this,” I said. “Don’t you have anything smaller?”
She smiled. “Well, I’ll just go see!” she said, and went off again.
I sat down on the kitchen table. I was beginning to enjoy myself, and was disappointed when she returned in the same green nightgown. She handed me a twenty.
“Will this do?” she asked.
I dug in my pocket for the change but she stopped me.
“Don’t bother, darling,” she said, smiling, and put her hand on my wrist. Her nails were painted dark red, but looked lighter in the hazy glow. “Keep it all,” she said, and took me by the hand to the front door.
She put my hand on her breast. I could feel a lump through the nightgown.
“Thank you very, very much,” she said, heavily, like Lauren Bacall or Tallulah Bankhead. I thought she looked like Tallulah Bankhead except for her hair, which was more like Lauren Bacall’s.
“You’re welcome,” I said, and she opened the door for me, letting me out.
It was still raining, but I stood for a minute under the Dutch elm tree where I’d left my bike and the bags of food covered by a small piece of canvas. I removed the cover from the bicycle and folded it over the bags in the basket. I felt the twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, and I smiled. If I could have two deliveries like this a day, I thought, just two.
The Deep Blue See
When I was in the eighth grade I was given the job of being one of the two outdoor messengers of Clinton School. Since I was far from being among the best behaved students, I could only surmise that some farsighted teacher (of whom there were very few) realized that I was well suited for that certain responsibility, that perhaps some of my excess energy might be put to use and I’d be honored and even eventually behave better because of this show of faith in my ability to run errands during school hours. Either that or they were just glad to get rid of me for a half hour or so.
I thought it was great just because it occasionally allowed me to get out of not only the classroom but the school. Escorting sick kids home was the most common duty but my favorite was walking the blind piano tuner across California Avenue to and from the bus stop.
For two weeks out of the year the old blind piano tuner used to come each day and tune all of the pianos in the school. My job during that time was to be at the bus stop at eight forty-five every morning to pick him up, and then, at whatever time in the afternoon he was ready to leave, to walk him back across, wait with him until the bus arrived, and help him board.
We became quite friendly over the two-week period that I assisted him. The piano tuner looked to me like any ordinary old guy with white hair in a frayed black overcoat, except he was blind and carried a cane. My dad and I had seen Van Johnson as a blind man in the movie Twenty-three Paces to Baker Street. Van Johnson had reduced an intruder to blindness by blanketing the windows and putting out the lights, trapping him—or her, as it turned out—until the cops came, but I’d never known anybody who was blind before.
I couldn’t really imagine not being able to see and on the last day I asked the piano tuner if he could see anything at all. We were crossing the street and he l
ooked up and said, “Oh yes, I see the blue. I can see the deep blue in the sky and the shadows of gray around the blue.”
It was a bright sunny winter day and the sky was clear and very blue. I told him how blue it was, I didn’t see any gray, and there were hardly any clouds. We were across the street and I could see the bus stopping a block away.
“Were you ever able to see?” I asked.
“Oh yes, shapes,” he said. “I can see them move.”
Then the bus came and I helped him up the steps and told the bus driver the old man was blind and to please wait until I’d helped him to a seat. After the piano tuner was seated I said good-bye, gave the token to the driver, and got off.
While I was waiting at the corner for the traffic to slow so that I could cross, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it was like to be blind. I looked up with my eyes closed. I couldn’t see anything. I opened them up and ran across the street.
Radio Goldberg
Rigoberto Goldberg was a tall, lanky kid, an Ichabod Crane with thick glasses bordered by heavy black rims who didn’t talk much. He also had a mustache, which no other twelve-year-old in Roy’s neighborhood had. Dickie Cunningham thought it might have been because of Goldberg’s being half Spanish.
“Puerto Rican kids grow up faster than we do,” he said.
“Goldberg isn’t from Puerto Rico,” Roy told him. “He was born in the Dominican Republic.”
“Where’s that?”
“An island around Cuba, I think,” said Roy. “And how do you know Spanish kids grow up faster? Mostly they’re smaller than us.”
“They’re shorter,” said Cunningham, “but they got hair on their chins when they’re our age. Lookit that kid Luis went to Margaret Mary.”
“One got thrown out for pullin’ a switchblade on a teacher?”
Cunningham nodded. “Luis Soto somethin’.”
“Sotomayor.”
“Kid had a goatee in seventh grade.”
“He was thirteen already. Got put back twice.”
Rigoberto Goldberg was not an outstanding student. Once in a while he’d crack wise in class, but mostly he seemed content to sit in the back row and hope to be ignored by the teacher. None of the other kids even knew if he could speak Spanish. Cunningham asked him if he could but Goldberg just shrugged and walked away. He was a real loner.
It was a surprise, therefore, when one afternoon after school Goldberg approached Roy and Cunningham and asked them if they wanted to see his radio station.
“What do you mean, your radio station?” asked Cunningham.
“I got a radio station,” said Goldberg, “in my garage. I built it.”
“Sure,” Roy said. “Let’s go.”
As they walked to Rigoberto’s house, Cunningham said, “Do you have call letters for your station, like WLS or WBBM?”
“I got a name,” he told them. “Radio Goldberg.”
“Wait a minute,” said Roy, “don’t you have to have letters? I thought east of the Mississippi River radio stations are all K-something, and west of the Mississippi they begin with W.”
“It’s my station,” said Rigoberto. “I can call it whatever I want to.”
Inside his family’s garage, Goldberg had constructed what appeared to be a gigantic crystal set. He sat down in front of the table it was on, placed earphones over his head, switched on the machine and began turning dials. With his thick black glasses, droopy nose, uncombed dark brown hair and mustache, Goldberg looked every bit the mad scientist. All sorts of squealy, squeaky, dissonant noises emanated from the equipment, rattling off the brick walls. Several voices filled the room simultaneously. Roy felt as if he were inside a fun house at an amusement park. Rigoberto remained calm, fiddling the controls with his spiderleg fingers. For the first time, Roy noticed that Goldberg had an inordinate amount of dirt under his fingernails.
Suddenly, the cacophony ceased and Rigoberto spoke into a large, wood-framed microphone.
“Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,” he said, “this is Radio Goldberg, broadcasting from the forty story Goldberg Building located in the heart of the heartland, Chicago, Illinois, U.S. of A. Seven hot watts for all you guys, gals and tots.”
Goldberg at the mike was an astounding sight to Roy and Cunningham. He transformed himself from a geeky, shirt-buttoned-up-to-the-collar, four-eyed bed-head into a smooth-talking ball of fire. Amazingly, Goldberg’s body language became that of a slinky jungle cat’s, and his voice had the timbre of Vaughan Monroe’s recording of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Rigoberto talked about whatever was on his mind at the moment. He trashed teachers of his by name, castigated girls he deemed stuck up because they wouldn’t give him the time of day, and he played records. Goldberg owned only a few 45s; these included such diverse platters as Patti Page’s “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?,” Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and Jim Backus’s spoken word rendering of the story of “Gerald McBoing Boing.”
Radio Goldberg’s broadcasting area, Rigoberto told Roy and Cunningham, encompassed approximately the six blocks surrounding his house. He came on the air after school on weekdays for a couple of hours, occasionally at night if his parents were out, and early Sunday mornings while his parents were still asleep. On Sunday, he said, he liked to tell his listeners that sometimes he thought he was a son of God, like Jesus, and then he would play Elvis Presley’s record, “I Believe.” His parents, Rigoberto said, knew nothing about Radio Goldberg.
It wasn’t long after he had revealed his secret station to Roy and Cunningham that Goldberg’s neighbors began lodging complaints with the legitimate local radio stations whose signals were irregularly being interfered with. Three weeks into his broadcasting career, the police, armed with a search warrant, knocked on the Goldbergs’ door. They discovered Rigoberto’s garage set-up and confiscated his equipment. A small article describing the dismantling of Rigoberto Goldberg’s operation appeared in the evening paper, the Daily News, under the heading, ‘radio goldberg’ goes off the air. boy, 12, cited for broadcasting illegally. The article quoted Arturo Goldberg, Rigoberto’s father, who said, “My son is a genius. One day, you’ll see.”
“They fined me fifty bucks,” Rigoberto told Roy and Cunningham. “My parents paid it but they’re making me pay ’em back out of the money I earn from my paper route.”
“Did the police return your equipment?” Roy asked him.
“Not yet. They still got my records, too.”
“The cops are a bunch of crooks,” said Cunningham. “One of ’em’ll probably swipe ‘Gerald McBoing Boing’ and give it to his kid.”
Why Skull Dorfman Went to Arkansas
Roy usually avoided Skull Dorfman’s booth, but when Skull himself beckoned, Roy went over.
“Here, kid,” Skull said, after reaching into one of his pants pockets and coming up with a five dollar bill, “get me a Form and an American.” As Roy took the fin from him, Skull added, “Make that a Sun-Times, too. And don’t forget to give the girl somethin’.”
Roy walked to the front of Meschina’s, where Flo, who’d been a blonde the last time Roy had seen her, was working the cash register.
“Hi, Flo,” Roy said. “I like your hair.”
Flo smiled, patted the back and sides of her head, and said, “Thanks, hon. I was a redhead once before, you know. I changed it to black after Tony Testonena and me went on the permanent outs. Feel like myself again. Ain’t it late for you to be out, Roy? It’s almost midnight.”
“No, my mother doesn’t care. She’s probably not home yet, anyway. Can I have a Racing Form, an American and a Sun-Times, please? They’re for Skull.”
Roy handed Flo the five. He looked at her closely as she bent down to pick up the papers, put them on the counter, and then made change. Roy’s mother was thirty-four years old and a real redhead. Flo had some serious creases in h
er face; cracks and crevices marred the thick, sand colored make-up around her eyes and mouth. His mother didn’t have creases yet, at least none as evident as Flo’s, and she didn’t wear much make-up. Roy figured Flo had to be at least forty, if not older. She was skinny and her narrow breasts jutted out and up like steer horns. Cool Phil said they were falsies. Roy had only a vague idea of what falsies looked like. He wasn’t crazy about Cool Phil because Phil was always in a bad mood and never had anything good to say about anybody. Roy thought maybe it was because Cool Phil, who was eighteen, six years older than Roy, had bad acne and was already losing his hair.
Flo gave Roy two dollars and fifty cents. “Here you go, hon,” she said, and shot him a big smile. Her lips were thin, too, and she applied ruby red lipstick unevenly beyond the edges.
“Keep the quarters, Flo,” said Roy, and handed them back to her. He folded the three papers under his right arm and kept the two singles in his left hand.
“Thanks, hon,” Flo said, “you’re a real gentleman.”
Roy delivered the papers to Skull Dorfman, placing them carefully on the formica next to two empty and one half-eaten whitefish platters and a table barrel of old dills with three pickles left in it. He held out the singles toward Skull.
“I gave Flo four bits,” Roy told him.
Seated across from Skull Dorfman in the booth was Arnie the Arm Mancanza. Arnie only had one arm, having lost his right in an industrial accident at Pocilga’s sausage factory. The Arm carried a good three hundred pounds, and Dorfman had to go two-sixty or seventy, so Roy assumed the whitefish platters were merely a warm-up.
Skull plucked one of the bills from Roy’s fingers and said, “The other one’s yours, kid. I’m fat but I ain’t cheap.”
“You ain’t fat, Skull,” said the Arm. “I’m fat.”
“Okay, Arm,” Skull said. “Okay.”
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