The Roy Stories

by Barry Gifford

  My buddy Magic Frank and I were regulars at Bebop’s. Almost every day after school we hitched down Howard to Paulina and walked half a block past the Villa Girgenti and up the two flights of rickety stairs next to Talbot’s Bar-B-Q. Bebop had once driven a school bus but had been fired for shooting craps with the kids. After that he bought the pool hall and had somebody hand out flyers at the school announcing the opening.

  Bebop always wore a crumpled Cubs cap over his long, greasy hair. With his big beaky nose, heavy-lidded eyes, and slow, half-goofy, half-menacing way of speaking, especially to strangers, he resembled the maniacs portrayed in the movies by Timothy Carey. Bebop wasn’t supposed to allow kids in the place, but I was the only one in there who followed the Cubs, and since Bebop was a fanatic Cub fan, he liked to have me around to complain about the team with.

  The Chinaman always wore a gray fedora and sharkskin suit. Frank and I waited by the Coke machine for him to beat the Pole. The Pole always lost at nine ball. He liked to play one-pocket but none of the regulars would play anything but straight pool or nine ball or rotation. Sometimes the Pole would hit on a tourist for a game of eight ball but even then he’d usually lose, so Frank and I knew it wouldn’t be long before we could approach the Chinaman.

  When the Chinaman finished off the Pole he racked his cue, stuck the Pole’s fin in his pocket, lit a cigarette, and walked to the head. Frank followed him in and put a dollar bill on the shelf under where there had once been a mirror and walked out again and stood by the door. When the Chinaman came out, Frank went back in.

  I followed Frank past Bebop’s counter down the stairs and into the parking lot next to the Villa Girgenti. We kicked some grimy snow out of the way and squatted down and lit up, then leaned back against the garage door as we smoked.

  When we went back into the pool hall Bebop was on the phone, scratching furiously under the back of his Cub cap while threatening to kick somebody’s head in, an easy thing to do over the phone. The Chinaman was sitting against the wall watching the Pole lose at eight ball. As we passed him on our way to the number nine table he nodded without moving his eyes.

  “He’s pretty cool,” I said.

  “He has to be,” said Frank. “He’s a Chinaman.”

  The End of Racism

  One of my favorite places to go when I was a kid in Chicago was Riverview, the giant amusement park on the North Side. Riverview, which during the fifties was nicknamed Polio Park, after the reigning communicable disease of the decade, had dozens of rides, including some of the fastest, most terrifying roller coasters ever designed. Among them were the Silver Streak, the Comet, the Wild Mouse, the Flying Turns, and the Bobs. Of these, the Flying Turns, a seatless ride that lasted all of thirty seconds or so and required the passengers in each car to recline consecutively on one another, was my favorite. The Turns did not operate on tracks but rather on a steeply banked, bobsledlike series of tortuous sliding curves that never failed to engender in me the sensation of being about to catapult out of the car over the stand of trees to the west of the parking lot. To a fairly manic kid, which I was, this was a big thrill, and I must have ridden the Flying Turns hundreds of times between the ages of seven and sixteen.

  The Bobs, however, was the most frightening roller coaster in the park. Each year several people were injured or killed on that ride; usually when a kid attempted to prove his bravery by standing up in the car at the apex of the first long, slow climb, and was then flipped out of the car as it jerked suddenly downward at about a hundred miles per hour. The kids liked to speculate about how many lives the Bobs had taken over the years. I knew only one kid, Earl Weyerholz, who claimed to have stood up in his car at the top of the first hill more than once and lived to tell about it. I never doubted Earl Weyerholz because I once saw him put his arm up to the biceps into an aquarium containing two piranhas just to recover a quarter Bobby DiMarco had thrown into it and dared Earl to go after. Earl was eleven then. He died in 1958, at the age of fourteen, from the more than two hundred bee stings he sustained that year at summer camp in Wisconsin. How or why he got stung so often was never explained to me. I just assumed somebody had dared him to stick his arms into a few hives for a dollar or something.

  Shoot the Chutes was also a popular Riverview ride. Passengers rode on boats that slid at terrific speeds into a pool and everybody got soaking wet. The Chutes never really appealed very much to me, though; I never saw the point of getting wet for no good reason. The Parachute was another one that did not thrill me. Being dropped to the ground from a great height while seated on a thin wooden plank with only a narrow metal bar to hold on to was not my idea of a good time. In fact, just the thought of it scared the hell out of me; I didn’t even like to watch people do it. I don’t think my not wanting to go on the Parachute meant that I was acrophobic, however, because I was extremely adept at scaling garage roofs by the drainpipes in the alleys and jumping from one roof to the next. The Parachute just seemed like a crazy thing to submit oneself to as did the Rotor, a circular contraption that spun around so fast that when the floor was removed riders were plastered to the walls by centrifugal force. Both the Parachute and the Rotor always had long lines of people waiting to be exquisitely tortured.

  What my friends and I were most fond of at Riverview was Dunk the Nigger. At least that’s what we called the concession where by throwing a baseball at a target on a handle and hitting it square you could cause the seat lever in the attached cage to release and plunge the man sitting on the perch into a tank of about five feet of water. All of the guys who worked in the cages were black, and they hated to see us coming. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen my friends and I terrorized these guys. They were supposed to taunt the thrower, make fun of him or her, and try to keep them spending quarters for three balls. Most people who played this game were lucky to hit the target hard enough to dunk the clown one in every six tries; but my buddies and I became experts. We’d buy about ten dollars worth of baseballs and keep those guys going down, time after time.

  Of course they hated us with a passion. “Don’t you little motherfuckers have somewhere else to go?” they’d yell. “Goddamn motherfuckin’ whiteboy, I’m gon’ get yo’ ass when I gets my break!” We’d just laugh and keep pegging hardballs at the trip-lever targets. My pal Big Steve was great at Dunk the Nigger; he was our true ace because he threw the hardest and his arm never got tired. “You fat ofay sumbitch!” one of the black guys would shout at Big Steve as he dunked him for the fifth pitch in a row. “Stop complaining,” Steve would yell back at him. “You’re getting a free bath, aren’t ya?”

  None of us thought too much about the fact that the job of taunt-and-dunk was about half a cut above being a carnival geek and a full cut below working at a car wash. It never occurred to us, more than a quarter of a century ago, why it was all of the guys on the perches were black, or that we were racists. Unwitting racists, perhaps; after all, we were kids, ignorant and foolish products of White Chicago during the fifties.

  One summer afternoon in 1963, the year I turned sixteen, my friends and I arrived at Riverview and headed straight for Dunk the Nigger. We were shocked to see a white guy sitting on a perch in one of the cages. Nobody said anything but we all stared at him. Big Steve bought some balls and began hurling them at one of the black guys’ targets. “What’s the matter, gray?” the guy shouted at Steve. “Don’t want to pick on one of your own?”

  I don’t remember whether or not I bought any balls that day, but I do know it was the last time I went to the concession. In fact, that was one of the last times I patronized Riverview, since I left Chicago early the following year and Riverview was torn down not long after. I don’t know what Big Steve or any of my other old friends who played Dunk the Nigger with me think about it now, or even if they’ve ever thought about it at all. That’s just the way things were.

  Way Down in Egypt Land

  There was a one-legged pool hustler named
The Pharaoh who used to eat his dinner every day at four o’clock in a diner under the el tracks on Blackhawk Avenue called The Pantry. The neighborhood kids didn’t know his real name, he just went by The Pharaoh because he said he came from Cairo, the tail of Little Egypt between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

  “It’s the asshole of Illinois,” The Pharaoh told Roy and his friends, none of whom had ever been there.

  “My mother had a cousin named Phil Webster was murdered in a bar in Paducah,” said Ralph McGirr. “That’s near there, ain’t it?”

  “Paducah’s in Kentucky,” The Viper said, “across the Ohio. It’s pretty close.”

  The Pharaoh said nothing, just finished his meatloaf and mashed potatoes and dug into a slice of blueberry pie. The boys sat on stools in The Pantry or stood around, waiting for The Pharaoh to be done with his meal so that they could follow him down the street to Lucky’s El Paso and watch him shoot pool. The El Paso was an old poolhall that had been closed down for years until Lucky Schmidt took it over. He renamed it Lucky’s but everybody around there still called it the El Paso, so he changed it to Lucky’s El Paso to pacify the old-timers. The Pharaoh didn’t care what the place was called as long as it had a five by ten foot table to play one-pocket on. The Pharaoh always dressed the same: he wore a red and black checkered flannel shirt buttoned up to the neck and dark gray trousers held up by black suspenders. Once Roy had seen what looked like part of a thick blue scar below The Pharaoh’s Adam’s apple; Roy guessed that was why he kept his shirt buttoned to the top.

  After The Pharaoh had polished off the pie, he propped himself up on his crutches and swung out of The Pantry. Jimmy Boyle held open the door and The Pharaoh turned right, followed by six boys aged twelve to fifteen. He didn’t wear a coat. Nobody knew exactly how old The Pharaoh was or how he lost his left leg. Roy figured The Pharaoh was around forty or fifty years old because his curly brown hair was thinning and his forehead and cheeks were pretty wrinkled. The Viper said he’d heard Lucky ask The Pharaoh about how his leg went missing. This was while The Pharaoh was sitting down waiting for Ike the Kike to miss and without looking at Lucky The Pharaoh told him maybe someday he’d tell him but first Lucky should go fuck himself and his sister. After that, said The Pharaoh, they could talk about it.

  The Pharaoh did not use his crutches when he shot; he supported himself by balancing his weight between his right leg and the table. The boys closely studied every move The Pharaoh made. His practice routine never varied: he lined up four balls at one end of the felt, hit them one after the other only just hard enough off the rail so that they came back to exactly the same spot at which he’d placed them. The Pharaoh did this three times with each ball unfailingly, then he was ready to play. Roy and his friends tried to emulate The Pharaoh’s warm-up but none of them could do it right more than once or twice. The only advice The Pharaoh would offer anyone was to tell them to tap the ball as if they were kissing their dead mother in her coffin.

  The Pharaoh preferred one-pocket but occasionally indulged someone at nine ball. He never played straight pool, which he said was for stiffs. “If I’d bought into boredom,” he told Roy, “I’d have stayed in school.”

  The only time Roy ever saw The Pharaoh lose was the last time he saw him, on a February night when he and The Viper went together to Lucky’s El Paso. The boys came in out of the beginning of a blizzard around nine o’clock and saw a very tall, skinny guy bent low over the match table, the one Lucky kept covered even when the place was full of customers. The other tables he sometimes let bums sleep on after closing but not this one. There were about fifteen men sitting or standing in close proximity to the match table, watching this tower of bones beating the bejesus out of The Pharaoh at his own game. The Pharaoh sat perfectly still in the ratty red armchair he always used, his lone leg stretched out in front of him, an inch and a half of white cotton sock exposed between his trouser cuff and a beat up brown brogan. He was smoking an unfiltered Old Gold, staring at his imperturbable opponent.

  The tall, skinny guy was about the same age as The Pharaoh but he was better dressed. He wore a dark blue blazer over an open-necked pale yellow shirt and chino pants. His few strands of black hair were greased back on his skull. Everything about him was long: his fingers, nose, even his eyelashes. Nobody spoke. Roy and The Viper stood and watched what were the final moments of the match, and when it was over the other witnesses to the slaying of The Pharaoh dropped their cash on the table and marched out of the poolhall into the storm.

  The victor picked up his winnings, folded the bills into a thick roll, wrapped a blue rubber band around it and stuffed it into a pants pocket. Then he went over to The Pharaoh and said softly, but not so softly that Roy and The Viper could not hear the words, “You’re washed up in Chi, Freddie, and don’t never go back to Cairo, neither.”

  The Pharaoh sat and let his Old Gold smolder while the thin man unscrewed his cue, packed it into his case, pulled on a shabby beige trenchcoat, shook loose a Chesterfield from its pack to his lips, lit it, and without looking back at The Pharaoh left the El Paso. Lucky was sweeping up butts and putting the folding chairs away. He did not speak to The Pharaoh, nor did the boys, though they stood and waited for him. Roy thought maybe he’d need help walking in the snow.

  After a half hour, The Viper elbowed Roy and they headed for the door. Before facing the blizzard Roy stopped and glanced over at The Pharaoh.

  “Come on,” said The Viper, “I’m hungry. Let’s get some Chinks.”

  “Think he can make it to his crib?” Roy asked. “Where do you think he’ll go?”

  “I don’t know,” said The Viper, “but it probably won’t be Little Egypt.”

  Bad Things Wrong

  Louie Pinna was a bad kid, everybody said so: his neighbors, relatives, teachers. He was a bad student, that was certain. Pinna never really learned to read or write, so he was stuck in the third grade until he quit school legally at the age of sixteen. Roy had been in that third grade class with Pinna, a situation that was embarrassing not only for Louie but for his classmates, as well. At fifteen Pinna was already six feet tall. His legs did not fit under the small desk he was assigned to, so he sat in the last seat of the last row and splayed his legs to either side. Everyone was relieved when Pinna was finally allowed to leave.

  After that Pinna hung out on the corner of Diversey and Blackhawk in the afternoons and worked as a night janitor at a downtown office building. Roy and his friends would often stop and talk to him after they got out of school. Pinna had always been nice to them; Roy never understood why so many adults considered Louie Pinna to be a rotten apple. In the 1950s, the concept of learning disabilities was not widely discussed, so a kid like Pinna was considered dumb and labelled a loser, earmarked for a bleak future as a bum or a criminal.

  By the time Roy was in high school, Pinna had disappeared from the neighborhood. Roy asked around about him but nobody he talked to seemed to know where Pinna had gone. Then one day when Roy was fifteen Pinna’s face appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. Under a photograph of the now twenty-three-year-old Louie Pinna, who had grown a fruit peddler mustache, were the words: NO BAIL FOR SUSPECT IN KILLINGS. The article accompanying the photo said that Pinna worked at a meat processing plant on the West Side of the city and was accused of feeding bodies of murder victims through a grinder, after which the remains were mixed with food products and packaged as pork sausage. Pinna had not actually been charged with committing any murders, only with disposing of corpses provided, investigators theorized, by The Outfit, Chicago’s organized crime syndicate.

  Alberto Pinna, Louie’s father, a retired plumber, was quoted in the newspaper as saying that his son had “a slow brain,” and that, “if Louie done such a thing, he was used by those type people who do bad things wrong.” Louie’s mother, Maria Cecilia, was quoted as following her husband’s statement with the remark, “And there ain’t no shortage of th
em in Chicago.”

  “You believe this?” Roy asked the Viper.

  “Pinna goes to prison,” the Viper said, “at least he won’t have to worry about taking care of himself no more.”

  “Do you think he did it? Ground bodies up for the Mob?”

  “What makes you think he wouldn’t?”

  Roy and the Viper were on a bus passing the lake, which was frozen over. Roy remembered seeing Louie Pinna with Jump Garcia and Terry the Whip, both of whom had done time in the reformatory at St. Charles, going into Rizzo and Phil’s, a bar on Ravenswood Avenue, a couple of years before. The cuffs of Pinna’s trousers came down only to the tops of his ankles and he was wearing white socks with badly scuffed brown shoes. Rizzo and Phil’s, Roy had heard, was supposedly a hangout for Mob guys.

  “Pinna never picked on younger kids,” Roy said. “He wasn’t a bully.”

  “He did the thing,” said the Viper, “ain’t no character witnesses from grammar school gonna do him no good.”

  “Can’t see what good it’d do to put Pinna away. He didn’t harm a living person.”

  That night, Roy’s mother’s husband, her third, a jazz drummer who used the name Sid “Spanky” Wade—his real name was Czeslaw Wanchovsky—almost drowned in the bathtub. He had been smoking marijuana, fallen asleep and gone under. Spanky woke up just in time to regurgitate the water he’d inhaled through his nostrils. Roy’s mother heard him splashing and coughing, went into the bathroom and tried to pull Spanky out of the tub, but he was too heavy for her to lift by herself.

  “Roy!” she yelled. “Come help me!”

  Roy and his mother managed to drag Spanky over the side and onto the floor, where he lay puking and gagging. Roy saw the remains of the reefer floating in the tub. Spanky was short and stout. Lying there on the bathroom floor, to Roy he resembled a big red hog, the kind of animal Louie Pinna had shoved into an industrial sausage maker. Roy began to laugh. He tried to stop but he could not. His mother shouted at him. Roy looked at her. She kept shouting. Suddenly, he could no longer hear or see anything.