Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  I was reminded, on my visit home, when my mother showed me the photograph, of my feelings as a boy in high school when I learned that Lesley and his family were coming to The Bronx for a visit.

  I remember my fears of introducing Lesley to my friends—the lousy people. They would kill him, I thought. They would take my cousin, that stiff-necked wonder, and destroy him.

  What I have to say is very hard. My crowd—and I don’t mean that old gang of mine, kids with holes in their gym shoes—my friends had a thing. I don’t know if I had it too. All I had, I think, was a feeling for this thing. But they had it, whatever it terribly was—an esprit de corps beyond rationality, or a sense of neighborhood run riot, or merely a kind of fatal intuition—and it made them wild. I’m not talking about delinquency. They didn’t steal. There was nothing to steal. There was no one to steal it from. What they already had was all they needed. What they had was—there’s no real name for it—personality, out-sized, grotesque, collective. Look, they didn’t have jobs with a future; they didn’t date girls; they didn’t apply themselves; they didn’t know anybody’s line-up, and they didn’t care. They weren’t rooters. In all that crowd there wasn’t one flat, half-hearted cheer between them. But anything could break them up. There was this little girl who’d come into the candy store at exactly the same time every afternoon and say to Fein, the owner, “Mr. Fein, my mother please wants a package of Chesterfield cigarettes and that you should put away a late edition of a World-Telegram which my brother will pick it up later,” and one of my friends would start laughing. And pretty soon they’d all be laughing, myself too. I don’t know why it was funny. It was, though.

  But they were wild, and even dangerous, flashing out with sudden viciousness at passing, solemn strangers or at each other. I don’t know, it was as though they sensed something terrible about the world.

  When Lesley came I introduced him around.

  “How come you’re so fat?” Danny Lubell asked him.

  Lesley answered as though this were a perfectly normal question, one asked him frequently. “I’m not fat,” he said. “I’m big-boned.”

  “You’re monstrous-boned,” Danny said, “but you’re fat too.”

  Lesley looked at him without smiling or even seeming to realize that he had been insulted. Often something would happen to Lesley—in college he might fail a course; a girl would rebuff him—and you thought, now, now he will question himself, now he’s going to realize what he is. But he never did.

  We were in front of the candy store and just then a stray cat, looking ill at ease in the street, as though it had drunkenly wandered from its alley home, and now, sober, could not find it, sulked by.

  “Hey, Lesley, there’s my cat. Did you ever see my pussy cat?” Danny said.”

  “Is that really your cat?” Lesley asked, mildly put off by its unkemptness.

  “Sure it’s my cat. Whose cat do you suppose it is? You see the special scientific color of the fur? That’s years of careful breeding. The cat books call that ‘Scientific Colored Pussy-Cat Fur.’ That’s some cat, ain’t it, Belgium?” He had turned to Joey Stowka, a refugee kid Danny called Belgium.

  Joey blushed and did not answer.

  Danny reached down suddenly and grabbed the cat, catching it skillfully around its belly. Its claws burst from the furred paws, its face contorted in rage. Danny made a feint with the cat, as if he were going to throw it at Lesley. Lesley stood stolidly, not even throwing up his hands in reflex.

  “All right, all right,” Danny said to the cat, calming it. He turned to Lesley. “Want to stroke its special pussy-cat fur?”

  “What’s special about it? It’s ordinary cat fur,” Lesley said.

  “Why’s it special, Belgium? Tell him.”

  “Because,” Belgium said shyly.

  “Go ahead. Tell Lesley why,” Danny said gently.

  “Because,” he said again.

  “Because it feels like the hair…” Danny said, inciting Belgium’s imagination.

  “Because it feels like the hair…”

  “On…” Danny said softly.

  “On…” Belgium repeated.

  “On…”

  “On my mother,” Belgium shouted.

  Danny dropped the cat and hugged Belgium. “Creep,” he roared, hugging him, kissing him. “Creep. Foreigner. Creep.”

  Danny Lubell was not so much our leader as he was a polarity about whom we gathered. He had a job in a gas station which paid him only enough to keep him in egg creams. These, as far as I could see, sustained him. The job also kept him in stolen gasoline for his long black 1933 Packard. What ventures we made beyond the horizons of the neighborhood were made in Danny’s car, which Ox Hersh, another member of our group, drove because Danny didn’t know how. These trips, rare because somehow we were uncomfortable in other sections of the city, were expeditions really, halting and tentative as steps into cold, deep water. Once Ox, sent to another borough on some special mission for Danny, told us on coming back, unfeigned sadness in his face, “There’s nothing out there. There’s really nothing out there.”

  I have said that Danny was a polarity, but this is inexact, at least incomplete. He was our taste-maker. There are night clubs—sometimes we went to them in the Village to insult the queers—where they cater to the demented, where for money they tap the private lusts of the diseased and crippled. In a way, Danny was like the owners of these clubs. He could never, as they were, have been in it for the money, however; he encouraged aberration for its own sake. He drew it out of you. Whatever secrets you kept—awful things—you could not keep, could not hide from him. He pulled them out of you, and then he’d laugh at them, making them such a good joke that you were almost glad you were the way you were.

  But all of them—pervert Belgium; Ox Hersh; Rabbi Old Guy, a crazy Yeshiva kid who told us he liked to spit in the shul because he was mad at God for Hitler; Shelly Malkin; all of the—had this private thing which turned into a public thing around Danny Lubell. This is the point. I had no thing, and Danny left me alone. I mean, I had no thing except the thing I had for my friends. For a year after I graduated from high school I didn’t go to college. I just wanted to be around the boys, wanted to stay in the neighborhood to see what was going to happen to them. I mean, you’ve got to see how they must have been to make me want to do that. Fun’s fun, but who delays his life just so he can hang around with his pals?

  Sometimes we’d go out with girls. Not with them, but where they were. Shelly Malkin, who went to C.C.N.Y. night school, was our social chairman. The girls were always ugly. After one of his parties he’d apologize. “Gee, I’m sorry,” he’d say. “It’s a night school. They never turn on the lights.” We didn’t care what they looked like. We liked to sit around and tell them filthy stories.

  Or we liked to listen to Ox Hersh talk to a girl. Ox was a giant. He shouldered out of his small suits in a way that gave you the impression you were actually watching him grow. His voice disturbed the peace. Listening to him used to break us up. He was wonderful with girls. We could hear him across the room. He’d be sitting on this couch and you could see he was straining not to put all his weight down on it—he had a way of sitting on tiptoe—and he’d let his huge head hang down, or roll it around on his chest or stick it in the girl’s lap as though it were the trunk of some curious elephant. He would talk very slowly, drawing out each word as though there were a danger that the girl did not understand English.

  “Oh, you go to col-lege? You are a col-lege girl? Education is a beauti-ful thing. I have a cousin who lives in Brooklyn who is planning on going to college. Maybe you will…meet…him there…one day. What do you study at your col-lege, miss? Do you study so-ci-ol-o-gy? I am sure that must be terribly difficult. Is it not, miss?”

  “You get used to it,” she’d say, clearing her throat.

  Ox would think about this for a while in silence, his big head shaking up and down. “I think you are being modest, miss,” he’d say finally. “I thin
k you must be very brilliant in col-lege.” He’d pause and start the business with the head again, rolling it around as though it had to be wound up every time he wanted to say something. “I think your pro-fess-ors must be very proud to have such a…brilliant girl in their col-lege…What is so-ci-ol-o-gy?” he would ask her suddenly. By now her own head would be unconsciously tracing the splendid arcs made by Ox’s and he would take it in his big hands and steady it. “Better get your head fixed, miss,” he would say.

  Maybe afterward we’d be feeling so good we’d go out to a cafeteria on the Grand Concourse, where each of us would do his imitation of Ox and the girl. We might arrive just when the movies were letting out, and Ox would storm into the place and start throwing people out of the line. We’d be right behind him. “Excuse me,” Ox told them, “ain’t ate today yet,” and little Belgium, stepping on his heels, ferociously pumping his tiny legs to keep up with the Ox’s long strides, would shout his favorite joke in his piping voice, “Excuse us, excuse us, got to feed an Ox. Out of the way please. Got an Ox here to feed.” It’s funny the way people relinquished their rights in the line. They always thought somebody was going to hit them. Not violent themselves, they thought they lived in a world of violence. People get hurt only by accident, but they don’t know that.

  Only Belgium and the Ox seemed to have a kind of extra-group relationship. The rest of us were each other’s friends and seemed to be able to let it go at that, but with Belgium and the Ox it was different. I don’t know if it was affection or hate Belgium felt for the Ox. Sometimes he’d whine to Danny, “Come on, Danny. Let’s get in your car and leave the big fat Ox. I drive it for you, Danny. Ox too fat to drive, Danny. Come on. I have to sit next to him and he’s so fat he squeezes me. Let’s leave the bastard.” But whenever all of us were together Belgium wouldn’t let the Ox out of his sight. In the cafeteria he’d run up behind the Ox, who was beginning to pile things on his tray, and he’d yell at him, “How come you always first in line and not me? How come? Why I’m always second? Why is that?”

  Ox would turn around to him, and not bothering to modulate his dangerous voice, tell him, “Cause you’re a midget, that’s why. You’re a little midget, you midget.”

  We were a tight-knit group, but no closed corporation. Eventually we got to know almost every nut in The Bronx.

  There was one guy named Eugene Lepransky. Eugene was much older than the rest of us, about twenty, I guess, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the turning point in Eugene’s life. He was huge, bigger even than the Ox. Something was wrong with Eugene, of course, which was why we took such delight in him, but what it was, even a psychiatrist couldn’t have told you. Except for us he was an insulated individual. He lived with his mother, and she never let him out of the neighborhood. He couldn’t cross streets, so he never had a job. When you asked him he said he was “self-employed.” This was true in a unique way. He got ten dollars a week for walking his mother’s dog, and-this was more than enough for Eugene to buy one copy of each comic book and flashy crime magazine in Fein’s candy store.

  But Eugene took Pearl Harbor as a personal insult and for weeks raged against “the day of infamy.” Soon afterward he told us he was going into the “services.” From that day until V-J Day none of us saw Eugene again, and we thought, fantastically, that perhaps some branch of service had accepted him. I think it was 1943 before we found out that he had simply hidden himself in his apartment.

  Eugene lived in an apartment on the second floor, and sure enough, not long after he went upstairs a flag with a blue star on it was popped into the window by his mother. After we learned what it meant we used to stand below that window with the blue star and look up at it, prouder of Eugene’s blue star than of any on the block. On V-J Day he came downstairs for the first time in four years.

  He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four but he looked much older. The war had aged him.

  “Hello, Eugene,” Danny said to him.

  “Hello, fellows,” Eugene said, and he told us of an experience we soon knew by heart. In all the long war he had killed, he said, only one German. Eugene variously described the circumstances which led up to it. Sometimes Eugene was a soldier, sometimes a naval officer on loan to the army for a special mission—one gathered, to kill this German—and sometimes a pilot forced to land in enemy territory, but the final act, the killing, was always the same. Eugene had been forced to kill him at close range with his M-1. “He was so young,” Eugene would say. “But I had to do it. Him or me. You know how it is in a war. He asked for a cigarette when he was dying, and I didn’t even have one to give him. I would have given him, but I didn’t even have one.” Then he’d add sadly, “He was young. Just a kid.”

  The rest of us would look down, pretending to be embarrassed. Finally somebody would say, “Aw, you would have given him, Eugene. You would have given him the whole pack if you’d had it.”

  Anyway, after the war Eugene gradually brightened. He had gotten an Ike jacket somewhere and like many people in those days that was all you ever saw on his back. “Got to get a job,” he’d say. “Got to make up for the years I lost. Got to get a job from one of those dirty-rat black marketeers who cleaned up during the war safe at home. Got to get an angle.”

  He was never really one of us, you understand. He was older and crazier and seemed not at all amused by his idiosyncracies, as though he suffered because of them even though he didn’t know it. But we were all keen on him. When he came by—walking so fast that you didn’t think he saw you, not walking his mother’s dog but pulling it behind him, its feet locked stiff, the neck resisting, the paws grinding along the cement sidewalk, until suddenly he was abreast of you and he stopped and turned quickly and said what he had to say about the black marketeers and then started again, yanking the dog along—Danny Lubell would say, “I admire him. I respect him. One thing about Eugene. He don’t stand still. Most nuts, they bury themselves in the sand. But not Eugene. Eugene moves along with the times. There’s a war, Eugene fights it in his bedroom. Peacetime, he’s a regular veteran worrying to get an angle. You got to give it to a man like that. He don’t stand still. He moves right along with the times.”

  One night when he came by, Danny called to him, “Hey, Eugene, Eugene, where you been?”

  He walked up close to examine us. He was wearing torn slacks and a dirty T-shirt. “Found an angle,” he said mysteriously. “Busy now, can’t talk much. Tell you quick and get along. Lots of details, lots to do. Sitting in the Roxy watching the picture. Next to me’s this beautiful babe. I think maybe she’s a movie star.

  “ ‘Ain’t you Eugene Lepransky from The Bronx?’ she says.

  “ ‘It’s me,’ I says.

  “ ‘After the picture we’ll go to my place up the Hudson, I got a few friends coming over, we’ll dance,’ she says. Well, I’m trying to figure out how to get there on the subway, but when the picture’s over this big limousine pulls up, it’s a block long. It’s ‘Miss’ this and ‘Miss’ that from the chauffeur and I can see this is a fancy dame. We get in the car. Drive to this place up the Hudson. A palace! We go in. Butler at the door. ‘Hello there,’ he says. ‘Hello there, miss.’ What a place!

  “ ‘You wait here, Eugene,’ she says. ‘I got to change into my beautiful ball gown. Then we’ll dance.’ So I’m waitin’ for her and she comes down, she’s got on this beautiful ball gown and we go into this ballroom. Chandeliers. Guys in tuxedos. We walk in right away everybody stops dancing and she nods to the guys in the band and she nods to me and we start to dance in the center all these people.”

  “In your T-shirt?” Danny asked him.

  Eugene doesn’t pay any attention to him. “So we’re dancin’ along and I give her the nod. How long can a guy dance, you know? We go off in her car, me and her and this other couple. We’re in the back seat necking and up in front is the mayor and his girl. Just the four of us. Me and her and the mayor of the City of New York and his date. Necking.”

  “Eugene, the
mayor was there?” Danny asked.

  “Sure. Very horny man, the mayor. So later on she tells the chauffeur to drive me home and that’s where I get the angle. Turns out the chauffeur is Black Matt.”

  “Who?”

  “Black Matt, the pirate. He fills me in on the angle. We’re going down the Amazon River on Black Matt’s boat to find the mysterious black pearls.”

  “Eugene, Eugene,” Danny says, “you can’t cross streets.”

  “Only Black Matt knows where they are. Dangerous. Very dangerous. We’ll be millionaires. Only thing, they got these jaguars that they jump on the boat they try to rip you up. Black Matt wants me to shoot the jaguars on account he heard how I’m a good shot from the War Department. I’m going to shoot the jaguars and the Pygmies that protect the black pearls on account they think they’re special holy eggs. Goddamn stupid Pygmies. Stupidest guy in the world is a stupid Pygmy. Lot of them in my outfit during the war. He’s got movies. Black Matt’s got movies. He showed me. Pearls as big as your fist. Black. You want to come along? I tell Black Matt you’re good shots he’ll probably take you. Need guys to lift the pearls. Heavy.”

  “Would you do that for us, Eugene?” Danny asked him.

  “Got to ask Black Matt. His boat.”

  “Would we meet him?”

  “Sure. Take you tomorrow.”

  The next day we were out in front again and Eugene came along pulling his mother’s dog.

  Danny called him over. “Eugene,” he asked him, “when are we going to meet Black Matt?”

  Eugene looked angrily at Danny, then at the rest of us. We didn’t often try to trap him. Ox Hersh moved up in case there was trouble.

  “Deal’s off,” Eugene said. “Black Matt died.”

  In 1949 Eugene went after his mother with a knife and they had to take him away. Shortly afterward—this was in the summer—I decided I’d better start school. I went around to the gas station and told Danny about it.