A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  “Why, yes … Ralph. Ralph … Parker.”

  She remembered me! Move in for the kill. New Year’s Eve!

  “Yeah, boy, remember the time Mr. Harris’ apron caught on fire, and Alex Jossway blew up the sink, and …”

  “Now I remember you”—she laughed an elfin, tinkling laugh–“of course. You’re the one who had the date with Daphne Bigelow and …” She tittered again.

  “Good old Daphne,” I said, playing it cool.

  “You’ve changed,” she said softly, her long, rich, curved lashes fluttering in the breeze, her sparkling crystal-blue eyes dancing. “Really changed.”

  “Well, you know how it is,” I answered, casually touching the bill of my garrison cap so that the sun would flash more brilliantly on its golden eagle. “A guy gets around, you know.”

  “How long are you home for?” Her voice was musical and trilling, like distant fairy flutes.

  “I’m out.”

  She was even cuter than I had remembered. Schwartz had once described Barbara Jean Dorthoffer for all time:

  “… she reminds me of Debbie Reynolds’ kid sister.”

  Under her picture in the yearbook was: Captain of the Cheerleaders, Secretary of the Girls’ Figure Skating Club, President of the Home Ec Club, lead in the Senior play “Seven Keys to Bald Pate,” State Champion Twirler, Alto saxophone player in the band.

  Naturally, she was continually surrounded by an admiring horde of fans. Now here she was, actually talking to me and looking me right in the eye. At least as much of her eye as I could see under her elfin little pom-pom cap with its white, fluffy earmuffs. By God, she was cute as a button.

  “Really?” she smiled. “I’ll bet you’re excited.”

  She didn’t know the half of it.

  “Barbi, uh … well … uh …”

  “Yes?”

  A milk truck roared by, drenching us in a sheet of gray slush. I should have recognized the omen for what it was.

  “Uh … do you have anything on for New Year’s? Like a date, or a party or something?”

  She hesitated for a long pregnant instant, and then said softly and slowly, “Yes, I do have a date. My Scout troop is putting on a Cookie Dance down at the church. But I don’t think they’ll miss me. Yes, I’d love a date.”

  I wrapped up the details cleanly and quickly. I didn’t want to louse up by talking too much, or flopping around in my usual style.

  That night at home I wolfed down my slab of meatloaf with its accompanying red cabbage with zest.

  “I got the car simonized today at the garage,” the old man said. “I figured you might want it for New Year’s. Just got the plugs changed. You got a date?”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, setting the old man and my mother up for their second shock of the day, “I’ve got a date with Barbara Dorthoffer.”

  The old man carefully set his can of Blatz down. “Barbara Dorthoffer?” he muttered. “You mean Reverend Dorthoffer’s daughter? The one that’s always heading the Red Cross and all that stuff? You got a date with a preacher’s daughter?”

  “Correct. She’s really cute.”

  My mother, who had read the famous Dorthoffer name many times in the paper connected with every conceivable Good Work, and a few that they’d invented themselves, smoothed her apron as though the reverend himself was about to come through the kitchen door.

  “Why, that’s nice. That’s very nice.”

  “Oh, sure. We’ve been friends for a long time,” I lied. “We used to hang around together in high school.”

  “Reverend Dorthoffer …” the old man mused. “He’s the bird that tried to close up all the taverns. The guy that got the mayor kicked out.” He nodded his head slowly from side to side, lost in thought, contemplating a sad world with all the taverns shuttered.

  “I’m glad you’re going out with a nice girl. Just watch your language when you’re with her.”

  “What are y’gonna do? See the New Year in playing dominos and making fudge?” My father looked forward to New Year’s as the absolutely greatest holiday of the year. It was on New Year’s that he always performed his famous Snake Dance, blew horns, and wore lampshades pulled down over his ears.

  He had a point. It hadn’t occurred to me. What were we going to do on New Year’s Eve? After all, you didn’t just go down to a movie and have a cheeseburger afterward on New Year’s Eve.

  I got up from the kitchen table and went into the living room for the evening paper. Let’s see, I thought, riffling through the amusement pages of the Sun Times. They were filled with ads for special New Year’s Eve midnight shows, most of them showing a naked lady wearing a high silk hat, surrounded by bubbles, with little musical notes running up and down the sides and tiny smudgy cocktail glasses dotted here and there.

  One ad caught my eye: See the New Year in in Style. Dance to the sophisticated rhythms of Lester Lanin on the elegant dance floor of the Ambassador Starlight Roof. Make your reservation now for a truly memorable New Year’s Eve. Beverages, and sumptuous dining, to the music of Lester Lanin and his incomparable orchestra.

  Aha! That was it! What the hell, you can’t take it with you. I wanted this night, of all nights, to be perfect. I was going to enter the New Year with style, grace, and elegance, the way my new life was going to be. I rushed to the phone, in keeping with the decisive New Me.

  The last day of the year sped by in a frenzy of preparation. I got a haircut. I bought some new Jockey shorts. By nine o’clock that night I was ready.

  “Just watch out for those New Year’s drunks, if you’re heading toward Chicago. Them Illinois drivers are crazy, all of them.”

  My father, in the tradition of all good Americans, firmly believed that all drivers from adjoining states were the true menace of the road.

  I eased myself out into the cold of the back porch and struggled through the snow to the garage where the polished Olds 88 was waiting. The temperature in the last hours of the year was down to around ten degrees, and everything was so still that I could hear freight trains slamming together over at the roundhouse two miles away.

  I backed out of the drive and pulled the Oldsmobile out into the hard, ice-rutted street. I noticed the old man had invested in a set of crackling-new Scotch plaid seatcovers. Letting me have the car for New Year’s Eve was, for him, the final statement of fatherly love. It meant he would spend the big night sitting around in Zudock’s basement, playing pinochle and eating Polish pickles.

  The Allstates crackled and popped over the snowy, icy street. I felt light and airy, like a Signal Corps weather balloon in my civilian clothes. I drove under a swinging arch of red-and-green Christmas tree lights across Hohman Avenue in front of Goldberg’s. They still had their Christmas window going full blast. I checked the heater and a nice puff of warm air billowed into the car. Everything was going right.

  I eased past the stark Gothic whiteness of the Reverend Dorthoffer’s church with its grim spire reaching up into the flickering darkness, the muttering hell-fire of the distant Open Hearths touching the night clouds with subtle magentas and oranges. The reverend lived in the white frame rectory next door, surrounded by black winter trees and heavy snowdrifts.

  Pulling into the driveway, I hopped out of the Olds–and dropped the car keys into the snow. Digging my hands deep into the grimy drift, I scraped around in the darkness for the goddamn key ring. My coat sleeves inched up to my elbows as I frantically tried to locate it. Ah! I grabbed something icy and pulled it out of the snow. It was a frozen dog turd.

  Just at that instant the front door opened. The scene was suddenly brilliantly lit. There I was, crouched over, blinded by the light, caught totally off guard.

  “WHO’S THERE?” a voice from the wide, glass-paneled doorway boomed. “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING THERE?”

  For once I was totally without words.

  “JUST WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT THERE, SIR?” the voice persisted.

  It was then that I realized that I was standing in
a full spotlight, holding a frozen dog turd in my right hand. From the size of it, he must have been bigger than the Hound of the Baskervilles.

  “Is Barbara ready?” I asked, casually dropping the disgusting frozen object back into the snowdrift.

  “Barbara?” The voice repeated on a rising note of incredulity, “You’re here for Barbara?”

  “Yes. Tell her I’m here.”

  The door closed silently and I was left in total darkness. Immediately I dropped to my knees and began sifting the crud for the goddamn keys. I turned up gum wads, cigar butts, bottle caps, but no keys. Oh, for Chrissake! What the hell am I going to do now? Yeah, the old man always tapes a spare set of keys under the left rear fender. Yeah!

  I darted around the rear of the Olds, giving my shin a nasty shot on a bumper guard. A quick trickle of red-hot blood gushed down through my natty Argyles. I put my hand under the left rear fender. Nothing! I reached in deeper amid shock absorbers, axles. Oil dripped down my wrist. What’s this? A sodden lump next to one of the body braces. I ripped it out. The old man had not failed me. A pair of greasy keys rested in the palm of my hand, amid crumbs of dog turd. I dashed around to the front of the car, straightening up my coat as best I could.

  The front door swung open. There stood Barbi Jean Dorthoffer, Debbie Reynolds’ kid sister, the rosy, cuddly, All-American baton twirler, the preacher’s daughter.

  We spun out of the driveway toward the wide world, toward the quiet dignified elegance of the Ambassador Starlight Roof.

  “Where are we going?” Barbi asked in her little-girl voice.

  “Oh, just a little place I know.” It was a line I’d picked up from David Niven movies. “I think we’ll have fun; you might find it interesting,” I said, allowing the words to ooze out in a silken purr.

  “You know …” She stopped in mid-sentence.

  “Yes?” I coaxed. “Go on.”

  The faint perfume of violets or taffy apples or buttercups filled the Olds. I felt deep stirrings, primal stirrings down in the depths of my being.

  “You’re … not like I remember you from Chem lab.”

  I casually guided the Olds with my left hand, using masterful flicks of the wrist to spin past slower, stodgier vehicles piloted by ordinary cloddish mortals. We skimmed into the night. My mind raced: Remember, she is a fragile bird on the wing. Don’t, for Chrissake, blow it!

  The clock on the dashboard read just after ten. We had entered the last hours of the old year. In a few fleeting minutes, the New Year would be rung in. My new life would truly begin at the stroke of Midnight. I would take her in my arms; kiss her softly, gently.

  At that moment we were driving through a truly barbaric neighborhood, shoddy stores punctuated by pizza joints and bookie parlors, with an occasional poolroom to brighten the block. I stepped on the gas to get through this miserable, sordid slice of the world. Obscenities were scrawled on every wall.

  I neatly avoided a reeling drunk, who waved blearily as we passed. I felt embarrassed that Barbi should witness such a spectacle.

  “Would you like the heat turned up a bit? How ’bout some music on the old radio?”

  We had slowed for a stoplight. The drunk happily relieved himself against a lamppost, in full view of whoever cared to watch.

  “Say, isn’t that an interesting Army-Navy Surplus store over there?” I pointed across the street to somehow head off Barbi’s seeing the sordid exhibition. The bum started to sing loudly.

  The light changed. I whipped across the intersection. “… across this land of ours people are celebrating the New Year. We salute the men of our Armed Forces who are returning home, and tonight, here in New York …”

  I flipped the dial, looking for music.

  “Oh,” Barbi squeaked, “isn’t that a cute little place?”

  “Uh … where, what? What place?” My windshield was icing up. I peered into the gloom of the dingy street.

  “Over there.”

  I spotted a flickering neon sign in the shape of a red champagne glass. Blue neon bubbles rose from the glass.

  KIT KAT KLUB KIT KAT KLUB KIT KAT KLUB–it flicked on and off.

  “I have a wonderful idea.” Barbi clutched my arm. “What do you say we drop in, just for fun?”

  “But … we have a reservation, and …”

  “Oh, just for a drink. Come on. It looks like such a cute place.”

  What the hell, why not? A quick drink to give Barbi Jean a glimpse of the sordid underbelly of Life, and then on to the Starlight Roof. Why not?

  I quickly parked the car behind an abandoned pickup truck, which had been stripped down to the bare bones.

  Inside the Kit Kat Klub was darker than a bat’s groin, the air a thick compost of stale beer, cigar smoke, ripely fermenting urinals. The stench rocked me back on my heels.

  “Barbi, are you sure that we …”

  She grabbed my arm and hauled me in. “Come on, don’t be a poop.”

  Well, here goes nothing. I went in over the horns. My eyes focused in the gloom. There was a horseshoe bar. A trio: bass, tenor sax, piano, worked in the darkness on a high stand behind the bar. All three musicians wore black shades. All around the horseshoe, drinkers hunched in the gloom. Barbi led the way eagerly. We squeezed onto two empty stools, jammed in between drinkers like slices of pastrami in a Coney Island sandwich. The band roared into “Perdido.”

  “Hey, look who’s here,” the bartender, also sporting black shades, yelled over the uproar. He strolled toward us.

  “What’ll you have, Barbi?”

  “The regular, of course, baby.”

  “Comin’ right up.” The bartender flipped glasses and bottles around like a juggler.

  The regular! What the hell is this? The regular?

  I glanced around to see who he was talking to. It couldn’t be us. I hadn’t been in a dive as mean as this since the night Gasser, Elkins, and I had spent a hellish time in Pearl’s Bamboo Hut in Lodi, New Jersey.

  “What’re you having, buddy?” the bartender tossed over his shoulder. No doubt about it. He was talking to me!

  “Bourbon. Bourbon and water. On ice.”

  “Comin’ at ya,” he hollered.

  More clanking and banging as the bass player switched to guitar for the second chorus.

  The bartender leaned his hawklike face over the bar as he laid the bourbon in front of me and ceremoniously passed a tall thin glass that looked like a test tube over to Barbi.

  “One regular, and one bourbon.”

  He flipped out a Zippo lighter and whipped it quickly over the test tube. A blue flame flared to life.

  What the hell is that? A regular?

  Barbi leaned forward, kissed the bartender lightly on the cheek. “How are they hanging, Vinnie?” She kissed him again.

  How are they hanging? How are what hanging, for Chrissake!

  “Ah, you win some, you lose some. You know how it is, Barb.” He turned and faced the band. “Hey, Zoot, look who popped in.” He extended his hand out with his finger pointed comically down at Barbi’s tousled Prom Queen head. The bass player shoved his shades up on his forehead for a second and kept right on playing without missing a beat.

  “Hey, man, good to catch you.”

  Barbi blew him a kiss. She inhaled deeply the fumes of the flaming test tube.

  “Ahhh,” she sighed sensuously.

  “Barbi, I’ve never seen them fix a regular quite like that.”

  She squeezed my arm lovingly. “It’s a Pousse Café au Vinnie.”

  Something banged heavily into my side. I turned to my left. “Oh, excuse me, I …”

  “Hey, honey, y’gotta light?”

  I recoiled slightly as the woman on the next stool leaned drunkenly against me. Her watery eyes swam blearily in the gloom, her lips painted a neon red. She wore a pink, lacy blouse that was too young for a twelve-year-old.

  “Y’gotta light, handsome?” Her voice slurred as she knocked over my bourbon.

  “Oops. ’Scuse
me.”

  The icy bourbon dripped off the bar, soaking my freshly cleaned suit.

  “C’mon, Vera, straighten up or it’s out on your ass,” Vinnie barked. He rapped sharply on the bar with a ten-inch piece of rubber hose. Vera reeled back, spinning off her stool and sitting down heavily, behind me. She shrieked with laughter.

  Holy Christ, what the hell is this I’m in?

  I reached down to help Vera up off the floor. She appeared to be sleeping. Barbi laughed.

  “Isn’t this fun?” She sipped her regular.

  “Yeah. Sure is.” I tried to recover. “Really an interesting place.”

  “Sorry about that, buddy.” Vinnie shoved a fresh drink toward me. “She don’t mean no harm.” He suddenly leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “Owner’s wife.”

  He went down the bar, rapping his rubber hose to show the flag. Somewhere in the gloom behind me, a scuffle broke out and subsided. The band had disappeared.

  “What’s in that thing you’re drinking, Barbi?” I tried to make conversation. I’ve never been good at Bar talk, a special category of time-wasting. Some make a life’s work of it.

  She held her glass up to the dim light provided by a brightly lit framed scene advertising Old Jeeter Ozark Bourbon. The scene was a little boy peeing into a moving electronic stream.

  “You see, there are seven colors”—Barbi carefully turned the glass to show off the drink—“each one is a different liqueur. Plus Vinnie’s secret ingredient.”

  “Who’s your friend, Barb-O?”

  We turned. The bass player leaned over us intimately.

  Barbi introduced me to Zoot, who apparently had no last name.

  “When’s the last time you seen Jimmy?” he asked, his eyes opaque behind his impenetrable shades. “I hear he got busted.”

  I hunched over my bourbon.

  “Don’t worry about Jimmy.” Barbi tossed off her Vinnie Spectacular. She coyly raised her empty glass.

  “Another little drinkie poo?”

  I waved down to Vinnie, who quickly supplied us with two more. I laid a twenty on the bar. Vinnie scooped it up and disappeared. I stood up.

  “I’ll be right back, Barbi. Men’s room.”