Eventually, the girl slowed down and they were walking beside each other. She said, “Did you see the cannonball in the tree?”
Sam said, “Which one?”
The girl stopped walking and said, “It’s super cool.”
She jumped off the wall; and the way she jumped holding her skateboard over her head was almost as cool as the way she said “super cool.” Sam stood there staring at her.
“Viens,” she said again.
Sam jumped down off the wall and the two of them ran down the narrow cobbled streets hand in hand.
Well, that’s how Sam imagined they ran. In truth, the girl ran in front of him, and Sam had to push himself to keep up. He had forgotten all about the IMAX.
“Tiens,” she said pointing. Sure enough there was a cannonball, at the edge of a narrow lane, the roots of a tree gnarled around it.
He smiled at her and said, “Super cool.” Then he said, “I was General Wolfe in the battle.”
Suddenly he remembered she was French and felt awkward and added, “It was just a play. Montcalm won once.”
And she said, “I saw Montcalm’s skull.”
The way she said it he knew it was true. Though the truth is he would have believed anything she told him. But the skull of Montcalm! He was so mesmerized he started speaking fluent French.
“Où?” he said.
And the most magical thing was that she understood him this time. She said, “Au musée des Soeurs Ursulines.”
And off they went again, over another cobblestone hill to another museum to see the skull of Louis-Joseph le Marquis de Montcalm.
When they got there, Sam said, “Moi, je n’ai jamais vu un crâne.”
Well, actually, he said, “I have never seen a skull.” But talking to her it felt like he’d said it in French.
The woman in the ticket booth said, “We don’t have it anymore. They buried it with his troops in the basse ville five years ago.”
“Too bad,” said the girl. “It was a cute skull.”
Sam said, “Ça fait rien.”
“Veux-tu un chocolat chaud?” she said.
“Oui,” he said noticing, with relief, that he had his French back.
They went into a little café on Rue Couillard.
She had a coffee that came in a little cup. His hot chocolate was served in a bowl. He didn’t know how you were supposed to drink hot chocolate when it came in a bowl. To be safe he went to the counter and got a spoon. He ate it like soup.
She wanted to ask, Is that the way the English do it? But she didn’t want him to think she was ignorant. The rest of his manners seemed perfect. Maybe we do it wrong, she thought.
Instead of asking him about chocolate, she said, “Aimes-tu Daniel Belanger?”
He shrugged.
“Avril Lavigne?”
They had to take a bus to the theatre. They sat at the back. He could feel her leg against his. He couldn’t think of anything to say to her, so they barely said anything. It took about half an hour.
When they got to the IMAX theatre, the big tour bus was parked outside. Sam said, “That’s my bus.”
There were kids getting on it.
The girl said, “I think you missed your movie.”
Sam said, “I can’t miss my bus.”
All he wanted to do in all the world was kiss her. He had never done that before. They stared at each other. That’s what she wanted too. She wanted him to lean forward and kiss her goodbye.
Instead they shook hands.
Murphy said the movie was amazing.
Murphy said, “I can’t believe you missed it. It was the best thing I have ever seen.”
Sam was looking out the bus window. The girl was standing there with her skateboard under her arm, her head to the side.
Sam said, “I’ll see it some other time.”
He lifted his hand and waved, tentatively. The girl was looking right at him, squinting at him, but she didn’t wave back. She couldn’t see him through the tinted windows.
So he brought his hand up to his lips and blew her a kiss.
If he had been older, he would have asked her name and her email or something. And if she had been older, he wouldn’t have had to ask.
He didn’t know anything about her, really. Except she had seen Montcalm’s skull. And he hadn’t.
The last moment Sam saw her, Murphy was sitting beside him telling him something about the movie, but he wasn’t listening. He had his face pressed to the window. He said something under his breath and Murphy said, “I can’t hear you.”
And Sam said, “Nothing. It’s okay.”
And then he turned back to the window and said it again. “Au revoir,” he said. “Salut.”
And then just before the bus turned the corner, she blew him a kiss. He leaned back in his chair and sighed.
It was his first kiss.
It was a French kiss.
Dear Stu,
Can I call you Stu? I feel as if I know you already.
I recently went to the local theatre where your Vinyl Cafe show was on tour. I didn’t actually go in, mind you. I find your voice kind of irritating. But I noticed that you drew quite a crowd, and that got me thinking.
You wouldn’t have any extra money that you could lend me, would you?
Awaiting your generosity,
Ted
Dear Ted,
There is no one here by that name. You might find the following story helpful, however.
NEWSBOY DAVE
The door to days gone by is a strange little door, and it can pop open at the oddest moments. When it does that—pops open—unbidden, and spills the light of memory at your feet, you know that almost always you are going to walk through the door, even though you are well aware that once you do, there is no telling the strange places you might go.
Dave was alone in his record store the last time memory came calling. It was a rainy afternoon, and you could tell it was going to be slow. An interlude. But Dave had anything but yesterdays on his mind. He was using the unexpected solitude to flip through a couple of boxes of albums he had been meaning to go through for weeks. Dave was firmly rooted in the here and now.
He was sorting the records into piles on the counter in front of him: a pile for the albums he would keep, a pile for the ones that would sell and a pile for the ones which would go into the bin at the back of the store—Vinyl’s Last Stop—two dollars an album. He had been at it for over an hour.
He had stopped to make a pot of tea, and he had just begun again, just picked up the very next album, and there it was— the little door of memory, and it was already way too late to do anything about it. The door was wide open, and Dave was already through it.
“Oh my,” he said, “Appaloosa.”
He hadn’t seen the album for fifteen years. Maybe twenty. He glanced, instinctively, at the old green file cabinet under the till. He had a folder in there, somewhere, with letters from people who wanted this record. He already had it out of the jacket, spinning it around to see what kind of shape it was in. Far better than it should have been. He put it on his turntable, of course. And that was the end of that afternoon.
Appaloosa only ever made the one album—jazzy and violiny, a path back to those days when Donovan, and Tim Hardin, and Gordon Lightfoot, and all those coffee house guys were reaching back and jazzing up their folk songs with baroque sounds. Dave’s old buddy Al Kooper had produced it. How many years since he had seen Al?
Al, who had famously insinuated himself into the studio during the recording of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Dave refilled his mug and leaned back, the Appaloosa jacket propped in his lap. He reached over and turned the volume up. He was listening to Appaloosa, but he was thinking of Al.
Al, who was maybe twenty-one at the time, had brought his guitar to the studio hoping he might be asked to play with Dylan. He put the guitar away as soon as he heard the prodigious Mike Bloomfield warming up. He was watching from the cont
rol room when the guy playing the B3 moved over to the piano, and he just couldn’t resist. He snuck onto the studio floor when the producer was on the phone. Al didn’t really know how to play the organ. Al was a guitar player. But when it was all over and they were mixing the cut, Dylan kept saying, “Turn up the organ.”
Al once told Dave he wouldn’t have been able to turn on the organ if someone hadn’t already done it.
“If you listen carefully,” he said, “you can hear me coming in late on a lot of the changes.”
That is because Al was being careful he had the chords right before he played them.
Dave looked up. Side one of the Appaloosa record had been over for a couple of minutes, the needle as lost in the groove of memory as he was.
He flipped the jacket onto the counter, walked to the back of his store and grabbed Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. And he listened to that all the way through. And then to Blood Sweat and Tears’ first album, which was Al’s work too. Heck, Blood Sweat and Tears was Al’s band, although he left them before they broke. When that album was over, he tried to phone Al at Berkeley. He was teaching there last Dave had heard. But all Dave got was an answering machine. By then it was time to close anyway, so he hung up without leaving a message, switched everything off and went home.
That night, after supper, Dave sat down at the computer and spent several hours drifting around, like a little lost boat on the foggy lake of memory. Appaloosa had led him to Al. Al was leading him all over the place.
Morley was asleep by the time Dave crawled into bed. He was tempted to wake her, but he didn’t. He could wait until morning.
When Morley opened her eyes, there he was. He didn’t say, Good morning.
Instead of Good morning, he said, “Guess what I found on the net last night?”
Morley sat up and squinted at him. “My gloves?” she said.
“A 1973 Gottlieb Deluxe Hot Shot,” said Dave. “The one with the green background.”
“A what?” said Morley.
It was only the greatest pinball game ever made—way better than the later version with the blue background.
“It’s for sale,” said Dave.
Only about twenty Hot Shots were distributed in North America. It was a game of pinball pool, set in a twenties-style pool hall. There was a quirk, however, in one of the relays— so it gave you a free game if you hit the eight ball directly after the three ball. Well, it didn’t take long for everyone to figure that out, and for store owners to notice that they weren’t making any money on the games. So the manufacturer recalled the machines and never reissued them. A few, however, had slipped through the cracks.
Morley rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. Dave rolled out of bed and followed her.
“Beauty of the Hot Shot,” said Dave, following Morley into the bathroom, “is you can service it yourself. You just open it up, adjust a rubber band or two and oil the relays and wheels.”
Morley was putting toothpaste on her toothbrush. She stopped and turned and stared at Dave in disbelief. Dave mistook it for a look of wonder.
That’s what he was feeling. Wonderfull. “If any lights burn out, you can replace them with bulbs you can pick up at a hardware store. Cheap.”
Morley said, “Imagine that.”
“I know,” said Dave, holding out his hand for the toothpaste.
He was still talking at supper—explaining how the Hot Shot was the game that he and Al Kooper had played the autumn they did that college tour, the one along the northeastern seaboard. They lugged the game around in the sound truck and set it up backstage every night.
They played for hours—after every show—under the dark stands of countless sports arenas. People would hang around and watch, using the game’s glass top as a counter for their beers. Their whoops, and the machine’s chunks, bells and flashing lights echoing through the empty hallways.
The Hot Shot was bright and it was loud.
“Oh, joy,” said Morley.
Dinner was over. They were washing the dishes and he was still going on. Morley had had enough. She put her towel down and headed into the living room.
And Dave, who hadn’t done the pots yet, followed her, wiping his hands on his pants. He was trying to remember the name of the sound guy who used to play by himself after Al and Dave had finished. He was a true artist, fabulous to watch. He would play quietly without saying a word, hardly moving. “It’s a Zen thing,” he said. “You have to not try. You have to allow the balls to go where they want to go.”
He finally said it.
“I want to buy that pinball game,” he said.
“No problem,” said Morley. “We can pay for it out of the grocery money.”
That shut him up. That put a damper on the fire of his enthusiasm. But it didn’t put the fire out.
Dave tended the embers. He kept thinking of the game when he should have been thinking of other things—remembering for instance the time he convinced Al that he had paid Marie-Rose, the Haitian tour cook, twenty-five dollars to put a curse on him.
Dave had ridden in the back of the sound truck that day all the way from Portland, Maine, to Burlington, Vermont. He had spent the trip doctoring the machine. He had opened it up and removed the five regulation stainless steel balls and replaced them with slightly smaller ones. Balls that moved faster, were harder to control, evaded the flippers and went down the gutter more easily.
That night, he let Al go first. Everyone knew what was going on except Al. And there was Al pounding on the flippers in exasperation, Dave standing beside him as calm as could be.
“Try another game, Al. There’s no hurry.”
The next day Marie-Rose sat at the big table by the cook trailer, working on a plate of chicken and rice. She tilted her head toward Al and said, “He paid me fifty bucks. You want that I should remove the curse?”
They had so much fun. How often could you go back to your boyhood? He couldn’t let the machine slip through his fingers.
The idea to pay for the pinball game by getting a second job came to him while he was walking to work.
He could have come up with the money. It wasn’t about the money. It was the principle. Morley was right—the pinball thing was extracurricular. So, he’d get an extracurricular job to pay for it. A part-time job.
The idea of working for the game pleased Dave enormously. The job would have to be something completely different from what he did day to day. That way there could be no question about where the money came from. Something simple, something contained. He considered all sorts of ideas. He considered house painting. He considered driving a cab. He considered delivering pizzas. All good ideas, but not perfect ideas. If he was going to do this, it had to be perfect.
He thought of the perfect idea at lunch.
He wanted to buy something from his boyhood? He should get a boyish job. What could be more boyish than a paper route? Perfect on every level. It would get him up in the morning. He would get some much-needed exercise. He would make the money he needed. And he would fulfill a boyhood ambition.
Dave had never had a part-time job. When he was a kid, he had always wanted to be a paper boy. But in Big Narrows, the town where Dave grew up, the Boxer brothers had a lock on the town’s one paper route. As each brother outgrew the route, he passed it on, like a peerage, to the next brother in line. The summer he was twelve, Dave was woken every morning by the creak of Peter Boxer’s bicycle. Dave would wake up and lie in bed waiting for the creaking to pause, waiting for the whir and slap of the paper, as Peter tossed it over their fence and onto their porch. As if Peter was in charge of waking him, in charge of waking the whole town.
Dave was stomping along the street, grinning foolishly as the kaleidoscope of summers past twisted through his head.
He would get a paper route.
Rising early to deliver papers would be like closing a circle. It would be a return to a simpler time. It would be more than a return to a simpler time. In the midst of his bus
y life, it would be like one of those things monks do, like bookbinding, or bread making. Delivering papers would be a meditation. His practice. Like the arrows let loose by the Zen archers in that book Al Kooper had given him. It wouldn’t be his role to deliver the papers—the natural state of the papers was on the front porches—his contribution would be to release the papers so they could deliver themselves. The paper route would bring patience into his life. Not to mention a pinball game.
He hadn’t applied for a job for years. He would need a resumé. It took him all day to get it down to two pages. A man from the paper called three days later.
“We got your resumé,” said the man. “Sorry, we only hire adults these days.”
“I am an adult,” said Dave.
“Oh,” said man. Dave could hear him shuffling paper.
“I own the store,” said Dave.
“Oh,” said the man again.
They had a route in his neighbourhood. Dave could start Monday morning. It was only after he had hung up that he realized the best thing of all about the job—by doing this he was going to be setting an example for his children. He would be living a principle that he had always tried to teach them: the important principle of delayed pleasure. If you wanted something, you had to earn it before you could enjoy it.
He received his route by fax on Friday afternoon. He knew many of the people on it. He sat down to talk to Sam on Sunday night. When he had finished explaining everything, he sat back and smiled. Sam didn’t say a word. Sam was staring at him.
Dave said, “I know that’s a lot to take in. But what do you think of all that?”
Sam said, “You’re going to deliver papers so you can buy a pinball machine, right?”
Dave smiled. “Yes, that’s right.”
Sam said, “Like walking around the neighbourhood delivering them door to door?”
Dave said, “Yes.”
Sam said, “Our neighbourhood?”
Dave said, “Yes.”
Sam said, “That is so … embarrassing.”
The next morning, his first on the job, Dave woke up five minutes before his alarm. It was still dark out. He reached out and turned off the alarm before it rang, so it wouldn’t wake Morley.
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