Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  So Honeyman contemplated the building before him a moment longer.

  The structure was five stories tall, composed all of muted red brick, aged by over a century of weather. The uppermost courses of brick were embellished with decorative motifs, achieved by the ingenious stacking of master masons: herringbone, twill, cross- hatching. Copper flashing, long verdigrised, ran around the eaves, surprisingly unvandalized for a building deemed abandoned. The roof was of slate, in decent repair. The windows were all painted black. The building occupied an entire large city block.

  At one corner of the building, closest to the river, reared an enormous square smokestack, capped at the top with more brick embellishment.

  There was a door directly in front of Honeyman. In point of fact, there were three doors. The first was twelve feet high and ten across, actually a double door of two leaves. Made of thick planks once painted green, but now peeling to reveal bare splintery wood, the two halves of this door were secured with a chain and an enormous, rusting padlock that appeared at least fifty years old. Inset in this door was a more conventional-sized one, with an old-fashioned latch. It was this one Honeyman considered entering. At the foot of the person-sized door was the third, a pet door. (Honeyman might have employed this entrance, had he wished. Others often had.) This upper-hinged small entrance bore a legend in a lovely calligraphic hand which Honeyman recognized as that of Suki Netsuke. It read: the cardinal.

  The lintel of the largest door was a huge piece of Jersey limestone, mortared into the brick wall on either side. Carved into the soft stone was the legend:

  1838 OLD VAULT BREWERY 1938

  The later date was executed in stark Futura, the earlier in wasp-waisted Baskerville.

  Honeyman, a few feet from the triple portal, listened. There was no noise from inside. This could be either a good or bad sign. It paid to remember that some of the most insane schemes of the Beer Nuts had been hatched in relative quiet. Thunder and lightning and apparitions on the Capitoline Hill did not attend the birth of every Caesar. On the other hand, everyone could be innocently sleeping. There was simply no way to tell.

  Tossing caution to the cafe au fish-scented winds, Honeyman stepped forward and opened the middle-sized door, which swung inward. He stuck his head and shoulders into the dark. “Yo, folks. It’s me, Rory. Is anyone home? Earl? Hilario?”

  There was no answer. Honeyman, his eyes sensitized to outdoor light-levels, could see nothing in the midnight interior. Sighing, he stepped fully inside and shut the door.

  Vast hulking shapes loomed about him. Brew kettles, pipes, mash vats—all the original equipment of the long-defunct brewery remained, covered by decades of dust.

  Honeyman took a few tentative steps forward, hands outstretched. People moved around frequently here, changing their nesting locations according to complex social interactions. Honeyman hadn’t visited the Beer Nuts in months, and had no idea in what spot Nerfball might be hibernating now.

  Shuffling along in the musty dark, Honeyman cursed softly. All he wanted was to reclaim his employee and start making sandwiches. Instead, he was forced to play Blindman’s Bluff. Growing angrier and more impatient, he unwisely picked up his pace.

  Suddenly his foot caught the edge of something soft, body or mattress. Unprepared, he lost his balance and felt himself going down.

  Honeyman landed heavily atop a lumpy something. A man grunted, a woman screamed. Make that “someone.” Two someones.

  Feeling that discretion required him to remain still, lest he unintentionally exacerbate the situation, Honeyman did not move. A match scratched on its gritty strip, a candle flared.

  Honeyman discovered that he was lying crosswise atop Earl Erlkonig and Suki Netsuke, who were, in turn, reclining upon a stained, bare mattress. The situation would have been less embarrassing had the pair not been mostly unclothed, and had Netsuke not been Honeyman’s ex-lover.

  “Hi, Rory,” said Netsuke coyly. Her half-Japanese features were as appealing to Honeyman as ever. Her skin was the color of pumpkin pie, her nipples the brown found at the pie’s edges. Propped up on one elbow, she reached modestly for an article of clothing, found nothing to hand, and shrugged off her nudity.

  “Hey, molecule,” said Erlkonig, “nice of you to drop by.” He extended a queerly colored hand, and Honeyman shook it.

  Earl Erlkonig was a young Black man who also happened to be an albino. His hair was a thatch of short kinky platinum wires. His complexion was the color of weak tea attenuated by lots of cream. His eyes were a watery gray.

  Netsuke squirmed devilishly beneath Honeyman, and Erlkonig said, “Uh, if you wouldn’t mind.…”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry.”

  Honeyman pushed himself up into a kneeling position beside the mattress.

  “Thanks,” said Erlkonig. He discovered a pair of Jockey shorts and skinned them on, still lying down. Netsuke, meanwhile, had donned a T-shirt.

  The light and noise had drawn a crowd. Honeyman looked up to find himself the focus of a circle of curious faces: a majority of the permanent Beer Nuts.

  Ped Xing, the only man in the world to profess both Orthodox Judaism and Zen monkhood. Long side curls contrasted rather sharply with his shaven pate.

  Hilario Fumento, unpublished writer with a curious artistic philosophy, his pockets filled with the materials of his trade: call slips and pencil stubs filched from the public library.

  Beatbox, a Hispanic fellow currently employed as a Balloon-O-Gram deliveryman, and also currently wearing his work clothes: a complete clown suit and white face.

  Leather ’n’ Studs, the inseparable lesbian couple.

  Hy Rez, resident hacker and phone phreak, who provided the Beer Nuts with essential communication services.

  Prominent among the missing was Nerfball, the one person Honeyman wanted to see.

  “So,” said Erlkonig, who was as much of a leader as the Beer Nuts allowed, “what brings you here, my moll?”

  “Nerfball was supposed to open up the store for me today, and he didn’t. Do you know where he is?”

  The Beer Nuts burst out laughing.

  “I don’t get it,” admitted Honeyman, when the noise had died down. “What’s so funny?”

  Erlkonig sought to explain. “Well, you know how Nerf believes in that dumb nasal irrigation of his. Snorting saltwater all day long to clear his sinuses, honking like a sick goose at all hours of the night. Well, this morning he goes to do it in the dark, only to find someone’s spiked his water bucket with Tabasco sauce.”

  “Ouch,” sympathized Honeyman.

  “So now he’s off somewhere sulking. I suspect you can track him down by the sniffles.”

  Someone handed Honeyman a flashlight. “Thanks,” he said, and stood.

  “Bye, Rory,” said Netsuke, and giggled.

  Honeyman shook his head wearily. Life was always tossing your past straight in your face.

  Nerfball was huddled in a far corner of the brewery’s upper floors. Honeyman could hear him talking to himself from some distance away and, not wishing to intrude on his personal soliloquy, called out in warning.

  “Hey, Nerf, it’s me, Rory.”

  “What do you want?” whined Nerfball.

  The flashlight beam revealed Nerfball sitting under an old oak desk. His pudgy form completely filled the capacious knee-well. His nose was inflamed. Incredibly lazy, Nerfball possessed one talent to an astonishing degree: he could make sandwiches better, faster, and more economically than anyone else Honeyman had ever seen. A sandwich crafted by Nerfball emerged from beneath his flashing knife as a thing of beauty, guaranteed to draw repeat customers. It was this salient skill that Honeyman now had to cajole him to employ.

  Squatting to make eye contact with the victim of Tabasco poisoning, Honeyman said, “Come help me with the store, Nerf. I need you.”

  “Why should I? You never pay me anymore.”

  Nerf had Honeyman there. Cash flow had been pitiful lately. The rent had just been hiked a
zillion percent, thanks to the gentrification of the city. (Honeyman himself was not a “B and B,” as those “born and bred” in Hoboken called themselves. But he had been here so long, since Hoboken was just a joke, that his conscience was clean.) And a McDonald’s had recently opened up in competition a few blocks away. Honeyman was barely scraping by.

  Honeyman thought desperately. “Listen, I will pay you, I swear.”

  Nerfball sneered. “Yeah, I bet. With what? Funny money?”

  Honeyman opened his mouth to deny the charge, then was struck by the futility of it all. Why should he lie to poor Nerfball? Chances were he’d soon go out of business, owing all his creditors immense sums. Why compound his guilt by promising more than he knew he could give?

  Then, amidst his despair, in a blaze of inspiration he was to remember for the rest of his life, Honeyman had an idea.

  “Yes, Nerf, I do intend to pay you in funny money.”

  This got Nerfball’s attention. “Huh?”

  Honeyman scrabbled in his pockets for paper and writing tool, coming up with an old unpaid electric bill and a lime-green crayon. He tucked the flashlight between chin and neck, and began to scribble on the back of the bill, reciting aloud what he was writing. “This paper redeemable for ten sandwiches at Honeyman’s Heroes. Signed, Rory Honeyman.” For good measure, he sketched a rough sandwich on it. The drawing ended up looking like that of a book with loose pages. He offered the paper to Nerfball, who took it suspiciously.

  “Here, this will be one day’s wages. It’s worth about forty dollars retail.”

  “What good is this to me? You already give me free food.”

  Honeyman, still in the grip of his genius, rolled right over the pitiful objection. “Right, sure, but isn’t everyone in this dump always starving? Make them pool their money—whatever you can convince them this is worth—and give it to you in exchange for the ten sandwiches, which you can make up and bring back here at the end of every day.”

  “Gee, I don’t know—”

  “People will love you for it.”

  “Oh, all right.” Nerfball made tentative movements to emerge, and Honeyman stood up to give him room. Somehow the big man twisted around beneath the desk and began to back out. He said something that was muffled by his position.

  “What’s that?” asked Honeyman.

  “I said, ‘What’s this coupon called?’”

  Honeyman was stumped. “Does it have to have a name?”

  Nerfball was standing now, brushing dust from his clothes. “Yes.”

  Honeyman reached deep down into some mythic well of American vernacular and came up with a word he would have earlier sworn he didn’t know. “Spondulix. It’s called a spondulix.”

  “Is that singular,” quizzed Nerfball, “or plural?”

  Without hesitation, Honeyman replied, “Both.”

  2.

  Days in the Pantechnicon

  In Mexico City, in the middle of 1968, the Summer Olympics were taking place.

  Sometimes when Honeyman said that sentence to himself, it sounded like a bit of incredibly ancient history. In the year 753 b.c., the city of Rome was founded. In the year 1066 a.d., the Norman invasion of England took place. A fact lost in the mists of time, relegated to musty textbooks, unseen by living eyes.

  Other times, that period seemed as close as last night, separated from today only by a little interval of sleep.

  For Honeyman had been there. And afterwards his life had never gone as he had once innocently thought it would.

  Prior to the start of these long-ago Games, Black protesters had succeeded in denying South Africa the right to participate. The head of the International Olympic Committee, one Avery Brundage, had led those who would have allowed South Africa to take part in the Games. This man was also in charge of handing out the medals.

  When two American trackmen, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won a gold and bronze respectively, they decided to stage a symbolic denunciation of Brundage’s role. On the victory block, wearing African beads and black scarves, their shoes removed as a symbol of poverty, they raised gloved fists and bowed their heads.

  They were immediately expelled from future events.

  Sitting in the stands during this bit of typical sixties theater was an eighteen-year-old member of the U.S. swim team, a diver named Rory Honeyman. A nice Iowa boy, he had never even spoken to a Black person before coming to the Olympics. Now, all at once, in the same kind of mental burst that would later engender spondulix, Honeyman experienced an epiphany of radicalization. There is, like, injustice in the world. We are all brothers and sisters. I must protest.

  Listening that night to the talk of the other Bloods in the Olympic dorms, Honeyman was confirmed in his initial decision. He said nothing to anyone, though, being of a retiring nature.

  The next morning Honeyman felt filled with spiritual vigor. He went to his events. He won the silver. On the stand, he raised his ungloved fist in protest and bowed his head. The crowd seemed stunned. There was a silence as big as Mexico. Honeyman was the only White who had elected to register his solidarity with the Blacks.

  Unfortunately, there were no television cameras present to broadcast his personal statement. (His hometown paper was the only one to print a photo, a blurred long-distance shot which made Honeyman look as if he were sniffing his own armpit.) Brundage, the media focus, was elsewhere, and at the same time three Black men named Lee Evans, Larry James and Ron Freeman were also protesting.

  Honeyman’s actions did not go entirely unnoticed, however.

  When he returned home, a changed person, all the familiar sights of his childhood looking transmogrified, his draft notice was waiting for him. Nothing too unusual there—except that he had previously been granted a deferment.

  (Eleven years later, talking in a Hoboken bar to a stranger who happened to be a retired Army Colonel, Honeyman learned that those members of the ’68 U.S. team who had belonged to ROTC had received phone calls warning them not to join the protest.)

  Life in Canada was not that bad at first. Honeyman was a little sad, naturally, thinking of his vanished career in international diving competition. But, possessing a naturally cheerful disposition and being still young, he made the best of this strange twist of fate.

  Life only became a bummer when his money ran out. His parents, feeling betrayed and disappointed by their son, refused to send him any more. Soon, Honeyman was desperate for a job.

  That was when he met Leonard Lispenard.

  Lispenard was the sole owner, chief roustabout, ringmaster and occasional marriage counselor in Lispenard’s Pantechnicon, a two-bit, vest-pocket, circus-cum-carny that made a circuit of Canada’s north in the summer months, and headed south in the autumn. Lispenard himself was a short fat man with bad skin, who, in his ringmaster garb, looked to Honeyman remarkably like the Penguin, Batman’s archenemy.

  It was June of 1969 in Calgary, and summer was already waning, when Honeyman approached Lispenard, reasoning that such an outfit would offer a lower-profile job than most other concerns, an essential attraction for an illegal interloper in a country not his own. Inquiring for the owner, he was informed that Lispenard would not be available until that night’s show was over. Honeyman purchased a ticket and resigned himself to waiting.

  The tent was only half-full. Curiously, no one was sitting in the front rows. Honeyman went and took a seat right up against the ring, determined to get his money’s worth.

  During the finale of the show, when Honeyman was simultaneously growing impatient and feeling sleepy, he was galvanized by the sight of the first real love of his life, the performer with whom he would daily be associated for the next seven years.

  The Baroness von Hammer-Purgstall.

  There was a twenty-foot tower in the middle of the tent, with a large platform at the top. No ladder ran up the tower, but rather a kind of open elevator cage, powered by a fitfully chugging engine, stood ready. At the base of the tower was a big square collapsible cont
ainer, metal-sided, plastic-lined. It had taken half an hour to fill it with water out of a fire hose.

  Lispenard waddled to the center of the ring. “Ladies, and Gentlemen, without further ado or needless puffery, may I present, for your edification, the Baroness von Hammer-Purgstall— Canada’s only diving equine!”

  The Baroness was led out. A gleaming white Lipizzan mare who had flunked out of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, she was the most beautiful horse the former farm-boy Honeyman had ever seen.

  Lispenard had disappeared. A clown led the Baroness willingly into the elevator. She rode it calmly to the top. She trotted out onto the platform. She paused a moment. She jumped off.

  It was like watching Pegasus. Honeyman couldn’t breathe.

  When she landed, the impact, as planned, flattened the tub, spraying water in a circle twenty feet out, drenching the first three rows of seats.

  Honeyman didn’t care. He vaulted into the ring, ran past the Baroness, and found Lispenard in among the trapeze girls and dog-trainers.

  Buttonholing the owner, Honeyman declared, “Mister, I can ride that horse.”

  Lispenard replied, “Why, so can I, boy.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. I mean going down.”

  Honeyman explained a little about himself. Lispenard still appeared dubious.

  “Listen, just give me a chance. Tomorrow night. C’mon. Please?”

  “And what if you break your fool neck?”

  “I’ll sign a waiver. Anything. Just let me ride her.”

  Lispenard, sensing novelty, a circus’s lifeblood, finally agreed.

  The next night, Honeyman, attired in borrowed yellow tights, found himself standing beside the Baroness as the elevator made its grumbling ascent. He didn’t even see the crowd or hear Lispenard’s spiel. All he felt was the horse’s shoulder muscles beneath his hand. All he smelled was her clean animal scent.