Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  The street was lined with trees, many, one supposed, that poodles had peed upon. Businessmen swinging attaché cases plodded homeward through fallen leaves. From time to time, an executive would intentionally kick up a brass geyser of leaves, then glance around sheepishly as if he might be cited for a violation of adulthood.

  Every time she passed a Japanese restaurant, which on East Forty-ninth was about every twenty seconds, Ellen Cherry thought, The bamboo was intended for this place, they delivered it to our Jerusalem by mistake. When, on the corner of Third Avenue, she passed Wollensky’s, a well-known hangout for politicians, she wondered how many inside secretly opposed peace in the Middle East. Then she thought, rugs. Then she kicked up a brass geyser of leaves, glancing around brazenly as if to say, “I’m twenty-four, jilted, and work in food service; I’m free to be as free as I please.” It occurred to her that despite the failure of her marriage, the failure of her career, despite her hangover and chronic horniness, she suddenly was feeling rather light and giddy. She couldn’t understand it. Was she simply too shallow to suffer indefinitely, or was she too wise to become attached to her suffering, too feisty to permit it to rule her life? She voted for wise and feisty, and walked on, kicking leaves.

  By Lexington Avenue, the trees had thinned out. The noble old brownstones had given way to glassy apartment towers and classy hotels. Sidewalks had widened, stretched by the muscular fingers of money, and the pour of office workers had curdled into a cyclonic multitude, well-dressed, cologned, and silently pouting because the limousines double-parked along each and every curb were not idling obediently for it. Crossing Lexington, she trod on the grates over the Grand Central underground tracks. As every child in New York was aware, there was another city down there in the tunnels, populated by fugitives, hermits, gypsies, mad scientists, albino alligators, giant mutated roaches, sorcerers, sages, and surviving members of the lost tribe of Manhattan (clothed in twenty-four dollars’ worth of blankets and beads).

  Ellen Cherry entertained the notion that Turn Around Norman resided in that subterranean milieu. If he didn’t live for free in the tunnels, where could he live? The donation box that he set out at his performances seldom had more than a few dimes in it. Airheads who played wooden flutes out of tune in Times Square attracted larger donations than he did. Aromatic winos with pus in their eyes earned more from intimidation than Turn Around Norman earned from his artistry. Either he slept in the streets or he had a patron. Ellen Cherry imagined a beautiful Barnard girl sacrificing her clothing allowance in order to provide Turn Around Norman a warm place to come home to. Grazed by a bullet of jealousy, she vowed to toss ten bucks into his box that day.

  At Park Avenue, there were banks on all four corners. Money in every direction. Bank of the West, Bank of the North, Bank of the East, Bank of the South. Bank of Fire, Bank of Air, Bank of Earth, Bank of Water. Spike was right about New York, it existed for moola. But how was Jerusalem any different? Wasn’t one of the main attractions of the New Jerusalem (heaven, if you will), to be streets that were paved with gold? At that moment, she noticed that there also were hot dog vendors on all four corners. Carts reeking of sauerkraut and farty sausages. Strangely, that seemed to balance things out—as far as New York was concerned. As for Jerusalem, she was positive that whatever it was that it was about, it was not about food. It was no accident, surely, that the Bible never mentioned cuisine in its descriptions of the City of Heaven. How many people would forgo cheating on their taxes or their spouses if they knew that their eternal reward included a steady diet of baba ghanoug? In the twelfth century, there was a thoroughfare in Jerusalem named the Street of Bad Cooking, a fact that for better or for worse had failed to deter Spike Cohen or Roland Abu Hadee in his culinary selection.

  Jostled past the Waldorf-Astoria and several more Japanese restaurants (this neighborhood reminded Ellen Cherry of a petri dish in which sushi bars and tourists multiplied like bacteria), she finally reached Fifth Avenue, turned uptown past Saks, and came to rest on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Was she the least aware, during her trek, of how often New York and Jerusalem had interfaced, interpenetrated in her consciousness? Probably not. In any case, it didn’t matter now. There before the massive bronze doors of America’s most famous monument to Jerusalem’s most famous former resident, her attention was nailed, as if to a cross, to the talents of Turn Around Norman.

  Turn Around Norman always performed in the same spot: on the sidewalk just to the south of the cathedral steps. As near as Ellen Cherry could determine, he was at his post from morning until dusk, daily with the exception of Wednesdays. For some reason, Turn Around Norman didn’t work on Wednesday afternoons. He took Wednesday afternoons off, the way doctors did. What did Turn Around Norman do on Wednesday afternoons? Ellen Cherry tried to picture him playing golf with dermatologists from Yonkers, proctologists from White Plains.

  The steps of St. Patrick’s were comparatively short, but Ellen Cherry was able to attain an elevation that afforded a satisfactory view of the performance space. She was settling onto her step like a dowager settling into her box at the opera, when a hand landed as softly as a dove on her shoulder and a familiar voice flared like a match near her ear.

  “As I live and breathe! Bless my sinful soul! It’s my little doll baby.”

  And there was the Reverend Buddy Winkler, in all his seedy glory, smiling at her through a bonfire of new gold fillings.

  “Uncle Buddy. What a surprise. Wow! They could pave the streets of heaven with your teeth.”

  “And they could paint the gates of hell with your lipstick. But, darlin’, lemme tell you, it’s right nice to hear you speakin’ of heaven and to find you in such close proximity to a house of God—even if it’s a corrupted house. You weren’t headin’ into this papist monstrosity, were you now?”

  Both Ellen Cherry and Buddy surveyed St. Patrick’s, their gazes slowly climbing the three hundred and thirty feet to the tips of its twin spires, then parachuting to the steps again.

  “No. I may be a Jezebel, Uncle Buddy, but I’m a Protestant Jezebel.”

  “You got a tongue like your mama’s, girl.” Ellen Cherry grinned in a sassy, knowing way, causing Buddy to blush uncomfortably, as if some memory of Patsy’s tongue shamed or inflamed him. When he regained composure, he asked, “Well, what are you doin’ here? In front of the doors through which passeth the richest mackerel-snappers in New York City? Some of whom, I might add, give generously to my cause. All hush-hush, of course.” He ran a hand over his cheek, over lacunae that all the bullion in Fort Knox could not plug. “My associates and me got us an office right up the street there. In the Bank of Austria. They’re better to us than our own countrymen.”

  They were nice to Hitler, too, she thought, but she said, “I’m waiting for somebody.” Surreptitiously, she glanced at Turn Around Norman, irritated that this chance encounter with Buddy was making her miss the subtleties of his work. One had to watch Turn Around Norman very, very closely.

  “Not waitin’ for our boy, Boomer, I needn’t expect. Naturally, I heard ’bout the separation and have been sorely distressed. Sorely distressed. I yearn to be the instrument through which God reunites you screwballs.”

  “Well, you’ll have to speak with ol’ Boomer about that.”

  “I have spoke with Boomer.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes, indeed. Your hubby bulled into my office only this mornin’, claimin’ he was goin’ to bust my born-again choppers if a hair offen your head was to be harmed at that satanic café where, I’m sorrowed to learn, you’ve once again taken up employ. We need to chat ’bout that, too.”

  Ellen Cherry wasn’t interested in chatting about the I & I. For the moment, she wasn’t even interested in watching Turn Around Norman. She just kept thinking about Boomer coming to her defense, trying to protect her. “Boomer did that? He did?” Suddenly, inexplicably, her heart was full of something, she did not know what.

  The Reverend Buddy Winkler was s
heathed in a mustard-colored sharkskin suit that fit him so tightly one was moved to take up a collection to send his crotch on vacation. His starched white shirt was stiff to the point of being bulletproof, and at its collar, a gray knit tie was knotted in one of those dated Windsor lumps that made him look as though he were plagued by a particularly hideous goiter. His shoes were black loafers that appeared to have been chewed by wolves. Ah, but his smile was golden now, and his voice had lost not a calorie of its old blue heat.

  “Naturally, naturally, Boomer is concerned with the welfare of his little wife. As am I. What’d you do to that boy, doll baby? That fop French thing he’s totin’ around on his head. And his ’art.’ I understand he’s having an exhibition. That boy used to do an honest day’s work. Did you have to go and turn him into an artist?”

  “I didn’t have a blessed thing to do with it. He turned himself into . . . whatever he is.”

  Once more, Buddy lay a surprisingly light hand on her shoulder. “When you was just a youngun, knee-high to a wiggly worm, you used to stare at your dish of Jell-O—raspberry Jell-O, usually, with cream on top—and see Santy Claus in it. ’Santy’s in my Jell-O,’ you’d say. You’d see pictures in your food. We figgered way back then that you was goin’ to be somethin’ different, somethin’ special. It didn’t fool nobody when you went in for art. But Boomer Petway . . . that boy ain’t no artist.”

  “You said it, not I.”

  “But you do agree?”

  “Did little Boomer boy ever see Santa Claus in his Jell-O?”

  “Hell—heck no! He’d gobble up his dessert so fast there wasn’t time to see no pictures in it.”

  “I rest my case,” said Ellen Cherry. A darkening sky was sucking up daylight like a sump pump siphoning milk gravy. Turn Around Norman would be quitting soon. She tried to concentrate on him, hoping to detect some nuance of great purity or grace, but the Reverend Buddy Winkler was practically standing in her shoes.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who’s what?”

  “That sorry fool over there that you been pretendin’ not to gawk at.”

  “Oh, him.”

  “He hasn’t moved a muscle since I been here. Standin’ there blank-faced like a cigar-store Indian. He afflicted, or what?”

  “He’s a street performer.”

  “Well, when’s he gonna perform?”

  “He is performing.”

  Buddy tightened his grip on her shoulder. He even shook her, ever so slightly. “Darlin’, he’s paralyzed, for God’s sake! That’s his act? Paralysis? This is what show business has come to? No wonder the Good Lord called Ed Sullivan home.”

  “But he does move,” objected Ellen Cherry, tumbling into a discussion she had sworn to avoid. “That’s the point. He turns around. Completely around. But he turns so slowly you can’t see him do it. If you watch him long enough, you’ll notice that he’ll be facing in a different direction than he was when you started watching. Over a period of a couple of hours, he’ll turn three hundred and sixty degrees. Only you’ll never see him move, no matter how hard you look. That’s what’s exciting about him.”

  Buddy let his hand slide off her. He issued a grunt of astonishment, followed by a sigh of exasperation. “Excitin’,” he mumbled. “Excitin’. If you wasn’t my own flesh and blood. . . . Let me ask you somethin’. How often you come here and eyeball this poor petrified simpleton?”

  “Now that I’m working within easy walking distance—” Oops. She hadn’t intended to admit to that. “Oh, I don’t know. I come here fairly often, I guess. He’s a source of comfort and inspiration to me, Uncle Bud. I suppose you’d have to say—you won’t like this—he’s my church.”

  “Humph! Some church. He don’t have diddly-squat in his collection plate.”

  St. Patrick’s cornerstone was laid in 1858, at a time when New York was starting to strut its stuff and Jerusalem (under the Turks) was up to its ears in woe and ashes. The age of Ellen Cherry’s “church” could not have been easily guessed. Turn Around Norman was one of those creatures of indeterminate years; he might have been any age between his late twenties and early forties. His poundage, too, was ambiguous, for while almost any observer would have classified him as overweight, nobody would have thought to call him fat. Just a bit rosy, just a bit round, he was molded like a healthy cherub. But, oh, his face was fastened to his large head with hellish hinges. His screaming blue eyes, his deeply furrowed brow, his mad poet’s mouth (poised to suck the marrow out of the bird bones of beauty), his nose so perfect it might have ridden into town on a swan; those features combined to create a countenance of the most serene intensity, a mixture of the tranquil and the tragic that could have fired the hearts and dampened the underpants of half the city’s women, had they paid him the smallest attention as he stood silently and ostensibly inert on the crowded street in a brown bag of a suit, soiled sneakers, and a colorless sweatshirt bearing the phrase Aplodontia rufas, which, research taught Ellen Cherry, was the Latin for a species of mountain beaver.

  For the moment, Turn Around Norman was facing downtown, so they saw him in profile. Apparently, in his present position he couldn’t see them at all, which suited Ellen Cherry fine. She didn’t relish her “church,” her “art museum,” her “ballet hall,” noticing that she kept company with the pushy evangelist of another faith. She hoped that Buddy would go away while there was still time to tap the quiet ecstasy of the performer’s relentlessly regulated passion, but Buddy stood there in the sad titillation of the autumnal chill, gawking at Turn Around Norman like a farm boy examining a runover snake.

  “Now don’t that beat all,” he marveled. “An able-bodied male spendin’ his life on the public sidewalk doin’ nothin’ but turnin’ around all day, and doin’ that so slow you can’t see him do it. Haw! Then expectin’ on top of it to be paid for what we don’t know he’s really doin’ in the first place.”

  “Another way in which he’s like the church, I guess. I hadn’t thought of it till now.”

  Buddy’s hidden saxophone emitted a soft indigo honk. “Girl, I’d warn you that God Almighty’s goin’ to strike you dead, exceptin’ I been warnin’ your mama that for years, and he in his infinite mercy has so far seen fit to withhold his lightnin’.”

  “You’d be sorry if Patsy got zapped. You and half the men in Colonial Pines.”

  Now Buddy placed both hands on her shoulders. He got as close to her face as her hair would allow. “You know ’bout your mama’s flirtations?” he whispered.

  “I knew about them back when I was seeing elves in my pablum. But that’s in the past, I reckon, and I don’t want to gab about the past.”

  “Me neither. Let’s us gab ’bout the present.”

  “Uncle Buddy, I don’t have time to gab.” Anxiously, she surveyed the failing light. Another five minutes and Turn Around Norman would be history. Or, more accurately, geology. “But next time we run into each other, you can explain to me why you object to peace in the Middle East.”

  “I’ll explain right now.”

  “No. Please.”

  “I’ll explain here and now. If you’d been readin’ your Scripture, you’d have knowed the answer. It’s not God’s plan for there to be peace in the Middle East. Not yet, it ain’t. First, we’ll be witness to an impressive scene. Yea, I say unto you . . .”

  Oh, shit, she thought. The sax was out of its case.

  “. . . the awfulness of the impending judgment will be unequaled on the earth! The Holy Land, your so-called Middle East, is prophesied to be the scene of the ultimate world war. Combatants will be lured to the area by demons sent by Satan to assemble the armies of the world to challenge the armies of heaven. Up and down the Holy Land, they’ll battle. On the very day of the return of Christ, there’ll be house-to-house fighting in Jerusalem itself, the homes ransacked and the women raped. Zechariah, fourteen, two.”

  “Bud, really . . .”

  “This is to be the last war, darlin’. The wicked will be destroyed
once and for all, whereupon the righteous will dwell with Christ in the New Jerusalem for—”

  “Bud!”

  “Come on now, let me answer your question. It’s not a matter of us Christians not wantin’ peace, it’s a matter of the time not bein’ ripe for peace. First, our Messiah must return. Then, the fightin’ in the Holy Land must begin in earnest. These bleedin’ hearts who’re clamoring for peace in the Middle East understand not what they do. They’re uninformed troublemakers, interferin’ with—and slowin’ down—the natural chain of events that’ll fulfill God’s promise and make the world sweet as pie for eternity.”

  Turn Around Norman was about to break his concentration. Ellen Cherry recognized the signs: a fluttering of his girlish lashes, a relaxing of the origami creases in his forehead. Still, she was unable to refrain from blurting, “Is that why you picket and bomb Isaac and Ishmael’s? Because their concern for brotherhood and love is screwing up some alleged timetable for destruction?”

  “Hush, now. We might picket, my associates and me might, but we don’t bomb. You and Boomer and the damn Yankee po-lice are jumpin’ to conclusions.” He flashed his gold teeth, teeth anxious to sink into afterlife pie. “That café is small fry. Small fry. When the Third Temple Platoon throws our dynamite, it’ll hit a right more important target than that grubby little restaurant, I promise you.”