by Ward, Robert
“Okay, Ma,” I said, leaning over and kissing her on the cheek. “Sure.”
The parking lot at WO AX radio was jammed with cars and Mother gripped the armrest as we found a space.
“I know it’s silly,” she said for about the tenth time. “But I just think it’ll be fun. You don’t have to come in …”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
We hurried across the windblown parking lot. Old Baltimore Sun papers wrapped themselves like snakes around my mother’s leg, and she reached down and cast them off with a furious motion, and it occurred to me then, she really wants this, she wants to be Miss Kissable Lips. I thought of that shy, sweet girl at her Methodist’s dance party, where she was popular, and of all the intervening years putting up with my father’s madness, and, yes, I knew that this was pathetic, absurd, but by God, I wanted it for her, too.
But when we got inside, my heart sank.
There were five other contestants—five young girls, either in their late teens or early twenties—and they were dressed to kill, tight skirts, push-out bras, and tighter sweaters. My mother looked around, then turned and looked at me, and I started to say, “Ma, come on. You don’t need this.” But she only gave me a brave little smile and sat down, while the five girls stared at her and traded condescending looks.
I felt a panic coursing through my stomach. God, she was going to be humiliated and she knew it, but she wasn’t going to chicken out. No, she’d stay until the bitter end, when sleazebag Johnny Apollo gave the award to one of the young beauties.
I slumped down in a chair near her while a curly-haired woman made her little announcement in a voice that sounded as though it came from a carnival Cupie Doll: “We are certainly glad to have each and every one of you, the final finalists in the Miss Kissable Lips contest, with us at the studio! Our master of ceremonies, Johnny Apollo, will see you all very soon. Meanwhile, you’ll see on that big table to your right a box filled with special Kissable Lips blotting paper. Now, I want you all to blot your lips and drop them into the Miss Kissable Lips box. I will take it away and Johnny will look at your lips for one last time and then make his announcement. One of you will then become Miss Kissable Lips!”
The young girls twittered and shifted in their seats, and one of them, a sexy blonde with a poodle on her pink sweater, looked over at me with a certain malicious confidence in her eyes.
Slowly, each of the girls got up, walked toward the table, and began blotting their lips.
I looked at my mother. She was gripping the chair arms as if she were on a rocket ride at Gwyn Oak Amusement Park. How she wanted this!
I felt the tension building in me and something else, a kind of fury, which caught me completely by surprise. All of her life she had been cheated, robbed of her rightful share of joy and happiness. She hadn’t always been a worry wart, a party-killing nag. My grandmother had told me that when my mother was young, she really was the life of the party. I remembered something my aunt had told me before she died. “Tommy,” she said, “If your mother had had an education, she could have been a writer, because she is a natural-born storyteller. It’s just a shame she has so little confidence.” And I began to feel a kind of nausea, for I knew that of course she wouldn’t win, that once more she would go home in defeat.
Then I thought of Raines—I don’t know why—but his voice popped into my head. It was as though he were communing with me from across town, and I heard him say: “Don’t just sit here, my boy. Kick some ass!”
The voice was so clear that it startled me. I got up out of my seat and walked out of the room.
Outside, I found myself in a hallway, and I looked down at the studio adjacent to the room with the contestants. I walked quickly down the hall and went inside.
The room was dark, except for one small light in the back. There, sitting alone, was a small middle-aged man in a maroon velour shirt, tight black leather pants, and ankle-high black Beatle boots. I recognized him at once as Johnny Apollo, for his picture had been featured on dance posters on billboards and telephone poles all over the city.
I walked toward him and saw the curly-headed woman leaving by a side door. It was just the two of us. Now was my chance, but what could I do?
And then, like in the old Mandrake the Magician comics, it was as though I was no longer in the real world, but in some swirling fog, and I clearly heard Raines’s voice inside my head. It wasn’t a matter of me thinking “here’s what Raines would do.” No, it felt as though he had literally taken over my body, my mind, my speech, and he was saying to me, “Listen Tommy, there are no rules except what we make. Everybody who has ever gotten anything knows that. So what are you waiting for, a miracle?” His voice was so clear inside my head that I felt startled and even turned around to see if somehow he had magically entered the room behind me. But there was no one else there. Then it was as if Raines himself were reaching into my pocket, pulling out a comb, and combing my hair straight back on my head, like a Harford Road Hot Shoppe Drape. I shrugged my shoulders a couple of times and walked slowly and with a certain measured bad-assed dignity toward Johnny Apollo, who slumped in a canvas director’s chair, with his short little legs up on a radiator. He was older than I had suspected, about thirty-five, and he was already losing his greasy black hair, which he attempted to hide by parting it from ear to ear. He had spent too much time in the sun, and his face was creased like a shrunken walnut. Then I saw what he was up to, looking through the darkened one-way mirror, as the Miss Kissable Lips contestants finished blotting their lips on the paper and deposited them in the tin-foil-covered box.
I must have startled him, for he jerked back in his seat, nearly tipping himself over. I stared down hard at him.
“Who the hell are you?” he said.
“My name is Eddie Moriarity,” I said. This was not my voice and not Raines’s voice either, but the husky, raspy voice of a hundred gangsters from a hundred tough-guy movies. Inside me there was another little voice screaming to get out, the Mr. Panic Voice, who was saying “What in the fuck are you doing, Tom? You’re going to get thrown in jail. Your mother will die of embarrassment.” But it was a voice I couldn’t use, so I ignored it.
“So what’s that to me?” Johnny Apollo said. “I mean what are you doing in my studio, kid?”
“Just visiting, pal,” I said. “You see I brought my aunt down here today. That’s her right there through the glass, the rather big, mature lady in the blue dress. She’s a finalist in the Miss Kissable Lips contest.”
His face kind of relaxed after that.
“So you brought her down. That’s very nice of you, kid. Now why don’t you go back in there and wait with her, ‘cause I’ll be announcing the winners real soon.”
“I don’t think you understand, Johnny,” I said. “I want my aunt to win the contest.”
That stopped him cold. He looked up at me in complete astonishment.
“You’re putting me on,” he said.
“No, sir,” I said. “And there’s some other people who would very much like her to win, too, like Bobby Murphy, maybe you heard about him. He runs the gang down in the Tenth Ward called the Shamrocks. You see that lady, Ruth Fallon, she’s Bobby’s second aunt. She practically raised him, you unnerstan me?”
Johnny Apollo looked as though I had put an axe through the middle of his head. He swung out of the chair and started toward me.
“You little Irish fuck,” he said. “You think you can come in here and fucking intimidate me?”
I felt a sudden desire to piss in my pants. How had I ever gotten into this? Then, I swear, it was as if Raines took over the show.
I reached down to my left. There was a turntable there, and with one quick swoop I pushed it off the edge of the table onto the floor. It smashed on the tile and the arm dangled off and quivered a little.
“What the fuck are you doing?” the little man said.
“I’m real sorry,” I said. “That was
very, very clumsy of me. But things like that happen all the time when I get mad. I mean I seem to lose control of my fucking muscles or something and everything around me gets all fucked up. Weird, huh?”
He started to say something else, but suddenly there was fear in his eyes.
“The Shamrocks, huh?” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “That is correct. Bobby Murphy sent me personally. He also told me to tell you he is your biggest fan, and the Shamrocks are gonna make a sizeable contribution to your Mercy Hospital fund later this year. Just remember her name, Ruth Fallon.”
I turned and walked out then as cool as any movie idol. It wasn’t until I got out into the hall that I started shaking. I found the men’s room just down the hall, went inside, and shut the stall.
My arms and legs were literally trembling, and I felt like I was going to puke. So I held my head over the toilet bowl, but then a strange thing happened. I didn’t get sick. No, I didn’t feel sick at all, but something else, something akin to sex, swept through me and I shut my eyes and I saw that huge mouth that I’d seen in the dream only nights before and I felt strong and powerful and there was a kind of wild electricity zapping through my veins. Only this time I wasn’t afraid, not at all, and I saw little pathetic Tommy—Little-Terrified-Waiting-by-the-Bathroom-Door Tommy—fall away, like a snake shedding his skin, and instead there was somebody else there, somebody young and strong and unafraid and ready to meet the hustling, lying, conniving world on its own terms, and I began to laugh—Oh, God, I laughed—tears ran down my face as I stood in that bathroom stall, because I suddenly understood what I had done. I had used Raines’s voice and style to give myself courage. But it really was me and only me who had just pulled off that outrageous hoax.
For a second I felt guilty for using my old friendship with bad Bobby Murphy to terrify Johnny Apollo, but then I realized that Bobby would have loved it. Besides, he owed me one. Bobby and I had met a long time ago in Go vans, on Winston Avenue, just a block away from our house at Chateau. He was already a legendary battler in the neighborhood, famous for taking on three hardasses from Hampden at Ameche’s one night and sending two of them to the hospital (the third showed some uncommon good sense, leapt into his 1949 Ford and got the hell out of there). At the time, however, I was better friends with his younger brother Terry. What endeared me to the Murphys was that I had once “saved” Terry from being thrown down a sewer by three ducktailed bullies in a Waverly gang called the Four Aces. (This was not bravery on the Murphy scale. They had jumped us outside of Govans Bowling Alley, and when a lizard-faced boy named Minsner had tried to grab Terry, I kicked him in the shins, grabbed Terry, and made a run for it. The Aces had nearly caught us, but we lost them in the Govans woods behind our houses, a woods completely gone now, covered over with more redbrick row houses.) That small piece of bravery, bravery I’d almost forgotten, made Murphy a friend of mine for life. Even though we had long ago gone down different paths, I would see him now and again in Baltimore Street corner bars and he would come over and hug me and say: “Tommy, you ever need anything, you know where to come. And fuck the Wops, huh?”
I leaned on the bathroom door so long, lost in a thousand reveries of my past, a past I had almost stomped out in my headlong rush to become an aristocratic little scholar. Suddenly, I looked around at the toilet stall and laughed out loud. It struck me that I was having all these thoughts in the goddamned bathroom, the place where my father escaped the narrow, claustrophobic realities of his life. But for me, on this day, the old tile Mecca had become the Room of Recognition, the place where I understood my deepest strengths came from the past I had tried so hard to repress. The thought excited me, made me want to race home and start writing in my journal, but then I suddenly panicked thinking that Johnny Apollo might not have fallen for my little sham after all. Christ, he could right this second have the cops coming down on me and my mother, and I thought of my father’s fury if he had to bail me out of jail.
So I crept out of the bathroom and down the hall, and I looked through a little square window in the big studio door and tears came to my eyes. For there, in the studio, black leather-suited Johnny Apollo was presenting my mother with the big silver Fun Box. The look on her face was worth ten thousand dollars, there were tears of joy rolling down her cheeks, while the young girls looked shocked in total disbelief (two of them were crying quietly), and I opened the door and went inside.
She saw me and smiled and called me over. She said, “Mr. Apollo, this is my …”
I cut her off then and looked coldly into the slimy little DJ’s eyes: “Johnny, I’m your biggest fan,” I said.
He looked at me as if he wanted to tear my throat out, but I merely smiled, looked at my mother, and said: “You won! That’s terrific. But then I always knew you had the most kissable lips. I mean it was obvious, huh, Mr. Apollo?”
“Yeah, obvious,” he said, staring holes through me.
“Well, this is truly terrific. So show me your prizes, Ruth!”
That set her back a little. We were not the kind of family that called each other by our first names.
“Oh, they’re wonderful,” she said. “I got this beautiful costume jewelry.”
She held up a pair of vintage earrings and modeled them a little. They were gold and orange half-moons, cheap junk, but they didn’t look bad on her.
“And I got a year’s subscription to Good Housekeeping and Photoplay—you know I love to read both of those—and I got some wonderful new lipsticks, pink, just like Jackie Kennedy, hon, and a gift certificate to Ameche’s Drive-In—isn’t that great—and, best of all, theatre tickets to the Lyric to see two shows. It’s just wonderful, hon. I really want to thank you, Mr. Apollo.”
She threw her arms around the little sleazebag, and though he looked as though he wanted to run, he squeezed her back, while Miss Curley Hair took pictures. I laughed out loud and said in as “street” a voice as I could muster, “Hey, you’ve done the right thing, Mr. Apollo. She’s a very happy lady!” Then I watched my mother show all the other “girls” the rest of her prizes. They all tried to be good sports, but you could tell they were dying inside.
A few minutes later Johnny accompanied my mother and myself down the long gray hallway toward the windblown, wet parking lot. My mother walked a few feet ahead of us, chatting in an excited voice with Miss Curly Top. Johnny leaned in next to me, and I could smell whiskey on his breath.
“You tell Murphy I want a really big contribution this year for this,” he said. “I’m fucking serious.”
“Don’t worry, John,” I said, “The Shamrocks never forget a friend.”
When we left, I gave him a Judas hug, just like Cagney in Public Enemy. My mother cried with joy all the way home.
All my life I have used melodrama, action, wildness to protect me from the brutal facts. High Doctors of the Mind I have known call it acting out, and maybe it’s true. But I prefer to think of it as a creative battling against the odds, finding some kind of victory in the midst of the hard, shitty facts. All I know is that day I conned Johnny Apollo into giving my mother the Miss Kissable Lips award, I felt good for hours. After I dropped my mother off, I rode around town higher than I could be from twenty tokes of gold hash, reliving the crazy moment when I tapped into my old rough self, a self that I had nearly forgotten. As I prowled the streets, it occurred to me that whatever good things studying with Dr. Spaulding had done for me—and there were many to be sure—that I had somehow paid too high a price. School had made me feel ashamed of my old friends like the Murphys, boys I had loved since I was five years old. Now I was an apprentice aesthete, and what contact did I have with my old buddies? None. Oh, I dropped in at the Hollow Bar now and again to see Murph and the old boys, but the gulf was too wide between us now. The old boys hadn’t gone to college; though Bobby was brilliant, he had barely finished City. His attitude had once fiercely been my own. College was for “pinheads,” “fairies,” and though I disliked his anti-intellectual
ism, his willed stupidity (the same kind of willed stupidity that my mother and much of the city practiced), now I thought about it all again, thought about it all in light of Raines and the house on Chateau Avenue. Of course, the Murphy family had long ago moved out of our old neighborhood; they’d fled to the suburbs with all the rest of the Irish. Now Bobby made headlines for his gambling hustles, his series of restaurants that were reputedly just fronts for money-laundering operations. He was, I suppose, merely a thug. Still, when I thought of him I felt a deep tenderness and respect, and as I drove the streets I saw now that moving in to the house at Chateau had put me in touch with some spirit of community, of real neighbors and a real neighborhood that we had lost when we moved near Calvert. Hell, out there, no one spoke to their neighbors, much less watched out for them, and as I drove moodily through the dark streets of Rodgers Forge, I thought that it wasn’t any accident that my parents had become even more estranged in the country. Yes, my father was embittered from giving up his art and by the terrible obsessions with his body and cleanliness, but it seemed to me now, all those obsessions grew wilder and faster, like some vicious cancer, in the isolation of the suburbs.
I stopped in front of an Amy Joy doughnut shop and looked inside at the blue neon, the trays of surreal doughnuts, and one lone gray-clad state trooper who leaned wearily over his coffee cup, and I remembered how it was in Govans after the war, the bustling streets, young mothers in flower-print dresses, their hair pulled back with safety pins, and guys in striped polo shirts walking down the block with baseball bats and gloves taking their kids to the parks to shag flies. At twilight everyone was out on the corner of Winston and Craig Avenue, in front of Pop’s Grocery Store, listening to the old International League Orioles, muscular, bald, Mr. Bond kidding dark-skinned Mr. Mitchell about his new Indian motorcycle, and Mr. Mitchell taking all of us kids for fast rides around the block. And the girls, girls like beautiful Ruth Anne Muir who smiled and flirted with the older boys, while we younger kids sat under a mulberry tree playing marbles in old man Snyder’s front yard. And Danny Snyder would buy a Nehi soda, and Eddie Richardson would put three blue gumballs in it and take the soda cap off the bottle and take out the cork with a penknife and use it to backup the bottle top as he put it in his felt-crown cap. Then we’d shake the soda up and fizz it all over one of the kids, and they would scream and fizz it back, and everybody laughed, and old man Snyder, in his undershirt and with his black lung cough (he’d emigrated from the coal mines of West Virginia), would get out a garden hose and bucktoothed, but kind Mrs. Snyder would squirt all of us kids and we would run around in that artificial rain, me and the Murphys and the Snyder boys, and it was like we were all one person or so it seemed, all one person, in one sweet little redbrick neighborhood in dear old Baltimore. And as the summer sun went down and a little cool breeze came sifting through the honeysuckle vine, even my disappointed father seemed happy. He’d walk with my mother down to the corner store and look at us and smile and say, “Just like young savages, aren’t they, honey?” but there was pride and love in his voice, and my mother would lean into his arms and he would hold her, and I would see them watching me and feel such pride that it made me want to burst inside. It was as though I was truly home and I wanted it to stay that way (and thought it would) forever.
