“And so they offered eighty thousand to settle and Jerry, my Jerry, says to them, ‘Blow it out your nozzle.’ Oh, I know he said something far more disgusting, but that’s what he told his delicate-eared aunt, always trying to protect me from anything untoward. He thinks I was born in the seventeenth century. Even people born in the seventeenth century weren’t born in the seventeenth century. Anyway, blow your eighty thousand out your nozzle! Can you imagine?”
“Nozzle?”
“Nose, Bernice, nose. What’s your problem?”
Bernice waves her off. She sighs appreciatively over Jerry. Gert’s hair is frostier than usual today. It looks like if you touched it, you’d get snow on your fingers. She thinks of mountains. God knows where they were, somewhere north of here where there’s mountains, Michigan maybe, and Seymour said, Look, Bernice, look what the wind did. Like somebody came up here with a paintbrush. He was right, Seymour, for once. The snow didn’t even look cold. It looked like sugar. And she remembers being vaguely afraid of those trees, remembers thinking for some reason that the snow was cruel to be so deceptive. How long ago? Seymour insisting we go walking in the snow in the mountains of all the cockamamie things and us getting in the car and driving for hours. Were the children with us? I can’t even remember.
“Why don’t they tear that thing down already?” Bernice says.
Gert pauses her Jerry narrative and looks curiously at Bernice. “What thing?”
“The tower.”
Oh, the tower, Gert thinks. The funny leaning tower. Who cares about the—Gert leans forward and stares more closely into Bernice’s glossy eyes and nearly gasps. She’s withering. When did this happen? Poor darling. Seymour. Dead more than a year now and here he is, right in her face.
“And you know I saw the real one,” Bernice says. “And you know what?”
“What?”
“It’s taller, but just as dull.”
“Dear—”
Bernice ignores her, honks into her napkins, and says, “In fact, I hated Italy. All that self-congratulation. They say the French are bad. Seymour said it was impossible, that nobody in their right mind could possibly hate Italy, that nobody on the face of the earth had ever—”
“Dear—”
But this time nothing stops Gert short other than her own simply not knowing what to say. What do you say? About the loss of a man who didn’t so much torment Bernice as mutter nasties in her direction for fifty odd years. For Christ sake, Bernice, stop the idiot talking, always the idiot talking. She considers her own Milt, as irrelevant as a pair of old garage shoes, but what if he wasn’t around? Milt with his morning peeing and his farts to beat the band. A sort of bland horror overcomes her. Gert reaches for her own neck and gently rests her fingers on her own pulsing throat.
Bernice is staring at the busboy with eyes she could swear—
“Bernice, you’re lusting the busboy.”
“What if I am?”
What do you say to that? Nothing. You don’t say anything to that. You let it go. You let a lot of things go. Gert calls for the check. She roots around in her purse for her wallet. At Seymour’s funeral Bernice said at least now she wouldn’t have to water down the Scotch. Because old Sy wanted to die soused, his ship gallantly jouncing through a gale in the South Seas, and it was a battle till the day he keeled over in the driveway. “Demasted,” was his last word.
Bernice said it was a relief and Gert knows now that she was either lying then, or it’s become a lie. Which is worse? Does it matter? We end up having coffee and gabbing. We think it’s the same but it isn’t. Is this the last cruelty? That we hold steady and still—
CHICAGO AND NORTHWESTERN TRACKS, HIGHLAND PARK (1988)
We’re waiting for the trains. After midnight and me and Barkus stoned again and lying on our stomachs on that huge corrugated sewage pipe in the ditch between the tracks and the bike path. It was about the light, the green gloom of the late-night trains, and how there were always a few people, bobbing heads, asleep, their pale cheeks pressed flat against the glass. And I remember Barkus saying that those trains were the moving aquarium tombs of recently dead suburban commuters. This is what happens. It’s limbo. God’s still trying to decide where to put these assholes. In the meantime, in order to preserve the souls of their bodies intact, he floods these trains with water and sends the dead to Waukegan and back again. Barkus laughed quietly. He was wearing sunglasses and a pair of his mother’s slippers.
“Why aren’t they swimming?” I said. “Train full of water, I’d swim.”
Barkus rubbed his chin. I never invented anything new. I only added to things he came up with. But this wasn’t bad. The dead swimming to Waukegan. I could feel him seeing them in his head. Exactly. The laps of the damned. Water torture by boredom. There’s a guy with a lash and a whistle, the kind only dolphins can hear. But every once in a while they sneak a look out at the world they once disdained because now they know. If only they’d been out here sharing a joint with us. Barkus sat up and hawked a loogie into the weeds. He shrugged. “No, the dead are feetless.”
MY FAVORITE INN, HIGHWOOD (1984)
My grandfather still wears his white Barry Goldwater pants. He smiles now. He’s gently rattling his drink. That always round face, those few strands of hair left scrawled across his head. He’s out. He’s at Willie’s. My grandmother, her heavy droopy face, her huge chorus girl eyes, those eyes that always got her noticed. It was always a competition among cousins over who most inherited her eyes. They’re alone in a booth toward the back.
They don’t talk much. It doesn’t matter. All that counts is they’re at Willie’s. They wait for their tortellini soup. My Favorite Inn, Highwood, Illinois. Anybody in the know calls it Willie’s. It’s not a club and Willie takes no reservations. Doesn’t matter if you’re a bum or Ron Santo. You wait for a table at Willie’s.
That was always the beauty of the place. A true democracy. Thank almighty God for Highwood! Years ago, an oasis, the only place to get a goddamned drink on the parched North Shore. And my Favorite Inn, of all the places to be, was the only place to be. And Willie presided. There was order to the universe. You waited at the bar till Willie came and tapped you on the shoulder. Willie, a pudgy, bellowy man with a tall froth of hair and huge white teeth.
Seymour! Bernice! Where you been all my life? I haven’t seen you since Tuesday. Whatayou? Eating slop at home?
All those laughs. Used to be you could measure your life in those roaring laughs.
The soup’s still tops, and the steak in marsala’s still thick as a radial tire. Willie had a simple notion. Make the food good and make a lot of it. Then charge up the wazoo for drinks. They used to come here with the Pearlmutters, with Mort and Happy Bernheimer, with Sammy and Doris Pinkert. And they’d hold court in one of the big semicircular booths up front and laugh, talk golf, business, children, vacations, politics.
But years pile up. Divorces. Businesses go bust, children fail, people fall out. Saturday nights now people stay home and watch the shows. They die. They move to Florida. And Willie’s kind of swank isn’t swank anymore.
Tonight, the place is mostly empty.
Seymour! Bernice! You two still kicking around. It’s a miracle. Myself, I could have sworn I dropped dead last month.
And my grandfather raises his head and laughs at the ceiling. And my grandmother reaches for Willie’s beringed hands and Willie squeezes and my grandmother squeezes and for a moment there’s nothing like it. To be seen, to be known by Willie in front of a crowd even if the crowd is a decade back in your mind.
My grandmother thinks of the smoky reddish light, how it used to slowly drift.
And there they are, three of them, my grandparents and Willie like the last soldiers standing.
My grandfather says, “For crying out loud, Willie, why don’t you cash out and move to Sarasota? You don’t need to stick around just for us.”
“Fuck Sarasota,” Willie says.
But it’s true. Wil
lie’s tired. The act has just about run its course. And he could have retired eight times over with what he’s socked away. He always preferred cash. God knows it made things easier. Some nights in the seventies they’d roll the paper money out the back door in a wheelbarrow.
Now even the light’s exhausted, my grandmother thinks. It sags, bloodless, across the walls.
You go out. You get in the Lincoln and you go out—
Because what’s the alternative? The silence of the house?
CHARLIE BEINLICH’S, NORTHBROOK (1979)
I go to Charlie Beinlich’s with my father. I order a cheeseburger and fries. The cheeseburger comes. I pick up a fry and try to eat exactly half of it, gnawing off the ridges but leaving the essence of the fry itself. It clings like a worm to my finger.
“Stop that, will you.”
“What?”
I eat the fry.
“Tell me about yourself.”
“What?”
I look at the mounted sturgeon above my father’s head. Its bulgy glass eyes and fat scaly body. Beinlich’s is supposed to look like a fishing lodge with the pine paneling and all the fish on the walls except that it’s on Skokie Boulevard across from the movie theaters Edens I and Edens II.
I start working on another half a fry. The ridges are where the good grease gets trapped away from the actual potato part so you want to try to save that part for later. It isn’t easy to do. It’s a surgical operation.
My father watches me. He chews his fish slowly, searching for the bones with his tongue.
Friday night in 1979. Dad’s night. The rollicking suburbs. Best damn burger on the North Shore!
“There’s nothing you can tell?”
“What?”
“I see. Already you’ve seen all there is to see. You’ve seen peace, you’ve seen war. You’ve been on the fucking moon with Buzz Aldrin.”
“What?”
“You think this is all a joke?”
Time for more ketchup. I whack the bottom of the bottle and get lucky on the first try. The ketchup throbs, pooling thickly on my plate, and the fries poke out like the heads of ferry passengers drowning in blood. Like when the Eastland tipped over in the sewage of the Chicago River. All those people drowning in shit. I rescue one, eat the fry whole.
“Look at me once in a while, will you.”
“I’ve seen you.”
My father laughs. He pulls a bone out of his mouth.
“All right. You win.”
He turns to watch the skirt of a waitress fling by. I watch the side of my father’s scrubbed, ruddy face. He is the cleanest, most scrubbed man on the face of the earth. Dogs would be in heaven shitting on the snowy white carpet of his bedroom. In fact, Rico once took that liberty and it almost led to capital punishment.
The wreckage on my plate, the half-eaten burger, flooded fries, avoided vegetables. I push it away and wait for my father to pay the check.
I think of Rico’s real death a couple of years after that glorious shit. One day he was lying on the kitchen floor breathing but he couldn’t stand up. For a week he was like that. Breathing on the kitchen floor and not standing up. Here was a dog who spent every hour of every day wanting milk bones but that last week he wouldn’t have eaten a milk bone if you shoved it down his throat. I know. I tried to jam one in his panting mouth.
SYLVESTER PLACE, HIGHLAND PARK (1976)
My grandfather forever lamented the fact that he’d gone all the way to the South Pacific and the only combat he saw was the age-old battle between the big fishes and the little fishes. Occasionally, he said, birds got in on the action. He did, though, lose one man. A young sailor, felled not by enemy fire but some kind of tropical fever.
We buried the boy, my grandfather used to say, at sea.
That was the grand talk. The not-so-grand talk was how they slid him off the board into the ocean. He’d tell this quietly. How they zipped him up in a canvas bag and placed him on the board. His ship didn’t sail with coffins like the larger ones. So they had to make do with a bag. They draped him with a flag. All hands bury the dead. After a few respectful words and the slow bugle and a prayer, they raised the board and the last thing that sailor did on earth was make a splash nobody heard because of the roar of the engines and the wind. Until he lost his memory completely, my grandfather remembered that sailor’s coordinates. Latitude 12°29'26"S, longitude 130°49'10"E. He’d repeat the numbers under his breath. I think of him massive behind his desk, his anxious hands, his fingers twiddling a freshly sharpened pencil. My grandfather was a hard man to love and most days he understood this and accepted it quietly. Every once in a while, though, he’d implore you to look at him, to see his sorrows, and that boy, that dead sailor whose funeral he presided over, would be raised again out of the Pacific. All hands bury the dead. He didn’t remember the sailor’s name, only that he was from a place called Two Hills, Nebraska. “How about that,” he’d say. “To not remember a person’s name, but that they’re from Two Hills, Nebraska.” And then, always, me looking at his fluttering hands, he’d repeat the coordinates. Latitude 12°29'26"S, longitude 130°49'10"E.
“Why are we saved when others, so many others, aren’t?”
Red-Hot Ruby
Robert Coover
ON HIS WAY OVER to Lem Filbert’s garage to hunt down some wheels after a fortuitous cheeseburger and beer at Mick’s Bar & Grill, Georgie Lucci stops in at the corner drugstore to check out the centerfolds in the magazine rack. It is a glorious April day, first of its kind, the sun’s popped at last, he has money in his pocket, the birds and flowers are doing their hot-ass spring thing—it is a day in short for draining the old coglioni, for having one’s ashes hauled, as they say in the Land of Oz, and Georgie is many moons overdue. His last fuck wasn’t even one, just a tired blow job in the front seat of his city taxi by an aging whore—una troia, as his long-gone old man used to call his mamma while belting her about—which he had to pay for. He’d even make a play for the scrawny titless snatch behind the soda fountain, but he’d probably have to order something and he hates anything with cow milk in it and has a philosophical objection to spending money for coffee. He loosens the staples and slips the centerfold out of the magazine (if he wins a pot someday, maybe he should buy a camera and take up photography), tucks it under his jacket, and with a wink at the little jugless kid, who has been watching him, strolls out into the sunshine.
It has been shitsville since his vomitous predawn return on Sunday, un merdaio di merda, as his dear babbo liked to put it when speaking of his beloved family, but things have at last turned around. For the past two days he has been mostly slopping around in the cold, wet weather looking for a job, getting nothing better from it than a sore throat. The post office, the lumberyard, the strip mines, the flour mill, the bars, the gravel pits. Niente. Main Street is like Death Valley. Shops boarded up, jobless guys hanging about in the pool hall and barber shop, trying to stay dry, the streets potholed and littered with garbage. No trains, few buses, newspaper now just a print shop, the old hotel looking like a war casualty. Even the bus station pinball machines have been permanently tilted. His old night mine manager, Dave Osborne, apparently got suckered into buying the shoe store from the new mayor when he got elected, and Dave, gone gray, looked twenty years older. Georgie figured there were worse things to do than tickle young girls’ feet and peer up their thigh-high skirts, but Dave just shrugged when he asked and gazed off into the wet gloom beyond the shop window. At the Piccolotti Italian Grocery Store, the kid now running the shop laughed in his face. “Fucking highway supermarket’s killing us,” he said. “Go try them.” He did. Offered himself up as a stock boy, bagger, delivery boy, whatever. The manager wouldn’t even talk to him. He stole some razor blades and a candy bar and left, wondering what the fuck had dragged him back here. He should have got back on the overnight bus the same day he arrived. Nothing has happened here for five years, nothing good anyway, and nothing ever will, that’s what he was thinking.
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