It has never been determined why Plato Makarios Costas was in rented dinner jacket and trousers, nor what he was doing in front of the Shore Road Casino. (It is, perhaps, unnecessary to note that these garments were rented.)
This particular night and morning were rife with what neighbors called “mixed emotions.” However, one of the revelers surprised most of those interviewed, since he was described by everyone as “very quiet.” One man, who did not wish to give his name, revealed that “he liked to read Sexology, but he was real quiet.”
Asked what it was like to be ogled by young, disreputable men with whom they had grown up on the mean streets, the “girls,” as they insist on calling themselves, were, basically, unanimous in their replies, e.g., “the bums ought to hang their heads in shame.”
Mary noted that Nickie had been an altar boy!
Dolores revealed that Cheech had penned a very interesting book report on Men of Iron by Howard Pyle.
Georgene admitted that Nickie once carried a bag of groceries home for her mother, who remarked: What A Nice Boy.
Well. Live and learn.
Where is their deep purple, their stardust, their winter wonderland and beer barrel polka and string of pearls? Where are their jingle bells and paper dolls and silent nights and glittering funny hats?
“Oh, for the love of Jesus and His Blessed Mother, give it a fucking rest, OK?”
Every fourth one on the house, and to the Republic for which it stands!
The kisses of Dolores
HE SAYS, SO WHAT DO YOU THINK, RED? How’s the fuckin’ Marines treating you? He looks up, arrogantly, from the bar and the big Irish lunk swings on him and knocks him off his stool, right across the space between the bar and the booths along the wall, so that he lands on his back beneath a table, blood pouring from his broken nose and split-open lip. How I love the kisses of Dolores, he thinks, for no reason at all, and then he thinks, for the first time in years, of Dolores. When he was fifteen or sixteen, he kept her company one night when she baby-sat for a neighbor. There was a piano in the apartment, a little upright against the wall, under a pitifully inept fake oil of pinkish clouds over a white sailboat on a lake the weird blue of Aqua Velva. Dolores, frowning beautifully, began to play the piano in a dreadfully mechanical way. He smiled, since he was helplessly in love with her, and her impossibly bad performance was as nothing to her sweet, dark virginity. She banged a tinny chord and then told him that she was very sad and tired of being a good student and that she wanted to do something, something, that she wanted to do something. Her face was as calm and beautiful as the Virgin’s. He turned this confidence into something else, sexual and forbidden. Of course.
Noise and commotion possess the bar and he decides that he’d better just lie there and stay out of the general brawl that is growing in the sickeningly inevitable way that brawls do. Barroom brawls are high-spirited affairs, with laughs and thrills, only in the movies. Who’s that Norwegian jarhead, who’s that punk jarhead?, lemme kick that son of a bitch’s ass!, somebody shouts. Red’s Irish, he says, to the bottom of the table. He’s glad that Dolores, wherever she is, didn’t see him get knocked flat. Fat George looks underneath the table, smiling, and holds out a bottle of beer to him. You’re not gonna eat any white clam sauce with that mouth, sport, right? He sings to Fat George: How I love the kisses of Dolores, only my Dolores. Well, he’s still got all his teeth.
Another night among the many that these young men in Brooklyn had to call their own, something, ah yes, that nobody could take away from them. Some think that experiences such as these build character, but they don’t. But they don’t. I’m enthralled, he says to Fat George, enthralled and thankful and proud to be a small part of neighborhood lore, yet again, and so will Dolores be proud, or so I have decided to pretend. Come out from under there, Fat George says, you look like shit. Dolores! Jesus.
“Dolores” was a hit song in 1941. Words by Frank Loesser, music by Louis Alter.
Dolores, at the time of the “piano incident,” was, as you may know, a sophomore at Fontbonne Hall, an academically excellent and sociallygenteel high school for very smart Catholic girls. The girls wore navy-blue wool serge jumpers, white blouses, black ties, black knee socks or white anklets, and black shoes. Young men, seized, as they were, by Eros, often ground their teeth in hopeless desire when gazing upon the more comely of these girls. These amorous reactions were surely not intended by those who devised the puritanical uniforms. The flesh is unruly.
The various acts of violence noted here occurred in Henry’s, an actual bar; “Red,” however, exists only in fiction, from which, it appears, he has escaped. Or, being a Marine, from which he has apparently gone AWOL.
An AWOL bag was a soldier’s term for a soft overnight or gym bag. Perhaps it still is.
A Jodie suit was, traditionally, a badly cut civilian suit of O.D. wool, given to prisoners upon their release, with Bad Conduct Discharges, from the stockade. Out into the world they went in these condemnatory rags. To make a brand-new start.
Jodie was a legendary figure who always managed to avoid military service. He was loathed and envied by the dog soldier, for his reward for shirking his duty was the easy acquisition of good jobs, plenty of money, excellent clothes, the best food and booze, and all the women he wanted. There was a shining American-ness to his exploits, for he was the man who got what he did not deserve.
EXHIBIT:
Jodie says he feels all right,
‘Cause he fucked your wife last night,
Sound off! One, two,
Sound off! Three, four!
Cadence count!
One! Two! Three! Four!
One-two!
Three FOUR!
Stars of the silver screen
SO, HERE ARE A FEW QUESTIONS FOR YOU dopes—losers all—in the candy store, or, for all I care, in a contemporary facsimile of same.
Why are not those glittering stars of the silver screen at home, fixing a tuna salad sandwich on whole wheat with lettuce and mayo, and a cold beer?
Why aren’t they learning to read and write?
Is it possible that they are neglecting this golden opportunity, away from the rigors of the set, to shine their many pairs of extremely expensive shoes?
Why don’t they use just a jot of the varied and profound expertise gained in preparing for their many and diverse roles—and playing them well enough to be remembered, one hopes, at “Oscar time”—to prove that the light of bowling alleys is romantic?
Don’t they have anything better to do with their time than fix breakfast for the children, hurry them off to school, and then buckle down to seemingly endless domestic chores, not to mention shopping?
Why don’t they trust the housekeeper or the maids or the gardeners or the chauffeurs or secretaries or valets or personal assistants, or personal trainers, tennis pros, golf pros, swimming instructors, gurus of mystical bent, and sundry astrologers and pool boys to sweep the floors, at least?
Why are they forever comfortable and really swell and relaxed in their old T-shirts and ripped, faded jeans?
Why don’t they learn, for Christ’s sake, to write a decent string quartet for once?
Why don’t they find out where Parkside Avenue is? Or Ridge Crest Terrace? Or Charles Lane?
Why do they refuse to recognize that Scientology was, originally, a card game, something like Casino?
Why don’t they lay off the goddamned cream of tomato soup?
Why do so many of them retreat to the sanctuary of the Zen rock garden in the Bel Air place whenever the “blow-job theory” as it pertains to inexplicable success, is mentioned?
Why don’t they go home to Ashtabula?
Why, to borrow Raymond Chandler’s phrase, are “all their brains in their faces?”
Why do they think that Raymond Chandler is a cocaine connection?
Why can’t they spell “cocaine”?
Or, for that matter, “connection”?
Or, for that matter, “ MGM
”?
How come they can’t shoot pool?
Why don’t they like the notion of themselves as “overnight successes”?
Does it have anything to do with the “blow-job theory”?
Why don’t they learn how to open clams? Why do they hate to be recognized?
Why do they think that they “work hard” for their money?
Why do they wish they could “just walk down the street” like “anybody else”?
Why do they rarely, if ever, really hurt themselves on skis or in boats, planes, and cars?
Why do they seem to live on and on?
Does it have anything to do with the money that they work so terribly, terribly hard for?
Why are they always in and out of one clinic or another?
Why don’t they stop throwing up on people?
Why do they think that fashion designers are artists?
Why do they think that they themselves are artists?
Why are they eternally honing their fucking craft?
Why don’t they know the words to “Prisoner of Love”?
Why must they have recently learned to “appreciate” jazz?
Why can’t they make a decent marinara sauce?
Why don’t they stop sucking on that bottled water?
Why do they drive such dumb cars?
Why do they think that they can write?
Why do they think that they can write poems?
Why do they all go to the same restaurants and then go to the same restaurants and then go to the same restaurants and then go to the same new restaurant?
Why do they eat egg-white omelets?
Is it true that they will hump anything that will stand still?
Why don’t they get rid of their grand pianos?
Their acoustic guitars?
Their “outsider” art?
Why are they such glorious marks for fake paintings, fake antiques, and fake first editions?
Should they drop dead already en masse, or one at a time?
Belatedly, Bromo Eddie queries: “Why don’t they go fuck themselves?” What a serious and well-informed citizen and consumer Eddie is!
What, precisely, is the “blow-job theory” of inexplicable success, and is it germane to occupations other than the movie business?
Eddie reminds his chums that he prefers the term “film business.”
Did many of these basically regular folks have gals and fellas back home in, say, ah, Moline?
What is the joke which bears this punch line? “Well, how about ten dollars’ worth?”
Can one actually “fix” a cold beer?
An attractive woman
HE ENTERS THE RESTAURANT WITH HIS mother, into the wonderful smell of the bar, just opened on Sunday early afternoon, the serious, adult smell of whiskey and bitters, lemon peel, gin and vermouth and rum; the sweet and sharp cigarette smoke from the first patrons, sitting quietly with their griefs and their hangovers and their Sunday papers, waiting patiently for the liquor to make the slow afternoon sadly bearable. He orders a Gibson, his mother a Clover Club, or is it a Jack Rose? He waits for her comments on his news, given her, abruptly, two days earlier, regarding his plans to marry, suddenly, a girl whom his mother dislikes a good deal. Not only is she a Protestant, but she is much too young, not even out of high school, so his mother insists despite the facts. The cocktails arrive, his mother takes out a pack of Herbert Tareytons and lights one with her beautiful little jewel of a Dunhill lighter, inhales and blows smoke at an angle past the little brim of her small black velvet hat. She is an attractive woman, whose terror and loathing of men has been elegantly metamorphosed, over the years, into an aloof but sharp contempt. She puts the lighter squarely on top of the cigarette pack. So, she says. Have you given any thought to this, you lummox? He looks at her and shrugs, a gesture of love, intimacy, and respect. The trouble with this girl, she says, that is, one of the troubles that I can see, is. She stops, and takes a sip of her gorgeously blushing cocktail. Is, she says, simply that she is obviously a little tramp. Do you, dear God, want another little tramp to set next to the first one? At least she was Jewish.
The restaurant was on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. It may well have been Armando’s. It looks like Armando’s.
The young man once accidentally saw his mother, through a half-open door, as she was dressing, and spied on her, shamed and disturbed. He has trained himself, if “trained” is the word, to think of her, on that particular day, as a woman wholly different from the woman he sits across from in the restaurant. In this way, even a hint, a breath of the incestuous may be successfully proscribed. More or less.
The Gibson was made with Beefeater gin, one of the small glories of this humdrum life.
CLOVER CLUB
* * *
Juice ½ Lemon.
2 Tsps. Grenadine.
White of 1 Egg.
1½ oz. Dry Gin.
Shake well with cracked ice and
strain into a 4 oz. cocktail glass.
JACK ROSE
* * *
1½ oz. Applejack.
Juice ½ Lime.
1 tsp. Grenadine.
Shake well with cracked ice and
strain into a 3 oz. cocktail glass.
The dark and iron world
THE CLIPPER, BOWLING THROUGH HEAVY glassy seas, all sails set, straining and singing in the wind, holds still, as always and ever, on the side of the laminated cardboard wastebasket. Just as still as the clipper is the woman, paralyzed drunk, athwart the hotel room bed. She is in her mid-fifties, and her face is attractive, though her blond hair is clearly too yellow to be natural. Her skirt, which has ridden up revealingly but not quite immodestly to mid-thigh, allows her legs to be seen as strong, straight, and well-made, with generous thighs, superbly shaped calves, and slender ankles. She is wearing a hat, cone-shaped, of shiny purple paper, which declares, in a sadly blatant red, HAPPY NEW YEAR. The hat is askew, and she snores, quietly, her mouth open. The young man, sitting at the little secretary on a hard straight chair in dim lamplight, finishes the whiskey in a thick bathroom glass, pours the last of a fifth of Ballantine’s scotch into it, and drinks that too.
He’ll maybe put her to bed, but he won’t, God, undress her. He is upset because he has allowed himself to think that she has very good legs. Maybe he’ll just put a blanket over her. Maybe he’ll go get another bottle, maybe he’ll leave and go to one of the bleakly frenzied parties he’s been invited to, or go to a crazed bar, or go for a walk, or go get laid. Maybe he’ll jump off the fucking pier or in front of the Fourth Avenue Local. Maybe he’ll just sit there until she wakes up and then ask her who she thinks she is, who she thinks he is to say what she said to him, and then to say it again. Love? she said, love? For Christ’s sweet sake, don’t make me laugh, I’m the one who said she was nothing but a tramp. Now you’re surprised?
Little Casino Page 5
