Little Casino

by Gilbert Sorrentino

  This is a variation on a certain kind of common marital quarrel. The elements are simple and faintly absurd, yet they must be understood as counters that have negligible literal value. The quarrel, that is, is metonymic, as are all inane quarrels. Such quarrels are very much like dreams. You remember dreams.

  Elements that might enrich this quarrel are many and diverse, the most interesting being any that have to do with the past, where all resentments and failures and regrets lie in a state of horrible suspended animation, ready, at the slightest nudge, to wake and shamble out of the darkness, unchanged, unchanging, terrible to behold.

  “The tomato episode” featured RUTH and HER LOUDMOUTH BELLIGERENT YAHOO HUSBAND. We don’t let anybody get away with anything.

  “Now’s the time to fall in love,” Eddie Cantor says. As it was in 1931, so it is now and ever shall be, love without end. Amen.

  “It says on this note that I’ve been asked to read,” adds Eddie Cantor, “’This could, too, be Dolores and her husband, the plumber.’”

  Fats Navarro

  HE HEARS OF A MAN, AS ONE WILL, OR HE “dreams up” a man, and, elaborating upon a simple notion, places him within a storm of sexual pleasure with his first wife of some three months, pleasure so intense that the newlyweds break the bed on which they have been making the fabled beast. Much loving laughter ensues, life cynically proffers itself in its lying guise as a bowl of cherries, and then goes blundering on.

  Some years later, the man, in an adulterous episode in a hotel, or a motel, thinks of that evening of the broken bed and recalls that it was a Sunday, as is this particular evening of, as they say, illicit love. He commemorates the fact by embracing the cliché of the post-coital cigarette. “I can’t believe that I’m actually thinking of this cigarette as a cliché,” he says to the girl. “That’s being self-conscious to a fare-thee-well, right, kid? It’s life imitating kitsch imitating the movies imitating life.” She smiles at him, and he realizes that she has no idea what “kitsch” means. God knows, she’s nice enough, but she worries, she has told him, about what will happen to the Beatles if George should leave. Well, if she doesn’t know what kitsch is, she can’t know who Fats Navarro is, either. “Fats Navarro?” he says to her. She smiles at him and asks for a drag. Oh shit, it is a scene from a lame slice-of-life movie, chock full of intense looks, precocious children, and New York stoops. [It was a Sunday evening, absolutely, when he and his first wife broke the bed.] Don’t forget the badinage in the laundromat!

  The years pass, he and his first wife divorce, the usual grief with the two children, the fucking puppet shows and zoo and trips to Coney Island, the strained jokes with the new boyfriend, an optometrist of enormous sensitivity, the prick. He remarries, and after a brief time, begins to commit adultery again. The girls with whom he grapples and sweats and fails and lies don’t know who Fats Navarro is, either. They don’t know who Red Garland is, or Lester Young, or Ziggy Elman or Kid Ory. They never heard of the Roxy or the Strand or “Brooklyn Boogie” or the old Battery Park Aquarium or Pete Reiser or the Third Avenue El or Grant’s or Toffenetti’s. Some of them have been to the Bronx, but not too many. They don’t know about Vito Marcantonio or William O’Dwyer or Joe Adonis. They don’t know anything. “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” he says to one of them one night as he puts her in a cab. She smiles at him, that Ohio smile, that editorial assistant smile, that Godforsaken Shakespeare-in-the-Park smile that they all have to hand. Now, when he’s in bed with one of these girls, he often has to put up with the fatal-secondhand-smoke cliché that tends to ride in on the back of the post-coital cigarette cliché. These young women, who have no idea of Art Tatum’s actuality, or that Dexter Gordon at his best can make your heart stop, think that a whiff or two of this evil smoke will cut years off their fulfilling, really peppy lives. They are content to flirt with chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, and aids, but fear the fragrant weed as if it is the Foul Fiend himself, in miniature static disguise. One, a stunning girl who sustained herself on yogurt and dried fruit, called his Marlboro a “death stick.” This is true. But more troubling than the dippy health concerns of these glowing, utterly amoral lawyers and consultants and junior brokers, these persons with promising careers in creative “fields” like magazine publishing and advertising, is the fact that each bed that he finds himself in—not a salubrious phrase, to be sure—reminds him of the broken bed, now, of course, rotting, figuratively, in the far-off past. He thinks to call his first wife about this, stupid as such a thought may be, but she has long been remarried, to, as he recalls, Mark, the civil engineer, has moved to some grim, sunny outpost crammed with Friendly People, and loathes him. He cannot speak of this to his current wife, for obvious reasons. So he keeps this malaise to himself, in the same box with Lundy’s and Steeplechase.

  The man who heard or invented this story, such as it is, later hears that the pitiful adventurer has died, and that he believed that his deathbed had broken. This pleased him. The deceased was identified as a fellow named either Teddy or Perry, and there should be someone who can confirm this, someone to whom a letter of inquiry might be sent, at some address like “Chez Freddy” or “The Blue Front” or, simply, “the island.” Perhaps the inquiry might be directed to Orville or Jackie Lang, but they, too, must be dead by now. Others who might know are anonymously strewn across the playful, desolate land.

  The broken bed was located in the bedroom of a four-room apartment in a small brick building on Woodside Avenue in Brooklyn. The motel was the Castle Rest Inn, some two miles from the Jersey entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. The “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” girl was put in the cab on the corner of Bleecker and Charles Streets. Chez Freddy burned down and on the site is a Christian bookstore, Gethsemane Books and Videos. The Blue Front is now Lakeview Video, after a Radio Shack in that location failed. Nobody seems to have any idea to what island “the island” might refer.

  Loue makes men sayle from shore to shore,

  So doth Tobaccoe,

  Tobaccoe, Tobaccoe,

  Sing sweetely for Tobaccoe,

  Tobaccoe is like loue.

  “It’s a shame that a person who is wholly uninterested in Beatles lore should suggest, by literary example, that smoking is acceptable. And where is Woodside Avenue, for God’s sake?”

  [“Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” words by Lew Brown, music by Ray Henderson, was published in 1931, when the Depression was still being characterized by Herbert Hoover as a passing aberration. This was the same Mr. Hoover who, at about that time, noted that many people had left good jobs to sell apples on the street, so profitable was the latter undertaking. What a sweetheart.]

  “The banal motif (e.g., the post-coital cigarette) is not precisely defined by the word ‘kitsch’….”

  —Ancilla to Theory Studies, 1984.

  Mysteries of causes and effects

  HAD HIS MOTHER NOT GIVEN HIM CREAM of tomato soup for lunch every day for four years, three months, one week, and two days, it is possible that he would not have married the neighborhood whore. Had his mother not got a restraining order against his father, which prohibited the latter from coming within fifty yards of him, it is probable that he would not have become a dedicated drunk. Had he not got “pink eye” at the Tompkinsville swimming pool, it is likely that he would not have become a truck driver. Had she not torn open her forearm on a rusty hurricane fence, it is not too much to assume that she would not have, some years later, contracted poliomyelitis. Had she not unaccountably lost her panties during a festive day at George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase, it can be conjectured that she would have graduated from a “good college.” Had he not drunk a third of the contents of his father’s quart of Kinsey Silver Label Blended Whiskey, he, perhaps, might have become a priest. Had he not, in 1950, bought a 1937 Chevrolet for sixty dollars, he, maybe, would have bought, in 1982, a 1982 Mercedes Benz. Had he not had eleven tubercular ribs removed, it’s a cinch that he would never have written a novel. Had he not been seduced by an ugly young ma
n in Owl’s Head Park, it is a surety that he would not have been seduced by a handsome young man at a Grove Street party. Had he not masturbated relentlessly, obsessively, and “at the drop of a hat,” he would surely not have burst into flames while sound asleep. Had he not regularly tormented and thrashed younger children in the schoolyard of P.S. 102, he would have absolutely avoided his fate as a palooka club fighter. Had he not had his eye injured in a fall down a stairway of Fort Hamilton High School, he, without a doubt, would have had a long career as a noncommissioned officer in the 2nd Armored Division. Had she not been sexually exploited and slandered by a petty criminal, she would, doubtlessly, have resisted the lure of heroin. Had he not blasphemously prayed to God and His Blessed Mother to supply him with “bevies” of lascivious girls with whom he could have his debauched way, he, conceivably, might have avoided “problems” with various sexually transmitted diseases. If she had not hated her mother and father throughout all the years of her childhood, adolescence, puberty, and young womanhood, she would have, presumably, resisted the call of the convent. Had he not been fascinated by ships and the sea, it is evident that he would not have been killed in action aboard the U.S.S. Portland. Had she not lied, regularly and flagrantly, in the confessional, she would certainly have embraced atheism. Had he not seriously injured his hip while roughhousing in the Loew’s Alpine, he would, clearly, have become a professional baseball player of minor-league proficiency. Had she not masturbated with various kitchen implements, most notably a wooden potato masher, she would have definitely resigned herself to her husband’s indifferent carnal performances. Had he not eaten, laughingly, a Baby Ruth just fifteen minutes before receiving the Eucharist at the altar rail of Our Lady of Perpetual Help R.C. Church, he would, indeed, have escaped the lightning bolt that killed him on the way home. Had he been aborted, as his mother wished, he would not, positively, have had the opportunity to shoot to death two Armenian shopkeepers and a policeman of Irish extraction one hot July afternoon. Had he not smashed a plate-glass window of Shiftman’s Toys, he would have become a successful corporate attorney and rapist. Had he not been dangerously frivolous in his play with a Gilbert chemistry set given him for Christmas, there is a good chance that he would have been famously unsuccessful in a “search for the cure” for AIDS. Had his mother not suffered his rage, insults, and contumely, it is not beyond expectation to assume that he would never have developed into a sadistic killer. Had he not become frightened when he tried on his mother’s underwear, he would, presumably, have become a contented, if boring homosexual, or, as he would have learned to say, “queer.”

  Each of these linkages can be added to or changed. The mysteries of causes and effects are beyond understanding.

  “Or not worth understanding, buddy.”

  “Whore,” in the present context, may be read as “tramp” or “slut.” No professionalism is suggested by the use of the word. It may even be read as “mam’selle” by Frankie Laine fans, among whom, believe it or not, are a number of boring homosexuals, or “queers.”

  This diversion, here indited for your pleasure, may ultimately be the cause of your divorce. Don’t ask me. It’s quite probable that had I not written this “chapter,” I would have written a different one. So much for the inevitability of art.

  “What do you mean?”

  Or the inevitability of anything else, for that matter. Save death.

  “What do you mean? Death? Who’s Frankie Laine?”

  Certain troops, discharged into civilian life from the bosom of the 2nd Armored Division, find that they are Nervous From The Service.

  Georgene liked Frankie Laine and knew all the words to his “Mam’selle,” “Black and Blue,” “Mule Train,” and, perhaps unforgivably, “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” That was before she went to Barnard and met Gilbert C. Grove, a man who worshiped F.R. Leavis and E.M. Forster. Nothing to be done with Gilbert!

  It may be of passing interest to note that the phrase, “queer studies,” if enunciated as an anapest, takes on a different meaning from the meaning projected when the phrase is enunciated as a dactyl.

  Never trust a writer

  SHE CRIED AND SULKED WHEN EVERYBODY was dressed and ready to leave for the park, and later in the day tried to push her half-brother in front of a bus, just a joke, well, she was laughing. She said that her mother’s lover and the lover before him and the lovers before him whom she could not quite recall had groped and fondled and stroked and fingered and raped her more times than she could count, aided and abetted by the silence of her mother. Her brother was a dope fiend, a speed freak, an alcoholic, a man who couldn’t keep a woman, even those skinny, dirty, hopeless schmecker drunk unemployables he got mixed up with. I’ll write soon, she always said, and send pictures of the family! And pictures of this and of that, the swell husband, the really great little house that she just loved in sunny and relaxed and laid-back and really beautiful Northern California, baking in the paralyzing heat of the Sacramento Valley, a heat that was the tangible counterpoint to the weirdness and barely concealed despair of that huge, hysterical state, crammed with maniacs wildly and grinningly unhappy, and hypnotized by regular explosions of blood in the ruthless sunshine, under the unsettling blue skies, when, of course, it wasn’t pouring rain for months on end. This really great weather! made her write even less frequently. She divorced her husband, the impossible dumbbell, after he had, on a number of occasions, suggested that maybe she could get a job? But how could she get a job, when the incredibly difficult pregnancy and ensuing stillbirth that had almost killed her, that had her on the very edge of death!, yes, she had been right on the edge of a death like nobody else’s death, a death as grim and terrible as, well, you know. Fifteen years earlier it had been a muggy, gray kind of day, when she cried and sulked and demanded to be begged and pleaded with and implored to please, please, oh please can we, let’s, please, can we go out to the park? Everybody is dressed and ready to go and it’s almost three o’clock, please? And after this intense look, like, into the very face of death, how could she get a job, considering her ensuing, insistent, recurring, and incurable ectopic pregnancies, her six dilation and curettage procedures by bloodthirsty butcher doctors who couldn’t even speak English, or was it seven?, her vaginal hemorrhages, bleeding hemorrhoids, back pains, endless infections of liver and kidneys and bladder and spine and what do you call it?, coccyx, and then the terrible discovery that her spinal infection was chronic and progressive. The dim son of a bitch machinist in the National Guard who got her pregnant after her husband had angrily departed, but not, oh no, not before he killed the dog and cat, uprooted the garden, tore the gorgeous black Naugahyde couch to shreds, and stole the best lamp with the mauve silk shade, the wedding present from her dearest mom, and did other things that she’d think of soon! This machinist, a guy who seemed like a really sweet man who had a nice little power boat, but also a bitch of a nagging shrew of a battleax of a wife, but he wouldn’t leave her, despite what he called “the fruit of their love” that lay in her womb an innocent, and despite her threats to tell the fucking cunt of a wife!, and then one day they had just goddamn moved away, and then the near-fatal recurring hemorrhages began, and the trauma of her history of sexual, physical, moral, mental, emotional, religious, and, uh, ethical abuses almost killed her, yes. And then there was the trauma of trying to live with the horrible memories of her ex-boss, the guinea bastard, her ex-boss, who had given her all the insulting, menial tasks in the air-conditioning store and repair shop, where she had gritted her teeth and got a job despite the rivers of blood that regularly gushed out of her generative organs and the spinal pain so bad that she wanted to scream right there at her tiny desk in real, actual agony. The traumatic recollection, too, was uppermost in her mind of him giving her that look that the Modern Living and Arts section of the newspaper called the “male gauge” or something like that, and the nightmarish horror of her shame at him saying that she looked very pretty in her new short skirt and him touching her on t
he forearm with a leer and another, even dirtier male gauge. She had to quit, and was thinking of suing, but a guy she met at a bar told her that her post-stress syndrome would be hard to prove after she told the guy that she’d gone out to dinner with the boss and did a few other things, too, maybe about oh, maybe twenty times. And anyway, how could she possibly sue and get involved with lawyers with her new pregnancy, when she could only get relief from her infected arthritic spinal column and kidneys by lying flat on the kitchen floor for hours, anything, anything to ease the agony of her corroding bones and ligaments and things. On top of that, she began to hemorrhage again a little bit and then came the blinding migraines and the brain-tumor fears. God knows why she didn’t lose the child, the poor little bastard love-child, nor why she didn’t die, the obstetrician said that in thirty-five years of experience hers was the most difficult birth that he’d ever seen. That rotten bum of a beer-swilling son of a bitch of a fake soldier and his bitch of a whore of a wife had nothing to do with her pulling through! Her mother’s house was the only place left to go now, since to go to work at some rotten minimum-wage job with her ovaries irritated and swollen and the new baby and his demands was out of the question, it was a place to take stock, right, even though her mother had looked the other way all during those years when she’d been as good as raped, and those, well, those, ah, episodes were most likely the cause of her infected kidneys, she’d read about things like that happening in the paper. The baby was so cute and pretty and a love, but let’s face it, a real pain in the ass, she couldn’t stand, that is, her nerves couldn’t stand the kid’s howling and the colic and the feedings and the dirty, stinking diapers, Jesus Christ, come on!, she just had to get out three or four times a week, anyway, for a few hours, and see some of her old friends and that big guy who used to be a Marine and who worked for the phone company. She wrote to a California girlfriend that the baby was adorable and as smart as a whip, and that her mother was helping her out a little bit once in a while, and soon she’d start interviewing for a job in her field, office management, that was her specialty, of course, or perhaps management and senior accounting, although she was a little rusty, her fathead of an ex-husband forbidding her to go to work no matter how many times she’d shown him the household budget figures and how much better off they’d be if only, oh well!, that’s water under the bridge, and, too, she had taken a long time to get over her sexual traumas of her childhood abuse and the guinea ex-boss’s rubbing up against her in the office and the sudden terrible hemorrhagic spinal infections with pus leakage, and the kid shitting and pissing and crying all day and all night, and then her dope-addict brother coming around to steal a few dollars from their mom while she was out, pretending to care about the baby, and nodding at the kitchen table the whole time. And it also looks as if I may be having my eleventh D and C, believe it or not, since I am in terrible abominal agony which is only relieved when I have a brief hemorrhage. OK. Pictures of the family on the way!