Little Casino

by Gilbert Sorrentino

  There were, surely, other things that worried, concerned, angered, appalled, and enraged her, but she continued to use Sunset Blush lipstick because her really manly but gentlemanly Italian American boss had once made a subtle and charmingly suggestive comment on her mouth, and she also continued to consume Ho-Hos, although they reminded her of an unpleasant summer she had spent at Camp Gitchegumee. She ate three meals a day, dieted constantly, was warm in winter and cool in summer, and had a number of so-so friends who were not curious or demanding or intrusive or constant. She thought her sex life a disaster, although it was, more or less, the norm. All in all, she lived better than eighty-five percent of the human beings on the face of this indifferent earth.

  And when the winter arrives for this concerned and worried woman, why, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

  “Well, if Jewish persons, and I’ll be the first, believe me, to say that you’ve gotta hand it to them, if they don’t own all the news media, how do you explain the fact that Rex Morgan, M.D., changed his name from Morgansky?”

  Uh-huh.

  This woman once owned a pale-blue knitted dress, but a person or persons unknown broke into her apartment and cut the dress into one-inch strips. A note, which read, in its entirety, “Dunderbeck’s Machine,” was left beneath her Christmas tree, long stripped of ornaments and lights, and thoroughly dried out.

  (Might be a symbol.)

  Mr. Schmitz writes: “There will be a tremendous explosion, but no one will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering through the sky, free at last from parasites and disease.”

  “Mr. Schmitz was Jewish and changed his name.”

  A nice surprise

  ON MOTHER’S DAY SHE TAKES HER MOTHER to the Paris on 58th Street to see Olivier’s Hamlet. Afterward, they go to Rumpelmayer’s for ice cream and coffee, and then stroll over to the Plaza and then down Fifth Avenue. All these small, thoughtful, and seemingly loving acts are really instances of an anemic contempt for and patronization of her mother, who, she is sure, absolutely sure, would much rather have seen a Bette Davis double feature in the neighborhood rerun house, the Stanley, and then have enjoyed a melted-cheese sandwich and a cup of tea in Holsten’s Ice-Cream Parlor. Her mother had little to say about the movie other than a comment on Olivier’s bleached hair. Well, why would she even begin to understand it? Her mother had gone to Manual Training High School, and was unaccountably proud of the commercial diploma that she had earned. God! They walk down to 34th Street, chatting and window-shopping, and then prepare to separate, she to board a bus for the Village, her mother to take the subway to Bay Ridge.

  Thanks, her mother says, so much, thanks so much, sweetie, I really enjoyed our day, it was such a nice surprise. They stand and wait for the daughter’s bus, which is just down the avenue, and her mother kisses her on the cheek and moves away. Really wonderful, dear, she says, so lovely to be up near the Plaza again, it’s been such a long time, and I remembered the hotel, too, perfectly. Talk about a long time! What? her daughter says. The Plaza, her mother says, the beautiful Plaza and the week I spent there, oh, long before I was pregnant with you. A couple of thousand years ago. What? her daughter says, and then she gets on the bus, and as she sits down, sees her mother walking west down the street, heading for the subway.

  The Plaza? A week at the Plaza? And before she was pregnant. Her father was not the sort of man who would take her mother to the Plaza. A week alone at the Plaza? Why? She sees, in her mind’s eye, her mother as a young woman. This is intolerable. She’ll call her tonight. A week at the Plaza, but not with her father, surely not. She must have misunderstood her mother, she was always doing that. Did she say a beautiful week?

  Children are often surprised to learn that before their births their parents lived secret, complex lives from which these children are wholly excluded. There they are in old photographs, dressed in odd clothes, their curiously unfamiliar faces in the foreground of strange streets and obsolete automobiles. This young woman, for instance, thinks of her mother in her remodeled gray Persian lamb coat, or sitting down to a plate of cream of chicken soup in the Bay Terrace Lounge and Restaurant, or scrambling eggs while she sings “Poor Butterfly.” What she cannot imagine is her mother, her clothes in disarray, being fucked from behind by a lover.

  “I think, although I only caught a quick glimpse of these women, that the older one might have been Annette.”

  The older woman was not Annette, but Linda Piro. Had she been Annette, there would have been here proffered a clean juxtaposition, across time and space, of two different years and two different parks. I might even have had the pleasure of seeing Annette, once again, holding down her light beige skirt, which the wind is lifting, slightly, above her knees. Oh well, another time, perhaps.

  The young woman, Linda’s daughter, Isabelle, has been dead for many years, as you know.

  Small magic

  HE TELLS, YET AGAIN, WITH A LITTLE ADDED here and a little subtracted there, a story centered on Fat Harry, an essentially unremarkable story, tells it as if to understand what he may think of as a “secret” at its banal core. Fat Harry of angry, abused, neglected, and deserted wives and forgotten children, of bad debts and beatings by shylocks and policy muscle, of absurdly long shots with no chance to run in the money, of disastrous losing streaks created and sustained by betting the wrong way, the right way, the hard way, by drawing to inside straights, holding low kickers, bluffing with pairs of deuces and treys, ignoring aces up, betting carefully when winning and recklessly when losing. In short, a chump. A Fat Harry of drunken nights and gonorrhea, lost keys, back rent, wrecked and repossessed cars, broken windows, maudlin tears, filthy bathrooms, dirty underwear, take-out Chinese, useless refrigerators leaking freon, plastic forks and spoons, dull knives, semen-spattered girlie magazines, of this job and that job, moving furniture, painting shotgun flats, spraying roaches and bedbugs, helping out in saloons in Bay Ridge and Park Slope, Red Hook and Borough Park, Greenpoint and Bath Beach. A Fat Harry who cleans out urinals, mops up vomit and blood, washes grease-slick dishes, walks dogs, shovels coal and snow, washes cars, pumps gas, delivers dry cleaning and laundry and groceries and flowers and pizza. A Fat Harry of fruitless, hopeless, futile, irrational, meaningless journeys by bus to Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, to Wilmington, Richmond, Albany, to Altoona and Camden, to the Delaware Water Gap, to the Poconos, to Binghamton and Paterson, for what reason? For no reason, for any reason, to be able to say—nothing. Nothing at all. A Fat Harry who is punched in the mouth and nose, who suffers lacerations and abrasions, cracked teeth, a broken jaw, crushed ribs, sprained fingers, split lips, for talking, for not talking, for saying the wrong thing, for not answering, for making promises and breaking promises, for being a wiseass, for being a dummy, for being a momo, for just being fucking there. A Fat Harry, who, in some crazed final gesture before he disappeared, trailing bad markers and murderous bookmakers, used his temporary night bartender job to close the Lucky Shamrock Bar and Grill, a police hangout by day and early evening, at 3:00 a.m. of a Saturday morning, to pull the blinds so as to enable the dozen patrons still at the bar to drink free of charge, dance to the jukebox fed by the bar’s quarters, laugh and embrace and sing and kiss and grope each other, make drunken assignations, confess hidden attractions, and then stagger out of the joint at dawn, reeling and blinking and joyous in the thin cold of the pre-snow morning, ecstatic with the pleasure of transgression. I’m fucking dead anyway, Harry supposedly said, by way of explanation, as he pocketed the cash in the till. And so he probably was.

  Fat Harry was the vector of small magic, the profane and secular equivalent of the sinner chosen by God to be the conduit of grace.

  Grace, by the way, was the name of one of Fat Harry’s sad, mistreated wives.

  It is an urban rule of thumb that police hangouts are good places to stay away from, at least while officers of the law are on the premises. This, in spite of the fact that the policeman is our friend.
>
  It may be clear that this Fat Harry is not the same Fat Harry who died* in the oily waters off the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

  *Vide “Presidential Greetings.”

  In a Mellotone

  BUT WHAT ARE THE STEPS OF THE PROOF that inevitably concludes that there are no winter wonderlands here, no deep purple, falling or otherwise, no stardust or star eyes or sleigh bells or open fires or garden walls or angels singing? Shall we accept the conclusions of such a proof without insisting on a clarification of its steps; or, at the very least, a dry martini? And although it may be proved that the light of bowling alleys is romantic, it must be made clear that those bowling alleys are nowhere in this vicinity, brother! And if Cheech and Nickie marry Annette and Inez, that will in no way enable those bowling alleys, to, well, appear. Nor will it preclude the vomiting of black blood by old men, dying in little pieces from bad food, bad whiskey, bad luck, and humiliation, their hearts more or less broken; nor will such ecstatic couplings improve the ratio of tapioca to semen in reprehensible masculine dreams, dreams in which young women are treated with the utmost disrespect, ruthlessly undressed, and spoken to in language not fit for a barracks, and there isn’t much that is not fit for a barracks, and all this carried out within the very dreamwork itself! A person could die from embarrassment. So Freud is wrong, yet again, thanks be to God. And after the light of bowling alleys has been used to “help one get through life’s daily stresses,” what apologist for the shameless fraud of a shambling Viennese Jew, whom dimmest sophomores can smugly mock, will dare to attempt to prove that he was less a fraud than Georgia O’Keefe, whose least accomplished paintings are moreso, oh moreso than they ever were, scintillant in their location, insistent in the depth of a statement that controls the picture plane with the saturated colors that are certain in their regard for the iconoclasm of erotic love, and twice on Sunday. Like chicken and mashed potatoes and fresh peas, with a full gravy boat down at the end of the table. Hey, pass that down, ok, Georgia? And who first noted that Ms. O’Keefe once said that she painted well on Saturdays but badly on Sundays, chock full as she inevitably was with “chicken and taters,” as she affectedly called the dish? It was, never doubt it for a moment, somebody. That’s exactly the way things used to be in old Santa Fe, a town that can never be imitated, nor even vaguely suggested as to its color, shade, and charm around these parts, dear pal. And it’s a cinch that not one resident would tolerate for a moment an imitation—assuming such an unlikely horror—of the town that is often called “prettier than Frisco.” These residents, or representative samplings of same, would, instead, make their way to the Loew’s Alpine to see a double feature with such actors as George Brent, Veronica Lake, Rondo Hatton, Edward Arnold, and Jack Carson, plus coming attractions, cartoons, a Pete Smith Specialty, a Robert Benchley short, and the news. The Alpine took to sporting blue sateen banners, which, draped casually from its marquee, announced, in silver letters, that the theater was AIR COOLED BY FRIGIDAIRE. Many have tried, oh many, many have tried in vain to prove that the blue of the banner was the blue of Lake Como or Lake Tahoe or Lake Sapphire, or even, for that matter, Lake Hopatcong, but there’s no chance of such a serene and glamorous lacustrine blue existing around here, sport. You have, by the way, an honest face, something like Jack Carson’s.

  Alfred Stieglitz, or so they say, wrote letters to Georgia O’Keefe in which he said more amorous, even erotic things, in barracks language, than you can shake a stick at. Nothing, by the way, is “prettier than Frisco,” often called “the Santa Fe of California,” whatever that means. Nothing.

  Jack Carson, who regularly played loud fools whose bonhomie could not conceal—nor was it meant to—the larceny in their hearts, had an uncanny ability to let the audience see his tender vulnerability beneath the intentionally revealed cupidity and the hearty bluster, so that when he was on screen, one watched three people at once. He can be seen at work in many films, two of his best being Strawberry Blonde and Mildred Pierce.

  “They don’t make ‘em like Jack Carson anymore,” Fat George the Armenian says. “Now any dimwitted dumb fuck of an actor is a STAR! You could die laughing.” His father, filling a huge jar on the counter of his Italian-Greek Food Products store, adds, “Bill Harris’s dozen or so choruses on his ‘In a Mellotone’ are worth any five movie stars you can think of, male or female. Hell, they’re worth any five Nobel laureates you can think of!”

  Had Freud somehow known that Gloria Steinem once “worked” as a Playboy Bunny in order to get “material” for a “story,” would he have remarked: “Uh-huh” or “Worked?” or “An anal repressive, surely” or “Not a bad built, Klaus”?

  George’s father filled the huge jar with, let’s say, Greek olives.

  Barracks language is always everywhere vile, and yet, after a time, it takes on the homely qualities of security, familiarity, and, generally speaking, regulated domesticity.

  “That is no fucking lie, you sorry sonofabitch motherfucker,” Corporal Wing avers, looking up from his fucking field-fucking-stripped M-1 carbine. Home sweet fucking home.

  Helen and Connie

  HIS MIND NO LONGER SEEMS TO FUNCTION properly, or, in any event, efficiently, but has become, instead, a welter of discrete images, all of which have equal importance. This eccentricity may not stand him in good stead, as they used to say, given the no-nonsense lust for instant results and useful facts that drives the nation. Well. He cannot, or will not, organize or categorize experiences. So that although he may recall the time that he first kissed a girl, and although his recollection that it occurred at another girl’s fifteenth birthday party is probably correct, he cannot see himself at that party as other than the seventeen-year-old who lost his virginity in the park situated just two blocks from the house in which the party was held. The name of the girl he kissed was Helen Ryan; the name of the girl in the park was Constance Mangini. Kisses, he remembers, somebody’s kisses, that tasted of vanilla. His entire past seems to work, if that’s the word, this way now, so that sometimes he knows that he kissed Constance at the party and pulled up Helen’s thrilling skirt under a tree in Bliss Park. And who is that little boy, or is it that gray-haired old man, who is falling in with his company at Fort Hood? He doesn’t seem to mind this confusion of the temporal, this shifting of imagery, this aphasia of blurred time. It fits, it seems to him, rather well with the blood-drenched, always justified chaos of the collapsing century’s history, its legacy, God help us all. Once in awhile he feels his own flesh, still reasonably sound, firmly fixed in long-gone time, and he turns to smile at people who are dead. The ravishing taste of a Lucky Strike as the war ends in the Pacific, the smell of his first love’s sun-warm skin, a clear picture of a woman, desired and desiring, on a shady patio, in white summer clothes, her gin and tonic lifted in a toast to something wholly forgotten but sweet, surely sweet. And who is that drunken soldier in dirty khakis and a flowered shirt on the street in Waco, of all places, a sandwich in one hand and a pint of J.W. Dant in the other?

  I’m afraid the two girls mentioned in this putatively tender yet wholly pointless, if not useless “recollection” have had their names garbled. They were Constance Ryan and Helen Mangini. The former was the recipient of what she now thinks of as the “unwelcome sexual attentions” addressed to her in the park. Constance was wearing a blue-and-white-striped linen skirt, and was concerned lest grass stains suggestto her brother, Paulie, an amorous dalliance. He put his jacket down for her when she said that she didn’t want Paulie to find out about it. Find out about what? he said, his hand under that tight skirt.

  “They don’t much go in for Dant in California, as far as I can see, am I right? You never hear it mentioned.”

  “Well, whiskey and cigarettes will kill you in about twenty minutes in California, a well-known fact. The only things that won’t hurt you are the merciless sunshine and the thousands of tons of poisonous automobile emissions that daily add a certain spice to the pollen and mold in the air. Anyway, ‘some weather!�
� is a useful phrase to keep in readiness amid the friendly hollow smiles.”