Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  My father liked telling the history of Ford City because, for him, a person who’d spent his entire life in Chicago, it was hard to imagine what Ford City had become. We lived only a few miles south of Midway Airport, and during the start of World War II, Ford City had been a government building, where Chrysler made B-29s, something called “The Superfortress,” and engines for bombers. After the war, sometime in the late ’40s, a man named Tucker made automobiles there, the Tucker Torpedo, but that didn’t last very long. A few years later, during the Korean War, the Ford Motor Company moved in and manufactured jet engines. Not until the early 1960s did a man named Harry Chaddick buy the property and turn it into what it was today: Ford City Shopping Center. It opened on August 12, 1965, a week before I was born, and my father took my mother, who was full-to-bursting with me inside, and my sister, only two years old at the time, to join hundreds of other people who had gone there to watch the Grand Opening Ribbon Cutting Ceremony and, more importantly, to catch a glimpse of Mayor Richard J. Daley, a man as famous in Chicago as the Pope.

  My father didn’t see Daley that day, and he took it personally, holding his grudge against Ford City Shopping Center itself. Each time we drove by, he’d say, “If you ask me—and, mind you, nobody has—the damned place still looks like a factory,” or “Talk about your eyesores,” or “One big red pimple on the ass of our fine city!”

  He was right: it did still look like a factory. Even though names like Wieboldt’s and Montgomery Ward adorned the building’s various entrances, you could easily imagine those names gone, and instead of shoppers there would be streams of women with goggles pushed up onto their heads and lunch pails tapping against their thighs, all filing inside for a day of work on the assembly line, probably already waiting for the shrill whistle when they could finally take a lunch break.

  The parking lot, with its long jagged cracks and poked-up dandelions, reminded me of an abandoned airport runway, and if a plane happened to be overhead while I was crossing the lot, I pretended that it was a Japanese fighter jet with blazing red suns painted on either side, and that a kamikaze pilot was inside spinning the plane toward the mall, spinning it like a gyroscope, prepared to take out the entire bomber assembly line. Sometimes, when I was alone, I would even yell, “Bonsai!” and then whistle the plane’s dark descent, ending with a muffled explosion: “Kuh-pkkkkkkkkkkkk.”

  Ford City Shopping Center was divided into two sections: the main building, with its dozens of stores inside, and then another strip of buildings, all the way across the parking lot, with several more businesses, each of which you could enter only from outside: the General Cinema movie theater, the bowling alley and pool hall, a fabric store that only old ladies went into, and a few other stores that no one could ever remember because they looked so dull.

  I headed for the main building today, the indoor part of Ford City.

  Certain stores fascinated me. The store that sold Wurlitzer organs, for instance. I always peeked inside because there were never any customers and because the salesman, bored, could be found playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” with a Rumba backbeat. Late at night, with the hope of luring in some of the younger kids, he’d play Yes’s “Roundabout” or the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” It never worked, though. Instead, he was greeted by confused looks and the occasional insult. The organist, tall and bony, wore a white short-sleeved shirt, black slacks, and a long, skinny black tie that made him look like a preacher from one of the fuzzy UHF stations I’d flip past on Sunday mornings while desperately searching for cartoons. I was fascinated with this place because I’d never seen a single customer pushing an organ out to their pick-up truck, and so I couldn’t imagine how they stayed in business.

  Woolworth’s was another place. It had an oval-shaped diner that took up a good part of the corridor just outside the store itself. It was an old diner with old people working there and old people eating there, and it wouldn’t have seemed any more foreign to me if a spaceship had landed inside the mall. I’d never eaten at a diner, ever, but I was spellbound by this one—the long steaming grill, the dozen hamburgers sizzling at once, the outrageous mountain of hash browns. Old men with fedoras sat at the counter and read the newspaper. Since none of my friends’ fathers wore fedoras, I wondered where these men came from and why they read the newspaper here rather than at home. I asked my father once about the newspapers, and he said, “Don’t get me wrong, I love your mother, but let’s just say it’s nice to go somewhere where no one’s riding you all day long,” and then he winked at me. Each time I walked by the old men at Woolworth’s, I imagined old women at their homes chasing them around with brooms, sweeping them from room to room, accusing them of this or that, until they couldn’t take it anymore and rode the city bus down to Woolworth’s. Since these were their few precious moments of peace, I always tiptoed by and tried not to stare too long.

  Today, I walked over to the entrance for Peacock Alley. Peacock Alley was an underground mall that you entered from a dank stairwell in the main mall. Painted on the stairwell’s walls were the names of various businesses that were supposed to be in Peacock Alley, but I recognized only a few of them. The rest, like Chuck’s Fine Photos or Betty’s Boutique, were long gone. Since Ford City had been a factory before it was a mall, it was hard to say what Peacock Alley used to be. It was dimly lit, the hallway was narrow, and it twisted all the way beneath the long parking lot to the other buildings, where the movie theater and the bowling alley were. The rumor was that a tunnel ran from Ford City to Midway Airport, several miles north, and that this was how the engineers and mechanics transported important parts for their bombers during wartime. I always looked for secret entrances or walled-up corridors but couldn’t find any. At a certain point inside Peacock Alley, there was a long tunnel where there were no stores, and if a large enough family was walking toward you, you’d have to suck in your gut and turn sideways to let them pass.

  It was in one of the tunnels that I once saw a high school boy kicking another boy in the stomach with his steel-toed boot. This was two years ago; I was in sixth grade. My parents and my sister were shopping upstairs. It was almost closing time, so not many people were left in Peacock Alley. I needed to walk through the tunnel in order to get back to the entrance that led into the mall itself, but I didn’t want to walk by the boy with the steel-toed boots, so I turned around and took the other way out of the Peacock Alley, the exit that led outside. The only thing more dangerous than one of the Peacock Alley tunnels was the Ford City Shopping Center parking lot at night, but I didn’t have a choice: I needed to get back to the mall. I never knew what happened to the high school boy with the boots or the boy getting kicked, but I made it safely across the dark parking lot, entered Montgomery Ward from outside, and found my parents in the large home appliance section where my father was arguing with the salesman about the prices being jacked up and about how he was getting screwed over. “When it comes to my hard-earned money,” he said, “I hate getting screwed over.” My mother was tugging his elbow, trying to get him to drop it. I was dripping sweat, but no one noticed, not even my sister, Kelly, who had stuck her entire head inside one of the ovens, and who, when she saw me out of the corner of her eye, said, “A twelve-year-old girl with her head in a gas oven and nobody cares.” She reached out of the oven and turned one of the knobs higher. I peeked behind the oven. “It’s electric,” I said, “and it’s not plugged in.” Kelly emerged, her face red as though she’d been holding her breath, and said, “That’s not the point,” and walked over to a deep-freeze, into which I imagined she might crawl and then shut herself.

  I waited a good twenty minutes today for Ralph before heading down into Peacock Alley to look for him. The deeper down you went into Peacock Alley, the dizzier you got from the incense that burned in about a third of the stores. The incense had names like Jasmine, Funky Cherry, and the Sea of Tranquility. Some stores used strobe lights to lure customers inside. Down here, teenage girls still wore leather vests wit
h long leather fringe circling their soft bellies. If you looked closely, you might even see a belly button, and although I tried not to give away that I was looking, I always checked to see if it was an innie or an outie. For reasons I couldn’t quite put into words, my favorites were the outies, though maybe this was because mine was an innie. On no fewer than five nights I had fallen asleep to the thought of a girl pressing her outie into my innie.

  The first store at the bottom of the stairs sold nothing but wicker furniture. I looked but couldn’t see Ralph in there. The next store was what my mother called a “head shop.” Teenagers hung out there, slumped at the counter, sometimes smoking cigarettes or looking, as my mother liked to put it, “doped up.” Dad told me that if he ever caught me in there, he’d skin me alive. My father had never hit me—not really—but the punishments that he threatened me with varied in their degree of severity depending upon the offense. I’ll whup your butt so hard, you won’t be able to sit down for a week was the least serious, probably because of the words “whup” and “butt,” but also because my dad usually said this without any emotion whatsoever, sometimes not even looking up from whatever he was doing. Next in seriousness was How’d you like the belt? Only once did he go so far as to unbuckle it, jerk it from his pants, and double it up, but that was enough to send me running and screaming, as if it were an ax he’d revealed and not the belt I’d bought for him at Kmart for Father’s Day. Finally, there was the threat of being skinned alive, which scared me for three reasons. Number one: he’d threatened me with it only four times in my life, and less carried more power than more. Number two: he always looked me in the eye when he said it, and since he almost never looked me in the eye, this scared the wits out of me. Number three: I’d read a Scholastics book about Indians skinning their enemies, and so I knew how much pain my father was talking about. I imagined him going so far as to bury me up to my neck in the dirt on a hot day and then pouring honey over my skinned head, letting ants and wasps have a field day with me. The result of the threat was that I wouldn’t even look at the head shop today, let alone step inside. The first place of business that I would step inside, however, was the record store, which was blocked off from the hallway not by walls but by a wrought-iron gate that was as high as my hip.

  In the record store, where they burned incense not by the stick so much as by the pound, I looked at the Roxy Music album covers because there were naked women on them. I also looked at the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album because it had a real zipper on the front of it. In addition to being one of the strangest things I’d ever seen, it was the first time I saw how two things that weren’t alike at all could come together to surprise everyone who came into contact with it. An album cover with a zipper! Who’d have thought it was possible? I looked at Linda Ronstadt and Olivia Newton-John albums because I had crushes on both of them, and then I looked at Styx albums because they were from the South Side of Chicago. I loved flipping through the record store’s display of posters, too. One of my favorites was of W. C. Fields wearing a stovepipe hat and peeking up from a handful of fanned cards. I also liked the one from Easy Rider with some guy riding a chopper. I liked how choppers looked and wanted to turn my three-speed bicycle into a chopper, but when I asked my father if I could use his blowtorch, he asked me how I’d like his belt. The poster that I saved for last was Farrah Fawcett-Majors in a red swimsuit, her white teeth practically glowing, her loopy signature in the bottom right hand corner. I never bought anything from the record store because I never had any money, but looking at the stuff was good enough. Sometimes looking seemed like getting something for free.

  After the record store came Nickelodeon Pizza, where high school boys sat at the counter and flirted with the waitresses. It was like a different planet, a different solar system, from the Woolworth’s diner upstairs, and I wondered if the customers of one place even knew about the existence of the other. I doubted it. Beyond Nickelodeon Pizza was a gag shop that sold rubber masks of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. My father once suggested that the four of us go as presidents for Halloween one year.

  “But I see only three presidents,” I’d said.

  My father shrugged. “One of us could go as the Wolfman, I suppose.”

  The masks were expensive and I knew that my father would never fork over that kind of money for four rubber masks, but it bothered me for days on end that he couldn’t see how wrong it would be for only three of us to be presidents while one of us went as a monster. Why couldn’t he see the problem with that?

  I sauntered through the tunnel, still hoping to bump into Ralph, but the longer I went without seeing him, the less likely it was that we were going to meet up. Maybe I had misunderstood. Maybe we were supposed to have met tomorrow.

  The end of the tunnel meant that the smell of incense would be replaced by the rich stench of perm solution. Ford City Beauty School was where my mother took me for haircuts. They charged half of what other places charged so that the girls, who weren’t yet licensed to cut hair, could experiment on a bunch of different cheapskates’ heads. Sometimes it looked pretty good when they were done, but more often than not one of my ears looked higher than it should have, or I appeared to be in the first stages of going bald, or, thanks to crooked bangs, one eye seemed an inch lower than my other eye. I didn’t mind because the girls, who weren’t much older than me, only four or five years older, would press into me while they snipped away.

  I loved the beauty school. I’d never been to a funhouse, but I suspected that getting my hair cut wasn’t so different: strapped in a chair, raised and lowered, tilted back, and so many mirrors that I could look nearly anywhere and see myself disappearing into infinity. I always left the beauty school knock-kneed—the lights had been so bright, the perm solution dizzying, the beautician’s body so warm that my own temperature raised a few notches—and the whole time I wouldn’t say a word. I’d just sit there, breathing heavier and heavier, until the girl I had fallen in love with, whichever girl happened to be cutting my hair, untied the drop-cloth and set me free.

  Ford City Beauty School was the end of the road, the last main attraction of Peacock Alley, and then came the stairwell going up into the parking lot, into the first shaft of light. Climbing the stairs, I imagined that I was a coal miner who’d spent the better part of my day underground, eager to see all my loved ones again. I took the steps two at a time, sometimes three, straining, making a bigger production than necessary, until I reached the top, where, blinking and shivering, I had to shade my eyes from the blinding piles of snow and wait for everything to come back into focus.

  “Where the hell have you been?” a voice asked. I heard him before I saw him, but when I turned around, there he stood. Ralph! Arms crossed, eyes narrowed, he was waiting for an answer.

  “Where’ve I been?” I said. “I was looking for you.”

  “Me? I’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Here?” I said. “You told me to meet you at the entrance.”

  “This is the entrance,” he said, and we both looked toward it for an answer, as if a sign might be posted, proving one of us right, but there was no sign. “Ah, forget it,” he said. “It’s not worth arguing about.” He unfolded his arms and walked toward me. “I just don’t know about you, Hank.”

  “Me?” I said. “What about you?”

  Ralph, ignoring my question, started down the stairs. I was about to tell him that I’d already seen everything that I needed to see, but then the smell of perm solution hit me again, and I suddenly didn’t mind working my way backward. I knew that every minute I lived was one less minute I’d be alive, but returning to Peacock Alley was different: it was like stealing time, getting back what I’d lost. It was quite a feeling, really, being thirteen years old and cheating death.

  12

  It was only a few months away from graduation, but in the ice-encased world that is February in Chicago, June shimmered like a mirage—within sight but unattainable. I knew that even if
it warmed up, even if all of this melted, there would be more snow, more sludge, and more ice before we could say goodbye, once and for all, to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School.

  On a Sunday when the sun came out, the temperature rose, and the sound of ice melting gave half the people in Chicago false hope that winter would soon be behind us, Ralph took me to the Scottsdale Shopping Center parking lot, where we met his cousin, Norm. The three of us stood by Norm’s trunk looking like a chart you’d see in a doctor’s office about age and height, but when Ralph started jumping up and down to keep warm and Norm sat on his haunches, I remembered drawings I’d seen of men evolving from monkeys. We were, I thought, finally returning to our former monkey selves.

  Norm motioned for all us to crouch down to his level. He looked around to make sure no one was watching us, then he pulled an envelope from his back pocket.

  “I’ve got these tickets to scalp, see?” he said.

  Ralph nodded. When it came to Norm’s hare-brained plans, Ralph always became all-business, but I knew better, so I stifled a yawn. However, when Norm opened the envelope and showed the tickets to us, my whole body started to convulse. He was holding eight tickets for a taping of the TV show Bozo’s Circus.