by John McNally
Ralph was sitting in the passenger seat; I rode in back next to two overstuffed Hefty bags.
“What’s in these?” I asked, poking one.
“Our costumes,” Ralph said.
“Costumes?”
Kenny, peeking into the rearview mirror to look at me when he spoke, explained how Frank Wisiniewski, owner of Frank Wisiniewski Ford, had hired him and Norm to greet customers at the grand opening of their remodeled car lots, but Norm was temporarily incarcerated. Here was where Ralph and I stepped in. The job would last all day, and we’d get paid six dollars an hour.
“Six bucks an hour?” I yelled. “Just to greet people?” I’d never heard of anyone making six bucks an hour. Minimum wage was $2.90.
Kenny whispered to Ralph, “I told you he’d wet his pants, didn’t I?”
I poked the bloated Hefty bag again. “So,” I said. “What are the costumes?”
“You,” Kenny said, pointing at me in the rearview mirror, “are going to be Big Bird. And Ralph here, he’s that elephant from the show.”
“Snuffleupagus?” I asked.
“Whatever,” Kenny said.
“You’re going to be Snuffy?” I asked Ralph.
Ralph said, “I know, I know. People like elephants better than they like birds, but since I landed us the job, I figured I could pick first. Don’t worry, though. People like birds, too.”
The way Ralph was talking, I wasn’t sure he’d ever actually seen Sesame Street. On Sesame Street, it was clear who the star was, and it wasn’t the elephant. Snuffleupagus was Big Bird’s imaginary friend, a giant brown elephant that only Big Bird could see, and while Snuffy certainly enjoyed his own cult following, Big Bird was nobody’s sidekick. I wanted to be Big Bird, but I was worried that I wasn’t tall enough.
I was about to say something about my height when Kenny issued a warning: “I had to put a deposit down on those suits, so if either of you damage them, I’ll come knocking at your door with a lead pipe.” Then he pulled into Wisiniewski Ford and told us to beat it.
Ralph and I, abandoned at the dusty outer edge of the parking lot, each held a Hefty bag. Ralph said, “Let’s find the john and suit up.”
We lugged our bags through the showroom, to the restroom, where, locked inside, Ralph stripped out of all of his clothes, including a gray pair of Fruit of the Looms and mismatched tube socks. Buck-naked and hairy in a way that only wild animals were hairy, Ralph wiggled into his Snuffleupagus costume. I considered telling him that I didn’t think people wore full-body costumes without any clothes on underneath, but then, holding Snuffy’s head as if it were the prize trophy from an African hunting expedition, he asked me to zip him up.
“Okie doke,” I said. Working as fast as I could, I snagged some of the hair on his back with the zipper’s teeth.
“Ouch!” Ralph yelled. “Watch it!” He lifted Snuffy’s head and placed it over his own head. Except for slight modifications—instead of four legs, he now had two legs and two arms—the Snuffleupagus in front of me looked like the Snuffleupagus from TV, and my feeling of revulsion melted into warmth. Here was this make-believe creature I had spent my early grade school years watching. I’d even had my own Snuffy hand-puppet, and I almost got teary-eyed at the thought of this part of my life coming to an end when Ralph, through the head of Snuffleupagus, said, “What are you screwing around for? Put the bird suit on.”
As fast as possible, and with my underwear and socks still on, I slipped into the Big Bird costume. For my hands, I wore yellow gloves made of felt. Each hand had only three triangular fingers to give the illusion of claws. The most gratifying part of the transformation was placing Big Bird’s head over mine. I wasn’t sure how it was going to work—I had assumed that I’d be staring out of Big Bird’s eyes—but in order to make Big Bird taller than the person inside, I was staring out of the beak from behind a sheet of wire-mesh painted black. It worked like a two-way mirror: I could see out, but no one could see in. The beak, however, remained permanently open, which didn’t seem particularly authentic.
We unlocked the door and stepped out of the bathroom. A mechanic waiting his turn flinched at the sight of us. Ralph said, “Sorry for the wait, bud,” and I nodded my beak at him.
The owner, who saw us before we saw him, called out from his office: “There you two are!” It was Frank Wisiniewski himself. I’d seen him on TV my entire life, a razor-thin, baldheaded man with bulging eyes who was always yelling about zero-percent finance charges and no money down. What I remembered most from those commercials were his hands. They never stopped moving, like a pair of battery-powered toys that wouldn’t shut off.
Frank said, “Norm and Kenny, right?”
Ralph scratched his trunk and said, “At your service.”
“Well, listen. I want this grand opening to be something special, okay? I want each family to leave here with a Ford automobile and memories to last them a freaking lifetime.”
People passing by the glass-walled window of Frank’s office slowed down at the sight of us, and I was starting to get a taste of celebrity. I sat down in one Frank’s overstuffed recliners and casually crossed my feathered legs, but Ralph motioned with his elephant head for me to stand back up.
Frank rubbed his palms together, quickly, as if trying to warm up. Then he clapped a few times, snapped his fingers, and, dedicating one hand to each of us, pointed at both me and Ralph. He said, “Big Bird stays here at the new car lot. Snuffy goes across the street to the used lot. Wave at the passing cars. Later, we’ll have one of you come inside so that folks can get their photos taken with you. We’ve got a professional photographer scheduled from noon to five. Any questions? None? Great! Let’s go and sell some friggin’ cars, then.”
Back in the showroom, Ralph said, “What if someone wants to buy a new car from the elephant? It seems screwy to have me all the way across the street.”
“I don’t think we’re actually going to be selling the cars,” I said.
“All I’m saying,” Ralph said, “is that it’s not a savvy business move putting the more popular animal across the street.”
I took my position at the curb next to the highway. Ralph attempted to cross over to the used cars, but a VW van quickly turned a corner and nearly took him out. Ralph, frozen in the middle of the road, lifted his shaggy brown arms over his head and swore at the van.
The rest of the morning wasn’t much of an improvement. Adults driving by didn’t notice me, while carloads of teenagers threw things at me. I peered across the street to see how Ralph was holding up, but Snuffleupagus was lying on a grassy strip next to the highway, taking a nap. I yelled across the traffic, trying to wake him up, but he wasn’t budging. The elephant, it appeared, was out for the count.
•
No one ever came to relieve me for lunch. Meanwhile, the grand opening itself, fueled by free hot dogs and Canfield sodas, gained momentum. In less than an hour, I was surrounded by dozens of women and children. They touched me, poked me, hugged me, and prodded me. Everyone seemed to want a piece of Big Bird, and in the course of this frenzy, I worried loose several of my own feathers. Ralph was finally coming to, but other than a beefy salesman sitting in a lawnchair, no one else was over there with him.
Frank Wisiniewski came out to work the crowd. He raised his arms into the air, as if conducting an orchestra, and yelled, “Who wants their picture taken with Big Bird?”
A dozen hands rose. “Me!” the kids yelled back.
“All right,” he said. Frank looked into my beak and said, “You’re doing great, big guy.” Then he glanced across the highway at Ralph, who was sitting with his shaggy legs over the curb and swatting flies with his trunk.
I was concerned about the authenticity of my costume, afraid some of the kids might decide to call me on it—the beak, after all, didn’t move, and I couldn’t speak because my voice didn’t sound anything like Big Bird’s—but to my surprise, the kids didn’t want their picture taken with me so much as their mothers di
d. One by one, the kids’ mothers sat on my lap, slung an arm around my neck, and cooed into my ear.
“He’s so cute,” one of the young mothers said, stroking the side of my head. “Look at those big eyes!”
Lucy Bruno, holding a helium-filled balloon in one hand and a hot dog with relish in the other, came waltzing in with her mother. Her mother had the sour look of someone who’d just realized she’d stepped in dog poop. Lucy, with the same sour look, sized up the situation before joining the line. When her turn to sit on my lap finally came, she gave me the once-over and said, “You’re a little short to be Big Bird, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. I was still steamed about her finger-pointing in Mrs. Davis’s class, a traitorous act, so when she sat on my lap, I took the quill of a feather that had come loose this morning and poked her butt with it. Hard. Lucy yelped and hopped off.
“He stuck me with a pin!” she yelled.
When I opened my arms to hug her, she screamed and ran to her mother.
Moments later, Frank Wisiniewski marched over. He offered his TV grin to the others in line, then crouched and whispered into my beak, “You drew blood on that kid. I don’t want any lawsuits, you hear?”
By three o’clock, I was starving and hoping for somebody to give me a break, but now that people were getting off work at the mall, the line grew even longer. At one point, a fat man stepped up to me, narrowed his eyes, then plopped down onto my lap. My legs felt as though they were going to snap in half, but I kept quiet. The man claimed that he wanted to take a good look at my costume up close, and that he wanted a photo so that he could study it later at home. “Tell me, pal, what’s the beak made out of, plaster?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m only renting.” These were the first words I’d spoken in hours, and my voice was hoarse.
The guy said, “I bet I could make one of these costumes myself. They sell the eyes in any half-decent arts and craft store. The feathers, hell, they would be a cinch to get. But the beak. I’d have to make that myself, I suppose. Papier-mâché, you think?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. The circulation in my legs had been cut off under the crush of weight, the initial pain dissolving into numbness with occasional bursts of tingling.
Before he heave-hoed himself up off my lap, he took one last look at me and said, “Yep, I think I could piece me together a costume as good as yours.”
“Good luck,” I said.
I watched him walk away. I wondered if he was a John Gacy type. John Gacy’d been a big, fat clown in his own killing-spree heyday—Pogo was Gacy’s clown name—and seeing all those body bags night after night made me curious about grown men who wore make-up. What were they really up to? Here was some guy three times my age and six times my weight talking about making a bird suit for his own private use. For what?
By the end of the day, the bird suit stunk, and just as the stink was reaching new heights, Mary Polaski appeared in the showroom with a throng of other girls from our class. When she saw me, she squealed. “Oh-look-oh-look!” she said. “I have to get my picture taken with him.”
Mary Polaski was the very last person in line. When her turn came, she hopped up onto my lap. Already overheated, my breathing growing heavier and heavier, I sounded more like Darth Vader than Big Bird.
While the photographer loaded a new roll of film into the camera, Mary turned her head and stared dreamily into my beak. Her eyelids were heavy, as if she had woken from a deep sleep, and I was starting to think that she could see through the perforated holes of the wire-mesh, and that she could tell it was me, Hank, but then she reached into my beak and, with the tip of her finger, tapped the screen twice. “Who’s in there?” she whispered. “Who’s the real Big Bird?”
I said nothing. I held my breath. I wanted to lean forward and kiss her, but I’d have engulfed her entire head with my beak if I’d tried.
“Talk to me,” she said. “It must get lonely in there.”
I knew that I had to say something—I couldn’t let the moment slip by—so I said, “Break up with Chuck McDowell. You can do better than that.”
She leaned back. “You know Chuck?” she asked.
Before I could answer, the photographer interrupted: “Let’s give Big Bird a smooch!” he said. When Mary put her lips against the corner of my beak, the photographer squeezed the rubber bulb and a flash of light exploded.
Blinking, Mary put her finger back inside my beak, resting it on my petrified tongue. She was about to speak when a group of tiny kids rushed over, plucking my feathers. Then Ralph, still dressed as Snuffleupagus, stepped into the showroom, his trunk swaying like a pendulum. When he patted himself down, mushroom clouds of dust erupted from his costume. A few flies buzzed around his head. He looked over at the kids and said, “Beat it, you punks. The bird’s ride is here.”
Mary Polaski hugged me hard and said, “Thanks for the advice. You’re absolutely right. I can do better.” On her way out the door, she turned and said, “You’re a sweetheart!” She winked, then bounded joyfully out the door and into the ever-gray Chicago spring.
After changing into my clothes and stuffing the costume into my Hefty bag, I found Ralph and told him that the restroom was all his.
“I’m fine,” Ralph said. “Kenny’s already here. Waiting.”
“You’re not going to take the Snuffleupagus costume off?” I asked.
Ralph wagged his head.
Kenny’s Nova was parked where he’d dropped us off this morning. Ralph and I took our usual seats, though Ralph’s fit was tighter now and he spilled over onto Kenny’s seat.
“So?” Kenny said. “How’d it go, girls?”
I told Kenny what a great time I’d had, how I was surrounded all day by women who kept sitting on my lap, and how, at the end of the day, Mary Polaski had sat down on me and flirted.
“But she didn’t realize it was you,” Kenny said.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It does matter,” Kenny said. “I know that kind of girl, the kind who’ll flirt with a guy inside a bird suit. She didn’t care who was inside. Could’ve been me in there. You can’t trust a girl like that. Listen to your Uncle Kenny. I know. Believe me, I know.”
Kenny wasn’t my uncle, and I didn’t want his advice. Ralph turned his elephant head toward Kenny and nodded, as if taking it all in, but he didn’t say a word the whole way home. At one point, I thought I heard him snort, but since he was still wearing his costume, it was possible he’d fallen asleep and was snoring.
Kenny slammed on the brakes in front of my house and said, “You’ll have to take the costume back yourself. Return the deposit to me in full and I’ll pay you for the job. You got that? Good. I guess me and the elephant are outta here then.”
Ralph turned to face me, but the pull of my instincts being stronger than my logic, I stared into his huge fake eyes, waiting for recognition, instead of looking into his mouth, where I knew his face was. The recognition never came, and then Kenny peeled away, wrapping me in a cocoon of exhaust.
I rubbed my eyes and saw dimly through the smoke my parents looking at me from the picture window. They must have wondered what was making all the noise, but what they found instead was their son materializing out of vapor, as if I’d returned home from another world. I started to wave, but my mother reached up and yanked the drapes shut, making me wonder if they’d even seen me at all.
The next day, at Waldo’s Trick Shop and Costumes, Waldo pulled the costume from the Hefty bag and carefully inspected it. “You lost some feathers,” he said and pointed at Big Bird’s crotch. He opened the cash register and counted out half of the deposit money—fifty dollars. My entire pay check would be forty-two dollars, meaning that I would owe Kenny eight dollars for my day of work. I knew Kenny would make me pay it, too. I wanted to argue with Waldo, but what could I say? I’d lost enough feathers that anyone could easily see the nylon body-suit beneath. It looked worse than I remembered, so I took what little money he
offered.
That night, Mom waited until Dad came home before serving dinner, and when he did finally arrive, three hours late, it was clear he’d been at Lucky’s Tavern for a few drinks. He was grinning at everyone and everything—clear sign that he’d lost a boat-load of money tonight playing poker. I already braced myself for the argument that I would hear later, muffled behind my parent’s bedroom door.
“These are great green beans!” Dad said, nearly yelling. “Are they FRESH?”
“No,” my mother said. “They’re canned.”
“Green GIANT?”
“No. Generic.”
“Oh.” Dad took another spoonful. I hated generic green beans. They were too green, still had the stems, and felt like tubes of rubber on my tongue. Dad looked up at me and Kelly, then waggled his eyebrows, trying to make us smile, but we weren’t falling for it. His eyes widened and he said, “Oh, crap, I almost forgot. I saw the damnedest thing on the way home. Actually, I’m not sure what I saw, but it looked like an elephant walking down 79th street.”
“You’ve been drinking,” Mom said. “Don’t scare the kids.”
“No, listen,” Dad said. “It wasn’t a real elephant. It was sort of rust-colored and it was walking on its hind legs.”
Mom stood up abruptly, gritting her teeth. She scooped her food into the trash and slammed her plate into the sink. Then she went to the bedroom, locking herself inside.
Dad helped himself to more green beans. He said, “An elephant on the prowl. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Honest to God.”
School may have been out for the week of spring break, but CCD was still in session, meeting on Thursday night, as usual. As far as I knew, everyone in Chicago was Catholic. All of my classmates, except for Hani Abdallah, were Catholic, and so every parent in the neighborhood, except for Hani Abdallah’s, sent their kids to CCD. No one knew why they had to go to CCD, though. “Why do I have to go?“ I’d ask my mother. “I’m missing The Bionic Woman! How can I follow what’s going on in The Six Million Dollar Man if I’m missing The Bionic Woman?” “Your job,” my mother would say, “isn’t to ask why. Your job is to do what I tell you to do.” So far as I could tell, that’s what everyone’s parents were telling their kids. Meanwhile, it was Hani Abdallah’s job to fill me in on The Bionic Woman.
