Pinball

by Jerzy Kosiński

  PINBALL

  Books by Jerzy Kosinski

  NOVELS

  The Painted Bird

  Steps

  Being There

  The Devil Tree

  Cockpit

  Blind Date

  Passion Play

  Pinball

  The Hermit of 69th Street

  ESSAYS

  Notes of the Author

  The Art of the Self

  Passing By

  NONFICTION

  (Under the pen name Joseph Novak)

  The Future Is Ours, Comrade

  No Third Path

  PINBALL

  Jerzy Kosinski

  Copyright © 1982, 1983 by Jerzy Kosinski

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  This edition, first published in 1983 by Arcade Publishing, Inc., New York,

  incorporates minor textual changes and revisions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kosinski, Jerzy N., 1933-1991

  Pinball / Jerzy Kosinski.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9576-0

  1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Musicians—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.08P5 1996

  813′54—dc20 96-24958

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers named below for permission to reprint the following material:

  Excerpt from “Under Which Lyre” from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden: copyright © 1946 by W. H. Auden. Courtesy of Random House.

  Excerpt from Ulysses by James Joyce, copyright © 1914, 1918 by Margaret Caroline Anderson, and renewed 1942, 1944 by Nora Joseph Joyce. Reprinted by permission of Random House, The Bodley Head, and the Society of Authors, literary representative of the Estate of James Joyce.

  Excerpt from “Hypocrite Auteur” from New and Collected Poems 1917-1982 by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright © 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Excerpts from The Book of Rock Quotes by Jonathan Green used by permission of the Publishers, Omnibus Press, UK/Music Sales Corporation, USA/Angus & Robertson, Australia.

  Excerpt from “His Confidence” from Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., M. B. Yeats, Anne Yeats, Macmillan London Limited, and A. P. Watt Ltd. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed © 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

  Excerpts from The Legacy of the Blues by Samuel Charters, copyright © 1977 by Samuel Charters. Published by Marion Boyars, Ltd., London, and Da Capo Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

  The excerpts and translations from “Chopin: The Man” by Arthur Hedley, “Studies, Preludes and Impromptus” by Robert Collet, and “The Songs” by Bernard Jacobson, which are included in Frédéric Chopin: Profiles of the Man and the Musician, edited by Alan Walker (Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc., 1967; © 1966 by Barrie & Rockliff), are reprinted by kind permission.

  To Katherina v. F., with love

  like no other,

  and to the memory of Goddard Lieberson

  and Boris Pregel

  The man that hath no music in himself

  Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

  Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

  The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

  And his affections dark as Erebus;

  Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

  SHAKESPEARE

  Merchant of Venice

  For he who has once had to listen

  will listen always, whether he knows

  he will never hear anything again,

  or whether he does not … Silence

  once broken will never again be whole.

  BECKETT

  The Unnamable

  I

  When Patrick Domostroy turned the ignition key of his car, no sound came from the engine and no lights showed on the dashboard. He tried again and again, and still nothing happened: the battery was dead.

  Knowing that in his neighborhood it would take at least an hour to get a mechanic to show up and not wanting to lose the time, he unbolted the battery from its brackets and put it in an old canvas bag he kept in the trunk of the car. Then he carefully lugged the bag the full length of the parking lot, and when he reached the street, he hailed a taxi.

  In a few minutes he was at the National Know How, the largest automobile service station in the South Bronx. A big sign reading “Wouldn’t You Rather Know How?” loomed above the main entrance.

  Canvas bag in hand, Domostroy went to the manager, a big-bellied guy in a blue work shirt, with JIM stitched on his white coveralls.

  “Will you charge a battery for me?” asked Domostroy.

  “Sure,” said Jim. “Just bring her in.”

  “Here,” Domostroy said, setting down the bag on the floor.

  Jim looked at the bag, then at Domostroy over his glasses. “The car,” he said, pronouncing each word deliberately; “bring the car in.”

  “I can’t,” said Domostroy. “It wouldn’t go with a dead battery.”

  “Couldn’t you jump-start it?” Jim asked.

  “A jump-start is not enough: It needs a full charge. I just took the battery out, grabbed a taxi and here it is!” He prodded the bag open with the tip of his shoe.

  Jim lifted his eyes wearily and asked, “Where is the car?”

  “In the Old Glory’s parking lot,” Domostroy replied.

  “You brought this”—Jim pointed at the battery—“in a cab?”

  “Sure. It was too heavy to carry all the way here on foot,” said Domostroy.

  Jim’s expression changed. Taking his glasses off, he kicked the bag shut. He called to another mechanic. “Pete, will you come here for a minute!”

  Pete, a slim young man, looked up, saw Jim and Domostroy, and put down his wrench. “Coming,” he said.

  Turning to Pete, Jim pointed at the canvas bag. “Guess what’s in that?” he said brightly, with the air of a host on a TV game show.

  Pete’s eyes circled from the bag to the visitor, back to the bag, then back to Jim. “I, don’t know,” he said with a shrug.

  “Just guess,” said Jim, clapping him on the back.

  Pete’s eyes measured Domostroy, then the bag. “Dirty laundry,” he said.

  “Wrong,” Jim answered triumphantly.

  “A bowling ball?”

  “Wrong again! Try once more,” Jim prodded.

  Pete took his time. “A dead dog,” he ventured.

  “Dead—right! Dog—wrong,” Jim announced, kicking the bag open. “It’s a dead battery! And this guy,” he said, pointing at Domostroy, “brought it here.” After pausing for effect, he added, “In a cab!’

  “But where’s his car?” asked Pete.

  “Couldn’t come with its battery dead,” Domostroy broke in, “so the battery had to come without it.”

  “In a cab?” asked Pete.

  “In a cab. To save time.”

  Shaking his head, Pete wandered away.

  Jim started to write out a w
ork order. “I’ve been twenty years at National Know How,” he said, bending over the form. “Plenty of people tow in cars with dead batteries. But you’re the first to haul in a dead battery without a car.” He paused. “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m a musician,” said Domostroy.

  “You have an accent,” said Jim. “Where are you from?”

  “South Bronx,” said Domostroy.

  “I mean—before that. Where does that accent come from?”

  “The New Atlantis,” said Domostroy. “But accents don’t show up in music.”

  Jim laughed. “What kind of music?”

  “Serious,” said Domostroy. “Dead serious.”

  “If it’s as dead as this battery,” said Jim, “you should have brought your music here to charge it too.” He kept on laughing as he glanced at the work order. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of New Atlantis,” he said. “Where is it?”

  “The Land of Sounds,” said Domostroy. “Francis Bacon wrote a book about it.”

  While the battery was being charged, Domostroy opened his mail, which he had thrown into the bag with the battery. He pocketed the bills and the usual creditcard statements; then he glanced through the junk mail. A letter from the National Vasectomy Club asked in large print, “Had a Vasectomy?” and then suggested, “Now Encourage Others! If you’re one of the thousands of men who have had a vasectomy, join the National Vasectomy Club and inspire others to follow your lead in bringing population growth under control.” For only a few dollars, the club offered to send him a sterling silver lapel pin or tie tack, a membership card, and a bumper sticker.

  Domostroy stopped to think. If he should ever undergo a vasectomy—although he could imagine nothing less likely—what right would he have to proselytize? Furthermore, if in search of external identity—again, a concept quite foreign to him—he should decide to define himself as an American Vasectomite, where would he feel confident wearing the National Vasectomy Club lapel pin or the tie tack? To cocktails? To dinner with a date? To church? And what about the membership card? Why and where would he need it? To whom could he show it? He imagined being stopped by the highway patrol for speeding and saw himself producing, in addition to his driver’s license, his National Vasectomy card: “It’s like this, Officer: I’ve got to get to all those guys who aren’t keeping population growth down, and there s not much time left!”

  In another letter, an illustrated flier advertised Candypants—the hundred-percent edible underwear. “Comes in butterscotch, cherry, banana, orange and lime flavors. One size fits all.” Domostroy tried to imagine eating-such panties off Andrea. Why, he asked himself, if he were aroused by her, would he want to waste his time eating her panties? Wasn’t eating underwear in itself time-consuming? And what would Andrea be doing while he filled up on her banana, cherry, or butterscotch panties? Watching him chew? Asking him how they tasted? For a moment he imagined a court case involving poisoning by Candypants, and their manufacturer, faced with a wide range of questions: Were edible panties more life-threatening than, say, candy? Did they improve family relations? Speed up courting? Did they increase or diminish a healthy sexual appetite? Should students engaging in campus panty raids be prohibited from ripping off more panties than they could chew? And finally, what was the responsibility of the manufacturer as tastemaker in such a business?

  When the battery was ready, he hailed a taxi for the trip back to the Old Glory, once the South Bronx’s largest ballroom and banquet center. It was empty now. The rise in crime and gang warfare in the neighborhood had driven out most of the Old Glory’s mostly Jewish clientele—who once flocked to it for their wedding parties and bar mitzvahs. Its owner, an aging slumlord, had finally closed the place, put it on the market, and retired to Florida.

  A decade ago, when Domostroy was at the height of his success, he had given several benefit concerts at the Old Glory to aid the displaced children of the South Bronx, and for the last two years the slumlord, remembering those benefits, had allowed him to live in the dressing room off the ballroom.

  Hoping that any potential buyer would want to reopen the Old Glory just as it had been in its golden days, the slumlord had left in it all the original furniture and fixtures. The vast kitchen stood ready to feed twelve hundred diners, and on a low stage next to the dance floor loomed an ancient grand piano backed by an impressive array of other musical instruments, all badly used and in need of repair, ranging from a harp and a cello to electric guitars, accordions, and—a mark of modern technology—an electronic music console that could simulate the sound of several instruments.

  There was still no buyer in sight. Until one came along, Domostroy had taken it upon himself, in return for the owner’s beneficence, to be guard and custodian of the Old Glory and everything the great shell contained.

  Now he asked the driver to stop the taxi next to his car, which stood alone in the vast space of the parking lot, and as he got out of the cab in the twilight, he saw the ballroom as if it were a huge starship that was grounded on a temporary landing pad. He had had similar feelings before. His room was the ship’s command post, and when inside he was the ship’s sole passenger, about to start on his latest voyage of discovery. At night, the sounds of a faraway street-gang gun battle or the howling siren of a police car or an ambulance or a fire engine were like signs of life calling out to him, and as he listened, he felt that he existed alongside that life as well as within it.

  Domostroy installed the battery and started the engine. He enjoyed the car’s quiet motor, the bulky leather seats, the power and speed that resulted from the slightest pressure on the gas pedal. He had always liked to drive, and of all the cars he had ever owned, he felt the greatest fondness for this one. It was an old and venerable vehicle, the largest convertible Detroit had produced at the peak of showing-off its industrial power. When Domostroy had bought the car in a showroom some fifteen years earlier, he recognized in it a symbol of his own mobility and affluence. In his concert performing days he often had the car shipped to him wherever he was—California, the Caribbean, even Switzerland—as if it were a small package, but now the convertible was the only remaining object from his opulent past—and one of his last links to it. But wherever he worked he took his car—his sole impressive possession. Patrick Domostroy’s old sedan was to him what a private customized superjet—a space-age flying saloon—was to a rock star.

  His musical talent was the other link. No longer composing, with no income to speak of from the sales of his past records, Domostroy had been making his living for the last decade by hiring himself out to play any of a number of instruments—piano, accordion, harpsichord, even the electronic synthesizer so popular with the rock and pop musicians half his age—in small out-of-the way nightclubs. He worked either as a combo stringer or as an accompanist for other performers—singers, dancers, jugglers, or magicians. If he was pressed for cash, he even did stints at private parties, dances, and bingo parlors.

  For the last year, he’d been working at Kreutzer’s. The crowd there never varied much. There were couples in their late fifties, locals mostly, but some came from as far away as Queens, Brooklyn, even New Jersey, lured by the newspaper ads listing free parking, live music, two drinks for the price of one, a salad bar, and as much homemade garlic bread as you could eat, all included in the price of the dinner. There were also middle-aged out-of-town salesmen, on the prowl, alone or with flashily dressed pickups from the nearby singles bar; young neighborhood couples who came mainly for the dancing; a birthday or anniversary party of eight, twelve, or sixteen people—usually families; and at the bar, several solitary men of various ages, watching the TV set, listening to the jukebox, playing an occasional pinball machine or electronic game, and casting furtive glances at the three or four ladies of the night who, in exchange for extending their favors to the manager and sharing part of their income with the bouncer, were allowed to sit at the bar and solicit, as long as they looked good and didn’t get out of li
ne.

  Before this crowd gathered each night, Domostroy ate his dinner at one of the corner tables, usually alone, sometimes with one of the headwaiters or the manager; then he went into the men’s room and changed into his tux, always checking himself carefully in the mirror. He was glad the job called for him to accompany singers and other musicians, never to play alone, because it made the break with his past—as a solo performer—clean and complete, and thus his own tradition was not abused.

  Since he no longer composed, he could devote his life to his own existence rather than the existence of his music. And because he could predict with relative ease what his life would be like in periods ahead—something he could not do with his music—his life had become fairly simple and devoid of anguish. He maintained it in somewhat the way he maintained his car—a minor repair here, a little polish there—and he was pleased when it rolled along smoothly.

  Had he lived among the Victorians or during Prohibition, or had he remained in totalitarian Eastern Europe where he spent his youth, he would undoubtedly have found the imposition of moral rules of any kind to be arbitrary and overly restrictive. And he was sure that the world of tomorrow, full of computerized technology and standardized behavior, depleted of natural and human resources, would neither challenge nor interest him in the least.

  Freed as he was from the deceptive security of accumulated wealth and the chimera of success—his freedom a useful by-product of his composer’s block—he rejoiced at being able to live his life as he pleased, at the time and in the place he was living it, and at being able to follow his own ethical code of moral responsibility, competing against nobody, harming no one, not even himself—a code in which free choice was always the indisputable axiom.