by Packer, Vin
Why didn’t the light change? Could he go on red anyway?
“Today you are a man!”
A woman passing said, “Oh, my God, I forgot the pickles! Now I have to go all the way back.”
“It was my brother’s suit.”
“You should have a suit of your own.”
“You don’t need the pickles,” a voice said.
“It wouldn’t be a picnic without pickles.”
The car took off abruptly from the curb; the man gunned the motor and it roared. Manny felt the hot air of the exhaust drift past him.
“Homosexuals can’t help the way they are. They’re born that way, mister.”
The light changed to green. Manny started to step down from the curb. The glass vial slipped from his hot, perspiring fingers and shattered on the pavement. Manny looked down and saw the grasshopper scurry away, down into the underside of the gutter; the roach stayed transfixed, his antennae quivering frantically. With the tip of the toe of his loafer, Manny gave the roach a little push to make him go. He could go now; Manny didn’t have anything to carry him in any more. The roach hesitated still; darted one way, then another, then ran in circles. The Madison Avenue bus came rumbling to the corner, puffing and snorting as it stopped within inches of Manny as he crossed the street. He saw the great round rubber tires of the bus bear down on the confused cockroach.
“Have a good day, son. Youth is to enjoy.”
• • •
Ruth Pollack reread the note under “Showing Today” in the New York Daily Record:
LAS VEGAS STORY — (90m. RKO, ‘52) Torch-bearing cop, night-club songbird married to big-shot gambler, sentimental pianist, and sudden murder. Victor Mature, Jane Russell, Vincent Price, Hoagy Carmichael. 12:30, 3:50, 7:10, 10:30.
She slapped the newspaper down and scratched an oven match under the table, touching its flame to her cigarette. Beside her, on the arm of the stuffed chair facing the television set, was a light-green glass plate holding the crusts from the cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich she had just finished. The set was turned on and an old movie was in wavy view. She looked at her watch and sighed, sucking on the cigarette, the expression on her thin, tired face one of acute rage. The cup of coffee next to the glass plate was half filled, and she raised it to her lips. When the front door of the apartment slammed, she banged it down in the saucer.
“Emanuel?”
There was no answer.
Her voice rose. “E-man-uel!”
She got up and walked to the hallway, where he stood. His blank, slow-eyed expression at once aggravated her anger. She said, “Do you know what time it is, young man? Do you?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. He just stood there like a glob, his dull, lusterless eyes like the eyes of a fish dying on a hook.
“It’s a quarter past two!”
“Oh.”
“You were finished at a quarter to twelve. Well, we missed the movie,” she said. “The picture went on at twelve-thirty.”
“I’m sorry,” Manny said.
“Sorry! You knew I wanted to see that picture.”
“I’m sorry,” Manny mumbled. “You should have gone.”
“Alone, I suppose! My own son isn’t thoughtful enough to get himself home here in time to go with me. Dawdling! You were dawdling, weren’t you?”
Manny shook his head. He turned from her slightly.
“Well, we missed the movie!”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated senselessly.
He started to walk back to his room. His mother said something as he was midway down the hall, and he stopped to hear.
She said, “If we went now, we’d get in right in the middle of Tarzan and the Leopard Woman, and I’m not going to sit through that trash!” She said, “Well, my day is ruined. Thanks to you, Emanuel!”
10
Love-bitten, smitten, smitten —
Sittin’ in a daze,
Goin’ through a phase …
— “Love-Bitten”
JOHNNY CAME UP THE WALK with his father on that muggy Thursday night, the first week of August. He saw her standing just inside the lobby, waiting for the elevator, and he tried to avoid meeting her eyes.
His father was saying, “What would you say to a vacation, Johnny? You’ve worked pretty hard this summer. Maybe you’d like the rest of the month off, before school starts again. Would you like that?”
He had his arm clamped affectionately around Johnny’s shoulders. They had come home together from the office, where Johnny was helping out as a messenger. He got $1.25 an hour for it, and he was saving to buy parts for a hi-fi he planned to build himself.
“I still have thirty dollars to go,” he answered. He had not seen her since that night on the roof.
“Maybe we can work something out so you can have the thirty dollars and a vacation,” his father said.
Johnny said, “It would be swell if we could, all right.”
“I think we can if we put our heads together, John.”
She looked up at them when they came into the lobby, and then away. She shifted a carton of root beer from one hand to the other, and pressed the button of the elevator again, although the red light indicated it was on the way down. Her white cotton dress had a tiny violet design; it was sleeveless and flimsy with a full skirt and a lace petticoat that showed a fraction of an inch beneath the hem. She wore the same sandals on her feet, and an infinitesimal gold chain on her bare ankle.
Johnny’s father said, “Hello, Lynn.”
“Hi, Mr. Wylie … J-Johnny.”
Johnny said, “Greetings.” His tone did not sound as offhand as he had anticipated. He looked down at the carton of root beer. “Getting drunk again t’night, I see,” he said.
Lynn Leonard giggled, and then looked at his face for the first time. She wasn’t mad at him; he could tell.
She said to his father, “How do you like Johnny’s ‘tash, Mr. Wylie?”
“That’s a new name for it,” Richard Wylie answered with a smile.
“I told her that,” Johnny said. “I told her it was a goofy name for a mustache.”
“If you want my frank opinion, Lynn, I don’t think it adds much.” He chuckled. “Maybe you can influence him to take a razor to it. His father certainly can’t.”
“Me?” the girl said. “Me!” She hit her head with the palm of her hand in a gesture of mock shock. “I don’t have anything to say far as Johnny’s concerned.”
“Darn right!” Johnny agreed, embarrassed. “Christmas! Christmas and Easter anyhow!”
The elevator reached the lobby then and the three got inside. Mr. Wylie studied ‘his folded newspaper, and Johnny stood off to the far end of the square box, away from her. She looked straight ahead at the door, and he feigned an absorbed interest in his hands, examining them assiduously. After a few moments’ silence, she said, “Got any new records lately, Johnny?”
“I got the new Brubeck album,” Johnny muttered, intent on his knuckles.
“Is it good?”
“You wouldn’t even know who Brubeck is, probably.”
“I’d like to hear the music. I like music.”
“Me too.”
“Johnny?”
“Huh?”
“Could I listen to it sometime? We’ve got a vic.” “Suits me,” Johnny said.
“I’ve got the Hilltoppers singing ‘P.S. I Love You.’ I like that one. I’ve got ‘Love-Bitten,’ too, by the Three Bells.”
“That stuff’s too goopy,” Johnny said. “I hate a lot of goop.”
“I don’t mind if it isn’t too goopy.”
“ ‘Love-Bitten’ gives me a big pain you know where,” Johnny said.” ‘S all you hear all over the place. ‘Love-bitten, smitten, smitten.’ Musta been Einstein wrote that one, ‘s got such good lyrics.”
Johnny’s father folded his newspaper and said, “We set a record high today. Ninety-seven degrees! That’s hot weather, real hot weather.”
The elevator jerked to a st
op and they all got out. Before Lynn turned to walk down to her apartment, she said, “If you’re not doing anything tonight, Johnny, it’d be swell to hear your records. Mom and Dad are going to see ‘Teahouse of the August Moon.’ I got some root beer.”
Johnny said, “I don’t know whether I’m doing anything or not. If nothing turns up I might lug ‘em over. You got three speed?”
“What do you think?” She giggled. “It’s the Dark Ages?”
“Who can tell any more?” Johnny said.
• • •
After dinner Johnny went back to his room. He snapped on the radio and walked over to his bureau. The room had light-green walls and dark-green curtains and bedspread. There were pictures of Stan Getz, Fats Navarro, Erroll Garner, the Johnny Guarnieri Trio, and Louis Armstrong, which he had sent away for, and which his mother had had framed for his walls last Christmas. They hung in a long straight row over his bed. Attached to the mirror over his dresser there was a piece of dried palm shaped like a cross, which he had saved since last Easter, and a rosary looped over a wooden knob. The words to “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home:?” and “Fine and Dandy” were ripped from a songbook and Scotch-taped to the upper left-hand corner of the mirror. A picture of himself and Flip and Manny, standing with their arms around one another in front of school, was contained in a plastic frame, set next to an old hard orange Johnny had been saving for seven years. Across the top of the photograph of the threesome, Johnny had printed in red ink: “The Three Musketeers, or A Day at the Zoo (Monkey Cage!).
From the radio, a woman’s passion-thick voice whispered, “Are you going to leave me like this, Frederick?”
Johnny hooted and slapped his knee. “Yeah, baby,” he said, strolling over to turn the dial of the radio, “I’m cutting out on you.”
Music filled the room then; a crooner sang, “They try to tell us we’re too young, too young to really be in love….” Johnny walked back to the bureau and looked into the mirror. He held his arms out and opened his mouth as though he were singing the song. He screwed his face up in an earnest expression, as though he were the vocalist. He did it until the song ended, and then he smiled winningly. His head bent as if he were receiving applause, and he said to his reflection, “Thank you. Thank you.” Then he took his military brushes and ran them through his hair, touching them gently to his mustache. He ambled over to his bed and flopped down on his back.
A knock came at his door, and he called out,” ‘Min.”
Richard Wylie stood in the doorway, tamping tobacco down into the bowl of a pipe he held in his hand. “Before you go, Johnny,” he said, “I thought we might discuss a way you could earn that extra money without working at the office.”
“Who says I’m going anyplace?”
“Aren’t you going over to Lynn’s?”
“That one,” Johnny said, pretending disgust. “Cripes, goes around calling a mustache a ‘tash.”
“Well,” his father said, “in any case, shall we talk about it now?”
“Pull up a toadstool,” Johnny said.
His father sat down in the chair before Johnny’s desk. He lit his pipe and sat back relaxed, his hands resting at the back of his head. “Here’s my proposition,” he began. “If you’ll promise to work out with me a way you can take both music and prelaw courses in school, I’ll see that you get the thirty dollars.”
“Music courses!” Johnny said. “I don’t want to study piano or learn all about long-hair stuff.”
“If you’re going into the field, fellow, you have to know your stuff. You said that was the field you were interested in.”
“I suppose Rodgers and Hammerstein went to college.”
“As a matter of fact, they did.”
Johnny said, “I bet most of the disc jockeys didn’t.”
“Those that didn’t, fellow, probably wish they had. In any field, John, you’ve got to know your stuff. Now, I hope you’ll eventually change your mind and go into law. That’s why I’d like you to carry a prelaw course. But you don’t have to go on if you don’t want to.”
“Don’t worry,” Johnny said, “I won’t.”
“But at least start off on the right foot. And take your music right along with it.”
“Aw, I don’t know,” Johnny said. “Cripes, it’s so far off.”
“Not as far as you think. You’re fifteen, John.” “Sweet fifteen.”
“Well, what do you say? Will you try to work something out with me?” “I suppose.”
“That’s my boy!” Richard Wylie said. He stood up and looked down at Johnny, who was sprawled on the bed. “We might even take a few trips to some of the colleges and look over the campuses. You know, you’ll be sixteen in a few months, and I suppose I’ll have to teach you how to drive. We could drive up to some of them together this summer.”
“Someday I want a little bright-red MG,” Johnny said. “They can go like the devil.”
His father laughed. “First things first.” He dug into his pants pocket and brought out a money clip. He took a five from the pack and put it on Johnny’s desk. “That’s severance pay, fellow. You’re fired.”
Johnny said, “Hot damn!”
When his father left, Johnny got up and took the bill and reached for his wallet. There were six or seven celluloid slots for pictures and identification cards in the wallet, and Johnny looked them over after he stuffed the five in the money section. There was a picture of his mother and his father and himself, taken three years ago up on Cape Cod. There was an identification card upon which Johnny had written after the words, “In case of accident please notify”: “City Morgue.” There was a picture of a sad-eyed basset hound, and one of a Mark-5 Jaguar, both cut from magazines. And there was a group picture of Eddie Condon and his orchestra, which he had clipped from Downbeat. Johnny closed the wallet, zipped if up, and whistled along with the music over the radio. He got up and walked around the room. He was frowning and snapping his fingers to the rhythm.
“Oh, when the saints!” he sang softly to himself. “Oh, when the saints! Oh, when the saints come march-ing in …
Again he stopped before the mirror and looked at his reflection. He felt his mustache, then opened his lips and looked at his teeth. He stepped back with his arms on his hips and looked fully at himself. He said very seriously, “Hi. I brought my records.” Then he turned, crossed the room, and shut off the radio.
“Hi. I …”
“Hello, Johnny,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d come.” “I can’t stay long,” he said. “Did you bring your records?” “What do you think?” “I don’t know, Johnny.”
“That’s what I came over for, isn’t it?” he grumbled.
He walked past her into the large living room. It was furnished nicely, less modern than the Wylies’ apartment, leaning toward the early-American style, but warm and comfortable-looking. Johnny had never been inside before. He plopped himself down in a wide, diamond-patterned stuffed chair and said, “One beer. No head, please.”
She laughed, her face flushing with some small excitement, and she said, “I’ll go into the kitchen and bring us some. I’ll only be a minute.”
Johnny looked at his watch with an exaggerated swing of his arm. “I’ll time you,” he said….
It was much later when she suggested they try dancing. They had been sitting opposite each other in that room, awkwardly becoming used to the fact that they were alone there together. Johnny had set up the records on the automatic player and turned the volume up very loud, so that when either said anything, it was necessary to shout, but they did not talk very much. When they did speak, it was only to make some unnecessary comment, to cover up their shy embarrassment. They said:
“Root beer! The Bowery’s favorite beverage!”
“I love a trumpet, Johnny. Really! I’d rather listen to a trumpet than anything in the whole world.”
“Boy, the joint is jumping tonight, all right.”
“Will another drink make you drunk, J
ohnny?”
They did not look at each other’s eyes at all, and they were both painfully aware of this. When she handed him a second glass of the root beer, she held the glass with her fingers near its rim, and he reached for it far down at its base, so that their fingers couldn’t possibly meet. Once when she passed him, her skirt brushed his knee, and he jumped back in his seat. Without knowing why, she apologized, and he answered, “’S O.K.”
Once he had looked at her dress, where it dipped down from her throat to the crease between the breasts that he, John Wylie, had touched on the second day of August in the year 1953. She had felt his eyes there, and they had both become immediately conscious of their own breathing, and, in that swift moment that soon passed, immensely lonely and confused.
Once while the records were changing, a second of silence seemed to split the room in half with its noise.
It was long after all of this had happened and nothing really had happened that she said, “Why don’t we dance, Johnny? It would be fun.”
“I can’t dance fast.”
“Muskrat Ramble” was coming out loudly over the speaker. She was already on her feet, and she had kicked off her sandals.
“I’ll teach you. Want to?”
“I’m not the type.”
“Yes, you are. You are too!”
“I can’t even dance slow. I can’t even dance.”
“I’ll teach you, Johnny,” she said. “C’mon.” She went to him where he was sitting in the chair and pulled at his arm. “C’mon.”
Grumbling, he got to his feet. He watched her for a moment while she did a step, and he said, “Uh-uh. I could never do that.”
“Try!”
“It’s sort of like this?” He tried. “That’s it. That’s good, Johnny.”
“It’s terrible!” he growled, but he did not stop. Then she took his hand, and together they were doing the steps, fast. She was smiling, and he was trying to suppress a smile, and both of them were glad. They danced faster and faster. He kept looking anxiously at his feet, and trying to make them go the same way hers went, and she kept telling him he was good, and she knew he could do it.
Her quick, agonized scream of pain finished their frenzy. Johnny had stepped fully on her bare foot with his heavy leather shoe. She looked as though she would cry, and Johnny stood helplessly staring at her, his arms dangling at his sides, his young eyes concerned and sorry.
