Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken

by Di Filippo, Paul

  Squatting to make eye-contact with the victim of prankish Tabasco insufflation, Rory said, “Come help me with the store, Nerf. I really need you.”

  “Why should I? You never pay me anymore.”

  Nerf had nailed Rory there. Lately any spare cash at Honeyman’s Heroes had been as nonexistent as a Texan’s humility. Whatever receipts came in daily went out just as fast, on supplies and a hundred other standard operating expenses. And just last month Rory had gotten the notice of a significant rent raise, inspired, he was certain, by the ongoing gentrification of the city and the generally booming twenty-first century U.S. economy. (Booming, that was, for certain privileged classes.) Rory was barely scraping by, letting bills pile up, wearing old clothes till they practically fell off his spare frame, drinking no-name beer.

  And now an essential human element of his business actually wanted to get paid. It was only fair. But still—

  Rory’s thoughts threatened to spin out of control. Money. What made money so special, so hard to come by, so easy to disperse? First Tiran had ragged him on his debts this morning, now Nerfball hurled accusations at him. Filthy lucre seemed at the root of all Rory’s troubles. He’d be so happy if he weren’t always worrying about money. If only dough grew on trees. If only he possessed the inexhaustible purse of folklore. Even if it disgorged only a steady stream of pennies, it would be enough.…

  Desperate, Rory pleaded. “Listen, I will pay you all I owe you, plus give you a raise. I promise, Nerf.”

  Nerfball sneered, an expression rendered even more dire due to his bloodshot eyes. “Yeah, I bet. With what? Funny money?”

  Rory opened his mouth, intending indignantly to deny the charge. But he found to his surprise that he just couldn’t lie anymore. Why contend against the obvious and inevitable? He’d likely go out of business any day now, owing all his creditors immense sums. Should he compound his imminent guilt by promising this innocent helper more than he could give?

  Tensions tore at Rory’s brain like linked horses straining in opposite directions. Cognitive dissonance held sway, as a sense of responsibility and duty swung in the balance against a fuck-it-all desire for utter abdication.

  Then, without warning, amidst this intense manic despair, inspiration struck. Born from Rory’s mental turbulence, a genuine vision appeared.

  Clear and undeniable as cancer under a microscope, Rory saw an apparition. A big antique safe, its door open. And spilling out, sheaves of currency. But not standard U.S. bills. Rather, some kind of strangely colored, eccentric scrip.

  Rory would recall this moment for the rest of his life. His ultimate feelings toward this road-to-Damascus experience would be hard to qualify. Perhaps the mingled horror and pride felt by Dr Victor F., upon witnessing the first galvanic twitch in a corpses stitched muscles, might best convey the emotion.

  His voice oddly confident, Rory said, “Yes, Nerf, I do intend to pay you in funny money.”

  This arrogant admission got Nerfball’s attention. “Huh?”

  Rory scrabbled in his pants pockets for paper and writing tool. Where was Hilario Fumento when you needed him? The best he could come up with was an old unpaid electric bill and a lime-green crayon some kid had left behind in the store. He tucked the flashlight between chin and shoulder and began to scribble on the back of the electric company notice, reciting aloud what he was writing.

  “This paper redeemable for ten sandwiches at Honeyman’s Heroes. Signed, Rory Honeyman.”

  For good measure, he sketched a rough sandwich after his signature. The drawing ended up looking like that of a book with loose pages. Rory handed the paper to Nerfball, who took it suspiciously.

  “This will be one day’s wages, Nerf. Its worth about forty dollars retail. That’s fair, isn’t it? No taxes taken out either.”

  “What good will this do me? You already give me free food. More than’s good for me.”

  Rory, still in the grip of his inspiring daemon, rolled right over this pitiful objection. “Right, sure, enough food for you alone. You’ll continue to get that. But isn’t everyone else in this dump always starving? Make them pool their hard cash—whatever you can convince them ten sandwiches is worth—and give it to you in exchange for this coupon. Then you make up the ten sandwiches at work just before the end of the day, hand the coupon back to me, and show up here like Ward Cleaver bringing home the bacon.”

  “They’d all have to be BLTs?”

  “No! I was just speaking metaphorically.”

  “Gee, I don’t know—”

  “People will love you for feeding them. No more nasty jokes. Plus you’ll have cash in your pocket.”

  “Oh, all right! If this is the only payment I’m going to get, I might as well take it. I’m sick of sitting here feeling sorry for myself anyway. I may as well be working at the one thing I’m good at.”

  Nerfball made tentative movements to emerge, and Rory stood up to give him room. Somehow the big man twisted around beneath the desk and began to back out, sweatpants-clad ass hippo-wide. He said something that was muffled by his head-down posture.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, ‘What’s this coupon called?’”

  Rory experienced a total stoppage of thought for just a millisecond. “Does it have to have a name?”

  Standing now, Nerfball brushed dust from his pants. “Yes.”

  Three topics have more slang terms associated with them than any other area of human endeavor, a valid gauge of their importance.

  Sex, drunkenness—

  —and money.

  Ackjay, ammunition, bacon, ballast, beans, bees and honey, berries, blunt, brass, cabbage, cash, chink, chips, coconuts, dead presidents, dibs, dinero, do-re-mi, dough, ducats, the evil, fish, gelt, gingerbread, gravy, grease, greenbacks, horse nails, jackson, jake, juice, kale, lettuce, long green, lucre, mazuma, moolah, mopus, needful, nuggets, oil, oofitish, pay dirt, pelf, pony, rhino, rocks, rubbish, sand, scratch, shekels, simoleans, smash, stuff, stumpy, sugar, swag, tin, tomatoes, wampum …

  Those are a few.

  Rory reached deep down into some mythic well of American vernacular and came up with a word he would have earlier sworn he didn’t even know.

  “Spondulix. Its called spondulix.”

  “Is that singular,” quizzed Nerfball, suddenly smiling archly, “or plural?”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, feeling positively drunk, Rory replied, “Both.”

  Chapter Two

  Honey and the Rock

  A little-known aspect of pop sociology called nominative determinism intrigued Rory Honeyman for a very good reason. Except for a concatenation of historical accidents, he would have fallen under its purview himself. Much as an ant elevated to sentience by genetic engineering might diligently continue to track developments in entomology, Rory collected examples of nominative determinism. He noted each instance with an almost subconscious feeling of brotherly sympathy. The plight of these subjects touched him somewhere numinous, evoking fragmentary ghosts of an alternate Rory from another timeline.

  Nominative determinism was the mock-ponderous designation for the study of people whose names matched their professions. Such folks were legion. Random reading of The New York Times during slow hours at the store had provided Rory with a large file of examples.

  The “sufferers” from nominative determinism seemed mostly a cheerful lot. From the evidence in the newspaper, most of them led quite happy and productive lives. But it could not be denied that they all carried around a certain ridiculous piece of psychic and social baggage. These folks—whose ranks Rory had barely escaped himself—always struck him as akin to a Fifties matron toting around an alligator-hide pocketbook actually shaped like an alligator, complete down to the beady glass eyes. Substance and symbol had been conflated in an unseemly mishmash.

  Not only that, but victims of nominative determinism seemed to advertise the heavy hand of a cosmic fate. As if foredoomed from birth to land in certain professions, these peo
ple appeared to deny the great American tradition of self-determination. Or else they appeared weak-willed, gravitating spinelessly toward the most likely career choice. In either case, their cheap date with their surname’s destiny disconcerted.

  Surely the Filipino prelate Cardinal Sin held the number one spot of most famous ND sufferer. But just a single year’s cursory reading of The Times had provided Rory with the following:

  • Sgt Klue, member of the Toronto police force;

  • Professor Starrfield, astronomer;

  • Joseph Badway, mobster;

  • Mr Ward well, lawyer;

  • James Fish, head of the Great Lakes Commission;

  • Earl Wolf, naturalist;

  • Lt Shotwell, officer in the U.S. Armed Forces;

  • James Breeding, livestock inseminator;

  • John Justice, FBI agent;

  • Fred Sipper, president of a bottled-water company;

  • Dr Fullilove, specialty not mentioned, but undoubtedly possessed of a hearty bedside manner;

  • Harold Stall, government spokesperson; and finally,

  • Gary Shilling, economist.

  By no means did Rory read The Times every day. Usually he was too busy. He kept the paper in the store for his customers, along with The New York Post, The Daily News, and The Hoboken Reporter. Who knew how many such names he had missed? But even the names that presented themselves were enough to cause Rory to pause in his casual perusal, stare up at the grimy antique punched-tin ceiling of Honeyman’s Heroes, and muse about the meanderings of his own life.

  If things had gone just a little bit differently for him and his ancestors.…

  * * *

  Yesterday, June 1, 1932, had been the day of “The Great Change.” Four hundred thousand dollars in debt, in the midst of the Depression without an end in sight to these worldwide hard times, the Community of True Inspiration had voted to separate the sacred and secular aspects of their community for more efficient functioning. No longer would the seven Amana colonies of Iowa—Amana, East Amana, Middle Amana, West Amana, South Amana, High Amana, and Homestead—share all material goods communally, according to their spiritual tenets. Instead one Society would handle Church matters, and another Society would handle the Community’s business affairs: the farms, the woolen mills, the furniture shops. A closed joint-stock company, this secular arm would count as its stockholders all the adults of the seven villages, each of whom would receive one share of Class A common stock worth $80.69. addition, further shares of less valuable prior distributive stock would be disbursed based proportionately on past service.

  The villages would be run like a real business now. Many Amanans registered protests against this heresy. These newfangled corporate practices were a betrayal of the principles that their sect had been founded under, nearly one hundred years ago in Europe. But the plan had passed by majority vote at a meeting conducted by the seventy elders, and even the most vehement dissenters had eventually toned down their grumblings and fallen into line with The Great Change. Really, no other way to deal with the money shortage had presented itself. To insist on other options was to invite factionalism. No one wanted to see the colonies go under for the sake of some rigid fundamentalism unable to meet changing times flexibly.

  Well, almost no one.

  A sturdy buckboard stood outside Horst Honigmann’s house in South Amana, a small collection of plain-faced homes and barren-shelved stores and weather-distressed barns plunked down in the middle of a vast flatness tessellated with late-spring crops in a hundred shades of green. Hitched to the buckboard was a sway-backed, dun-colored horse named Axel, The horse nibbled grass by the lane’s margins in a leery fashion, frequently looking up as if worried about what labors it would soon be called up to perform. It seemed to sense the unique qualities of the day, and consequently suffered from nervous equine doubts about its abilities to live up to demanding new standards.

  Perhaps the unconventional cargo of the vehicle—not hay or livestock or lumber—contributed to Axel’s unease. The creaking buckboard was piled high with household goods: cornshuck mattresses, ladderback chairs, a scarred, sidegated table with its wings down, kerosene lamps, several worn suitcases, a black leather-strapped steamer trunk, a few books tied in a bundle with hairy twine.… Stout ropes lashed the whole precarious assemblage down.

  Perched upon the high front seat, two people studiously avoided looking at each other.

  Freyda Honigmann exhibited tumbled masses of hair the color of peaches, gold shot with russet. Forty-two years old, she had somehow maintained through the rigors of an often harsh farmbound life the flawless white complexion and unlined cheerful features that had first attracted Horst Honigmann to her twenty years ago, when she had been known as Miss Freyda Storch. Although of course even her adoring husband had to admit that her once-trim figure had undeniably filled out, to the tune in fact of an extra forty pounds. German potato salad, cinnamon bread, ham and sauerkraut, roast beef, cole slaw, thick frosted cakes, rhubarb pie, Colony-brewed wine and beer.… If cooking had been an Olympic event, Freyda would have taken the gold.

  Freyda wore a look of despair now that sat uneasily on her normally benevolent and happy features.

  On Freyda’s left, holding Axel’s traces, sat Rudy Honigmann. At eighteen, Rudy patterned his father physically. He had his father’s corn-colored hair worn in the same brushcut. He had his father’s ruddy skin and bulb-tipped nose. He had his father’s brawny arms and straight-shouldered posture. Temperamentally, however, he shared his mother’s easy-going nature and quirky imagination.

  At the moment, Rudy also shared his mother’s unease. Between the boy, the horse and the woman stretched a taut net of sympathetic tension which the boy and his mother sought not to exacerbate by appearing to trade sympathetic eye-contact with each other. Axel exhibited no such wisdom, however, frequently striving to capture the attention of his owners.

  Rudy’s nervous caution manifested itself as a wandering gaze. He stared down at the dusty road. He contemplated Axel’s fly-dotted rump. He lifted his eyes to the translucent Delft-blue sky. In short, he let his gaze roam everywhere except toward his mother or toward the source of their common anxiety.

  Horst Honigmann stood beside the buckboard. Dressed in patched coveralls, faded blue shirt and scratched work boots (from the seams of which protruded a straw or two cemented in place with manure), Horst worked his beefy jaw like a beaver in a lumberyard. At age fifty, Horst knew himself all too well. He was stubborn as a brace of politicians, dogmatic as a goat. But fair. Fair and pragmatic. He knew when he had lost an honest battle, knew when the tide flowed against him, knew when he should fold his hand, quit the game, and clear the house.

  Standing uneasily next to Honigmann was Torsten Storch, one of South Amana’s elders, but more significantly, Honigmann’s father-in-law. Storch, a small man, faced the world with a visage like a dried fruit shielded from further dangerous desiccating exposure by the wide brim of a black hat.

  The cachinnation of crows jagged the clover-scented air. June sunlight—sharing precisely the same quality as that which would almost seventy years later shine down upon Rory Honeyman as he pondered the locked door of his sandwich store half a continent away—now spilled benevolently down over Rory’s great-grandfather, grandparents, and teenaged father.

  Storch and Honigmann seemed inclined to continue a long-running fruitless argument right up to the point of the buckboard’s foredoomed departure. No other citizens intruded: the men and older children worked in the fields, the women and babies stayed inside.

  “To leave is to weaken the community,” said Storch. “Surely even a stubborn perfectionist such as yourself will admit that.”

  “The community has already weakened itself more than I ever could by agreeing to The Great Change. We have severed the bonds between God and mortal work. Nothing I do can have any consequences greater than this fatal blow. I am leaving now solely for the salvation of my own soul and conscienc
e, and my family’s.”

  Young Rudy Honigmann looked up from his boots then, as if he might have wished to say something on his own behalf, as a certified member of the Honigmann clan. One peripheral look at his father’s stern face, however, thoroughly dissuaded him, and he resumed studying the woodgrain of the buckboard’s footrest.

  “Who will tend your already planted crops?” demanded Storch.

  Honigmann spat into the obliging dust. “Since the Inspirationists seem to care only for money nowadays, I’m sure you will be able to persuade someone to take the fields over. Just offer the wage slaves more shares.” The emphasized words reeked of unsavory corruption in Honigmann’s mouth. “And also, many outsiders are looking for work.”

  Storch removed his hat. His white hair lay thinly across a sunburnt scalp. “Horst, you know your words to be false. We care no more for money now than we ever did. Our heavenly dreams continue to inspire us. But we cannot operate in a vacuum, we do not inhabit a self-sufficient island. We have to deal with bankers and merchants who do not subscribe to our beliefs. If we intend to survive and flourish in this world, we sometimes have to bend our principles a little.”

  “I prefer to abandon the pretense entirely then. Why should I continue to live here, among sanctimonious hypocrites, when I find unrepentant pagans less disagreeable? The Great Change has made our way of life a mockery. I do not care to be continually reminded of what we have lost. Better to plunge into hell than live in a corrupt heaven. Now are you going to pay out our shares or not?”

  Storch replaced his hat and sighed. “You know how deeply we’re in debt. You’re cutting the community’s cash to the bone by demanding this payment.”

  “You should have thought of all the implications of money before you switched to using it then.”