by Bill Scheft
“No. We’re getting ice cream at the Howard Johnson’s.”
“Mort,” said Sheila, “do you really think that’s such a good idea?”
“No,” he said. “Friendly’s is a good idea. Howard Johnson’s is the cotton gin.”
Morton Martin Spell, writer/author/intellectual, loved ice cream like someone who wasn’t a writer/author/intellectual. There had been more than a few nights just after Jeopardy when College Boy would have this exchange with his uncle:
“Mort, what do you want to do for dinner?”
“I’ve decided to give you the night off.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m quite sure.”
“Okay, go nuts.”
“Go nuts” meant an entire pint of Haägen-Dazs coffee for supper rather than a scant half-pint for dessert. College Boy would serve it packed and stacked out of a rocks glass and wrap a napkin around the glass to give Mort’s hands a little traction. It worked consistently as no mood elevator could. Or any sleeping aid. The effort required to lap up the remnants inside of the glass usually left Mort exhausted and barely able to stay awake during the mandatory face cleaning that followed. By nine, he was down for the night.
Haägen-Dazs coffee was damn good, but Howard Johnson’s had a god named mocha that demanded Mort Spell’s worship and drew him nigh. Nigh being Vernon Center.
This was no splash and go. The whole sticky business took forty-five minutes. They sat at the counter because Mort liked its press box feel. College Boy bought a rocks glass from the bar next door for five dollars and walked the HoJo counterboy through the packing-stacking process. “Damn good job, kid,” Mort told the boy. “We’re bringing you up to the varsity next week for the Brown game.”
Two seats down, Sheila had a cup of coffee and watched this otherwise tragically refined man go to work on his Mocha Lisa. Near the very end, when the tremors seemed to work in his favor and help make the intra-tumbler tonguing more thorough, she nudged College Boy. “See this?” she muttered. “This is why I had to get out of the business. The competition.”
That was the unquestioned height of conversation between College Boy and Sheila on the drive to New York. She went through her schedule for the next twelve hours a few times (Sheila would drop them off, drive to Roosevelt Island, clean the gym, do forty-five on the treadmill, wake up early, move her morning workout with Q-Dog to five P.M., clean her Friday and Thursday apartments at 301 East Sixty-fifth and meet him at Dr. Zing’s by noon.) or until College Boy stopped saying “That’s too much, Sheila.” She played the polite host behind the wheel and as soon as the signal was strong enough, tuned the radio to the all-sports station, WFAN, even though he hadn’t asked.
“Are you sure you want to listen to this?”
“Yeah. I love the idiots who call. Do you know Doris from Rego Park, with the cough? Hello (ech) Jody, why aren’t the Mets (ech, ech) not hitting (ech) behind (ech) the run(ech!) ner.”
“Ah, no.”
“I’m very disappointed, College Boy.”
On second thought, that may have been the height of conversation. Mostly, College Boy was quiet. Especially after Vernon Center, when he began to feel exactly like what he was. A passenger. A mere passenger. The view in any direction was scary. He could look to his right and ask himself, “Where am I now?” Or look to his left and ask this woman, handling things much too well for his own good, “Where are you taking me?” Or look behind at his sleeping uncle and not know. That left straight ahead, where all the questions collided, or in his lap, where Thursday’s New York Post lay open to page five.
“You’re very quiet.”
“Well, if you were me, what would you talk about?”
“Well, who are you?”
“What?”
“Well, if I’m you, who are you, me?”
“No, I’m me.”
“Me me, or me you?”
“All right, Sheila. I’ll ask you one question. Why are you handling this so well and I’m not?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Great. Let’s turn up the radio.” Three minutes later…“Okay, Doris from Rego Park, you’re on The Fan….”
It was certainly not the intention of the Yale Club to create lodging that was best suited for the recent graduate who needed a relatively inexpensive place to pass out in Midtown Manhattan and wasn’t especially picky about the quality of bedding on which he landed face-first. That’s just how things turned out. The privilege of attending Yale was rewarded by the greater privilege of recreating your undergraduate housing. The rest of the place—the tap room, the restaurant, the library, the squash courts, the pool, the game room—had the smug coziness, varnished oak elitism, and extra-dry martini precision of a private club, which it was. The rooms were, well, rooms. Their starkness implied what was already known: Yale men, if they’re smart, and by God they are, need not have to cough up real hotel money.
The bathroom was the problem. It was designed to hold one hygienically self-sufficient man. College Boy and Mort had not foreseen the difficulties in suddenly making their lifestyle a traveling circus. Somebody, okay Sheila, had said “We’ve got to go to New York,” and bags were packed with no space for consequences. And this bathroom was a consequence. All of College Boy’s installations that had transformed shitting and showering at Vinnin Estates from debilitating possibilities to exhausting realities—the raised cushioned seat and supporting bars around the toilet, the walker and chair in the shower—they were still at Vinnin Estates. The Yale Club had no handicapped toilets in its rooms (A Yale man handicapped? Maybe if he forgot his corkscrew, but that’s it.), and the spacious facilities they had been blessed with made a 747 lavatory seem like Xanadu.
So, it was just Morton Martin Spell ’37, his cane, and the strong neck of his nephew. They rigged a system where Mort would stand in front of the toilet and lean on his cane while dropping his pants. College Boy would then wedge himself in the eleven inches of floor space between Mort’s feet and the shower. He would bow his head and Mort would let go of his cane and grab around his neck. “Bend your knees and hang on, Mort.” Slowly, he would lower his uncle onto the seat, his compass due south, his vantage point a seventy-six-year-old post-operative penis. Once Mort had touched down safely and released, College Boy held him down by the shoulders so his tremors would not pitch him off the pot. Once he was finished, the process was reversed, except while Mort was back up and leaning on his cane, College Boy had additional honors of wiping and repanting.
You can bet they both had remarks to make, but during this procedure, there was no room, literally, for laughter. When they were finally out of the bathroom after the first run-through, Mort, while catching his breath, wheezed, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Aristocrats.” That line kept College Boy punchy until one-thirty, then four-thirty, when Mort woke up and they were on again.
It was now five A.M. and Mort was good until nature’s wake-up call at eight. College Boy was not going back to sleep. He pulled Thursday’s New York Post off the foot of his bed and again stared at the good-sized article on page five in whatever light came through the corners of the bathroom door. He had been done reading the thing since ten P.M., after he bought the Post on the way out of Vernon Center. Now he just stared.
Monday Burial for Dirt King?
Hold on to your shovels.
The verdict in the trial of former Parks Department employee Ernest “The Dirt King” Giovia, scheduled for this morning, has been postponed until Monday morning at 9:00 A.M. after four jurors, including the foreman, contracted food poisoning at the hotel where they had been sequestered the last week.
Giovia, indicted last September on two counts of racketeering, four counts of extortion, and four counts of embezzlement of city funds, was fired from his job with the Parks Department eleven years ago. In five days of withering testimony, the prosecution paraded a steady stream of witnesses who testified that Giovia, once off the city payroll, nonetheless kept his office and uno
fficial position as “The Dirt King” through an elaborate system of kick-backs, threats, and physical harm.
Giovia’s conviction has virtually never been in doubt. The jury deliberated less than a hour before court adjourned Wednesday, and now the only question confronting the jurors seems to be what caused the food poisoning rather than if they will find Giovia guilty on all counts.
Lawyers for Giovia, who served a year in jail in the early seventies for unarmed robbery, have unsuccessfully tried to cut a deal since his arraignment, and their client refused to take the stand during his trial. He did not remain silent, however, several times mumbling “This f—ing guy…” as each state’s witness was called.
District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office is expected to recommend a minimum sentence of ten years in prison. With parole and time served, The Dirt King may be released in six years.
It was the first time College Boy had seen a Post since August. He began to flip to the back and see what numbers made up the ninth race triple at the Big A. He stopped just after he realized he didn’t do that anymore. What have you done with College Boy?
He was not going back to sleep. And Mort was good till eight o’clock. Quarter past five Friday morning in March, Manhattan dark as the future, but yet somehow, College Boy had a place to go. He showered and dressed as fast as any fourth-grader and before the Yale Club Pinkertons could bust him for walking through the lobby without a tie, he was heading west toward the park with the darkness at his back.
The security guard at WLLS-102 recognized him. The guy, Clyde or Willis—one of the old Knicks—trumpeted, “Your attention, please, College Boy returns!” and pencil-whipped him past the new receptionist on the studio floor. This girl ignored him out of necessity, already fielding calls from fans whose encyclopedic allegiance to Dan Drake had somehow turned an offhand remark he’d made six years ago (“You know, the show is much better if you call the station and listen to all four hours while you’re on hold.” ) into a kind of Studio 54 phone bank. College Boy slipped easily through the halls, past the same three large retired cops (“Hey, look who decided to come in….”), and into the studio, where Dan Drake sat alone, head down, hard at work on a Hershey bar. He took a full beat, the beat only five guys have ever been funny enough to take, grabbed the nearest memo pad and never looked up.
“Ah, while you were out…Luca Brazzi called to confirm lunch.”
He threw an unopened Hershey bar, hard, which College Boy backhanded. It was Dan Drake’s last Hershey bar. That’s how happy he was to see College Boy.
“Can you hang out?”
“Yeah, a little while.”
“That’s all we can do today anyway.” Dan Drake called down to the front security desk and told Clyde to let him know when Carl or Dr. Blob came in. “So, how about your buddy The Dirt King heading for the old Graybar Hotel?”
“It’s funny—”
“How are you now, good? Dynamite. Do you have any idea what’s going on here? Would it kill you to stop thinking about yourself for a second?”
As it happened, College Boy had a second. Dan Drake, twenty minutes away from becoming Dan Drake, spoke in a voice too soft for broadcasting. And too choppy. The softness was hurt. The choppiness was betrayal. Three weeks ago, Carl and Dr. Blob had signed a deal to do their own morning show at another station, WCRK, Crack-105. They had wanted to start immediately, and Dan Drake, who kept waiting for them to tell him of their plans, was more than willing for them to get the fuck out. Unfortunately, the station manager at WLLS wouldn’t let them out of their contract, which ran through July 1 and would force them to have their big Crack-105 debut in the Arbitron drive-time wasteland of summer. Sound thinking, except rather than pay to keep Carl and Dr. Blob off the air, he required them to come to work until the end of the deal. After threatening to give himself a disease that needed four months of repeat broadcasts to cure, Dan Drake eventually got the station manager to agree to keep them out of the studio after May 15.
That was still six weeks away, and although Dan Drake drove through success with the self-pity pedal perpetually jammed to the floor, this time, he was justified. Carl and Dr. Blob now came to work, when they came to work, with the energy and passion of Eastern bloc factory workers. These days, if Carl or Dr. Blob added anything to the broadcast it was by accident, and if it turned out to be funny, well, as Dan Drake would say, send this back to the lab for further tests.
Early last week, he thought he had stumbled onto something which would at least guarantee some flow of dialogue in the studio. Blob made some remark about trying to pick up women in Bosnia…with a bulldozer, off the charts for bad taste, and Dan Drake held back his wince and asked, “Is this the kind of cutting edge comedy we can expect on the new show?” For the next two hours, then the next four days, he devoted almost all of The Dan Drake Show to Carl and Dr. Blob’s new venture. There were calls to the promotions department at Crack-105 to find out how the ad campaign was coming (there was none) and a clause-by-clause reading of their old WLLS contract looking for a loophole to get them out and on their way earlier. All under the dripping earnestness of “Just wanting to make sure the tri-state region is fully prepared for the onset of audio entertainment history. Carl and Dr. Blob are stepping out.” Dan Drake knew radio and he knew psychological torture. And he knew there was no better radio than steady psychological torture.
For two hours and four days, it was great. And then Carl and Dr. Blob figured out that maybe Dan Drake was making fun of them. So, they shut down again, this time aggressively. Two days ago, in the middle of a broadcast effort the host termed “A Salute to Dead Air,” Dan Drake let himself sound as exasperated as he was. “You two,” he said, “are just as blank as farts. Godspeed to Crack-105.” The next sound you heard was two chairs being pushed back clumsily across the carpet. That was Wednesday. Thursday, Carl and Dr. Blob called in sick.
“They’ll be in today. They have to pick up their checks.”
“I’m sorry, Danny. That sucks.”
“Fuck ’em. You know what the worst part of this whole thing is? The absolute worst? I’m doing a lot of time now with the news guy, Jason.”
“I thought his name was Larry.” Which was the name Dan Drake always used on the air when he couldn’t be bothered with information.
“Bite me.”
“Sorry,” said College Boy. “You know, I remember Jason being a bit of a—”
“Load?”
“I was going to say stiff, but load is good.”
“Actually, it’s not terrible. He kind of gets it. Gets what we’re trying to do. That this is, for want of a better word, show business. He’s not dyeing his hair and buying a Corvette, but he knows when I ask him something the idea is to answer quickly.”
“That sounds okay.”
“Sure, but during the breaks it’s just God-awful. He’s either compiling his little news update—And by the way, do you think anyone who listens to me cares about the news?—or sitting with his mouth open trying to make sixty-seven four-letter words out of ‘spina bifida.’”
“That’s tough”
“Fuck yeah.”
“All I can think of is ‘spin.’”
“Aaaaaahh!” That was Dan Drake’s surprise laugh. The “Hey, somebody else in the room said something funny” laugh. “See, I don’t have this anymore. At least with Carl and Dr. Blob, lazy shit-bags that they might be, there was some social component. You see each other every day for thirteen years, you work up an exchange during the breaks. What did you eat last night? Did you see the Ranger game? What was that God-awful movie with Paul LeMat and the girl in the car? How’s your pecker? That sort of thing. Well, that’s gone because they’ve somehow decided that I’m responsible for them still being here.”
College Boy took a stab. “Aloha Bobby and Rose?”
“YES!”
Clyde the security guy buzzed Dan. Carl was across the street, waiting for the light to change.
“Shit, you gotta go
. See, I’d love to tell them that—Aloha Bobby and Rose, good Christ—but that’s over. You should go before they see you. I’d rather avoid that particular brand of ungainliness today.”
“Sure.”
“You know I still feel like shit about you getting worked over by those thugs.”
“Yeah Danny, well—”
“Hey, you gotta get out of here. How long you here for?”
“Weekend, Monday.”
“Well, make sure you stop by before you leave.”
“I’ll try.”
“Would it kill you? Would it fucking kill you to think of somebody else for once in your life, College Boy?”
One of the retired cops unlocked the door to the backstairs, Dan Drake’s exclusive egress, and College Boy avoided running into Carl by a good twelve to thirteen seconds. He was back on the street at 6:02 and skirted behind Dr. Blob, who was thoroughly transfixed by his impending purchase of two bowties from the coffee cart on the near corner.
He walked the six blocks north and three blocks east and almost let himself be sucked into the Medea Restaurant as if by some Greek coffee shop undertow. The Medea had been his regular breakfast and Romanian tenderloin joint, when not just breakfast, but every meal alone had been his birthright. He was not up for “Hey, hey, my friend! Where you been, my friend? Hey my friend, how ’bout a dlink?”, well-meaning as the reception may have been. College Boy stopped just short of Central Park South and realized what he had done. Walked out of the studio and away from the Yale Club. Toward the park. Toward Heckscher Fields.
Somewhere in the mid-40s, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, College Boy slipped into a diner he’d never noticed before—the New Delos. Did they have any idea how great that name was? He had bacon and eggs and potatoes and toast all at once for the first time in about a year. He raced through his breakfast, his breakfast alone, as if Mort was an oven he’d left on, and made it back to the Yale Club just before seven o’clock. He grabbed Friday’s Post in the lobby and threw a dollar at the guy in exchange for no shit about his not wearing a tie.
