Little Casino Read online

  Céline writes that “the living people we’ve lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.”

  No one used to think that a vacant lot was owned, rather, lots were everybody’s property, loci of quiet anarchy. A lot took its character from that of the surrounding neighborhood. Because of this, it was an accurate index of a neighborhood’s present, but held no hint of its future. To place a living human figure in the center of a lot is to compose a kind of iconic reality that is, oddly, more real than the presence of an actual living figure in the center of a lot.

  It is hard to be a father.

  No love. No nothing.

  The scow

  THE BOY LEAPS FROM THE SLIPPERY EDGE of the pier out toward the scow tied up alongside it. He’s done this dozens of times over the past few years, timing the slow heave and slide of the clumsy vessel as the swells carry it toward the pier and then away from it, but this time he misjudges and, in midair, his arms outstretched and his legs pistoning, realizes that he won’t land on the deck. His left foot touches the gunwale, but the scow is riding away from him on the water, glassy with oil. Some other boys stand in momentary silent terror, still, on the pier in the anemic sunlight and brisk wind of the October afternoon, knowing that their friend’s foot has not gained purchase. He falls between the hull and the pier just as the scowreaches its maximum distance from the pier, and is held, wholly still, by its huge, splintery hawsers. As the boy surfaces, the scow lifts and begins its terrible slide toward him, the swell carrying it silently, calmly, toward the pier. A deckhand hears the screaming of the boys on the pier and emerges, half-drunk, from a makeshift cabin of planks and tarpaper on the deck, and knows, instantly, what has happened, and that there is nothing to be done. He stands at the gunwale and looks into the space between the hull and the pier, sees the boy’s small, tough face white with shock and fear, and yells, in a voice high with rage and anguish, in a near-comic Norwegian accent, that the focking goddamn kid is focking goddamn crazy and to get the focking goddamn hell out of there, and then the boy is a soft crack and an explosion of gore and, weirdly, makes no sound as he is crushed to his filthy death.

  “What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?/Did it make you drunken with hearing?”

  The boy would not have understood these lines in any other way but the literal. That is, had anyone known to avail him of the poem from which they come. But who would have known?

  Go fish. And blues in the night.

  A more innocent time

  TO BOMBARD THE SMALL AND INEFFICIENT gas refrigerator with grapefruit would be his weekly, perhaps daily delight, yet he was astigmatic, myopic, amblyopic, cross-eyed, knock-kneed, bowlegged, and box-ankled. To heave huge turkeys, each shot several times with a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, into the kitchen sink, seemed a promising idea, not, however, to be realized by the likes of him, who could not catch a ball, the pitiful bastard. To pull up the skirts and slips of all the pretty girls on their way to Sunday mass was a romantic ideal, and yet, he broke his steel clinic glasses every week or so. What about throwing the guys who had ripped his shirt right off the fucking roof, one after the other? But had he ever, once, managed to hit the ball past the infield? Killing that large, handsome German shepherd with a perfect slab of perfectly poisoned meat would have surely benefited mankind, but the poor chooch was afraid to put his head underwater. To become a priest, kind and brave and strong among the disgusting yet worthy lepers, was a noble calling, but how could he find time to study when he couldn’t stop polluting himself for a minute, the pasty-faced, underweight, nervous degenerate? He could easily kidnap Dolores and Georgene from in front of Fontbonne Hall and carry them off to Rio and CARNIVAL! and unspeakable sin, although he would not let them know that he still, on occasion, wet the bed. To sink, with nary a moment’s hesitation, the Staten Island ferry, so as to drown the secret Nazi agents who spied on convoys in the Narrows would have shortened the war by a month, but he was having serious problems with long division. To use his Amazing Hypnotic Powers, from time to time, and solely for the refined amusement of his closest academic chums, so as to compel Miss Ramsay to happily strip naked in front of the hearty group gathered in the detention room was a pastime that appealed to his sense of fair play, but hard, hard to do when she pinched his earlobe and called him a dunce. To smoke a quiet pipe before the cheery fire while mulling over the details of the latest gruesome ax murder always hit the old anglophilic spot, but not for the sort of rough fellow who smoked Wings, Twenty Grand, and Sweet Caporal loosies. To show Liz and Mary how to do the Harlem Glide could have been a charming way to pass the time, had the young women been willing to tolerate the importunate if unintentional prodding of his manly erection. He argued, convincingly, that a Tom Collins was more refreshing than a John Collins, that upstart drink, but his buttocks showed through the large holes in his threadbare corduroy knickers. And who better to warn the grizzled pilots of the Queen Mary and the Normandy, as the great ships approached the Narrows, of the foul Sargasso Sea of floating condoms that threatened their safety? But had not two Garfield Boys cut his tie off with a switchblade and stolen his lunch money? To batter the persons of the neighborhood bullies, in, of course, strict accordance with the Rules of the Ring, while casually remarking on Annette’s tiny though shapely breasts, was always invigorating, but the shirt-cardboard inserts in his worn-out shoes were soaked through. To carry swiftly messages of highest priority, down pitch-black streets, from one air-raid warden to another, could help to bring the Axis to its knees, but 3¢ chocolate sodas and Mrs. Wagner’s strangely malevolent pies had given him a faceful of pimples. Most seriously, he would have liked to explode a magical bomb that he had invented one night in bed, a bomb that would do the Job, that is, maim, dismember, roast, fry, broil, and obliterate all his enemies, but for the fact that a group of charming and brilliant, sober and judicious proxy killers were about to do the trick. Twice.

  Turkeys that have been shot, however accurately, with .38 caliber slugs, are not edible. A man named Pasquale Colluccio demonstrated this fact to me when I was sixteen, and to my complete satisfaction.

  In Brooklyn, in what many people have been taught by crack journalists to call “a more innocent time,” floating condoms were often called “Coney Island whitefish,” whereas condoms discarded on the ground after use were, quite simply, “scumbags,” semen being, of course, “scum.” Bodies torn apart by bullets fired into them at close range were often come upon in vacant lots in Bath Beach and Canarsie. “Hello! There’s Santo Throckmorton, the jewel thief!” The occasional newborn infant would be fished out, dead as Santo, from ashcans filled with clinkers and “scumbags,” or recovered from the ladies’ room in the Alpine, Stanley, Electra, Bay Ridge, Dyker, and Harbor.

  An “ashcan” was the name given to a very large and powerful firecracker, responsible, each Fourth of July, for the loss of the fingers and eyes of many neighborhood youths. These occurrences might be placed under the heading of “Good Practice” for the good and righteous war that was just around the cozy little corner. We showed them.

  It is often forgotten that they also showed us.

  Someone, after Hiroshima, was reported to have remarked, anent the scientists who had created the bomb: What did they think was going to happen when it exploded?

  “Music? Music? Music?”

  Lest it be forgotten

  AFTER AN HOUR OR SO OF TRYING TO GET her brassiere off, or her skirt up, or both, he lies back, next to her, on the couch, thinking that maybe he’ll just go home, when she accidentally brushes, with the back of her hand, and through his slacks, his still-erect but by now leaden penis, and he realizes that he’s going to come. It’s like a joke. Let’s say, unequivocally, that it is a joke.

  Some ten years later, the boy, now, of course, a man, very drunk but not so drunk as his wife, spreads her legs open as they lie, he is somewhat surprised to realize, on the living room c
arpeting. She is humming, over and over, the first bar of “Ruby, My Dear.” He cannot understand, for the life of him, and it’s not, let’s face it, much of a life, why he is unable to pull her panties any further down than her thighs. Can’t make a fucking thing right anymore, he says to her, but she pays him no mind, or, in any event, she does not reply. Then he puts his head on her naked belly and they both fall asleep.

  And, lest it be forgotten, there is his first serious sexual experience, when a nurse or a nurse’s aide at Brooklyn Eye and Ear, where he lies after an operation, both eyes bandaged, feeds him his supper, tells him what she looks like, and, while spooning what may be tapioca pudding into his mouth, masturbates him under the covers with skill and dispatch. He thinks that he might faint with pleasure, but he stays marvelously conscious, even alert, listening to the rustle of what he imagines to be her crisp white uniform.

  As she is leaving the room, she says, mysteriously, “There are a lot of nice guys in Jersey, too, but.”

  One might, as an amusement, do worse than to think of adventures such as these enveloping forward-looking politicians, dim professors of civil engineering, and dreadful Christian fundamentalists. (Add or substitute your own favorites.)

  It is the fashion to make fun of New Jersey, much as it is the fashion to denigrate Los Angeles and to praise the San Francisco Bay Area. “What weather!” they bubble, as the earth splits open amid vast fires, and the houses slide downhill, in cataracts of mud, onto the clogged and poisonous freeways.

  Sexual experiences are rarely reported with candor, accuracy, or honesty, and these are no exceptions.

  Why is this the case? It’s magic?

  In 1968, CBS wanted Thelonious Monk to record an album of Beatles tunes. There sat the band’s songbook on his piano. To add, as the nice phrase has it, insult to injury, the company sent someone to Monk’s apartment to play through the book. In case Monk couldn’t read music.

  Well, you needn’t, motherfucker.

  Spring colors

  APHOTOGRAPH OF DOLORES IN PROSPECT Park. She is in a dusty-rose suit and has on a small white hat with a half-veil, white gloves, blush-tan nylons, and white high heels. Behind her are Mary and Liz. In another photograph we discover Dolores and Georgene, the latter in a pale-yellow suit with matching gloves and a flat straw hat, white heels. Annette is beside her, too, her face in half-profile, laughing, one hand holding down her light beige skirt, which the wind is lifting, slightly, above her knees. Their teeth seem remarkably white, their figures just beginning to take on womanly contours. It must be Easter Sunday, let us assume that it is Easter Sunday. On the back of a photograph of Dolores—yet another one, in which she poses dramatically against a lamppost—someone has written, in a labored, childish hand, “sweet young girl.”

  Time. The photographs, somewhat carelessly and inadequately described here, are in black and white.

  “Photographs, because they exclude everything except the split second in which they are snapped, always lie,” he once wrote. Time.

  And the angels sing, but perhaps not always.

  Dusty rose, pale yellow, and light beige were spring colors, worn exclusively by virgins. Don’t argue with me!

  The fool

  DONALD SMIRKS AND TELLS THE FOOL THAT Liz told him, and that Mary, Liz’s best friend, told her, and that she, Mary, heard it from Georgene, who goes to Fontbonne Hall with Dolores, that she, Dolores, sometimes changes, after physical education class, into black lace underwear, garments that look, according to Georgene, like sin itself, garments that have been proscribed by the Pope, garments that the nuns have forbidden the girls even to think about, on pain of mortal sin.

  The fool can no longer look at dark, tall, shy Dolores without having the urge to say or do something so idiotically reprehensible that the neighborhood will never forget it, even unto the tenth generation.

  The fool can’t talk to Dolores without blushing.

  The fool can’t think of Dolores without committing the terrible sin of self-abuse that will send him to hell soon after he loses his health and sanity and life. But Dolores will also be in hell, oh Jesus Christ, and naked, like everybody else. God must be out of his mind.

  The fool thinks about talking to Donald concerning this vile tale, but Donald is a thickheaded lump of a boy, ravaged by acne, meanness, and varied budding pathologies, and would, the fool knows, probably snicker and grab at his crotch in overt insult to the dark goddess.

  One day, when the fool sees Dolores skipping rope with Mary and Liz, the snowy whiteness of her slip glancing out, each time she skips, from under her navy-blue jumper, he realizes that he will probably collapse and die if he can’t stop thinking of Dolores standing, nervously blushing and trembling, in nothing but her black lace underwear, the specific configuration of which he cannot imagine. Just as well. A few minutes later, as the girls start for home and supper, Dolores approaches the fool and asks him if he’d like to keep her company on the following Thursday night when she baby-sits for the Ryans. He nods, from out of the darkness of erotic mania that has enshrouded him. That would be nice, he says, sure, he says, to the impossibly lovely and amazingly half-naked girl who is smiling at him. His hands at his side are, what are they? They are cauliflowers, much too big to put into his stupid pockets.

  Mount St. Vincent’s Academy, St. Mary’s Academy, Cathedral Girls’, Bishop McDonnell Memorial. Each has at least one Dolores among their various student bodies. “Such is the way of Satan and his clever wiles, boys.”

  There is no proscription, in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, against the wearing of black lace underwear. If such apparel should become the occasion of sin, however, well, you’re on your own.

  Donald, you will not be surprised to know, was secretly in love with Dolores, of course. He often whispered her name as he punched himself in the mouth. What the hell happened to your face, Don?

  Donald liked to eat chocolate-covered graham crackers covered with grape jelly, and adorned with chopped-up marshmallows, all washed down with Dixie Shake. His acne sang the song of empty gratification.

  To think that God might be out of his mind is blasphemous. On the other hand, is it blasphemous to think that God might occasionally wear a dusty-rose suit? A string of pearls?

  “You’re on dangerous ground, boys, with a thought like that, just what the foul fiend likes to see.”

  “La volupté unique et suprême de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal.”

  Absolutely beautiful

  DOLORES, DARK, BLACK-EYED, SWEET ITALIAN girl, with a straight-A average at Fontbonne Hall, who looks absolutely beautiful in her school uniform, asks him if he’d like to come over to the Ryans’ apartment to keep her company while she’s baby-sitting. Her breasts are too small—just as well—for her to wear a brassiere, but lovely beneath her snowy, spotless blouse.

  He sees that the Ryans have a piano in the living room, a small upright that, he will soon discover, is utterly out of tune. They drink Cokes, they eat peanut-butter sandwiches, and then Dolores, he’s certain, looks directly into his face and tells him that she’s wearing black lace underwear. He thinks that he probably hasn’t heard this, so he grins and says—what savoir faire!— “What?” She says, he is certain that she says, “I know you won’t believe me, you’re such a dope, but I’m wearing, really, black lace underwear.” Just as he’s about to do something crazed and reckless, he has no idea what, perhaps pull up her skirt or kiss her white anklets, she smiles, drapes, for some arcane reason, a towel over his head, and sits down at the piano. She plays, mechanically, the tinny piano making the music sinister, “All or Nothing at All.” One of the straps of her jumper slips off her shoulder and he buries his face in the towel. He cannot look at her and he cannot think of her and he cannot say her name. Even the towel is making him crazy.

  “Just as well,” in the context of this faux-vignette, or, perhaps more accurately, Catholic joke, means “just as well,” and only “just as well.”

&
nbsp; Dolores became a registered nurse.

  “Haunted heart,” a malady with which this “dope” was afflicted, has an almost comic or melodramatic ring to it, especially when paired with “registered nurse.” Can’t be helped.

  Many of the boys and young men in the neighborhood thought that Dolores’s nose was too big, and made crude and vulgar comments about her. These comments issued from those who had driven themselves senseless with pink-and-white fantasies concerning blondes like Doris Day, June Allyson, and Virginia Mayo, women who, it might fairly be argued, were virtually noseless. Dolores’s nose was the nose of Clodia and Lesbia, of Sulpicia and Cynthia. Of Helen.

  “If hair is mussed on her forehead, if she goes in a gleam of Cos, in a slither of dyed stuff, there is a volume in the matter.”

  And if her skin smells of Castile soap, he “shall spin long yarns out of nothing,” and sing them to the dreadful noise of an out-of-tune piano.

  The light of bowling alleys

  HE HAD BEEN VAGUELY AWARE, FOR SOME time, that odd and unexpected things often happened in odd and unexpected places, but he had no sense that such things could happen to him. Perry or Sam, let’s say Perry, had picked him up about seven o’clock, after supper, in his old dusty black Plymouth coupe, and they’d gone up the hill to the Blue Front for a Coke, then down to Chez Freddy, if witnesses can be believed, but nobody seemed to be around. Well, it was a May weekend, well before the season. They wound up in, of all places, the bowling alley. He didn’t know how to bowl and Perry wasn’t much good, but they rented their shoes and made fools of themselves: expected behavior for bowling alleys. A few people were there, and a couple of girls, the bowling-alley light, harsh and shadow-less, setting them in clattering and crashing space precisely. The light of bowling alleys can be proven romantic, though the steps of the proof and its final flourish may be too simple to be given credence.