A Christmas Story (7 page)

“… 
all
of it.”

She rose to the fly like a hungry she-salmon:

“It’s The Bronx, all right. Fordham Road, squared. Let 'em laugh
this
off on the Grand Concourse!”

I moved in quickly.

“You can say that again!”

Hissing in the venomous sibilant accents of a lifelong Coffee Shop habitué that I always used in the Museum of Modern Art on my favorite late afternoon time-killer—Girl Tracking—which is the art most fully explored and pursued at the Museum of Modern Art. Nowhere in all of New York is it easier, nor more pleasant, to snare and net the complaisant, rebellious, burlap-skirted, sandal-wearing CCNY undergraduate. Amid the throngs of restless Connecticut matrons and elderly Mittel European art nuts there is always, at the Museum, a roving eddying gulf stream of Hunters and the Hunted.

It was the work of an instant to bundle her off to the outdoor tables in the garden where we sat tensely; date and cream cheese sandwiches between sips of watery Museum of Modern Art orange drink.

“Marcia, how many of these clods
really
dig?” I shrugged toward all the other tables around us. “It’s really sickening!!”

“Bastards!”

She whistled through her teeth. I sensed the stirrings, faint but unmistakable, of an Afternoon Love. Up to her pad off the NYU campus, down to the Village by subway for a hamburger, and then.…

“Only the other day,” she continued, “at the Fig, I said to Claes: ‘Pop Shmop. Art is Art, the way I see it’….”

She trailed off moodily and then bit viciously into the raisin nut bread, her Mexican serape sweeping the ashes from her cigarette into my salad.

“Good old Claes.” I followed her lead, “He lays it on the Phonies!”

I wondered frantically for a brief instant who the hell Claes was!

“And they lap it up,” she added.

Our love duet was meshing nicely now. Point and counterpoint we wove our fabric of Protest, Tristan and Isolde of the Hip.

A light fog-like rain descended on us from what passes for sky in New York. We ignored the dampness as we clutched and groped toward one another in the psychic gloom.

“What do these Baby Machines know of Pop Art?”

I nodded toward a covey of Connecticut ladies eating celery near us. Our eyes met intensely for a long, searing moment. Hers smoldered; mine watered, but I hung in there
grimly. And then, her voice low, quivering with emotion, deliberately she spoke:

“Pop Art, as these fools call it, is the essential dissection of Now-ness, the split atom of the Here moment.”

We looked deep into each other’s souls for another looping instant. I took three deliberate beats and countered:

“Now-ness is US, baby. The
Now
of Here!”

Her hand clutched convulsively at the smudged and dogeared paperback copy of
Sexus
. A Henry Miller. I knew my harpoon had struck pay dirt!

Suddenly, without warning, she stood up and called out in a loud voice:

“Steve! Oh Stevie, over here!”

I turned and saw striding toward us over the marble palazzo, past a Henry Moore fertility symbol, a tall broad-shouldered figure wearing black cowboy boots and tight leather pants. Marcia hurriedly darted forward.

“I’ve been waiting, Stevie. You’re late.”

Stevie, her high cheekbones topped by two angry embers for eyes, snapped:

“Let’s go, baby. I’m double-parked. And the fuzz tag a Harley-Davidson around here quicker than a kick in the ass. Let’s go.”

Her rich bass voice echoed from statue to statue. Marcia, weakly indicating me, said:

“Uh … this is … uh … uh.…”

“Pleased ta meetcha, Bud,” Stevie barked manfully, her thin moustache bristling in cheery greeting. They were off
arm in arm. Once again I was alone amid the world’s art treasures.

“You can’t win ’em all.”

I muttered under my breath as I wolfed down what remained of Marcia’s sandwich, salvaging what little I could from the fiasco. The competition for girls in New York is getting rougher and more complex by the moment. I ironically raised my paper cup of tepid orange drink to the gray heavens, sighting over its waxen brim the glowering bronze head of Rodin’s
Balzac
outlined craggily against the jazzily lit museum interior, the pink plaster arm of
IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET
seeming to reach out of Balzac’s neck.

“To good old Claes. And Pop Shmop.”

I drained the miserable orange drink with a single strangled gulp. Then it happened. Somewhere way off deep down in that dark, buried coal bin of my subconscious a faint but unmistakable signal squeaked and then was silent. A signal about what? Why? What was Balzac trying to say? Or was it Rodin? Once again I sighted over the statue’s head and aligned the mannequin arm at exactly the same position that had set off that faint ringing. The rain drifted down silently while I waited. Nothing.

I tried again; still nothing. My eye fell on Marcia’s half-empty cup. Could there be a connection? Carefully realigning the arm and statue, I sipped the sickening liquid. Far off, unmistakably, once again the bell tolled for me. There was no question about it. Unmistakably there was a connection between the orange drink and that arm,
not to mention glowering old Balzac, the original woman hater.

By now the rest of the tables had been deserted by my fellow Pop Art lovers. Alone, I sat in the museum garden, contemplating the inexplicable. The pieces began to assemble themselves with no help from me. I slowly began to realize that I had been fortunate enough to be present at the very birth of Pop Art itself. And had, in fact, known intimately the very first Pop Art fanatic who had endured, like all true avant-garde have always, the scorn and jibes of those nearest to them. His dedication to his aesthetic principles almost wrecked our happy home. My father was a full generation ahead of his time, and he never knew it.

The Depression days were the golden age of the newspaper Puzzle Contest. Most newspapers had years before given up the futile struggle to print News, since nothing much ever happened and had turned their pages over to comic strips and endless Fifty Thousand Dollar Giant Jackpot Puzzle Contests. Dick Tracy became a national hero. Andy Gump was more widely quoted than the President. Orphan Annie’s editorializing swayed voters by the million. Popeye raised the price of spinach to astronomical heights, and Wimpy spawned a chain of hamburger joints.

As for puzzles, when one ended, another began immediately and occasionally as many as three or four colossal contests ran simultaneously.
NAME THE PRESIDENTS, MYSTERY MOVIE STARS, FAMOUS FIGURES IN HISTORY, MATCH THE BABY PICTURES
. On and on the contests marched, all
variations on the same theme, page after page of distorted and chopped-up pictures of movie stars, kings, novelists, and ballplayers, while in the great outer darkness, for the price of a two-cent newspaper, countless millions struggled nightly to Hit The Jackpot. They were all being judged for Originality, Neatness, and Aptness of Thought. All decisions, of course, were final.

Occasionally the tempo varied with a contest that featured daily a newspaper camera shot taken of a crowd at random—walking across a street, waiting for a light, standing at a bus stop.
IS YOUR FACE CIRCLED? IF IT IS, CALL THE HERALD EXAMINER AND CLAIM FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS!!
The streets were full of roving bands of out-of-work contestants, hoping to have their faces circled. My father was no exception. One of his most treasured possessions was a tattered newspaper photo that he carried for years in his wallet, a photo of a crowd snapped on Huron Street that showed, not more than three inches away from the circled face, a smudged figure wearing a straw skimmer, looking the wrong way. He swore it was him. He had invented an involved story to corroborate this, which he told at every company picnic for years.

He was particularly hooked on
FIND THE HIDDEN OBJECTS
and
HOW MANY MISTAKES ARE IN THIS PICTURE?
, which consisted of three-legged dogs, ladies with eight fingers, and smokestacks with smoke blowing in three directions. He was much better at this game than the Historical Figures. No one in Hohman had ever even heard of Disraeli,
but they sure knew a lot about smokestacks and how many horns a cow had, and whether birds flew upside down or not.

Contest after contest spun off into history. Doggedly my father labored on. Every night the
Chicago American
spread out on the dining-room table, paste pot handy, scissors and ruler, pen and ink, he clipped and glued; struggled and guessed. He was not the only one in that benighted country who pasted a white wig on Theodore Roosevelt and called him John Quincy Adams, or confused Charlemagne with Sitting Bull. But to the faithful and the persevering and to he who waits awards will come. The historic day that my father “won a prize” is still a common topic of conversation in Northern Indiana.

The contest dealt with
GREAT FIGURES FROM THE WORLD OF SPORTS
. It was sponsored by a soft-drink company that manufactured an artificial orange drink so spectacularly gassy that violent cases of The Bends were common among those who bolted it down too fast. The color of this volatile liquid was a blinding iridescent shimmering, luminous orange that made
real
oranges pale to the color of elderly lemons by comparison. Taste is a difficult thing to describe, but suffice it to say that this beverage, once quaffed, remained forever in the gastronomical memory as unique and galvanic.

All popular non-alcoholic drinks were known in those days by a single generic term—“Pop.” What this company made was called simply “Orange pop.” The company trademark, seen everywhere, was a silk-stockinged lady’s leg,
realistically flesh-colored, wearing a black spike-heeled slipper. The knee was crooked slightly and the leg was shown to the middle of the thigh. That was all. No face; no torso; no dress—just a stark, disembodied, provocative leg. The name of this pop was a play on words, involving the lady’s knee. Even today in the windows of dusty, fly-specked Midwestern grocery stores and poolrooms this lady’s leg may yet be seen.

The first week of the contest was ridiculously easy: Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Man O’ War, and the Fighting Irish. My Old Man was in his element. He had never been known to read anything
but
the Sport page. His lifetime subscription to the
St. Louis Sporting News
dated back to his teen-age days. His memory and knowledge of the minutia and trivia of the Sporting arenas was deadening. So naturally he whipped through the first seven weeks without once even breathing hard.

Week by week the puzzlers grew more obscure and esoteric. Third-string utility infielders of Second-Division ball clubs, substitute Purdue halfbacks, cauliflower-eared canvas-backed Welterweights, selling platers whose only distinction was a nineteen-length defeat by Man O’War. The Old Man took them all in his stride. Night after night, snorting derisively, cackling victoriously, consulting his voluminous records, he struggled on toward the Semi-Finals.

A week of nervous suspense and a letter bearing the imprint of a lady’s leg informed him that he was now among the Elect. He had survived all preliminary eliminations and
was now entitled to try for the Grand Award of $50,000, plus “hundreds of additional valuable prizes.”

Wild jubilation gripped the household, since no one within a thirty-mile radius had ever gotten this far in a major contest, least of all the Old Man. He usually petered out somewhere along the fourth set of
FAMOUS FACES
and went back to his Chinese nail puzzle and the ball scores. That night we had ice cream for supper.

The following week the first set of puzzles in the final round arrived in a sealed envelope. They were killers! Even the Old Man was visibly shaken. His face ashen, a pot of steaming black coffee at his side, the kids locked away in the bedroom so as not to disturb his massive struggle, he labored until dawn. The pop company had pulled several questionable underhanded ploys. Water Polo is not a common game in Hohman and its heroes are not on everyone’s tongue. Hop Skip & Jump champions had never been lionized in Northern Indiana. No one had even
heard
of Marathon Walking! It was a tough night.

His solutions were mailed off, and again we waited. Another set of even more difficult puzzles arrived. Again the sleepless ordeal, the bitter consultations with poolroom scholars, the sense of imminent defeat, the final hopeless guesses, the sealed envelope. Then silence. Days went by with no word of any kind. Gaunt, hollow-eyed, my father watched the mailman as he went by, occasionally pausing only to drop off the gas bill or flyers offering neckties by mail. It was a nervous, restless time. Sudden flareups of
temper, outbursts of unmotivated passion. At night the wind soughed emptily and prophetically through the damp clotheslines of the haunted backyards.

Three weeks to a day after the last mailing, a thin, neat, crisp envelope emblazoned with the sinister voluptuous insignia lay enigmatically on the dining-room table, awaiting my father’s return from work. The minute he roared into the kitchen that night he knew.

“It’s come! By God! Where is it?”

What had come? Fifty thousand dollars? Fame? A trip to the moon? The end of the rainbow? News of yet another failure?

With palsied hand and bulging eye he carefully slit the crackling envelope. A single typewritten sheet:

That night was one of the very few times my father ever actually got publicly drunk. His cronies whooped and hollered, guzzled and yelled into the early morning hours, knocking over chairs and telling dirty stories. My mother supplied endless sandwiches and constantly mopped up. Hairy Gertz, in honor of the occasion, told his famous dirty
story about the three bartenders, the Franciscan monk, and the cross-eyed turtle. Three times. It was a true Victory Gala of the purest sort.